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The Timaeus, perspective, and early Renaissance concepts of architectural space

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Temple, Nicholas (2024) The Timaeus, perspective, and early Renaissance concepts of architectural space. In: The Legacy of Plato's Timaeus. Brill's Studies in Intellectual History (353). Brill Publishers, Leiden, pp. 386-422. ISBN 9789004705838 (E-book), 9789004431089 (Hardback) (In Press)

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Abstract

The reception of Plato’s Timaeus during the Renaissance coincided with ground-breaking developments in the conceptualisation and design of architectural space and the ‘invention’ of pictorial space. This coincidence gave rise to fertile areas of influence of Platonic principles on artistic and architectural creativity, which drew closely on the Timaean commentary tradition through the intellectual exchanges of humanists, artists, and architects. This chapter explores the influence of Plato’s cosmological accounts in the Timaeus on architectural and pictorial ideas in fifteenth-century Florence. This was revealed by a combination of harmonic proportional systems in architecture, conceived through imagined, mental constructs that pictured buildings as ‘cosmological receptacles’, and the creation of projective, illusory space in perspective that consciously drew alignments between the vantage point of the human observer and the infinitude of divine vision. A key figure in the early Renaissance who cultivated these connections between architecture, perspective, and Timaean principles was Leon Battista Alberti whose treatises on painting and architecture laid the theoretical foundations for the development of Renaissance ideas of Platonic ‘space’. The chapter examines Alberti’s writings in the light of influences of other key figures in fifteenth-century Florence such as Filippo Brunelleschi, Ambrogio Traversari and Marsilio Ficino.

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