Renaissance Works Research Articles

Images of Medieval Art in the French Surrealist Periodicals <i>Documents</i> (1929–31) and <i>Minotaure</i> (1933–39)

The avant-garde movement Surrealism claimed historical figures as supposed ancesters, as is well known, but also interacted with the past, and especially art of the past, in other ways. This article explores the reception of the European Middle Ages in French Surrealism, in particular medieval art, by means of a case study: illustrations of medieval and early-modern Western art in the surrealist periodicals Documents (1929-1931) and Minotaure (1933-1939). The cerebral and contrary Documents challenged the canon of art by actively looking at the margins of European art, reproducing medieval art from a wide variety of periods and geographic locations, and in very differing media, including jewelry and vessels, murals, bronze church doors, and manuscript illuminations. The glossy art review Minotaure, which came with coloured inserts, was more conventional in its selection, reproducing primarily late-medieval and renaissance art works, mainly (panel) paintings. However, the intention is just as contrary, as late-medieval and renaissance art in Minotaure is framed in terms of surrealist aesthetics in a manner undermining the conventional canon. In Documents medieval art primarily serves to makes points about style and iconography, which is often posited as primitive or exotic. In Minotaure, medieval art serves to make points about Surrealism, about the oneiric qualities of form or iconography. Both periodicals offered an interesting array of medieval and renaissance art and introduced this art into the surrealist discours.

Diego de Riaño and the main sacristy of the Cathedral of Seville: a new approach to its authorship

Crucial Spanish Renaissance work, the Main Sacristy of the Cathedral of Seville (1528-1547) has been a long controversial issue, leaving behind it a shadow of doubt about the name of its true creator. In the context of a broader work, aiming to refine the building catalogue of Diego de Riano (c. 1490-1534), a review of the problem has been posed. Based on the combined analysis of preserved historical documents and stonemasonry, new evidences confirm the authorship of the Cantabrian master and enrich the monument construction history.

Columnar Entasis in Vignola’s and other Renaissance Works

Abstract Entasis, upward curvature, columnar inclination and several other manipulations or deviations from the strict geometrical rules were known in Ancient Greece and Rome and some of them - entasis could be taken as example - were used up to the beginning of the 20th century in eclectic and historicizing architecture. The article mentions historical texts about entasis from Vitruvius up to Renaissance works. Mainly Vignola’s description of proper and elegant way of how to construct columnar entasis curve of the Tuscan and Doric order columns is discussed in detail and expressed mathematically.

The Flesh is Not Sad: Returns of the Body in the Modern Utopian Tradition

This essay locates the beginnings of modern European utopian thought and imagination not, as is customary, in Thomas More's canonical Renaissance work, but in the popular medieval topos of Cockaigne: the profane corporal imaginary of the land of shared plenty, pleasure, and leisure, mostly omitted from major and wide-ranging treatments of utopia. The satisfaction of bodily appetites, including erotic desire, through general abundance and freedom from labor that defines the plebeian pays de cocagne—the clearest literary example of which is an anonymous mid-thirteenth-century French poem—resurfaces powerfully in the somatic-utopian, or eusomatic, visions of the Marquis de Sade and Charles Fourier. The projections of these authors pursue (differently, to be sure) a dream of society rooted in the lived body and its passions by availing themselves of Cockaigne's logic of the subversion of hierarchies, laws, and mœurs. This study aims both to correct the bias of the dominant view that the modern utopian tradition owes all of its force to More and to draw attention to the intermittent resurgence of body utopias. A critical historical sketch against the grain, it retrieves this latent and neglected minor strand of utopianism as a resource for utopian thinking across the humanities and social sciences today and beyond.

Effects of a Straw Phonation Protocol on Acoustic Measures of an SATB Chorus Singing Two Contrasting Renaissance Works

Researchers have found that semi-occluded vocal tract (SOVT) exercises may increase vocal economy by reducing phonation threshold pressure and effort while increasing or maintaining consistent acoustic output. This research has focused solely on individual singers. Much singing instruction, however, takes place in choral settings. Choral singers may use different resonance strategies or unconsciously adjust their singing based on the ability to hear their own sound in relation to others. Results of studies with individual singers, then, may not be directly applicable to choral settings. The purpose of this investigation was to measure the effect of an SOVT protocol (ie, straw phonation) on acoustic changes of conglomerate, choral sound. This is a quasi-experimental, one-group, pretest-posttest design. Participants in this study constituted an intact SATB choir (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass) (N = 15 singers) who performed from memory two unaccompanied pieces of varied tempos from memory, participated in a 4-minute straw phonation protocol with a small stirring straw, and then sang each piece a second time. The long-term average spectrum results indicated small, statistically significant increases in spectral energy for both pieces in the 0-10 kHz (.32 and .20 dB Sound Pressure Level) and 2-4 kHz regions (.46 and .25 dB SPL). These results, although not likely audible to average hearing humans, seem consistent with the assertion that singers enjoy vocal benefits with consistent or increased vocal output. SOVT exercises, therefore, may be useful as a time-efficient way to evoke more efficient and economical singing during choral warm-up and voice building procedures.

An Old Pond, a Frog Leaps in the Sound of Water: Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

An Old Pond, a Frog Leaps in the Sound of Water: Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

Mona Lisa’s Mysterious Smile

The article discusses the view, held by many nineteenth-century authors, of Leonardo da Vinci as an esotericist, and his La Gioconda as mysterious, sinister and filled with hidden signs. This “esoterization” of the painting and its creator was part of a broader tendency to view artists, both historical and contemporary, as magicians and mystics in some sense. Hereby, art became integrated into the endeavors of various esoteric groups and thinkers, and an originally secular Renaissance work was absorbed into a nineteenth-century “occulture” or “cultic milieu.”

The impact of new data for identification and authorship: the case of The Last Judgement, triptych from the National Museum in Gdańsk, a Northern Renaissance work, by Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling

The triptych The Last Judgement from the National Museum in Gdańsk is one of the most mysterious of the Flemish Renaissance works of the 15th century. Since the late 1960s, based on conservation research, art historians have known that another painting lays underneath the work. Until 2012-2014, however, identification and seeing all hidden image in detail has been impossible. There are no known historical sources making specific reference to the origin of this work. Its authorship has often been questioned. Since Hotho’s hypothesis of 1843, the painting is regularly attributed to Hans Memling. The earliest and only certain date in the history of the triptych is the 27 April 1473, the date when it was seized by pirates at sea during its transportation from the port of Bruges to Badia Fiesolana near Florence. As a Hanseatic spoil of war, the triptych passed to St. Mary’s Basilica in Gdańsk. The artwork was analysed from a number of perspectives, ranging from a humanistic enquiry to its physico-chemical properties. It was found that the triptych was painted with a multilayer tempera-oil technique on oak support. Dendrochronological work by Tomasz Ważny showed that the oak support was prepared for painting at the end of 1460. The results of these tests facilitate a fresh approach to the dating of the work and a new interpretation of its origins. A number of scientific examinations were undertaken owing to a grant from the 7th Framework Programme in 2012-2014 in collaboration with an international group of scientists in the project CHARISMA-MOLAB and ARCHLAB. The project offered an access to most advanced EU scientific instrumentations and knowledge to enhance our research, the goal of studies at ARCHLAB in the C2RMF was to confront documents and draw a comparison of the results of The Last Judgement investigations with data of other works of Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling.This provided a number of new results based on MNIR results concerning the several stages of the artistic process. New information confirmed the thesis of the dates 1460 – instead of 1466-1467, as expressed previously – as well as three stages in the composition and underdrawing of the work; with the priming layers probably made by Rogier van der Weyden with his collaborators. It was the norm in 15th century painting workshops, while the completion of the painting and final layers were probably the work of Hans Memling (his earliest and most important achievements in his oeuvre). The results shed light on the original proto-Renaissance pedigree of 15th century Flemish painting with its identity born in the north of Europe.

