Carolyn Yerkes

Why did early modern architects continue copying drawings long after the invention of print should have made such copying obsolete? Carolyn Yerkes answers that question in a fresh investigation into the status of architectural drawing in the 16th and 17th centuries. Drawing after Architecture: Renaissance Drawings and their Reception investigates the status of architectural drawing after the invention of print, and explores a vast group of 16th and 17th century manuscripts and collections of drawings that are each part of a larger network of copies. Made by French and Italian draftsmen who studied Roman monuments, the drawings contain information about the buildings - buildings that include the most important ancient and modern works, the Pantheon and Saint Peter's - that is not known from any other sources. But the information that the drawings preserve is only part of their value: the drawings also show how that information was recorded, transferred, and analysed by other draftsmen. In the 16th century, survey drawing was the key mechanism through which the material past was understood, and many 16th and 17th century drawings after ancient architecture are extant. Ultimately, this book pursues the nature of architectural evidence, in that it asks how Renaissance architects used images to explore structures, to create biographies, and to write history.

Renaissance Architectural Drawings and Their Reception

Drawing After Architecture

Heather Hyde Minor

"One of the greatest graphic artists of any age, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) is best known as the virtuoso etcher responsible for print series such as Imaginary Prisons and Views of Rome. These largescale engravings depict scenes in and around Rome, taken from first-hand examinations of antiquities and classical structures. Piranesi combined these vistas with exaggerated compositions, scale, and perspective, in order to create immense, ambiguous scenes that have inspired generations of artists-Piranesi's 18thcentury biographer named him "the Rembrandt of ruins." But Piranesi was also a gifted and prolific scholar, architect, and designer, who printed and published twelve books over the course of his career. While most of his visual work was created to appear alongside texts that explain his theories of space, architecture, and drawing, their study has historically separated the images from the texts for which they were designed. Co-authored by two leading scholars, this is the first book to examine Piranesi's complete printed volumes and career as a maker of books, and argues that his engravings cannot be fully understood without studying them in the context of the books he designed. Individual chapters examine how Piranesi's drawings and prints became pages, how pages and plates became volumes, how volumes became books, and how books were marketed, sold, and read. Embedded within these essays are several focused explorations of each theme: illustrations with texts designed to explicate aspects of Piranesi's production and distribution"--

Carolyn Yerkes

Books

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