Introduction

Renaissance and Baroque

Architecture

Alina Payne

When the young Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt was hoping to join the
faculty at the newly founded Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich in
the 1850s his supporters felt that his work, much focused on the Renaissance,
needed some leavening. The study of antiquity was the “heavyweight” academic
discipline at the time and the Renaissance only a weak surrogate considered to be
derivative. In short, they feared that his profile would not “do.” Listening to his
advisors, Burckhardt wrote Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke
Italiens (1855) – perhaps the most successful art guidebook ever written – in which
he discoursed about all the arts of Italy from antiquity to the baroque.1 The strategy
worked: he duly received the appointment that same year and the rest is history. At
his hands the Renaissance – and its architecture – was not destined to remain in the
background for much longer.2
Indeed, historically, the architecture of the early modern period – roughly
between 1400 and 1700 – has not lacked scholarly attention, though the project
to encompass and condense large amounts of information within the covers of
a single book have lagged in recent decades. The vast project initiated in the
1950s by Penguin Books with their Pelican History of Art series, which was
intended to cover all geographies and all time periods – including the early modern
one – slowed down in the 1980s and has not seen recent challengers.3 The project
owed much to the legendary German Propyläen der Kunstgeschichte (1923–44; rep-
rinted in the 1980s) and offered in English a similarly broad and systematic though
more articulated assessment of world art. Both in English and in other languages,
scholarship has since moved away from large treatments of the period and, if at all,
has concentrated thematically: on theory; on the city; on specific buildings and
building types; on individual countries; or on individual periods.4 Even in the “Peli-
cans,” as they came to be known, the early modern period was divided into several
volumes (both geographically and chronologically), and a reader would not have
been expected to read them all.
One reason for the shift has been the explosion of information and ensuing pub-
lications that have made a synthetic view increasingly difficult to achieve. The
other – and more serious – reason has not been quantitative but qualitative: the
expansion of the so-called canon. The days when the architecture of Italy could
xxvi Introduction

claim the lion’s share of academic attention for this period are long since gone, and
much greater variety is now expected both in the classroom and in publications.
The reaction in scholarship has been two-fold: either increasingly focused studies
(a return to the archive to document increasing numbers of buildings); or very
large-scale world perspectives from which specificity has inevitably disappeared.5
Both tendencies respond to the wax and wane of preservation imperatives (espe-
cially in the countries, such as Italy, where the monuments are located) on the one
hand, and on the other, to teaching curricula that have shifted from the large sur-
veys of (mostly) western traditions either to more focused ones or to global read-
ings of architecture.
Hesitations in naming the period – for “early modern” is not universally
accepted or even liked – as well as drawing its confines historically are themselves
a sign of the times. Renaissance and baroque, though clear and useful as terms,
became increasingly hard to use when attempting to absorb and accommodate
the expansive boundaries of current research. When dealing with mission churches
in Latin America, cathedrals in Goa, and Elizabethan palaces in Britain, not to men-
tion much Mediterranean architecture (which includes Italy itself, as well as the
Middle Eastern and North-African rim), can these terms still be meaningful?
Nor are the historical edges from which this period is usually detached as self-evi-
dent as they once were. Both the evolution in the study of the Middle Ages in
recent decades, like that of other cultures, have complicated things. Thus, clear
distinctions between periods are increasingly hard to justify and Petrarch’s power-
ful and long surviving simile of the Middle Ages as “a thousand years of darkness”
has long since been discredited, while the traditional terms cannot be applied to all
cultures in a universalizing manner.
One other problem may be attached to these powerful monikers: structures are
always self-generating and boundaries once established are difficult to overcome.
Historical borders invite as well as reject, or worse still, bury certain kinds of ques-
tions, and as a result scholarship speeds along its well-worn tracks. The category
“Renaissance” in particular, with its aura of birth of individualism and humanism,
of great discoveries and origins of modern science, traditionally dignified all that it
was seen to embrace into a vision of a “golden age.” What was excluded and fell
outside also seemed to fall outside these larger aspirations. Of course dismantling
existing modes is not an answer either, as they have served and continue to serve
useful ends. And revisions wouldn’t be revisions if they did not have something
to upend. Thus, canon and anti-canon exist always in a productive if tense
relationship.
In response to many of these considerations, the term “early modern” has met
with much success in English-speaking scholarship, providing as it does a more
neutral label that is less country-specific or culture-specific; it also does away with
at least one boundary – that between the Renaissance and the baroque, a difficult
problem of old.6 And as will become clear, many of the chapters in this volume cut
 Introduction xxvii

across periods, thus tacitly acknowledging the meaninglessness of what is essen-

tially a stylistic separation. But if “early modern” solves some problems, it poses
others, the term “modern” being the principal bone of contention. Why should
“modernity” (complete with its aura of progress and the new) start here and
not earlier or later? And does not the Renaissance as a concept and as a term have
an important historical resonance and heritage – for better or for worse – that
would be lost in a flattened terminology?7 “Words which history invents – but
which immediately escape from its control” have great power, as Lucien Febvre
argued a long time ago when musing on French historian Jules Michelet’s coining
of the term Renaissance.8
Clearly, both sides raise valid questions. In the event, this volume uses Renais-
sance and baroque in its title to signal and recall the vast – and admittedly often
problematic – intellectual edifice built by scholars for nearly two centuries around
these two categories. Thus, Renaissance and baroque conjure up the importance of
Italian material, for historiographically they were originally attached to the art of
Italy and appropriated to other cultures by analogy or as a case of response and
influence (implying a “before” and an “after,” or an “initiator” and a “follower”).
It would certainly be disingenuous to claim that Italy did not promote and artic-
ulate an attitude, a visual vocabulary and a wholesale cultural reorientation. But
it is not the only perspective, and the plurality of responses to the renewal and
recovery mechanisms once set in motion were many and distinct, and a number
of authors in this volume focus precisely on these variances. And yet, despite these
imperfections – or better put, because of them – the two concepts of Renaissance
and baroque remain useful for they contain and record these and so many other
debates within their copious boundaries. Of course, “early modern” does turn up
frequently on these pages too and it is important for the broader and more global
approach to both geographies and issues attempted here, but used exclusively it
might leave out the rich collective memory and intellectual labor that the older
terms conjure.
Most of these general considerations apply to the field of early modern art as a
whole, to all the arts, architecture among them. However, when it comes to archi-
tecture scholarship specifically, other traditional questions and prejudices have
resisted longer and continue to inform new work. For some time now, early mod-
ern architectural scholarship has been relatively insulated from the issues and chal-
lenges in the neighboring fields, feeling deeply the schism that goes back to the
post-war period when in the wake of modern architecture’s reorientation toward
the sciences, engineering, and the social sciences, some of the traditional bonds
between the arts and their scholarship also collapsed, as did architecture’s links
to the humanities.9 Of course this was not all to the detriment of the field, for
important and useful issues surfaced and have been attended with great care.
The history of construction, building science, urbanism, and urbanization patterns
as well as a marked interest in the sociology of architecture and its economic
xxviii Introduction

