Live words and experience in early modern architecture

© Ashgate Publishing Ltd 5 Live words and experience in early modern architecture ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m Christy Anderson ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m In the New York Times Magazine, the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor criticised modern architects (especially American architects) for having lost contact with what he called ‘the real business of building’, that is, with the understanding of how things are made. ‘It’s all talk these days’, according to Zumthor. ‘We should force universities to train carpenters and woodworkers and leather workers. Architects all want to be philosophers or artists now.’1 Zumthor’s own training as a cabinetmaker justiies such a claim, as does his architecture that celebrates the sensual qualities of material. In the Bruder Klaus Chapel (in Mechernich, Germany, 2007), for example, the concrete structure was poured over a tepee-shaped frame of logs (Plate 9). After the concrete was set, the logs were then burned out, smoke escaping through an oculus at the top of the building. The shape of the logs and the marks of the burning remain in the building as a powerful reminder of the materials used and sacriiced in the construction process. Zumthor’s statement on architectural training reveals an anxiety with the current building situation, a distrust of architectural theorising in favour of architectural making that has resonance for those of us interested in an earlier period. This anxiety is also an acknowledgment of the shifting tides, and a fear that a certain kind of knowledge of making is under threat of being lost. For Zumthor, the ability to make things is fundamental to the skill of the architect, and the way for architects to understand how buildings are made is through a training in the crafts that engage and develop the knowledge that can only be gained through the labour of architecture. For him, the craft of building is intimately tied to an understanding of materials on both a technical and spiritual level. ww w.a shg ate .co m Wooden loors like light membranes, heavy stone masses, soft textiles, polished granite, pliable leather, raw steel, polished mahogany, crystalline glass, soft asphalt warmed by the sun … the architect’s materials. Our materials. We know them all. And yet we do not know them. In order to design, to invent architecture, we must learn to handle them with awareness. … All design work starts from the premise of the physical, objective sensuousness of architecture, of its materials.2 © Ashgate Publishing Ltd © Nebahat Avcioğlu, Allison Sherman and the contributors (2015) From Nebahat Avcioğlu and Allison Sherman (eds), Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472443656 78 © Ashgate Publishing Ltd artistic practices and cultural transfer in early modern italy ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m Through a knowledge of what materials can do as well as what they represent and ultimately evoke in the user, an architect can tie skill into the physical requirements of the structure. Zumthor urges an architectural education that emerges out of craft techniques and training as a way for designers to get to a higher level of building than through what he sees as intellectual means alone. Concerns about the proper training for architects is as old in the Western tradition as Vitruvius who advocated for architects having a comprehensive range of knowledge including medicine, law, astronomy, history, philosophy, music.3 Through this broad knowledge an educated man will form ‘a more lasting remembrance in his treatises’.4 Each of the disciplines named by Vitruvius depended not upon books alone but rather on well-developed practices grown out of practical experience. Even philosophy was tested through debate and rhetorical practices which tried the theories in a public venue. It was not only the variety of disciplines but also their range that presented such a daunting task for an aspiring architect. In the ifteenth century and following Vitruvius’s advice, Filarete wrote in his treatise that it was not simply the amount of information known by the architect but the kind of information that is important. ww w.a shg ate .co m It would [thus] be necessary for him to know how to do so many things that it would be impossible for him. I say that if he does not know how to do them with his own hand, he will never know how to show them or to explain them so they will turn out well. He must be clever and imaginative in making diferent things and in showing them by his own hand. In addition to these two things, that is, knowing how to do it with his own hand and being inventive, it is also necessary for him to know how to draw.5 ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m Filarete insists upon the hand and the knowledge it confers (making, showing, knowing, inventing and, ultimately, drawing) as the determining factor in good architectural