Transient Cities. Representations of Urban Destructions in European Iconography in the Fourtheenth to Seventeenth Centuries

This essay is the introductory chapter of a book collecting the results of a joint research project on European iconography of architectural and urban ruination coordinated by Marco Folin. By exploring a wide range of sources – from the representations of urban destructions in late medieval Italian painting to the first analytical maps of London after the Great Fire − the article aims to investigate the evolution of the idea of town underlying the governance of urban space in early modern Europe.