ADH 2020: Shortlist Interview - David Hemsoll
In the lead up to the Annual Lecture and Awards Ceremony, our President, Neil Jackson, interviews the authors shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion. In this interview, Neil is joined by Dr David Hemsoll to discuss Emulating Antiquity.
David Hemsoll reflects: ‘I am honoured and thrilled to have my book Emulating Antiquity: Renaissance Buildings from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo shortlisted for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion. No book on the subject of Renaissance architecture and its engagement with the antique had been written previously, even despite its fundamental importance to the subsequent course of architecture in Europe and beyond, and to write one myself, which could encompass the individual achievements of Brunelleschi, Bramante, Michelangelo and others, was a longstanding ambition of mine. To understand how this should best be achieved, however, became clearer to me only in more recent years, when I began to realise just how much Renaissance architects designed their buildings in dialogue, or sometimes in deliberate conflict, with one another, and just how closely their intentions were seemingly matched with those of others operating in congruent fields. My hope for my readers is that I have succeeded in fulfilling the potential which this book has afforded me. It is, above all, that I have clearly explained the changing and contrasting mindsets of successive Renaissance architects in their responses to the common challenge that classical antiquity posed to them, and that I have demonstrated the outlooks of these architects by analysing the Renaissance buildings, here plentifully illustrated, that they designed.’
Bramante, Tempietto (c. 1510; © author). This much admired and imitated building dates (as argued here) from towards the end of Bramante’s life, after he had committed himself to an architecture that was inventive but now heavily reliant on the antique. The building, commemorating the first pope St Peter, was presumably commissioned by Bramante’s long-term patron Pope Julius II, who presented himself as a modern-day equal of Julius Caesar.
David Hemsoll’s Emulating Antiquity is published by Yale University Press. You can purchase the book here.
Follow David on @TheGolovine