practice. Through the hand, he says, comes a kind of architectural knowledge that is essential and unique, and accessible only through physical and tactile means.6 He emphasises manual skill, the ability to do things with one’s own hand, as an essential part to being clever and inventive. It does not seem that Filarete is advocating that the architect necessarily be the workmen or do the work of the workmen, that is the maker of the architecture – but that he knows how it is done so that he can explain it, presumably to the craftsmen who are implementing his designs.7 Architects need this knowledge in order to communicate their ideas to the craftsmen who will execute their designs. Filarete’s comments would be repeated in Daniele Barbaro’s commentary on Vitrivius where Barbaro says that ‘not only must the architect devote himself with ardent desire to the understanding of leters but he must take great pleasure in knowing how technical things work, in investigating them, and in making them, so that his understanding does not remain dead and useless’ (Figure 5.1).8 Knowledge without experience cannot be put into practice, leaving it moribund and unable to propagate new design solutions. © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Copyright material: You are not permitted to transmit this file in any format or media; it may not be resold or reused without prior agreement with Ashgate Publishing and may not be placed on any publicly accessible or commercial servers. 5.1 ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m © Ashgate Publishing Ltd M. Vitruvius, I dieci libri dell’architettura, transl. and commentary by Daniele Barbaro (Venice, 1584), p. 463. (Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) © Ashgate Publishing Ltd © Nebahat Avcioğlu, Allison Sherman and the contributors (2015) From Nebahat Avcioğlu and Allison Sherman (eds), Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472443656 80 © Ashgate Publishing Ltd artistic practices and cultural transfer in early modern italy ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m Filarete and Barbaro both advocate for a more integrated understanding of architecture as being both manual and theoretical. What is it that needed to be communicated to the worker, and why isn’t book learning knowledge enough? There is in Filarete and Barbaro’s comments a double admonition to atend to both knowledge from books and the knowledge from making. Filarete writes from the point of view of the craftsman and architect, Barbaro as the learned and passionate patron, yet both recognise a duality in architectural knowledge: book learning, or theoretical savvy; and hands-on experience. Both are essential to the architect. This dialogue about the training of an architect and what he needs to know became couched in the language and the debate around the nature of making and the power of craft.9 Filarete and Barbaro, each from their own perspective and with their own motivation for doing so, recognise the value in architectural labour. Here we might invoke the language of modern day sociologists such as Mike Rose who in his study of the intelligence of the American worker has articulated the skills (both physical and intellectual) that are developed by workers.10 By looking at waitresses, welders, carpenters, plumbers, physical therapists and so on, Rose has shown that labour has its own set of skills, how workers adapt and change to suit circumstances, how they develop luidity in their physical performances. He shows, in other words, how labour has practices as well as theory as highly developed as what we might usually call more intellectual professions. Rose represents a new interest in scholarship and the popular culture of the complicated exchange between theory and practice in the professions.11 Much of the knowledge of labour, argues Rose, is never writen down and can be learned only through experience. Physical therapists, for example, can only learn the manipulation of the body as a means to facilitate healing through hands-on training.12 All crafts involve knowledge that can only weakly be described with words. Cellini described the diiculty of ‘[the making of iligree which] one is not able to teach with writing, but a good part of it is told with live words and with experience’.13 Scholars may well have paid less atention to ‘live words and experience’ because it is diicult to articulate and study activities that are understood to be outside the domain of language.14 Unless we have carved stone, or cast metal, or carved wood, how exactly are we to understand the things that the craftsman needed to know?15 In his two chapters primarily dedicated to building and making, Chapters 2 and 3 on materials and construction, Leon Batista Alberti goes on at length about how to do things even he admits are diicult to describe with words. In seting out the foundations, for example, the dimensions must be very precise, but ‘how to set out the angles would not be easy to explain using words alone: