Journal articles on the topic 'Italian Medieval architecture'

This study presents five little-known bathing chambers from the region of Amalfi in southern Italy. Dating from the thirteenth century, the baths define with remarkable consistency a type of structure that has not previously been identified or considered in histories of medieval architecture in the West. The study begins with an analysis of the five bathing chambers and their specific architectural features, technological remains, and domestic contexts. The diverse antecedents of the buildings, which appear in ancient Roman, medieval Italian, Byzantine, and Islamic architecture, are explored, along with the implications of this eclecticism for the history of southern Italy. Utilizing the rich array of surviving medieval documents for the region, including episcopal charters, royal decrees, and medical treatises, the study then reconstructs the economic, social, and scientific significance of the baths within medieval Amalfi. As monuments outside the traditional contexts of art production in southern Italy, the baths challenge long-standing characterizations of southern Italy's art and architecture, and point to the existence of a Mediterranean-wide balneal culture in which Byzantine, Islamic, and southern Italian communities participated.

Precision in building was pursued and achieved well before the rise of modern science and technology. This fact applies to the classical tradition as well as to medieval architecture, and is particularly evident in architectural drawings and design from the Italian Renaissance onward. In this essay, I trace the shift from geometry-the primary tool for quantification in classical architecture- to numeracy that characterizes Renaissance architectural theory and practice. I also address some more general aspects of the relation between technologies of quantification and the making of architectural forms.

The acculturation Ashkenazic Jews in Italy is the focus of the present discussion. By 1500 Jews had been living in Padua for centuries, but their cemeteries were destroyed in the 1509. Four cemeteries remained with over 1200 inscriptions between 1530–1860. The literary features of the inscriptions indicate a shift from a preference for epitaphs written in prose, like those of medieval Germany, to epitaphs in the form of Italian Jewry's occasional poetry. The art and architecture of the tombstones are part and parcel of the Renaissance ambient, with the portals and heraldry characteristic of Palladian edifices. The lettering, too, presents a shift from the constituency's medieval Ashkenazic origins to its Italian setting. These developments are situated in the broader context of Italian Jewish art and architecture, while the literary innovations are shown to reflect the revival of the epigram among poets of the Italian Renaissance.

This article is dedicated to the problem of formation of national style in the architecture of French Renaissance. The indicated problem is the topic of intense discussion within the historiography of Renaissance. Leaning the concept of J. Burckhardt, who describes Renaissance as a specifically Italian phenomenon, a number of scholars identity French Renaissance with “Italianism”. On the other hand, there is a contradictory historiographical trend that acclaims national medieval tradition that views the revival of classical antiquity as a foreign and shallow phenomenon. An attempt is made to examine the problem from the perspective Renaissance itself, relying on the reasoning and assessments expressed by the three theoreticians of architecture: Sebastian Serlio, Philibert de l'Orme, and Jacques I Androuet du Cerceau. The conclusion is made that the theoreticians of French Renaissance were not prone to contrapose the shapes borrowed from antiquity to national tradition. They perceived antiquity as the common past of the entire contemporary to them culture. They did not see any preponderance of Italian Renaissance over the national culture. The contradiction between antiquity and Gothicism was interpreted as a contradiction between the ancient and the new, rather than foreign and native. In creation of the style of Renaissance architecture they resorted to synthesizing heritage of the antiquity with national medieval tradition.

High Victorian Gothic in England was an exotic style, and the importance of Italian Gothic precedents in its development has long been recognized, as has the interest in thirteenth-century French Gothic in the 1850s. What has received much less attention is the influence of the medieval buildings of Normandy. In this article, I examine the historical and cultural connections between England and Normandy, which were stimulated by the Napoleonic Wars and the threat of invasion, and were further encouraged by the ease of crossing the English Channel. Seeking the origins of English Gothic and Romanesque architecture, antiquaries and artists explored Normandy in the decades after Waterloo, anticipating the interest of architects. Whether the results of travel or study of a growing number of publications on the medieval architecture of Normandy, numerous midcentury buildings show intimate acquaintance with thirteenth-century churches in Normandy-old village churches with saddleback towers or distinctive spires, which, paradoxically, resemble High Victorian designs in their rugged austerity.

The Canova Association is an international non-profit organization founded in 2001 in the medieval village of Canova, in Oira di Crevoladossola (Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, Italy). The main purpose and the goal of the association are the re-evaluation of local stone architecture and raising awareness and appreciation of its importance, all of it through educational, cultural and artistic events and activities. During these years, Mauricio Cesprini and Ken Marquardt have witnessed the gradual transformation of this historic enclave into a habitable environment following the teachings of the local building tradition.

A whitewashed neo-Renaissance façade set into a high rock escarpment above the village of Abreha wa-Atsbeha, in East Tigray, Ethiopia, stands in stark contrast to its sunbaked highland surroundings. Behind this façade is a relatively large rock-cut structure, one of the oldest medieval church buildings in Ethiopia. An Italian Renaissance Face on a “New Eritrea”: The 1939 Restoration of the Church of Abreha wa-Atsbeha addresses how the restoration of this church conducted by Italian Fascist authorities represents the appropriation of local history by both Fascist Italy and Ethiopia's own imperial rulers. As Mikael Muehlbauer describes, while the façade classicizes the building, evoking both the Italianita of the Renaissance and the Romanitas of imperial Rome, earlier murals inside claimed it for Yohannes IV, the nineteenth-century Tigrayan emperor of Ethiopia.

This article explores the peculiarities of spatial planning and construction phases of apse in the Franciscan Church of San Lorenzo Maggiore in Naples. Gothic deambulatory with a crown of radial chapels in the Church of San Lorenzo Maggiore is a unique typology of apse structure for the architecture of Franciscans in Italy. The architectural monument is ranked with a number of other Franciscan churches in Naples, built under the patronage of the monarchs of the Kingdom of Naples from Anjou Dynasty. Analysis is conducted on engineering aspects and system of orders of the Neapolitan Church. The analysis of formal-stylistic features and taking and consideration of historical peculiarities of the architectural monuments, the author suggests possible influence of the architectural language of French Gothicism upon the plan of the Church of San Lorenzo Maggiore. The article revises historiography of the question of origin of oriental hue in the Church of San Lorenzo Maggiore. The author substantially broadens the vector of research problems and interpretations associated with examination of French influence upon the plan of the apse of the Church of San Lorenzo Maggiore. The novelty of consists in the analysis of apse of the Church of San Lorenzo Maggiore the context of logics of the development of deambulatory in French Gothicism, rather than borrowing of this shape from medieval Italian architecture.

The construction of Milan Cathedral from 1386 was one of the most important episodes in the history of Italian and European architecture because of the uniqueness of the building itself — the largest Gothic church ever constructed in Italy — and because of the presence of some of the most authoritative architects of the late Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries in Europe (Lombard, French, German).The documentation about the discussions on how to build the Duomo in the late Trecento and early Quattrocento, especially on the structural choices to be made and the different Lombard and Northern building-site practices, made famous to English readers in a celebrated article by James Ackerman, is extraordinarily rich and extensive, permitting considerations on the relationship between medieval architectural ideals and an actual project.The paper focuses on the famous discussions of 1400, in part a re-run of those of 1392. It will be argued that famous criticism by the French expert Jean Mignot of Milanese architects involving the terms ars and scientia could have a very different meaning from the one generally accepted in the literature. Consequently, it will result that Mignot wanted to return to the original project proposed by Gabriele Stornaloco, which embodied the desired correspondence between the sacred architecture and the perfect God’s world.All of which, could be of some interest to medievalists in general, and to those concerned with architectural theory and with the relationship between Gothic architecture and literature in particular.

The Monastery of Deçan is a monument of cultural heritage in Deçan-Kosova. The monastery was built in the 14th century, and is listed at the UNESCO monuments list. The monastery of Deçan is considered one of the most important cultural and monumental building pertaining to the medieval period in Kosova and in the region in general. The paper deals especially with the historical aspect of its existence as well as its architectonic properties. The architecture of monastery of Deçan is characterized by Byzantine elements, but one can also observe Roman Italian elements in its architecture. The attempts to appropriate and assimilate the historical and cultural background that is characteristic to the monastery, and classify it as a Serbian monastery are numerous and often times lack sufficient scientific basis. The monastery of Deçan, with its Roman-Gothic architecture and its unique history enriches the cultural mosaic of cultural heritage in Kosova, and as such it is part of the culture of all Kosovars.

AbstractThe construction from 1386 of Milan Cathedral, the largest Gothic church ever constructed in Italy, was one of the most important episodes in the history of Italian and European architecture. The documentation of the lateTrecentoand earlyQuattrocentodiscussions over how to build the Cathedral is extraordinarily rich and extensive, and permits a consideration of the project from many points of view including the relationship between medieval architectural theory and an actual project. At the same time, any enquiry has to contend with the copious modern literature and the conclusions that have been reached hitherto – often erroneously in our view – about many of the most salient points. We thus re-examine published and unpublished documentation and the existing literature, analysing especially the format of the building's elevation, the proposals by Gabriele Stornaloco and Jean Mignot, and the drawings attributed to Antonio di Vincenzo. We also reconsider the notions ofarsandscientiawhich have previously been misinterpreted in discussions of the cathedral documentation.

The Franciscan church of S. Fortunato in Todi, an important central Italian example of a Gothic hall church, was begun in 1292, when this building type was still rather unusual in the region. Earlier students of S. Fortunato have generally attributed its appearance in Todi to the Franciscan demand for open preaching halls, but a closer analysis suggests there were additional, perhaps even stronger, incentives for using it. A hall church achieved an imposing effect on a small construction site and helped fulfill a desire to underscore the building's Franciscan affiliation. Previously ignored, this question of the motivations of the Todi hall church has particular relevance to current studies of the mendicant architecture, that is, the architecture of the new urban orders, principally the Franciscans and Dominicans. The question is: do we continue to see mendicant churches exclusively in terms of the friars' altruistic religious mission, or should we see them as efforts at self-promotion in the competitive milieu of the late medieval city?

The Italian building stock consists of buildings mainly constructed until the mid-20th century using pre-industrial construction techniques. These buildings require energy refurbishment that takes into account the preservation of their architectural heritage. In this view, this work studies an innovative integrated modelling and simulation framework consisting of the implementation of Historical Building Information Modeling (HBIM) for the energy retrofit of historical buildings with renewable geothermal HVAC system. To this aim, the field case study is part of a medieval complex in Central Italy (Perugia), as representative ancient rural offshore architecture in the European countryside. The system involves of a ground source heat pump, a water tank for thermal-energy storage connected to a low-temperature radiant system, and an air-handling unit. The building heating energy performance, typically influenced by thermal inertia in historical buildings, when coupled to the novel HVAC system, is comparatively assessed against a traditional scenario implementing a natural-gas boiler, and made inter-operative within the HBIM ad hoc platform. Results show that the innovative renewable energy system provides relevant benefits while preserving minor visual and architectural impact within the historical complex, and also in terms of both energy saving, CO2 emissions offset, and operation costs compared to the traditional existing system. The integrated HBIM approach may effectively drive the path toward regeneration and re-functioning of heritage in Europe.

