The Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion for 2005 was awarded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain to Dr Georgia Clarke for her book Roman House - Renaissance Palaces: Inventing Antiquity in Fifteenth-Century Italy, published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.
The way Roman temples and other public buildings were understood and transmuted has tended to predominate in the written history of Italian Renaissance architecture. Georgia Clarke's book (in which, it was noted, the name of Palladio does not once appear!) thus provides a stimulating alternative approach, in which the history of one fifteenth-century Italian building type, the palazzo, is related to what was then known or supposed about Roman domestic architecture. In carrying out her study, Dr Clarke ranges with impressive philological breadth over textual sources, over archaeological evidence, and over building theory and practice.
The stimulating ideas that lie behind the book are matched by the tremendous scholarship shown by the author is covering the primary material and the extensive bibliography of the early Italian Renaissance field.
Roman House - Renaissance Palaces is a work of great scholarship, then, that sheds new light on an ostensibly familiar field. Cambridge University Press is to be congratulated on having published it and for allowing Georgia Clarke nearly two hundred illustrations (including a few in colour), even if these are not always of a standard to match the text. The Committee noted with regret, however, that the Press has now withdrawn from publishing work in art and architectural history outside of that of the ancient world.
The doctoral dissertation on which Roman House - Renaissance Palaces is based was submitted in 1992. The Committee was impressed that, at a time when there is much pressure on academics to publish, Dr Clarke had spent a further eight years thinking about and researching her subject prior to sending it to press. Just as impressive was the fact that the origins of the text in a dissertation were not evident: the book is well written and readily accessible to the specialist academic and the non-specialist alike, which adds to the singularity of its achievement.