drivers are among the most noteworthy. Most recently, attentive to what moves
contemporary architectural practice – globalization, computer aided design, and
the dematerialization of the surface, the over-scale, population mobility, and migra-
tion – historical scholarship has also turned toward related issues.10 Ornament in
particular is a rising concern where in post-war “modernist” architectural scholar-
ship it hardly figured.11
Yet self-reflection as a theme for the field of early modern architecture has lagged
behind, and the kinds of debate around what makes up the discipline and how,
within what parameters, and how it all relates to a more inclusive and global his-
tory, are not present as yet in the major fora where the field is usually constructed,
revised, and contended. Indeed, although certainly dated, the Pelican History of
Art surveys of the 1950s through the 1970s (by Ludwig Heydenreich and Wolfgang
Lotz, by Rudolf Wittkower, John Summerson and Anthony Blunt), like the peren-
nially useful volume Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (of the late 1940s,
also by Rudolf Wittkower), and histories of various building types, continue to be
reissued and remain reference points for teaching and further scholarship providing
a solid “foundation” from which scholarship takes off.12 But they have as yet not
given way to a new generation of broad treatments that embrace the findings and
debates raised in the figural arts (on vision, on spectatorship, on center and periph-
ery, on cultural hybridity, on artistic performance, on the image, etc.) and related
fields (such as in the history of reading and the book, or history of science). Post-
colonial theory, gender studies, historiography, and the history of institutions, have
been other areas of research developed in recent decades that have changed the
ways of scholarship significantly. Likewise, questioning traditional historical
accounts has led to a rejection of smooth narratives laid on teleological
frameworks, and permitted alternatives to come to the fore: a history sensitive
to anachronism and suspicious of selective approaches focused on geniuses and
major events.13 Of course, recent work – and much of it done by the authors in
this volume – is chipping away at the old formats and challenging them.14 But
it has not as yet found its way into a broader overview such as this volume pro-
poses: both revisionist and addressing time-honored themes, aimed both at specia-
lists – who will find it useful as a starting point for in-depth investigations of the
period – and accessible to students, a companion for courses in art history and
architecture, in cultural and visual studies.
This volume then is a first attempt in a long while to offer a historically broad
and geographically expansive perspective on the period roughly from 1400 to 1700.
As the systole and diastole of scholarship alternate between deep, focused research
and large, synthetic overviews, the time has come to attempt a reassessment of
work done and accumulated findings. Is such a project still possible? Perhaps
not individually, but at least as a choir with many voices. Needless to say this col-
lection cannot address all the issues needing attention in the field. But it does aim to
present a balanced and nuanced view of a variety of approaches, themes, and geo-
graphies that will go a long way toward offering a more complex and inclusive
 Introduction xxix

picture of early modern architecture in Europe and its dialogue with its colonial
holdings and other large powers across the seas.
Having said that, the perspective presented here is still predominantly European,
pace global history. If by global history is meant a concordance between what and
how was being built in China or India when the Renaissance was in full force in
Italy, then the reader will look for it in vain here. The relevance of global
approaches is illuminating if and when moments and instances of contact existed
and can be demonstrated, otherwise they remain in the realm of analogous and
parallel readings of the universalist Zeitgeist-type. Yet, the Europe in this volume
is not a Europe disconnected from the rest of the world. And although some chap-
ters look at architecture country by country, the edges are blurred and identities are
not nearly as clear-cut as they once were. Spaniards in Mexico and Peru, Portu-
guese in Goa and China, Arabs in Spain, like Flemings in Portugal, or Italians in
Bohemia, and goods from all over the Ottoman world in Florence testify to mul-
tiple and sometimes unexpected contacts and intersections between architects,
patrons, objects, books, prints, craftsmen, and materials that found their way into
building as well.
The volume is also not the work (and vision) of one, or two at most, scholars
such as is traditional for surveys, but a collective effort to rethink and redraw the
contours of how the architecture of these three centuries is conceived – historically,
geographically, stylistically, and theoretically. Together the 26 scholars gathered
here offer a panorama; individually they focus on specific problems and examples
that illuminate the larger issues that shape the field now. They do not carry theory
on their sleeves, but the very questions they pose and perspectives they bring are
embedded in the new directions that architecture and its neighboring fields
confront.
Seeking to navigate between the Scylla of overly specific treatments and the Cha-
rybdis of broad generalizations, this volume then offers both a comprehensive yet
focused perspective on early modern architecture. At first blush this may seem a
contradiction in terms, for large surveys by definition do not and cannot offer con-
centrated discussions of issues, sites, buildings, or their architects and patrons. Yet
engaging this combination of issues has been the challenge that was posed to the
authors, and this charge is what they have responded to. The result is a balance
between case studies and larger overviews. Such an approach produces instead
a dynamic quality, with perspectives shifting from close-up to long distance, blend-
ing the detail with the large brushstroke, as well as supplying useful examples that
validate the general statement. In short, this group of essays is a snapshot of the
most up-to-date scholarship on early modern architecture; a pluralist vision in mul-
tiple voices addressing the tensions and contradictions we have come to recognize
as characteristic for the period rather than the smooth narratives (complete with
their blind-spots) that previous generations have bequeathed to us.
The volume is thematically organized. This approach acknowledges that none of
the traditional taxonomies – period divisions, geographic ones, a succession of
xxx Introduction

genius architects, or major cities – do justice to the complexity of the artistic

