This work tells the story of the largest masonry dome ever built, describing the tremendous labour, technical ingenuity and bitter personal strife involved in its creation. Initially regarded as impossible to build, the construction of the dome, for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, became the greatest architectural puzzle of the age, and, when finally completed in 1436, was hailed as one of the great wonders of the world. Also told is the story of the dome's architect, the bri...
Livre d'Architecture de Jaques Androuet Du Cerceau, (Ed.1559) (Arts)
by Androuet Du Cerceau J
O Manuelino (Guias Tematicos Mwnf)
by Pedro Dias, Dalila Rodrigues, and Fernando Grilo
For a brief moment at the close of the 13th century, the town of Assisi was the focus for the two greatest powers in the Latin Church: the Roman papacy and the Franciscan Order. The election in 1288 of Nicholas IV, the first Franciscan pope, was the catalyst for the creation of frescoes of unprecedented intellectual ambition in the Basilica of San Francesco. At the heart of the new decorative scheme were twenty-eight scenes depicting the life of Saint Francis. Putting to one side the long debate...
A leading architect of the Italian Renaissance, Baldassarre Peruzzi (1481-1536) has, until now, been a little-known, enigmatic figure. A paucity of biographical documentation and a modest number of surviving buildings, coupled with an undeservedly critical assessment by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), have long cast Peruzzi's career in shadow. With Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy, Ann C. Huppert taps into a known, but neglected resource-Peruzzi's autograph drawings-and reveals the full sc...
Habiter Merveilleusement Le Monde (Etudes Et Essais Sur La Renaissance, #118)
by Dominique de Courcelles
One of the most brilliant and original authors and architects of the entire Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti's output encompassed engineering, surveying, cryptography, poetry, humour, political commentary and more. He employed irony, satire and playful allusion in his written works, and developed a sophisticated approach to architecture that combined the ancient and modern. Born into the Florentine elite, Alberti was nonetheless disadvantaged due to exile and illegitimacy. As a result, he beca...
This masterly account of Leonardo da Vinci and his vision of the world is now widely recognized as the classic treatment of Leonardo's art, science, and thought, giving an unparalleled insight into the broadening and deepening of Leonardo's intellect and vision throughout his artistic career. Kemp, one of the world's leading authorities on Leonardo, takes us on a journey through the whole span of the great man's career, giving a fully integrated picture of his artistic, scientific, and technolog...
In this engaging and handsome book, Cammy Brothers takes an unusual approach to Michelangelo's architectural designs, arguing that they are best understood in terms of his experience as a painter and sculptor. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on the built projects and considered the drawings only insofar as they illuminate those buildings, this book analyses his designs as an independent source of insight into the mechanisms of Michelangelo's imagination. Brothers gives equal weight t...
Leonardo's enduring fascination with water—from its artistic representation to aquatic inventions and hydraulic engineeringFormless, mutable, transparent: the element of water posed major challenges for the visual artists of the Renaissance. To the engineers of the era, water represented a force that could be harnessed for human industry but was equally possessed of formidable destructive power. For Leonardo da Vinci, water was an enduring fascination, appearing in myriad forms throughout his wo...
Of all the Italian cities, Florence is one of the best loved and most visited. In this book, Florence's rich and glorious past is vividly brought to life through the medium of letters, diaries, memoirs and commentaries written by travellers from past centuries and by the Florentines themselves. The extracts chosen by Edward Chaney are as rich in variety and colour as the city itself Boccaccio on the Black Death; Vasari on the building of Giotto's Campanile; an eyewitness account of the installat...
Formation is ideal and utopian thinking, whereas Transformation is the adaptation of the ideal to the real or existing conditions. Are the two mutually exclusive? Or do they exist in conversation, a constant back-and-forth, push-and-pull between the idealised and the pragmatic? This book examines the dialectical relation of Formation and Transformation in the creation of the city. Taking Rome as its central case study, it develops a contextual theory of urban development that incorporates Ital...
Renaissance Architecture (The great ages of world architecture)
by Bates Lowry
A dazzling array of invention, insight and observation from perhaps the greatest genius of Western civilisation. Towering across time as the painter of the Mona Lisa, forever famous as a sculptor and an inventor, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest minds of both the Italian Renaissance and Western civilisation. His celebrated notebooks display the astonishing range of his genius. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and recent in-depth biographies have stimulated renewed interest in Leonardo and...
Marco Polo's Account of a Mongol Inroad Into Kashmir
by Aurel Stein and Marco Polo
A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England....
Andrea Palladio and the Architecture of Battle with the Unpublished Edition of Polybius' Histories
by Guido Beltramini