Print, Architecture, and Renaissance Cultures of Copying
The advent of printing has long been derided as enabling individuals with little capacity for invention to design buildings by means of copying. While scholars have challenged this understanding of architecture in the age of printing, little attention has been paid to the practices of copying at the heart of this belief. Confronting this paradigm through a bottom-up approach, one that focuses on the use of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s treatise on the five architectural orders (first published in 1562), this talk explores how the reproduction of printed images, including commonplace acts of copying, processes of direct translation, and monotonous processes of manual replication, shaped architectural practice. In doing so, I reveal these seemingly mundane, transmedial techniques as critical elements in the production of architectural knowledge and part of a larger culture of copying that flourished in the Renaissance.
