NEW BOOK
The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science:
Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation

The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation explores the rise of architecture as a vehicle for scientific discourse. I chart that phenomenon across the work of artists, architects, and scientists in northern Europe and the Viceroyalty of Peru between the eras of Dürer and Rubens, anchoring its pivotal moment in the 1593-8 Architectura treatise of Strasbourg artist Wendel Dietterlin (c. 1550-1599).

I argue that Dietterlin and his peers revived the Vitruvian concept of architecture as both art and science by bringing artistic and scientific techniques of visual research such as nature study and perspectival representation to architectural practice through a new genre: architectural images. I further show that the rise of architectural images rendered architecture a hotbed of empiricism, or the idea that knowledge derives from sensory experience, and thus made architecture indispensable to the emergence of empirical science in modernity. The book traces those developments from northern Europe to viceregal Peru, where it examines how Inca and Ychsma architectural sculptors contested Dietterlin’s ideas about form and matter by asserting their own architectural ontologies.

The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science establishes that the new, empirical imagery of architecture in Dietterlin’s world shaped the image-making practices of early modern architects and scientists in Europe and colonial Latin America, and that this rapport proved instrumental to the global emergence of architecture and science as the mutually imbricated arts we know today.

The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Princeton University Institute for International and Regional Studies.

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Praise for The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: ​

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“In this immensely learned and beautifully illustrated book, Elizabeth J. Petcu reveals the vast ambitions and stunning virtuosity of Wendel Dietterlin’s architectural images. Petcu illuminates the protean nature of Dietterlin’s work as he strove to realize for architecture the prestige and potential of artistic and natural philosophical inquiry. Working in the creative hothouse of Strasbourg with its unfettered experimentation by artisans and printers, Dietterlin raised architectural image-making to new epistemic status. The book is also a demonstration of Petcu’s own virtuosity and the remarkable versatility of her scholarship – crossing languages, fields, and vast realms of scholarship with ease. Like its protagonist, her book is endlessly inventive.”

-Pamela H. Smith, Seth Low Professor of History, Columbia University

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“This important and elegant book transforms our understanding of the relationship between architectural culture and empirical science. Through Petcu’s exacting scholarship, Dietterlin’s corpus has been revealed as a crucible of fertile invention, where design, observation, and fantasy meet. With its remarkable disciplinary and geographical breadth, transporting the reader from Vitruvian architects in Northern Europe to Inca sculptors of colonial Latin America, it should be essential reading for scholars of early modern art and science.”
-Alexander Marr FSA, Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art, University of Cambridge