Northern Imaginative Antiquarianism: The Dismembered Column as Relic and Tool

Abstract

For many Northern Europeans, the overwhelming source about architecture – antique or modern ‐ was prints. German, Dutch, French, English, Swedish, Russian, and Czech translations of Serlio or Palladio all appeared before 1800. What such prints, in league with loose entablature engravings, often “systematized” was the idea that no purist canon of the classical orders existed, only signature, localized version of ornament. Unlike certain Italians, that is, the question besetting many northerners was not how to understand physical bits strewn around them; but to make sense of the books that were flooding their cities. Such images functioned as – and changed the idea of – architectural tools, often drawing upon a late‐medieval poetics of sacral fragmentation.