770 deborah howard
to the modern aesthetic. Pietro still lacks a full architectural monograph,
although his son Tullio has benefited from the fruits of recent scholarship,
mainly devoted to his sculpture.90
The careers of Sansovino, Sanmicheli, and Palladio, preserved for pos-
terity in the published biographies of Vasari and later Temanza, have
long attracted monographic study.91 Both Vasari and Francesco Sansovino
devoted long passages to praising the technical achievements of Jacopo
Sansovino—just as Vasari had praised the Medici architect Michelozzo’s
triumphant restoration of the foundations of a Venetian palace while the
family slept undisturbed upstairs—as if to underline the supremacy of the
Tuscan tradition.92 During the second half of the 20th century, the study
of Palladio achieved a unique prominence: it is said that he has attracted
more publications than any other architect except Frank Lloyd Wright.93
The study of Palladio’s architecture, raised to a new academic level by the
four richly documented volumes by Giangiorgio Zorzi in 1959–69, benefits
in particular from the survival of a remarkable corpus of architectural draw-
ings, most of them now in England, especially the major collection held by
90 Anna Pizzati and Matteo Ceriana, eds., Tullio Lombardo: Documenti e testimonianze
(Verona, 2008); Alison Luchs, et al., Tullio Lombardo and Venetian High Renaissance
Sculpture, exh. cat. (New Haven/London, 2009). See the fundamental study of Pietro
Lombardo’s life and career by Matteo Ceriana, ‘Lombardo, Pietro’, in Dizionario biografico
degli italiani, 65 (Rome, 2009), available on-line as http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/
pietro-lombardo_(Dizionario-Biografico)/; and also Deborah Howard, “Space, Light and
Ornament in Venetian Architecture: Pietro Lombardo Reconsidered,” in Blake de Maria
and Mary Frank, eds., Reflections on Renaissance Venice; A Celebration of Patricia Fortini
Brown (Milan, 2013), pp. 94–103.
91 Because the attribution of buildings according to stylistic criteria is more difficult
than that of painting and sculpture, relatively few monographs on architects emerged
from the golden age of connoisseurship in the mid-20th century. The large square-format
volumes on published by Marsilio in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought the first modern
architectural monographs on Jacopo Sansovino by Manfredo Tafuri (Padua, 1969) and
Michele Sanmicheli (Padua, 1971) by Lionello Puppi. These volumes drew together existing
knowledge, analyzing the architecture within a framework of Marxist criticism. Excited
by the new possibilities of the telephoto lens, their photographers gave new prominence
to unfamiliar details, but also created some deceptive foreshortening effects. Meanwhile
the comprehensive researches of Giangiorgio Zorzi led to the publication by Neri Pozza
in Vicenza of four richly documented volumes on Andrea Palladio’s work in Venice and
the Veneto. See below, note 94. The fruits of recent decades of documentary research have
been synthesized in the new series of architectural monographs published by Electa.
92 Vasari, Le vite, 2:434–35, 7:505; Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima, fol. 144r.
These texts are analyzed in Deborah Howard, “Renovation and Innovation in Venetian
Architecture,” Scroope: Cambridge Architecture Journal 6 (1994), 66–74.
93 Deborah Howard, “Four Centuries of Literature on Palladio,” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 39 (1980), 224–41.