RESEARCHING THE BEGINNINGS OF BILINGUAL POLISH-ENGLISH / ENGLISH-POLISH LEXICOGRAPHY: POLYGLOT DICTIONARIES (PART 2)

The present paper is the second of two papers investigating polyglot dictionaries which comprised Polish and English wordlists. It rests on the assumption that, by providing the earliest documentation material for Polish and English respectively, the polyglots can be regarded as historical antecedents of bilingual dictionaries. While the first paper focused on three Renaissance works of reference, including Calepino’s eleven-language edition, this one concentrates on two relatively little known endeavours of the Enlightenment: Christoph Warmer’s Gazophylacium decem linguarum Europaearum … (1691) and Peter Simon Pallas’ Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa … (1787–1789). The bilingual material they embrace has been analysed and illustrated with examples in order to shed new light on the two polyglots, which are additionally traced back to their sources.

Las divisiones menores del tiempo: aspectos terminológicos y lexicográficos

El estudio de las unidades divisoras de las horas del día se realiza a partir de las principales fuentes de estudio medievales, las Etimologías de San Isidoro y el Libro de las propiedades de las cosas de Bartolomé Ánglico, y renacentistas: un conjunto de tratados (Chronographía o Reportorio de los tiempos (1545) de Jerónimo de Chaves, el anónimo Repertorio de los tiempos (1554) y la Chronographía y Repertorio de los tiempos (1585) de Francisco Vicente de Tornamira) que recoge los conocimientos plasmados en las enciclopedias medievales citadas y que permiten constatar la transmisión de este léxico, en una etapa caracterizada por el creciente interés hacia las cuestiones metrológicas. El análisis de esta terminología refleja tanto las conexiones semánticas establecidas entre las distintas magnitudes (peso, espacio y tiempo), como su evolución semántica que va desde el dominio espacial a la expresión de la temporalidad, relaciones atestiguadas en los primeros diccionarios del español.

Antiquity and the Renaissance in Oceanside: The European Legacy of the Last Judgment at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia

Like much of the art of the Upper California missions, the painting of the Last Judgment at Mission San Luis Rey de Francia reveals a long and vibrant pedigree in the European tradition. The composition is based on a Flemish print of a French masterpiece. Some elements of the French composition trace back to Classical and Renaissance works of art. This essay will identify these particular artistic details and explain how they made their way from Antiquity and Renaissance Rome, to Paris, Antwerp, Seville, Mexico City and, ultimately, to what is now Oceanside, California

Flowers of the Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: Flowers of the Renaissance Lisa Boutin Vitela Celia Fisher, Flowers of the Renaissance (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum 2011) 160 pp., 150 color ill. Celia Fisher’s Flowers of the Renaissance is a significant contribution to the study of plants and gardens represented in Renaissance works of art. This comprehensive text serves as an important addition to Fisher’s previous publications that considered the role of flora in art, Flowers and Fruit (National Gallery 1998) and The Medieval Flower Book (British Library 2007). The text will also be of interest to those who are familiar with the research of Mirella Levi D’Ancona, who has published extensively on Renaissance plants and gardens, including studies of the flora represented in Botticelli’s Primavera and Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise. More recently, scholars have published many thought-provoking studies of Renaissance gardens and villas. Examples include a volume of essays on gardens in and around Florence, Genoa, Milan, Venice, and Ferrara entitled The Italian Garden: Art, Design, and Culture that was edited by John Dixon Hunt (Cambridge 1996), and Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto’s Medici Gardens: From Making to Design (University of Pennsylvania 2008), which explores the development and purposes of the Medici gardens. Despite this attention to Renaissance vegetation and gardens, the study of plants in paintings is often relegated to a subspecialty within art history. Due to the current aversion to iconography as a methodology, the flowers depicted in paintings are often ignored by art historians in favor of discussing issues related to the larger historical context. Celia Fisher’s Flowers of the Renaissance serves as a reminder to consider the role of plants in Renaissance art. The book includes a brief introduction, a section on the Renaissance garden and gardening, and sections on individual flowers, plants, and fruit that were frequently depicted in Renaissance works of art. A thorough index lists the artists, patrons, places, works of art, and common artistic motifs and themes that appear in the text. A bibliography is not included, and the text does not include footnotes. Thus, the text serves as an informative, but rather general source for art historians, historians, and botanists. The book’s numerous rich color illustrations and succinct passages of analysis provide an excellent starting point for researchers interested in representations of plant life by European artists from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. Fisher introduces the text by asserting the importance of flowers in Renaissance works of art. Through an example from Hugo van der Goes’s Portinari Altarpiece, she demonstrates that assemblages of flowers can possess layered meanings. Fisher suggests that during the Renaissance artists represented flowers with greater accuracy than in previous periods and that this attention to [End Page 191] detail was part of the Renaissance interest in science and close observation. As the author acknowledges, the works of art featured in the text, dating to the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, expand beyond the traditional temporal boundaries of the Renaissance. The first section of the text about gardens and gardening serves as a useful starting point for analysis of plants and works of art. Fisher examines a page of a French manuscript and painting of a paradise garden by an unknown German master as examples of the northern Renaissance garden. While the author identifies the iconography and discusses important stylistic features, she does not explain what is especially “northern” about these artworks. This lack of specificity leaves the reader wondering whether the flowers and fruit in these images were more common in the northern Europe than elsewhere. In the author’s discussion of the Italian Renaissance garden, Fisher analyzes Botticelli’s Primavera with its central myrtle bush and abundant orange trees. She also analyzes a painting of one of the many Medici villas, known as La Petraia. With its formal gardens and orderly orchards, Fisher highlights desire for symmetry and balance during the Italian Renaissance. The final part of the first section is a brief discussion of the practice of gardening. Fisher demonstrates that by the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century planting and harvesting had become activities worthy of artistic representation. For the remainder of the book, Fisher describes the types of...

