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On the Use and Limitations of Architectural Literature: Renaissance and Gothic in the Work of Bonifaz Wolmut

Bonifaz Wolmut (c. 1500-1579) served as the the Habsburg court architect in Prague in the second half of the sixteenth century. There he designed major imperial commissions after illustrations from Serlio’s Terzo libro while simultaneously building a vast Gothic vault in Prague Castle. Further, although the architect’s extensive personal library survives, it contains no books on architecture. Wolmut’s explicit use of Serlio as a model, rejection of the architectural ‘rules’ proposed in published architectural theory, and his innovative designs in both the Classical and Gothic styles offer an opportunity to observe the interaction between a Renaissance architect and the literature that was ostensibly intended to instruct him in his own profession. This paper uses the case of Bonifaz Wolmut to examine how mature, guild-trained architects responded to these books, and why the use of Gothic persisted in the later sixteenth century in Central Europe.