Filarete's Body: Unpacking the Pregnancy Analogy in the Renaissance Patronage Context

Fifteenth century Florentine architect Il Filarete authored the first illustrated book on architecture, with a distinct pedagogical agenda to teach his patron to build nobly. Written as a dialogical narrative, taking place between a patron and his architect, the treatise's pedagogical tone unfolds as a form of storytelling about the design and construction of an ideal city. Despite its miscellaneous aspects embedded in the book, which differentiates it significantly from the architectural treatises belong to the Western cannon, the author stresses his role as an architect, and proposes an unprecedent analogy to define the role of the architect (his profession) in regards to building practice [edificare]. Extending the Vitruvian body topos under the influence of Civic Humanism to an organic anthropomorphism, Filarete bases the generation of a building on similar grounds to human generation, through which he defines gender-specific roles to the patron (male agent) as the father of the building, and the architect (female agent) as its mother. This generally known analogy, although has been frequently mentioned, was not taken as a clue that can pertain the essence of architectural production in the Renaissance patronage context. In this dissertation, I propose to contextualize his unprecedented proposal within the larger framework of the production agency of building in the early modern period, and how architecture as a profession is aimed to be defined within that.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Architecture and Design Research

Department dc:contributor.department

Architecture

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Terim, Berrin

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Emmons, Paul F.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Holt, Jaan
• Feuerstein, Marcia F.
• Kunze, Donald E.

• patronage
• anthropomorphism
• diesgno
• generation
• Architecture

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:30721

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/104118