The Villa As Hegemonic Architecture

Here for the first time in a complete English translation is the now classic study of 1970 by Bentmann and Muller, which was one of the earliest, and still is one of the most innovative examples of New Left art history. Because of its deft use of critical theory, "The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture" is one of the best examples of how the thought of the Frankfurt School and the New Left relates to art history as a whole. Bentmann and Muller mount a sustained but supple ideological critique of the values leading to the construction of the sixteenth-century Venetian villa. They are able to explicate how the villa's structural logic and overall configuration embodied resolutely patriarchal values and also how it was a formative force in the consolidation of incipient Venetian capitalism.