Marvin Trachtenberg

New York University, New York, New York ~Edith Kitzmiller Professor of Fine Arts. Studies of late medieval and early modern architecture stimulated new perceptions of buildings in their environments, notably Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art and Power in Early Modern Florence (1997) and What Brunelleschi Saw: Monument and Site at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (1988), which uncovered the perspectival character of the pre-Renaissance piazza and trecento visual culture. Other work challenged medieval periodization, proposing that Gothic architecture be redefined as medieval modernism, and upended long-standing attributions of seminal early Renaissance monuments such as the Pazzi Chapel in Florence. The Campanile of Florence Cathedral: Giotto's Tower (1971) demonstrated how the bell tower of Florence Cathedral, initiated by Giotto, meaningfully changes authorship and style at successive levels. Book was the seed of his work Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (2010), which recovers and illuminates a lost aspect of the architectural past: the vital dimension of time-as-duration in the design and construction of monumental buildings as a single, fluid, imbricated process. Process was challenged and ultimately upended when Leon Battista Alberti, in keeping with his invention of the architectural author, proposed a new conception in which time and change would ideally be excluded from the making of architecture. His 1976 book The Statue of Liberty (reissued in 1986) examines the political, historical, and aesthetic origins of the design together with the statue's pioneering structural skeleton by Gustave Eiffel.~