"Suspended in Admiration": Reconsidering the Discourse on Magnificent Architecture in Late Medieval Italy
(2026) Viator : Medieval and Renaissance studies — Vol. 56, n° 2, p. 177-198 (2026)
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- This article reconsiders the role of magnificence in late medieval political thinking, focusing on how the built environment was thought to evoke authority through its capacity to inspire admiration. The study traces the intellectual roots for these ideas back to scholastic commentaries of Aristotle’s Politics. Commentators such as Albert the Great and Giles of Rome expanded upon Aristotle’s insights, arguing that awe induced by magnificence could suspend the viewer in admiration, leading to reverence and support for political rule. In his De regimine principum, Giles applied these ideas on the protective role of magnificence specifically to princely residences. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century mirrors for princes testify how widespread the notion became that a magnificent residence leads to authority. Through a close reading of Leonardo Bruni’s Laudatio Florentinae urbis, and by examining manuscript circulation of Giles’s De regimine principum in Florence, this article further investigates how this discourse on magnificent architecture—initially formulated in and for courtly contexts—was absorbed into civic humanist settings such as fifteenth-century Florence, where magnificence was claimed to project collective power as the magnificence of the cityscape was thought to evoke admiration that sustains domination.
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Dijkdrent, M., & De Raedt, N. (2026). “Suspended in Admiration”: Reconsidering the Discourse on Magnificent Architecture in Late Medieval Italy. Viator : Medieval and Renaissance studies, 56(2), 177-198. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.154719 (Original work published 2026)