92 What is Architectural History?
might have occurred in between. These intermediate phases
between one moment of relative analytical security and the
next are the rightful domain of interpretation. As Ginzburg
later observes in his 1991 polemical judicial history Il giudice
e lo storico, ‘A historian has the right to detect a problem
where a judge might fi nd an “absence of grounds for
proceedings”.’^13
Architecture as historical evidence
These three brief examples attend to the way that evidence
operates within some of the more central problems of archi-
tectural history: processes and circumstances of design, dating
and attribution of works, infl uences and references invoked
by the architect, and so forth. It is possible for architectural
historians to treat the world of architecture hermetically, as
presenting a set of self-contained problems and motivations.
Architecture, of course, is also present in a world that pays
little heed to its internal concerns. In this light, architectural
works of all kinds can themselves become evidence for his-
torical problems that are not architectural, posed by intel-
lectual history, social history, population history, cultural
history, institutional history, military history, history of reli-
gion, history of science, political history, national and area
histories and so forth, not to mention art history, the history
of technology and construction, or urban history – all of
which come close to the way that the history of architecture
attends to architectural subjects.
Consider how anthropomorphism and the divinity of the
measurements derived from the ideal human body (made in
God’s image) diminished in Italian architecture of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries following its instigation in
the fi fteenth century as part of a Christianized re-appraisal
of antiquity. As much as the problems facing architects
(then) and thus architectural historians (today) are particular
to the fi elds of architecture and art, the architectural works
of this era nonetheless shed light on the intellectual processes
of the religious, cultural and political crises experienced
by the once-totalizing Christian church in view of the
Reformation.