The Villa As Hegemonic Architecture

Here for the first time in a complete English translation is the now classic study of 1970 by Bentmann and Muller, which was one of the earliest and is still one of the most innovative examples of New Left art history. Because of its deft use of critical theory, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture is one of the best examples of how the thought of the Frankfurt School and the New Left relates to art history as a whole.
Bentmann and Muller mount a sustained but supple ideological critique of the values leading to the construction of the sixteenth-century Venetian villa. They are able to explicate how the villa's structural logic and overall configuration embodied resolutely patriarchal values and also how it was a formative force in the consolidation of incipient Venetian capitalism.
By locating the "villa ideology" in relation to the larger "city vs. country" conflict about which Marx, Raymond Williams, and others have written, Bentmann and Muller also perceptively address the Western concept of nature, with its attendant ecological consequences. In one of their most brilliant formulations, the authors compellingly show how all of the above factors led to the actual function of the Venetian villa as a "negative utopia," that is, as the ruling-class alternative to the more egalitarian "positive utopias" then being envisioned by Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella.
Illustrated with 24 full-page photographs and line drawings, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture will be of particular interest to those engaged in the study of art historical methods and of architectural history, especially of the Renaissance period.