Between the eras of Dürer and Rubens, artists, architects, and scientists in northern Europe collaborated to revive the Vitruvian concept of architecture as both art and science. They did so by creating images of architecture in drawing, painting, print, and sculpture that brought techniques of visual research to architectural practice—a phenomenon epitomized in Wendel Dietterlin’s 1593–98 Architectura treatise. In this talk—celebrating the publication of her new book, The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation (Cambridge, 2024)—Elizabeth Petcu argues that such architectural images created a hotbed of empiricism and rendered the medium indispensable to the advent of modern, empirical science. She sketches a new method for investigating the roles of architectural images in the entwined histories of early modern art, architecture, and science.

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Elizabeth J. Petcu is a senior lecturer in architectural history at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching examine the intersections of visual and scientific inquiry in the art and architectural culture of the early modern world.