Alcuni meccanismi cognitivi tra psicologia, arte e psicoanalisi

Several mechanisms of perceptual and cognitive relevance which are often activated during artistic fruition are illustrated. These are phenomena of ambiguity, incongruity and masking, largely clarified in their dynamics by perception and thinking psychology researchers. The connections between these phenomena and the psychoanalytic concepts of ambivalence, conflict and repression are indicated. It is claimed that appropriate consideration of these psychological references contributes to enrich complex communications comprehension, such as in the case of artistic languages. Through analyses carried out on renaissance and contemporary works of art, it is shown how the use of the meanings suggested by the above mentioned perceptual phenomena allows to highlight latent contents.

Abū al-Wafā’ Latinus? A study of method

This article studies the legacy in the West of Abū al-Wafā’s Book on those geometric constructions which are necessary for craftsmen. Although two-thirds of the geometric constructions in the text also appear in Renaissance works, a joint analysis of original solutions, diagram lettering, and probability leads to a robust finding of independent discovery. The analysis shows that there is little chance that the similarities between the contents of Abū al-Wafā’s Book and the works of Tartaglia, Marolois, and Schwenter owe anything to historical transmission. The commentary written by Kamāl al-Dīn Ibn Yūnus seems to have had no Latin legacy, either.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Ottocento Opera

In the early 1960s a PhD candidate at Princeton University informed his professors that he wished to write a dissertation on the operas of Gioachino Rossini. He was pointedly discouraged from doing so and told that, if he wished to be taken seriously in musicology, he should focus on worthwhile repertory such as Renaissance music or works by nineteenth-century German composers. The student persisted in his purpose and, with his groundbreaking dissertation, set the study of ottocento opera on a solid trajectory. That student was Philip Gossett. Recently, at a gala event celebrating Philip's ‘retirement’, many of us who have focused our scholarship on this repertory were reminded about the evolution of the study of nineteenth-century Italian opera during the past 50 years.

<span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">La bibliothèque parisienne de Gabriel Naudé en 1630: Les lectures d’un libertin érudit</span> (review)

