Northern Italian Details (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Northern Italian Details "Northern Italian" is, to many of us, a sufficiently alluring adjective applied to almost anything, from architectural details to a specialized cuisine; but it was not wholly the title that first fixed my serious attention on the plates making up this volume. I have had the habit of looking through the current architectural periodicals and marking plates to be cut out for the office files. I have come to mark so very few that when I began by selecting the first of this series I remember thinking that I should probably stop there, but I ended by taking the entire series. Architecturally speaking, Northern Italy may be considered, for the present purposes, Lombardy, the Venetia, the Emelia, with the less important Liguria and Piedmont. The epoch of which these details give the savor is the epoch of the late full development that came to these northern towns after the first great group of architects and artists had developed and really finished their earlier works, which we principally identify with Rome. It was then that Sansovino, summoned by the King of France, stopped on his way at Venice, tempted by so honorable a "job" that he forgot the King permanently, and his work in Venice was of the epoch used in this book. It was a late epoch, of course, and not a primitive one; but even such full blown work as that of Palladio or Alessi must not be slighted by the purists. This epoch was one of careful study and dignity. The details were executed by more highly developed artisans than it was possible to find for the much earlier North Italian work, like the Temple at Rimini, where some of the charm is due to the naivete of the execution. These fully developed later details were often worked from finished architects drawings, such as we produce today, and so we now come to the reverse problem, three hundred years later, of how to get these fine details back into the hands and heads of our present architects and draughtsmen. The method used in this collection seems the direct and practical one - i.e., that of giving photographs and measured drawings of the same detail side by side. The photograph gives the sentiment and impression of the original detail, and the drawing gives the means of reproducing it exactly. I think for our architectural health just now in America an exact reproduction of a good detail is usually better, both for the architect and for the public, than a denatured or "improved" reproduction. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.