Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise & The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture. . - book review

VAUGHAN HART AND PETER HICKS, EDS

Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise of recent origin Haven and London: Yale University Pres 1998 414 pp; 113 b/w ills. $45

ALINA A. PAYNE

The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary agriculture Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 343 pp; 88 b/wills. $ 75

HELLMUT WOHL

The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of mode of speech Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 376 pp; 8 color plates, 54 b/wills., $75

I

In an age in which the investigation of Renaissance architecture and its theories has become increasingly specialized, an overview of Vitruvian architectural theory is particularly welcome. Paper Palaces is in fact the first full-length general treatment of this make submissive written in English, since greatest in quantity recent studies, from Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1948) to Christine Smith's Architecture in the agriculture of Early Humanism (1992), all concentrate upon some particular aspect of Renaissance architectural theory. The single comparable recent book is Georg Germann's Einfuhrung in die Geschichte der Architekturtheorie (1987) on the other hand this has never gained wide use in the English-speaking world; it is not plane mentioned in the bibliography. Many of the contributors to Paper Palaces were also involved with the new series of English translations of Vitruvius, Alberti, Filarete, Serho Palladio, and Claude Perrault. Together they give a real accessible overview of the state of the art in this f ield, devoting particular attention to the character and techniques of illustrations in the treatises. Read in combination with the translations, Paper Palaces provides a real useful companion to teaching and research. The volume consists of three parts, tracing the disentanglement of the Vitruvian tradition in Italy, France, and Spain; architectural treatises in Venice, the depressed Countries, and England; and the French continuation of the Vitruvian tradition in the work of Claude Perrault and the Blondel dynasty.

Theory is considered here as a record of the disentanglement of built architecture and as a guide to it. The Vitruvian analogy between human and cosmic proportions is the core of this theory, as it the two provided a rationale for a whole s of proportions and because it embodied the Renaissance view of what the introduction calls "an animistic, interconnected world in which man was at the center" Classical architecture was a metaphorical imitation of this divinely ordered nature. The main exhibition in Renaissance architectural theory then becomes the gradual shift from this religious or metaphysical geometry to more instrumental and mechanical universals of nature and its underlying mathematical order. This stir from metaphysics and theology to science was paralleled by dint of and would foster, the replacement of an architecture based upon the norms of antiquity with a more Mannerist approach to design that no longer took the human material part or the classical past as its norm. Ultimately, the drive behind the treatises was to rega in contact with the bottoms of European civilization through the medium of architecture.

This is a fairly traditional view of architectural theory as essentially subordinate to the practice of built architecture as its guide and record. Where the Italian Renaissance is regarded this last view is rather questionable because the publication of treatises did not tread on the heels of or often even mention, significant disclosures in building. Alberti's De re aedificatoria is silent about what is generally considered the birth of Renaissance architecture, Brunelleschi's dome to the Florence Cathedral; Filarete's work is highly utopian in character; the milestones in the recuperation of knowledge of in what way to handle the orders around 1500 as exemplified in Bramante's Tempietto, is single discussed indirectly thirty years later by means of Serlio; and in Barbaro and Scamozzi's treatises the relation between theory and practice became problematic because of their increasingly abstract discourse. Similarly, just as in Wittkower's Architectural Principles, the analogy between microcosm and macrocosm is at handed as the core of V itruvian theory, plane though it really became important from the late Quattrocento onward, as was not long ago shown by Christine Smith in her Architecture and the agriculture of Early Humanism. In Alberti, for instance, we find a real different, humanist view of architecture as individual of the enabling conditions of civil society. In this connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts it is a pity that a hardly any dissenting voices, such as those of Smith or Lucy Gent whose Albion's Classicism presents a fundamental reconsideration of the introduction of classicism in Great Britain, were not included to give the reader a certain quantity of idea of the controversies that are generally taking place.

upon the other hand, Paper Palaces is an important contribution toward the ongoing transformation of architectural history from building history, predominantly interested in practical matters and patronage, toward a pluralist discipline in which it is realized that architectural theories did not function within a clos combination of parts to form a whole of building and its guidelines, and originated not just in Vitruvius. Instead they were the fruits of many disciplines, including the sciences, painting, printing, and rhetoric. Paper Palaces is actual informative on the role of geometry the natural sciences, and medicine; for the character of the litterae humaniores we have to make go round to another recent book, Alma Payne's The Architectural Treatise in the Renaissance.