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Italian Architecture of the 16th Century
Italian Architecture of the 16th Century is the last published work of the legendary Colin Rowe, the fruit of his four-year collaboration with Leon Satkowski, a Rowe student and author of Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier. The book is a testament to the buildings, architects, and artists Rowe most deeply appreciated. For the millions of travelers who flock to Italy to see the art and architecture of the 16th century-subjects that captured Rowe's heart and challenged his fertile mind-this book is at once a pleasurable read and the pinnacle in scholarship. It is written in Rowe's unmatched and engaging personal style, and it is beautifully illustrated throughout with photographs, drawings, and paintings of the art and architecture that make this period and this place so beloved. The book emphasizes the leading subjects of the 16th -century Reniassance: the architects (Bramante, Vignola), the patrons (Leo X, Cosimo I de Medici), the artists (Michelangelo), and the cities (Rome, Venice, Florence). As the finest critical scholarship on conquecento Italy and an accessible guide for the non-scholar, this book is destined to be regarded as one of Rowe's most important.
- GenresArchitecture
300 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2002
About the author
Colin Rowe
30 books16 followersColin Rowe was a British-born, American-naturalised architectural historian, critic, theoretician, and teacher; acknowledged as a major intellectual influence on world architecture and urbanism in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, particularly in the fields of city planning, regeneration, and urban design. During his life he taught briefly at the University of Texas at Austin and, for one year, at the University of Cambridge in England. For the majority of his life he taught as a Professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1995 he was awarded the Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects, the professional group's highest honor.
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August 17, 2017
Quoting T. H. Huxley, Colin Rowe said somewhere “Those who refuse to go beyond the facts rarely get as far as fact....Almost every great discovery has been made by 'the anticipation of nature', that is by the invention of hypotheses which, though verifiable, often had little foundation to start with." Rowe frequently asserted that history is 10% fact and 90% the imagination of the historian—and who would pretend otherwise?
In this major collection of essays this greatest of architectural theoreticians, assisted by Leon Satkowski, scrupulously avoids using the term “Renaissance” for sixteenth-century Italian architecture because that term implies an agenda, or a parti pris: the idea that the XVI century in Italy was some kind of Golden Age. Instead, he takes the same line as Manfredo Tafuri (did he read Tafuri?) that this was a time of conflict and violence when powerful patrons required architects to express and glorify the power they had seized.
The book begins with the work of Donato Bramante as an architect who travelled, going to see the work of other architects and painters. Imagining Bramante’s journey from Rome to Milan around 1477, Rowe supposes that he must have stopped at Padua and Mantua, where he would have seen Mantegna’s works, which thereby influenced Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio. Fanciful certainly, and historically unsupported: we have no idea whether Bramante visited either Padua or Mantua. But that's how Rowe reconfigures history in order to make a point.
His vast erudition enables him to assemble notional evidence of connections between buildings widely separated in time and space. Architecture, he argues, develops through the circulation of ideas and the zeitgeist, or “spirit of the time”: his evidence is the architecture itself, which he examines with forensic precision. using carefully juxtaposed illustrations to lend force to his argument.
This book is largely based on lectures delivered during Rowe’s 28 years at Cornell University. The show him at his most challenging and stimulating: an intellectual giant who changed architectural historiography, exploding conventional historical narratives and reassembling them to create new readings of the past in the here and now.
An essential book for every serious architect and architectural thinker. For those already familiar with Rowe, a major component of his published work; for newcomers, a different way to think about architectural history as an ever-present underpinning for architectural design in the here and now,Those who refuse to go beyond the facts rarely get as far as fact....Almost every great discovery has been made by 'the anticipation of nature', that is by the invention of hypotheses which, though verifiable, often had little foundation to start with." Rowe frequently asserted that history is 10% fact and 90% the imagination of the historian—and who would pretend otherwise?
In this major collection of essays the great architectural theoretician, assisted by Leon Satkowski, scrupulously avoids using the term “Renaissance” for sixteenth-century Italian architecture because that terms implies an agenda, or a parti pris: the idea that the XVI century in Italy was some kind of Golden Age Instead, he takes the same line as Manfredo Tafuri (did he read Tafuri?: that this was a time of conflict and violence when powerful patrons required architects to express and glorify the power they had seized.
