The sixteenth-century painter, architect, and print designer Hans Vredeman de Vries (1526–1609) has not been ignored by recent art history. Two exhibitions—in Antwerp and Schloss Brake—in 2002, an international symposium in 2004, with catalogues, proceedings, and other publications and detailed studies of parts of his oeuvre, edited by Heiner Borggrefe, Piet Lombaerde, and others, have secured the artist’s firm position in the current view of northern Renaissance art history. Christopher P. Heuer’s The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries, published on the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, is the first book-length study of Vredeman in English. It aims to consider Vredeman’s various activities as “a sequence of roles that appear masterful only in retrospect, enacted for different patrons, under different circumstances, in different locales” (213). The book proceeds in a more or less chronological order, skillfully evaluating and reconsidering scholarship, and deepening an understanding of the artist’s work and decisions. Heuer is specifically interested in tracing those aspects of Vredeman’s work and career that “occurred in the cracks between the practices of painting, printing, and building” (3). It was in these marginal areas that a new kind of artist could emerge who, by making full use of print culture and his contemporaries’ interest in architectural representations, could become a successful architect specializing in building images rather than creating buildings.

The book consists of six chapters, divided into two parts, with the first introducing Vredeman, his early architectural prints and activities in Antwerp, and his volumes on architecture and ornament. The second part concentrates on his wanderings as a painter and designer in Prague, Wolfenbüttel, and Danzig, his opinions in later life, and concludes with a detailed discussion of his publication Perspective (1604/05). Heuer relates Vredeman’s “empty” architectural perspectives to the disfiguring of religious sculpture, but also explains how in the aftermath of iconoclasm many artists were prompted to find a new clientele, reconsider their subject matter, and even reinvent their art or handicraft. Vredeman succeeded in making intelligent and varied use of the printing press, taking the large-scale reproduction and repetition of forms as starting points, and making the idea of rehearsal an act of creation in its own right.

The first chapter quickly moves from Vredeman’s paintings to images and their relation to the built environment. Invention was compromised, and complicated, by questions raised by the success of reproducible—printed—design. In a Europe divided over questions of belief, Vredeman’s architectural prints introduced non-controversial subject matter that was welcomed enthusiastically by a growing number of consumers. The processes of drawing and engraving remained separate, but their relation changed the concept of artistic invention and would often complicate claims of authorship, as artists, engravers, and publishers discovered. Architectural prints like Vredeman’s represented a state between drawing and building, a design that needed the appropriation by the architect to become reality in the built environment. In Architectura (1577) Vredeman took another shot at Pieter Coecke van Aelst’s earlier unsuccessful attempt to differentiate between designers and builders by articulating a parallel with the rhetorical division between theory and practice, and Vitruvian ratiocinatio and fabrica. Heuer’s understanding, “that the domain of the Dutch architect might be the domain of the image, or more precisely, the domain of images” (45; emphasis in original), is in line with recent reevaluations of text-image relationships in architectural treatises by Robin Evans, Mario Carpo, Werner Oechslin, and Alina Payne that take architectural evolution on paper much more seriously. Vredeman was not simply an architect making pictures of buildings, but was constantly inventing through the act of repetition, and in Scenographiae (1560), making perspective itself a component of his vocabulary of patterns.

In chapter 2, Vredeman’s early Antwerp work and his idealized perspectival cityscapes are understood as innovative ways of perceiving the rapidly growing and changing city as a structure, a stage of human drama, organized and upheld by laws, restrictions, and codes that regulated human conduct. With prints of his designs Vredeman offered the means to architecturally transform Antwerp’s reality; ideal views with a “perspective thrust,” they were cleared of anything that might be considered disturbing in order to appeal to city officials and propertied amateurs. In a period when Gilbert van Schoonebeke designed more than two hundred new streets, and construction work would have made Antwerp look like an enormous building site, Vredeman “pictured the idea of city space as a quilt of possessable patches, a new form of transferable good” (72), while rendering the city much more serene and majestic on paper than it was in reality.

