Under the direction, of what was then known as the School of Architecture, Joseph F. Morbito established an opportunity for the students in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design, to study in Florence.
The Kent State forum on the city : Madrid 2012 by 
Florence: a Portrait by
Nestled in the Apennines, cradle of the Renaissance, home of Dante, Michelangelo, and the Medici, Florence is unlike any other city in its extraordinary mingling of great art and literature, natural splendor, and remarkable history. Intimate and grand, learned and engaging, Michael Levey's Florence renders the city in all of its madness and magnificence.
Art and Architecture Florence by
Travel Guide and Art Guide in one. Each volume of the Art & Architecture series is opulently illustrated.
Florence: the City and its Architecture by
A historical account of the pivotal centre of Renaissance architecture.
Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century by
In this book, which was originally published in 2005, Amanda Lillie challenges the urban bias in Renaissance art and architectural history by investigating the architecture and patronage strategies, particularly those of the Strozzi and the Sassetti clans, in the Florentine countryside during the fifteenth century. Based entirely on archival material that remained unpublished at the time of publication, her book examines a number of villas from this period and reconstructs the value systems that emerge from these sources, which defy the traditional, idealized interpretation of the 'renaissance villa'. Here, the house is studied in relation to the families who lived in them and to the land that surrounded them. The villa emerges as a functional, utilitarian farming unit upon whose success families depended, and where dynastic and patrimonial values could be nurtured.
The Art of Florence by
Since the radiant years of the Renaissance, the city of Florence has come to represent the greatest triumph of the Western cultural tradition. Here, hundreds of the most splendidly talented artists in history lived and worked, and collaborated in the creation of the great urban museum we know as Florence. The Art of Florence analyzes the history of Florentine art in terms of the distinctly Florentine and Tuscan influences that shaped it, linking the city's architecture, sculpture, and painting to the rich social fabric and the dramatic political life of the city. Woven into this history is a visual documentation of Florence's treasures.
The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance : How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Changed the Art World by
The lively and intriguing tale of the competition between two artists, culminating in the construction of the Duomo in Florence, this is also the story of a city on the verge of greatness, and the dawn of the Renaissance, when everything artistic would change. Florence's Duomo: the dome of the Santa Maria del Diore cathedral is one of the most enduring symbols of the Italian Renaissance, an equal in influence and fame to Leonardo and Michaelangelo's works. It was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, the temperamental architect who rediscovered the techniques of mathematical perspective. He was the dome's inventor, those secret methods for building remain a mystery as compelling to architects as Fermat's Last Theorem once was to mathematicians. Yet Brunelleschi didn't direct the construction of the dome alone. He was forced to share the commission with his archrival, the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, whose Paradise Doors are also masterworks. This is the story of these two men, a tale of artistic genius and individual triumph.
The Renaissance in Florence : the birth of a new art by 
Brunelleschi's Dome : How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by
Anyone alive in Florence on August 19, 1418, would have understood the significance of the competition announced that day concerning the city's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, already under construction for more than a century. "Whoever desires to make any model or design for the vaulting of the main Dome...shall do so before the end of the month of September." The proposed dome was regarded far and wide as all but impossible to build: not only would it be enormous, but its original and sacrosanct design eschewed (shunned) the flying buttresses that supported cathedrals all over Europe. The dome would literally need to be erected over thin air. Of the many plans submitted, one stood out--a daring and unorthodox solution to vaulting what is still the largest dome (143 feet in diameter) in the world. It was offered not by a master mason or carpenter, but by a goldsmith and clock maker named Filippo Brunelleschi, then 41, who would dedicate the next 28 years to solving the puzzles of the dome's construction. In the process, he did nothing less than reinvent the field of architecture. Brunelleschi's Dome is the story of how a Renaissance genius bent men, materials, and the very forces of nature to build an architectural wonder we continue to marvel at today. Denounced at first as a madman, Brunelleschi was celebrated at the end as a genius. He engineered the perfect placement of brick and stone, built ingenious hoists and cranes (some among the most renowned machines of the Renaissance) to carry an estimated 70 million pounds hundreds of feet into the air, and designed the workers' platforms and routines so carefully that only one man died during the decades of construction--all the while defying those who said the dome would surely collapse and personal obstacles that at times threatened to overwhelm him. This drama was played out amidst plagues, wars, political feuds, and the intellectual ferments of Renaissance Florence--events Ross King weaves into the story to great effect, from Brunelleschi's bitter, ongoing rivalry with the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti to the near capture of Florence by the Duke of Milan. King also offers a wealth of fascinating detail that opens windows onto fifteenth-century life: the celebrated traditions of the brickmaker's art, the daily routine of the artisans laboring hundreds of feet above the ground as the dome grew ever higher, the problems of transportation, the power of the guilds. Even today, in an age of soaring skyscrapers, the cathedral dome of Santa Maria del Fiore retains a rare power to astonish. In telling the story of the greatest engineering puzzle of the Renaissance and one of the world's architectural marvels, Ross King brings its creation to life in a fifteenth-century chronicle with twenty-first-century resonance.
