In any academic book, a preface is expected, requiring an author to announce and even defend the ensuing text with a certain degree of self-consciousness. This is especially so in the present case, for this book is dedicated to the historical moment in which such an expectation arose, and the genealogy of the literary preface is intimately related to that of the architectural facade. In a sense, indeed, this book is itself preface, or at least prolegomenon. Others are better qualified than I to analyze the facade as a design project or task; I have sought to address puzzles that pressed into my consciousness whenever I turned my attention to Renaissance architecture, a built world in which the facade was a conspicuous element, yet in some ways also a highly obscure one.

The book is less a forensic performance, therefore, than a many-tracked exploration. Nevertheless, certain convictions are crucial in my approach. First, departing from the familiar preoccupation with Renaissance architecture as fundamentally mimetic, i.e., defined by its emulation of “antiquity,” I return the focus to the social milieu and to practices of assigning and locating meaning evident within it. Second, I adopt a skeptical attitude to unilinear and downward (i.e., “trickle-down”) paradigms of the transmission of culture, preferring to privilege evidence for relatively dialogic and dynamic processes. Third, I am interested in a wider standard of evidentiality than is often accepted in scholarly work on the built environment (though architectural historians have been known to venture opinions on the social and cultural meanings of their objects of study on the basis of relatively exclusive consideration of those objects themselves).