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Marvin Trachtenberg

Edith Kitzmiller Professor Emeritus of the History of Fine Arts

PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, 1967

Research Interests

Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance architecture and urbanism
Problems of temporality in architecture and historiography
Problematics of architectural authorship
The origins of perspective

Sample Courses

Architect, Patron and Society in the Early Renaissance
Architectural Problems of Renaissance Classicism
Architectonic Culture of Late Medieval Italy
Public Space in Early Modern Italy
Gothic Architecture: Theory and methods of interpretation
on-site summer course in Florence, architecture and urbanism 11-15th centuries

Selected Publications

Building-in-Time from Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion.  Yale University Press, London, 2010. 

Trachtenberg, Marvin and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture from Prehistory to Postmodernity, 2nd edition.New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

"Architecture and Music Reunited: A New Reading of Dufay's Nuper Rosarum Flores and the Cathedral of Florence," Renaissance Quarterly (2001): 740-75.

"Desedimenting Time: Gothic Column/paradigm Shifter," RES 40 (2001): 5-27.

Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art and Power in Early Modern Florence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

"Why the Pazzi Chapel is not by Brunelleschi." Casabella, (June 1996): 58-77 (bilingual).

Selected Honors

George Sarton Medal in the History of Science, University of Ghent, Belgium, for Dominion of the Eye (1997) and Building-in-Time from Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion. 2012.

Induction into American Academy of Arts and Science, 2013.

Awarded the Agnes Mongan Prize for Distinguished Contribution to Renaissance Scholarship, by Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, 2015 (Prize to be conferred in May 2016).

Architecture, Urbanism, and the Arts in Honor of Marvin Trachtenberg, Five Sessions at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, Boston, 31 March-2 April 2016: Urban Space, Medieval Time; Assessing Roman Juxtapositions; Building Time Outside Italy; Slow Art History; Paradigms Reconsidered.  Chair of organizing committee: Areli Marina, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.