Building Through the Paper: Disegno and the Architectural Copybook in the Italian Renaissance

Abstract

The dissertation looks at architectural theory in early modern Italy through a history of its drawings. It examines a group of early-sixteenth-century drawing books, made in and around Rome, that comprised reproductive drawings based on circulating drawing exemplars from the late fifteenth century. The drawing books are identified as study tools made by artisans who aspired to the practice of architecture. The study illuminates the broader shift toward drawing as the primary means of architectural design. The first chapter contends that the distinctive drawing practices of architecture arose from the merging of the representational traditions of figural and mechanical drawing, identifying this progression in architectural texts by Cennino Cennini, Leon Battista Alberti, Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Leonardo, and Raphael. The next chapter reconsiders the “treatise-books” of the 1510s-1530s as copybooks for architectural draftsmen, analogous to the commonplace books created by humanist scholars, using the Codex Coner (Soane’s Museum, London) as a case study. Chapter 3 looks at the widespread phenomenon of drawing and copying architectural details and tracks its development from detail drawing series made in the fifteenth century to the precisely measured images of the early sixteenth century. The case study is the Codex Fogg (Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge). Chapter 4 traces the empirical development of orthographic section drawing as an established component of the drawing palette of the architectural draftsman, taking the Codex Mellon (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) as an example. Chapter 5 investigates the circumstances that influenced the end of the architectural copybook phenomenon in the late 1530s-40s. Two examples demonstrate the transition, the Codex Lille by Raffaello da Montelupo (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille) and the Codex Campori App. 1755 of Giovanni Antonio Dosio (Biblioteca Estense, Modena).