The City Rehearsed: Architecture, Rhetoric, and Print in the Arts of Hans Vredeman de Vries (1526-1609)

This dissertation examines the creation and reception of "architectural" prints by the Netherlandish polymath Hans Vredeman de Vries (1526-1609). Painter, architect, rhetorician, perspective theorist, but chiefly draughtsman, Vredeman was active in Antwerp, where he designed a bizarre and (until recently) unstudied body of images of fantastic architecture. Starting with the Scenographiae (1560), and continuing through the two-volume Perspective (1604-5) his publications depicted nightmarish structures and cities largely bereft of any narrative action, or of human figures altogether. Few of Vredeman's hypothetical structures were ever built. As a print designer, Vredeman's work for Antwerp publishers like Gerard de Jode, Philips Galle, and Hieronymous Cock was always subject to the multiple inputs of different etchers, engravers, and publishers, and as a painter his compositions were frequently supplied with staffage by other hands: Lucas van Valkenborch, Marten van Cleve, and reputedly, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Vredeman was of course not unique in this respect, and the locales where he was employed-Prague, Danzig, Wolfenbuttel-cherished exactly the combinatory possibilities of his work. Yet unlike Albrecht Ddrer, Lucas van Leyden, or Hubert Goltzius-artists who drew, cut, and even published their own designs-Vredeman's control over the path from inventio to execudit was never total. Hence he has never fulfilled the gilded role of the peinture-graveur that print history since Bartsch has historically adored. The study posits a new way of thinking about the Renaissance artist as a historical subject, overturning conventional criteria such as originality, beauty, and solitary genius in favor of categories like collaboration, copying, and failure.