This book is unused and unread. It has minor cosmetic imperfections such as scuffing, creasing and fading.

This book cannot be discounted further.

Villa Madama, Raphael's late masterwork of architecture, landscape, and decoration for the Medici popes, is a paradigm of the Renaissance villa. The creation of this important, unfinished complex provides a remarkable case study for the nature of architectural invention. Drawing on little known poetry describing the villa while it was on the drawing board, as well as ground plans, letters, and antiquities once installed there, Yvonne Elet reveals the design process to have been a dynamic, collaborative effort involving humanists as well as architects. She explores design as a self-reflexive process, and the dialectic of text and architectural form, illuminating the relation of word and image in Renaissance architectural practice. Her revisionist account of architectural design as a process engaging different systems of knowledge, visual and verbal, has important implications for the relation of architecture and language, meaning in architecture, and the translation of idea into form.

• Considers Renaissance architectural design in a broad social and cultural context, showing how the dialectical practice of invention in this cultural matrix engaged architectural design in larger, self-reflexive discourses about the relative powers of word and image to envision new things, and the poietic processes of making them
• Works across traditional disciplinary boundaries of art and architectural history and literary studies, allowing a new and holistic perspective on Raphael's work, and a rare portrait of intellectual culture and creative processes in Leonine Rome
• Provides a new critical edition and facing-page translation by Nicoletta Marcelli of Francesco Sperulo's long neo-Latin poem describing the Medici villa, with a gloss by the author, enabling this important poem to find a different place in art- and architectural-historical studies, opening up a new Renaissance genre of literature as a tool of architectural design