In association with
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THE ARCHITECTURAL TREATISE IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE: ARCHITECTURAL
INVENTION, ORNAMENT, AND LITERARY CULTURE Wittkower’s celebrated Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949), influenced by the white forms and mathematical harmony associated with Le Corbusier, reminds us that every age interprets the past in the light of its own preoccupations, for ornament has been largely outlawed in twentieth-century architecture. In reaction, Alina Payne now concentrates on Renaissance thinking about the relation of architecture and ornament. Developed from her PhD thesis, her book is loaded with academic impedimenta which, though valuable to scholars, will reduce its wider impact. Indeed, the treatises have been more clearly presented to a non-specialist audience in Vaughan Hart’s Paper Palaces (1998). Many plates are so lamentably muddy that they obscure rather than illuminate argument. In investigating the attempts made by Renaissance architects and theorists to negotiate between the imitation and the reinvention of Classicism, she places ornament at the heart of the debate, pointing out that Renaissance architects adorned the surfaces of their buildings with ornamental forms which were scarcely sanctioned by antiquity, such as brackets, volutes, consoles, balustrades, parapets, masks, shells, frames, garlands, and niches. She notes that there was nothing in Vitruvius or Alberti on topics like the placement of astragals, of egg and dart mouldings, and of sculpture. Even Palladio avoids discussion of sculpture, despite the prominence of it in his own buildings. By contrast, she rightly credits Serlio with providing the most comprehensive programme for the use of ornament in private and public buildings. DAVID WATKIN |