Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects

by Manfredo Tafuri, Daniel Sherer (Translation), K. Michael Hays (Foreword)

Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) is acknowledged as one of Italy’s most influential architectural historians. In his final work, Interpreting the Renaissance, published here in English for the first time (the Italian edition, Ricerca del Rinascimento, appeared in 1992), Tafuri analyzes Renaissance architecture from a variety of perspectives, exploring questions that occupied him for over thirty years.  
What theoretical terms were used to describe the humanist analogy between architecture and language? Is it possible to identify the political motivations behind the period’s new urban strategies? And how does humanism embody both an attachment to tradition and an urge to experiment?
Tafuri studies the theory and practice of Renaissance architecture, offering new and compelling readings of its various social, intellectual and cultural contexts, while providing a broad understanding of uses of representation that shaped the entire era. He synthesizes the history of architectural ideas and projects through discussions of the great centers of architectural innovation in Italy (Florence, Rome, and Venice), key patrons from the middle of the fifteenth century (Pope Nicholas V) to the early sixteenth century (Pope Leo X), and crucial figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione, and Giulio Romano.
A magnum opus by one of Europe’s finest scholars, Interpreting the Renaissance is an essential book for anyone interested in the architecture and culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction

568 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 1992

About the author

Manfredo Tafuri an Italian architect, historian, theoretician, critic and academic, was arguably the world's most important architectural historian of the second half of the 20th century.[1] He is noted for his pointed critiques of the partisan "operative criticism" of previous architectural historians and critics like Bruno Zevi and Siegfried Giedion and for challenging and overturning the idea that the Renaissance was a "golden age" as it had been characterised in the work of earlier authorities like Heinrich Wolfflin and Rudolf Wittkower.
For Tafuri, architectural history does not follow a teleological scheme in which one language succeeds another in linear sequence. Instead, it is a continuous struggle played out on critical, theoretical and ideological levels as well as through the multiple constraints placed on practice. Since this struggle continues in the present, architectural history is not a dead academic subject, but an open arena for debate. In his view, like other cultural domains, but even more so, due to the tension between its autonomous, artistic character and its technical and functional dimensions, architecture is a field defined and constituted by crisis.
During the 1970s, Tafuri published important essays in Oppositions, the journal directed by Peter Eisenman. Although he always had a strong interest in this area of research, in the last decade of his career he undertook a comprehensive reassessment of the theory and practice of Renaissance architecture, exploring its various social, intellectual and cultural contexts, while providing a broad understanding of uses of representation that shaped the entire era. His final work, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects, published in 1992, synthesizes the history of architectural ideas and projects through discussions of the great centres of architectural innovation in Italy (Florence, Rome, and Venice), key patrons from the middle of the fifteenth century to the early sixteenth century, and crucial figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Francesco di Giorgio, Lorenzo de' Medici, Bramante, Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione and Giulio Romano.
Tafuri held the position of chair of architectural history at the University Iuav of Venice.

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Manfredo Tafuri was once described by the architect Vittorio Gregotti as “the most intriguing and gifted historian of architecture of the last fifty years”.

From “Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development” (1976), a seminal critique of modernism and the contemporary city, to “ The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s” (English edition,1990) Tafuri's range was wide and his erudition enormous. This was thanks to his ability to question accepted truths and propose new ones. This book was his last; he died in 1994.

Consisting of eight essays that concentrate on what is still considered the key period in Western culture, the early and late Italian Renaissance (1450-1600 ) he takes issue with the conventional presentation of that period as a sunlit upland, and exposes instead the violence with which urbanists and architects of that time, working for powerful clients, replaced the medieval world with another vision that was entirely invented through design; notably architectural design.

For Tafuri history is not the gentle flow of events, but a man-made artifice in which power struggles enable particular elites to come to power; their architects then redesign the world to express that power. More than the gentle morphing of one stylistic period into the next, the history of architecture is a clash of big ideas, and its progression is traumatic.

Two introductory forewords by Michael Hays and Daniel Sherer explain this more clearly: for Tafuri, says Hays, history is an active agent that “disturbs the present as we know it”. Sherer adds that Tafuri’s purpose was “ to study the ways in which historical tensions arising from the past silently shape the present; essentially unresolved, they are hence still able to disturb”.

In one of the disturbing instances discussed in this book, Tafuri examines the “political use of city change” describing how at the end of the Florentine Republic, Florence came under the control of the Medici who ruled “with consummate arrogance” and who in 1513 made the son of Lorenzo de’Medici into the Pope. His ceremonial entry into Florence as Leo X was marked by triumphal parades, spectacles, festivals, and masquerades intended to generate “a sense of general optimism” and obliterate all memory of the previous freedoms that had now been lost.

In 1515 this new Pope (desirious to publicly affirm his power through great building works) commissioned the best architects to compete on the design a new façade for the church of San Lorenzo in Florence, which Filippo Brunelleschi had left unfinished a century before. Examining Raphael’s entry for this competition, Tafuri notes that scholars are unsure whether the only extant drawing of it is by Raphael himself; it may be a copy by an assistant - so a question arises: is it genuinely Raphael’s project?

Superimposing this drawing on an elevation of the unfinished San Lorenzo as we find it today, Tafuri compares it to other projects. He sees suggestions that Bramante or Giuliano da Sangallo might have designed it (possibilities that he carefully circumstantiates with refined argumentations); in this project’s three-dimensionality and its architect’s ability to freely manipulate the elements of the new classical language, he discerns the hand of a true innovator - probably indeed Raphael.

It is this process of scholarly analysis that interests us, and that established Tafuri’s enormous reputation while he was alive. His readiness to challenge earlier authorities like Rudolf Wittkower and James Ackerman enabled him to re-open discussion about the Renaissance as, mercilessly but politely, he subverts the thinking of those earlier experts. For Tafuri architectural history is an open subject and theirs was not the last word. Wittkower’s “normative picture of the Renaissance as the triumph of a serene and unimpeded classicism” is severely lambasted; the Renaissance was, in reality, a period of upheaval “in which different forms of knowledge arose, each eager to undermine acquired systems of thought” which in the end “assumed tragic implications”. The history of architecture “is not a triumphal march” but “a dialectical process that does not take outcomes for granted”.

In another essay Tafuri recounts how when Brunelleschi building the cupola on Florence cathedral, he deliberately drove one of the carpenters to insanity by making him believe he was actually not himself but somebody else: an episode that confirms to Tafuri that great and powerful architects, willing to use their power, possess the ability to artificially change perceptions of the world; this for him is the essence of how architectural history proceeds -through the artificial changing of perceptions.

And if, as Wittkower proposed, there were norms of design to which Renaissance architects worked - mathematical, proportional - these only had meaning insofar as innovators like Brunelleschi or Raphael were able to subvert them. All such principles are in any case only “conventional and arbitrary”.

Another fiction about the Renaissance (says Tafuri) was that architects intended to bring classical architecture back to life. Impossible: because with the then only partly and unsystematically excavated ruins of ancient Rome as their reference, their real instinct was to reinvent and create. And if for a while the proportions of the human body, of which artists and architects like Leonardo made use to invent “divine” proportioning systems that were held to be a microcosm of a perfectly ordered universe, by the end of the Renaissance that idea was killed when Galileo wrote that “God, seeming to use the hand of pure chance, has dispersed the stars without any order, symmetry or elegance; or so it seems to me”.

Thanks to his vast scholarship and his ability to re-think the whole idea of the Renaissance, Tafuri redefined architectural history and began to rewrite it for our own time. Recognised as an intellectual giant even when he was still a young teacher, his books are of great relevance for everyone.