The First Italian Guide to Mapping the State: Book IV in Cosimo Bartoli’s Del modo di misurare (1564), Karen edis Barzman
Cosimo Bartoli’s Del modo di misurare (1564) is known as a treatise on how to measure lines, planes, and solids, applied to things like the height of a tower, depth of a well, or volume of a barrel, which belong to what Bartoli termed “private interests.” Less recognized is what it says about mensuration of “public things” – fortresses, cities, entire provinces. Containing the first practical guide to mapping the state, this illustrated text provides a window onto cartographic practice in the service of the Venetian republic, where the treatise first entered print and where systematic mapping first arrived in a government archive. The Newberry’s copy will serve as our point of departure.
The Lost Seventeenth Century in Spanish Architectural History, Jesús Escobar
This paper examines the historiography of Spanish baroque architecture with particular attention to formative nineteenth-century scholarship on the topic and intellectual as well as political developments in twentieth-century Spain that have resulted in a facile understanding of seventeenth-century buildings in Spain. To correct this gap in historical knowledge, I propose a reconsideration of Spanish baroque architecture via the lens of the early modern, transatlantic Spanish Habsburg world in which ideas about buildings and cities circulated widely and individuals as well as institutions played active roles in giving physical shape to a global empire.