Reviewed by: La bibliothèque parisienne de Gabriel Naudé en 1630: Les lectures d’un libertin érudit Brett B. Bodemer La bibliothèque parisienne de Gabriel Naudé en 1630: Les lectures d’un libertin érudit. By Estelle Boeuf. Geneva: Librairie Droz SA, 2007. 439 pp. €125,00. ISBN 978-2-600-01067-2. Estelle Boeuf and the editors of Librairie Droz have combined forces to produce a book that is interesting, searchable, and a pleasure to handle. This is no mean feat, considering that well over half of its four hundred pages renders the contents of a private seventeenth-century library, and the volume could just as easily have been monotonous, opaque, and very hard on the eyes. Although Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653) served variously as librarian to the president of the Parlement de Paris, to Cardinal Mazarin of France, and later to Queen Christine of Sweden, the interest of the book exceeds the strict domain of library science. Among his writings can be found not only the celebrated pioneering handbook Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Advice on Establishing a Library, 1627) but also a work in defense of those falsely accused of magic and political works with extrapolations of the ideas of Machiavelli. After studying literature and philosophy in Paris, Naudé received a degree in medicine from the University of Padua and formed a circle of open philosophical discussion with his friends Pierre Gassendi, La Mothe le Vayer, and the lesser-known Elie Diodati, a friend of Galileo who facilitated the translation of the latter’s Dialogues. Boeuf’s exposition clearly shows why Naudé has been viewed by scholars as an intermediary between figures of the Italian Renaissance such as De Valla and Machiavelli, French Renaissance humanists such as [End Page 230] Montaigne and Henry II Estiennes, and prototypes of the French Enlightenment such as Fontenelle and Bayle. Thus, this book will not only serve the interests of librarians and historians of print but also provide a resource for intellectual historians and historians of science and biomedicine. Expanding on her previous work and on that of others, Boeuf here undertakes a full study of a handwritten (though not autograph) inventory entitled “Catalog des livres qui sont en l’étude de G. Naudé à Paris” (Catalog of Books in the Study of G. Naudé in Paris) (Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. Fr. 5681). This relatively early inventory (thirty-two pages in quarto) was compiled prior to Naudé’s departure for Italy in 1631, lists 2,250 volumes comprising approximately 3,700 editions, and can be compared to expanded inventories of his library made at later dates (8). In her ample introduction Boeuf gives an overview of this early Paris collection from considerations of size, language, edition dates, and the geographical distribution of printers. She then describes how Naudé came to be a librarian for figures of much greater social and economic status than himself, how he avidly collected on his own, and how he merited, for his bibliographic knowledge, the moniker of bibliothèque vivante (living library) (7). As Naudé did not arrange his private Paris collection according to his own suggestions for organizing a library (102), Boeuf analyzes the inventory by subject, citing many titles to illustrate how the books reflected Naudé’s interests and the intellectual milieu. She begins with medicine and the other sciences, noting how natural sciences and astrology were essentially auxiliary to his interests in medicine (42, 46). She then moves methodically through philosophy, politics, history, geography, literature, theology, and law and concludes her introduction with an account of the various means by which Naudé acquired this collection. The catalog itself is admirably presented. The top portion of each page contains numbered transcriptions of entries from the catalog, while the lower portion, reflecting identical numeration, gives a more standardized name authority and the standardized version of titles and adds information about specific possible editions that is not given in the original inventory. This is a boon to any researcher, as the various names of authors and the variant titles of many ancient, medieval, and Renaissance works are indeed legion. Nor does Boeuf stop here. She offers five additional indexes: an alphabetized author index; an...

Marriage in the Elizabethan Calendar: From Shakespeare's and othehr Renaissance Works

Marriage in the Elizabethan Calendar: From Shakespeare's and othehr Renaissance Works

Romania's Madrigal Choir and the Politics of Prestige

Since its founding in 1963, the Romanian National Chamber Choir, Madrigal, has received international honors and praise for performing Renaissance works, twentieth-century avant garde compositions, and Romanian folksongs and carols (colinde), within Romania and abroad. While the choir served an important role as a musical ambassador of Romania both during and after the Cold War, scholarship about this state-supported ensemble has been dominated by a discourse of praise that excludes critical considerations of the choir's political history. Based on fieldwork with Madrigal and archival study in Romania, this article examines connections between national ideology during the presidency of Nicolae Ceauşescu (1965–89) and Madrigal's politics of prestige, including the role of the choir's repertoire in the state-sponsored projection of national image on the international concert stage.

