Materiality and Mimesis in Milanese Renaissance Architecture

In the last quarter of the fifteenth century, a variety of overtly mimetic columns began to appear throughout the Duchy of Milan. Some of these took the form of candelabra composed of virtual antiquities carved from various different types of stone. Others were crafted to resembled pruned tree-trunks. And in one extraordinary case, small candelabra-shaped columns were made to resemble contemporary wrought and cast-iron cannons.

While scholars have largely ignored these examples, this talk proposes that they are indicative of a distinctly local mode of architecture that flourished in late fifteenth-century Lombardy. Specifically, I argue that artists and architects from Leonardo da Vinci and Donato Bramante to Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, Francesco Cazzaniga, and Benedetto Briosco forged a native Renaissance architecture—one that looked back to a distant antiquity as well as forward to an emerging modernity—by exploring the mimetic potential of columns. In doing so, they demonstrated the fluid boundaries between different classes of objects and redefined the nature of the column by creating architectural elements that signified not just through their visible form and physical materials, but also their implicit materiality.