26 What is Architectural History?
of critical philology late in the nineteenth century and on into
the twentieth. This manifestation of the elusive quest for a
pure knowledge of culture, combined with the growing
importance of the empirical foundations of archaeology as a
project of documenting the surviving past, set aside the pic-
tures of the ancient world brought alive in the pages of Livy,
for example, in order to record truthfully and accurately
the remnants of the world he described, which was now
underfoot.
From the time of Alberti and the renewed appreciation of
Roman antiquity for which he has come to stand, there had
been a strong tradition of measuring the extant buildings of
the ancient city in order to understand them better as models
for contemporary buildings.^22 The new dome of Santa Maria
del Fiore in Florence (1418–36) by Filippo Brunelleschi is a
famous tribute to the ancient dome of Rome’s Pantheon and
allegedly relied on his fi rst-hand studies of its structures in
the company of Donatello.^23 Architectural treatises regularly
presented measurements and scale drawings, advancing
through empirical means the task of reinforcing architectural
design with principles derived from ancient structures and
ruins. Measurement of the work of the past was therefore
one process in the refi nement of the proportional, formal
and semantic systems laid out in prose by Vitruvius and
Alberti.
Studying the past
The later distinctions between antiquarian, archaeologist and
architect are thus implicated in the studies of antiquity con-
ducted by Serlio, Palladio and Pirro Ligorio (c.1510–83).
Serlio’s Regole generali di architettura (1537) was the fi rst
book of a projected seven concerning the rules and principles
of architecture derived from measurements of ancient exam-
ples. His fi ve-volume Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospe-
tiva contained measured drawings and projected views of
ancient buildings and monuments (book III), as well as anti-
quities. Palladio similarly took the ancient architecture of
Rome to be the pinnacle of his art’s historical achievements
and searched out its lessons for his own work. The fourth