Publications
Books
Alina Payne
L'Architecture parmi les arts: Matérialité, transferts et travail artistique dans l'Italie de la Renaissance
Hazan with Louvre Editions; forthcoming 2016
Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne (eds.)
Histories of Ornament: From Global to Local
Princeton University Press, 2016
This lavishly illustrated volume is the first major global history of ornament from the Middle Ages to today. Crossing historical and geographical boundaries in unprecedented ways and considering the role of ornament in both art and architecture, Histories of Ornament offers a nuanced examination that integrates medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and modern Euroamerican traditions with their Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican counterparts. At a time when ornament has re-emerged in architectural practice and is a topic of growing interest to art and architectural historians, the book reveals how the long history of ornament illuminates its global resurgence today.
review by Michael Squire in Critical Inquiry, April 2017
Alina Payne (ed.)
Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science and Technology in Early Modern Europe
Penn State Press; fall 2014
Alina Payne (ed.)
Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archeology and the Poetics of Influence
Brill; January 2014
Using the Braudelian concept of the Mediterranean this volume focuses on the condition of “coastal exchanges” involving the Dalmatian littoral and its Adriatic and more distant maritime network. Spalato and Ragusa intersect with Constantinople, Cairo and Spanish Naples just as Sinan, Palladio and Robert Adam cross paths in this liquid expanse. Concentrating on materiality and on the arts, architecture in particular, the authors identify portability and hybridity as characteristic of these exchanges, and tease out expected and unexpected serendipitous moments when they occurred. Focusing on translation and its instruments these essays expand the traditional concept of influence by thrusting mobility and the "hardware" of cultural transmission, its mechanisms, rather than its effects, into the foreground.
Video, published by Faculti
Introduction: The Republic of the Sea
Alina Payne
From Ornament to Object. Genealogies of Architectural Modernism
Yale University Press; May 2012
In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, humble objects of everyday life—from crockery and furniture to clothes and tools—began to receive critical attention in relationship to architecture. Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing for a new understanding of the genealogy of architectural modernism. Rather than the well-known story in which an absorption of technology and mass production created a radical aesthetic that broke decisively with the past, Payne argues for a more gradual shift, as the eloquence of architectural ornamentation was taken over by objects of daily use. As she demonstrates, the work of Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier should not be seen only as the ignition point of modernism, but also as the culmination of a conversation about ornament and what constitutes architectural eloquence that goes back to the Renaissance. Payne looks beyond the “usual suspects” of philosophy, industry and science and identifies theoretical catalysts for architecture’s shift of attention from ornament to object in fields as varied as anthropology and ethnology; art history and the museum; and archaeology and psychology.
Review by Spyros Papapetros, Journal of Historiography, N. 7, December 2012.
Review by Ayla Lepine, Burlington Magazine, P. 47-8, August 1, 2013.
Alina Payne
The Telescope and the Compass: Teofilo Gallaccini and the Dialogue Between Architecture and Science in the Age of Galileo
Leo S. Olschki editore, 2012
Teofilo Gallaccini’s (1564-1641) oeuvre represents a nearly intact personal archive pertaining to the sciences, architecture and the arts, as well as history, anatomy and letters. The very amount and heterogeneity of the material provides a unique snapshot of how diverse areas of knowledge communicated at a significant moment of transition: between the Renaissance and the Baroque in the arts, or, from the perspective of the sciences, on the eve of the Scientific Revolution. Following these threads, this book examines Gallaccini’s thought against the panorama of contemporary events and issues with which he interacted closely: the astronomical discoveries and condemnation of Galileo in Counter-Reformation Rome; the growing interest in mechanics, motion and engineering; the rise of a Baroque sensibility in the arts; the deep-felt need of eloquent representation techniques across disciplines; and the culture of manuscripts and oral intellectual sociability in the age of the printed book. A “go-between” milieus and disciplines Gallaccini illuminates the nature of intellectual labor and its sites: the university, the academy, the princely court and the isolated haven of the private library.
Review by Marzia Caciolini, Lo Sguardo - rivista di filosofia, N. 10, 2012 (III).
Review by Claudia Conforti, Casabella 820, F. 4/4, P. 100-3, 12-2012.
Review by Andrew James Hopkins, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Fall 2013), pp. 998-1000.