The article deals with two unknown projects made by the Swiss-Italian architect Pietro Antonio Trezzini, who was active in Russiabetween 1726 and 1751. According to the Commission of the Senate,in 1747 Trezzini designed a five-domed cathedral in Stavropol, forwhich he provided two design options. One of these projects, whichwas approved by Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, was realized between1750 and 1757. In both projects, Trezzini presented the cathedralas a monumental five-domed centrally planned church, which isan integral part of Trezzini’s designs. All but one of the Orthodoxchurches designed by the architect had five domes (we know of13 such designs, including all the alternative versions). AlthoughTrezzini was not a initiator of this new type of five-domed centrallyplanned church, his work displays the most mature and diversedevelopment of this approach in Russian Baroque architecture. The article describes the general features of Trezziniʼs churches andcertain individual ones as well.Trezzini’s projects for five-domed churches were directly relatedto the revival of a traditional type of Orthodox church proclaimedby the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna. This idea was widely reflected inRussian church architecture of the time, but its concrete realisationwas rather varied. An attempt is made in article to characterise thissituation by briefly focusing on a comparison of Trezzini’s designsand the five-domed centrally planned churches designed by otherarchitects.The five-domed churches, which were revived in mid-18th centuryRussia and persistently promoted as a national and Orthodox solution,actually had nothing in common with local medieval tradition.Typologically, the five-domed Russian churches of the mid-18thcentury were rooted in European architecture, namely in ItalianRenaissance and Central European Baroque architecture. The mostimportant European sources of inspiration were probably St Peter’sCathedral in Rome (a project by Michelangelo), the Church of StCatherine in Stockholm and the Frauenkirche in Dresden, which theleading mid-18th century architects in Russia were undoubtedlyfamiliar with European, primarily Italian, churches with twosymmetrically placed towers on the western facade and a domeover the intersection, for example, Sant’Agnese in Agone in Rome,should also be taken into consideration.

Abstract In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Palermo's Museo Nazionale (National Museum) displayed one of the earliest institutional collections of Islamic art in Western Europe. The museum's director, Antonino Salinas, exhibited objects demonstrating the island's material heritage, including its two-and-a-half centuries of rule by North African dynasties during the medieval period. The prevailing perception elsewhere in post-unification Italy ‐ that Sicily was ungovernable and barbaric in nature ‐ heightened the display's significance. Another exhibition that many Italians would have perceived as representing the 'other' was the Mostra Etnografica Siciliana (Sicilian Ethnographic Exhibition), which the folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè created for the 1891‐92 Palermo Esposizione Nazionale (National Exposition). Highlighting Sicily's volatile image, the Italian press implicitly equated Pitrè's show with the so-called Abyssinian Village, which stood in the exposition fairgrounds and marked the establishment of Italy's first colony in Eritrea at a time of unprecedented imperial expansion. At the National Museum, Salinas remained undeterred, and despite associations of the island's conditions with Africa, he expanded its Islamic holdings. Likewise, Pitrè exhibited costumes, tools, and devotional objects that further accentuated regional differences at the National Exposition. In both displays, Salinas and Pitrè presented what they conceived as Sicily's unique cultural and historical patrimony.

Forty Hall, built in 1629 for Nicholas Rainton (1569–1646), is one of a group of Jacobean and Carolean suburban villas around London. This type of house has its antecedents in medieval secret houses and Tudor lodges, and was influenced by Italian Renaissance models. It provided a convenient escape from the bustle and squalor of the City, whilst being close enough to stay in touch with business or court, and so was popular with aristocrats and merchants alike.Rainton was one of the latter, a wealthy London merchant who imported fine textiles, principally satin and taffeta, from Florence and Genoa. He took an active part in the corporate and political life of the City, including serving as Alderman of Aldgate Ward from 1621, Sheriff of the Ward in 1622 and Lord Mayor in 1632–33. He was also master of the Haberdashers’ Company in 1622–23 and 1632–33. His religious sympathies were firmly Puritan, and he consistently sided with Parliament in its disputes with the Crown in events leading up to the Civil War.

The historical research of the illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle [Schedelsche Weltchronik (English: Schedel’s World Chronicle)] of Hartmann Schedel com­prises the complex historical knowledge about numerous woodcuts which pre­sent views of various cities important in the world’s history, e.g. Jerusalem, Constantinople, or the European ones such as: Rome, some Italian, German or Polish cities e.g. Wrocław and Cracow; some Hungarian and some Czech Republic cities. Researchers have made a serious study to recognize certain constructions in the woodcuts; they indicated the conservative and contractual architecture, the existing places and the unrealistic (non-existent) places. The results show that there is a common detail in all the views – the defensive wall round each of the described cities. However, in reality, it may not have existed in some cities during the lifetime of the authors of the woodcuts. As for some further details: behind the walls we can see feudal castles on the hills shown as strongholds. Within the defensive walls there are numerous buildings with many towers typical for the Middle Ages and true-to-life in certain ways of building the cities. Schematically drawn buildings surrounded by the ring of defensive walls indicate that the author used certain patterns based on the previously created panoramic views. This article is an attempt of making analogical comparisons of the cities in medieval painting. The Author of the article presents Roman mosaics and the miniature painting e.g. the ones created in the scriptorium in Reichenau. Since the beginning of 14th century Italian painters such as: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Giotto di Bondone, Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted parts of the cities or the entire monumental panoramas in various compositions and with various meanings. One defining rule in this painting concerned the definitions of the cities given by Saint Isidore of Seville, based on the rules which he knew from the antique tradition. These are: urbs – the cities full of architecture and buildings but uninhabited or civita – the city, the living space of the human life, build-up space, engaged according to the law, kind of work and social hierarchy. The tra­dition of both ways of describing the city is rooted in Italy. This article indicates the particular meaning of Italian painting in distributing the image of the city – as the votive offering. The research conducted by Chiara Frugoni and others indica­ted the meaning of the city images in the painting of various forms of panegyrics created in high praise of cities, known as laude (Lat.). We can find the examples of them rooted in the Roman tradition of mosaics, e.g. in San Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. They present both palatium and civitas. The medieval Italian painting, especially the panel painting, presents the city structure models which are uninha­bited and deprived of any signs of everyday life. The models of cities – urbs, are presented as votive offerings devoted to their patron saints, especially to Virgin Mary. The city shaped as oval or sinusoidal rings surrounded by the defensive walls resembled a container filled with buildings. Only few of them reflected the existing cities and could mainly be identified thanks to the inscriptions. The most characteristic examples were: the fresco of Taddeo di Bartolo in Palazzo Publico in Siena, which presented the Dominican Order friar Ambrogio Sansedoni holding the model of his city – Siena, with its most recognizable building - the Cathedral dedicated to the Assumption of Mary. The same painter, referred to as the master painter of the views of the cities as the votive offerings, painted the Saint Antilla with the model of Montepulciano in the painting from 1401 for the Cathedral devoted to the Assumption of Mary in Montepulciano. In the painting made by T. di Bartolo, the bishop of the city of Gimignano, Saint Gimignano, presents the city in the shape of a round lens surrounded by defence walls with numerous church towers and the feudal headquarters characteristic for the city. His dummer of the city is pyramidally-structured, the hills are mounted on the steep slopes reflecting the analogy to the topography of the city. We can also find the texts of songs, laude (Lat.) and panegyrics created in honour of the cities and their rulers, e.g. the texts in honour of Milan, Bonvesin for La Riva, known in Europe at that time. The city – Arcadia (utopia) in the modern style. Hartman Schedel, as a bibliophile and a scholar, knew the texts of medieval writers and Italian art but, as an ambitious humanist, he could not disregard the latest, contemporary trends of Renaissance which were coming from Nuremberg and from Italian ci­ties. The views of Arcadia – the utopian city, were rapidly developing, as they were of great importance for the rich recipient in the beginning of the modern era overwhelmed by the early capitalism. It was then when the two opposites were combined – the shepherd and the knight, the Greek Arcadia with the medie­val city. The reception of Virgil’s Arcadia in the medieval literature and art was being developed again in the elite circles at the end of 15th century. The cultural meaning of the historical loci, the Greek places of the ancient history and the memory of Christianity constituted the essence of historicism in the Renaissance at the courts of the Comnenos and of the Palaiologos dynasty, which inspired the Renaissance of the Latin culture circle. The pastoral idleness concept came from Venice where Virgil’s books were published in print in 1470, the books of Ovid: Fasti and Metamorphoses were published in 1497 and Sannazaro’s Arcadia was published in 1502, previously distributed in his handwriting since 1480. Literature topics presented the historical works as memoria, both ancient and Christian, composed into the images. The city maps drawn by Hartmann Schedel, the doctor and humanist from Nurnberg, refer to the medieval images of urbs, the woodcuts with the cities, known to the author from the Italian painting of the greatest masters of the Trecenta period. As a humanist he knew the literature of the Renaissance of Florence and Venice with the Arcadian themes of both the Greek and the Roman tradition. The view of Constantinople in the context of the contemporary political situation, is presented in a series of monuments of architecture, with columns and defensive walls, which reminded of the history of the city from its greatest time of Constantine the Great, Justinian I and the Comnenus dynasty. Schedel’s work of art is the sum of the knowledge written down or painted. It is also the result of the experiments of new technology. It is possible that Schedel was inspired by the hymns, laude, written by Psellos in honour of Constantinople in his elaborate ecphrases as the panegyrics for the rulers of the Greek dynasty – the Macedonians. Already in that time, the Greek ideal of beauty was reborn, both in literature and in fine arts. The illustrated History of the World presented in Schedel’s woodcuts is given to the recipients who are educated and to those who are anonymous, in the spirit of the new anthropology. It results from the nature of the woodcut reproduc­tion, that is from the way of copying the same images. The artist must have strived to gain the recipients for his works as the woodcuts were created both in Latin and in German. The collected views were supposed to transfer historical, biblical and mythological knowledge in the new way of communication.

Outdoor public seating is an intriguing and virtually unstudied element in the history of western architecture and urbanism. This article focuses on Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, tracing the numerous stone benches that once existed on piazzas, streets, loggias, and palace façades throughout the city. More than simply utilitarian appendages, the benches were carefully integrated into the design of iconic urban spaces and building fronts, both civic and private. The study draws on abundant and varied primary source material: contemporary chronicles, histories, letters, poetry, statutes, etiquette books, and architectural treatises, which provide a wealth of information on the use and form of the benches. Together with Renaissance images recording Florentine daily life, the documents reveal a rich culture and vocabulary of alfresco bench-sitting by people of all ranks, from government officials to vagrants. I examine the design, sociopolitical functions, and urban context of the benches. I propose that benches were part of the Tuscan urbanistic model for a civic piazza, and show how in Florence, the civic piazza was configured with tiered seats, exploring formal and semiotic resonances with the tribunal, theater, and council hall. I explore the appearance of stone façade benches on private palaces in fifteenth-century Florence. This was in part a monumentalization of a vernacular element, but I also suggest that for the Medici and other patrician builders, the bench was a direct reference to the civic center. The palaces valorized the stone façade bench for domestic architecture and codified it as a common element of Renaissance palace typology. References to contemporary seating provisions of other Italian towns and to precedents in Roman antiquity and late-medieval Italy provide context for the Florentine innovations. The bench emerges as a versatile element, both functionally and semiotically, which provides new insight into representations of power through the social control of outdoor space, and expressions of political ideology in urbanistic and architectural forms.

Food and wine tourism in Italy is characterized by the reference to natural foods and to the history of the cities. For most of the foods the bond with the territories and especially with the cities was and is crucial. Always food, typically produced in a family business, have the same name of the cities, as if the city was the real corporate brand of taste. This city brand is often copied in many countries of the world to product industrial supplies that have a wide commercial distribution. These products are impossible to reproduce. They are the result of the combination of local products, craft skills, bonds with legendary or real historical events. The reflection on the food and wine tourism and urban development, comes from these assumptions. With a socio-anthropological approach, some methods and qualitative techniques were used, as the historical comparative method, document analysis and participant observation. These methods were applied to investigate three different Italian towns that gave the name to three foods: Marino, with the wine festival, Fabriano with its production of salami and Ascoli Piceno with the production of the Ascoli olive. The Marino Grape Festival is based on legendary events, on the presence of ancient vineyards, on the representation in the style of 1500s square machines. In Fabriano is produced a famous salami dates back to medieval times, reproduced in paintings and frescoes and handed down to us with a disciplinary unchanged. Ascoli Piceno has given its name to a prized food preparation called Oliva Ascolana. Marino has thousands of visitors every year to drink and buy wine and to participate in the grape and wine festivals. Fabriano has a tourism that seeks the history, architecture, art and the taste of his salami. The Ascoli olive stuffed with meat and spices is great tourist vehicle to Ascoli Piceno.