production of the three centuries under investigation here. Indeed, these three
centuries represent a period of major continental-plate-like shifts across the board –
economic, scientific, humanistic, geographic, religious, philosophical, and political –
all of which affected architecture directly. For this reason the larger thematic
groupings within this volume do not try to impose a structure but raise issues
and allow blurred boundaries to come to the fore: between artistic media,
between the sciences and the arts, between territories, and between historical
periods. Geography is certainly present as one organizing principle, though it
is not the only one. This is not Kunstgeographie, even if its recent revival has
shown some of its merits.15 Instead it is an acknowledgment that architecture
modifies territorial appearance, that geography allows for particular forms of cul-
tural interaction (e.g. in the Mediterranean), and that built form is a consequence
of specific local conditions, be they political, building materials, craft and artistic
traditions, climate, or economic resources. As recent historical scholarship
belonging to the “spatial turn” has argued, “how you are and where you are in
the world” are connected. Indeed, place has emerged more and more as inherent
in if not equivalent to social practice.16 Such a perspective is particularly appro-
priate for architecture, and as the chapters demonstrate, once we look at it from
this vantage point, the established taxonomies of high/low, center/periphery,
early/late lose their significance and must cede their place to other criteria.
Instead, mobility and portability become more significant, as does agency, since
they acknowledge the importance of location and travel routes that re-form
and reconnect geographies, things, and people.
Likewise, chronology is not a “strong” organizing principle. Such a diachronic
reading of artistic production would imply a consistency across cultures that puts
historical evidence under undue pressure. The arts, like all other cultural phenom-
ena, are not armies that march in step with each other. Moments of creative inten-
sity do not occur necessarily at the same time in all cultures (or in all media) and it
would be distorting history to imply it.17 This problem was tacitly acknowledged
early on, by the “fathers” of the discipline – Jacob Burckhardt, Heinrich Wölfflin,
Alois Riegl, and August Schmarsow. Certainly the infatuation with the period and
its construction as a golden age was a result of the deeply felt destabilizing conse-
quences and alarming modernity of the Industrial Revolution.18 Yet despite the
construction of this period as a long lost Elysium, scholars observed discontinuities
and they were at pains to account for them. Chronology itself was a thorny
problem – such as identifying when the Renaissance began and when it ended,
and why.19 All three were valid and recurrent questions. The medieval/Renais-
sance edge in particular was a moving target and at first the center of gravity of
the period was placed earlier than modern scholars would have it now. The Ren-
aissance – for Burckhardt at least – was deemed to start in the fourteenth century
and come to a close by the mid-sixteenth century, which gave the quattrocento much
greater importance than it now claims. Equally problematic was the other, baroque
 Introduction xxxi

end. Held to be a degeneration of the Renaissance – a view inherited from the later
eighteenth-century critics who hailed neoclassicism as a return to purity after many
excesses – the art of the seventeenth century was little studied for a long time. And
although Burckhardt was finally reconciled with this grand style (which he had held
in abhorrence in his 1855 Cicerone), and Wölfflin and others began to chip away at
establishing it starting in the 1880s, old prejudices died hard.
If chronology was problematic, structuring the period was even more difficult,
and the implication of “early,” “high,” and “late” have plagued the field for some
time. Vasari himself in his Lives of the Artists (1550) recognized the problem though
he tried to ignore it. Art historians since Giorgio have had a harder time avoiding the
issue. Some proposed mannerism as an “intermezzo” between the Renaissance
proper and the baroque – a courtly, highly intellectualized art of preciousness
and great sophistication that eventually gave way to a muscular, emphatic, and rhe-
torical style of mass appeal associated with the Counter Reformation and the mili-
tancy of the Catholic church.20 Yet not all agreed, and doubts regarding the presence
of a Mannerist style across all the arts, across Italy let alone across Europe, and even
regarding its very existence were often raised.21 Such an unstable structure also
meant that the center of gravity and the paradigmatic artists used to define the period
also changed as did the narritive. A litmus test of all and any periodization theories
was the location of Michelangelo in these histories. For some (in the nineteenth cen-
tury) he was the father of the baroque; for others a leading Mannerist (Wittkower
and Pevsner); for others again a classical Renaissance artist.22 Too large an artistic
personality to fit neatly into any structure, he demonstrated how limiting such divi-
sions were and how arbitrary the confines of period categories.
Finally, the framework proposed here also strays from another traditional organ-
izational principle for architecture: building types. In more narrowly focused his-
tories this is certainly a valid perspective; but in this case it would obscure more
than help identify the larger forces at work. Rather than look to individual patrons
and types of commissions this volume seeks to identify networks of relationships,
cross-cultural exchange, the importance of mobility (of artists and craftsmen, of
objects, of materials), of construction techniques, and building trades, as well as
geographic specificities. Of course the traditional issues – patronage, architectural
practice, construction history, and building types – do come up and inflect the lar-
ger discussions. But they are not thematized as such, as the volume moves on dif-
ferent and larger vectors.
Lest it should seem that the volume is a spontaneous creation let me state the
obvious: the framework was conceived, the themes were identified, the authors
were selected, and each chapter had a well-defined charge. My own conception
inevitably informs the whole, and the subjective “I” is very much present. Like
the days of the canon, those of the invisible author behind the narrative, even
an edited one, are also gone. The themes identified come out of my knowledge
and experience of the field and of personal interaction with the scholars whose
interests and projects I was aware of when these were not as yet available in print.
xxxii Introduction

In a way, the project to conceive and assemble this volume was more akin to cur-
ating than editing; an act of historiographic performativity, that is, a dialogue
within a historiographic tradition – a concept more at home in studies of contem-
porary art, precipitated by the challenges of performance art, though one that is
valid across the board.23 In the end, both the insertion of another way of structuring
the field of early modern architecture into the historiographic chain and the respon-
sibility for a different cut through the material falls squarely on my shoulders.
To this vision the authors add their lively and very personal voices. Indeed, the
volume draws on many types of expertise and insights acquired in various scholarly
milieus. This was one of my principal desiderata and a very diverse international
cast may be found here together in English for the first time. In an academic envi-
ronment in which the global has asserted itself, it seemed to me anachronistic to
limit the voices to those from the Anglo/American academic tradition alone.
Therefore the variety of viewpoints the volume offers also stems from this richness
of backgrounds – Italian and Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and German, Belgian and
French – that are not normally available for readers in English. Trained in different
ways and milieus, they also bring diverse perspectives to the material: as architects
and historians of architecture, art historians, and historians of science as well as of
engineering.
The volume is divided into two parts: the development of tools and categories
for Renaissance architecture, mainly in Italy, the crucible of early modern cultural
renewal; and the dissemination and vicissitudes of the ensuing “international style”
and architecture culture both within Europe and globally. Part I, Section 1, “Archi-
tecture and its Culture,” examines the intellectual and instrumental underpinnings
of architecture, those material and immaterial components of architectural perfor-
mance: the books, drawings, and theory that became indispensable to architects in
this period and key disseminating instruments of a new style; the confrontation
with the ruins of antiquity and with the newness of a geographically expanded
world; the engineering knowledge essential to practice. This section also looks
to exchanges with the other arts – especially sculpture, and especially in the domain
of ornament – and to theater as experimentation ground, as well as to the building
site, the “theatre of construction.”
The first chapter focuses on historiography, which, though not an instrument as
such, lays out the definitions of the period and how they have affected the very read-
ing of the material. Thus, Marvin Trachtenberg looks at beginnings and ends – those
apparently innocent yet deeply structuring borders that more often separate than
connect. Central to his questions is the trecento (the fourteenth century), the real
economic driver of the Renaissance, yet always caught “in between,” that is, neither
included in the waning Middle Ages nor perceived as a full fledged force in the reno-
vatio that the Renaissance inaugurated. Most interesting, he argues against the quat-
trocento’s (and therefore the Renaissance’s) absolute newness (as generally held in
scholarship since Vasari first wrote the Lives 1550): without the trecento’s eclectic
approach, the Renaissance could not have happened.
 Introduction xxxiii

