- Department: History of Art
- Credit value: 20 credits
- Credit level: H
- Academic year of delivery: 2024-25
- See module specification for other years: 2023-24
This module looks at three outsider architects: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564), Francesco Borromini (1599-1667), and Nicholas Hawksmoor (c.1661-1736). What did it mean to be an architectural outsider in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, and what alternative theories, methods and values were at play?
Occurrence | Teaching period |
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A | Semester 2 2024-25 |
This course looks at three roguishly individualistic architects: Michelangelo, Borromini, and Hawksmoor. According to Vasari, Michelangelo ‘proceeded quite differently in proportion, composition, and rules from what others had done following common practice, Vitruvius and antiquity’. According to Bellori, writing about Borromini, ‘everyone imagines in his head a new idea or phantom of architecture in his own manner … so that they deprave buildings’. And according to James Ralph, Hawksmoor’s London churches were ‘mere Gothique heaps of stone, without form or order’. In short, all three architects were from the outset associated with the corruption of antiquity, the destruction of order, and the extirpation of good taste and humane reason.
But this is not how they understood themselves, and all three architects have had their champions, especially in the last century or so.
This module will explore what it meant to be a rogue architect in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It will explore a series of key works by each of the three architects, set these analyses against cannonic concepts of classicism, and then go in search of the alternative theories, methods and values that were espoused by the rogues themselves.
By the end of the module, students should have acquired:
Task | % of module mark |
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Essay/coursework | 100 |
None
Task | % of module mark |
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Essay/coursework | 100 |
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