Renaissance Architectural Drawing in the Expanded Field

Modern scholarship on Renaissance drawing has focused overwhelmingly on works on paper. This ‘medium specific’ conception of draftsmanship, however, overlooks the reality that designs for early modern buildings and other artworks were executed in a vast range of media, contexts, and dimensions. Architectural drawings were regularly incised or traced in full scale with chalk on walls and floors. Ground plans and elevations were composed, often directly on the construction site, out of rope and string. Renaissance writings abounded with stories of young artists who doodled on the ground and on rock faces, or who invented new imagery by gazing at the veins of marble revetment and the splotches on dirt-stained walls. This lecture explores the symbolic and experiential implications of this expanded understanding of graphic creation.