Carrying through with the theme of beginnings Tod Marder looks to the touch-
stone of Renaissance architecture: Vitruvius’ De architectura, the only ancient treatise
on any visual art to come down from antiquity. Following its various inflections –
and their consequences – across its enthusiastic reception in Europe and beyond, he
identifies the text and the illustration campaigns it generated as a collective labora-
tory for architects across several centuries. Kathleen Christian also turns to origins,
that is, to the fascination with antiquity, but this time to solid pieces of marble. Fram-
ing a neglected issue for Renaissance architecture she asks: How did the massive
finds of ancient sculpture turning up everywhere in Rome affect the architectural
imagination? Displayed and embedded on walls, in gardens, and in palace court-
yards, these relics modified the experience of architecture and invited emulation.
A missing link in traditional assessments of the period, Christian argues that these
combined sculpture/architecture settings played a role determinant in the develop-
ment of the Renaissance architectural vocabulary.
Cammy Brothers takes the issue of models and their transformation to the next
level and raises the issue of visual records and invention – through drawings and
facilitated by them. As she argues, this permitted antiquity to be used in design in
the era before photography, as well as invited the architect to invent possible and
impossible structures on paper in the manner of figural artists. My own chapter picks
up these threads and addresses the neglected relationship between architecture and
the other arts. Exchanges between architecture and sculpture, drawing, surface dec-
orations, as well as the perennial human analogy that traverses all the arts come into
focus here. So does the relationship between architecture and the mobile, minor arts,
that world of objects that disseminated ornament, ideas of luxury, and representa-
tions of architecture across Europe and across the Mediterranean and found unsus-
pected echoes in architecture. Following up on this look at architecture in the world
of the arts writ large, Alice Jarrard looks to theater, a place of make-believe where
literary and visual conceits came together and provided literally a stage upon which
to display a view of antiquity and potential architectures that real construction and
urban constraints could not always accommodate.
Finally Pamela Long and Federico Bellini take the discussion in the other direc-
tion, away from the arts and toward science and technology. Looking to the inter-
sections between architecture and the sciences – mechanics, mathematics, statics,
as well as practical construction technology as it developed around the demands of
classical formats used in architecture (such as domes) – they both reveal a complex
and lively exchange between them. Indeed, the classical vocabulary recedes some-
what into the background here as real construction issues such as seismic condi-
tions that need to be attended take center stage. Domes and vaults emerge as
more than symbols of antiquity recovered than as genuine engineering master-
pieces, and building science an unjustly neglected component of Renaissance craft
and management ingenuity.
In Section 2, “City, War, and Religion,” the authors look to the principal societal
forces behind building: to the growing and systematic urbanization that
xxxiv Introduction

characterized the period; to war and destruction/catastrophes that likewise consti-

tuted a significant motor to urban renewal (fortification construction that became a
way of life in three centuries of continuous armed conflict, whether European or
across oceans); and to religion and the church as a disseminating and predominant
force for architecture, because it was the most constant and consistent patron. Thus
Claudia Conforti looks to the early modern city as a dynastic representational
device in the cradle of the Renaissance, in Italy, and more specifically in Florence
and Rome. Interestingly, she notes not only the significance of sculpture and urban-
ization layouts that glorify the prince as central pivot of the state in the era of the
nascent absolutist regime, but more important the role of infrastructure. Water sup-
ply, sewage systems, new roads, and bridges necessitated by both population growth
and large scale destruction (wars, natural calamities) were the ignition mechanism
behind the highly original renewal programs in this period and caused the serendip-
itous and opportunistic evolution of an urban aesthetic. Following upon this argu-
ment, Marion Hilliges focuses on fortification architecture and military architects.
Traditionally an area of scholarship that straddles mathematics and architecture, it
has been marginalized and become an almost separate domain of research. Yet,
like Conforti, Hilliges also makes the case for the importance and centrality of “infra-
structure,” both to the commissions received by architects and to their creative con-
tributions. Moreover, the military projects she discusses were not peripheral to their
creative solutions in the domain of church or domestic architecture, but offered an
alternative aesthetic of massing and abstract forms as well as the mathematical tools
and experience in using them much needed in all aspects of building.
If war was one impetus behind building and rebuilding, religion was another. In
an era of religious dissent and (armed) confrontation, the buildings commissioned
by the Church, whether churches or convents, were significant markers on the
world map and were part of deliberate campaigns whether Catholic or Protestant.
Helen Hills thus digs deep into the ways in which the church sought to embed its
rituals and practices, both inside walls – through enclosure – and through orches-
trating the urban behavior of the citizens (inside and outside the walls), thus draw-
ing the city at large into the theater of religious performance. In her presentation,
architecture itself is ultimately questioned: Are buildings and walls the sum total of
religious architecture? Or does it seek to engage beyond its physical boundaries,
thus dramatizing the ubiquity of holy presence? If Hills focuses on Naples as
her prime example – a viceroyalty part of the Spanish empire and therefore marked
by its extreme religious politics – Evonne Levy turns to the most international of
the new Counter-Reformation orders, the Jesuits, and unpacks their architectural
strategies of religious colonialism precisely in those countries where Catholicism
was most threatened by Protestantism: the Netherlands (Antwerp), and the
German lands (Munich). As it turns out, the strategies were multiple and complex:
on the one hand promoting a “corporate architecture” that harked back to estab-
lished Jesuit formats, on the other a tolerance for local specificity in situations
where deft visual diplomacy was needed to accommodate delicate negotiations.
 Introduction xxxv

