Renaissance architecture
More general subjects:
Stones of Zadar
The Capital of Venetian Dalmatia
The book investigates the transformation of the architectural and visual language in Zadar eastern Adriatic town at the dawn of the early modern era when the mighty mediaeval commune was being transformed by the emerging governmental structures of the Republic of Venice. These events coincided with the Ottoman Empire's takeover of the hinterland of Dalmatian cities transforming Zadar into a city on the brink of two worlds.
A highly autonomous mediaeval commune was a lively trans-Adriatic artistic centre a network of builders painters and sculptors from Dalmatia Venice Marche and Lombardy so with the early adoption of humanist concepts by the local elite this practice continued. However the transformations the governmental structure and economic policies steadily limited its community autonomy and commercial sources. The crisis worsened in the 16th century when the local elites lost a large portion of their revenue from the fertile hinterland captured by the Ottoman Empire.
This launched an ongoing militarisation of social structures and fortifying the town. These events were reflected in the fields of architecture and art. The process of adopting a new architectural and artistic language began in the second half of the 15th century as demonstrated by motifs in architectural decoration and sculpture with impulses from important Dalmatian sculptural and stonemasons’ circles as well as Venetian models from the circles of Pietro Lombardo and Mauro Codussi. When the new classical language of architecture began spreading in the middle of the 16th century it expressed mostly in the renovation of administrative structures with occasional departures from the stylistic canons of artistic centres.
Contending Representations II: Entangled Republican Spaces in Early Modern Venice
This bookaddresses the issue of political celebration in early modern Venice. Dealing with processional orders and iconographic programs historiographical narratives and urbanistic canons stylistic features and diplomatic accounts the interdisciplinary contributions gathered in these pages aim to question the performative effectiveness and the social consistency of the so called ‘myth’ of Venice: a system of symbols beliefs and meanings offering a self-portrait of the ruling elite the Venetian patriciate. In order to do so the volume calls for a spatial turn in Venetian studies blurring the boundaries between institutionalized and unofficial ceremonial spaces and considering their ongoing interaction in representing the rule of the Serenissima. The twelve chapters move from Ducal Palace to the Venetian streets and from the city of Venice to its dominions thus widening considerably the range of social and political actors and audiences involved in the analysis. Such multifocal perspective allows us to challenge the very idea of a single ‘myth’ of Venice.
Building the Presence of the Prince
The Institutions Responsible for the Construction and Management of the Buildings of European Courts (14th-17th centuries)
By the late Middle Ages architecture became an increasingly important means of representation of princely rule and institutions. In addition to their symbolic significance the ruler’s buildings served a host of practical purposes. Obviously castles and fortresses defended the territory while urban and rural residences served the itinerant court during its proceedings but their possessions also comprised a wider network of estates that included infrastructure and agricultural commercial industrial and administrative buildings. Together these networks of sites became a significant means of consolidating the sovereigns’ power and served as key instruments for promoting their rule. To tighten the control over their possessions and to ensure their upkeep rulers set up Offices of Works permanent administrative bodies entrusted with their management.
These building administrations have not yet been systematically studied and it remains unclear to what extent such centralised institutions developed autonomously responding to local conditions and requirements or were part of international developments facilitated by the close networks of the European courts.
This volume with contributions from architectural historians administrative historians and court historians represents a first attempt to compare these institutions on a pan-European scale from the late Middle Ages up to the end of the seventeenth century. It aims to explore the relationships between the local specificities of these organisations and their shared characteristics. From a multidisciplinary perspective it addresses questions concerning the nature of such administrations their purpose organisational structure and judicial powers as well as their role in the formation of the state.
Triumphal Entries and Festivals in Early Modern Scotland
Performing Spaces
This book offers unprecedented insights into the richness of Scottish culture in the early modern period studying triumphal entries — that is processional civic welcomes offered to royal guests — staged in Edinburgh in the period between 1500 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Based on a comprehensive and imaginative analysis of the written and archival sources available for these events it also brings renewed attention to the country’s artistic architectural and literary traditions. The analysis of comparable events staged in England and continental Europe — in France the Italian peninsula and the Low Countries — helps frame Scotland’s distinctiveness within a network of international connections. The book explores how the urban space of early modern Edinburgh was employed with changing fortunes to address potentially explosive power dynamics expressed by civic and royal secular and religious (pre and post Reformation) Scottish and post-1603 pan-British worldviews. Scottish triumphal culture is presented as profoundly embedded in the urban context within which it is set rich in politicised rituals of negotiation and mutual acknowledgement and visually vibrant through temporary structures decorations pageants and costumed performers. This book offers a well-rounded answer to the still relevant question of Scottish identity and how identity and power — individual communal national royal — can be performed through active engagement with civic space.
