An enlightening exploration of a crucial Renaissance art—military architecture—and its unexpected connections to contemporary aesthetic, cultural, and technological innovations.

Urban fortifications were the most colossal artistic achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Renowned sculptors, painters, and architects such as Michelangelo, Bramante, Leonardo, Francesco Paciotto, and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger collaborated with humanists and military commanders to design fortresses and walls. Unprecedented in their geometric complexity, construction ambition, and physical grandeur, these monuments radically transformed the form and experience of the built environment.

"Form and Fortification" challenges the widespread belief that military architecture was merely a tool of war, restoring the practice to its central role at the crossroads of the creative and cultural endeavors of the 16th century. Through a rich variety of drawings, archival manuscripts, early printed sources, treatises, and completed works, this book traces the remarkable exchanges between fortification and other fields of art, design, and engineering.

Mapping these interdisciplinary convergences, Morgan Ng develops the groundbreaking concept of "kindred technologies" to describe military and civil structures that co-created and came to share striking formal affinities. Defensive earthworks bore the same forms as elevated gardens; subterranean artillery chambers resembled artificial caves and hydraulic corridors; and fortified passages transformed into Palladian galleries. The relationships between these kindred technologies, this book argues, are essential to understanding the interconnected nature of early modern artistic invention.

Pages: 256, Year of Publication: 0609, Dimensions: 21.6x21.6cm.