This book offers the first interpretation of Spanish architectural patronage in Naples during the reigns of Philip II and Philip III of Spain. The principal architecutral protagonists are Domenico Fontana (1543-1607) and his son Giulio Cesare (1580-1627), whose projects in Naples and Spain are set within the context of the cultural politics of the Monarquia Hispànica. Rather than being seen as resistant to habsburg imperialism, Naples (the most loyal city) actually participated, on a number of different levels, in the imperial program of the monarchy. While focusing on engineering and secular architecture, this book also takes related projects into account, such as commissions for major public sculptures and one fresco cycle, as well as the restoration and reuse of existing monuments and spaces. In this book, Sabina de Cavi discusses the evolution of Neapolitan architecture in ca. 1600 in relation to Rome, Palermo and Madrid, and in doing so casts light on the local process behind public commissions, and suggests a tentative explanation for the delayed flowering of Baroque architecture in Naples.

This book investigates the Casa de Montejo and considers the role of the building’s Plateresque façade as a form of visual rhetoric that conveyed ideas about the individual and communal cultural identities in sixteenth-century Yucatán. C. Cody Barteet analyzes the façade within the complex colonial world in which it belongs, including in multicultural Yucatán and the transatlantic world. This contextualization allows for an examination of the architectural rhetoric of the façade, the design of which visualizes the contestations of autonomy and authority occurring among the colonial peoples.

These essays constitute the first radical reassessment since the nineteenth century of the role of architecture as an expression of lordship and status among Scottish secular and ecclesiastical elites in the period c.1124–c.1650. These studies of the architectural patronage of particular families or groups explore how the nobility operated socially and economically, as well as politically, in the organisation and structure of lordship throughout the medieval and renaissance periods. The contributors draw on the traditions and strengths of Scottish genealogical, archaeological and art-historical enquiry to illustrate key themes, which include: family or kindred styles in building on a local, regional or national level; builders' or patrons' motives; the scale and use of the buildings; and ascertainable changes in function, purpose and attitude.

Philip II of Spain was a major patron of the arts, best known for his magnificent palace and royal mausoleum at the Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial. However, neither the king’s monastery nor his collections fully convey the rich artistic landscape of early modern Iberia. In this book, Laura Fernández-González examines Philip’s architectural and artistic projects, placing them within the wider context of Europe and the transoceanic Iberian dominions. Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire investigates ideas of empire and globalization in the art and architecture of the Iberian world during the sixteenth century, a time when the Spanish Empire was one of the largest in the world. Fernández-González illuminates Philip’s use of building regulations to construct an imperial city in Madrid and highlights the importance of his transformation of the Simancas fortress into an archive. She analyzes the refashioning of his imperial image upon his ascension to the Portuguese throne and uses the Hall of Battles in El Escorial as a lens through which to understand visual culture, history writing, and Philip’s kingly image as it was reflected in the funeral commemorations mourning his death across the Iberian world. Positioning Philip’s art and architectural programs within the wider cultural context of politics, legislation, religion, and theoretical trends, Fernández-González shows how design and images traveled across the Iberian world and provides a nuanced assessment of Philip’s role in influencing them. Original and important, this panoramic work will have a lasting impact on Philip II’s artistic legacy. Art historians and scholars of Iberia and sixteenth-century history will especially value Fernández-González’s research.

In Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before, during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents negotiated imperial encroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries. From Mahajanga’s hilltop palace to the alluvial depths of its cesspools, the city’s spaces were domains for ideological debates between rulers and subjects, French colonizers and indigenous Malagasy peoples, and Comorian migrants and Indian traders. In these spaces, Mahajanga’s residents expressed competing moral theories about power over people and the land. The built world was also where varying populations reckoned with human, ancestral, and ecological pasts and laid present and future claims to urban belonging. Migrants from nearby Comoros harnessed built forms as anticipatory devices through which they sought to build their presence into the landscape and transform themselves from outsiders into "children of the soil" (zanatany). In tracing the centrality of Mahajanga’s architecture to everyday life, Rijke-Epstein offers new ways to understand the relationships between the material world, the more-than-human realm, and the making of urban life.

The purpose of this book is to draw attention to the sites of life, politics and culture where current and past generations of the Islamic world have made their mark. Unlike many previous volumes dealing with the city in the Islamic world, this one has been expanded not only to include snapshots of historical fabric, but also to deal with the transformation of this fabric into modern and contemporary urban entities. Salma Khadra Jayyusi was awarded Cultural Personality of the Year by the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for her profound contribution to Arabic literature and culture in 2020. The paperback edition of The City in the Islamic World was published to celebrate the occasion.