The methodological approaches of Colin Rowe: the multifaceted, intellectual connoisseur at La Tourette

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In England, the establishment of art history as a professional discipline was consolidated by the foundation of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932, and the Warburg Library's move from Hamburg to London the following year due to the rise of the Nazi régime; a political situation that caused the emigration of German-speaking scholars such as Fritz Saxl, Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Wittkower. Colin Rowe, an influential member of the second generation of historians of modern architecture, was educated as part of this cultural milieu in the postwar period, studying at the Warburg Institute in London. In the ‘Addendum 1973’ to his first published article ‘The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa’ (1947), Rowe acknowledged the Wölfflinian origins of his analysis – Saxl and Wittkower had studied under Heinrich Wölfflin – and the validity of his inherited German formal methods. This assumption, in the opinion of one of Rowe's students, the architectural historian and critic Anthony Vidler, indicated the ‘still pervasive force of the late nineteenth century German school of architectural history in England in the years after the Second World War’.