The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance

A landmark survey and analysis of Italian Renaissance architecture by an internationally renowned expert in the field.

The literature on Italian Renaissance architecture is vast, but every popular account is out-of-date almost before it is written. Once in a generation, however, there is a scholar who is a master of both the documentary evidence and the buildings themselves. In this new study, Christoph Luitpold Frommel, who has won a worldwide reputation through his contributions to specialist journals in Germany and Italy, distills his scholarship into a new synthesis that is both up-to-date and securely based on primary sources.

Avoiding the straitjacket of fashionable theory, he organizes the book traditionally by period and architect. Social context, technical innovation, and aesthetic judgment are all given due weight, with particular emphasis on the way in which each architect balanced individual inspiration with the accepted Vitruvian canon. Generously illustrated throughout with photographs, drawings, plans, and reconstructions, it brings into vivid relief the extraordinary flowering of architectural genius between the birth of Brunelleschi and the death of Michelangelo, a turning point in Western culture whose riches and pleasures prove themselves yet again to be literally inexhaustible. 290 illustrations.

Christoph Luitpold Frommel has held academic posts in America(the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the University of California, Berkeley), Germany (Bonn University), and Italy (La Sapienza in Rome). From 1980 to 2001 he was Director of Rome's Biblioteca Herziana.