Part II turns to the dissemination of and responses to the vocabularies and prac-
tices inaugurated and developed in Italy, and examines “Global Geographies and
European Internationalism.” Organized geographically this part looks to territories,
but also to the seas, those liquid melting pots of cultures – the Mediterranean, the
Atlantic and Indian oceans – as locations where cultures intermingled and hybri-
dized. Islamic, Christian (of various stripes), Jewish, Latin American, Indian, and
Chinese touched and left greater or lesser traces upon each other’s formal vocabu-
laries and planning strategies. Part II also looks to classical architecture as a formal
lingua franca that united northern and southern European elites (secular and reli-
gious) and created an “international style” of ostentatious learnedness. Long before
the International Style of modernism, Renaissance architects created a visual lan-
guage with universal aspirations and equally wide applications. Yet as the chapters
show, despite this veneer, the exchanges with local vernaculars and historical tradi-
tions produced highly original and diverse architectural vocabularies, for in parallel
to the enthusiasm for the classical rose resistance as well as invention.
Thus in Section 1, the authors look to France, with its multiple Italian ties created
by wars and marriages, as well as to Britain and the Netherlands with their complex
responses to Catholicism and reform, on the one hand, and antiquarianism on the
other. Section 2 focuses on the Mediterranean: the Iberian peninsula – Spain and
Portugal – and the Ottoman empire. Deeply marked by several centuries of links
with both northern Europe and North-African Arab territories, these monarchies
engaged in expansive trading and colonial occupation exporting their architectural
vocabularies to China, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, and Goa as well as to their Italian vice-
royalties nearer to home. The Ottomans added their own hybridized vocabulary of
architecture – drawing on classical antiquity as well as Persian models – and offered
yet another interpretation to the mix. Finally, Section 3 turns to the German lands
and Bohemia, the parts of that other great European empire that would both
morph and clash with the Spanish one and ultimately be dismembered and recast.
Thus, Sabine Frommel examines the French response to the Italian models
while focusing on patronage – in particular that of Italian-born queens – as key
instrument in the merging of architectural practices and modes in a French context
that had its own powerful physiognomy and identity. Architecture turns out to be
an indirect but efficacious way for a female to claim and retain power in an
overwhelmingly male dominated monarchical system. In thus looking at patron-
age, Frommel raises the larger question of how “building fever” takes hold and
is transmitted. What sparks it? What are its agents? Looking to the seventeenth
century, Erika Naginski unpacks the traditional category of “French classicism”
and the concept of architectural “archetype.” In so doing she finds the peculiar orig-
inality of French religious architecture that belonged to the larger international
Catholic world to be due to a number of factors: institutional resistance and eco-
nomic pressures (favoring renovations of existing Gothic buildings) but also a
burgeoning new space of theory (rather than reception of antiquity). Likewise
revisiting the notion of “classicism” and moving North, Maarten Delbeke looks
xxxvi Introduction

at alternative and vernacular modes embraced by “high architecture” at a time of

religious and political uncertainty, strife, and complex negotiation of international
and local identities in Catholic Flemish territories. Finally, Vaughan Hart and Car-
oline van Eck turn to Britain. In their chapters, too, the issue of an imported clas-
sicism is posed as a historiographical problem, refined and redrawn and given more
depth. Thus, Hart takes issue with the view of a pure “British classicism” arising
from Inigo Jones’ fateful encounter with Palladio, and identifies an older, broader,
and more complex context for an interest in ancient architecture in Britain. Never
quick to absorb Continental practices, British classicism, he argues, was “blended,”
“canonical,” and “experimental” in turns, responding to national tastes and tradi-
tions (e.g. the Gothic) and always mindful of local identity. Van Eck focuses on the
baroque and on the scientist and architect Sir Christopher Wren. Identifying an
evaluative rather than deferential approach to ancient forms in keeping with the
scientific epistemology of the period, she demonstrates that it is in heraldic and
emblematic form that the classical vocabulary was ultimately acceptable, and could
be blended with local architectural traditions in Britain.
In Section 2, the cluster of chapters focusing on the Iberian and Ottoman
worlds and their presence in the Atlantic and Mediterranean, Maria Feliciano
and Juan Carlo Souza re-evaluate Spain’s Islamic past. Turning to the multiple
layers compacted inside the Spanish architectural idiom and surviving long into
its “classical” period, they insist on continuities rather than abrupt changes fol-
lowing the Christian victory over Muslims on the “frontier” date of 1492. Focus-
ing on the kingdom of Castile they demonstrate how the idioms of al-Andalus
(the Nasrid state on the Iberian peninsula) were not erased with the Reconquista
but, born of centuries of exchanges, were actively preserved, and survived in
architectural typologies, forms, and urbanization. Far from being an architecture
of European/Italian emulation, the architecture of Castile and Iberia as a whole
emerges as highly original, blending al-Andalusian alongside a much broader
range of sources (Flemish, Burgundian), all creatively superimposed. Daniela
del Pesco makes a similar argument about Spanish Italy, the viceroyalty based
in Naples that controlled all of southern Italy for the best part of three centuries.
Local practices – her examples are Naples and Puglia (Lecce and L’Aquila) – once
again emerge as being highly sophisticated and creative solutions and trends.
These, she argues, are not “lesser” to the Roman baroque models as traditionally
claimed in the scholarly literature but rather – like the Spanish examples – a blend
of international with vernacular idioms and local historical traditions reworked
into original formats. Gülru Necipoğlu turns to the Mediterranean and the con-
frontation between the two superpowers that dominated it, the Ottomans and
the Habsburgs, drawing into their pincers Italy, which bordered and divided
their two zones of influence. Focusing on a particularly powerful Mediterranean
form – the domed sanctuary – she traces its origins and evolution across Roman
and Byzantine architecture and argues for the shared architectural heritage of
Ottoman and European (especially Italian) architects, their fascination for each
 Introduction xxxvii

