Eleonora Pistis

17th- and 18th-Century European Art, Architecture, and Urbanism; Antiquarianism; Collecting
Ph.D., University IUAV of Venice, 2012

Eleonora Pistis was trained as both an architectural historian and an architect at the IUAV in Venice, Italy, where she earned her PhD in the History of Architecture and Urban Planning. Before coming to Columbia she was the Scott Opler Research Fellow in Architectural History at Worcester College, Oxford (2011-2014), and Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America (Spring 2015). From 2015 to 2016, she was Visiting Assistant Professor in Art History at Grinnell College in Iowa, where she taught courses on early modern European architecture and architectural theory. She has also been Michael Sovern Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (Summer 2019); a Getty Scholar (Spring and Summer 2022); a Visiting Scholar at the Norwegian Institute in Rome (Fall 2022); a Scholar-in-Residence at the Nederlands Interuniversitair Kunsthistorisch Instituut in Florence (Fall 2022); and a Guest Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz–Max-Planck-Institut (Summer 2024). She has also received fellowships from the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund, the Paul Mellon Centre in London, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

Pistis is an early modern historian who studies the significance of art and architecture as epistemic instruments in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her scholarship addresses how the study of art and architecture contributed to the accumulation of academic knowledge in universities; how it led to the design and production of new spaces for scholarly inquiry; and how it underwrote the antiquarian construction of historical knowledge. Her interests extend across the fluid boundaries of the European Republic of Letters and of the Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Italy, Britain, and France. In both her research and her teaching, Pistis applies a range of skills and methods of investigation, from analyses of paper, bindings, drawings and prints to archival research and from theory to surveys of architectural structures. To her rigorous training in the details of art and architectural history, she adds frameworks from other fields, especially the histories of knowledge, scientific observation, antiquarianism, books, museums, and cartography.

Pistis has published extensively and taught on a range of topics: the architecture of institutions devoted to learning (libraries, museums, archives, colleges, and universities); the production, circulation, use, and storage of architectural drawings, prints, and treatises; history of collecting; and studies of ancient Mediterranean art and architecture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a pivotal period for the future formation of the discipline of archaeology and the institutionalization of the teaching of architecture.

Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (2024) is Pistis’s first book. What is architectural knowledge and how can we come to an understanding of it? To what extent can architectural knowledge actually shape built architecture? Conversely, how can built space shape and host the creation and accumulation of knowledge? Universities are the paradigmatic spaces for exploring the intense entanglements of knowledge and architecture. The early eighteenth-century University of Oxford offers unparalleled insights into this relationship. No other university at this time underwent a comparable building boom. In just three decades, Oxford witnessed the construction of twenty colleges, a university press, a central library, a laboratory, and numerous new interior and urban spaces linked by streets, paths, gates, and squares. Simultaneously, the university became a key hub for the cultivation of architectural studies, well before this discipline was formally included in the curricula of European universities. These studies were nourished by the collection of ever-growing numbers of architectural books, prints, and drawings in library collections. Significantly, such designing and studying involved one of the most intriguing architects of the period, Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736). Alongside master masons, librarians, and men of letters, Hawksmoor used Oxford’s urban fabric and libraries as an extraordinary laboratory for architectural experimentation. In the process, architectural knowledge on paper and architecture in stone was profoundly reshaped. Architecture of Knowledge aims to address the unity of all the architectural activities that took place both inside libraries and in urban space, blurring the boundaries between these domains. By using the broad framework of “knowledge,” the study offers a new model for a history of architecture that goes beyond questions of form, style, and singular design decisions. Rather than focusing on the history of single buildings or on a corpus of drawings for an “Unbuilt Oxford,” this investigation reconstructs for the first time the intensity of architectural studies and academic experimentation that surrounded the creation of buildings. At the same time, it traces forgotten links between scholars and practitioners, collective and private interests, institutional hierarchies and informal exchanges, and philological study and artistic creation. Thus, the book demonstrates the equal contributions of scholars and non-academics to university buildings that were designed to contain and enable the creation of knowledge. It also examines the small and large scales of university architectures and their urban environments, showing how they were interlocking spaces of various forms of knowledge.

Pistis’s current book project is provisionally titled Fragments of History: Art, Architecture and Antiquarianism in Scipione Maffei’s Republic of Letters. This is a study that investigates how material, visual, and textual fragments—both received and created—were used in the making of artistic (and especially architectural) knowledge and history within the Republic of Letters between the end of the seventeenth century and the mid-eighteenth century. In doing so, it aims to understand the clash between a way of learning in which physical observation as well as objectivity were considered crucial, and the often physical impossibility of directly observing the object of study—if not through fragments.

Professor Pistis is also working on an edited volume provisionally titled Architecture and Fragmented Pasts.

Book

Architecture of Knowledge: Hawksmoor and Oxford (London/Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2024), 320 pp.

Edited Book

Architecture and Fragmented Pasts (Leiden: Brill, 2026) [Forthcoming]

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“Knowledge on the ground: John Talman and the Representation of Floors on Paper”, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historian, 84.3 (2025) [Forthcoming]

“Architecture of Museums, Architecture of Books: From the Walls of Museums to the Pages of Musea,” Studi sul Settecento Romano (2024): 143-156

“The Thinkability of Architecture: Piranesi Without Images,” in Piranesi at 300, ed. by M. Bevilacqua and C. Hornsby (Rome: Artemide Edizioni 2023), 84-93 

“Con i piedi per terra: Talman e un frammento colorato,” in Per havermi sognato un gran tesoro, ed. by F. Lenzo (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2021), 137-142

“La biblioteca nella biblioteca: leggere con altri occhi,” Annali di Architettura, 31 (2020): 145-15

“Nicholas Hawksmoor: Creating the Image of a New Oxford,” Annali di Architettura, 26 (2016): 123-138

“ ‘Tironibus pro exemplo’: Henry Aldrich’s Elementa Architecturae and Architectural Education at Oxford,” in Traduire l’architecture: texte et image, un passage vers la création?, ed. by R. Carvais, J-S. Cluzel, and J. Hernu-Bélaud (Paris: Editions Picard, 2015), 145-159

“Storia e architettura: ‘vari frammenti d’antichità’ nell’incontro fra Filippo Juvarra e Scipione Maffei,” in Filippo Juvarra (1678-1736): architetto dei Savoia, architetto in Europa, 2 vols., II, ed. by E. Kieven and C. Ruggero (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2014), 65-77

“Verona,” in Il Settecento: storia dell’architettura nel Veneto, ed. by E. Kieven and S. Pasquali (Venice: Marsilio, 2012), 258-277

“La biblioteca di architettura secondo Scipione Maffei,” in I libri e l’ingegno: Studi sulla biblioteca dell’architetto (XV-XX secolo), ed. by G. Curcio, M. Nobile, and A. Scotti Tosini (Palermo: Edizioni Caracol, 2010), 115-122

“Chiswick House & Gardens,” Casabella, 797 (Jan. 2011): 36-47

“ ‘Farò con la copia’: una raccolta inedita di disegni d’architettura nella Bibliothèque Carré d’Art di Nîmes,” Pegasus: Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike, 11 (2009): 93-116

“Catalogo dei disegni,” Pegasus: Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike, 11 (2009): 117-207

“ ‘A più nobile simmetria per ornamento, e decoro della Città.’ Progetti e cantiere della Dogana di San Fermo a Verona,” Annali di Architettura, 21 (2009): 167-178