Emilio de Fabris's completion of the west front of Santa Maria del Fiore is the best-known of the architectural interventions carried out during the nineteenth century in the Piazza del Duomo and Piazza di San Giovanni in Florence. But this initiative was preceded by an earlier one that was more radical in character, insofar as it transformed the area around the Campanile and Duomo. A proposal of November 1823 by the architect Gaetano Baccani resulted in the demolition of a large part of the late medieval cathedral canonry and the creation of an extensive new piazza on the south side of Santa Maria del Fiore. This intervention introduced two issues that were to become fundamental to the notion of urban patrimony. On the one hand, it prompted consideration of the relationship between a historic monument and its ambience; on the other, it brought into focus the tension that was likely to exist between conservation and the creation of a modern urban environment. The present study publishes Baccani's formal submission to the Deputazione Secolare sopra l'Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and draws on other documents preserved in the Archivio dell'Opera to construct a detailed history of the project. The study also introduces other literary and visual materials to establish the nature of Baccani's "systematization" of the Piazza del Duomo. Baccani's project is linked retrospectively to a Napoleonic plan for the modernization of Florence, but it is discussed also as a harbinger of later programs of urban renewal in Florence and in other Italian cities. The paper outlines the history of the canonry compound and places Baccani's reorganization of it in the context of the development of a new relationship between church and state in Florence. The piazza likewise is considered in relation to the transformation of Florence into a modern, orderly city, well-suited to the growing tourist industry. From Baccani's proposal to the Deputazione Secolare it is apparent that he wished it to be believed that his project was in keeping with the intentions of the original architects of the Duomo. The present study considers Baccani's project in this light, while also assessing the extent to which his plans were rooted in his own time. In particular, Baccani's conception of the area around the Duomo is discussed in relation to other urbanistic projects that were planned in Florence, Milan, and Rome during the Napoleonic period. Finally, Baccani's scheme is considered in relation to recent studies of the area around the Duomo by Piero Sanpaolesi, Margaret Haines, and Marvin Trachtenberg. The paper establishes that Baccani's intervention fundamentally changed the manner in which Santa Maria del Fiore and the Campanile could be seen, revealing an "ideal" view of the two buildings in juxtaposition. Baccani's vision is discussed in relation to a widespread nineteenth-century wish to consecrate the individual monument. The study concludes by introducing a number of unfamiliar images of the Campanile and Duomo and proposes that they lent authority to Baccani's concept of a "best" general view of these monuments.

Italian maiolica has a long history extending back into the Middle Ages. That history recounts a slow evolutionary process, with its main themes being: first, the importation of tin-glazed pottery from the Islamic world in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which has survived primarily as architectural decoration (the bacini inserted into church façades); secondly, the development of the local production of ceramics with lead glazes and then improved tin glazes and with modest painted and incised decoration; thirdly, the diffusion of that production, presumably from Sicily and southern Italy, throughout the rest of the peninsula; and, finally, beginning in the later fourteenth century, the elevation of the quality of production to the level of a veritable art form. Our knowledge of this history has been amply expanded in the last few years by an extraordinary amount of very solid research conducted into the subject by medieval archaeologists and by ceramic scholars—many of the latter talented amateurs who work on their own local traditions in Italy; and this lively interest has had reverberations in both the museum world and the art market.

LA COSTITUZIONE DI UNA CITTÀ MONASTICA. L'ARCHITETTURA DI SAN VINCENZO AL VOLTURNO NEL NONO SECOLOQuesto articolo esamina l'architettura del nono secolo del monastero alto medievale di San Vincenzo al Volturno nella regione di Molise. L'articolo prende in considerazione l'ampia gamma di costruzioni rinvenute negli ultimi quindici anni di scavo, compreso la grande chiesa abbaziale, San Vincenzo Maggiore, il palazzo degli ospiti di riguardo, il chiostro, le officine e le strutture in legno del vicus del monastero. Il lavoro fa riferimento a un ampio numero di paralleli per queste costruzioni sia nella penisola italiana che nell'Europa continentale.

Cittaslow International promotes harmonious development of small towns based on sustainable relationships between economic growth, protection of local traditions, cultural heritage and the environment, and an improvement in the quality of local life. The aim of this study was to analyze and evaluate the differences and similarities in the spatial structure of Cittaslow towns in the Italian regions of Tuscany and Umbria and the Polish region of Warmia and Mazury. The study examined historical towns which are situated in different parts of Europe and have evolved in different cultural and natural environments. The presented research attempts to determine whether the spatial structure of historical towns established in different European regions promotes the dissemination of the Cittaslow philosophy and the adoption of sustainable development principles. The urban design, architectural features and the composition of urban and architectural factors which are largely responsible for perceptions of multi-dimensional space were evaluated. These goals were achieved with the use of a self-designed research method which supported a subjective evaluation of spatial structure defined by historical urban planning and architectural solutions. The study demonstrated that Medieval urban layouts can be successfully incorporated into the modern urban fabric to promote sustainable development and slow living.

Cultural heritage relating to the sky in the form of sundials, old observatories and the like, are commonly found in many cities in the Old World, but rarely in the New. This paper examines astronomical heritage embodied in the Barolo Palace in Buenos Aires. While references to Dante Alighieri and his poetry are scattered in streets, buildings and monuments around the Western world, in the city of Buenos Aires, the only street carrying Dante’s name is less than three blocks long and, appropriately, is a continuation of Virgilio street. A couple of Italian immigrants—a wealthy businessman, Luis Barolo, and an imaginative architect, Mario Palanti—foresaw this situation nearly a century ago, and did not save any efforts or money with the aim of getting Dante and his cosmology an appropriate monumental recognition, in reinforced concrete. The Barolo Palace is a unique combination of both astronomy and the worldview displayed in the Divine Comedy, Dante’s poetic masterpiece. It is known that the Palace’s design was inspired by the great poet, but the details are not recorded; this paper relies on Dante’s text to consider whether it may add to our understanding of the building. Although the links of the Palace’s main architectural structure with the three realms of the Comedy have been studied in the past, its unique astronomical flavor has not been sufficiently emphasized. The word of God, as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church in Sacred Scripture, Aristotle’s physics and Ptolemy’s astronomy, all beautifully converge in Dante’s verses, and the Barolo Palace reflects this.

The porticoes, together with medieval masonry towers, are the architectural element which mainly characterizes the city of Bologna, northern Italy. These porticoes, which extend all inside the city centre for a total length of almost 40 kilometres, have a high artistic and cultural relevance at the point that they are candidates as “Unesco World Heritage Site”. One of portico of highest heritage value is that next to the church of Santa Maria dei Servi, which is suffering important structural pathologies requiring urgent strengthening interventions. The ones strictly necessary to preserve the stability have been already implemented. It is known that for historical constructions appropriate strategies of interventions are to be adopted with special attention in the aspects related to the compatibility, durability, integrity of the original configuration. The aim of this paper is to identify the main criticalities and priorities of interventions. Based on the identified criticalities and priorities possible strategies of interventions are finally identified. A possible cause of the actual bad state of conservation could be related to the continues vibrations induced by the traffic. For this reason, measurements noises have been recently conducted by the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) in order to quantify their influence of the stress levels of the columns of the portico.

Medieval Italian city-states with access to the sea, most notably the Venetian and Genoese, were in need of safe ‘stopovers’ that would allow their inhabitants to travel to distant places across the territories in which they conducted commerce. As the most important ‘stopover’ and centre of consumption, Constantinople became a point of attraction for Italian merchant colonies, particularly after the eleventh century. Among these, the most powerful one with the largest settlement was the Venetian colony. Following a decree dated 1082 (Chrysoboullos) that granted them certain privileges, the Venetians settled across the southern shores of the Golden Horn. In terms of administration, it appears that, until the Latin period (1204–1261), no formal officers were appointed to the Venetian Merchant Colony. ‘The bailo’ was first instituted in Constantinople only after the treaty of 18 June 1265. The mention of a house owned by the bailo dates as late as 1277. Documents on the residence of the bailo remain silent until the early fifteenth century. It is unclear if the palace of the bailo mentioned in fifteenth-century documents and the house allocated to the bailo in 1277 are the same building. Despite the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Venetians, albeit with interruptions, continued to live on the historic peninsula. However, it is no longer possible to speak of a Venetian settlement similar to the one that had existed in Byzantine times. Per the agreement signed on 16 August 1454, the Venetians were granted a house and a church that ‘once’ belonged to Anconitans. The possible location and architectural features of the residences of the bailo, which have left behind no archaeological data, are discussed here through written sources including Ottoman documents.

Pese a asentarse sobre un estrato hídrico que abastece de forma natural a sus habitantes y cultivos, Milán ha dedicado incansables esfuerzos a establecer una red de infraestructuras hidráulicas como conexión con otras ciudades. Un trabajo continuo de planificación ingenieril le permitió construir, a lo largo de su historia, un extenso sistema de canales navegables que salvase la distancia que la aleja de los ríos más próximos. Un gran empeño técnico por el que fue denominada por muchos la Città dell’acqua. Paradójicamente, la idea de prescindir de estas aguas antropogénicas surgió a raíz de uno de sus primeros planes urbanísticos, a finales del siglo XIX. Este artículo caracteriza la ciudad a través de un recorrido cronológico, centrándose en la hidrografía de la región y en sus principales obras hidráulicas medievales y modernas, los llamados navigli. A continuación, se exponen las circunstancias y argumentos urbanos que, tras la industrialización, llevaron a políticos, urbanistas e ingenieros a soterrar estas infraestructuras; coincidiendo con el desarrollo de las tecnologías sanitarias modernas y el auge del tráfico rodado frente a la navegabilidad. Por último, la aportación analiza la actual propuesta del gobierno municipal para recuperar las antiguas canalizaciones. Para ello, se revisan y discuten los objetivos del proyecto a escala urbana y metropolitana, junto al resto de problemáticas presentes en esta gran urbe del Norte de Italia.

