The legacy of Dietterlin’s Architectura is evident in the enduring role of empiricism across seventeenth-century architecture and natural philosophy. The Architectura served as the culmination of a breed of architectural image-making informed by the humanistic philosophy of learned empiricism, which intertwined the iconography of the fantastical and the occult with empirical ideas and practices. The decline of learned empiricism’s influence over architectural images is already anticipated in Dürer’s Melencolia I, which inspired the final etching of Dietterlin’s Architectura as an elegy to that tradition. Dietterlin’s contributions to the consolidation of architectural images as platforms for empirical scientific inquiry, as well as the waning of learned empiricism, resonated in seventeenth-century England and France, where architectural images eschewed symbolic representations for a novel visuality that foregrounded purely empirical evidence. Dietterlin’s Architectura catalyzed the new relationship between architecture and science by exposing the limits of humanist symbolism and the vast potential of architectural images as agents of empirical thinking, philosophy, and practices.

In Chapter 3, Herbert’s verse is read in the context of another collaborative enterprise, the Stuart court masque. These playful and extravagant secular entertainments are an unusual context against which to set Herbert’s often modest devotional poetic, though Herbert can hardly have been ignorant of the genre: members of Herbert’s family – including the Earls of Pembroke, their wives and children, and Herbert’s own brother Sir Henry Herbert (c.1594–1673), sometime Master of the Revels – were involved in their performance and production. This chapter offers the court masque as a particularly vivid contemporary genre that engages with the possibilities of interdisciplinary expression. These entertainments alert us not only to the interplay between words and music, but also to the ways in which musical ideas of harmonious proportion might be expressed visually through the stage’s elaborate perspectival sets, and through the moving human medium of dance.