other’s achievements and their dialogue across travelers and their accounts,
patrons, texts and representations.
Returning to the Iberian peninsula, Nuno Senos likewise inflects his reading of
Portuguese classical architecture with a look at the great variety of sources – Italian,
French, Flemish, German, and Spanish – that it drew on and blended into an
equally original idiom. It is this vocabulary then that Portugal exported to its many
overseas colonies and trading partners, to India (Goa), Brazil, Morocco, and China.
Yet, as Senos demonstrates by examining buildings in all these locations, too quick
an assumption of cultural exchanges can be deceiving: the unorthodox formats –
both in building volume and ornament – that were used in these distant sites were
surprisingly not contaminated by local visual traditions but recorded instead the
many and heterogeneous European influences at work in Portuguese architecture
itself. Jesús Escobar attends to baroque Spanish architecture at home and explores
the consequences of a large empire upon its visual culture in the years of the pax
hispanica when building projects proliferated there. Examining architecture of the
seventeenth century in Seville and Santiago de Compostela, he shows that although
a form of classicism arose that shared much with other European versions of the
idiom, the cosmopolitan population like the architects hailing from various parts of
the empire – equally at home in Rome as in Mexico – contributed to forge new
design traditions. In the end, he argues, this Spanish inclusive version of classicism
allowed visual links across an empire and underpinned its claim to universality.
Finally, Tom Cummins turns to Latin America and examines the unprecedented
building campaigns undertaken there between 1492 and 1600. Inspired by dreams
of empire, Renaissance ideals took material form there and not in Italy: new cities
displayed all the unfulfilled ideals of Europeans and disseminated them from
Mexico to the Andes and the jungles of the Amazon. The métissage between local
and invader architecture caused, he argues, eclectic choices from the whole Roman
through Renaissance palette available, as seen through Indios eyes.24
Section III, “The German Lands and Bohemia,” rounds out the volume and
offers a glimpse at another tradition, more distant from the Mediterranean, where
the ancient world was less palpable and less imbricated in the history of local build-
ing practices, though one with no less an ambition to claim succession to the
Roman empire. Ever since the Swabian Frederick II ruled over half of the Medi-
terranean, the myth and appeal of the Southern lands and their culture operated
powerfully in the North. As the authors in this section argue, distance proved
to be both an obstacle and an opportunity. Christopher Heuer turns to dissemi-
nation and its instruments – the print – in looking at the ways in which antiquity
reached the North. A very mobile medium, it was a mixed blessing for, on the one
hand, it offered much needed information for those who never crossed the Alps,
but on the other it caused consternation and uncertainty, given that what reached
most readers were images of fragments. What ensued, as Heuer argues, was a con-
ception of architecture as an art of manipulation, a position that generated a par-
ticularly creative response to southern classicism among German architects. It is
xxxviii Introduction

this particular creativity to which the final two chapters turn. Harry Mallgrave
examines in tandem the architectural books and the buildings that arose across
all of the German lands from the Baltic to Bavaria and finds a particularly vibrant
architectural scene that was in no way hampered by the religious divisions that tend
to overshadow the accounts of the period. Instead, as he argues, the German lands
before the Thirty Years’ War were a buoyant and experimental place and it was
only this devastating event that put a stop to its exuberance. Looking past 1648
and into the eighteenth century, he notes not so much a surprising architectural
flowering but rather the continuation of an interrupted trend. Finally, Dirk De
Meyer looks at Bohemia and Moravia and at the vexed scholarly tradition that
saw the spectacular architecture of the period as the product either of a national
(Czech) school, or of an Italianizing or a Germanophile one, depending on the scho-
lar’s own background. Taking issue with this view, De Meyer argues for a blend of
traditions that goes back to the late Middle Ages and arises from the highly cosmo-
politan culture in the area always in dialogue with the local vernacular, whether
Catholic or Hussite, whether commissioned by German emperors or local abbots.
Moving into the eighteenth century De Meyer, like Mallgrave, ends with a look at
the remarkable architectural flowering in the North at the very end of the period
and so brings the volume also to a close.
As this short synopsis suggests, the volume was designed to offer a different cut
through the material. Yet even so, unexpected synergies and critical mass emerge
that propose alternative paths through the chapters, beyond what the table of con-
tents suggests. For example, and perhaps not surprisingly, classicism is a recurrent
issue. After all, the architectural vocabulary of ancient Rome did meet with a
remarkable afterlife, no matter how we may view classicism as a historical force
today.25 Yet, where in previous general treatments of the period it was taken
for granted – the triumphalist road that led from the gradual “correct” acquisition
of this vocabulary in Italy to its dissemination and its gradual use from “naïve” to
“correct” across the world – here it emerges as an elastic and infinitely adaptable
system that permitted any number of alien vocabularies to invade it without losing
its fundamental character. Intersections with Moorish, Gothic, Ottoman, with ver-
naculars of many stripes, with French, Aztec, and Inca formal vocabularies are only
some of the rich alternatives it produced. Antiquity was a major datum point, but it
was also a movable feast, and by the very fact of its mobility it could be detached
and pieced off from its ancient sites, and became malleable; fragments invited “bri-
colage” more than imitation. (e.g. in Britain, France, Bohemia, and Germany, but
also in Latin America and the Ottoman world).26
What becomes clear is that this “elastic classicism” was the norm rather than the
exception and it raises the question of whether there was such a thing as a “pure”
classical moment, and if so, where and for how long? In Rome? Between the arrival
of Bramante and Raphael’s death, that is, less than 20 years later? What then of the
next 80 years, and what of the baroque? It is for this reason that the volume delib-
erately avoids a chronological path. Of course a diachronic approach is not
 Introduction xxxix