Alina Payne
Teofilo Gallaccini: Selected Writings and Library
Leo S. Olschki editore, 2012
This volume offers a selection of inedited writings by the Sienese polymath Teofilo Gallaccini (1564-1641). Author of over forty manuscript works--literary, historical, artistic and architectural, scientific and medical--his oeuvre, located on the cusp between the Renaissance and Baroque or, seen from a different perspective, on the eve of the Scientific Revolution, has remained largely inaccessible in print. The inedited texts included in this volume were therefore selected to illustrate both the variety and interconnectedness of his thought: the Monade celeste, a text on astronomy and a splendid example of learning applied to a contemporary topic of great moment; his commentary on John Dee's Monas hieroglyphica; his drawn commentary on Sebastiano Serlio's Books III and IV; and finally a selection of his academic lectures covering the full range of topics that attracted him from geology to astronomy, mathematics to fortifications, art theory to architecture and that were delivered during the nearly five decades of his membership in the Accademia dei Filomati in Siena. The volume also contains the reconstruction of Gallaccini's library, his most cherished working “instrument”.
Alina Payne
Rudolf Wittkower
Bollati Boringhieri editore, 2011
Review by Vittorio Gregotti, Corriere della Sera, Sunday, November 6, 2011.
Alois Riegl (Author), Andrew Hopkins (Editor), Arnold Witte (Editor), and Alina Payne (Introduction)
The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome
Getty Research Institute, 2010
Alois Riegl’s lectures on the origins of Baroque art in Rome broke new ground in the field of Italian Baroque studies by analyzing together the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture and by interpreting Mannerist artists as lacking in the spiritual absorption of their Renaissance predecessors. Both in approach and content, Riegl’s account markedly differs from that of Heinrich Wölfflin and other contemporaries: this new artistic era was to be judged according to its own rules and not merely as a period of decline.
The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome brings Riegl’s compelling vision of the Baroque to life. His text is full of perceptive and intuitive analyses of artists from Michelangelo to Caravaggio. Moreover, by taking the spectator into consideration, Riegl identifies the crucial, defining feature distinguishing the Renaissance from the Baroque. Three new essays by leading scholars complement this translation of Riegl’s text, framing it historically and explaining why it is important for present-day readers.
Table of Contents
Review by Itay Sapir, Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 64, 3 (Fall 2011), pp. 915-6.
Alina Payne, Guest Editor
Displacements/Déplacements. Special issue of AI. Architecture and Ideas.
Canadian Journal of Architecture, vol. 11, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2000)
Alina Payne, Anne Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick, editors
Antiquity and Its Interpreters
Cambridge University Press, 2000 [paperback edition 2011]
Antiquity and Its Interpreters examines how the physical and textual remains of the ancient Romans were viewed and received by writers, artists, architects, and cultural makers of early modern Italy. The importance of antiquity in the Renaissance has long been acknowledged, but this volume reconsiders the complex relationship between the two cultures in light of recent scholarship in the field and a new appreciation and awareness of the act of history writing itself. The case studies analyze specific texts, the archaeological projects that made “antiquity” available, the revival of art history and theory, the appropriation of antiquities to serve social ideologies, and the reception of this cultural phenomenon in modern historiography, among other topics. Demonstrating that the antique model was itself an artful construct, Antiquity and Its Interpreters shows that the originality of Renaissance culture owed as much to ignorance about antiquity as to an understanding of it. It also provides a synthesis of seminal work that recognizes the reciprocal relationship of the Renaissance to antiquity.
Alina A. Payne
The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture
Cambridge University Press, 1999 [paperback edition 2011]
Recipient of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize from the Society of Architectural Historians (2000)
The Architectural Treatise in the Renaissance examines the Italian Renaissance architects' efforts to negotiate between the imitation and reinvention of classicism. Through a close reading of Vitruvius and texts written during the period 1400-1600, this study identifies ornament as the central issue around which much of this debate focused. Argues that ornament facilitated a dialogue across disciplines and invited exchanges with literary and rhetorical practices. Also highlights the place of the architectural treatise in the text-based culture of the period and of architectural discourse in Renaissance thought.
Articles
Payne, Alina. "Introduction: The Republic of the Sea". Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archeology and the Poetics of Influence. Leiden: Brill, 2014. 1-18. Print.
dalmatia_introduction.pdf
Payne, Alina. “Michelangelo Contra Palladio: From Le Corbusier to Robert Venturi”. Ed. Emanuela Ferretti, Marco Pierini, & Pietro Ruschi. Michelangelo and the Twentieth Century (2014): , 7-23. Print. saggio_payne.pdf