Stereotomy

Sara Galletti is Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Her research focuses on the history and theory of architecture and urbanism in early modern Europe and the premodern Mediterranean. Her publications include Le Palais du Luxembourg de Marie de Médicis, 1611–1631 (Paris: Picard, 2012), “Stereotomy and the Mediterranean: Notes Toward an Architectural History” (Mediterranea. International Journal on the Transfer of Knowledge 2, 2017), and “Philibert de L’Orme’s Dome in the Chapel of the Châ teau d’Anet: The Role of Stereotomy” (Architectural History 64, 2021). She is currently working on a book project titled History of Stone Vaulting in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean: Practices, Theories, and Patterns of Knowledge Transfer.

Stereotomy, the art of cutting stones into particular shapes for the construction of vaulted structures, is an ancient art that has been practiced over a wide chronological span, from Hellenistic Greece to present-day Switzerland, and over a wide geographical area, centered in the Mediterranean but extending far beyond—from Cairo to Gloucester, from Yerevan to Braga, and into colonial Latin America. Yet the history of stereotomy is still largely based on nineteenth-century narratives about the art’s Syrian origins, its introduction to Europe via France and the Crusades, and the practice’s inherent Frenchness in the early modern period. In this talk, I will challenge these narratives with the help of a database and database-driven maps that consolidate evidence of stereotomic practice from the third century BCE to the sixteenth century CE and across the Mediterranean region. I will argue that the history of stereotomy is far more complex than what historians have assumed, and that much of it remains to be written.