The Printed Illustration of Medieval Architecture in Pre-Enlightenment Europe

Abstract

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of readers a series of significant examples of texts printed prior to 1700 and illustrated with images of medieval architecture in continental Europe. British illustrations of buildings and ruins from the Middle Ages have received relevant attention from modern scholarly writers, but studies of analogous continental examples are lacking. Illustrations of medieval architecture have been little considered in most studies of the Early Modern period, as compared with those of their sixteenth-to eighteenth-century counterparts. In addition, the few studies that do exist of the interest in medieval buildings and illustration of them, prior to the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’, have generally been restricted to monographs on individual antiquarians or else have focused on Enlightenment, Romantic and Positivist criticism, and have tended to concentrate on medieval revivalism. Furthermore, with the exception of a few studies on the perception of the Romanesque, the most frequently investigated category has been the Gothic. Hence, despite the existence of some crucial works, the perspectives adopted in research into Early Modern attitudes to medieval architecture have inevitably been limited. We still lack any comprehensive overview of the architecture of the Middle Ages as a whole (that is, including the Late Antique / Early Christian era), or any studies showing genuine interest in the late Renaissance and Baroque roots of subsequent antiquarian medievalism. This article, therefore, attempts to begin to fill such a lacuna by studying the architectural aspect of those pre-Enlightenment illustrations of medieval antiquities that appeared in continental Europe, and by considering scholars’ awareness of the entire medieval millennium.