<p>La irrupción de la artillería marcó el comienzo de un acelerado proceso de refundación de la arquitectura militar durante el Renacimiento. Esta necesidad trascendía el plano funcional al que se vincula tradicionalmente la fortificación, poniendo en riesgo las connotaciones simbólicas y representativas que hasta ese momento representaban las murallas medievales en el imaginario colectivo. El dibujo, como medio por el que comprender la nueva realidad impuesta por la artillería y herramienta con la que guiar las reflexiones de los arquitectos participes de este desafío, tomó un papel activo en la refundación de lo que hoy en día conocemos como la fortificación bastionada, definiendo las bases de una nueva lógica geométrica y formal de la que trata este artículo. Dos proyectos de Leonardo da Vinci reconstruidos por el autor, sirven de base para estudiar la base geométrica y formal que fundó esta nueva idea de la fortificación.</p>

In this contribution, in which the preliminary outcomes on the monitoring of the “Garisenda” Tower are discussed, there are also briefly presented the results already obtained from the monitoring of the “Asinelli” Tower, carried out a few years ago by the authors. The two medieval towers, recognized as the “twin towers” of Bologna, represent a remarkable symbol of the city and of Italian Architectural Heritage. The Asinelli Tower was built during the period 1109–1119. It rises to a height of 97.30 m above the ground, and shows a deviation from verticality of 2.38 m. The Garisenda Tower, built around the same time, is much smaller (48 m) but with a steeper leaning (3.22 m) due to an early and more marked subsidence of soil and foundation. The data collected during the AE monitoring period of the Asinelli Tower were analyzed to evaluate the damage progress in a certain region of the masonry structure and correlate it with other considered phenomena, such as the influence of vehicle traffic, seismic activity, and wind action. To arrive at a comprehensive and objective evaluation of the structural conditions of the Garisenda Tower, whose monitoring is still ongoing, the results obtained by the AE technique were supplemented with data obtained from other zones of the structure, subject to different stress–strain conditions or by means of other techniques. Thanks to this arrangement, the AE signals distribution is related to the data measured by optical cables and a seismometer to obtain an objective correlation between the actions generated by the environment and the tower damage.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The basilica of St. Anthony in Padua (13th–14th cent.) is one of the most remarkable pilgrimage sites in Italy. To date, the monument itself has never been subject to a comprehensive stratigraphic analysis. Important information about the construction sequence of the building may be conserved in the domed roofs protecting the inner masonry shells.</p><p>The present paper will focus on the dome next to the facade. During the survey, data acquisition via laser scanner have been flanked by standard tasks. Specifically, the stratification analysis of the timber framework of the dome requires to measure the entire structure, including parts with difficult access, and calls for many scan bases to go further the sight obstacles represented by the rafters and the horizontal collar-beams. Therefore, application of laser scanning might appear difficult at first sight.</p><p>The authors will show that the approach confirms the suitability of the laser scanner technology in facing the general complexity of the structure. The development of a graphic documentation in CAD environment entailed a manageable complexity in terms of time-consumption and precision in data processing. So far, the plans reveal the irregular profile of the dome in its inner masonry shell, and of the outer masonry drum. The sections show a two-centre curvature of the elevation of the outer timber shell. However, the joints among the rafters, ribs, and tie-beams still require a series of traditional in-depth assessments acquired in close-range access.</p><p>Nevertheless, the pragmatic investigative modus operandi, tested up to now, does represent a fixed protocol suitable to be iterated and perfected for each cupola. In such complex structures, the laser scanning process confirms to be a valid strategy to reach a good compromise between time consumption, human effort, and millimetre precision. In this way, the collected material provides a first contribution to acquire knowledge on this Italian medieval masterpiece, which stands out on the international scenario for its historical richness and architectural complexity.</p>

Medieval Dubrovnik was rich in Romanesque figural and decorative sculpture but only a small group of fragmentary carvings has been preserved to date due to the fact that the town suffered a devastating earthquake in 1667. The earthquake completely destroyed the monumental Cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin which had been considered “la piu bella in Illyrico” on the basis of its sculptural abundance. Archaeological excavations undertaken beneath the present-day Baroque Cathedral, consecrated in 1713, unearthed several thousand fragments of high-quality sculptures. Their analysis has confirmed the close connections between Dubrovnik and artistic centres in Apulia, which are well known from archival records. This article re-assesses the results of the excavations and the information from the primary sources in a new light and deepens our knowledge about the date, authorship and reconstruction of the thireenth-century pieces under consideration.The article opens with a discussion about the archival record informing us that Eustasius of Trani came to Dubrovnik in 1199 to work as a protomagister of Dubrovnik Cathedral. The document in question was the reason why art historians attributed to him a number of rather damaged, narrative reliefs which replicate the models and forms that can be seen on the portal of Trani Cathedral. Since the sculptor responsible for that portal was not known and given that the contract preserved in Dubrovnik referred to Eustasius as a son of “Belnardi, protomagistri civitati Trani”, the two artists came to be considered as the builders of the Cathedral of S. Nicola Pellegrino at Trani and of several other churches in the Terra di Bari. The sculptures produced by Eustasius and his father were convincingly deemed to display the artistic influence of southern and central France and the same can be observed in Dubrovnik. The article assigns the figure of Christ the Judge from a portal lunette depicting the Last Judgement, which has no parallels in Apulia, to the same group of sculptures and interprets the subject matter as being inspired by the iconography of numerous pilgrimage churches to which Dubrovnik Cathedral also belonged. The assessment of the formal qualities evident in all the carvings demonstrates that they are less refined than those on the portal of Trani Cathedral. Furthermore, the article separates the works of the father from those of the son and suggests that Bolnardus introduced the aforementioned French-style carving method, which had already taken root in Palestine, and that Eustasius followed it. The starting point in the proposed chronology was the Fall of Jerusalem in 1187 and the associated withdrawal of western master carvers alongside the Crusaders. During their stopover at Trani, around 1190, Boltranius was in charge of the carving of the portal of Trani Cathedral where he was helped by his son who left for Dubrovnik in 1199. Based on the visual characteristics of the fragments of architectural decoration, Eustasius is identified as being responsible for the building of Dubrovnik Cathedral according to Apulian taste which appealed to the local patrons as a consequence of their constant exposure to it through numerous trade links and the overall cultural milieu. In fact, Apulian taste was a symbiosis of Byzantine traditions and Romanesque novelties introduced by the Normans, and its allure was grounded in the fact that both the Terra di Bari and Dubrovnik acknowledged the supreme power of these two political forces albeit not at the same time and in unequal measure.The vernacular current in the Romanesque sculpture of Dubrovnik during the second quarter of the thirteenth century can be noted in a small number of works which influenced the decoration of Gothic and Renaissance public buildings. The source of this diffusion can be identified in the decoration of the Cathedral which epitomized the strong artistic connections with southern Italy from where typological and morphological models were borrowed. The redecoration of the Cathedral’s interior, especially the pulpit – recorded for the first time in 1262 – the archaeological remains of which reveal a polygonal structure resting on twelve columns, drew on those very models. Together with the ciborium above the altar in the main apse, the pulpit was praised by local chroniclers and foreign travel writers during the fifteenth century but also by the earliest church visitation records of the mid-seventeenth century. These two monuments belonged to a group of standard Apulian-Dalmatian ciboria and pulpits which also included those that can today be seen in the cathedrals of Trogir and Split but also in many south Italian churches. Some scholars have argued that the source model for this group can be found in Jerusalem but this article suggests that the ciborium from the church of S. Lorenzo fuori le mura in Rome, dated to 1148, presents a more likely option. Particular attention is given to the naturalistic workmanship of a polygonal capital from Dubrovnik Cathedral, which is assigned to the aforementioned pulpit. It is argued that the style of the capital inspired a series of capitals carved à jour on both sides of the Adriatic and that they display characteristics consistent with the manner of carving of Pietro di Facitolo seen at Bisceglie. The exceptional workmanship of the eagle from the same pulpit is attributed to Pasquo di Pietro who was recorded as a protomagister of the Cathedral from 1255 to 1282 and who well regarded as a master carver. His good reputation earned him the citizenship and an estate; he and his son were mentioned in the local documents as “de Ragusio”. The author of the article hypothesizes that Pasquo may have been Pietro di Facitolo’s son, with which he concludes the outline of the sculptural development of the Apulian Romanesque in Dubrovnik and Dalmatia in general.The final part of the article focuses on the only known work of Simeonus Ragusinus who signed himself as “incola tranensis” on the portal of the church of S. Andrea, that is, S. Salvatore at Barletta. The hybrid artistic expression of this eclectic sculptor with a limited gift, who gathered his knowledge from a variety of sources, reveals that he may have borrowed some iconographic motifs from Eustasius’ portal of Dubrovnik Cathedral or from the other two portals. Overall, the article corroborates several hypotheses that were previously expressed in the scholarship while dismissing and rerouting others. At the same time, it emphasizes the scarcity of solid evidence because of the fragmentary nature of the material. The main goal of the article is to present new research findings and widen our perspective on the issue. The article is a revised version of a brief paper presented at the international conference “Master Buvina and his Time” which was held at Split in 2014 and which will be published in a foreign language. I hope that with the addition of new comments and the scholarly apparatus the article will be a useful point of reference to Croatian researchers of similar topics and that it will contribute towards the creation of syntheses about the medieval art in the Adriatic.

Categorization of Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533) is a matter of defining modern at the turn of the sixteenth century. His depiction of Late Gothic and Classic architectural forms in his prints shows an interaction between the Italian Renaissance and the Netherlandish traditions. The use of urban setting is to familiarize the viewer with the story. This technique of grabbing the attention of the viewer by situating him within the audience in the image is a traditional characteristic of medieval art. On the other hand, he employs the new method of Renaissance spatial perspective in order to create the three dimensional effect in the print. Ornaments work as metalingual elements giving away subtle information on the subject. A symbol exists by being a reference to a former incidence, which adds to the discussion of whether Lucas van Leyden was a Renaissance or an early modern artist. His concern is with the narrative rather than the idealistic illustration of architecture. His German contemporary Albrecht Dürer also appears to come and go in representing two styles of architecture. Therefore there will be a comparison between Lucas van Leyden, Albrecht Dürer and Italian contemporaries such as Perugino and Raphael. Yet it is still a question to where to position Lucas van Leyden.

Образ города, предстающий в расписанных Беноццо Гоццоли капеллах, фиксирует в себе достижения изобразительного искусства, архитектуры и градостроительства в эпоху Кватроченто. В статье впервые прослеживается эволюция изображений городских видов и конкретных сооружений во фресковых циклах, выполненных мастером в Риме, Умбрии и Тоскане. Представление образа города в творчестве Гоццоли связано с решением перспективных задач, реальной ренессансной городской действительностью, особенностями заказа и личностью художника. Проанализированы разные ракурсы и масштабы в изображении городов, а также варианты их символического прочтения как в контексте священной истории, так и современных Беноццо событий. Показано, как в его творчестве новое ренессансное искусство сочетается с наследием античности и интернациональной готики. The subject of this article is an ideal city in Italy of the Early Renaissance. Starting with the first decades of the 15th century the erecting a new buildings at cities, primarily in Florence which was at that time a very progressive part of Italy, could be seen as a tendency to realize a perfect city on the basis of humanistic conceptions. Even the real situation when medieval patterns of planning and building combined with Renaissance elements in Florence was interpreted from an idealized perspective: the social and political superiority of Florentine Republic seems interflowed with its perfect appearance. Despite the fact that a new type of the city as architectural and planning whole was not devised in Renaissance Italy, the model of an ideal city was being successfully developed there in Quattrocento treatises on architecture and vedutas. The author of this article examines the principles underlying the idea of such city with optimal potentialities for man to fulfill its predestination on Earth as it was presented concepts of humanism.

