Christine Smith

Robert C. and Marian K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History

Christine Smith is the Robert C. and Marion K. Weinberg Professor of Architectural History. She teaches courses in Late Antique, Medieval and Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture.

Christine Smith has published on Early Christian, Italian Romanesque, Italian Renaissance and Twentieth-Century American art and architecture; most of her publications are in the field of Tuscan Romanesque or on Leon Battista Alberti and Early Renaissance architectural theory.

Her most recent book is Eyewitness to Old St. Peter’s. Maffeo Vegio’s “Remembering the Ancient History of St.Peter’s Basilica in Rome” with Joseph O’Connor (Cambridge University Press, 2019) which makes available for the first time an English translation of Vegio’s text, accompanied by full-color digital reconstructions of the basilica as it appeared in Vegio’s day.

Her current project is a book-length study of the experience of wonder as it relates to architecture. Drawn entirely from the evidence of primary sources from the fifth century B.C. to the eighteenth century A.D, the work explores changing ideas about what the experience of wonder consists of, what the qualities of a “wonderful” building might be, and what role wonder in architecture played in human society at different times and places.