Ideal Cities (Renaissance)

Abstract

Renaissance ideal cities are an enduring construct that tended to express, through ideals of order and symmetry, the centralized authority of princely rulers, and by the later sixteenth century combined with this military functions as fortified new towns. The symmetry that defined ideal city designs of the early Renaissance, like the fortified cities of the following centuries, articulated in visual terms a totalizing vision of centralized authority, although their formal qualities had a lasting appeal that informed urban design solutions into the twentieth century.