One of today's foremost art historians and critics presents a strikingly original view of architecture and the city through the twin lenses of cultural theory and psychoanalysis. Hubert Damisch--whose work on the history of perspective, the notion of imitation, and the question of representation has emerged as the most important body of critical thought on painting since, perhaps, Meyer Shapiro's collected essays--here engages a subject that has been of continuing interest to him over the last thirty years.
In the field of architecture, this book has been awaited for a long time; in the fields of art history and cultural studies, it will be welcomed as a powerful argument for utilizing in an urban context interpretive approaches developed for the analysis of spatial and visual phenomena. Though architecture has served since Descartes as a structural analogy for philosophical discourse and has played a similar role in literature, contemporary studies on architecture have tended to be very specialized, with little regard for their accessibility to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This book, however, with its solid grounding in architecture and urban theory and its profoundly humanistic approach, will prove deeply rewarding to specialist and generalist alike.
The book engages a wide range of subjects, including reconstructions of the Egyptian labyrinth, architectural museums, European visions of New World cities, the great spaces and national parks of the American West, and landscape gardening in the United States. These subjects work together to develop a unique way of looking at the city and its architecture, the landscape and its spaces.

Taking Freud's seminal essay A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci as his starting point and opposite, Hubert Damisch uses the preposition 'by' instead of 'of' in the title of his book to indicate that he is searching for a way of doing psychoanalysis with art that does not amount to psychobiography. The book is in some respects a parody of Freud's work on art. The return to Freud was necessary because work in psychoanalysis and art has not solved the problem of what is being analyzed. Damisch studies Piero della Francesca's painting Madonna del Parto as a construction by the artist of what viewers throughout history may have pursued on the basis of their unconscious fantasies involving what Freud considered the most characteristic question of human beings: where do children come from, and how did they get there?

Taking Freud's seminal essay A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci as his starting point and opposite, Hubert Damisch uses the preposition 'by' instead of 'of' in the title of his book to indicate that he is searching for a way of doing psychoanalysis with art that does not amount to psychobiography. The book is in some respects a parody of Freud's work on art. The return to Freud was necessary because work in psychoanalysis and art has not solved the problem of what is being analyzed. Damisch studies Piero della Francesca's painting Madonna del Parto as a construction by the artist of what viewers throughout history may have pursued on the basis of their unconscious fantasies involving what Freud considered the most characteristic question of human beings: where do children come from, and how did they get there?

This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author's basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud.
On a literal level, this could be represented by the absence of the sky, as in Brunelleschi's legendary first experiments with panels using perspective. Or it could be the vaporous swathes that Correggio uses to mediate between the viewer on earth and the heavenly prospect in his frescoed domes at Parma. Insofar as the cloud is a semiotic operator, interacting with the linear order of perspective, it also becomes a dynamic agent facilitating the creation of new types of pictorial space. (Damisch puts the signifer cloud between slashes to indicate that he deals with clouds as signs instead of realistic elements.)
This way of looking at the history of painting is especially fruitful for the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but it is also valuable for looking at such junctures as the nineteenth century. For example, Damisch invokes Ruskin and Turner, who carry out both in theory and in practice a revision of the conditions of appearances of the cloud as a landscape feature. Even for the twentieth century, he has illuminating things to say about how his reading of cloud applies to the painters Leger and Batthus. In short, Damisch achieves a brilliant and systematic demonstration of a concept of semiotic interaction that touches some of the most crucial features of the Western art tradition.

One of today's foremost art historians and critics presents a strikingly original view of architecture and the city through the twin lenses of cultural theory and psychoanalysis. Hubert Damisch--whose work on the history of perspective, the notion of imitation, and the question of representation has emerged as the most important body of critical thought on painting since, perhaps, Meyer Shapiro's collected essays--here engages a subject that has been of continuing interest to him over the last thirty years.
In the field of architecture, this book has been awaited for a long time; in the fields of art history and cultural studies, it will be welcomed as a powerful argument for utilizing in an urban context interpretive approaches developed for the analysis of spatial and visual phenomena. Though architecture has served since Descartes as a structural analogy for philosophical discourse and has played a similar role in literature, contemporary studies on architecture have tended to be very specialized, with little regard for their accessibility to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This book, however, with its solid grounding in architecture and urban theory and its profoundly humanistic approach, will prove deeply rewarding to specialist and generalist alike.
The book engages a wide range of subjects, including reconstructions of the Egyptian labyrinth, architectural museums, European visions of New World cities, the great spaces and national parks of the American West, and landscape gardening in the United States. These subjects work together to develop a unique way of looking at the city and its architecture, the landscape and its spaces.

This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author's basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud.
On a literal level, this could be represented by the absence of the sky, as in Brunelleschi's legendary first experiments with panels using perspective. Or it could be the vaporous swathes that Correggio uses to mediate between the viewer on earth and the heavenly prospect in his frescoed domes at Parma. Insofar as the cloud is a semiotic operator, interacting with the linear order of perspective, it also becomes a dynamic agent facilitating the creation of new types of pictorial space. (Damisch puts the signifer cloud between slashes to indicate that he deals with clouds as signs instead of realistic elements.)
This way of looking at the history of painting is especially fruitful for the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but it is also valuable for looking at such junctures as the nineteenth century. For example, Damisch invokes Ruskin and Turner, who carry out both in theory and in practice a revision of the conditions of appearances of the cloud as a landscape feature. Even for the twentieth century, he has illuminating things to say about how his reading of cloud applies to the painters Leger and Batthus. In short, Damisch achieves a brilliant and systematic demonstration of a concept of semiotic interaction that touches some of the most crucial features of the Western art tradition.

Drawing on Freudian theories of sexuality and Kant's conception of the beautiful, French art historian Hubert Damisch considers artists as diverse as Raphael, Picasso, Watteau, and Manet to demonstrate that beauty has always been connected to ideas of sexual difference and pleasure. Damisch's tale begins with the judgment of Paris, in which Paris awards Venus the golden apple and thus forever links beauty with desire. The casting of this decision as a mistake--in which desire is rewarded over wisdom and strength--is then linked to theories of the unconscious and psychological drives. In his quest for an exposition of the beautiful in its relation to visual pleasure, Damisch employs what he terms "analytic iconology," following the revisions and repetitions of the motif of the judgment through art history, philosophy, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. This translation brings an important figure of the French art historical tradition to Anglo-American audiences.

From Noah's Ark to Diller + Scofidio's "Blur" Building, a distinguished art historian maps new ways to think about architecture's origin and development. Trained as an art historian but viewing architecture from the perspective of a "displaced philosopher," Hubert Damisch in these essays offers a meticulous parsing of language and structure to "think architecture in a different key," as Anthony Vidler puts it in his introduction. Drawn to architecture because it provides "an open series of structural models," Damisch examines the origin of architecture and then its structural development from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. He leads the reader from Jean-Francois Blondel to Eugene Viollet-le-Duc to Mies van der Rohe to Diller + Scofidio, with stops along the way at the Temple of Jerusalem, Vitruvius's De Architectura, and the Louvre. In the title essay, Damisch moves easily from Diderot's Encylopedie to Noah's Ark (discussing the provisioning, access, floor plan) to the Pan American Building to Le Corbusier to Ground Zero. Noah's Ark marks the origin of construction, and thus of architecture itself. Diderot's Encylopedie entry on architecture followed his entry on Noah's Ark; architecture could only find its way after the Flood. In these thirteen essays, written over a span of forty years, Damisch takes on other histories and theories of architecture to trace a unique trajectory of architectural structure and thought. The essays are, as Vidler says, "a set of exercises" in thinking about architecture.