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BOOK
Form and Fortification:
The Art of Military Architecture in Renaissance Italy
Yale University Press, 2025
Urban fortifications were the most colossal artistic achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Celebrated sculptors, painters, and architects such as Michelangelo, Bramante, Leonardo, Francesco Paciotto, and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger collaborated with humanists and military commanders to design citadels and ramparts. Unprecedented in their geometric sophistication, constructional ambition, and physical grandeur, these monuments profoundly transformed the shape and experience of the built environment.
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Form and Fortification challenges the long-held assumption that military architecture was merely an instrument of warfare, restoring the practice to its central place at the nexus of sixteenth-century creative and cultural endeavors. Through a rich array of drawings, archival manuscripts, early printed sources, treatises, and realized works, this book traces the remarkable exchanges between fortification and other arenas of art, design, and engineering.
Charting these cross-disciplinary convergences, Morgan Ng develops the novel concept of “cognate technologies” to describe military and civil structures that coevolved and came to share striking formal affinities. Defensive earthworks bore the same shapes as terraced gardens; subterranean artillery chambers resembled artificial grottoes and hydraulic tunnels; and fortified passageways morphed into palatial galleries. The relationships among such cognate technologies, this book contends, are essential for understanding the interconnected nature of early modern artistic invention.
ARTICLES, ESSAYS, REVIEWS
“‘Terremoti artificiali’. La sismologia aristotelica nella guerra sotterranea del Rinascimento”
in Material World: The Intersection of Art, Science, and Nature in Ancient Literature and its Renaissance Reception, ed. Guy Hedreen, (Brill, 2021), 133–62.
“‘An impression made on the ground, or dust, or even paste or snow’: Mediums of Architectural Drawing at the Dawn of Paper-Based Design”
in Building with Paper: Rethinking the Materiality of Renaissance Architectural Drawings, ed. Cara Rachele and Dario Donetti, (Brepols, 2021), 15–37.
“Illuminated Sculpture and Visionary Experience at the Cardinal of Portugal Chapel in Florence”
in The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy, ed. Amy Bloch and Daniel Zolli, (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 239–58.
“Toward a Cultural Ecology of Architectural Glass in Early Modern Northern Europe”
in Art History 40 (2017), 496–525.
“New Light on Francesco De Marchi (1504–1576) and His Treatise on Fortification”
in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 58 (2016), 403–10.
“Collage, Architectural Inscription, and the Aesthetics of Iconoclasm in Jacques Perret’s Des fortifications et artifices (1601)”
in Renaissance Collage, ed. Juliet Fleming, William H. Sherman and Adam Smyth, special issue of Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45 (2015), 573–94.
“Milton’s Maps”
in Word & Image 29 (2014), 428–42.
“The Renaissance Superstructure”
in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (forthcoming).
“Gunpowder Grottoes: Seismology and the Subterranean Landscape in Renaissance Italy”
in The Three Natures: Gardens and Landscapes of the Italian Renaissance, ed. Anatole Tchikine, (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).