Word and Image in Architectural Treatises of the Italian Renaissance

Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Sebastiano Serlio, Daniele Barbaro, and Andrea Palladio all composed illustrated architectural treatises in which they overcame innumerable obstacles facing them as innovators in a new genre. All found answers to the problem of structuring the relation between word and image, whether by conscious design or by intuition based on "habits of mind" that grew from their own study and practice of architecture. These answers, which took the form of creative principles, as well as the origins of these principles and their application, are the object of this study. As part of the history of representation, this study aims to make the treatises more accessible to the student of Renaissance culture and to the contemporary architect-author. The chapters are arranged in the chronological sequence in which these major treatises were written. The treatises themselves are studied thematically, according to the interests of the writers. The method used has been structural: to find in the texts patterns of thought or statements of principle that apply to the relationship between the texts and the images. For Francesco di Giorgio, Daniele Barbaro, and Andrea Palladio, some of these principles are revealed in changes that occurred between various stages of composition of the treatises; for Sebastiano Serlio structural principles are revealed in the changes in approach that occurred between the published volumes, which appeared at irregular intervals. The time frame is 1470 to 1570--from the time Francesco di Giorgio's treatises were initiated to the publication date of Palladio's Quattro Libri. The conclusion reached is that all of the writers called upon their own humanistic interests and architectural experience for principles that could be applied to the "construction" of the relationship between the words and the images in their books.