the method by which they are drawn is derived from mathematics and would require graphic illustration’.16 It is interesting to contrast Filarate and Barbaro with Alberti’s presentation of the same two areas as all architecture being divided into lineamenta and © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Copyright material: You are not permitted to transmit this file in any format or media; it may not be resold or reused without prior agreement with Ashgate Publishing and may not be placed on any publicly accessible or commercial servers. © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Christy Anderson 81 ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m materia. Although it is not exactly clear what Alberti means by this, lineamenta encompasses the conceptualisation of architecture, or as he puts it, ‘it is quite possible to project whole forms in the mind without any recourse to material’.17 Lineamenta has variously been understood to include processes of design, planning and theorising. Materia on the other hand are all those aspects of architecture connected to the natural world. In those sections of his treatise dedicated to materials, primarily Book 2, Alberti presents examples of the power of nature contained within raw mater, and the subsequent transformation of that mater into materials. By linking the observations of natural historians with what Alberti observed (or learned) from craftsmen, he lays out a narrative for how architecture derives from natural processes harnessed for practical purposes.18 Alberti’s division of architecture into these two realms has been taken to mean, in very modern parlance, theory and practice as if they could be neatly divided and placed on either side of an equation that somehow added up to architecture. His motivation for doing so, when in fact architecture consistently demands both intellectual and physical engagement, may be a product of his speciic writing project: to present a comprehensive view of architecture as a humanist discipline, equal to Vitruvius yet on a par with contemporary ifteenth-century texts. Writing for an educated audience, Alberti also sought to elevate architecture away from craft traditions, and the restrictions of apprenticeship training that carefully controlled speciic guild-regulated skills. All these reasons, and certainly more besides, forever changed the understanding of architecture as divisible into two realms, one embodied and the other theorised.19 This view of architecture as both a product of the hand and the intellect requires a much broader interpretation of Renaissance building. Much of our understanding of this period has privileged the development of the architectural treatise as a major innovation in the early modern period. The development of movable type in the ifteenth century and subsequent emergence of the architectural treatise as a distinct literary genre in the sixteenth century has tended to overshadow the continuing importance of tacit knowledge in architectural production. The atention given to treatises in the history of architecture is not surprising. For scholars, the availability of treatises ofers an important insight into architectural knowledge of the period. The vast amount of scholarly writing on the treatises of Alberti, Palladio, Serlio and others (though signiicantly less on the non-Italian writers) is witness to this. Even accounting for historical misreading and conlicting opinions, we can, through architectural writing, construct a convincing narrative of the development and course of classical architectural theory in the early modern period.20 Yet for all that we know about architectural theory, we know substantially less about practice, other than that it happened. While the economic situation of building including the acquisition of materials and the organisation of the cantiere has been studied by Richard Goldthwaite and others, these © Ashgate Publishing Ltd © Nebahat Avcioğlu, Allison Sherman and the contributors (2015) From Nebahat Avcioğlu and Allison Sherman (eds), Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472443656 82 © Ashgate Publishing Ltd artistic practices and cultural transfer in early modern italy ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m structural accounts of the building process do not drop down to the level of individuals, and how they went about their daily work.21 Even technical feats such as Domenico Fontana’s moving of the obelisk outside St Peter’s is not fully described in his treatise.22 The skills of making are diicult to grasp. The kinds of knowledge of the world that practitioners had was less frequently writen down, and derived more from what we might today refer to as tacit knowledge, based on bodily senses and experiences.23 Even those books which seem the most basic, Palladio’s I quatro libri for example, atending to fundamental aspects of the building crafts, leave much unsaid, assuming that any information contained within would be supplemented by the