Three - Drafting the Architectura: Drawing as Research in Art, Architecture, and Science

Summary

If Dietterlin’s Architectura epitomized the empirical turn in architectural image-making, the preparatory drawings for the treatise’s etchings show how such firsthand research in art, architecture, and science coalesced in drawing as a context for managing visual research. The 164 surviving Architectura drawings constitute an ideal case study for this phenomenon, for they stand as one of the largest corpora of sixteenth-century architectural drawings made north of the Alps. Dietterlin’s Architectura drawings are compared with drawings from Bramante and Raphael’s St. Peter’s workshop as well as botanical and geological drawings by natural historians Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, and other natural philosophers. The comparison reveals that, during the sixteenth century, tactics for making images and managing information – such as cutting, collaging, annotation, folding and counterproofing – came to inform both architectural and scientific drawing. Indeed, artists, architects, printers, and natural philosophers began to trade tactics of drawing as a means for managing visual information, thereby codeveloping empirical artistic techniques for producing knowledge. Through its drawings, Dietterlin’s Architectura promoted the new, empirical methodology of architectural image-making.