Mon premier blog

The City Rehearsed: The Architectural Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries (The Classical Tradition in Architecture) by Christopher P. Heuer

Download The City Rehearsed: The Architectural Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries (The Classical Tradition in Architecture)

The City Rehearsed: The Architectural Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries (The Classical Tradition in Architecture) Christopher P. Heuer
Language: English
Page: 312
Format: pdf
ISBN: 0415433061, 9780415433068
Publisher:

Review

"Heuer's book is a remarkable rhetorical performance.... he gracefully mingles the historical moment of late Renaissance thinking and working with an appeal to the modernity and strangeness of Vredeman's work..." --Oxford Art Journal

"Vredeman's large production of prints gives rise to an impressive analysis...Heuer pursues his argument in constant dialogue with early twentieth-century German art history and philosophy." --Renaissance Quarterly

"...courageously blends biography, historiography, modern theory, a close reading of images and their sources to create an exciting new model for the life and works of artists of the past." --Historians of Netherlandish Art Review of Books

"...Heuer remains firmly grounded in Renaissance period practices...he places perspective at the very heart of visual cognition and art's history..." --Sixteenth Century Journal

"Heuer daagt via Vredeman uit tot het nadenken over de zestiende-eeuwse kunst buiten de kaders van de kunsthistorische discipline." - Oud Holland

From the Back Cover

"Alongside a highly accomplished scholarly account of Vredeman de Vries's life and work, Heuer's book offers a fascinating probe of topics and themes that reshaped culture and technology, art and faith at the dawn of modernity.  Like many at his time, Vredeman de Vries had to come to terms with the practice and theory of a new class of images that were being redefined by the power of identical copies (both as perspectival constructions and as mechanical prints), while at the same time some traditional forms of visual communication were mistrusted, and were being demoted by the tenets of the new faith. Heuer demonstrates brilliantly how Vredeman de Vries's patently dysfunctional visual "inventions" were often designed as functional tools: forms for making new forms, destined for replication in drawing, in print, and in building.  Beneath and beyond Vredeman de Vries's "grotesque" excesses and distortions stood, as many knew at the time, a dual strategy of apparent dissolution, and of hidden, recombinant transmutation of what was understood as 'art.'"

Mario Carpo
Ecole d'Architecture de Paris-La Villette, Paris