Description
Book SynopsisThe City Rehearsed offers an entirely new perspective on printed architecture in early modern Europe through the lens of Hans Vredeman de Vries. It probes the geographical encounters of dozens of engravings with contemporary texts on architecture, theatre, urbanism, art collecting, even ethnography.
The Netherlandish polymath Hans Vredeman de Vries (1526-1609) devoted his entire career to the production of imaginary architecture. Painter, architect, rhetorician, perspective theorist, festival designer, and draughtsman, Vredeman was active in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Prague, where he designed a mysterious body of architectural prints, works which by the seventeenth century had influenced buildings from Tallinn to Peru. Including Scenographiae (1560), and Perspective (1604-5), Vredeman's strange publications were among the most widely-distributed Renaissance books on building and vision, shipped to England, Spain and even Mexico by 1600.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Iconoclasm’s Faces Part 1: Performances of Order 1. Unbuilt Architecture in the World of Things 2. Antwerp: The City Rehearsed 3. Guidebooks to Chaos Part 2: Perspective and Exile 4. The Vanishing Self 5. Hidden Terrors: The Perspective (1604-5) Epilogue: Vredeman de Vries and the Modern
