Dominion of the Eye

Trachtenberg's book exmines the urban transformation of Florence in the fourteenth century. Focusing on the creation of the Piazza della Signoria and the Piazza del Duomo, he documents in engaging detail how and why urban planners, in league with the civic government, enlarged these urban spaces. Articulating the design principles that served as the foundation for these urban renewal projects, Trachtenberg's book fundamentally revises our understanding of urban planning in the early modern period, countering the received claim that rational planning begins only in the Renaissance. His book also brings a new depth of understanding to the entire visual culture of Trecento Florence, demonstrating how many of the developments in painting, sculpture and architecture of this period form the basis of the achievements of the Quattrocento, particularly the discovery of perspective. Combining both empirical and post-structuralist methods, Trachtenberg's book is among the first, if not the first, to question critically many of the assumptions that have formed the basis of scholarship of Renaissance art since the sixteenth century.
A close analysis of the major squares of Florence.
Marvin Trachtenberg is Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Art, New York University. A recipient of fellowships from the Kress Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Villa I Tatti, he is the author of The Campanile of Florence Cathedral, 'Giotto's Tower', and coauthor of Architecture from Prehistory to Postmodernism.
...essential for anyone specializing in any of the visual arts, including architecture and urbanism. Choice
engaging, forcefully written, and highly polemical book...this elegantly argued, relentlessly single-minded, and extravagantly speculative book rewards the reader with a keen appreciation of the many dialectical nuances informing trecento Florrentine urban planning. Speculum
This deeply revisionary study of urbanism, art, and power in early modern Florence is without question one of the most important works of architectural history to appear in many decades....Trachtenberg's exciting, highly suggestive synthesis forces us to see in new ways the profound tranformation of one of the great cities in modern Europe.... Virginia Quarterly