Reading the Renaissance

Reading the Renaissance:

Canonical Books and Architectural Language

This course focuses on the history of Renaissance architecture, from the perspective of a series of canonical books, both historical and modern. The course concentrates on a specific historical moment, from the end of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance to what is generally known as the High Renaissance, or the Cinquecento. This 'return to the Canonicals' should not be seen as a nostalgic look back and celebration of past monuments, but as a way to restudy and reread them. To be critical, it is first important to know them well, and then, eventually, to question the canons. In this sense, readings of humanists' canons, their interpretation of classical ancient architecture, and some of the most well-known Renaissance buildings will be explained through critical analysis, situating each figure and case study in its historical context. Along with contextualizing books, buildings, and projects, the course will try to give specific attention to the question of architectural language.

Architectural language, seen from a theoretical and historical perspective, is not simply a question of style. While the notion of type and typology, defined mainly through the plan, is not immediately visible to the naked eye, since antiquity, the design of façade has been important for communicating what a building was. Adapting a language to architecture implies the need to communicate something on the exterior, through façades and building forms. What is expressed can consist of different messages: this building is an institution; this is a palace; this is a church, this is a temple, this is a public building, etc.

The question of language will be a fundamental aspect of the reading of the case studies in this course. Language has also been a fundamental issue since the early Renaissance, when architects sought to 'upgrade' medieval culture by modifying the image of buildings. From Dante Alighieri's De vulgari eloquentia to Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria, the rediscovery of the classics and the use of the Latin language, for instance, were not simply a cultural sophistication by humanist thinkers but a way to elevate the vulgar Italian language to the level of 'erudition' and 'beauty' of Latin. Moreover, this shift, which can be described as the 'humanist turn', produced a new mentality that sought to get rid of the stigmatized pagan medieval culture, and this had to be reflected in architecture: how could a building type be upgraded to something else?

The course will attempt to answer these questions by examining how architects and intellectuals in the 1400s and 1500s articulated a new agenda and architectural canon, and how 20th-century historians wrote about these issues. At the same time, many contemporary problems related to the praise of the single authorship stem from how certain Renaissance architects have been perceived, despite many historians being careful with attributions.

The course will thus be structured in three parts: the first one will be dedicated to the main texts and treatises of the Renaissance: Alberti's De re aedificatoria, Sebastiano Serlio's All the Works on Architecture and Perspective and Filarete's Treatise on Architecture, etc.; the second part will be focused on modern texts such as Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form, Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Leonardo Benevelo's The Architecture of the Renaissance, and Manfredo Tafuri's Interpreting the Renaissance, etc.; a third part will also look at modern books about Renaissance, but with a focus on monographic publications on single authors, such as Raphael, Michelangelo and Giulio Romano, by historians such as Tafuri, James S. Ackerman, Christoph L. Frommel, Caroline Elam, Cammy Brothers, etc. A fourth, shorter part, will be like a corollary dedicated to the way a few modern and contemporary architects read the Renaissance canons and translated those principles in their design methods, as in figures such as Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Giorgio Grassi, Flora Ruchat-Roncati, or Baukuh.

Each lecture will present two or three books focusing specifically on the examples of projects and buildings chosen by their authors.

For the final exam, students have to read one book thoroughly and produce two representations. The students can work in groups of two or three. The oral exam will consist of the presentation of two posters of drawings. The first poster will include a drawing of an axonometric view and a schematic plan of a chosen case study. The second poster will be a 2D representation of the façade, with lines, material textures, and shadows, made in Photoshop. The case studies will have to be proposed by the students, selected from the book they read and studied. The main goal of this exercise is to represent a building in a critical manner and learn its architectural language, materials, ornaments, and the use of architectural orders.

In the last lectures, the teacher will offer a series of tutorial sessions on the exercise.