The Italian Renaissance Palace Façade
Structures of Authority, Surfaces of Sense

A theoretical and anthropological study of the Italian Renaissance Palace in the sixteenth century.

Charles Burroughs (Author)

9780521624381, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 June 2002

310 pages, 68 b/w illus. 5 maps
25.1 x 17.5 x 2 cm, 0.7 kg

"...Burrough's interpretive framework offers a welcome and stimulating reconsideration of many subjects." Sixteenth Century Journal, Andrew Hopkins, Villa I Tatti, Florence

The architectural facade addresses and enhances the space of the city, while displaying, or dissembling, interior arrangements. In this book, Charles Burroughs tracks the emergence of the facade in late medieval Florence and then follows the sharply diverging reactions of Renaissance architects to new demands and possibilities for representation in both residential and governmental contexts. Understanding the facade as an assemblage of elements of diverse character and origin, Burroughs explores the wide range of formal solutions available to architects and patrons. In the absence of explicit reflection on the facade in Renaissance architectural discourse, Burroughs notes the theoretical implications of certain celebrated designs, implying mediation on the nature of architecture itself and the society it serves and represents, as well as on the relationship between nature and culture.

Introduction
1. The forked road to modernity: ambiguities of the Renaissance facade
2. Domestic architecture and Boccaccian drama: court and city in Florentine culture
3. Between opacity and rhetoric: the facade in Trecento Florence
4. The facade in question: Brunelleschi
5. The bones of grammar and the rhetoric of flesh
6. Setting and subject: the city of presences and the street as stage
7. Bramante and the emblematic facade
8. Facades on parade: architecture between court and city
9. From street to territory: projections of the urban facade
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Architectural structure & design [AMC]