problematic in and of itself but it has too often invited a division into early, high,
and late – ever since Vasari in fact – and this has been the origin of the canon, and
with it of teleology and the illusion of progress, of beginnings, climaxes, and
declines, of high and low, of center and periphery, of the inevitable narrative line.
Instead, as presented here, architecture is embedded in its culture and emphatically
not the result of an isolated and a priori stylistic evolution.
Another theme that emerges with great force is that of architecture as both a
representational and a coercive tool at one and the same time. As many authors
show, dynastic power and military uses conflate, and the architecture thus
engendered shapes the everyday lives and visual horizons of its citizens, their
social, political and artistic behavior (Conforti, Frommel, Cummins, Escobar,
Hilliges). Surprisingly, perhaps, this is not only achieved with grids and symmetry
but also, and perhaps first, with utilitarian work: roads, water supply, fortifications,
harbors, and bridges that responded to conquest, wars, catastrophes, population
growth, and its occasional but extraordinary swelling during religious feasts that
invited original and sophisticated architectural responses from their builders. What
Cummins terms the “discursive power of the city,” the very act of founding a city –
never mind what it looked like – is in itself a legitimation instrument, hence the
urgency to found new towns in the distant colonies of the Habsburg empire.
To make a city is to instantiate authority and give visible form to law: by enacting
laws the city becomes “performative language.”
Beyond presenting new themes, the volume also poses challenges, the most
urgent being to question the limits of architecture. The impossibility of detaching
architecture from the larger visual field and cultural context moves into the fore-
ground in several chapters (Long, Bellini, Christian, Payne, Jarrard, Hills). Cross-
media and cross-disciplinary overlaps and dialogues invite readers to think beyond
the traditional patronage and Baugeschichte formats. This was one of the aims of the
volume – to relocate architecture as an active participant in the cultural and visual
context in which it was conceived, built and used – and the chapters certainly
underpin this view. Whether interacting with scientists, engineers, gun and
machine makers, artisans, painters and sculptors, antiquarians and humanists,
the architects emerge much more embedded in their culture than modernist
treatments of the period from the immediate post-war and following period pre-
sented. Privileging as they were a view of early modern architects in the image of
the contemporary professional, such readings had distanced architecture from the
inquiries in neighboring fields. Art history, for example, was one such casualty; the
history of science and technology (surprisingly) was another. When Erwin
Panofsky wrote his now famous essay, “Art History as a Humanistic Discipline”
(1940) he did not think architecture to be located outside its boundaries – and
nor should we.27
The geographical panorama brings its own surprises. What emerges as partic-
ularly striking is the importance of Spain. With the shift in recent years to a study
of contact rather than specificity, of mobility and portability of artifacts and people,
xl Introduction

Mediterranean studies in particular have come to the fore and with this the powers
controlling that liquid continent: Spain and the Ottoman Empire.28 The chapters on
and around the Iberian peninsula – on Spain and Portugal – make the point about
hybridity and its cross-pollinators abundantly.29 With viceroyalties in northern and
southern Italy (Milan, Naples and Palermo), with links to North Africa and the Mid-
dle East, and colonies from Latin America to Goa, the Spanish and Portuguese
empire builders created cultural short-cuts and loops of interconnectedness and
influence that strictly national histories do not sufficiently acknowledge (Hills,
del Pesco, Feliciano/Souza, Senos, Escobar, Cummins). In thus rereading the mate-
rial, these authors also reconfigure the long-established and hallowed issue of cen-
ter (Italy) and periphery (everything else). In the event, national identities – such as
of Italy or Germany – that support such definitions are hard to sustain. When Italy’s
North and South were Spanish viceroyalties, when Venice and its holdings were in
constant contact, exchange and struggle with the East (be it Ottoman, Byzantine, or
Balkan etc.), when today’s Belgium and Holland, Austria and Germany, as well as
Poland, and Bohemia, and Moravia engaged in a perpetual ballet of conquests and
reconfigurations, where does the center lie? In Rome? In Madrid? In Paris? In all and
in none of them? Does the highly original yet nevertheless “Mediterranean” work
in Constantinople that drew equally on a western and eastern Roman past fit in any
way in such a scheme?
Of course there are caveats. The volume cannot be exhaustive and cover all
issues and all geographies with the international exchanges that obtained. Nor is
it intended to do so. For that matter, nor is Italy covered in all its variety – major
centers like Milan, Venice and Palermo are as absent as Scandinavia and Poland.
There is also no meta-narrative. Instead, I hope the volume opens up a space
for conversation, allows for serendipity, diversity, and the unexpected encounter.
At the very least it is a step in that direction. Intellectual cosmopolitanism, various
itineraries across geographies, media boundaries, and periodization, architecture as
a humanistic discipline, are so many proposals to rethink and recast the material. It
is this goal that united us all in this undertaking. And it is to the next generation of
scholars, architects and lovers of this intricate period full of contradictions, new
horizons and conflicts that still casts its long shadow over our present, not to
say its spell, that this volume is dedicated.

Notes

1. Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (Basel,
1855) was written at the instigation of his German mentor Franz Kugler (a key figure in
the development of art history as a discipline) to whom he dedicates the work. The
guidebook was the result of his travels to Italy in 1838, 1846, 1847/8, and 1853/4.
On the vicissitudes of Burckhardt’s appointment at Zurich see Werner Kaegi, Jacob Burc-
khardt: Eine Biographie (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1956).
 Introduction xli

2. Trailblazing in the field of Renaissance studies in general was his subsequent major
publication, Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel, 1860). For
architecture, foundational for the field were: Jacob Burckhardt, Die Geschichte der neue-
ren Baukunst: Die Renaissance in Italien (1867), reissued as Die Geschichte der Renaissance
in Italien (1868), a history of architecture that he wrote for Franz Kugler’s series
Geschichte der Baukunst (his earlier Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte series in which Burc-
khardt participated was the first survey of world art); and the work of Burckhardt’s
protégé and student Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock (1888).
3. The Pelican series started to appear in the 1950s and new volumes were still added
into the 1980s, though by far the greatest numbers came out in the 1950s through the
1970s. Ludwig Heydenreich and Wolfgang Lotz, Architecture in Italy 1400–1600
(Baltimore: Pelican, 1974); Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–
1750 (Baltimore: Pelican, 1958); John Summerson, Art and Architecture in Britain
1530–1830 (Baltimore: Pelican, 1953); Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France
1500–1700 (Baltimore: Pelican, 1954); Eberhard Hempel, Baroque Art and Architecture
in Central Europe (Baltimore: Pelican, 1965); George Kubler, Art and Architecture in
Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions 1500–1800 (Baltimore: Pelican,
1969); Jakob Rosenberg, Dutch Art and Architecture 1600–1800 (Baltimore: Pelican,
1972). A more accessible and heavily illustrated series was that of Electa/Rizzoli,
which also embarked on a similar project covering the architecture of all times
and places, History of World Architecture, though this was less finely articulated.
See Peter Murray, Renaissance Architecture (New York: Abrams, 1971; republ. Milan:
Electa, 1978) and Christian Norberg-Schulz, Baroque Architecture (Milan: Electa, 1972;
transl. New York: Abrams, 1974; republ. Milan: Electa, 1980).
4. For example, see Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Court, Cloister and City: The Art and
Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
and, part of the Oxford University Press series, Christy Anderson, Renaissance Architec-
ture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For Italian architecture alone, recent gen-
eral treatments were spearheaded by Electa in the 1990s, which chose to focus on the
period century by century. Broader, though still only focused on Italy and the Renais-
sance, is Christoph Luitpold Frommel, Architecture of the Italian Renaissance (London:
Thames & Hudson, 2007). More expansive geographically though more narrow the-
matically is the Laterza series, “Storia della città,” under the editorship of Donatella
Calabi, which only focuses on urban history. See, for example, Claudia Conforti, La
città del tardo Rinascimento (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2005) and Donatella Calabi, La città
del primo Rinascimento (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2001). On theory, see Hanno-Walter Kruft,
Gechichte der Architekturtheorie: von Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1985);
Georg Germann, Einführung in die Geschichte der Architekturtheorie (Darmstadt: Wis-
senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980); Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, Paper Palaces
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), and the volumes produced at Tours such
as, for example, Jean Guillaume, ed., Les traités d’architecture de la Renaissance (Paris:
Picard, 1988). For an Italian focus see Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian
Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament and Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999).
xlii Introduction

