Drawing as a Way of Knowing

Carolyn Yorke Yerkes

"Drawing as a Way of Knowing: Architectural Survey in the Late Renaissance" explores a group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural manuscripts that are each part of a network of copies. Made by French and Italian draftsmen studying ancient and modern Roman monuments from the 1560s to the 1640s, the drawings contain information about the buildings--which include the Pantheon and Saint Peter's--that is not known from any other sources. Yet the information that the drawings preserve is only part of their value: the drawings also show how that information was recorded, transferred, and valued by other draftsmen. With a special focus on chronological complications, "Drawing as a Way of Knowing" examines the singularities that are produced when draftsmen try to repeat pictorial statements exactly. These chronological complications include the representation of elements that no...