"Renovatio" Reconsidered: Richard Krautheimer and the Iconography of Architecture

Abstract

In 1942 Richard Krautheimer (1897-1994) published two seminal articles, "Introduction to an ' Iconography of Mediaeval Architecture'" and "The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture. "This essay seeks to consider, within a broad historiographie context, the impact of these two articles, their ready assimilation in the field of medieval architectural studies, their later codification in Krautheimer's Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308 (1980), and the manner in which they have shaped the field. A critical examination of these two articles together suggests that significant tensions operate between the conceptual formulation of the method and the realities of its application. Moreover, situating Krautheimer's work within its intellectual context reveals the influence of Warburg's approach, his symbiotic exchange with Panofsky, and, most significantly, clear traces of the imprint of his mentor, Paul Frankl. Krautheimer's theses, it is proposed, structure the development of the Western architectural tradition, situating the Carolingian revival as a conduit from classical architecture to the Renaissance and beyond. His project to order the development of architecture led to a compromising of the method for the structural concerns of the greater narrative. The later history of the ideas offered in 1942 locked the monuments of twelfthcentury Rome into a singular reading—a result completely at odds with the attractive fluidity of his method. It also has limited our scope of inquiry to a specific set of monuments, and thus it is with a return to the fluidity of his method that we can expand the parameters of the study of medieval Rome beyond those monuments of papal purview.

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