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.
Courses
Publications
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Building the Kingdom: Giannozzo Manetti on the Material and Spiritual Edifice
By Christine Smith
July 2006
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Before and After the End of Time: Architecture and the Year 1000
Edited by Christine Smith
August 2001
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St. Bartholomew's Church in the City of New York
By Christine Smith
January 1998
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Retrospection: Baccio Bandinelli and the Choir of Florence Cathedral
By Christine Smith and George L. Legendre
February 1997
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Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400-1470
By Christine Smith
February 1992
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Baptistery of Pisa
By Christine Smith
January 1978