Existing scholarship on the fifteenth-century Florentine church of San Lorenzo celebrates the church's visual clarity and grounds that aesthetic assessment in proportions, drawing on the prevailing interpretive model that Rudolf Wittkower established in formative writings of the 1940s and 1950s.1 Setting out to understand these proportions through measured surveys of both San Lorenzo and Filippo Brunelleschi's subsequent design of Santo Spirito, Matthew A. Cohen discovered a proportional system different from the one Wittkower had suggested. In this carefully argued study, Cohen sets forth intriguing new proposals regarding the chronology of San Lorenzo's construction, its design attribution, and, more broadly, the period's mathematical culture and the place of...
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December 2016
