Easter 2024
by Sheena McKeever (MPhil, History of Art)
“Diagnosing Difference” visually re-examines how artists and architects have utilized medical analogies to ‘treat’ the ‘ill’ building. Scholarship tends to explore ‘non-normative’ states as static, completed conditions. This display, rather, showcases the active processes of diagnosing and treating anomaly.
The exhibition offers a range of secondary sources that feature the repair and augmentation of ‘defective’ or ‘unnatural’ spaces. Modern and pre-modern histories demonstrate keen interest in how ‘strange’ conditions were affected by methods of artistic intervention. The books on display shed light on the history of treating anomalous symptoms as objective sites for restoration. Architects throughout history have contributed to the fluid relationship between prescribing and curing buildings.
The state of ‘anomaly’ is a locus for debate between truth and falsehood that rewards consideration through its many facets of media. This display invites discourse about ‘unnatural’ buildings to provoke a broader reflection on the interrelationship between cultural representations and their medicalized undertones.
Sheena McKeever is a History of Art MPhil at the University of Cambridge, specializing in visual histories of science. Her research centres on how intellectual systems of knowledge are encoded in the artistic culture of sixteenth-century Europe. In Fall 2024, she will pursue a PhD in History at Columbia University to study the topos of repairing bodies and buildings in the early modern period.
Primary
Serlio, Sebastiano. Regole generali di architetura sopra le cinque maniere de gliedifici. Venetia : Per Francesco Marcolini Da Forli, 1537.
Serlio, Sebastiano. Il settimo libro d'architettura. Francofvrti ad Moenvm: Ex officina typographica Andreæ Wecheli, 1575.
Secondary
Akkach, Samer. De-Placing Difference: Architecture, Culture and Imaginative Geography. 2002. [Architecture and History of Art Library, 400.01 AKK]
Bazzotti, Ugo. Palazzo Te: Giulio Romano’s Masterwork in Mantua. London: Thames and Hudson, 2013. [University Library, S405:4.bb.201.2]
Cheetham, Mark. Abstract Art Against Autonomy: Infection, Resistance, and Cure Since the 60s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [Architecture and History of Art Library, 100 CHE].
Frommel, Sabine. Sebastiano Serlio: Architect. Milano: Electa, 2003. [Architecture and History of Art Library, 471].
Gage, Frances. Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome: Giulio Mancini and the Efficacy of Art. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016 [Architecture and History of Art Library, 13 GAG].
Gombrich, Ernst Hans. Giulio Romano. Milano: Electa, 2007. [Architecture and History of Art Library, 71.5]
Harris, Samuel. Building Pathology: Deterioration, Diagnostics, and Intervention. New York: Wiley, 2001. [Architecture and History of Art Library, B HAR]
Harrison, Harry. Roofs and Roofing: Performance, Diagnosis, Maintenance, Repair and the Avoidance of Defects. London: Construction Research Communication, 1996. [Architecture and History of Art Library, B]
Houghton-Evans, Robert Williams. Well Built?: A Forensic Approach to the Prevention, Diagnosis, and Cure of Building Defects. London: RIBA Enterprises, 2005. [Architecture and History of Art Library, C]
Hughes, Francesca. The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. [Architecture and History of Art Library, 400.01 HUG]
Jansen, Dirk Jacob. Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court: The Antique As Innovation. Leiden: Brill, 2019 [Available Online].
Jones, Mark Wilson. Origins of Classical Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014 [Architecture and History of Art Library, 400.01 WIL].
Maurer, Maria. Gender, Space and Experience at the Renaissance Court: Performance and Practice at the Palazzo Te. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. [Available Online]
Murphy, Douglas. The Architecture of Failure. Lanham: John Hunt, 2012 [Architecture and History of Art Library, 400.01 MUR].
Smith, Marquard and Joanne Morra. The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge: MIT, 2006 [Architecture and History of Art Library, 17].
Summerson, John. The Unromantic Castle. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990 [Architecture and History of Art Library, 400.01 SUM].
Tafuri, Manfredo and Ernst Hans Gombrich. Giulio Romano. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. [Architecture and History of Art Library, 71.5]
Verheyen, Egon. The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. [Architecture and History of Art Library, 471.3]
Verheyen, Egon. “Jacopo Strada’s Mantuan Drawings of 1567-1568.” The Art Bulletin 49, no. 1 (1967): 62-70.
Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. [Architecture and History of Art Library, 400.01 VID]
Weizman, Eyal. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2017. [Architecture and History of Art Library, 400.01 WEI]
