New technologies and ancient discoveries inspired a range of creative responses from early modern architects. This seminar explores the tools that architects used as a means to consider relationships between invention and tradition, craft and art, material and form, ancient and modern. We study works by Alberti, Serlio, Philibert de l’Orme, and Michelangelo, among others, and take a transnational and transmedial approach to the study of key developments in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architecture.