Elusive, enigmatic and inspirational by turns, Howard Burns was to become the leading scholar of Italian Renaissance architecture.[1] He achieved this through a determined and focused programme of self-education, mapping out his career to allow him to pursue a dedicated life of research and discovery. With generosity and kindness he passed on his learning and motivation to students and colleagues, expecting the same high standards from everyone else. His subtle sense of humour was combined with a deep seriousness of purpose. 

Born in Aberdeen on 10th June 1939, Burns (Fig.2) was proud of his Scottish ancestry but moved to England as a young child. His father was a medical doctor who became Professor of Physiology at London University. From his childhood onwards the young Burns was fascinated by old buildings, an interest nurtured during his schooldays at Westminster School, not only by the medieval abbey but also by an inspirational history teacher. One summer holiday he set off with a school friend to visit the Renaissance buildings of Italy, armed with a copy of Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949).[2] Later he was to become critical of this classic book, but in Burns’s youth it was a surprisingly effective cicerone. Burns graduated in history from King’s College, Cambridge, in 1961. During his undergraduate years he attended Nikolaus Pevsner’s weekly Slade lectures in architectural history and was inspired by the more left-wing members of the Faculty of History, such as Moses Finley and Geoffrey Elton, as well as by Denis Mack Smith’s lectures on Italian history. 

After graduation he went to Italy to begin his doctoral research into the study of Antiquity by Renaissance architects, focusing on Francesco di Giorgio, Baldassare Peruzzi and Pirro Ligorio; he had abandoned his original topic of ‘Baldassare Peruzzi as architect and his influence on Serlio’ after one year. His research was nominally supervised by Peter Murray, but he also enjoyed interactions with German-speaking colleagues in Italy, such as Konrad Oberhuber, Christoph Frommel and Tillman Buddensieg. In 1965 a written dissertation earned him a Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, although reports from Murray between 1967 and 1969 commented that his doctorate was likely to remain unfinished. A memo in the college’s archives from 1969 remarked ‘all I know is that HB has an enormously long record of perfectionist non-production’.[3] 

As a Fellow of King’s College, Burns began teaching in the Faculty of Architecture in Cambridge, where art history (then called Fine Arts) was only a higher-level option. As an undergraduate I took his course on ‘Bramante to Palladio’ in 1966–67, followed by ‘Quattrocento Architecture’ in 1967–68. Burns’s impeccable colour slides captivated us by bringing Italian sunshine and Renaissance elegance into the austere modernist lecture room. I still have my lecture notes, which consisted of largely unpublished material. Our long weekly essays were discussed in supervisions of two students at a time – the youthful Burns was a shy teacher, but I was fortunate to have an extroverted supervision partner, who kept the dialogue flowing. 

In 1969, at the instigation of Anthony Blunt, Burns was appointed to a lectureship at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he remained for the next seventeen years. There he delivered courses in the Italian Renaissance alongside John Shearman and Michael Hirst. His Master’s courses, in particular, produced a generation of exemplary architectural historians who learned the skills of analysing drawings in front of the originals, whether in the collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the British Museum or the Soane Museum in London, or on field trips to Italy. I became his first PhD student in 1969, but because of his nomadic habits our meetings were infrequent. 

During this period, his stature as a scholar was becoming more widely recognised. In 1974 he became a member of the academic board of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura ‘Andrea Palladio’ (CISA) in Vicenza, later to become its chairman from 1993. From 1977 to 1978 he held the Slade Professorship at Cambridge: students remember his lectures on Palladio as challenging but were rewarded by his penetrating insights into the architect’s mastery. As a result of his rapidly developing expertise, Burns was invited to catalogue the RIBA’s huge collection of Palladio drawings, but over the ensuing decades this project seemed to grow exponentially as he conceived ever more elaborate strategies for the work. The project fell victim to Burns’s obsessive perfectionism, and he was reluctant to accept collaboration from others.[4] 

In 1986 Burns accepted a position at Harvard University, where his former colleague John Shearman was already settled. There he enjoyed contacts with well-known architects at the Graduate School of Design, as well as with such art historians as Gülru Necipoğlu, who introduced him to Ottoman architecture and fuelled his interest in parallels between the work of Palladio and Mimar Sinan. At Harvard, another generation of students learned from his seemingly infinite knowledge, but Massachusetts was too far from Italy and in 1994 he accepted a position at the University of Ferrara. A year later he was elected to the late Manfredo Tafuri’s chair at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV). Burns had been a friend and admirer of Tafuri: although his own approach was less theoretical, they shared a left-wing perspective as well as formidable intelligence. At the invitation of Salvatore Settis, Burns ended his academic career at the Scuola Normale in Pisa from 2005, where he appreciated the interdisciplinarity and intellectual stimulation. After his retirement in 2010, he remained active as a scholar, writer and lecturer, especially through his close involvement in the activities of CISA. 

Burns’s research into Italian Renaissance architecture fell into three broad themes: the influence of Antiquity, architectural drawing and the life and work of Palladio, all often intertwined. In 1973 he made his first major contribution to the literature on Palladio when he catalogued the drawings for an exhibition in Vicenza. Two years later, he curated the revolutionary exhibition The Portico and the Farmyard (1975) in collaboration with two of his former students, Lynda Fairbairn and Bruce Boucher. This exhibition brought Palladio’s architecture to life through the inclusion of objects in a range of media: drawings, paintings, photographs, models, manuscripts, documents, printed books, maps, furniture, domestic objects, coins and medals, farm implements, drawing instruments, armour, clothing and building fragments, while the catalogue included engaging chapters on the cultural background of both Vicenza and Venice. 

