If Dietterlin’s Architectura epitomized the empirical turn in architectural image-making, the preparatory drawings for the treatise’s etchings show how such firsthand research in art, architecture, and science coalesced in drawing as a context for managing visual research. The 164 surviving Architectura drawings constitute an ideal case study for this phenomenon, for they stand as one of the largest corpora of sixteenth-century architectural drawings made north of the Alps. Dietterlin’s Architectura drawings are compared with drawings from Bramante and Raphael’s St. Peter’s workshop as well as botanical and geological drawings by natural historians Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, and other natural philosophers. The comparison reveals that, during the sixteenth century, tactics for making images and managing information – such as cutting, collaging, annotation, folding and counterproofing – came to inform both architectural and scientific drawing. Indeed, artists, architects, printers, and natural philosophers began to trade tactics of drawing as a means for managing visual information, thereby codeveloping empirical artistic techniques for producing knowledge. Through its drawings, Dietterlin’s Architectura promoted the new, empirical methodology of architectural image-making.

As architectural images became vehicles for natural philosophical thinking and practices, they also challenged certain conventions of architectural design. Dietterlin’s Architectura upended enduring principles of architectural naturalism and stability promoted in Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria by developing a genre of amorphous ornaments that resembled the internal forms of the human body while effacing the conventional distinctions between architectural structure and surface, interior and exterior. Dietterlin derived these corporeal ornaments from empirically oriented images such as anatomical flap prints and the woodcuts of Vesalius’s De corporis fabrica. As architects and artists in northern Europe adopted the Architectura’s anatomical ornaments, they revealed the limits of architectural naturalism. Paradoxically, the waxing role of architectural images as tools for studying and embodying nature destabilized architecture’s long-standing traditions of naturalistic design.

The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century revival of Vitruvius’s theory of architecture as art and science as well as the Reformation and the rise of print spurred a “figural turn” in architectural culture and the advent of a new genre of architectural images. In northern Europe, four institutions – artist guilds, publishers, masons’ lodges, and courts – acted as the key contexts for the figural turn. Artists began to specialize in forming architectural images, thereby making inroads into architectural professions and enriching the conventional practices of architectural design with new artistic and scientific modes of visual research. Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, façade paintings by Wendel Dietterlin and Hans Holbein the Younger, and printer Bernhard Jobin’s collaborations with builder Daniel Specklin to form scientifically informed architectural prints all exemplify the figural turn. So, too, did Dietterlin’s botanically rich mural for the Strasbourg Masons and Stonecutters, as well as an empirically conceived, microcosmic interior Dietterlin made for the Duke of Württemberg. By the middle of the sixteenth century, artists and natural philosophers had introduced empirical visual research methods to northern Europe’s developing culture of architectural images, setting the stage for Dietterlin’s seminal Architectura.

Dietterlin’s Architectura experienced perhaps its richest reception and afterlife among architectural sculptors in seventeenth-century colonial Peru. The façades of the Cathedral of Cuzco, Cuzco’s Jesuit Compañía church, and the monastery of the church of San Francisco in Lima all adapted motifs from Dietterlin’s Architectura to compare European and Indigenous Peruvian ideas about the stability of matter. Constructed in the wake of catastrophic earthquakes in the 1650s by Andean and other Indigenous sculptors, the façades reinterpret the structural, anatomical and material conceits of Dietterlin’s treatise to overturn its vision of architectural matter and especially stone as a materially unstable entity. Instead, they used the imagery of Dietterlin’s Architectura to promote an alternative ontology that underscored the transience of forms and structures while affirming the fixity of matter such as stone. Even as architectural images like those of the Architectura spurred artistic and natural philosophical discourses on a global scale, Peruvian artists adapted Dietterlin’s ideas to accommodate their own ontologies and philosophies of nature.

The legacy of Dietterlin’s Architectura is evident in the enduring role of empiricism across seventeenth-century architecture and natural philosophy. The Architectura served as the culmination of a breed of architectural image-making informed by the humanistic philosophy of learned empiricism, which intertwined the iconography of the fantastical and the occult with empirical ideas and practices. The decline of learned empiricism’s influence over architectural images is already anticipated in Dürer’s Melencolia I, which inspired the final etching of Dietterlin’s Architectura as an elegy to that tradition. Dietterlin’s contributions to the consolidation of architectural images as platforms for empirical scientific inquiry, as well as the waning of learned empiricism, resonated in seventeenth-century England and France, where architectural images eschewed symbolic representations for a novel visuality that foregrounded purely empirical evidence. Dietterlin’s Architectura catalyzed the new relationship between architecture and science by exposing the limits of humanist symbolism and the vast potential of architectural images as agents of empirical thinking, philosophy, and practices.

Dietterlin’s Architectura prints and the processes he used to form them engaged with sixteenth-century Central Europe’s robust culture of alchemy to transform the architectural image into a context of scientific inquiry. Formal and iconographic analyses of architectural etchings by Dietterlin, Wenzel Jamnitzer, and Hans Vredeman de Vries, in conversation with texts by alchemists Agrippa of Nettesheim and Paracelsus, reveal how architectural image-makers used etching’s mercurial, shapeshifting forms and the protean materiality of ornament not only to picture but also to activate alchemical theories and principles of empirical investigation. Dietterlin’s Architectura prints channelled etching’s alchemical dimensions, comparing the material and chemical transformations involved in architectural etching with the processes of transmutation studied in contemporary alchemical research. As is evident from the alchemical imagery that Dietterlin’s Architectura contributed to the court art of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, the Architectura established architectural images as contexts of alchemical thinking in the years around 1600. In sum, the transformative structures of Dietterlin’s architectural etchings allowed architectural prints to become fora for natural philosophical inquiry.

Artists, natural philosophers, and architects in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century northern Europe regarded images and image-making as sources of knowledge. Diverse practitioners of art, architecture, and natural philosophy – from artists Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer to medical practitioner Walther Hermann Ryff and natural historian Conrad Gessner – used images to revive Vitruvius’s vision of architecture as both art and science, for instance in collaborating to complete the Strasbourg Astronomical Clock in 1574. Architectural ornament came to act as a model for visualizing nature’s regular forms and systems, playing a vital role in the revival of such Vitruvian interdisciplinarity. That process, in turn, prompted early modern architects and designers of architectural ornament to combine artistic and scientific techniques of visual research, a phenomenon exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura treatise.

Dietterlin and other Renaissance artists supported an empirical approach to architectural image-making, one that emerged in treatises like Dietterlin’s Architectura. Such treatises became sites of conflict between rationalist and empirical mathematical traditions, with Dietterlin’s mixed arithmetic and geometrical design procedures marking a pivotal turn toward empiricism. The development of prints in architectural texts – from geometrical illustrations in masonic incunables to Dürer’s 1525 Lesson on Measurement and archaeological renderings by Sebastiano Serlio, Philibert De L’Orme, and Hans Blum – shows how Dietterlin and his contemporaries increasingly rejected received knowledge in favor of the empirical epistemology also practiced by period artists and natural philosophers. As architectural treatises shifted from rationalist to empirical approaches to architectural design, they aligned architecture with the empirical culture of Renaissance image-making exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura.