Rowe's Renaissance: Italian architecture of the 16th century - Reviews - Italian Architecture of the 16th Century Italian Architecture of the 16th Century - Book Review

Architectural Review, The, August, 2003 by David Watkin

ITALIAN ARCHITECTURE OF THE 16TH CENTURY

By Colin Rowe and Leon Satkowski, New York: Princeton Architectural Press. 2002. [pounds sterling]24.95

Colin Rowe (1920-1999) may be best known to readers of The Architectural Review for The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, first published in this journal in 1947, in which he compared Palladio's Villa Malcontenta with Corbusier's Villa Stein at Garches. He sought to make international modern architecture acceptable by investing it with a historical legitimacy, rather as Pevsner claimed Voysey as a precursor of the Bauhaus. But Rowe came to regret his support of Modernism so that the present book is prefaced by his confession in 1998 that he found looking at Renaissance buildings 'gratifying and refreshing as the spectacle of Modern Architecture becomes more depressing'.

Studying at the Warburg Institute, Rowe was influenced by Wittkower and especially by Gombrich from whom he derived his hostility to the Zeitgeist interpretations and historical determinism of critics such as Pevsner. He thus aimed to 'avoid terms like Renaissance or Mannerism because they obscure the stylistic diversity of sixteenth-century architecture'. Regarding technique and tradition as important as style, he argued that it was 'all too easy to accept the kind of inevitable stylistic development that was first postulated by Vasari and continued by the architectural historians of the twentieth century'.

This book is based on his 28 year tenure at Cornell University where his courses on Renaissance architecture became legendary. I recall attending his compellingly subversive lectures at the Cambridge School of Architecture in the 1960s where, in his mannered, hissing voice, he described Michelangelo's Laurentian Library vestibule as boasting 'a staircase which impedes assent'. Unfortunately, there is no description of this in the present book but it does include his surprising interpretation of Raphael's Villa Madama as a folly like Strawberry Hill or Fonthill. His argument that, with its 'origins in literature and archaeology, it seems to anticipate the eighteenth-century revival of styles based on historical sentiment', well gives the flavour of this stimulating book.