Dedicated to the Duke of Urbino in 1475, Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum de’architectura (The British Museum, ms.197.b.21) was unprecedented as a visual manifesto of machine design. The luxury brochure celebrated the productivity of the fabled Urbino court while showcasing Francesco di Giorgio’s excellence as a draftsman and technician. Although the Opusculum has been substantially neglected by scholars, the machine renderings it contains were, paradoxically, well-known among Francesco di Giorgio’s contemporaries.  Dozens of manuscript compilations from the late-15th and 16th centuries attest to the widespread assembly of the images, which filled architects’ personal notebooks and illustrated didactic theories. As underscored in the foundational study of Carlo Promis, Francesco’s machine designs were “found in all books of mechanics of the sixteenth century,” and consequently, were “of little importance.” For Promis, as for generations of architectural historians to follow, early modern machine design did not belong to architecture proper. Moreover, as subjects of extensive copy, the machine drawings were considered mundane, the diagrammatic models of the lowly practitioner.

This research project, which will culminate in a scholarly exhibition, explores the manual reproduction of Francesco di Giorgio’s Opusculum drawings. Bringing together a rich assortment of early modern drawing books, along with new 3-D architectural renderings and scaled wooden models, the exhibition will consider the practical and didactic value of the Opusculum’s machine models. Further, in reframing the relationship between Francesco’s manuscript and the famed “frieze of engineering” of the Urbino palace, the symbolic character of the images is brought to light. More than a display of design ingenuity, the machine drawings were an explicit appeal to the grandeur, excellence, and ingenuity of the classical past. In mastering the art of mechanics -- and amassing a critical knowledge of the natural world -- Urbino might emerge as a new Rome, an empire to surpass all others.

Project Info

Research group: Theory and History of Architecture
Start Date: 15/11/2022
Researchers: Elizabeth Merrill and Anna Rebecca Sartore