Department of Art History

Abstract

Reliefs as paintings and paintings as reliefs abounded in the Renaissance and called into question the limits between two sister-arts that had quarreled bitterly about each other’s claim to artistic nobility in what is collectively known as the paragone debate. Perhaps the greatest though silent partner in this quarrel was architecture, the traditional physical support for these reliefs. Yet, what the relief as a two-dimensional enlivened plane embedded into architecture contributed—or took away from it—was not discussed by either theoreticians or practitioners at the time: architects used reliefs unsparingly but did not reflect on their role and use. Starting with the debates focused on the architectural relief in the later 19th /early 20th centuries, when the topic emerges and quickly comes to a head at the hands of Hildebrand, Burckhardt and Wölfflin, this talk examines the relevance and demise of the relief in the longue durée: its Renaissance conception and architectural use from Raphael to Michelangelo, its consequences in later avatars and ultimate rejection. 

Architecture in Two Dimensions

Architects have perennially struggled with the problem of conceiving and executing three-dimensional structures using vehicles at scales and materials vastly different from those of the finished buildings. Yet, these conceptualizing and visualizing tools, among them drawings, prints, models, books, photographs, slides, computer models, and even paintings are not transparent devices, invisibly and seamlessly connecting the mind with the finished product. Rather, I argue, they leave significant residues on the object of architecture; as tools and mediators they themselves have agency. In these three lectures then I seek to address the consequences of the most fundamental distortion that architecture suffers: the design of buildings and environments as conditioned by two-dimensional supports. Taking a longue durée perspective, my case studies focus on pivot points in the history of architectural representation—from the invention of orthogonal projection in drawings, through photography to computer modeling— that is, moments when genuine paradigm changes occurred that allowed two-dimensional biases to seep into the design of architecture and remain quietly at work within the realm of tools, beneath the surface, for a long time thereafter.

About the Lecturer

Alina Payne is Alexander P. Misheff Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and Director of Villa I Tatti (Florence). Most recently she published L’architecture parmi les arts. Matérialité, transferts et travail artistique dans l’Italie de la Renaissance (Hazan/Louvre 2016) and The Land Between Two Seas. Art on the Move in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea 1300-1700 (Brill, 2022). She is the editor of a number of volumes among which The Renaissance in the 19th Century (with Lina Bolzoni; I Tatti/Harvard, 2018); The Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Architecture (Wiley/Blackwell, 2017); and Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local (with Gulru Necipoglu; Princeton, 2016). In 2006 she received the Max Planck and Alexander von Humboldt Prize in the Humanities and is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has held visiting appointments at the GSD (Harvard University); Villa I Tatti; Kunsthistorisches/ Max Planck Institut Florence; École Pratique des Hautes Etudes; Paris, Hertziana/ Max Planck Institute, Rome; University Roma II; University of Palermo; and Max Planck Institute, Berlin.

About the Louise Smith Bross Lectures

The Bross lecture series is endowed in memory of Louise Smith Bross, presented every three years by a distinguished scholar of pre-1800 European art and resulting in a book-length publication. There are three lectures presented in this series and the invited lecturer for the 2022 series is Alina Payne. 

This series is being offered in a hybrid format. To register for the virtual lecture please RSVP here.