Dominion of the Eye Urbanism, Art, and Power in Early Modern Florence

Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art and Power in Early Modern Florence radically revises our ideas about the origins of rationally planned public space in the European city. Through a spatial and historical analysis of the major squares of Florence, all built in the Trecento, together with primary civic monuments, Marvin Trachtenberg shows that, contrary to current belief, Florentine planners engaged in a theoretically sophisticated mode of practice. In these squares, geometrically structured perspectival views of the principal monuments were established long before Alberti and other Renaissance theorists may have promoted such planning. Trachtenberg demonstrates that this urbanistic scenography, deeply informed by medieval optical science, was closely allied with perspectival developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture, forming a unified visual culture that was highly attentive to the eye of the spectator. An analysis of the critical role of the piazza in the Florentine sociopolitical field reveals how the art of the piazza was part of state practice as a work of art. Including more than 50 new drawings and 200 illustrations, Dominion of the Eye challenges many of the cardinal truisms in the art history of the Renaissance, offering a new model for understanding the art of Italy in the early modern era.

Preface; Part I. History and Theory: 1. Florence brought to historical account; 2. Toward the Trecento Florentine piazza: problematics; Part II. From Theory to Practice: 3. The Piazza del Duomo; 4. The Piazza della Signoria; Part III. Framing Urbanistic Discourse: Space, Subject and Vision in Trecento Theory and the Arts: 5. Spatial theory; 6. The spatial order of Florentine streets, monumental architecture, and the new towns; 7. Trecento pictorial perspective reconsidered; 8. Perspective in Trecento sculpture and architectural detail; 9. The Trecento fusion of the arts; 10. The architecture of painting and the multimedia tableau; 11. The role of optical and surveying theory; Part IV. On The Politics of Urbanistic Order: 12. The political logic of demolition; 13. Spatial form and political authority; 14. The symbolic power of scopic order; 15. Florentine Trecento urbanism as institutional and ideological praxis II; 16. The Florentine urbanistic 'style' as bourgeois instrumentalism; 17. Resistance and Renaissance: an afterword.

Marvin Trachtenberg is Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Art, New York University. A recipient of fellowships from the Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Villa I Tatti, he is the author of The Campanile of Florence Cathedral,'Giotto's Tower', and coauthor of Architecture from Prehistory to Postmodernism.