Cities have long been important sites of collective memory. In this paper, I highlight the ritual and memorial functions of cities by focusing on Gibellina, a Sicilian town destroyed by earthquake, and the subsequent struggle among its community to articulate a sense of spatial belonging with its remains. By examining the productive relationships between art, landscape and collective memory, I consider how memorial objects in Gibellina have become integral to the reimagining of place, and, in some cases, to forgetting. To address the relationship between memorial objects and the articulation of communities from this unique vantage point, a significant part of my analysis compares memorial initiatives both in and around the old site on which Gibellina once stood. More specifically, my paper compares the aesthetic similarities between the Italian artist Alberto Burri’s design for a large concrete overlay of the city’s remains, and the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by the American architect Peter Eisenman. To reveal the distinctiveness of Burri’s design in relation to Eisenman’s work and the rich commentaries that have been produced in its name, and therefore to highlight the specificity of their relationship, I extend my comparison to more recent attempts at rebuilding Gibellina in the image of a “frontier city of art” (“Museum Network Belicina”).Broadly speaking, this paper is framed by a series of observations concerning the role that landscape plays in the construction or naturalization of collective identity, and by a further attempt at mapping the bonds that tend to be shared among members of particular communities in any given circumstance. To organize my thoughts in this area, I follow W. J. T. Mitchell’s interpretation of landscape as “a medium of exchange,” in other words, as an artistic practice that galvanizes nature for the purpose of naturalizing culture and its relations of power (5). While the terms of landscape art may in turn be described as “complicated,” “mutual” and marked by “ambivalence,” as Mitchell himself suggests, I would further argue that the artist’s sought-after result will, in almost every case, be to unify the visual and the discursive fields through an ideological operation that engenders, reinforces, and, perhaps also mystifies the constituents of community in general (9). From this perspective, landscape represents a crucial if unavoidable materialization both of community and collective memory.Conflicting viewpoints about this formation are undoubtedly present in the literature. For instance, in describing the effects of this operation, Mitchell, to use one example, will suggest that landscape as a mode of creation unfolds in ways that are similar to that of a dream, or that the materialization of landscape art is in accordance with the promise of “emancipation” that dreams inscribe into imaginaries (12). During the course of investigating and overturning the premise of Mitchell’s claim through a number of writers and commentators, I conclude my paper by turning to a famous work on the inoperative community by Jean-Luc Nancy. This work is especially useful for bringing clarity for understanding what is lost in the efforts by Gibellina’s residents to reconstruct a new city adjacent to the old, and therefore to emancipate themselves from their destructive past. By emphasizing the significance of acknowledging death for the regeneration and durability of communities and their material urban life, I suggest that the wishes of Gibellina’s residents have resulted in an environment for memory and memorialization despite apparent wishes to the contrary. In my reference to Nancy’s metaphor of ‘inoperativity’, therefore, I suggest that the community to emerge from Gibellina’s disaster is, in a sense, yet to come.Figure 1. The “Cretto di Burri” by Alberto Burri (1984-1989). Creative Commons.The old city of Gibellina was a township of Arabic and Medieval origins located southwest of Palermo in the heart of Sicily’s Belice valley. In January 1968, the region experienced a series of earthquakes as it had before. This time, however, the strongest among them provoked a rupture that within moments led to the complete destruction of towns and villages, and to the death of nearly 400 inhabitants. “From a seismological point of view,” as Susan Hough and Roger Bilham write, the towns and villages of the Belice valley were at this time “disasters in the making” (87). Maligned by a particular configuration of geological fault lines, the fragile structures along the surface of the valley were almost certain to be destroyed at some point in their lifetime. In 1968, after the largest disaster in recent history, the surviving inhabitants of the dilapidated urban centres were moved to the squalor conditions of displacement camps, in which many lived without permanent housing into the 1970s. While some of the smaller communities opted to rebuild, a number of the larger townships made the decision to move altogether. In 1971, a new settlement was created in Gibellina’s name, just eighteen kilometres west of the ruin.Since that time, I claim that a pattern of memory and forgetting has developed in the space between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. For instance, the old city of Gibellina underwent a dramatic refurbishment in the 1980s when an internationally renowned Italian sculptor, Alberto Burri, was invited by the city to build a large concrete structure directly on top of the city’s remains. As depicted in Figure One, the artist moulded the destroyed buildings into blocks of smooth concrete surfaces. Standing roughly at human scale, Burri divided these stone slabs, or stelae, in such a way as to retain the lineaments of Gibellina’s medieval streets. Although unfinished and abandoned by the artist due to lack of funds, the tomb of this destroyed city has since become both an artistic oddity and a permanent fixture on the Sicilian landscape. As Elisebha Fabienne and Platzer write,if an ancient inhabitant of Gibellina walks in the inside of the Cretto, he is able to recognise the topic position of his house, but he is also forced by the Verfremdung [alienting effect] of the topical elements to distance himself from the past, to infer new information. (75)According to this assessment, the work’s intrinsic merit appears to be in Burri’s effort to forge a link between a shared memory of the city’s past, and the potential for that memory to fortify the imagination towards a future. In spatial terms, the merit of the work lies in preserving the skeletal imprint of the urban landscape in order to retain a semblance of this once vibrant and living community. Andrea Simitch and Val Warke appear to corroborate this hypothesis. They suggest that while Burri’s structure includes a specific imprint or reference point of the city’s remains, “embedded within the masses that construct the ghosted streets is the physical detritus of imagined narratives” (61). In other words, Simitch and Warke maintain that by using the archival or preserving function to communicate a ritual practice, Burri’s Cretto is intended to infuse the forgotten urban space of old Gibellina with a promise that it will eventually be found and therefore remembered. This promise is met, in turn, by the invitation for visitors to stroll through the hallowed interior of Gibellina as they would any other city. In this sense, the Cretto invites a plurality of narratives and meanings depending on the visitor at hand. In the absence of guidance or interruption, the hope appears to be that visitors will gain an experience of the place that is both familiar and disturbing.But there is a hidden dimension to this promise that the authors above do not explore in sufficient detail. For instance, Nigel Clark analyzes the way in which Burri has insisted upon “confronting us with the stark absence of life where once there was vitality,” a confrontation by the artist that is materialized by “cavernous wounds” (83). On this basis, by interpreting the promise of memory that others have discussed in terms of a warning about the longevity or durability of the built environment, Clark writes that Burri’s Cretto represents “an assertion of the forces of earth that have not been eclipsed by other forms of endangerment” (83). The implication of this particular forewarning is that “the precariousness of human settlement” is guaranteed by a non-human world that insists upon the relentless force of erasure (83). On the other hand, I would argue that Clark’s insistence upon situating the Cretto in relation to the natural forces of destruction ultimately represents a narrowing of perspective on Burri’s work. Significantly, by citing Burri’s choice of supposedly abstracted shapes made from lifeless concrete, Clark reduces the geographical intervention of the artist to “a paradigm of modernist austerity” (82). From Clark’s perspective, the overture to Modernism is meant to highlight Burri’s attempt at pairing the scale and proportion of the work with an effort to convey a sense of purity through abstraction. However, while some interpretations of Burri’s Cretto may be dependent upon its allusion to such Modernist formalism, it should also be recognized that the specific concerns raised by Gibellina go significantly beyond these equivocations.In fact, one crucial element of Burri’s artistic process that is not recognized by Clark is his investment in the American land art movement, which at the time of Burri’s design for Gibellina was led by Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and other prominent artists in the United States. Burri’s debt to this movement can be detected by his gradual shift towards landscape throughout his career, and by his eventual break from the enclosed and constrained space of the gallery. On this basis, the crumbling city design at Gibellina obliterates the boundaries as to what constitutes a work of art in relation to the land it occupies, and this, in turn, throws into question the specific criteria that we use to assess its value or artistic merit. In an important way, land art and landscape in general forces us to rethink the relationship between art and community in unparalleled ways. To put it another way, if Clark’s overriding concern for that which lies beneath the surface allows us to consider the importance of relationships between memory, forgetting, and erasure, I argue that Burri’s concern with the surface and the ground make it clear that projects such as the Gibellina Cretto might be better paired with memorial sites that deal in architecture.Figure 2. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe / Berlin Holocaust Memorial, by Peter Eisenman. Photograph courtesy of the author.A useful comparison in this regard is Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin. For one, not only is Eisenman’s site composed of a similar exterior of concrete stelae, those concrete blocks resembling gravestones, but it has also been routinely scorned for the same reasons that Clark raised against Burri as mentioned above. To put it another way, while visitors may be struck by the memorial’s haunting and inspirational configuration of voids, some notable commentators, including the venerable James E. Young, have insinuated that the site signifies a restoration of the monument, derived as it is from a modernist architecture in which recuperation and amnesia are at play with each other (184-224). A more sympathetic reading of Eisenman’s memorial might point to the uniquely architectural vision he held for cultural memory. With Adrian Parr for instance, we find that the traumatic memory of the Holocaust can be effectively transposed through the virtual content of the imagination as personified by visitors to Eisenman’s memorial. That is, by attending to the atrocities of the past, Parr claims that we need not be exhausted by the overwhelming sense of destruction that the memorial site brings to the literal surface. Rather, we might benefit more from considering the event of destruction as but one aspect of the spatial experience of the place to which it is dedicated—an experience that must be open-ended by design. By using the topographical lens that Parr, taking several pages from Gilles Deleuze, describes as “intensive,” I argue that Eisenman’s design is unique for its explicit encouragement to be both creative and present simultaneously (158).On this account, Parr makes the compelling assertion that memorial culture facilitates an epistemic rupture or “break,” that that it reveals an opportunity to restore the potential for using the place occupied by memory as a starting point for effecting social change (3). Parr writes that “memorial culture is utopian memory thinking”—a defining slogan, to be sure, but one with which the author hopes will re-establish the link between memory and the force of life, and, in the process, to recognize the energetic resources that remain concealed by the traditional narratives of memorialization (3). Stefano Corbo corroborates Parr’s assertion by pointing to Eisenman’s efforts in the 1980s to supplement formal concerns with archaeological perspectives, and therefore to develop a theory whereby architecture presages a “deep structure,” in which the artistry or attempt at formal innovation ultimately rests on “a process of invention” itself (41). To accomplish this aim, a specific reference should be made to an early period in Eisenman’s career, in which the architect turned to conceptual issues as opposed to the demands of materiality, and more significantly, to a critical rethinking of site-specific engagement (Bedard). Included in this turn was a willingness on Eisenman’s part to explore the layered and textured history of cities, as well as the linguistic or deconstructive relationships that exist between the ground and the trace.The interdisciplinary complexity of Eisenman’s approach is one that responds to the dominance of architectural form, and it therefore mirrors, as Corbo writes, a delicate interplay between “presence and absence, permanence and loss” (44). The city of Berlin with its cultural memory thus evinces a sort of tectonic rupture and collision upon its surfaces, but a rupture that both runs parallel and opposite to the natural disaster that engulfed Gibellina in 1968. Returning to Parr’s demand that we begin to (re)assert the power of virtual and imaginative space, I argue that Eisenman’s memorial design may be better appreciated for its ability to situate the city itself in relation to competing terms of artistic practice. That is, if Eisenman’s efforts indicate a softening “of the boundary between architecture and the landscape,” to quote Tomà Berlanda, the Holocaust Memorial might in turn be a productive counterpoint in the task of working through the specificity of Burri’s design and the meaning with which it has since been attached (2).Burri’s Cretto raises a number of questions for this hypothesis, as with the Cretto we find a displacement of the constitutive process that writers such as W.J.T. Mitchell describe above in relation to the generative potential of community. Undoubtedly, the imperative to unify is present in the Cretto’s aesthetic presentation, as the concrete surfaces maintain the capacity to reflect the light of the sun against a wide green earth that stretches beyond the visitor’s horizon. On the other hand, while Mitchell, along with Parr and other commentators might opt to insist upon a deeper correlation between the unifying function of the landscape and the forces of life, intensity, or desire, I would only reiterate that Burri’s design is ultimately based on establishing a meaningful relationship with death, not life, and he is consequently focused on the much less spectacular mission of providing solutions as to what the remains should become in the aftermath of total destruction. If there is an intensity to speak of here, it is a maligned intensity, and an intensity that can only be established through relation.Figure 3. The “Porta del Belice” by Pietro Consagra (2014). Wiki Commons.If Burri’s Cretto were measured by the criteria that are variously described by Mitchell and others, the effects that the landscape produces would have necessarily to account for an expression of desire for emancipation from death. However, in a significant departure from Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial, Burri’s design by itself is marked by a throughout absence of any expression of desire for emancipation as such. Indeed, finding such a promised emancipatory narrative would require one to cast their gaze away from the Cretto altogether, and towards a nearby urban center that has supposedly triumphed over the very need for a memory culture at all. This urban center is none other than Gibellina Nuova. As a point in fact, the settlers of Gibellina Nuova did insist upon emancipating themselves from their destructive past. In 1971, the city planners and governors of Gibellina Nuova made efforts to attract contemporary Italian artists and architects, to design and build a series of commemorative structures, and ultimately to make the settlement into a “città di frontiera dell’arte”—a frontier city of art (“Museum Network Belicina”). With the potential for rejuvenation just a stone’s throw away from the original city, the former inhabitants appear to have become immediately invested in the sort of utopian potential that would make its architectural wonders capable of transgressing the line that perennially divides art from community and from the living world. Rivalled only by the refurbishment of Marfa, Texas, which in the last twenty years has become a shrine to minimalist sculpture, the edifices at Gibellina Nuova have been authored by some of Italy’s better-known mid-century artists and architects, including Ludovico Quaroni, Vitorrio Gregotti, and, most notably, Pietro Consagra, whose ‘Porta del Belice’ (Figure Two) has become the most iconic urban fixture of the new urban designs. With the hopes of becoming a sort of “open-air museum” in which to attract international visitors, the city is now in possession of an exceedingly large number of public memorials and avant-garde buildings in various states of decay and disrepair (Bileddo). Predictably, this museological distinction has become a curse in many ways. Some commentators have argued that the obsession among city planners to create a “laboratory of art and architecture” has led in fact to an urban center of monstrous proportions: a city space that can only be described as “elliptical and spinning” (Bileddo). Whereas Gibellina Nuova was supposed to represent a rebalancing of the forces of life in relation to the funereal themes of the Cretto, the robust initiatives of the 1980s have instead produced an egregious lack of cohesiveness, a severed link to Sicilian culture, and a stark erasure of the distinctive traditions of the Belice valley.On the other hand, this experiment in urban design has been reduced to a venerable time capsule of 1970s Italian sculpture, an archive that persists but in constant disrepair. More significantly, however, the city’s failure to deliver on its many promises raises important questions about the ritual and memorial functions of urban space in general, of what specific relationships need to be forged between the history of a place and its architectural presentation, and the ways in which memorials come to reflect, privilege or convoke particular values over those of others. As Elisebha Fabienne Platzer writes, “Gibellina portrays its future in order to forget,” as “its faith in contemporary art is precisely a reaction to death,” or, more specifically, to its effacement (73). If the various pastiche designs of the city’s buildings and ritual edifices fail to stand the measure of time, I claim that it is not simply because they are gaudy reminders of a time best forgotten, but rather because they signify the restless hunt for resolution among inhabitants of this still-unsettled community.Whereas Burri’s Cretto activates a process of mourning and working-through that proves to be unresolvable and yet necessary, the city of Gibellina Nuova operates instead by neutralizing and dividing this process. Taken as a whole, the irreparable relationship between the two sites offers competing images of the relation between place and community. From the time of its division by earthquake if not sooner, the inhabitants of Gibellina became an “inoperative” community in the same way that the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has famously described. In the specific hopes of uncovering the motives of Burri and those of the designers and architects of Gibellina Nuova, I argue that Nancy uses the terms of inoperability as a makeshift solution for the persistent rootedness of communities in an atomized metaphysics for which the relationality between subjects is an abiding problem. Nancy defines community on the basis of its relational content alone, and for this reason he is able to make the claim that death itself should be a necessary moment of its articulation. Nancy writes that “community has not taken place,” as beyond “what society has crushed or lost, it is something that happens to us in the form of a question, waiting, event or imperative” (11).Though Nancy is attempting to provide his own interpretation of the impervious dialectic between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between “community” and “society,” the substance of his assertion can be brought into a critical reading of Gibellina’s abiding problem of its formations of collective memory in the aftermath of destruction. For instance, it might be argued that if we leave the experience of loss aside, we can perhaps begin to acknowledge that communities are transformed through complex interactions for which their inert physicality provides but one important indication. While “old” Gibellina was not lost in a day, Gibellina Nuova was not created in an instant. For Nancy, it would rather be the case that “death is indissociable from community, and that it is through death that the community reveals itself” (14). Given this claim, while Gibellina Nuova has undoubtedly been shaped and reconstituted by the architecture of the future and the desire to forget, it could equally be argued that this very architecture shares in a reciprocal exchange with the Cretto, a circuit of memory that inadvertently houses an archive of the city’s destructive past. As the community comes into being through resistance, entropy, possibility and reparation, the city landscape provides some clues regarding the trace of this activity as left upon its ground.ReferencesBedard, Jean-Francois, ed. Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978-1988. New York: Rizzoli Publishing, 1994.Berlanda, Tomà. Architectural Topographies: A Graphic Lexicon of How Buildings Touch the Ground. New York: Routledge, 2014.Bileddo, Marco. “Back in Sicily / The Three Dogs Gibellina.” Eodoto108 Magazine. 30 July 2014. Bilham, Roger G., and Susan Elizabeth Hough. After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.Clark, Nigel. Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2010.Corbo, Stefano. From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and Philosophy of Peter Eisenman. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Mitchell, W.J. Thomas. Landscape and Power. University of Chicago Press, 2002.Museum Network Belicina. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Inoperative Community. Trans. Christopher Fynsk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.Parr, Adrian. Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.Platzer, Elisbha Fabienne. “Semiotics of Spaces: City and Landart.” Seni/able Spaces: Space, Art and the Environment. Edward Huijbens and Ólafur Jónsson, eds. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.Simitch, Andrea, and Val Warke. The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know. Rockport Publishers Incorporated, 2014.Young, James E. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