knowledge of the craftsman. Among the skills that craftsmen and labourers had to have was an understanding of nature and geology in the selection of materials; expertise in the transformation of raw nature into useable materials such as bricks, tiles and mortar through the processes of drying, moulding and iring; discernment in determining quality materials and workmanship; management skills in organising groups of craftsmen on the building site; a knowledge of applied geometry; and the ability to improvise and adjust to changing circumstances. Some of these skills were learned through the apprenticeship period, others the result of experience and still others obtained through the collaborative process that occurred on the building site itself. These are skills that derive from apprenticeship and the experience of working with the raw mater of nature, turning it into the useable materials of architecture. Alberti, in his desire (or belief) that all experience can be turned into literature, includes descriptions of these bodily experiences of the building act. The best kind of sand to be used in the making of lime, he writes, ‘will be the one that crackles when rubbed or crushed in the hand’.24 In describing the selection and preparation of materials, Alberti uses everyday analogies that evoked a range of bodily senses. Bricks, for example, should be baked thin, like bread, so that they will have more crust and fewer crumbs.25 The De re aediicatoria stands as a watershed moment in the shaping of architecture as a humanist, scholarly discipline, out of the workshop and into the scholar’s study. Yet one can hear in Alberti’s text the voice of craftsmen providing these descriptions of their work and expertise, which Alberti then incorporates into his larger narrative. If masons or brick makers themselves did not see a need to record their everyday practices and experiences, we do get lorid descriptions of making when it is part of an artist’s self-conceptualisation. The physical labour of carving is well recorded in the account of Michelangelo’s work with marble, described as moving ‘with such impetuosity and fury, knocking to the loor large chunks three and four ingers thick with a single blow …’.26 Carving stone was so much a part of Michelangelo that it was a part of his very body, and was from birth; Condivi tells of Michelangelo’s claim that he was nursed by the daughter of a stonemason who was also the wife of a stonemason.27 Michelangelo famously made much of the physical demands of his work, and the toll it took on his body. My work, he is said to have claimed, made © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Copyright material: You are not permitted to transmit this file in any format or media; it may not be resold or reused without prior agreement with Ashgate Publishing and may not be placed on any publicly accessible or commercial servers. © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Christy Anderson 83 ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m me shit blood (‘nelle mie opere, caco sangue’).28 The extreme demands of his commissions often elicited such ramped up claims – the end of a continuum of making and designing indicative of the physical intertwined experience of the craftsman and his body in the making of art – both in terms of the toll it took but more broadly of the very corporeal and sensual nature of making. Leonardo, however, emphasized the physical repetition of carving using ‘the strength of his arm in hammering’ and the mess it makes in the artist’s house. The work with any material was more often less dramatic and involved great stretches of repetitive activity that required subtle modulation of physical movement. The accounts of the sculptor working, useful though they are, are only of limited use in understanding the process of working on the building site. As Pamela Long has discussed, building sites were one of a number of places of ‘knowledge production’ including libraries, laboratories, courts and arsenals where scholars, practitioners and patrons came together.29 This sense of the community of workers at the building site is recorded, somewhat, in numerous images of the cantiere in ifteenth- and sixteenth-century art. Piero di Cosimo’s painting of the building of a double palace sets of the various activities of building including the transportation of materials, the carving of stone, sawing of wood, laying foundations and so on against a building which is eerily almost complete, as if the work happening in the foreground were in another time zone than the product of its labour in the distance (Plate 10). Yet in that disconnect is also this same working out of the two worlds of Renaissance architecture – the labour of the craftsmen which goes on in its own domain, guided by long established practices and atendant to the materials, and the visionary product of the architect’s invention. Architects who were not directly involved in building are recorded nevertheless in taking a direct, and