Biography

Niall Atkinson’s research and teaching focus on the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance with a particular focus on the experience of artistic environments and urban spaces in late medieval and Renaissance Italy. These fields of inquiry have led him into investigations of the soundscapes of Renaissance Florence and the role of the acoustic environment in the meaning of built space and the construction of social communities.

Project Summary

On the move, sometimes lost, and often battered by adverse weather conditions, early modern Mediterranean travelers responded to their experiences in unfamiliar places by developing techniques of describing the world they encountered as a series of proximate landscapes that integrated human design and natural systems. Over centuries, these vernacular practices produced a body of knowledge about the landscapes of the Mediterranean region that established them as a shared, if contested cultural phenomenon. In the fifteenth century such practices were integrated more formally into architectural thinking about designing ideal urban communities, creating the conditions for a more rationalized 'landscape" that would become the "territory" of modern state formation. This project argues that the seemingly ephemeral experiences of disoriented travelers in the early modern Mediterranean generated enduring forms of environmental knowledge that would fundamentally reshape Mediterranean approaches to landscape, territory, and architectural intervention. By attending to the relationship between embodied mobility and emergent territoriality, I demonstrate that the roots of the modern western spatial imagination lie not in abstract cartographic rationality, but in the contingent, weather-beaten encounters between wandering bodies and disaggregated environments.