The Italian Renaissance Palace Façade: Structures of Authority, Surfaces of Sense

by Charles Burroughs

Overview

The architectural facade — a crucial and ubiquitous element of traditional cityscapes — addresses and enhances the space of the city, while displaying or dissembling interior arrangements. Burroughs traces the development of the Italian Renaissance palace facade as a cultural, architectural and spatial phenomenon, and as a new way of setting a limit to and defining a private sphere. He draws on literary evidence and analyses of significant Renaissance buildings, noting the paucity of explicit discussion of the theme in an era of extensive architectural publishing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521109734
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2009
Series:	Res Monographs in Anthropology and Aesthetics
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.60(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The forked road to modernity: ambiguities of the Renaissance facade; 2. Domestic architecture and Boccaccian drama: court and city in Florentine culture; 3. Between opacity and rhetoric: the facade in Trecento Florence; 4. The facade in question: Brunelleschi; 5. The bones of grammar and the rhetoric of flesh; 6. Setting and subject: the city of presences and the street as stage; 7. Bramante and the emblematic facade; 8. Facades on parade: architecture between court and city; 9. From street to territory: projections of the urban facade; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"The strength of the book is undeniably Burroughs's methodology and sources outside the scope of traditional architectural studies, and to this end Burroughs accomplishes his goal of writing something that will bridge the gap between practical examinations of Renaissance architecture and theory." Michelle Duran-McLure, University of Montevallo, H-Net

"...no one who studies the facades of Rome and Florence will have read more widely or pack his notes more intriguingly with the latest in cultural studies and architectural theory [than Burroughs]." Renaissance Quarterly

"...a provocative look at secular, mostly domestic, facades as cultural phenomena...at once logical and idiosyncratic, a combination that recalls the speed and serendipity of discourse around a seminar table." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians

"...Burrough's interpretive framework offers a welcome and stimulating reconsideration of many subjects." Sixteenth Century Journal, Andrew Hopkins, Villa I Tatti, Florence

From the Publisher