Daniel Savoy
Modeling Architecture, the Body, and the Soul in Renaissance Italy
2023-2024 (September - December)
Biography
Daniel Savoy is Professor of Art History and Digital Media Art at Manhattan College. He is the author of the award-winning book, Venice from the Water: Architecture and Myth in an Early Modern City (Yale, 2012), and the edited volume, The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review (Brill, 2017). His articles have appeared in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, The Renaissance Quarterly, and World Art among other journals. In addition to serving as Department Chair (since 2016), he is the Director of his institution’s Venice Study Abroad Program as well as the international digital initiative, Virtual Venice (virtualvenice.org).
Project Summary
As the fall 2023 Digital Humanities Fellow at I Tatti, Daniel is working on a 3D modeling and visualization project launched in conjunction with his forthcoming monograph, Architecture of the Soul: Buildings, Cities, and the Construction of Life in Early Modern Italy. The goal of the project is to create laser-generated, high-density point clouds and BIM models of the main built environments under discussion in the book, which will be displayed both in the text and on an accompanying website. As printed illustrations, the models will provide the first visual reconstructions of numerous little known and difficult to access architectural spaces across the Italian peninsula, including sewage canals, ventilation ducts, tunnels, stairways, and wells. In digital form, they will offer 360-degree maneuverability, animations, and Mixed Reality capability, making it possible to illustrate kinetic architectural processes that are critical to the argument of the book yet impossible to capture with static images. This enhanced content promises not only to strengthen the book but also provide a model for the integration of digital media in future art-historical publications.