Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College History of Art Faculty Research and Scholarship History of Art 2016 The mI age of a Building: Santa Maria in Trastevere Dale Kinney Bryn Mawr College,
[email protected] Let us know how access to this document benefits ouy . Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Custom Citation Kinney, Dale. 2016. "The mI age of a Building: Santa Maria in Trastevere." California Italian Studies 6.1. This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs/104 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. A Building’s Images: Santa Maria in Trastevere Dale Kinney Images If only because it has an inside and an outside, a building cannot be grasped in a single view. To see it as a whole one must assemble images: the sensory impressions of a beholder moving through or around it (perceptual images), the objectified views of painters and photographers (pictorial images), the analytical graphics of architects (analytical images), and now, virtual simulacra derived from laser scans, photogrammetry, and other means of digital measurement and representation. These empirical images can be overlaid by abstract or symbolic ones: themes or metaphors imagined by the architect or patron (intended images); the image projected by contingent factors such as age, condition, and location (projected images); the collective image generated by the interaction of the building’s appearance with the norms and expectations of its users and beholders; the individual (but also collectively conditioned) “phenomenological” images posited by Gaston Bachelard (psychological images), and many more.1 In short, the topic of a building’s images is one of almost unlimited complexity, not to be encompassed in a brief essay.