The Building of Renaissance Florence by
Awarded the Howard R. Marraro Prize by the American Historical Association "Always fascinating... The reader will get from Goldthwaite's book on the economics of architecture a more lively and more authentic impression of life in Renaissance Florence than from many more general descriptions of Florentine culture." -- Felix Gilbert, New York Review of Books.
Florence: A Map of Perceptions by
Many years have passed since architect Andrea Ponsi settled in Florence, and still he feels he does not fully comprehend this mysterious city. The way Florence eludes understanding, however, can be an opportunity--to keep seeking, to keep exploring. Ponsi's Florence is endlessly suggestive. His tour of the city is one of continually shifting light and perspective, of stunning symmetry and an even more compelling asymmetry, of sudden transitions from bustling streets to the most perfect silence. While Ponsi does consider such celebrated sites as the Piazza Santa Croce, the Ponte Vecchio, and the Duomo, the book is a decidedly personal view of Florence. The author notes the city's recurring geometry--the square courtyards, triangular spires, octagonal plaques and pillars--and marvels at a room almost too big to be called a room. He views the city from various terraces and likens the expanse of rising and falling rooftops to ocean waves.Here is Florence as labyrinth, possessing a medieval density that is relieved only by the sudden views of sky framed by its piazzas. Ponsi shows us a six-street intersection and ponders the abundance of acute angles, both indoors and out, in this city of infinite corners. In Florence, humans and buildings commingle. The author equates haircuts and changes of clothes with fresh coats of paint and re-shingling jobs, and contemplates the way a human hand, feeling its way down a city block, adds to the patina of a stucco wall. Ponsi sees the city itself as a living body, through whose veins its inhabitants course. This is the way we dream an architect could speak to us, fully communicating his passion. The book's elegant, concise prose--as well as its balance of the civic with the intensely personal--recalls the Calvino of Marcovaldo and Invisible Cities. The text is accompanied by Ponsi's own spare but evocative watercolors and sketches, which, like his words, seek to behold rather than pin down. This lyrical tribute is as much an ode to the lost art of contemplation as it is to Florence--a city where every moment is different from every other moment.
The Stones of Florence by
This is a unique tribute to Florence, combining history, artistic description, and social observation. A memorable portrait of the Florentine spirit and of those figures who exemplify this spirit, such as Dante, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Machiavelli.
Michelangelo at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur by
This book amends a common misconception about one of the greatest Renaissance masters, who has been characterized since his own day as incapable of effective collaboration. This study focuses on San Lorenzo, a key Florentine monument of the Renaissance, where Michelangelo's contributions to the church are among his greatest achievements as a sculptor and architect. Organised around his three commissions at San Lorenzo - the never-realised facade for the church, the Medici chapel and the Laurentian Library - each chapter examines the organisation and day-to-day operations at the building site, as well as the artist's personal and professional relations with nearly three hundred persons who assisted him in carrying out the designs. From the marble quarries at Seravezza to the building site in Florence, William Wallace relates Michelangelo's struggles and triumphs as he worked on these projects for over two decades.
Filippo Brunelleschi: The Buildings by
Filippo Brunelleschi's few but seminal buildings have stood as touchstones of a "return to Antiquity" in the Florentine era since his own day. Their quiet balance and perfection have fascinated and delighted generations of architecture students. Howard Saalman offers here a definitive modern study of Brunelleschi's buildings, based on detailed archaeological investigation of the monuments and new exhaustive research in the Florentine archives. Saalman reassesses Brunelleschi's architectural work in the context of the political, economic, and religious environment of early fifteenth-century Florence. He reexamines Brunelleschi's personal style of designing details and of managing the quantity and disposition of light in his metrically and geometrically proportioned spaces. Saalman devotes much attention to the role of Brunelleschi's leading patrons, the Barbadori in their chapel in Santa Felicita, Cosimo de'Medici at San Lorenzo, Andrea Pazzi at the chapter house of the Pazzi in the convent of Santa Croce, and the Scolari at the Angeli rotunda. The picture of Brunelleschi that emerges confirms earlier views of him as a traditionalist with a new language. But readers will find here a new dimension of historical precision and clarity in the definition of this much studied architect. Clear lines of demarcation are drawn between the work of Brunelleschi and that of his major contemporaries such as Michelozzo di Bartolomeo and, in particular, Leon Battista Alberti. Saalman gives a significantly new view of Brunelleschi, seeing him less as a revolutionary innovator than as a model of the self-trained professional brought up in the aesthetic and pragmatic traditions of late Trecento Florence and an artist-engineer-architect in the service of a dynamic evolving political organism outgrowing the trappings of a medieval commune as it competed with other regional powers of its time.
