Book contents
- The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science
- Reviews
- The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Editorial Note
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction The Renaissance of Architecture as Art and Science
- One Architecture’s Figural Turn
- Two Devising the Architectura: Rationalism and Empiricism in Architectural Design
- Three Drafting the Architectura: Drawing as Research in Art, Architecture, and Science
- Four Printing the Architectura: Architectural Etching Becomes Alchemical Inquiry
- Five Dissecting the Architectura: Anatomy, Ornament, and the Limits of Figuration
- Six Deconstructing the Architectura: Enduring Matter and Transient Forms in Peru
- Conclusion The Death and the Life of the Architectural Image
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Six - Deconstructing the Architectura: Enduring Matter and Transient Forms in Peru
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- The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science
- Reviews
- The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Editorial Note
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction The Renaissance of Architecture as Art and Science
- One Architecture’s Figural Turn
- Two Devising the Architectura: Rationalism and Empiricism in Architectural Design
- Three Drafting the Architectura: Drawing as Research in Art, Architecture, and Science
- Four Printing the Architectura: Architectural Etching Becomes Alchemical Inquiry
- Five Dissecting the Architectura: Anatomy, Ornament, and the Limits of Figuration
- Six Deconstructing the Architectura: Enduring Matter and Transient Forms in Peru
- Conclusion The Death and the Life of the Architectural Image
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Dietterlin’s Architectura experienced perhaps its richest reception and afterlife among architectural sculptors in seventeenth-century colonial Peru. The façades of the Cathedral of Cuzco, Cuzco’s Jesuit Compañía church, and the monastery of the church of San Francisco in Lima all adapted motifs from Dietterlin’s Architectura to compare European and Indigenous Peruvian ideas about the stability of matter. Constructed in the wake of catastrophic earthquakes in the 1650s by Andean and other Indigenous sculptors, the façades reinterpret the structural, anatomical and material conceits of Dietterlin’s treatise to overturn its vision of architectural matter and especially stone as a materially unstable entity. Instead, they used the imagery of Dietterlin’s Architectura to promote an alternative ontology that underscored the transience of forms and structures while affirming the fixity of matter such as stone. Even as architectural images like those of the Architectura spurred artistic and natural philosophical discourses on a global scale, Peruvian artists adapted Dietterlin’s ideas to accommodate their own ontologies and philosophies of nature.
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- The Architectural Image and Early Modern ScienceWendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation, pp. 347 - 398Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024