Architecture and the Language Debate: Artistic and Linguistic Exchanges in Early Modern Italy

This book examines the creative exchanges between architects, artists and intellectuals, from the Early Renaissance to the beginning of the Enlightenment, in the forging of relationships between architecture and emerging concepts of language in early modern Italy. The study extends across the spectrum of linguistic disputes during this time - among members of the clergy, humanists, philosophers and polymaths - on issues of grammar, rhetoric, philology, etymology and epigraphy, and how these disputes paralleled and informed important developments in architectural thinking and practice. Drawing upon a wealth of primary source material, such as humanist tracts, philosophical works, architectural/antiquarian treatises, epigraphic/philological studies, religious sermons and grammaticae, the book traces key periods when the emerging field of linguistics in early modern Italy impacted on the theory, design and symbolism of buildings.

Nicholas Temple is an architect, Professor of Architecture and Director of the Centre for Urban Design, Architecture and Sustainability (CUDAS) at the University of Huddersfield. A graduate of the University of Cambridge, he previously served as head of the School of Architecture at the University of Lincoln and was an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Temple was a Rome Scholar in Architecture at the British School at Rome, a Paul Mellon Rome Fellow and Bogliasco Fellow and has collaborated on research projects on the history and theory of architecture and urbanism in Europe and China. His most recent research is a British Academy funded project with Professor Cecilia Panti on Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Third Commentary. He was shortlisted for the International CICA Bruno Zevi Book Award in 2014 for his book Renovatio Urbis: Architecture, Urbanism and Ceremony in the Rome of Julius II (Routledge, 2011), and is chief editor of the Routledge Research in Architectural History series and co-editor of the Journal of Architecture.