Architecture and the Sites of History by
Twenty-eight brief, accessible essays, each by a different scholar or practitioner in the field of architecture, shed light on a variety of subjects, from Greek and Roman architecture to the Industrial Revolution, the modern city, and contemporary theory and technology.
Timeless Cities: An Architect's Reflections on Renaissance Italy by
For Italian city builders over the course of a thousand years, the urban realm was the great theater where their best aspirations were played out, the place where society said the most substantial things about who they were and what they longed for. In Timeless Cities , architect David Mayernik reveals how Venice, Rome, Florence, Siena, and Pienza emerged from the cultural ideas of humanism that characterized Italian society from late antiquity to the eighteenth century. Cities were literally designed to be models of the mind and images of heaven. Mayernik takes the reader on an architect's tour of these five cities and describes the cultural beliefs and ideas behind the buildings. Not only a journey into the past, Timeless Cities also explains why these city-building ideas are relevant today. Whether travelling on holiday or appreciating the art and architecture of Italy from home, Mayernik helps bring the wonder and beauty of the Italian mind and its great cities a little closer.
Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance by
A lucid biographical study of a key figure of European culture Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) was one of the most original, creative, and exciting figures of the Italian Renaissance. He wrote the first modern treatise on painting, the first modern manual of classical architecture, and a powerful set of "dialogues" about the princely families that dominated his home city of Florence. He rediscovered the forgotten aesthetics of classical architecture and described, in incomparably vivid terms, the artistic revolution in Florence that began what we now call the Renaissance. But Alberti was more than a mere chronicler - he practiced what he preached. He made spectacular advances in the art of painting and in engineering, and as an architect he was responsible for some of the most exciting buildings in Italy. Yet in spite of his central importance, work on Alberti has for the most part been confined to scholarly monographs. Here, one of our greatest Renaissance scholars offers the general book that Alberti has so long deserved. This is a compellingportrait of a mysterious, original, and highly unusual intellectual, and a colorful tableau of the cities and courts in which he lived and worked.
Andrea Palladio, 1508-1580 : Architect Between the Renaissance and Baroque by
No other architect in the history of Western art has had an influence so spontaneous and yet so enduring as Andrea Palladio. Palladianism broke through all cultural stylistic barriers. It spread not only throughout the Neo-Latin nations but held Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the countries of Eastern Europe in its sway and formed the lineaments of English architecture of the 17th and 18th centuries. Palladio lived in an age which was extremely exciting for the historical development of architecture and his work was an important factor in the evolution from Renaissance to Baroque. This volume offers a thorough
An Architectural Progress in the Renaissance and Baroque by
This is a study of architectural progress in the Renaissance and Baroque sojourns in and out of Italy.
Formal Design in Renaissance Architecture by 
Italian Architecture : From Michelangelo to Borromini by
The years from 1520 to 1630 were crucial in the development of Western architecture, but to label as Mannerist the transition from Michelangelo's "licentious" New Sacristy in Florence to Borromini's innovative S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane is coming to seem unduly simplistic. In this carefully researched and original study, Andrew Hopkins examines the century's changing functional demands, the political forces, the patronage system, and local traditions. Exploring a wide range of Italian buildings (including those outside the major urban centers), he introduces us to dozens of neglected architects whose works will come as a revelation. By 1630, architecture had taken on a new dynamism that would soon conquer Italy, Europe, and the New World: the baroque.
The Italian Renaissance Palace Facade by
The architectural facade -- a crucial and ubiquitous element of traditional cityscapes -- addresses and enhances the space of the city, while displaying or dissembling interior arrangements. Burroughs traces the development of the Italian Renaissance palace facade as a cultural, architectural and spatial phenomenon, and as a new way of setting a limit to and defining a private sphere. He draws on literary evidence and analyses of significant Renaissance buildings, noting the paucity of explicit discussion of the theme in an era of extensive architectural publishing.
Italian Villas and Gardens by 
Genoa Lab : Proceedings of the International Symposium : Kent State University Florence by 
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