A Winchester Mason and the Early Renaissance Style in the 1520s: The Chapel and Tomb of Sir John and Mary Lisle at Thruxton Church, Hampshire

Architectural settings of the early Tudor period, executed in terracotta and adorned with Renaissance ornament, have long attracted the interest of architectural historians. The surviving examples at Sutton Place in Surrey and Layer Marney in Essex are well known, as is the series of terracotta tombs across East Anglia, which date from the 1520s and likewise include Renaissance detail. A group of contemporary funerary monuments in Hampshire, that also exhibits Renaissance detail, has been largely overlooked by scholars. These monuments can be associated with the Renaissance work in Winchester Cathedral, and in particular with the well-known presbytery screens. The group includes the remains of a chapel at Thruxton, with a tomb chest for Sir John and Mary Lisle, built between 1524 and 1527. The Lisle chapel was demolished in the 1790s to provide material for the refurbishment of the church tower. An important series of Renaissance carvings were set into the tower at this time (Fig. 1). Long overlooked by scholars, their original position in the Lisle chapel will be reconstructed in this essay.

Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (review)

Reviewed by: Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production Sergio Sanabria (bio) Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. By Dalibor Vesely. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. xviii+506. $49.95. Important, erudite, dense, turgidly written, this complex assembly of several related tracts investigates how architecture has yielded a central autonomous role to technology and its instrumental values since the eighteenth century. The book joins a distinguished line of pessimistic assessments of technology, led by Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1954; English translation 1964). Since 1968, its author, Dalibor Vesely, has disseminated his views as studio instructor at the Architecture Association in London and later at Cambridge University, and is the éminence grise behind Alberto Pérez-Gómez's Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (1983). This, his first book, establishes Vesely's firm claim to a central and controversial position in postmodern architectural theory. Vesely argues that purely instrumental geometric modes of representation ("emancipated" from the world they stand for) used by contemporary architects and engineers sacrifice values once explicit in traditional Western culture, where reality and its optical representations emerged from an embedded participation in the world. In chapters 1 and 2, he grounds this claim philosophically in his interpretation of Hans Gadamer's hermeneutics of communicative space, and what seems to this reviewer a much less convincing discussion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological psychology. He argues that the Enlightenment program for mathematical precision excluded humanistic values from the unity of knowing, forcing two mutually exclusive visions of reality: "Because any representation, despite its claims to universality, is inevitably partial, there is always a residuum of reality left out, which has to define its own mode of representation. The result is a duplication that may be best described as 'divided representation'" (p. 177). The world in Vesely's (and Gadamer's) view has a latent structure in which all thinking, language, and even space must be situationally embedded: "Communication . . . takes place in a world that is already to some extent articulated, acting as a background for any possible communication or interpretation" (p. 215). In chapters 3 and 4, Vesely examines earlier approaches to representation in the science of optics and its applications in the visual arts of the late Gothic, the Renaissance, and the baroque. Optical treatises of Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon show that thirteenth-century science supported an ontological role, incorporating Proclus's and Plotinus's Neoplatonic vision of light as intelligible substance and radiance of the Divine. The ontological role of light shifted in the Renaissance work of Alberti, Ghiberti, Piero della Francesca, Luca Pacioli, and Leonardo to an equally metaphysical role for proportion in the optico-geometric construction of perspective. While [End Page 659] Renaissance perspective laid the ground for later illusional technical representation, its geometric language still conveyed a symbolic representation of the world. But perspective generated a shift to internalized subjectivity that Vesely connects to Descartes's cogito and early autonomous mathematical physical models, exemplified in Johannes Kepler's cosmology. Vesely incisively discusses parallels in baroque architectural theory and practice in Guarino Guarini's chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin and Johann Michael Fischer's abbey church at Zwiefalten that preserved ancient unified paradigms alongside advanced mathematical innovations. Vesely's intellectual horizon seems most comfortably situated here, in the circle of Gottfried Leibniz and his artistic contemporaries. Chapters 5 and 6 cover the absorption of techniques by theory, and the emancipation of instrumental thinking. Vesely's discomfort with modernity begins with Newton's mathematization of motion, paralleled in Claude Perrault's severing of architecture from European metaphysical tradition and grounding it in personal taste. Vesely troublingly dichotomizes a reductive scientism, where instrumentality (techne) becomes self-sufficient, from what he views as a richer traditional symbolic mediation (poiesis) between universals and embodied beings. He offers a brief but sharply focused history of positivistic inroads in science and architecture, from Pierre-Simon Laplace and the group of Auteuil to Jean-Nicolas Durand's universal architectural design methods based on typology and Gottfried Semper's project for an architectural science inspired...