Architectural Posters of Italy

Italian Architecture: Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

These fifteen motifs range from an exceptionally well-preserved Roman bath complex to cathedrals, communal palaces, tower houses and the residences and images of the Renaissance. Precise architectural views appear beside comparative plates, townscapes and paintings, revealing how closely architecture in Italy was connected with political representation, religious life and new ideas about the city and landscape.

AP 553 · Architectural History in Comparison

Architettura Italiana arranges selected masterpieces from Roman antiquity to the late eighteenth century as comparative elevations. Their scale, proportions and characteristic silhouettes can thus be studied side by side. AP 553 shows how ancient orders, domes, façades and centrally planned buildings were adopted and reinterpreted in later centuries.

AP 525 · The Suburban Baths at Herculaneum

The Suburban Baths stood outside the city walls between ancient Herculaneum and its former shoreline. Their original core dates from the Augustan age; the complex was enlarged after the earthquake of AD 62 and buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. Its three levels combined an exercise terrace with bathing rooms and water and heating systems. AP 525 presents the remarkably complete interior of one of the best-preserved Roman bath buildings.

AP 358 and AP 328 · Pisa Cathedral and Campanile

Pisa Cathedral was founded in 1064 and consecrated in 1118. Begun by Buscheto and enlarged under Rainaldo, its façade of pale and dark stone was completed in the last quarter of the twelfth century. The detached campanile was begun in the 1170s. Soft ground caused it to lean during its long construction and ultimately made it the most famous element of the Piazza dei Miracoli. AP 328 focuses on the cathedral façade’s tiers of blind arcading, while AP 358 isolates the bell tower’s open colonnades and unmistakable inclination.

AP 329, AP 360 and AP 359 · Sacred Architecture and Civic Power

The façade of Orvieto Cathedral was begun under Lorenzo Maitani around 1310 and reached architectural completion in 1532. Reliefs, sculpture, gilded bronzes and gold-ground mosaics make AP 329 a study in Gothic architecture as image. The Certosa di Pavia, commissioned by Gian Galeazzo Visconti from 1396 as a monastery and dynastic mausoleum, combines a Late Gothic structure with Lombard Renaissance reliefs, marble inlay and statues (AP 360). AP 359 provides a civic counterpart: Perugia’s Palazzo dei Priori was built in successive phases from 1293. Its triple windows and great Gothic portal still embody the self-government of the medieval commune.

AP 715 and AP 714 · Urbino and San Gimignano

Federico da Montefeltro radically renewed Urbino in the mid-fifteenth century. Shaped principally by Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini, his Palazzo Ducale incorporated earlier medieval buildings into a residence that joined court, government and humanist culture as a “city within a city”; AP 715 shows its representative façade. AP 714 instead explores San Gimignano’s vertical skyline. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century, powerful families along the Via Francigena built perhaps 72 tower houses as emblems of wealth and power. Fourteen survive, preserving the unusually coherent character of the medieval hill town.

AP 515, AP 531, AP 312 and AP 529 · The Ideal City and the Court of Urbino

AP 515 brings together three related late-fifteenth-century images of ideal cities now preserved in Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin; their authorship remains disputed. Central perspective, regular squares and architecture inspired by antiquity imagine the city as a harmoniously ordered space. AP 531 and the smaller AP 312 isolate the celebrated Urbino panel. AP 529 complements this architectural vision with courtly self-representation: the motif shows Federico’s triumphal chariot from the reverse of Piero della Francesca’s double portrait, painted around 1473–75. Personified virtues and a Latin inscription place the duke’s rule within a humanist framework.

AP 513, AP 217 and AP 218 · Giusto Utens and the Medici Villas

The Flemish painter Giusto Utens created fourteen lunettes depicting Tuscan Medici villas for Grand Duke Ferdinando I. Their elevated viewpoints encompass buildings, gardens, roads and cultivated land as coherent ensembles. AP 513 surveys the series; AP 217 singles out the Palazzo Pitti with the Boboli Gardens and Forte di Belvedere, while AP 218 presents Villa La Petraia. The paintings are both architectural portraits and records of a residential culture in which garden design, landscape and princely representation were inseparable.