Review: Renaissance Architecture, by Christy Anderson

Abstract

Christy Anderson Renaissance Architecture Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 258 pp., 151 color illus. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 9780192842275 We are all familiar with the narrative of Italian Renaissance architecture: Filippo Brunelleschi produced a series of technically and stylistically innovative structures in Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century that are taken as the starting point of a new kind of architecture. This foundation gave way to Leon Battista Alberti’s buildings and writings in the next generation, then in turn to Giuliano da Sangallo, Donato Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Vignola, and Palladio. Other architects are usually included, as are excursions to Urbino, Milan, Mantua, and Venice. This progression has served as the spine of a series of important surveys by Peter Murray, Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich and Wolfgang Lotz, and Christoph Luitpold Frommel, which has introduced two generations of undergraduate students to Renaissance architecture, forming their view of the material.1 In Anglophone architectural history, this account of Italian Renaissance architecture has often represented the development of building in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries more generally. In Architecture of the Renaissance , published in a series on world architecture, Peter Murray expands this narrative by appending a short closing section on buildings in France, Spain, the Low Countries, Germany, and England.2 A relatively small group of scholars have championed architecture elsewhere, but even these accounts have often been presented as something of an adjunct to the Italian Renaissance. For example, Anthony Blunt’s essential survey of French art and architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries opens with an account of King Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494, and its cultural effects. Much …