The 'serliana' (Venetian window) is the feature which best sums up the history of western architecture and whose prestige has been the most long-lasting, spanning from late Hellenism to the extravagance of the postmodern period. This book surveys its constructional, functional and symbolic history from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, analysing its role in architectural experimentation and debates, antiquarian studies and the image of power in European art through countless examples.0Despite originally being associated with authority, sacred architecture and power, the Serliana continued to be a paradigmatic model in western art following the fall of the Roman Empire. During the Renaissance the debate between ancients and moderns developed into a productive dispute between scholarship, material reality, creativity and personal interest which involved, among others, Bramante, Raphael?s workshop and the Fabric of Peter?s and was disseminated through the treatises of Serlio and Palladio. In Spain innovations were introduced in parallel with the international development of the Serliana, it began to spread worldwide, and designs materialised that were never built in Italy. The Baroque period subsequently emphasised the theatrical aspect already explored by Mannerism and in the eighteenth century, when the old theocratic and imperial ideals had almost died out, Piranesi and Ledoux offered new utopias expressing their shared admiration for Antiquity through elements such as the Serliana.

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