abstract:Manfredo Tafuri (Rome, 4 November 1935 – Venice, 23 February 1994), an Italian architect, historian, theoretician, critic and academic, was arguably the world's most important architectural historian of the second half of the 20th century.2006 The Assassin: The Critical Legacies of Manfredo Tafuri in Radical Philosophy 138 July/August 2006 He is noted for his pointed critiques of the partisan "operative criticism" of previous architectural historians and critics like Bruno Zevi and Siegfried Giedion and for challenging and overturning the idea that the Renaissance was a "golden age" as it had been characterised in the work of earlier authorities like Heinrich Wolfflin and Rudolf Wittkower.