Perceptions of Architecture in Early Modern Europe (Durham, 5 November 2016)

UK Registration Deadline: Wednesday, 26 October 2016

Across discourses and media, early modern Europeans encountered advice about and models for interacting with the built environment around them. Architects scattered brief instructions for designing a viewer’s experience throughout their treatises, poets narrated imagined tours of house and estate, and artists who composed prints and paintings of buildings located viewers at particular vantage points. Simultaneously, philosophers and scientists debated human perception of the physical world at large – for example, explanation first by Aristotelian Scholastics and then mechanistic philosophers of how particle vibrations acted upon the human senses to create mental images of objects. Such architectural, philosophical, and scientific discussions had their echoes in self-reflective viewing of buildings by travellers who described in their journals the buildings that they visited. This conference investigates the terms, criteria and questions by which early modern viewers were expected to and/or did interact with the built spaces around them. In so doing, it merges independent yet overlapping strands of scholarly inquiry: for instance, architectural and cultural historians have examined uses of spaces and a patron’s rationale behind a design, while art historians who follow Michael Baxandall’s notion of the ‘period eye’ and literary historians who discuss the imagined tours of poets have analyzed concepts underpinning early modern viewing. These and other strands of inquiry are brought together by an international, interdisciplinary group of speakers examining case studies encompassing England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

For the programme and registration form, please see: https://earlymodernarchitecture.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/perceptions-of-architecture.pdf.