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Dominion of the Eye
Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence

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Author: Marvin Trachtenberg, New York University

Date Published: June 2008
availability: Unavailable - out of print August 2022
format: Paperback
isbn: 9780521728256

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About the Authors

Trachtenberg's book exmines the urban transformation of Florence in the fourteenth century. Focusing on the creation of the Piazza della Signoria and the Piazza del Duomo, he documents in engaging detail how and why urban planners, in league with the civic government, enlarged these urban spaces. Articulating the design principles that served as the foundation for these urban renewal projects, Trachtenberg's book fundamentally revises our understanding of urban planning in the early modern period, countering the received claim that rational planning begins only in the Renaissance. His book also brings a new depth of understanding to the entire visual culture of Trecento Florence, demonstrating how many of the developments in painting, sculpture and architecture of this period form the basis of the achievements of the Quattrocento, particularly the discovery of perspective. Combining both empirical and post-structuralist methods, Trachtenberg's book is among the first, if not the first, to question critically many of the assumptions that have formed the basis of scholarship of Renaissance art since the sixteenth century.
- Radically original and comprehensive analysis of urbanistic practice in the pre-Renaissance period
- Deeply contextual study of the intersection of art and politics of a period and a city central to European history and culture
- More than 50 new analytic drawings illustrating the planning of Florentine squares, and almost 200 photographs, mostly unpublished
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Awards
- Winner of the Hitchcock Book Prize, awarded by the Society of Architecture Historians
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Reviews & endorsements
"...essential for anyone specializing in any of the visual arts, including architecture and urbanism." Choice
"This deeply revisionary study of urbanism, art, and power in early modern Florence is without question one of the most important works of architectural history to appear in many decades....Trachtenberg's exciting, highly suggestive synthesis forces us to see in new ways the profound tranformation of one of the great cities in modern Europe...." Virginia Quarterly
"engaging, forcefully written, and highly polemical book...this elegantly argued, relentlessly single-minded, and extravagantly speculative book rewards the reader with a keen appreciation of the many dialectical nuances informing trecento Florrentine urban planning." Speculum
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Product details
- Date Published: June 2008
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521728256
- length: 380 pages
- dimensions: 279 x 215 x 20 mm
- weight: 1.24kg
- contains: 253 b/w illus.
- availability: Unavailable - out of print August 2022
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I. History and Theory:
1. Florence brought to historical account
2. Toward the Trecento Florentine piazza: problematics
Part II. From Theory to Practice:
3. The Piazza del Duomo
4. The Piazza della Signoria
Part III. Framing Urbanistic Discourse: Space, Subject and Vision in Trecento Theory and the Arts:
5. Spatial theory
6. The spatial order of Florentine streets, monumental architecture, and the new towns
7. Trecento pictorial perspective reconsidered
8. Perspective in Trecento sculpture and architectural detail
9. The Trecento fusion of the arts
10. The architecture of painting and the multimedia tableau
11. The role of optical and surveying theory
Part IV. On The Politics of Urbanistic Order:
12. The political logic of demolition
13. Spatial form and political authority
14. The symbolic power of scopic order
15. Florentine Trecento urbanism as institutional and ideological praxis II
16. The Florentine urbanistic 'style' as bourgeois instrumentalism
17. Resistance and Renaissance: an afterword.
Author
Marvin Trachtenberg, New York University
Marvin Trachtenberg is Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Art, New York University. A recipient of fellowships from the Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Villa I Tatti, he is the author of The Campanile of Florence Cathedral,'Giotto's Tower', and coauthor of Architecture from Prehistory to Postmodernism.
Awards
- Winner of the Hitchcock Book Prize, awarded by the Society of Architecture Historians
- Winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Award, awarded by the College Art Association