Architecture as Profession
The Origins of Architectural Practice in the Low Countries in the Fifteenth Century
Fifteenth-century Florence is generally considered the cradle of the modern architect. There for the first time since Antiquity the Vitruvian concept which distinguishes between builder and designer was recognised in architectural theory causing a fundamental rupture in architectural practice. In this well-established narrative Northern Europe only followed a century later when along with the diffusion of Italian treatises and the introduction of the all’antic style a new type of architect began to replace traditional gothic masters. However historiography has largely overlooked the important transformations in building organisation that laid the foundations for our modern architectural production such as the advent of affluent contractors public tenders and specialised architectural designers all of which happened in fifteenth-century Northern Europe. Drawing on a wealth of new source material from the Low Countries this book offers a new approach to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period by providing an alternative interpretation to the predominantly Italo-centric perspective of the current literature and its concomitant focus on style and on Vitruvian theory.
Ritual and Art across the Danish Reformation
Changing Interiors of Village Churches, 1450-1600
This volume presents a thorough study of the more than a thousand preserved Danish medieval rural parish churches. It traces the transformations of church interiors from c. 1450 to 1600 (thus covering both the emergence and impact of the Danish Reformation) by interpreting material changes within a broad historical perspective that highlights changes in religious practices and liturgy. The book explores the spatial and artistic implications of liturgy as well as the role of the congregation the donor and the clergy both in shaping and disrupting these interiors. It sets out to answer four basic questions: What did these rural churches look like by the middle of the fifteenth century? How did they change from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the sixteenth? How were they used and integrated into public as well as private ceremonies? And how may these churches have been perceived and experienced by the congregation and clergy?
This study seeks to establish a methodological framework that incorporates the disciplines of archaeology art history history and theology in order to facilitate an overall understanding of the architectural setting embracing spatial material and artistic elements within the church through liturgy.
Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F.W. Kent
This volume honours F. W. (Bill) Kent (1942–2010) internationally renowned scholar of Renaissance Florence and founding editor of the Europa Sacra series. Kent belonged to an energetic generation of Australians who in the late 1960s tackled the Florentine archives and engaged key issues confronting historians of that ever-fascinating city.
With his meticulous archival findings and contextual interpretations spanning a scholarly career of more than forty years Kent engaged with indeed drove the scholarly response to many of the issues that have shaped not just our current and emerging understanding of Florence and other urban centres of Italy but along with that a more nuanced view of the role of frontier towns and the countryside.
Interdisciplinary in scope and grounded in visual literary and archival materials the essays presented here explore a variety of facets of the society of Renaissance Italy confronting and extending themes that have been emerging in recent decades and exemplified by Kent’s work. These themes include the role of kinship and networks power and agency in Laurentian Florence gender ritual representation patronage spirituality and the generation and consumption of material culture.
The Church of Saint-Eustache in the Early French Renaissance
Considered the most important French Renaissance church Saint-Eustache in Paris has long remained an enigma. What new circumstances allowed its parishioners long desirous of a new church suddenly to begin buiding it 1532? Did Francis I play a role? Was the obscure Jean Delamarre possibly its architect? Could the ideas of the Italian theorist Serlio have affected his design? These and other key issues are resolved by the author in a sustained reading of all known evidence. The baffling formal complexity of the church is clarified through lucid analysis that employs hundreds of new photographs executed by the author. The building is studied within the context of sixteenth-century French architecture and its roots in antiquity the Italian Renaissance Romanesque and Gothic France and the Flamboyant Style. Sankovitch’s work will serve as a standard for all those who desire to understand this mysterious building and its times. A bright clear window revealing an unseen architecture previously an invisible - or at best murky - episode in the history of art it is a portal to all future research on the building and a key to the architectural life of the period.
The Low Countries at the Crossroads
Netherlandish Architecture as an Export Product in Early Modern Europe (1480-1680)
This book focuses on the diffusion of architectural inventions from the Low Countries to other parts of Europe from the late fifteenth until the end of the seventeenth century. Multiple pathways connected the architecture of the Low Countries with the world but a coherent analysis of the phenomenon is still missing. Written by an international team of specialists the book offers case-studies illustrating various mechanisms of transmission such as the migration of building masters and sculptors who worked as architects abroad networks of foreign patrons inviting Netherlandish artists printed models and the role of foreign architects who visited the Low Countries for professional reasons. Its geographical scope is as broad as the period under review and includes all European regions where Netherlandish elements were found: from Spain to Scandinavia and from Scotland to Transylvania.
Konrad Ottenheym is professor of architectural history at Utrecht University The Netherlands. He is specialised in the architecture of the Northern Low Countries and its international relationships.
