Palazzo del Te, Mantua, Italy, 1524–34 (architect: Giulio Romano).
Photograph: Kimberley Skelton

New Early Modern Architecture Initiative

At the beginning of this year Freek Schmidt and Kimberley Skelton launched the organization and associated website Early Modern Architecture (EarlyModernArchitecture.com), an initiative that explores global, interdisciplinary frameworks for the architecture (design, theory, and practice) of Europe and its colonies, 1400–1800. Early Modern Architecture particularly fosters scholarly exchange of innovative research and education. It seeks to showcase methodologies that link architectural history, art history, and the humanities through calls for papers, conference announcements, and fellowship opportunities spanning fields such as literature, philosophy, and sociology. Materials too are provided for global study, with images and bibliography, stretching from the Spanish New World to Russia and with links to digital resources as well as research centres across Europe and North America. As the site continues to develop, a projected online publishing platform will examine the rich array of issues raised by these methodologies and global resources.

In founding this initiative, Schmidt (associate professor at the faculty of arts, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Skelton (an independent scholar who recently received her Ph.D. from Yale University) aim to encourage debate about the ambiguities, paradoxes, and possible contradictions complicating the early modern world. Building, body, book, and boundary all appeared oddly knowable yet unknowable, familiar yet foreign, stable yet malleable to early modern Europeans. Architectural theorists claimed that buildings protected humans, but buildings also might dangerously overwhelm the fragile senses that were too often fallible, too easily drowned by the physical environment, and too closely tied to the volatile passions. Books that claimed to set forth comprehensible design principles were no more predictable; seemingly definite mathematical proportions changed from one author to another, and the same book might contain different content when translated or when reproduced in cheaper editions. Buildings, too, startlingly unsettled their viewers. A long corridor could be a trick of perspective, blocks of stone could be stucco masking brick, and a façade might undulate along a city street. Imagined in the mind, buildings might seem more predictable and controllable—the readily identified spaces espoused by rhetorical theorists for recalling stored knowledge. But the mind could waver as readily as the built façade, digressing from expected to unexpected routes.

These moments of wavering were anything but surprising to the early modern European. Geographical boundaries were just as uncertain as built ones, for colonial discoveries revealed unmapped territories that cartographers could only suggest with white blankness. Religious and political tradition crumbled as well: papal supremacy suddenly fragmenting across Europe, the Netherlands slipping free of Spanish Habsburg control, England and France disintegrating into civil wars, and the list might continue. Chronological boundaries were equally malleable with growing interest in the historical precision of archaeology. That is, early modern Europeans debated about and navigated through a physical and intellectual world ever in process.

Scholars from a range of disciplines have probed these early modern ambiguities and paradoxes. Cultural geographers and architectural theorists have placed viewers in motion—examining changing perceptions with circulation around a building and exploring a language of formal and spatial analysis. Social and intellectual historians have underscored the perpetually slippery overlap between public and private. In their turn, historians of the book and of reading have complicated the role of the viewer as both audience and author; readers learn from text and image but also excerpt, compare, and critique. And art historians have argued that the eyes and minds of viewers are neither so stationary nor so predictable as Michael Baxandall’s ‘period eye’ once presumed; viewers move, are of differing ages and genders, and experience distinct cultural constructs.

Architectural historians stand at the rich confluence of these international, interdisciplinary methodologies. What were the ‘eyes’ through which architect and patron, much like stage directors, manipulated the viewer’s experience? How could those ‘eyes’ be unpredictable and even paradoxical? Such questions stretched across a wide range of media and of disciplines: print, painting, plasterwork, rhetoric, social theory, and science. Debates too swirled in global networks from the North and South American continents to Russia to Portuguese India. With a website searchable by scholars from any field and including basic information alongside current research endeavors, Early Modern Architecture seeks to evoke a broad dialogue about these and other early modern complexities.

For more information, see http://earlymodernarchitecture.com