tangible, interest in the qualities of the materials used in their projects. Their knowledge of materials and their proper preparation allows them to judge the quality of construction. Maneti recounts that Brunelleschi examined each brick and stone used in his designs. ww w.a shg ate .co m During his life not a small stone or brick was placed which he did not wish to examine to see whether it was correct and if it was well-ired and cleaned: something which no care was expended upon afterward, since today atention is paid only to what appears to be economical, and stones from the river and rough bricks and all sorts of crudity are employed. The care he gave to the mortar was wonderful. He personally went to the brickyards regarding the stones and the baking, the sand and the lime mixture, and whatever was required.30 ww w.a shg ate .co m A knowledge of how things were made, and well made, allowed an architect as overseer to control the quality of the building. Architects cared about the notion of what had been made by the hands of the architects they admired. When the English architect Inigo Jones visited the Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza (1613–1614), a mason working there pointed out the capital on the piano nobile that had been carved by the hand of Palladio, a fact Jones recorded in his copy of Palladio’s treatise (Figure 5.2).31 © Ashgate Publishing Ltd © Nebahat Avcioğlu, Allison Sherman and the contributors (2015) From Nebahat Avcioğlu and Allison Sherman (eds), Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472443656 ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m 84 © Ashgate Publishing Ltd artistic practices and cultural transfer in early modern italy ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m Palladio’s own labour on the capital would have served as a model to his craftsmen of the kind of work he expected. For Jones, evidence of Palladio’s own labour was as signiicant as were the Palladio drawings that Jones had access to through the collection of Sir Henry Woton. Jones frequently notes in his copy of Palladio’s treatise where he was able to compare the woodcut in the book with the drawings themselves. The hand of Palladio, whether in the drawing or in the crafting of the building itself, conferred a veil of authenticity on the project for Jones, a direct connection with an architect long dead. This conversation across time must certainly have served a psychological need for Jones to connect with an architect whose work he especially revered. Palladio, having been trained as a mason, represents a relatively unique position as a major architect with a irst-hand knowledge of what went on in the mason’s yard.32 Palladio made use of this training in his supervision of masons, hiring of high-level craftsmen and ability to communicate his ideas to the workers without confusion. It is even possible to see the efects of this knowledge in the treatise itself where he states that even in his language he will write in the language of the craftsmen, that is, he ‘will avoid wordiness … and will use those terms which are generally used by craftsmen today’.33 Although language became ever more a method and metaphor for architecture as a counterpart to classicism in the literary origins of architectural form, it was ww w.a shg ate .co m 5.2 Giulio Romano and Andrea Palladio, Palazzo Thiene, Vicenza, 1542–1558. (Photo: Isabella Cazzamali) © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Copyright material: You are not permitted to transmit this file in any format or media; it may not be resold or reused without prior agreement with Ashgate Publishing and may not be placed on any publicly accessible or commercial servers. © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Christy Anderson 85 ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ironically also understood to be a problem in easy communication between designer, patron and craftsmen. Cellini warned about the dangers of trying to describe a project, writing ‘there are many things that are beautiful to say, but which, when made, do not work out very well’.34 Of the forms of knowledge gained through the hand, as Filarete called it (or in the language of sociologists, the intelligence of labour) – making, showing, knowing and inventing – it is the last one, inventing, that we most often associate with architects, that is, drawing. Graphic images as made on paper, roughly marked out on a wall, or impermanent in the dirt, ofered a visual solution to a problem on the building site. Drawing (as well as model making) was a physical act that architects used to claim authority for their ideas. If drawing allowed architects to privilege the hand of the designer over the hand of the craftsman, it was a batle that they were also doomed to lose against time. Drawings could only arrest their authority in a limited way after the architect or draughtsman’s death with the accompanying voice explaining its signiicance and overseeing its execution. Filarete’s