Krista De Jonge is professor of architectural history at Leuven University Belgium. She is well known for her publications on the architecture of the Southern Low Countries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in a European perspective.
Early Modern Urbanism and the Grid
Town Planning in the Low Countries in International Context. Exchanges in Theory and Practice 1550-1800
From the late sixteenth century until around 1800 new ideas and practices of urban planning and the implementation of public buildings water works and fortifications from the Low Countries were disseminated across Europe and America. Engineers mathematicians and other scientists in the Low Countries applied methods of design and land surveying that were gradually assimilated and often modified following exchanges within local practice. In some cases models were projected onto the existing situation. This phenomenon of disseminating and exchanging theoretical models and practical methods between the Low Countries Europe and its colonies during this period developed into a new Early Modern Urbanism movement within the Western World.
Grid-like plans figured prominently in these processes of dissemination and exchange. In the Low Countries grid-like structures allowed a comprehensive approach to a multitude of complex problems in urban planning (for example the connection of canals streets and fortifications) in parts of existing towns as well as in city extensions and ex novo cities. Moreover the experimental approaches in Antwerp and other urban laboratories resulted in new theories on town planning and fortification as well. Given the distinct cultures of the Catholic Spanish Southern Netherlands and the Republican Dutch Calvinist Northern Netherlands the Low Countries provide an excellent case for studying the identity of urban forms. Both engaged in enormous expansion overseas and the simultaneous exchange of practices between the southern and northern parts of the Low Countries lead to the combination of identities. In this new volume in the Architectura Moderna series various scholars examine the dissemination of practical methods and theoretical models of urban planning from the Northern and Southern Low Countries in addition to exchanges with local practices in Northern and Central Europe and in the New World.
Piet Lombaerde is professor in history and theory of architecture urbanism and fortification at the Faculty of Design Sciences of the University College of Antwerp (UA).
Charles van den Heuvel is Head Research of History of Science at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe
In the early modern European city public buildings were the main pillars of the political mercantile and social infrastructure. In a first attempt to create a preliminary overview of current knowledge in various European countries the IIIe and Ve Rencontres d’Architecture Européenne held in 2006 and 2008 at Utrecht University The Netherlands in cooperation with the Centre André Chastel Paris were dedicated to this subject. In these two meetings architectural historians from all over Europe discussed the results of their research on the development of various types of public building in the various European regions between the late fifteenth and mid-eighteenth century. This publication brings together most of the contributions to these two conferences subdivided into three categories:
buildings erected for government and justice
buildings serving mercantile functions
buildings for education health and social care.
Konrad Ottenheym is professor of Architectural History at Utrecht University.
Monique Chatenet is senior researcher at the Centre André Chastel/Sorbonne Paris-IV Paris.
Krista De Jonge is professor of Architectural History at the Catholic University Leuven.
Nicodemus Tessin the Elder. Architecture in Sweden in the Age of Greatness
Nicodemus Tessin the Elder was an architect gentleman and founder of the artistic dynasty that was immensely influential at the Swedish court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was architect to the crown to the nobility and to the city of Stockholm and he supplied buildings for a wide range of functions from palaces to banks courthouses and fortifications. His unusually extensive travels in the Netherlands Italy France and Germany provided him with a comprehensive picture of contemporary European architecture which he drew on as he synthesized a new group of buildings that would attract international attention as models for princely architecture. His productivity required a new approach to architecture and he was part of the first generation of architects in northern Europe to develop the architectural studio distinguishing the design process from the business of building and in the process recreating himself as the modern architect.
Kristoffer Neville is assistant professor of early modern art and architecture in the department of art history at the University of California Riverside.
Innovation and Experience in Early Baroque in the Southern Netherlands. The Case of the Jesuit Church in Antwerp
During the sixteenth century Antwerp was at the forefront of the Renaissance north of the Alps. Not only a new architectural style flourished in the Antwerp metropolis but at the end of the sixteenth century sciences such as mathematics optics geometry and perspective became more and more important. They helped to redefine architecture and the other fine arts on a more scientific base. Their introduction in the arts at the beginning of the seventeenth century lead to new experiences applications and even innovations in architecture. The Jesuit Order played a very crucial rule in this process. The realization of their new church in the centre of the city of Antwerp became one of the first attempts to bring together the applications of all those new ideas in one total project. Paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and sculptures by Hieronymus Duquenoy Artus Quellinus etc. were participating in one of the first Early Baroque architectural realizations in the Low Countries. The Jesuit Church of Antwerp currently the St Carolus Borromeus Church was designed by François d'Aguilón a scientist and architect of the Jesuit Order. His publication Opticorum Libri sex on optics and on the reflection of light was edited by the Officina Plantiniana in 1613 the same year he started his project for the church. This scientific and theoretical work helps us to understand the new experiences with light and space he experimented with.
