Raphael the architect: a key role in the architectural culture of Rome in the early 1500s.
[Raphael architect]. The architectural work of Raphael is still substantially overlooked, and often considered much less important than his painting.
This volume, in its fourth edition in 2002, with new packaging, offers a complete, updated overview of this subject, restoring it to its place in contemporary cultural awareness, while shedding light on the extreme complexity of the figure of the artist. Many new aspects have emerged from study of the history of the design of St. Peter’s and Villa Madama, or the chronological progress of the work on Palazzo Branconio.
The architecture of Raphael is re-examined from different but complementary viewpoints: in its development, its relations with the cultural context and its own status as “culture”, and against the background of the urban condition, the strategies of power and the ideological implications of papal Rome. Reflection on Raphael the architect also, and perhaps above all, means reconsidering a crucial moment of the history of Renaissance architecture.