Tektonikon and Surfacescape: Architecture and the Body in the Italian Renaissance

Abstract

ONE OF MY CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS centers on architectural authorship. Through issues of authorship of a single building I came to reconsider the relationship of body and building in Renaissance architecture by devising the categories of Tektonikon and Surfacescape and exploring their implications— categories to be studied in the course of this essay. It is this train of thought that I present here as a lightly edited version of the Agnes Mongan lecture as it was delivered at I Tatti in 2016. The building at issue is the Pazzi Chapel in Florence. Before my research, it was regarded as the defining work of Brunelleschi, the “inventor” of Renaissance architecture. Emblematic of the entire Renaissance movement, it was considered a high point in architectural history. Thus, the chapel was made the frontispiece of the Heydenreich-Lotz quattrocento volume of the canonical Pelican History of architecture in its original 1970s edition. It also appeared on the cover of the box for the book and on the dust jacket as well. The chapel received celebrity treatment in other standard textbooks. In H. W. Janson’s widely used survey of the history of art, for example, it is allowed an exceptional four images. Its facade was even depicted on several denominations of Italian banknotes in the late twentieth century (before the Euro). Thus, one can understand why many people, and not only art historians, were sensitive to any questioning of Brunelleschi’s authorship of the chapel, as I was doing in lectures and at conferences beginning in the mid-1990s. Such sensitivity became shock and anger, mainly among Italians, particularly Florentines, when at the invitation of Francesco Dal Co, editor of the prestigious architectural journal Casabella, I published a notorious article in 1996, “Why the Pazzi Chapel Is Not