It is the aim of this publication to bring together researchers to confront the results of their studies about the interpretation of the façade of this Counter-Reformation church the phenomenon of diffuse light created by reflection and refraction on marble statues pillars and multiple ornaments the combination of linear and parallel perspective applications the sacral and social use of space the signification of the façade and towers as parts of a perspective scene in the city landscape. Special attention is also devoted to the School of Mathematics installed in Antwerp by the Jesuits at that time.
The central question will be whether we can conclude that at the beginning of the seventeenth century the innovative sense of creating a new architecture so typical for the sixteenth century in Antwerp still persisted in this city during the early seventeenth century and even lead to a new interpretation of architectural space in European context.
Unity and Discontinuity
Architectural Relationships between the Southern and Northern Low Countries (1530-1700)
This study focuses on change and continuity within the architecture of the Southern and Northern Low Countries from 1530 to 1700. Instead of looking at both regions separately and stressing the stylistic differences between the classicist North and the baroque South the book establishes a new common history of architecture for both parts of the Low Countries during the seventeenth century. Their reception of Antiquity in the guise of the Italian Renaissance first introduced in Court circles in the early sixteenth century constituted the common heritage on which they built after the political separation. The book also reassesses the position of Netherlandish architecture in the international debate on the Renaissance north of the Alps.
Krista De Jonge is professor of history of architecture at the Catholic University of Leuven.
Konrad Ottenheym is professor of history of architecture at Utrecht University.
The architectural network of the Van Neurenberg family in the Low Countries (1480-1640)
Stone traders initially based in the Meuse valley the Van Neurenberg family expanded northwards to Nijmegen and Dordrecht from 1530 on becoming an international trading company in the process. Their subsequent activities reflect the huge changes the Dutch building sector underwent during the 17th century. They cooperated with the most famous artists of their time such as Hendrick de Keyser in Amsterdam and were involved in the most modern building projects of the Dutch Golden Age such as Frederik Hendrik of Orange's Honselaarsdijk Palace. This study offers new insights into a relatively neglected aspect of Netherlandish building history in the 16th and 17th century.
Hans Vredeman De Vries And The Artes Mechanicae Revisited
In this publication attention is devoted to the technical aspects in the work of Hans Vredeman de Vries. Throughout his long career he has perfected his skills as a painter architect fortification engineer and hydraulic engineer. Those technical aspects are considered not so much as discrete characteristics but rather as a particular way in which this late sixteenth- century artist from the Low Countries typically dealt with a number of disciplines of the technical and applied arts. Indeed from a predominantly traditional approach to his work too much emphasis has until now been placed on his highly personal contribution to the dissemination of ornamental elements whereby typical Renaissance characteristics such as technical innovation and engineering are relegated to the background.
During Hans Vredeman de Vries's lifetime attempts began to be made to define the arts and the sciences. Defining the demarcation criteria of the sciences would continue to gain in importance especially at the beginning of the seventeenth century. With his work Vredeman de Vries raised Architectura together with all its technical acquisitions to the level of both the Artes and the Scienciae. Attempts were even made to establish some kind of hierarchy. Yet the artist never strictly separated fine and applied arts nor did he explicitly distinguish between theory and practice. It was the intention of Vredeman de Vries to aim towards an equilibrium between the sciences and the arts. A team of thirteen distinguished art and architectural historians from North America Germany the Netherlands and Belgium focus upon Vredeman de Vries's diverse manifestations of knowledge: urbanism fortification works hydraulics interior decoration architecture (its practical and technical aspects) inlay work and furniture tapestry and the use of scientific instruments. One author points out that the similarity between such 'technical' practices and the structure of for example sixteenth-century rhetorical practices forces us to consider Vredeman de Vries not simply as an architect an engineer or a designer but above all as an experimenter in multiple disciplines and various fields.
The Emblem and Architecture: Studies in Applied Emblematics from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries
This publication is a collection of essays on the function and significance of emblematic decoration of buildings in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century dealing with general issues involved in architectural emblematics while a number of the essays are case studies of specific types of building.
The emblematic decoration of buildings both secular and ecclesiastical was widespread in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The function and significance of such decoration is however frequently overlooked. The two introductory essays seek to come to grips with the general issues involved in architectural emblematics. The remaining essays are case studies of specific types of building while the final two consider the relation of architecture to the book. The essays are revised versions of selected papers presented at an international conference on the subject held at the Canadian centre for Architecture in November 1994.