Architectural Invention in Renaissance Rome
Artists, Humanists, and the Planning of Raphael's Villa Madama

A revisionist view of Renaissance architectural design as a dialectical process engaging word and image in the creation of Raphael's masterwork.

Yvonne Elet (Author)

9781107130524, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 January 2018

360 pages, 98 b/w illus. 19 colour illus.
26.1 x 18.4 x 3.2 cm, 1.3 kg

'This substantial, original book makes significant contributions to our understanding of the architectural design process in early modern Rome … [Elet] moves effortlessly across traditional disciplinary boundaries, deftly interweaving different modes of analysis and a profound familiarity with myriad sources, primary and secondary … The book's production value matches the quality of its concept and writing, with many well-chosen illustrations that evoke both the villa and the ideas in circulation around it quite nicely.' Jessica Maier, Renaissance Quarterly

Villa Madama, Raphael's late masterwork of architecture, landscape, and decoration for the Medici popes, is a paradigm of the Renaissance villa. The creation of this important, unfinished complex provides a remarkable case study for the nature of architectural invention. Drawing on little known poetry describing the villa while it was on the drawing board, as well as ground plans, letters, and antiquities once installed there, Yvonne Elet reveals the design process to have been a dynamic, collaborative effort involving humanists as well as architects. She explores design as a self-reflexive process, and the dialectic of text and architectural form, illuminating the relation of word and image in Renaissance architectural practice. Her revisionist account of architectural design as a process engaging different systems of knowledge, visual and verbal, has important implications for the relation of architecture and language, meaning in architecture, and the translation of idea into form.

Preface and acknowledgements
Note on translations and abbreviations
Introduction. The nature of invention, in word and image
1. Reviving the corpse
2. Writing architecture
3. Sperulo's vision
4. Encomia of the unbuilt
5. Metastructures of word and image
6. Dynamic design
Conclusion. Building with mortar and verse
Appendices
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D], History of architecture [AMX], History of art & design styles: c 1400 to c 1600 [ACN]