One - Architecture’s Figural Turn

Summary

The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century revival of Vitruvius’s theory of architecture as art and science as well as the Reformation and the rise of print spurred a “figural turn” in architectural culture and the advent of a new genre of architectural images. In northern Europe, four institutions – artist guilds, publishers, masons’ lodges, and courts – acted as the key contexts for the figural turn. Artists began to specialize in forming architectural images, thereby making inroads into architectural professions and enriching the conventional practices of architectural design with new artistic and scientific modes of visual research. Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, façade paintings by Wendel Dietterlin and Hans Holbein the Younger, and printer Bernhard Jobin’s collaborations with builder Daniel Specklin to form scientifically informed architectural prints all exemplify the figural turn. So, too, did Dietterlin’s botanically rich mural for the Strasbourg Masons and Stonecutters, as well as an empirically conceived, microcosmic interior Dietterlin made for the Duke of Württemberg. By the middle of the sixteenth century, artists and natural philosophers had introduced empirical visual research methods to northern Europe’s developing culture of architectural images, setting the stage for Dietterlin’s seminal Architectura.