Deborah Howard

Venice and Islam in the Middle Ages: Some Observations on the Question of Architectural Influence

Once described by the great Venetian art historian Giuseppe Fiocco as a colossal suq , the city of Venice has always conveyed a distinctly oriental atmosphere to the western european visitor. Mystified by its labyrinth of dark, narrow, often dead-end streets, twisting at right-angles through densely built-up, separately demarcated parishes, glimpsing fragrant gardens hidden behind high, crenellated walls, sniffing the pungent odours of exotic oriental spices in the bustling, crowded markets, the traveller might well have imagined himself transported, as if on a magic carpet, to one of the great mercantile centres of the Middle East — to Baghdad, Cairo or Damascus — to the world of Marco Polo’s travels or the Arabian Nights.

Venice between East and West: Marc'Antonio Barbaro and Palladio's Church of the Redentore

This article reconsiders the role of Palladio9s friend and patron the Venetian Senator Marc9Antonio Barbaro in the design of the church of the Redentore in Venice, commissioned after the great plague of 1575-76. It examines the circumstances surrounding Barbaro9s unsuccessful support of the centrally planned design in light of his recent return from a five-year period as consul in Constantinople. The religious and political issues informing the debate are investigated in detail, in order to amplify the motives behind the final choice of plan. The architectural dialogue between Venice and Milan, two cities seeking to build votive churches after the plague, forms one axis of the debate, but Venice characteristically looked east as well as west. The article suggests that Palladio9s subtle range of allusions may have included not only the lessons of antiquity and issues of church reform, but also ideas drawn from the recent work of the great Ottoman architect Sinan. Significantly, Barbaro9s dispatches from Constantinople had transmitted enthusiastic descriptions of new Ottoman buildings to the heart of the Venetian Senate.

Teaching Architectural History in Great Britain and Australia: Local Conditions and Global Perspectives

Over the past two decades, enormous changes have been imposed on British universities. Readers from other countries may be perplexed by the world of acronyms that now characterizes British academia, but it has had such a dominating effect on our lives that it may be useful to explain the wider context before turning to the specific issues relating to architectural history itself. In an effort to improve accountability, the state has devised complex procedures of external monitoring. Both teaching and research in all British university departments are regularly assessed under the auspices of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE-or, in Scotland, SHEFC) and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). Hardly any British university teachers are immune to the stress and administrative demands imposed by these repeated government inspection processes. The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is a quinquennial procedure that assesses the calibre of research produced by academic staff in defined subject areas. Architectural history falls in two main categories: Unit of Ass ssment or UOA 33, Built Environment; and UOA 60, History of Art, Architecture and Design. Some architectural historians occupy posts in other areas, such as history, Oriental studies, or English, and are assessed with their own department. The bureaucracy involved in preparing a departments submission to the RAE is enormous and occupies valuable time that could well be spent on scholarship and teaching. In essence, each a ademic staff member has to nominate four pieces of significant, published research in the relevant five-year period, and the research profile of the department is assessed in terms of its national or international reputation. The number and size of research grants are also important criteria; therefore, more scientific and coll borative p ograms are favored over individual scholarly p rformance. In theory, a high rating in the RAE leads to increased government funding, but since the rewards are passed to the central university authorities, individual departments may never receive any noticeable benefit. The competitive aspect of the process encourages the poaching of prolific scholars from other universities and may even l ad to the employment of high-profile academics in nonteaching positions. Moreover, the emphasis on speed of publication discourages major scholarly contributions and favors quicker projects, such as edited books. Although the RAE does not, in itself, involve teaching, the pressures on staff to produce a steady flow of publications inevitably distract them from teaching. Whereas the RAE affects teaching only indirectly, the QAA inspects teaching performance in all subject areas. The stressful and time-consuming aspects of the process have left many scars, but objectively some benefits must be acknowledged. Problems of amateurish presentation and poorly structured courses have been addressed, and students now expect well-prepared course documentation and handouts. Over the past decade or so, all university departments in the U.K. have undergone a Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA), an exercise that led to bureaucratic demands even greater than those imposed by the RAE. As a result, several prominent universities have declared that they will not cooperate with future TQA inspections. It therefore seems unlikely that the exercise will be repeated in its present

Seasonal Apartments in Renaissance Italy

In the Italian Renaissance, architects turned to antique sources such as Pliny and Vitruvius as they began to open up domestic space to light, air and landscape. Instead of relying on the thermal inertia of the thick-walled mediaeval castle, they enlarged windows and added loggias to both villas and palaces. Inspired by the ancients, they incorporated seasonal flexibility into their designs, allowing vertical or horizontal shifts from one apartment to another according to the time of year.

The Kinnoull Aisle and Monument

Inside the rubble-walled chapel known as the Kinnoull Aisle, across the Tay from the city of Perth, stands one of the most remarkable funeral monuments ever erected in Scotland (Fig. 1). Now abandoned and desolate, the monument commemorates the life of Sir George Hay, who was created Earl of Kinnoull in 1633, the year before his death, at the end of a brilliant career as a courtier, politician and industrialist. The burial chapel (Fig. 2) was originally attached to the former parish church of Kinnoull. Like the more celebrated Montgomery Aisle and Monument at Skelmorlie, near Largs, erected in the same years, it is now freestanding; the adjoining church was demolished in the nineteenth century, probably in 1826 when a new church was erected on a different site to serve the parish of Kinnoull. Before turning to the monument itself, it is expedient to introduce the formidable statesman whose memory it enshrines.

Reading at Home

Let’s begin ... ♥ Listening to your child should be an enjoyable, shared experience. ♥ Find a time when you and your child are relaxed – make it a special time. ♥ Sit beside your child, either at a table or on the couch. Allow your child to hold the book. ♥ Don’t argue with or force your child to read, if they are tired or disinterested; there is no pleasure for either person. ♥ Patience is extremely important if the child is frightened about making mistakes. Resist jumping in and correcting errors but ask questions like: Does that make sense? Does that look right? What does it start with?

Mamluk History Through Architecture: Monuments, Culture and Politics in Medieval Egypt and Syria

which will not travel, had been included. Since so many of the images in the exhibition come from printed books, the serious catalog reader would find it fairly easy to reconstruct the exhibition by finding the images in a reasonably good architecture library. The catalog is an enduring record of the scholarship in the exhibit that demonstrates architectural connections, amplified in the essays, in a period of great change.

The Status of the Oriental Traveller in Renaissance Venice

Travel lore in its widest sense was an integral part of Venetian culture. Over the centuries, merchant handbooks, ambassadors’ reports and pilgrim chronicles had recorded journeys made in the interests of trade, diplomacy and Christian devotion. Within Venice this body of knowledge circulated freely, orally and in manuscript form, but during the sixteenth century its dissemination was to be transformed by ambitious printing initiatives. A new genre, the printed anthology of travel narratives, gave added authority to geographical information and helped to shape the ways in which travellers were perceived.

Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100-1500

An investigation of the influence of oriental travel and trade on mediaeval Venice and its architecture. Deborah Howard argues that many Venetians gained insight into Islamic culture through personal contacts with their Moslem trading partners.