Building Pictures: The Architectural Imaginary of Italian Renaissance Painting (Florence)

1.5 units

Italian Renaissance painters such as Antonello, Botticelli, and Crivelli, and their contemporaries, often depicted architectural spaces – buildings, streets, piazzas – in their works. The rendered spaces were both religious and secular, ancient and modern all within the two-dimensional canvas surface. The masterpieces, often intertwining real and imagined spaces were depicted as hyper-real with tremendous amounts of focused detail on the specific setting, lighting, ornament, historical elements, and artifacts. Perspectival linework and architectural frameworks were often drawn onto the canvas at the start. In this course, students will build architectural models of selected paintings exploring their formal composition, materiality, light sources, staging, and details. The models, crafted out of paper, paint, and marmorizzazione will prompt the class examine the role of architecture in painting while engaging the fantastical spaces within the architectural imaginary of Italian Renaissance Painting. The class will include visits to the Uffizi and the Galleria dell’Accademia to research and view some of the artworks in person.