The book begins with the work of Donato Bramante as an architect who travelled, going to see the work of other architects and painters. Imagining Bramante’s journey from Rome to Milan around 1477, Rowe supposes that he must have stopped at Padua and Mantua, where he would have seen Mantegna’s works, which thereby influenced Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio. Fanciful certainly, and historically unsupported: we have no idea whether Bramante visited either Padua or Mantua. But that's how Rowe reconfiguresl history in order to make a point.
His vast erudition enables him to assemble notional evidence of connections between buildings widely separated in time and space. Architecture, he argues, develops through the circulation of ideas and the zeitgeist, or “spirit of the time”: his evidence is the architecture itself, which he examines with forensic precision. using carefully juxtaposed illustrations to lend force to his argument.
This book is largely based on lectures delivered during Rowe’s 28 years at Cornell University. They show him at his most challenging and stimulating: an intellectual giant who changed architectural historiography, exploding conventional historical narratives and reassembling them to create new readings of the past in the here and now.
In this major collection of essays this greatest of architectural theoreticians, assisted by Leon Satkowski, scrupulously avoids using the term “Renaissance” for sixteenth-century Italian architecture because that term implies an agenda, or a parti pris: the idea that the XVI century in Italy was some kind of Golden Age. Instead, he takes the same line as Manfredo Tafuri (did he read Tafuri?) that this was a time of conflict and violence when powerful patrons required architects to express and glorify the power they had seized.
The book begins with the work of Donato Bramante as an architect who travelled, going to see the work of other architects and painters. Imagining Bramante’s journey from Rome to Milan around 1477, Rowe supposes that he must have stopped at Padua and Mantua, where he would have seen Mantegna’s works, which thereby influenced Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio. Fanciful certainly, and historically unsupported: we have no idea whether Bramante visited either Padua or Mantua. But that's how Rowe reconfigures history in order to make a point.
His vast erudition enables him to assemble notional evidence of connections between buildings widely separated in time and space. Architecture, he argues, develops through the circulation of ideas and the zeitgeist, or “spirit of the time”: his evidence is the architecture itself, which he examines with forensic precision. using carefully juxtaposed illustrations to lend force to his argument.
This book is largely based on lectures delivered during Rowe’s 28 years at Cornell University. The show him at his most challenging and stimulating: an intellectual giant who changed architectural historiography, exploding conventional historical narratives and reassembling them to create new readings of the past in the here and now.
An essential book for every serious architect and architectural thinker. For those already familiar with Rowe, a major component of his published work; for newcomers, a different way to think about architectural history as an ever-present underpinning for architectural design in the here and now,Those who refuse to go beyond the facts rarely get as far as fact....Almost every great discovery has been made by 'the anticipation of nature', that is by the invention of hypotheses which, though verifiable, often had little foundation to start with." Rowe frequently asserted that history is 10% fact and 90% the imagination of the historian—and who would pretend otherwise?
In this major collection of essays the great architectural theoretician, assisted by Leon Satkowski, scrupulously avoids using the term “Renaissance” for sixteenth-century Italian architecture because that terms implies an agenda, or a parti pris: the idea that the XVI century in Italy was some kind of Golden Age Instead, he takes the same line as Manfredo Tafuri (did he read Tafuri?: that this was a time of conflict and violence when powerful patrons required architects to express and glorify the power they had seized.
The book begins with the work of Donato Bramante as an architect who travelled, going to see the work of other architects and painters. Imagining Bramante’s journey from Rome to Milan around 1477, Rowe supposes that he must have stopped at Padua and Mantua, where he would have seen Mantegna’s works, which thereby influenced Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio. Fanciful certainly, and historically unsupported: we have no idea whether Bramante visited either Padua or Mantua. But that's how Rowe reconfiguresl history in order to make a point.
His vast erudition enables him to assemble notional evidence of connections between buildings widely separated in time and space. Architecture, he argues, develops through the circulation of ideas and the zeitgeist, or “spirit of the time”: his evidence is the architecture itself, which he examines with forensic precision. using carefully juxtaposed illustrations to lend force to his argument.
This book is largely based on lectures delivered during Rowe’s 28 years at Cornell University. They show him at his most challenging and stimulating: an intellectual giant who changed architectural historiography, exploding conventional historical narratives and reassembling them to create new readings of the past in the here and now.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review