The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture by Alina A. Payne (review)

humanities 343 all appearances, a masterful teacher. (JOHN F. DOERKSEN) Alina A. Payne. The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture Cambridge University Press. xvi, 344. 88 illus. US $74.95 Renaissance architects claimed to model their designs on those of antiquity . Payne's study addresses the central question of how then to account for the designs of the Renaissance that are so markedly distinct from their assumed models. The answer that Payne reveals lies in ornament which was the site of a careful balancing between imitation and invention. The Renaissance project of recuperating antiquity entailed, for architects, investigation of two complimentary sources of authority: the surviving ancient monuments and the one complete ancient text on architecture, Vitruvius's first-century BCE treatise, The Ten Books on Architecture. Payne concentrates on the literary side of this effort. Rather than focusing on built works, Payne examines the statements about architecture to be found in Renaissance treatises, all of which had their roots in Vitruvius's work. In part 1 of the book, `Texts, Ruins and Academies,' Payne lays the groundwork for the four textual case studies that constitute part 2, `La Questione del Ornamento.' She first examines the `impulse towards imitatio,' and sets up the dialectic between invention, or licence, and convention. Arguing that licence gains meaning only in reference to a known authority, Payne proposes a more nuanced reading of sixteenth-century architecture than has generally been presented, in which convention counterbalanced invention rather than acting as a restrictive, ossifying force. Payne `un-reads' the accumulated layers of interpretation surrounding the Vitruvian text, to uncover his actual words and identify the key issues of subsequent theorists. She then explores the connections between Vitruvian study and the broader literary culture of the period: `Since the Renaissance access to Vitruvius was mediated by language, it interacted with the whole spectrum of text-based culture and entered its deeply intertextual environment.' Payne's project is to untangle the complex web of exegesis that developed around the humanist effort to understand this ancient text. Payne uses the fifteenth-century treatises by Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco de Giorgio Martini to establish a context and explore the issues from which subsequent theory developed, but she also identifies a significant point of divergence between the two. Vitruvius offered both architectonic structure and the human form as mimetic paradigms for 344 letters in canada 1999 architectural design. While Alberti's conception of ornament relied on the tectonic paradigm, Francesco de Giorgio drew upon the analogy to human form and developed a pictorial conception of ornament. Here opened two routes for subsequent theoretical development. Payne's choice of authors ranges from the familiar to the obscure. Sebastiano Serlio was the first sixteenth-century theorist to commit his ideas to paper and so the second half of the book begins with examination of his work. Gherardo Spini is a more surprising selection. A man of letters without practical building experience, his work had little influence in its time and was only published in 1980. Nonetheless, his text established an important link between the literary and architectural cultures of its time and, especially significant for Payne's argument, he continued the tectonic argument of Alberti's theory where Serlio had adopted the human analogy of Francesco de Giorgio. Words about architecture more than buildings themselves constitute the material of most chapters. However, when Payne addresses Andrea Palladio, a prolific builder as well as author of possibly the most influential of Renaissance architectural treatises, she devotes considerable attention to his built work. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is the most readable of her chapters. Payne's discussion of the structural expressiveness of Palladio's ornament is particularly insightful. She also notes the increasing linkages to scientific thought in Palladio's work. This finds fuller expression in the writings of Vincenzo Scamozzi at the end of the sixteenth century. Payne ends with a brief discussion of how these currents developed in the course of the seventeenth century. Payne captures the difficulty faced by Renaissance architects struggling to understand the Vitruvian text and in so doing has produced a book that proves challenging to expert and non-expert alike...