We are delighted to announce this SAHGB/IHR Seminar
Please note that due to unforseen circumstances this event will now be Online Only, via Zoom.
A Zoom link will be circulated on the day of the event to all those who registered.
Vignola and the Culture of Architectural Copying
The advent of printing has long been derided as enabling individuals with little capacity for invention to design buildings by means of copying.
While scholars have challenged this understanding of architecture in the age of printing, little attention has been paid to the practices of copying at the heart of this belief. Confronting this paradigm through a bottom-up approach, one that focuses on the use of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola's Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura (first published in 1562), this talk explores how the reproduction of printed images, including commonplace acts of copying, processes of direct translation, and monotonous processes of manual replication, shaped architectural practice.
In doing so, I reveal these seemingly mundane, transmedial techniques as critical elements in the production of architectural knowledge and part of a larger culture of copying that flourished in the Renaissance.
Composite capital from Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura (1562); Anonymous draftsman, Composite capital after Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura (late sixteenth century) [Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, B7797] (images in the public domain)
Michael Waters is an assistant professor at Columbia University. He earned his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and was previously the Scott Opler Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. He is the author of the forthcoming book Renaissance Architecture in the Making and co-curated the exhibit Variety, Archeology, and Ornament: Renaissance Architectural Prints from Column to Cornice at the University of Virginia Art Museum in 2011.