Kirjahaku

Pirro Ligorio (1510–1583), an Italian architect and antiquarian who designed the Casino of Pius IV and large portions of the gardens of the Villa d’Este, has long been a notoriously elusive subject because of his daunting erudition and because his notebooks and drawings are in collections scattered throughout the world. In this book David R. Coffin, one of America’s leading experts on Renaissance architecture and landscape architecture, mobilizes all available published and unpublished materials to offer the first comprehensive account of Ligorio’s life and multifaceted career. Coffin traces the unfolding of Ligorio’s life from his early years in Naples, to his work in Rome, where he served several popes and pored over Ancient ruins, through his residency in Ferrara as court antiquarian. In addition to illuminating Ligorio’s relationship to his patrons, Coffin sheds new light on Ligorio’s famed map of ancient Rome, a masterpiece that bears witness to Ligorio’s cartographic skills, his erudition, and his lifelong fascination with the eternal city. Copiously illustrated, Coffin’s biography includes a checklist of Ligorio’s drawings. It will be of interest to architectural historians, art historians, and all those involved with the study of Rome and of the classical heritage.

Magnificent Buildings, Splendid Gardens returns to print some of the most important works of David Coffin, a leading authority on Renaissance architecture who, as one of the first scholars to apply the tools of art history to the study of gardens, became a founder of the discipline of garden and landscape studies. These essays span the wide range of Coffin's work, from Italian Renaissance architecture, garden design, sculpture, and drawings to English gardens and landscape designers of the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. Coffin's approaches are as varied as his subject matter. Some of these essays present the results of his archival research, including his discovery of crucial documents on the Emilian architect Giovan Battista Aleotti and the only documentary evidence identifying Vignola as the architect of the Villa Lante at Bagnaia. Other essays take a much broader cultural view, investigating, for example, the phenomenon of public access to private Renaissance gardens, elucidating the evolving meaning of images of the goddess Venus in English gardens, and identifying the significance of the decorative programs of monuments as diverse as the Villa Belvedere in Rome and the eighteenth-century gardens at Rousham in Oxfordshire. The book also includes a commentary on each essay, written by one of Coffin's former students; a full analytical index; and a complete bibliography of Coffin's work.