A bridge between Italian Renaissance and French architecture: a theorist who put his ideas into practice.
[Sebastiano Serlio architect] Sebastiano Serlio, who began working in the field of architecture only late in life, in France, is known above all as a theorist, and this has had a negative effect on any critical approach to his work.
The aim of this volume is to retrace the artist’s evolution as a whole and in relation to his time, starting with research on the singular chateau of Ancy-le-Franc, where two fundamental components of his formal language are already evident: his Italian classicist background and the influence of French decorativism.
This approach reconstructs the specifics and the overall progress of Serlio, whose activity as an architecture is more wide-ranging than is generally believed.
The analysis of the buildings and projects is integrated with continuous references to the treatise, concentrating on the constant interchange between theory and practice. A chapter on Serlio’s life outlines his personality, freeing his figure from preconceived notions.