Elizabeth J. Petcu’s research and teaching examine the intersections of visual and scientific inquiry in the artistic and architectural culture of the early modern world. Methodologically, her work interrogates how investigative practices and beliefs concerning nature are formed and mediated through images. Petcu is an expert in the art and architectural culture of northern Europe and colonial Latin America and their entanglements with the natural sciences. By scrutinizing the rapport between the research practices of art, architecture, and science at the start of the modern period and within colonial contexts, her research exposes the deep historical conditions of our current epistemological and environmental predicaments.

Petcu’s book, The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation (Cambridge University Press, 2024), probes the most important architectural treatise of the German Renaissance, the Architectura (1593-1598) of Straßburg artist Wendel Dietterlin the Elder (c. 1550-1599) to establish how architectural images became platforms for modern science. The book details the ways in which artistic techniques of observation and description infiltrated the architectural culture of sixteenth-century northern Europe and its colonial contact zones via drawing, print, and decorative arts, and examines the apogee of that trend in the nearly 200 richly figural etchings Dietterlin devised and executed for his Architectura. The Science of the Architectural Image further reveals through works like Dietterlin’s Architectura how architecture’s appropriation of artistic techniques such as drawing on paper, printmaking, and nature study made architecture a hotbed of empiricism, or the idea that knowledge derives from experience. It argues that the rise of empirical practices of image-making in the architectural culture of northern Europe and Habsburg colonies such as Peru set architecture in dialogue with the visual investigations of early science (natural philosophy), a shift that proved instrumental to the emergence of architecture and science as the mutually enmeshed fields we know today. 

Petcu’s second book, Albrecht Dürer, Measurement, and Uncertainty, examines how Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer (1475-1528) transformed measurement in art from a tool for picturing knowledge into an instrument for probing uncertainty. Drawing on paintings, drawings, and writing by Dürer and his contemporaries, the book reconciles prevalent yet clashing interpretations of measurement in Renaissance art: on the one hand, as a

source of certainty, and on the other, a wellspring of doubt. Combining methods from the histories of art, architecture, mathematics, science, and philosophy as well as the philosophy of science, it exposes how Dürer’s art came to clarify nuances of metric incertitude. In so doing, it revises our framework for evaluating the visual cultures of measurement in early modern Europe.

A third book project, Nature and Imitation in Early Modern Architecture, will probe how early modern architects in Europe and its colonial contact zones—steeped in emerging geological, botanical, zoological, and anatomical sciences—formed modern concepts of nature and thus present beliefs about how humanity shapes the natural world.

Petcu’s research has appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and 21: Inquiries Into Art, History, and the Visual—Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur, as well as numerous edited volumes and conference proceedings. Petcu joined the University of Edinburgh following two years as a Wissenschaftliche Assistentin in the Institut für Kunstgeschichte of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, after receiving her Ph.D. from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University in 2015. Her research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Society of Architectural Historians, and Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies). She has delivered invited lectures for the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Essex, the University of Basel, MIT, the University of Michigan, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, and the University of Edinburgh (prior to her appointment there).