IntroductionThe European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting and then through English landscape garden style was wrought in three dimensions on the land itself. From representations of place a theatrical transformation occurred so that gardens became a places of representation.“The Genius of the Place in All”The eighteenth century inherited theatrum mundi from the Renaissance, although the genealogy of its key features date back to ancient times. Broadly speaking, theatrum mundi was a metaphorical expression of the world and humanity in two ways: dramaturgically and formally. During the Renaissance the dramaturgical metaphor was a moral emblem concerned with the contingency of human life; as Shakespeare famously wrote, “men and women [were] merely players” whose lives consisted of “seven ages” or “acts” (2.7.139–65). In contrast to the dramaturgical metaphor with its emphasis on role-playing humanity, the formalist version highlighted a relationship between spectator, theatre-space and spectacle. Rooted in Renaissance neo-Platonism, the formalist metaphor configured the world as a spectacle and “Man” its spectator. If the dramaturgical metaphor was inflected with medieval moral pessimism, the formalist metaphor was more optimistic.The neo-Platonist spectator searched in the world for a divine plan or grand design and spectatorship became an epistemological challenge. As a seer and a knower on the world stage, the human being became the one who thought about the world not just as a theatre but also through theatre. This is apparent in the etymology of “theatre” from the Greek theatron, or “seeing place,” but the word also shares a stem with “theory”: theaomai or “to look at.” In a graceful compression of both roots, Martin Heidegger suggests a “theatre” might be any “seeing place” in which any thing being beheld offers itself to careful scrutiny by the beholder (163–65). By the eighteenth century, the ancient idea of a seeing-knowing place coalesced with the new empirical method and aesthetic sensibility: the world was out there, so to speak, to provide pleasure and instruction.Joseph Addison, among others, in the first half of the century reconsidered the utilitarian appeal of the natural world and proposed it as the model for artistic inspiration and appreciation. In “Pleasures of the Imagination,” a series of essays in The Spectator published in 1712, Addison claimed that “there is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art,” and compared to the beauty of an ordered garden, “the sight wanders up and down without confinement” the “wide fields of nature” and is “fed with an infinite variety of images, without any certain stint or number” (67).Yet art still had a role because, Addison argues, although “wild scenes [. . .] are more delightful than any artificial shows” the pleasure of nature increases the more it begins to resemble art; the mind experiences the “double” pleasure of comparing nature’s original beauty with its copy (68). This is why “we take delight in a prospect which is well laid out, and diversified, with fields and meadows, woods and rivers” (68); a carefully designed estate can be both profitable and beautiful and “a man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions” (69). Although nature should always be one’s guide, nonetheless, with some small “improvements” it was possible to transform an estate into a landscape picture. Nearly twenty years later in response to the neo-Palladian architectural ambitions of Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington, and with a similarly pictorial eye to nature, Alexander Pope advised:To build, to plant, whatever you intend,To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;In all, let Nature never be forgot.But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d,Where half the skill is decently to hide.He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.Consult the Genius of the Place in all;That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,Or helps th’ ambitious Hill the heav’ns to scale,Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,Calls in the Country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,Now breaks or now directs, th’ intending Lines;Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. (Epistle IV, ll 47–64) Whereas Addison still gestured towards estate management, Pope explicitly advocated a painterly approach to garden design. His epistle articulated some key principles that he enacted in his own garden at Twickenham and which would inform later garden design. No matter what one added to a landscape, one needed to be guided by nature; one should be moderate in one’s designs and neither plant too much nor too little; one must be aware of the spectator’s journey through the garden and take care to provide variety by creating “surprises” that would be revealed at different points. Finally, one had to find the “spirit” of the place that gave it its distinct character and use this to create the cohesion in diversity that was aspired to in a garden. Nature’s aestheticisation had begun with poetry, developed into painting, and was now enacted on actual natural environments with the emergence of English landscape style. This painterly approach to gardening demanded an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual engagement with place and it stylistically rejected the neo-classical geometry and regularity of the baroque garden (exemplified by Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles). Experiencing landscape now took on a third dimension as wealthy landowners and their friends put themselves within the picture frame and into the scene. Although landscape style changed during the century, a number of principles remained more or less consistent: the garden should be modelled on nature but “improved,” any improvements should not be obvious, pictorial composition should be observed, the garden should be concerned with the spectator’s experience and should aim to provoke an imaginative or emotional engagement with it. During the seventeenth century, developments in theatrical technology, particularly the emergence of the proscenium arch theatre with moveable scenery, showed that poetry and painting could be spectacularly combined on the stage. Later in the eighteenth century the artist and stage designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg combined picturesque painting aesthetics with theatrical design in works such as The Wonders of Derbyshire in 1779 (McGillivray 136). It was a short step to shift the onstage scene outside. Theatricality was invoked when pictorial principles were applied three dimensionally; gardens became sites for pastoral genre scenes that ambiguously positioned their visitors both as spectators and actors. Theatrical SceneryGardens and theatres were explicitly connected. Like “theatre,” the word “garden” was sometimes used to describe a collection, in book form, which promised “a whole world of items” which was not always “redeemable” in “straightforward ways” (Hunt, Gardens 54–55). Theatrum mundi could be emblematically expressed in a garden through statues and architectural fabriques which drew spectators into complex chains of associations involving literature, art, and society, as they progressed through it.In the previous century, writes John Dixon Hunt, “the expectation of a fine garden [. . .] was that it work upon its visitor, involving him [sic] often insidiously as a participant in its dramas, which were presented to him as he explored its spaces by a variety of statues, inscriptions and [. . .] hydraulically controlled automata” (Gardens 54). Such devices, which featured heavily in the Italian baroque garden, were by the mid eighteenth century seen by English and French garden theorists to be overly contrived. Nonetheless, as David Marshall argues, “eighteenth-century garden design is famous for its excesses [. . .] the picturesque garden may have aimed to be less theatrical, but it aimed no less to be theater” (38). Such gardens still required their visitors’ participation and were designed to deliver an experience that stimulated the spectators’ imaginations and emotions as they moved through them. Theatrum mundi is implicit in eighteenth-century gardens through a common idea of the world reimagined into four geographical quadrants emblematically represented by fabriques in the garden. The model here is Alexander Pope’s influential poem, “The Temple of Fame” (1715), which depicted the eponymous temple with four different geographic faces: its western face was represented by western classical architecture, its east face by Chinese, Persian, and Assyrian, its north was Gothic and Celtic, and its south, Egyptian. These tropes make their appearance in eighteenth-century landscape gardens. In Désert de Retz, a garden created between 1774 and 1789 by François Racine de Monville, about twenty kilometres west of Paris, one can still see amongst its remaining fabriques: a ruined “gothic” church, a “Tartar” tent (it used to have a Chinese maison, now lost), a pyramid, and the classically inspired Temple of Pan. Similar principles underpin the design of Jardin (now Parc) Monceau that I discuss below. Retz: Figure 1. Tartar tent.Figure 2. Temple of PanStowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire has a similar array of structures (although the classical predominates) including its original Chinese pavillion. It, too, once featured a pyramid designed by the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, and erected as a memorial to him after his death in 1726. On it was carved a quote from Horace that explicitly referenced the dramaturgical version of theatrum mundi: You have played, eaten enough and drunk enough,Now is time to leave the stage for younger men. (Garnett 19) Stowe’s Elysian Fields, designed by William Kent in the 1730s according to picturesque principles, offered its visitor two narrative choices, to take the Path of Virtue or the Path of Vice, just like a re-imagined morality play. As visitors progressed along their chosen paths they would encounter various fabriques and statues, some carved with inscriptions in either Latin or English, like the Vanbrugh pyramid, that would encourage associations between the ancient world and the contemporary world of the garden’s owner Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, and his circle. Stowe: Figure 3. Chinese Pavillion.Figure 4. Temple of VirtueKent’s background was as a painter and scene designer and he brought a theatrical sensibility to his designs; as Hunt writes, Kent particularly enjoyed designing “recessions into woodland space where ‘wings’ [were] created” (Picturesque 29). Importantly, Kent’s garden drawings reveal his awareness of gardens as “theatrical scenes for human action and interaction, where the premium is upon more personal experiences” and it this spatial dimension that was opened up at Stowe (Picturesque 30).Picturesque garden design emphasised pictorial composition that was similar to stage design and because a garden, like a stage, was a three-dimensional place for human action, it could also function as a set for that action. Unlike a painting, a garden was experiential and time-based and a visitor to it had an experience not unlike, to cautiously use an anachronism, a contemporary promenade performance. The habit of imaginatively wandering through a theatre in book-form, moving associatively from one item to the next, trying to discern the author’s pattern or structure, was one educated Europeans were used to, and a garden provided an embodied dimension to this activity. We can see how this might have been by visiting Parc Monceau in Paris which still contains remnants of the garden designed by Louis Carrogis (known as Carmontelle) for the Duc de Chartres in the 1770s. Carmontelle, like Kent, had a theatrical background and his primary role was as head of entertainments for the Orléans family; as such he was responsible for designing and writing plays for the family’s private theatricals (Hays 449). According to Hunt, Carmontelle intended visitors to Jardin de Monceau to take a specific itinerary through its “quantity of curious things”:Visitors entered by a Chinese gateway, next door to a gothic building that served as a chemical laboratory, and passed through greenhouses and coloured pavilions. Upon pressing a button, a mirrored wall opened into a winter garden painted with trompe-l’œil trees, floored with red sand, filled with exotic plants, and containing at its far end a grotto in which supper parties were held while music was played in the chamber above. Outside was a farm. Then there followed a series of exotic “locations”: a Temple of Mars, a winding river with an island of rocks and a Dutch mill, a dairy, two flower gardens, a Turkish tent poised, minaret-like, above an icehouse, a grove of tombs [. . .], and an Italian vineyard with a classical Bacchus at its center, regularly laid out to contrast with an irregular wood that succeeded it. The final stretches of the itinerary included a Naumachia or Roman water-theatre [. . .], more Turkish and Chinese effects, a ruined castle, yet another water-mill, and an island on which sheep grazed. (Picturesque 121) Monceau: Figure 5. Naumachia.Figure 6. PyramidIn its presentation of a multitude of different times and different places one can trace a line of descent from Jardin de Monceau to the great nineteenth-century World Expos and on to Disneyland. This lineage is not as trite as it seems once we realise that Carmontelle himself intended the garden to represent “all times and all places” and Pope’s four quadrants of the world were represented by fabriques at Monceau (Picturesque 121). As Jardin de Monceau reveals, gardens were also sites for smaller performative interventions such as the popular fêtes champêtres, garden parties in which the participants ate, drank, danced, played music, and acted in comedies. Role playing and masquerade were an important part of the fêtes as we see, for example, in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Fêtes Vénitiennes (1718–19) where a “Moorishly” attired man addresses (or is dancing with) a young woman before an audience of young men and women, lolling around a fabrique (Watteau). Scenic design in the theatre inspired garden designs and gardens “featured prominently as dramatic locations in intermezzi, operas, and plays”, an exchange that encouraged visitors to gardens to see themselves as performers as much as spectators (Hunt, Gardens 64). A garden, particularly within the liminal aegis of a fête was a site for deceptions, tricks, ruses and revelations, assignations and seductions, all activities which were inherently theatrical; in such a garden visitors could find themselves acting in or watching a comedy or drama of their own devising. Marie-Antoinette built English gardens and a rural “hamlet” at Versailles. She and her intimate circle would retire to rustic cottages, which belied the opulence of their interiors, and dressed in white muslin dresses and straw hats, would play at being dairy maids, milking cows (pre-cleaned by the servants) into fine porcelain buckets (Martin 3). Just as the queen acted in pastoral operas in her theatre in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, her hamlet provided an opportunity for her to “live” a pastoral fantasy. Similarly, François Racine de Monville, who commissioned Désert de Retz, was a talented harpist and flautist and his Temple of Pan was, appropriately, a music room.Versailles: Figure 7. Hamlet ConclusionRichard Steele, Addison’s friend and co-founder of The Spectator, casually invoked theatrum mundi when he wrote in 1720: “the World and the Stage [. . .] have been ten thousand times observed to be the Pictures of one another” (51). Steele’s reiteration of a Renaissance commonplace revealed a different emphasis, an emphasis on the metaphor’s spatial and spectacular elements. Although Steele reasserts the idea that the world and stage resemble each other, he does so through a third level of abstraction: it is as pictures that they have an affinity. World and stage are both positioned for the observer within complementary picture frames and it is as pictures that he or she is invited to make sense of them. The formalist version of theatrum mundi invokes a spectator beholding the world for his (usually!) pleasure and in the process nature itself is transformed. No longer were natural landscapes wildernesses to be tamed and economically exploited, but could become gardens rendered into scenes for their aristocratic owners’ pleasure. Désert de Retz, as its name suggests, was an artfully composed wilderness, a version of the natural world sculpted into scenery. Theatrum mundi, through the aesthetic category of the picturesque, emerged in English landscape style and effected a theatricalised transformation of nature that was enacted in the aristocratic gardens of Europe.ReferencesAddison, Joseph. The Spectator. No. 414 (25 June 1712): 67–70. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.Garnett, Oliver. Stowe. Buckinghamshire. The National Trust, 2011.Hays, David. “Carmontelle's Design for the Jardin de Monceau: A Freemasonic Garden in Late-Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1999): 447–62.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hunt, John Dixon. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992.———. The Picturesque Garden in Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.Marshall, David. The Frame of Art. Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.Martin, Meredith S. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2011.McGillivray, Glen. "The Picturesque World Stage." Performance Research 13.4 (2008): 127–39.Pope, Alexander. “Epistle IV. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.” Epistles to Several Persons. London, 1744. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.———. The Temple of Fame: A Vision. By Mr. Pope. 2nd ed. London, 1715. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge, 1991.Steele, Richard. The Theatre. No. 7 (23 January 1720).

