Vernacular Vignola

This study examines the presence of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s composite ornament in appendices to seventeenth-century European language translations of Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura (1562), focusing on the centrality of Michelangelo’s example to the manual’s mobility. An analysis of the unprecedented inclusion of his architecture in Italian versions of the Regola around 1600 and its manifold appearances in subsequent foreign reeditions demonstrates how publishers construed Michelangelo’s unconventional amalgam of the orders as the equivalent of a modern canon, as a model for architectural vernacularization, and as a visual counterpart to linguistic translation itself.