Review: Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi, by Ann C. Huppert

Abstract

Ann C. Huppert Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2015, 224 pp., 35 color and 140 b/w illus. $70 (cloth), ISBN 9780300203950 Elusive, enigmatic, and engaging, Baldassarre Peruzzi (1481–1536) was among the most compelling artists of the Italian Renaissance. He was responsible for some of the greatest architectural achievements of the sixteenth century and was a pioneering antiquarian and draftsman. In Rome, he was a close collaborator with Raphael, Donato Bramante, and the Sangallo family architects, and in his native Siena, a skilled fortification architect and a knowledgeable designer of hydraulic works. In recent decades, his prolific graphic output and masterful constructions have rightfully been the subjects of a significant body of scholarship. Yet where much has been written in Italian and German, comparatively little has been published in English. Ann Huppert's Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi addresses this lacuna, providing the first English-language monograph on this exceptional artist in nearly a century. Richly illustrated and beautifully produced, Huppert's volume engages Peruzzi's entire career, bridging the two halves of his life—characteristically marked by the Villa Farnesina (1506–10) and the Palazzo Massimo (1532–36)—and examining the practices that grounded these achievements. Above all, this is a book about Peruzzi as a draftsman. As argued by Huppert, it was Peruzzi's adroitness with the pen (stylus and chalk) that allowed him to excel in diverse artistic fields, from facade painting to book illustration, theatrical design, fortifications, and surveying. Further, as documentary evidence, the drawings offer insight into those periods of Peruzzi's life not directly associated with his authorial achievements. They reveal aspects of his early training in Siena, his methodical study of antiquity, and his approach to building design. The image of Peruzzi formed by the reader is that of a pragmatist, an artist whose creativity was tempered and refined by his distinctly rational …