Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne (eds.)
Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local
Princeton University Press, 2016
This lavishly illustrated volume is the first major global history of ornament from the Middle Ages to today. Crossing historical and geographical boundaries in unprecedented ways and considering the role of ornament in both art and architecture, Histories of Ornament offers a nuanced examination that integrates medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and modern Euroamerican traditions with their Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican counterparts. At a time when ornament has re-emerged in architectural practice and is a topic of growing interest to art and architectural historians, the book reveals how the long history of ornament illuminates its global resurgence today
Alina Payne (ed.)
Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science and Technology in Early Modern Europe
Penn State Press; 2014
Alina Payne (ed.)
Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archeology and the Poetics of Influence
Brill; January 2014
Using the Braudelian concept of the Mediterranean this volume focuses on the condition of “coastal exchanges” involving the Dalmatian littoral and its Adriatic and more distant maritime network. Spalato and Ragusa intersect with Constantinople, Cairo and Spanish Naples just as Sinan, Palladio and Robert Adam cross paths in this liquid expanse. Concentrating on materiality and on the arts, architecture in particular, the authors identify portability and hybridity as characteristic of these exchanges, and tease out expected and unexpected serendipitous moments when they occurred. Focusing on translation and its instruments these essays expand the traditional concept of influence by thrusting mobility and the "hardware" of cultural transmission, its mechanisms, rather than its effects, into the foreground.
Alina Payne
The Telescope and the Compass: Teofilo Gallaccini and the Dialogue Between Architecture and Science in the Age of Galileo
Leo S. Olschki editore, 2012
Teofilo Gallaccini’s (1564-1641) oeuvre represents a nearly intact personal archive pertaining to the sciences, architecture and the arts, as well as history, anatomy and letters. The very amount and heterogeneity of the material provides a unique snapshot of how diverse areas of knowledge communicated at a significant moment of transition: between the Renaissance and the Baroque in the arts, or, from the perspective of the sciences, on the eve of the Scientific Revolution. Following these threads, this book examines Gallaccini’s thought against the panorama of contemporary events and issues with which he interacted closely: the astronomical discoveries and condemnation of Galileo in Counter-Reformation Rome; the growing interest in mechanics, motion and engineering; the rise of a Baroque sensibility in the arts; the deep-felt need of eloquent representation techniques across disciplines; and the culture of manuscripts and oral intellectual sociability in the age of the printed book. A “go-between” milieus and disciplines Gallaccini illuminates the nature of intellectual labor and its sites: the university, the academy, the princely court and the isolated haven of the private library.
Review by Marzia Caciolini, Lo Sguardo - rivista di filosofia, N. 10, 2012 (III).
Review by Claudia Conforti, Casabella 820, F. 4/4, P. 100-3, 12-2012.
Review by Andrew James Hopkins, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Fall 2013), pp. 998-1000.
Alina Payne
Teofilo Gallaccini: Selected Writings and Library
Leo S. Olschki editore, 2012
This volume offers a selection of inedited writings by the Sienese polymath Teofilo Gallaccini (1564-1641). Author of over forty manuscript works--literary, historical, artistic and architectural, scientific and medical--his oeuvre, located on the cusp between the Renaissance and Baroque or, seen from a different perspective, on the eve of the Scientific Revolution, has remained largely inaccessible in print. The inedited texts included in this volume were therefore selected to illustrate both the variety and interconnectedness of his thought: the Monade celeste, a text on astronomy and a splendid example of learning applied to a contemporary topic of great moment; his commentary on John Dee's Monas hieroglyphica; his drawn commentary on Sebastiano Serlio's Books III and IV; and finally a selection of his academic lectures covering the full range of topics that attracted him from geology to astronomy, mathematics to fortifications, art theory to architecture and that were delivered during the nearly five decades of his membership in the Accademia dei Filomati in Siena. The volume also contains the reconstruction of Gallaccini's library, his most cherished working “instrument”.