Recombinant Renaissance

Exploring the work of some of the most noted figures in Italian architecture in the 16th century, this course will investigate the multiple combinative authorships — the various authors and authorities — at play in any given architectural figure and any of their works. While there are some nameable architects and master masons in the Middle Ages, the most noted names in architecture begin to appear in the early Renaissance and emerge in force in the sixteenth century. And yet, already in that time, the singularity of authorship for these architects remains complex. It is not merely that many of these figures —Raphael, Giulio, Michelangelo, Palladio, and later Bernini, Borromini, da Cortana — worked across diverse media (architecture, painting, sculpture, engraving, tapestry, decorative arts) that makes their authorship multiple. In the intensive levels of self-consciousness that develops in (what is called for that reason) the Early Modern period — with its new forms of political, religious, and social forms of identity — the invention of new material and new forms of media (through which authorship is channeled) combined with the reinvention of past materials and media to radically transformed modes of design. All of which were influenced by encounters and exchanges with the contemporaneous or past Ottoman, Persian, and African Empires.

We will also take the occasion this semester to consider how so many of the most significant buildings, chapels, frescos, paintings, sculptures, urban reorganizations, and the development of new socially engaged institutions in Italy were initiated as creative responses to the many instances of pandemics in Italy through the centuries. There are, in other words, many signatures at work in these figures. Add to which all the many commentators — the historians, critics, and architects — on these figures and their works, short excerpts of texts from which we will read each week to situate a given figure within a greater context and to review different forms of historical analysis, to which now you can add your own analysis. Each of these architects in this period may thus be more productively understood as a nexus in which and through which social forms develop through mediated cultural techniques as designed formations, to be subsequently recombined and reformed yet again.

Engaging the media of our own time, in this seminar we will explore new forms of investigation in the digital humanities, to which the digital visualization techniques of architecture can make a fundamental contribution by evolving beyond merely documenting a building to provide innovative modes of critical and historical analysis. The course will investigate the diverse ways digital visualization can be a crucial new lens of perception and communication. Students who are versed in these 2-D and 3-D techniques may elect, as an alternative to a substantially written analysis of the case-study they will select, to produce either a written paper augmented with their graphic analysis or to develop a substantially graphic form of analysis augmented with their narrative text.