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E-book: François Blondel: Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution [Taylor & Francis e-book]

(Oxford University, UK)
  • Taylor & Francis e-book
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First director of the Académie royale darchitecture, François Blondel established a lasting model for architectural education that helped transform a still largely medieval profession into the one we recognize today.

Most well known for his 1676 urban plan of Paris, Blondel is also celebrated as a mathematician, scientist, and scholar. Few figures are more representative of the close affinity between architecture and the "new science" of the seventeenth century.

The first full-length study in English to appear on this polymath, this book adds to the scholarship on early modern architectural history and particularly on French classicism under Louis XIV and his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert. It studies early modern science and technology, Baroque court culture, and the development of the discipline of architecture.
List of illustrations
x
Preface xv
Editorial note xviii
Introduction 1(2)
Architecture and erudition
3(2)
Aims and structure of the book
5(3)
Mathematician, engineer, courtier
8(33)
Early sources and family background
10(1)
Trial by fire: Richelieu
10(3)
Brienne: minister of state and patron of science
13(9)
The European voyage
22(3)
Diplomacy
25(3)
Colbert and Paris
28(5)
Louis XIV
33(5)
The career of a client
38(3)
The rebirth of French classicism I: the Academie Royale d'Architecture
41(30)
Entrepreneurs and architects
43(3)
The Academie and the maitrise
46(2)
Libertinage and the crisis of the Louvre
48(9)
La belle architecture
57(8)
The Cours d'architecture
65(4)
Colbert and Blondel
69(2)
The rebirth of French classicism II: Paris
71(47)
The Paris plan and the royal entry
73(4)
The city gates: the Porte Saint-Denis
77(7)
The Porte Saint-Martin
84(11)
The Porte Saint-Antoine
95(7)
The Porte Saint-Bernard
102(6)
The Cours Royal
108(6)
Urban space and the promenade
114(3)
Colbert and Paris
117(1)
Architects and mathematicians
118(30)
The mathematical practitioner: between the scientist and the artisan
121(3)
``Il n'est pas praticien''
124(3)
Nicomedes's compass
127(5)
Rampant arches and conic sections
132(3)
The breaking resistance of beams
135(5)
The contemporary reception
140(4)
Blondel and the Vitruvian tradition
144(2)
L'intelligence des anges
146(2)
Architecture versus erudition: the Perrault-Blondel debate revisited
148(18)
The dispute
150(6)
Claude Perrault's Ordonnance des cinq especes de colonnes (1683)
156(3)
Literary idols: Ouvrard, Philandrier, and Freart
159(2)
Studia humanitatis
161(3)
Mathematics as erudition
164(2)
Architecture and the encyclopedia: Blondel as reader and collector
166(26)
Blondel and the ``metamathematical'' tradition
169(4)
Proportion and the ``mixed'' mathematical sciences
173(5)
The library: tradition, innovation, erudition
178(1)
The house, the curiosity collection, and the study
179(3)
The library: size
182(1)
Languages and subjects
183(4)
Bibliotheconomie as an intellectual ideal
187(3)
Architecture and the encyclopedia
190(2)
Conclusion: Blondel's Nachleben
192(8)
The eighteenth-century fortune
194(1)
From erudit to pedant
195(2)
Blondel and the architects
197(2)
How history forgets you
199(1)
Documents I: Letters patent, October 1659 200(6)
Documents II: Inventory of the library, February 1986 206(31)
Abbreviations 237(1)
Notes 238(50)
Bibliography 288(25)
Photographic acknowledgements 313(1)
Index 314
Anthony Gerbino is a historian of early modern architecture in France and England. His research focuses on the role of architecture in seventeenth-century scientific and academic circles and on the technical and mathematical background of early modern architects, engineers, and gardeners. He is an Associate Member of Worcester College at the University of Oxford and co-author of Compass and Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England 1500-1750 (Yale University Press, 2009).