This project will produce, with Yale University Press, the first thematic study to appear in the English language on Baldassare Longhena and the architecture of the Venetian Baroque. Apart from the celebrated church of Santa Maria della Salute, five other chapters examine all the most important works in their historical and cultural context. The photographic campaign by Alessandra Chemollo, organized in a year-long collaboration with the author for the Italian edition published by Electa in 2006, illustrates properly for the first time the architecture as the photographs were conceived as an integral part of the original project.

Andrew Hopkins has been associate professor of architectural history at the University of L'Aquila since 2004. His books include Santa Maria della Salute: Architecture and Ceremony in Baroque Venice (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Italian Architecture from Michelangelo to Borromini (Thames and Hudson, 2002), Baldassare Longhena (Electa Editrice, 2006/Yale University Press, 2012), Alois Riegl:  The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, edited and translated by Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte (Getty Research Center, 2010). Recipient of the Society of Architectural Historians GB (UK) Essay Medal in 1996, he was a fellow at Harvard University's Villa I Tatti in Florence in 2003, a Paul Mellon Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC in 2009, and will be a Getty Research Center Visiting Fellow in 2013. He has been a research fellow of the British School at Rome since 2003, where he was assistant director from 1998–2002.