Art Imitating ArtThis article discusses the global, historical and literary references that are present in the video game franchise Bayonetta. In particular, references to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the works of Dr John Dee, and European traditions of witchcraft are examined. Bayonetta is modern in the sense that she is a woman of the world. Her character shows how history and literature may be used, re-used, and evolve into new formats, and how modern games travel abroad through time and space.Drawing creative inspiration from other works is nothing new. Ideas and themes, art and literature are frequently borrowed and recast. Carmel Cedro cites Northrop Frye in the example of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. These writers created stories and characters that have developed a level of acclaim and resonated with many individuals, resulting in countless homages over the years. The forms that these appropriations take vary widely. Media formats, such as film adaptations and even books, take the core characters or narrative from the original and re-work them into a different context. For example, the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1883 was adapted into the 2002 Walt Disney animated film Treasure Planet. The film maintained the concepts of the original narrative and retained key characters but re-imaged them to fit the science fiction genre (Clements and Musker).The video-game franchise Bayonetta draws inspiration from distinct sources creating the foundation for the universe and some plot points to enhance the narrative. The main sources are Dante’s Divine Comedy, the projections of John Dee and his mystical practices as well as the medieval history of witches.The Vestibule: The Concept of BayonettaFigure 1: Bayonetta Concept ArtBayonetta ConceptsThe concept of Bayonetta was originally developed by video game designer Hideki Kamiya, known previously for his work including The Devil May Cry and the Resident Evil game series. The development of Bayonetta began with Kamiya requesting a character design that included three traits: a female lead, a modern witch, and four guns. This description laid the foundations for what was to become the hack and slash fantasy heroine that would come to be known as Bayonetta. "Abandon all hope ye who enter here"The Divine Comedy, written by Dante Alighieri during the 1300s, was a revolutionary piece of literature for its time, in that it was one of the first texts that formalised the vernacular Italian language by omitting the use of Latin, the academic language of the time. Dante’s work was also revolutionary in its innovative contemplations on religion, art and sciences, creating a literary collage of such depth that it would continue to inspire hundreds of years after its first publication.Figure 2: Domenico di Michelino’s fresco of Dante and his Divine Comedy, surrounded by depictions of scenes in the textBayonetta explores the themes of The Divine Comedy in a variety of ways, using them as an obvious backdrop, along with subtle homages and references scattered throughout the game. The world of Bayonetta is set in the Trinity of Realities, three realms that co-exist forming the universe: Inferno, Paradiso and the Chaos realm—realm of humans—and connected by Purgitorio—the intersection of the trinity. In the game, Bayonetta travels throughout these realms, primarily in the realm of Purgitorio, the area in which magical and divine entities may conduct their business. However, there are stages within the game where Bayonetta finds herself in Paradiso and the human realm. This is a significant factor relating to The Divine Comedy as these realms also form the areas explored by Dante in his epic poem. The depth of these parallels is not exclusive to factors in Dante’s masterpiece, as there are also references to other art and literature inspired by Dante’s legacy. For example, the character Rodin in Bayonetta runs a bar named “The Gates of Hell.” In 1917 French artist Auguste Rodin completed a sculpture, The Gates of Hell depicting scenes and characters from The Divine Comedy. Rodin’s bar in Bayonetta is manifested as a dark impressionist style of architecture, with an ominous atmosphere. In early concept art, the proprietor of the bar was to be named Mephisto (Kamiya) derived from “Mephistopheles”, another name for the devil in some mythologies. Figure 3: Auguste Rodin's Gate of Hell, 1917Aspects of Dante’s surroundings and the theological beliefs of his time can be found in Bayonetta, as well as in the 2013 anime film adaptation Bayonetta, Bloody Fate. The Christian virtues, revered during the European Middle Ages, manifest themselves as enemies and adversaries that Bayonetta must combat throughout the game. Notably, the names of the cardinal virtues serve as “boss ranked” foes. Enemies within a game, usually present at the end of a level and more difficult to defeat than regular enemies within “Audito Sphere” of the “Laguna Hierarchy” (high levels of the hierarchy within the game), are named in Italian; Fortitudo, Temperantia, Lustitia, and Sapientia. These are the virtues of Classical Greek Philosophy, and reflect Dante’s native language as well as the impact the philosophies of Ancient Greece had on his writings. The film adaption of Bayonetta incorporated many elements from the game. To adjust the game effectively, it was necessary to augment the plot in order to fit the format of this alternate media. As it was no longer carried by gameplay, the narrative became paramount. The diverse plot points of the new narrative allowed for novel possibilities for further developing the role of The Divine Comedy in Bayonetta. At the beginning of the movie, for example, Bayonetta enters as a nun, just as she does in the game, only here she is in church praying rather than in a graveyard conducting a funeral. During her prayer she recites “I am the way into the city of woe, abandon all hope, oh, ye who enter here,” which is a Canto of The Divine Comedy. John Dee and the AngelsDr John Dee (1527—1608), a learned man of Elizabethan England, was a celebrated philosopher, mathematician, scientist, historian, and teacher. In addition, he was a researcher of magic and occult arts, as were many of his contemporaries. These philosopher magicians were described as Magi and John Dee was the first English Magus (French). He was part of a school of study within the Renaissance intelligensia that was influenced by the then recently discovered works of the gnostic Hermes Trismegistus, thought to be of great antiquity. This was in an age when religion, philosophy and science were intertwined. Alchemy and chemistry were still one, and astronomers, such as Johannes Kepler and Tyco Brahe cast horoscopes. John Dee engaged in spiritual experiments that were based in his Christian faith but caused him to be viewed in some circles as dangerously heretical (French).Based on the texts of Hermes Trismegistas and other later Christian philosophical and theological writers such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Dee and his contemporaries believed in celestial hierarchies and levels of existence. These celestial hierarchies could be accessed by “real artificial magic,” or applied science, that included mathematics, and the cabala, or the mystical use of permutations of Hebrew texts, to access supercelestial powers (French). In his experiments in religious magic, Dee was influenced by the occult writings of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486—1535). In Agrippa’s book, De Occulta Philosophia, there are descriptions for seals, symbols and tables for summoning angels, to which Dee referred in his accounts of his own magic experiments (French). Following his studies, Dee constructed a table with a crystal placed on it. By use of suitable rituals prescribed by Agrippa and others, Dee believed he summoned angels within the crystal, who could be seen and conversed with. Dee did not see these visions himself, but conversed with the angels through a skryer, or medium, who saw and heard the celestial beings. Dee recorded his interviews in his “Spiritual Diaries” (French). Throughout Bayonetta there are numerous seals and devices that would appear to be inspired by the work of Dee or other Renaissance Magi.In these sessions, John Dee, through his skryer Edward Kelley, received instruction from several angels. The angels led him to believe he was to be a prophet in the style of the biblical Elijah or, more specifically like Enoch, whose prophesies were detailed in an ancient book that was not part of the Bible, but was considered by many scholars as divinely inspired. As a result, these experiments have been termed “Enochian conversations.” The prophesies received by Dee foretold apocalyptic events that were to occur soon and God’s plan for the world. The angels also instructed Dee in a system of magic to allow him to interpret the prophesies and participate in them as a form of judge. Importantly, Dee was also taught elements of the supposed angelic language, which came to be known as “Enochian” (Ouellette). Dee wrote extensively about his interviews with the angels and includes statements of their hierarchy (French, Ouellette). This is reflected in the “Laguna Hierarchy” of Bayonetta, sharing similarities in name and appearance of the angels Dee had described. Platinum Games creative director Jean-Pierre Kellams acted as writer and liaison, assisting the English adaptation of Bayonetta and was tasked by Hideki Kamiya to develop Bayonetta’s incantations and subsequently the language of the angels within the game (Kellams).The Hammer of WitchesOne of the earliest and most integral components of the Bayonetta franchise is the fact that the title character is a witch. Witches, sorcerers and other practitioners of magic have been part of folklore for centuries. Hideki Kamiya stated that the concept of” classical witches” was primarily a European legend. In order to emulate this European dimension, he had envisioned Bayonetta as having a British accent which resulted in the game being released in English first, even though Platinum Games is a Japanese company (Kamiya). The Umbra Witch Clan hails from Europe within the Bayonetta Universe and relates more closely to the traditional European medieval witch tradition (Various), although some of the charms Bayonetta possesses acknowledge the witches of different parts of the world and their cultural context. The Evil Harvest Rosary is said to have been created by a Japanese witch in the game. Bayonetta herself and other witches of the game use their hair as a conduit to summon demons and is known as “wicked weaves” within the game. She also creates her tight body suit out of her hair, which recedes when she decides to use a wicked weave. Using hair in magic harks back to a legend that witches often utilised hair in their rituals and spell casting (Guiley). It is also said that women with long and beautiful hair were particularly susceptible to being seduced by Incubi, a form of demon that targets sleeping women for sexual intercourse. According to some texts (Kramer), witches formed into the beings that they are through consensual sex with a devil, as stated in Malleus Maleficarum of the 1400s, when he wrote that “Modern Witches … willingly embrace this most foul and miserable form of servitude” (Kramer). Bayonetta wields her sexuality as proficiently as she does any weapon. This lends itself to the belief that women of such a seductive demeanour were consorts to demons.Purgitorio is not used in the traditional sense of being a location of the afterlife, as seen in The Divine Comedy, rather it is depicted as a dimension that exists concurrently within the human realm. Those who exist within this Purgitorio cannot be seen with human eyes. Bayonetta’s ability to enter and exit this space with the use of magic is likened to the myth that witches were known to disappear for periods of time and were purported to be “spirited away” from the human world (Kamiya).Recipes for gun powder emerge from as early as the 1200s but, to avoid charges of witchcraft due to superstitions of the time, they were hidden by inventors such as Roger Bacon (McNab). The use of “Bullet Arts” in Bayonetta as the main form of combat for Umbra Witches, and the fact that these firearm techniques had been honed by witches for centuries before the witch hunts, implies that firearms were indeed used by dark magic practitioners until their “discovery” by ordinary humans in the Bayonetta universe. In addition to this, that “Lumen Sages” are not seen to practice bullet arts, builds on the idea of guns being a practice of black magic. “Lumen Sages” are the Light counterpart and adversaries of the Umbra Witches in Bayonetta. The art of Alchemy is incorporated into Bayonetta as a form of witchcraft. Players may create their own health, vitality, protective and mana potions through a menu screen. This plays on the taboo of chemistry and alchemy of the 1500s. As mentioned, John Dee's tendency to dabble in such practices was considered by some to be heretical (French, Ouellette).Light and dark forces are juxtaposed in Bayonetta through the classic adversaries, Angels and Demons. The moral flexibility of both the light and dark entities in the game leaves the principles of good an evil in a state of ambiguity, which allows for uninhibited flow in the story and creates a non-linear and compelling narrative. Through this non-compliance with the pop culture counterparts of light and dark, gamers are left to question the foundations of old cultural norms. This historical context lends itself to the Bayonetta story not only by providing additional plot points, but also by justifying the development decisions that occur in order to truly flesh out Bayonetta’s character.ConclusionCompelling story line, characters with layered personality, and the ability to transgress boundaries of time and travel are all factors that provide a level of depth that has become an increasingly important aspect in modern video gameplay. Gamers love “Easter eggs,” the subtle references and embellishments scattered throughout a game that make playing games like Bayonetta so enjoyable. Bayonetta herself is a global traveller whose journeying is not limited to “abroad.” She transgresses cultural, time, and spatial boundaries. The game is a mosaic of references to spatial time dimensions, literary, and historical sources. This mix of borrowings has produced an original gameplay and a unique storyline. Such use of literature, mythology, and history to enhance the narrative creates a quest game that provides “meaningful play” (Howard). This process of creation of new material from older sources is a form of renewal. As long as contemporary culture presents literature and history to new audiences, the older texts will not be forgotten, but these elements will undergo a form of renewal and restoration and the present-day culture will be enhanced as a result. In the words of Bayonetta herself: “As long as there’s music, I’ll keep on dancing.”ReferencesCedro, Carmel. "Dolly Varden: Sweet Inspiration." Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 37-46. French, Peter J. John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus. London: London, Routledge and K. Paul, 1972. Guiley, Rosemary. The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology. Infobase Publishing, 2009. Howard, Jeff. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. Wellesley, Mass.: A.K. Peters, 2008. Kamiya, Hideki.Bayonetta. Bayonetta. Videogame. Sega, Japan, 2009.Kellams, Jean-Pierre. "Butmoni Coronzon (from the Mouth of the Witch)." Platinum Games 2009.Kramer, Heinrich. The Malleus Maleficarum of Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Eds. Sprenger, Jakob, or joint author, and Montague Summers. New York: Dover, 1971.McNab, C. Firearms: The Illustrated Guide to Small Arms of the World. Parragon, 2008.Ouellette, Francois. "Prophet to the Elohim: John Dee's Enochian Conversations as Christian Apocalyptic Discourse." Master of Arts thesis. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2004.Treasure Planet. The Walt Disney Company, 2003.Various. "Bayonetta Wikia." 2016.

