Drawing as a Way of Knowing

About this book

"Drawing as a Way of Knowing: Architectural Survey in the Late Renaissance" explores a group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural manuscripts that are each part of a network of copies. Made by French and Italian draftsmen studying ancient and modern Roman monuments from the 1560s to the 1640s, the drawings contain information about the buildings--which include the Pantheon and Saint Peter's--that is not known from any other sources. Yet the information that the drawings preserve is only part of their value: the drawings also show how that information was recorded, transferred, and valued by other draftsmen. With a special focus on chronological complications, "Drawing as a Way of Knowing" examines the singularities that are produced when draftsmen try to repeat pictorial statements exactly. These chronological complications include the representation of elements that no longer exist, that never existed, or that collapse several distinct chronological moments into a single image. All these complications can be found in the network of drawings now found in the Goldschmidt and Scholz Scrapbooks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ms XII. D. 74 in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, the Cronstedt Collection of the Stockholm Nationalmuseum, the album known as Architectura Civile in the Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo at Windsor Castle, codex Destailleur D at the Berlin Kunstbibliothek, the Album François Derand at the Louvre, and Ms B 2. 3 at the Worcester College Library at Oxford. This dissertation examines this web of manuscripts to consider how drawing was used as a way of knowing after the invention of print.