Thanks to the enduring influence of Burns’s broad vision, it is hard now to remember how new this approach was in 1975. Over time the exhibition culture of CISA and its Palladio Museum has continued to develop these strategies for enlivening architecture in an informative and perceptive way through imaginative loans and stylish displays. One could single out, for example, the exhibitions Palladio nel Nord Europa (1999) or Andrea Palladio e la villa veneta da Petrarca a Carlo Scarpa (2005). On the five hundredth anniversary of Palladio’s birth in 2008, Burns, along with CISA director Guido Beltramini, co-curated the blockbuster exhibitions held in Vicenza and at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (Fig.1). 

Among his many book chapters, his essay ‘Building against time’ (1995) illustrates the way in which primary evidence, meticulously researched and thoughtfully analysed, can lead to new interpretation without the application of any fashionable intellectual theory.[5] Burns’s interest in theory was strictly limited to the ideas found in treatises and other writings of the period. His articles on Alberti, for example, remain some of the sharpest, most perceptive publications on the subject.[6] His writings – always concise and carefully argued, yet underpinned by meticulous documentation and visual evidence – spanned a vast range of Italian Renaissance architectural topics. Throughout his career he contributed incisive and original essays to exhibition catalogues and conference volumes, often publishing four or more titles in a single year, but he completed few single-author books.[7] He often delayed submitting his works until the very last minute, held back by insistent perfectionism. Over the course of over thirty-five years, no text for his catalogue of the Palladio drawings in the RIBA was ever delivered, and in 2012 the commission was handed over to Guido Beltramini, whom Burns trusted as his intellectual heir, even if the catalogue had to be started again from scratch. 

Burns’s public lectures delivered at the CISA conferences and summer courses showed how he was able to penetrate Palladio’s mentality, especially through the design strategies revealed by analysis of drawings. His most remarkable ‘virtual’ entry into the mind of Palladio, however, was his authorship of a play, Il giuoco del palazzo, ovvero Palladio in piazza, about the construction of the Basilica in Vicenza, which was performed at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza in 2003. In this drama, written in Vicentine speech, he made skilful use of different dialects for the various social groups, transporting his audience into Palladio’s day-to-day life on the building site. 

Throughout his adult life, Burns maintained his distinctive personal style, always dressed in a loosely fitting grey or tweed suit, white shirt and tie, with a plastic bag in his hand and often a camera around his neck. As he became older his shock of white hair suited his image perfectly, and he had an endearing habit of tilting his head sideways when listening to someone. He moved around constantly between his flats in London, Vicenza and Florence and was hard to track down, especially before the days of email. He was married three times: his first wife, Jehane Barton, whom he married in 1962, later worked for Charles Eames in California. In 1983 he married the radical feminist writer Michèle Roberts and is recognisably depicted in some of her writings. After they split up he became the companion of Giusi Boni, whose home in Lugano gave him a new stability and happiness. They married in 2024, just a few months before he died of a brain tumour on 18th February 2025. 

Howard Burns will be much missed as a friend, teacher and collaborator. Countless former students in the United Kingdom, North America and Italy are profoundly indebted to his inspiration. He always expected excellence, although he rarely made any value judgement, whether positive or negative, on our work. From the start Burns challenged his students to move beyond issues of style and chronology by expanding the repertoire of questions to be asked. The themes he addressed included not only design procedures and the close study of drawings, but also patronage, collecting, archaeology, humanistic and scientific pursuits, the culture of cities and countryside, new technologies, the use of materials and sources of wealth. He bequeathed huge ambitions and expected the highest standards of scholarship. His own visual memory was astonishing. He seemed to know every Renaissance building in Italy; he drew constantly and was an expert photographer. Although sadly this vast image databank is lost with his passing, his vision remains as transformative and inspirational to the future as it was fifty years ago. His long life put into practice his own concept of ‘building against time’: as he himself argued, a creative personality might not fulfil every ambition, but the real achievement was to lay the foundations for the guidance of those who followed.

[1] For a more extensive appreciation of Howard Burns, see C. Elam: ‘Introduzione: precision and “fantasia”: Howard Burns, scholar and teacher’, in idem and M. Beltramini, eds: Some Degree of Happiness: Studi di storia dell’architettura in onore di Howard Burns, Pisa 2010, pp.xiii–xxii. 

[2] Howard Burns in conversation with Cammy Brothers, to be published in a forthcoming issue of Annali di Architettura. I am grateful to Professor Brothers for sharing the recordings. 

[3] I am grateful to Tom Davies, Archivist, and Victoria Zeitlyn, Obituarist’s Assistant, King’s College, Cambridge, for their kind assistance. The memo from 1969 is signed T.E. (or J.E.?) and addressed to the Tutor for Graduate Studies. 

[4] In the early stages he was assisted by Lynda Fairbairn. 

[5] H. Burns: ‘Building against time: Renaissance strategies to secure large churches against changes to their design’, in J. Guillaume, ed.: L’église dans l’architecture de la Renaissance, Paris 1995, pp.107–31. 

[6] See, for example, H. Burns: ‘Leon Battista Alberti’, in F. Paolo Fiore, ed.: Storia dell’architettura italiana: Il Quattrocento, Milan 1998, pp.114–65. 

[7] See the bibliography of his publications from 1966 to 2009, compiled by Ilaria Abbondandolo, in Elam and Beltramini, op. cit. (note 1), pp.591–600.