5. Mark Jarzombek, A Global History of Architecture (Hoboken: Wiley, 2006). Finally, ency-
clopedias have been another way to collect the ever-growing information and make it
available in a systematic manner, though these have not been focused on the arts alone
or on the whole early modern period. In English, see especially Paul Grendler, ed., The
Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999).
6. The term first gained currency in scholarship on English literature. For a review of the
usefulness of this term see Leah S. Marcus, “Renaissance/Early Modern Studies,” in
Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies,
eds Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: MLA, 1992), 41–63.
7. See most recently debated in Hans Christian Hönes, Léa Kuhn, Elizabeth J. Petcu, and
Susanne Thüringen, (eds.), Was war Renaissance? Bilder einer Erzählform von Vasari bis
Panofsky (Passau: Dietmar Klinger, 2013).
8. Lucien Febvre, “How Michelet Invented the Renaissance,” in Peter Burke, ed., A New
Kind of History: From the Writing of Febvre (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 258–67.
9. Alina Payne, “Architectural History and the History of Art: A Suspended Dialogue,” Jour-
nal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Special Millennium Issue 59/60 (September/
December 1999): 292–9.
10. On the reciprocal relationship between architecture scholarship and contemporary the-
ory and practice see Alina Payne, “Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in
the Age of Modernism,” JSAH 53 (September 1994): 322–42. On recent issues of rep-
resentation that have entered architectural scholarship see Alina Payne, “Architecture:
Image, Icon or Kunst der Zerstreuung?” in Das Auge der Architektur, eds. Andreas Beyer
et al. (Berlin: Fink Verlag, 2011), 3–39. For the rise of scholarship on Mediterranean
studies that involve the Ottoman and Italian worlds see Deborah Howard, Venice
and the East (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Alina Payne, ed., Dalmatia
and the Mediterranean: Portable Archaeology and the Poetics of Influence (Leiden: Brill,
2014); Gülru Necipoğlu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). For architecture included in the larger
debates within art history see, for example, Caroline van Eck, ed., The Secret Lives of
Artworks: Exploring the Boundaries Between Art and Life (Leiden: Leiden University press,
2013); Christopher P. Heuer, The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture and Print (London:
Routledge, 2009); Alina Payne, The Telescope and The Compass: Teofilo Gallaccini and the
Dialogue Between Architecture and Science in the Age of Galileo (Florence: Leo
Olschki, 2012).
11. See Alina Payne, “L’Ornament architectural: du langage classique des temps modernes
à l’aube du XXe siècle,” Perspective. Revue de l’INHA 1 (2010): 77–96, and idem, “Reclin-
ing Bodies: Figural Ornament in Renaissance Architecture,” in Sixteenth-Century Italian
Art, ed. Michael Cole (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 218–39.
12. Helen Hills, ed., Rethinking the Baroque (London: Ashgate, 2011); Claire Farago, ed.,
Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450–1650 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), though neither zeroes in on architecture.
13. Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisem de l’image
(Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 2000) Alexander Nagel, and Christopher Wood, Ana-
chronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
 Introduction xliii

14. For example, see Marvin Trachtenberg, Building in Time (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2011); Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Federico Bellini and Pamela Long
in this volume.
15. For its early and politically problematic origin see Kurt Gerstenberg, Ideen zu einer
Kunstgeographie Europas (Berlin: Seemann, 1922). For the recent interest in this
approach and its revision see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of
Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
16. For a review of the concepts of place and spatial turn, and their utilization in history and
intellectual history writing (in a state of the field discussion) see Charles W. J. Withers,
“Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and in History,” Journal of the History of Ideas
70, no. 4 (October 2009): 637–58.
17. See, for example, Krzysztof Pomian, L’ordre du temps (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).
18. Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object: Munich: T Ackermann, Genealogies of Architectural
Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).
19. Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, Munich: T Ackermann, 1888.
20. The historiography on Mannerism is vast. A classic treatment remains John Shearman,
Mannerism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967).
21. On the various views of periodization see Alina Payne, “On Sculptural Relief: Malerisch,
the Autonomy of Artistic Media and the Beginnings of Baroque Studies”, in Rethinking
the Baroque, p. 54–5 and Idem, “Beyond Kunstwollen: Alois Riegl and the Baroque”, in
Alois Riegl, The Origins of the Baroque Art in Rome, eds. and trans. A. Hopkins and A.
Witte (Los Angeles: Getty Research.)
22. On this issue see Payne, “Beyond Kunstwollen”.
23. Philip Ursprung, Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, and the Limits of Art (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2013; 1st German ed. 2003), 1–8. For the contemporary art orig-
inal take on the idea see Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, eds, Performing the Body,
Performing the Text (New York: Routledge, 1999).
24. The term was most notably used by anthropologist Serge Gruzinski, Les quatre parties
du monde: Histoire d’une mondialisation (Paris: La Martinière, 2004).
25. See for example David Freedberg, “Editor’s Statement: The Problem of Classicism:
Ideology and Power,” Art Journal 47 (March 1988): 7–10.
26. Alina Payne, “Architectural Creativity and bricolage in Renaissance Architectural Liter-
ature,” RES. Journal of Aesthetics and Anthropology (fall 1998): 20–38.
27. Erwin Panofsky, “Art History as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Meaning in the Visual Arts
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955; 1st publ. 1939), 1–25.
28. Trailblazing for the field of Mediterranean studies and in particular for the early mod-
ern period remains Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean in the Age of Phillip II, 2 vols.
(Paris: Armand Colin, 1949). More recently and focusing on a much broader historical
panorama are Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of
Mediterranean History (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 2000); David Abulafia, ed., The
Mediterranean in History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003); and William
V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Interestingly, architecture receives little attention in these books.
xliv Introduction

29. I am using the term hybridity in Homi Bhabha’s meaning to avoid implications of hier-
archy: as “interstitial passage” and “difference without an assumed imposed hierarchy.”
See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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