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(Christiane Liermann, Como) Asmussen, Tina, Scientia Kircheriana. Die Fabrikation von Wissen bei Athanasius Kircher (Kulturgeschichten, 2), Affalterbach 2016, Didymos-Verlag, 220 S. / Abb., € 39,00. (Mona Garloff, Stuttgart / Wien) Schlegelmilch, Sabine, Ärztliche Praxis und sozialer Raum im 17. Jahrhundert. Johannes Magirus (1615 – 1697), Wien / Köln / Weimar 2018, Böhlau, 352 S. / Abb., € 50,00. (Pierre Pfütsch, Stuttgart) Félicité, Indravati, Das Königreich Frankreich und die norddeutschen Hansestädte und Herzogtümer (1650 – 1730). Diplomatie zwischen ungleichen Partnern, übers. aus dem Französischen v. Markus Hiltl (Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte. Neue Folge, 75), Köln / Weimar / Wien 2017, Böhlau, 439 S., € 60,00. (Guido Braun, Mulhouse) Renault, Rachel, La permanence de l’extraordinaire. Fiscalité, pouvoirs et monde social en Allemagne aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Histoire moderne, 57), Paris 2017, Éditions de la Sorbonne, 389 S. / Abb., € 25,00. (Claire Gantet, Fribourg) Godsey, William D., The Sinews of Habsburg Power. Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State 1650 – 1820, Oxford 2018, Oxford University Press, XX u. 460 S. / Abb., £ 90,00. (Simon Karstens, Trier) Riotte, Andrea, Diese so oft beseufzte Parität. Biberach 1649 – 1825: Politik – Konfession – Alltag (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für geschichtliche Landeskunde in Baden-Württemberg. Reihe B: Forschungen, 213), Stuttgart 2017, Kohlhammer, LII u. 779 S., € 64,00. (Stephanie Armer, Nürnberg) Müller, Andreas, Die Ritterschaft im Herzogtum Westfalen 1651 – 1803. Aufschwörung, innere Struktur und Prosopographie (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission für Westfalen. Neue Folge, 34), Münster 2017, Aschendorff, 744 S. / Abb., € 69,00. (Nicolas Rügge, Hannover) Lange, Johan, Die Gefahren der akademischen Freiheit. Ratgeberliteratur für Studenten im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (1670 – 1820) (Beihefte der Francia, 84), Ostfildern 2017, Thorbecke, 339 S., € 45,00. 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(Georg Eckert, Wuppertal) Ducheyne, Steffen (Hrsg.), Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, London / New York 2017, Routledge, XII u. 318 S., £ 32,99. (Bettina Dietz, Hongkong) Lehner, Ulrich (Hrsg.), Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism. A Transnational Biographical History, London / New York 2018, Routledge, XI u. 236 S. / Abb., £ 100,00. (Elisabeth Fischer, Hamburg) Möller, Horst / Claus Scharf / Wassili Dudarew / Maja Lawrinowitsch (Hrsg.), Deutschland – Russland. Stationen gemeinsamer Geschichte, Orte der Erinnerung, Bd. 1: Das 18. Jahrhundert, Berlin / Boston 2018, de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 410 S. / Abb., € 29,95. (Martina Winkler, Kiel) Bittner, Anja, Eine königliche Mission. Der französisch-jakobitische Invasionsversuch von 1708 im europäischen Kontext (Schriften des Frühneuzeitzentrums Potsdam, 6), Göttingen 2017, V&amp;R unipress, 277 S., € 45,00. (Torsten Riotte, Frankfurt a.M.) Schmidt-Voges, Inken / Ana Crespo Solana (Hrsg.), New Worlds? 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