advice captures this moment of change in early modern architecture as the relative importance of the architect and craftsman began to shift. His atention to the hand of the architect reveals much about the complicated nature of the problem. The hand was both the bodily tool of the craftsman and the agent of the architect’s skill in drawing. These divisions in the making of architecture could not be easily disentangled, and Filarete argues that they must stay enmeshed. In this light, the clarity with which Alberti divides the world of building into lineamenta and materia seems all the more an artiicial equation. For me, the problem of the architect’s hand becomes a metaphor for broader issues in the study of early modern architecture. The atention to architectural theory and texts can exclude the study of architecture itself, the physical qualities and conditions of buildings. In a similar mode, the complexities of the physical remains can make the study of the building’s context seem extraneous in the light of archaeological evidence. Yet this academic divide between the theorists and the structural historians, precisely the paradigm suggested by Alberti, is in fact the interesting problem at the heart of Renaissance architecture. If it were possible to go beyond our too rigid separation of the work of the hand (craft, construction, materials) from intellectual processes (books, drawings, theory) it might be possible to see how craftsmen operated according to theories as carefully honed as that of architects, though often not transcribed in texts or recorded on paper. And more atention might be given to the labour of architectural authors in the creation of their books from the initial investigations through the printing processes themselves. The hand as metaphor and everyday reality became a contested image of authority for early modern architects and craftsmen. Philosophy and art moved architecture into the domain of humanist discourse, atempting to explain by language aspects of building that craftsmen knew by other means. © Ashgate Publishing Ltd © Nebahat Avcioğlu, Allison Sherman and the contributors (2015) From Nebahat Avcioğlu and Allison Sherman (eds), Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472443656 86 © Ashgate Publishing Ltd artistic practices and cultural transfer in early modern italy Notes Michael Kimmelman, ‘The Ascension of Peter Zumthor’, The New York Times Magazine, 11 March 2011. 2 Peter Zumthor, ‘Teaching Architecture, Learning Architecture’ in his Thinking Architecture (Basel, 2006), p. 66. 3 See the discussion of the architect’s education in Vitruvius and later treatises by Liisa Kanerva, Between Science and Drawings: Renaissance Architects on Vitruvius’s Educational Ideas (Helsinki, 2006). 4 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. M.H. Morgan (New York, 1914), Bk. 1:4, p. 6. 5 Filarete (Antonio Averlino), Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, trans. and ed. J.R. Spencer (2 vols, New Haven, CT, 1965), vol. 1, p. 198. 6 Compare the more recent discussion of the architect’s hand in Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture (Chichester, 2009). 7 See the discussion of this by Pamela O. Long, Artisan/Practitioners and the Rise of the New Sciences, 1400–1600 (Corvallis, OR, 2011), pp. 76–80. 8 Quoted in Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 2001), p. 229. 9 Also see the discussion of the hand in Richard Sennet, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT, 2008), esp. pp. 149–78. 10 Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (New York, 2004). 11 See for example Mathew Crawford, Shopcraft as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York, 2010). 12 Mike Rose, ‘“Our Hands Will Know”: The Development of Tactile Diagnostic Skill – Teaching, Learning, and Situated Cognition in a Physical Therapy Program’, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 30 (1999): 133–60. 13 Benvenuto Cellini, ‘Dell’Oreiceria’ in Bruno Maier (ed.), Opera omnia (Milan, 1968), pp. 623–4, 643 and cited in Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship, p. 239. 14 See Christy Anderson, ‘Words Fail Me: Architectural Experience beyond Language’ in Jean-Philippe Garric, Frédérique Lemerle and Yves Pauwels (eds), Architecture et théorie. L’héritage de la Renaissance (Actes de colloques), published online 21 November 2011, htp://inha.revues.org/3396 (accessed 17 July 2012). The diiculty of studying architectural making solely through the study of texts is revealed in Alina Payne, ‘Materiality, Crafting and Scale in Renaissance Architecture’, Oxford Art Journal, 32 (2009): 365–86. 15 See the discussion of reconstruction as historical method in Leora Auslander, Amy Bentley, Leor Halevi, H. Oto Sibum and Christopher Witmore, ‘AHR Conversation: Historians and the Study of Material Culture’, American Historical Review 114 (2009): 1355–404; and Pamela H. Smith, ‘In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, and Meaning’, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 19 (2012): 4–31. ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m 16 ww w.a shg ate .co m 1 Alberti, Art of Building, Bk. 3, Ch. 2, p. 62. © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Copyright material: You are not permitted to transmit this file in any format or media; it may not be resold or reused without prior agreement with Ashgate Publishing and may not be placed on any publicly accessible or commercial servers. © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Christy Anderson 87 On ‘lineamenta’, see S. Lang, ‘De lineamentis: L.B. Alberti’s Use of a Technical Term’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965): 331–5. More recently see Roy Eriksen, The Building in the Text: Alberti to Shakespeare and Milton (University Park, PA, 2001), pp. 58–61. Also see the review of other discussions of this term s.v. ‘lineaments/lineamenta’ in Alberti, Art of Building, pp. 422–3. 18 I discuss the architect as natural historian in my forthcoming book Fusible Stones and Solidiied Juices: The Mater of Renaissance Architecture. 19 On a related efect of Alberti’s writing, see Marvin Trachtenberg, Building-inTime: From Gioto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (New Haven, CT, 2010). 20 See my discussion of this narrative in my Renaissance Architecture (Oxford, 2013), pp. 1–4. 21 In addition to Richard Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD, 1980), also see these collections of essays: Claudia Conforti and Andrew Hopkins (eds), Architetura e tecnologia. Acque, tecniche e cantieri nell’architetura rinascimentale e barocca (Rome, 2002); Amadeo Serra Desilis (ed.), Arquitectura en construcción en Europa en época medieval y moderna (Valencia, 2010); Jean Guillaume (ed.), Les chantiers de la Renaissance (Paris, 1991). 22 Domenico Fontana, Della transportatione dell’obelisco Vaticano e delle fabriche di Sisto V (Rome, 1590). 23 See the fundamental discussion of this in Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, IL, 2009). Also see Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (Chicago, IL, 2010) and Jason Stanley, Know How (Oxford, 2011) and Pamela H. Smith, ‘Craft Secrets and the Inefable in Early Modern Europe’ in Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin (eds), Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Burlington, VT, 2011), pp. 47–66. 24 Alberti, Art of Building, Bk. 2, Ch. 12, p. 57. 25 Alberti, Art of Building, Bk. 2, Ch. 10, p. 51. 26 This was reported by a French contemporary, Blais de Vignère. Quoted in William Wallace, Michaelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times (Cambridge, 2010), p. 145. 27 Ascanio Condivi, Michelangelo: Life, Leters and Poetry, trans. G. Bull (Oxford, 1987), p. 9 cited in Wallace, Michelangelo, p. 51. 28 Paul Fréart de Chantelou, ‘Michelangelo’ in Jean Paul Guibbert (ed.), Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin in France (Paris, 1981), p. 206, quoted in Michael Cole, ‘Cellini’s Blood’, The Art Bulletin, 81/2 (1999): 225. 29 Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship, pp. 249–50. 30 Antonio di Tuccio Maneti, The Life of Brunelleschi (1480s), quoted in Isabelle Hyman (ed.), Brunelleschi in Perspective (Englewood Clifs, NJ, 1974), p. 71. 31 Christy Anderson, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge 2007), n. 7, p. 92. 32 Howard Burns, ‘Building and Construction in Palladio’s Vicenza’ in Guillaume, Les chantiers de la Renaissance, pp. 191–226. 34 ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m 33 ww w.a shg ate .co m 17 Andrea Palladio, I quatro libri dell’architetura (Venice, 1570), Bk. 1, p. 6. Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, ed. Charles Hope, Alessandro Nova and John Addington Symonds (Oxford, 1983). © Ashgate Publishing Ltd © Nebahat Avcioğlu, Allison Sherman and the contributors (2015) From Nebahat Avcioğlu and Allison Sherman (eds), Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472443656 ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Plate 9 Peter Zumthor, Bruder Klaus Chapel, Mechernich (Germany), 2007. (Photo: Jörn Schiemann) (Courtesy of Schiemann Weyers Architects) © Ashgate Publishing Ltd From Nebahat Avcioğlu and Allison Sherman (eds), Artistic Practices and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Italy: Essays in Honour of Deborah Howard, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472443656 ww w.a shg ate .co m © Ashgate Publishing Ltd © Ashgate Publishing Ltd Copyright material: You are not permitted to transmit this file in any format or media; it may not be resold or reused without prior agreement with Ashgate Publishing and may not be placed on any publicly accessible or commercial servers. ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m ww w.a shg ate .co m Plate 10 Piero di Cosimo, The Building of a Palace, c. 1514–18, oil on panel, 82.6 × 196.9 cm, object no. SN22. (Bequest of John Ringling, 1936, Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University)