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This ambitious book is about a way of building that for centuries dominated the making of monumental architecture - yet now not only is it lost as practice, but knowledge of its very existence is consigned to oblivion. In pre-modern Europe, the architect built not just with imagination, brick and mortar, but with time, using vast quantities of duration to erect monumental buildings that otherwise would have been impossible. Not mere medieval muddling-through, this entailed a sophisticated set of...

Alexandre Dumas, born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (24 July 1802 - 5 December 1870 was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world. Many of his novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne were originally serialized. He also wrote plays and magazine articles and was a prolific correspondent. Born in poverty, Dumas was the...

Between the catastrophic flood of the Tiber River in 1557 and the death of the "engineering pope" Sixtus V in 1590, the city of Rome was transformed by intense activity involving building construction and engineering projects of all kinds. Using hundreds of archival documents and primary sources, Engineering the Eternal City explores the processes and people involved in these infrastructure projects--sewers, bridge repair, flood prevention, aqueduct construction, the building of new, straight st...

This remarkable and beautiful new volume examines twenty-three major artworks that were produced to decorate Sta. Maria del Fiore in Florence, better known to visitors as the Duomo, or cathedral, in the first decades of the 1400s. These include nine works alone by Donatello, considered one of the greatest and most influential Italian sculptors, including his masterpiece Lo Zuccone, and The Evangelist John which inpsired Michelangelo. There are also detailed discussions of the gilded bronze d...

A unique, richly illustrated study of Ottoman religious buildings standing today in CairoWith the conquest in 1517 CE of Egypt by the Ottomans, Cairo lost its position as the capital of the Islamic empire to Istanbul but it retained an eminent position as the second most important city, with Egypt still regarded as one of the wealthiest provinces of the new empire. Round minarets with pointed hoods, as symbols of the new rulers, began filling the landscape alongside the octagonal minarets with p...

From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an "acoust...

Known as “Napoleon’s architects,” Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre Fontaine (1762–1853) were not only Emperor’s official government architects, but two of the most celebrated teachers at the legendary Ecole des Beaux–Arts, responsible for developing the highly influential neoclassical Empire, or Directoire, style of design. In addition to their renovations to the Louvre and the Tuileries, and construction of the Arc de Tromphe de Carttousel, they are best known for Empress Josephine’s hou...

Inigo Jones (1573-1652) is widely acknowledged to have been England's most important architect. As court designer to the Stuart kings James I and Charles I, he is credited with introducing the classical language of architecture to the country. He famously traveled to Italy and studied firsthand the buildings of the Italian masters, particularly admiring those by Andrea Palladio. Much less well known is the profound influence of native British arts and crafts on Jones's architecture. Likewise,...

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores how both the Risorgimento and the Symbolist movements have shaped our perceptions of the Italian Renaissance, as the Quattrocento was filtered through the lens of contemporary art and politics.