Vredeman’s work was to a large extent constructed with the aid of rhetoric and its principles of persuasive communication. Heuer situates Vredeman in the context of Antwerp culture, as an artist who was connected with influential publishing houses and involved in the creation of festival architecture for a number of occasions. Vredeman, together with a number of local publishers, was a member of the rhetoric chamber “De Violier,” an association that may have promoted the idea that architecture was analogous to a well-structured text and that it should appeal to, and inform, its audiences. Thus, readers learn that in his prints Vredeman tried to give shape to the idea of a city at a time of political, social, cultural, and demographical unrest, when urban planning had not yet emerged as a coherent discipline, let alone a practice with standardized methods of representation and techniques of visualization.

At points, fruitful insights into the worlds of Vredeman are discussed in philosophical terms. However, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, and their subjective readings of architecture seem not to be overly relevant for understanding Vredeman, even if his work might owe part of its recent popularity to its supposed autonomous character. Investigating Vredeman’s ornamental language and his preference for grotesques, Heuer draws on the writings of Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Riegl, and Adolf Loos to discuss the unease of art history with ornament, and the concept of the supplement or “Parergon.” This creates a somewhat anachronistic and modern “frame” around a very engaging investigation of the often still badly understood role of ornament in early modern architecture, as an un-detachable member and necessary element of “menghinge,” mixing license and decorum.

Vredeman’s many patterns and grotesques show him judiciously navigating between tradition and invention, revealing an accomplished talent in design. The classical orders of architecture became essays in an aesthetic of recombination for Vredeman, who translated ornaments to make them suitable to modern circumstances, with invention guided by careful selection. Although classical rhetoric could provide a legitimating basis for this practice, so could calligraphy, as in the traditional art of illuminated and decorated manuscripts. Printing enabled the rapid spread of new and personalized ornamental designs that represented a specific “manner” and prepared the way for the grotesque—that deliberately confusing brand of ornament located somewhere between the traditional and the innovative, between ancient Rome and the designer’s invention, a mixture “as an ongoing activity instead of a set of inviolable rules” (118)—which as a model in print could easily fuse with local tradition. In this way, Vredeman’s work was often closer to actual building practices in Northern Europe than other sixteenth-century treatises that hardly ever looked beyond the amateur’s or gentleman’s library.

At the brilliant court of Rudolf II in Prague, and later in Danzig, Vredeman’s experiments with the counterfeiting of distance, along with his essays in the portrayal of real and fictive space, developed into a specialty, which would culminate in the publication of his final book, the two-volume Perspective. By closely studying the contemporary vocabulary used to describe Vredeman, and the use of “doorsien” and “perspect” in Karel Van Mander’s biography, Heuer convincingly suggests that Van Mander based his narrative on a letter supplied by the artist himself, illustrating the level of self-promotion the artist employed throughout his career. Like perspective itself, Vredeman’s Perspective has often been misinterpreted or considered an aberration, condemned for its lack of accurateness and verisimilitude rather than appreciated for its ability to combine things near and far into an ordered visual composition. In bringing perspective to the printing press in more than seventy illustrations, Vredeman added a lavish but hybrid publication—part designs, part text, and part theory—to the already vast literature on the subject, but without showing any real interest in the exactness sought after by geometers and mathematicians. Following Leon Battista Alberti and Albrecht Dürer, Vredeman may have begun the work as yet another manual for painters, but ultimately produced an unprecedented work of art on architecture instead of optics, aesthetically constructing spaces and evoking multiple moving planes instead of bodies and solids, thus creating new worlds within the flat foliages of the book.

Heuer’s narrative is constructed with a comprehensive use of art-historical hermeneutics and contains many theoretical, philosophical, and historiographical digressions that inspired the argument and the initial research questions. They demonstrate Heuer’s mastery of the material, but sometimes also distract the reader rather than emphasizing the new and often thought-provoking interpretations of known facts and old readings, or elaborating on their consequences for the study of early modern art and architecture in different European regions and international cultural networks.