52 What is Architectural History?
open a door on the question of the extent to which architec-
ture’s internal artistic forces balance those that shape it from
the outside. Conceptually, style and period have some fun-
damental differences, but as categories that allow the archi-
tectural historian to begin arranging the drawings, buildings
and ruins of the past they share an abstract approach to
historical time based on variable unities within defi nable
parameters. This returns us to Gay’s defi nition of style and
the problem it has posed for historians of architecture. If style
is, indeed, the pattern in the carpet, the markings on the
wings of the butterfl y, and the gesture of the witness in a
court case, then the problem this leaves the historian of
architecture is how to account for the origins of these
patterns, marks and gestures. When they occur within the
history of architecture, are they architectural in nature, or
historical?
Biography
As we saw in the fi rst chapter of this book, the tradition of
writing biographical portraits of artists, including some
fi gures we now identify as architects, offered one important
model for an academic architectural history as it emerged at
the end of the nineteenth century. This tradition indexed
examples like Antonio di Tuccio Manetti’s biography (c.1480)
of Brunelleschi and Vasari’s sixteenth-century Vite.^27 It
equated architectural history with the history of architects.
However far contemporary architectural histories concerned
with the architect might have moved from Vasari’s mode of
writing history, they still owe to him the fundamental divi-
sion of time according to lifespan, its trajectory and works,
and its repercussions and relations with other biographical
entities. The life-and-works genre of architectural history is
a persistent way of accounting for the contributions of the
individual to history.
We could spend a great deal of time on its mechanisms
alone. The observations that follow, however, also pertain
to a biographical organization of architectural history con-
cerned with corporate entities and the activities of patrons,