Origins, Imitation, Conventions- Representation in the Visual Arts

Origins, Imitation, Conventions

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

JAMES S. ACKERMAN

REPRESENTATION IN T HE VISUAL ARTS

Origins, Imitation, Conventions

© 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Berkeley and Frutiger by Graphic Composition, Inc., and was printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ackerman, James S. Origins, imitation, conventions : representation in the visual arts / James S. Ackerman p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-01186-7 (hc. : alk. paper) 1. Art criticism—Historiography. 2. Art—Historiography. 3. Art, Renaissance. 4. Modernism (Art) 5. Poststructuralism. I. Title. N7480 .A29 2001 701'.18—dc21

vignettes by Jill Slosburg-Ackerman

2001044155

For Anne, Tony, Sarah, and Jesse

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CONTENTS Preface viii 1

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism 1

2

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 27

3

Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs 67

4

On the Origins of Architectural Photography 95

5

Imitation 125

6

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci 143

7

The Aesthetics of Architecture in the Renaissance 175

8

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas 185

9

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius 217

10

Palladio: Classical in What Sense? 235

P R E FA C E

The following studies are based on articles and lectures written during the past decade,

since the publication of my earlier collection, Distance Points (MIT Press, 1991).

These studies reflect my—not always conscious—absorption of poststructuralist criticism

of the traditional historical-critical métier. Much of this is too pertinent to be ignored,

even by one whose age justifies a relaxed attitude toward seeking rebirth. My earlier

work, like that of so many of my contemporaries, was guided by a narrative that assumed

a development of the arts as they responded to social, economic, political, and cultural

changes. I articulated this view many years ago in an article entitled “Art and Evolution”

(in Nature and the Art of Motion, ed. György Kepes [New York, 1965], 32–40). The idea

of progress—or at least of continuous steps away from the past—was intensified in the

romantic period, as art and criticism distanced themselves from the classical tradition (a

phenomenon discussed below in the essay “Imitation”). The idea gained momentum in

the age of modernism, intensifying the concept of an avant-garde (borrowed for the arts

viii

by Saint-Simon from the military designation for small units that advanced beyond the main force) whose function was to lead the arts into new territory. The possibility that artists’ engagement with the past, which in many ways is inevitable, might also produce something desirable rarely occurred to writers of my generation.

The papers in the following pages center on the tension between the authority of the past—which may act not only as a restraint but also as a challenge and a stimulus—and the potentially liberating gift of invention. So the approach to history in these pieces, parallel in some respects to that of anthropology, addresses the ways in which artists and writers on art have related to and contended with ancestors and with established modes of representation as well as with contemporary experiences.

“Origins” in my title applies to the first four pieces collected here: studies of the earliest art history and criticism, the beginnings of architectural drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the first architectural photographs, and Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches for churches, the first in the Renaissance to propose supporting domes on sculpted walls and piers, anticipating the design of St. Peter in the Vatican and much of later ecclesiastical architecture.

“Origins” in this sense are innovations, more notable for their departure from than for their

cault and later Manfredo Tafuri (whom I regard as the outstanding architectural historian of our time) against the presumption that a historical event can be shown to have had its ori-

Preface

dependence on preceding modes. Thus the term avoids, I hope, the strictures of Michel Fou-

gins in certain preceding events. The achievements discussed in the essays on art history and criticism and on architectural photography were indebted to forms established previously in practices outside the fine arts—the former to those of ancient Roman rhetoric, the latter to representation in print media—and are therefore in part dependent on imitation. Only the achievement of architectural drawing was apparently without precedent; the architectural elevations and sections of the thirteenth century appeared as spontaneously as the theory of the solar system in the late Renaissance. But, as revealed in my final essay, once

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these astonishing graphic inventions had been achieved, they immediately became conventions and resisted change over the centuries.

“Imitation,” described in the essay of that name, a key concept of ancient rhetoric, had a special meaning within the classical tradition. Prior to the modern era, whenever and wherever a type of representation in the arts already existed, it was virtually impossible for the artist not to be affected by it and in some way to relate to it. The concept of imitation, as applied to the relation of the artist to his or her forebears, however, did not involve either a suppression of individuality or a limitation on invention; it encouraged—even demanded— both, but with the understanding that the achievements of the past constituted a structure of support and a challenge. So the inventiveness discussed in the sixth through eleventh essays was built, both consciously and unconsciously, on what had survived from the past and was accessible in the present.

The graphic work of Leonardo da Vinci, the subject of the sixth essay, was a special case. Leonardo was virtually alone among artists of the Renaissance in his minimal engagement with ancient sculpture, architecture, and theoretical writing, yet his readings of ancient and medieval scientific and technological texts influenced his early theories and empirical investigations (which in some cases proved to be a detriment), and, like his contemporaries, he pursued ancient themes in figural studies. His anatomical, mechanical, and cartographical drawings anticipated major advances in graphic conventions but had no impact on his successors because they remained out of circulation in his notebooks and portfolios of drawings.

Though conventions are the exclusive concern only in the final essay of this book, they are an issue in many of the preceding ones. They function like languages in facilitating communication between the artist and the viewer, but they are both more universal (being readable by people in cultures whose languages differ) and more fixed (resisting regional and spontaneous variation that might diminish the clarity of their communication).

x

Earlier versions of the studies in this volume have been published as indicated below.

The categories of Origins, Imitation, and Conventions, then, are interactive; most acts of representation partake to some degree in all three.

I am grateful for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1993 that helped me to develop studies on Renaissance criticism and art theory, and to my wife, Jill Slosburg-Ackerman, for keen criticism of each study and for enriching the text with her drawings. I want also to acknowledge the exceptionally helpful editing of Matthew Abbate and the enterprising contribution of my assistants, Kathleen Christian and David Karmon, for whom I wish and augur distinguished careers as teachers and scholars.

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Origins, Imitation, Conventions

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ONE

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

For there to be a history of art, art-making must be perceived as an activity distinct from other human activities and the sequence of past products of that activity as potentially exhibiting some describable pattern of change. These preconditions did not effectively exist in the Middle Ages, when art in the modern sense was rarely distinguished from other functional productions of shop artisans, and when there were not even names to differentiate classes or periods of artifacts of the past. The history of modern art history begins in the Italian Renaissance, though with farreaching dependence on ancient antecedents. But the achievement of a historical consciousness liberated from the unsophisticated mentality of the chronicler was a much more difficult task than we have realized. It remained undeveloped in antiquity and it was still inchoate in the mind of the Renaissance writer who is accepted as the father of modern art history, Giorgio Vasari. The problem was that the most obvious aspect of works of art that could be represented as evolving or at least changing with time was their likeness to nature. History could be an account of the progressive conquering of obstacles—in Renaissance terminology, “difficulties”—to mimesis. The difficulties were overcome by inventions, of which an obvious example would be painter’s perspective; that meant that the history of art could be constructed on the kind of model later adopted for the history of science or of technology. This was consistent with the definition of ars in antiquity and the Middle Ages as “technique” or “craft.” That satisfied the ancient and pre-Vasarian writers, even though it must have been obvious to them that the works of art themselves were pursuing other, less mechanical and more resonant goals. But those goals were embodied in the artist’s imaginative reconstitution of nature, and in order for them first to be recognized and described and second to become the motivator of change, a new critical consciousness was required.1 In one sense, this essay concerns the role of art criticism as the motivator of history. A historical consciousness more subtle than the recognition of progress in mimesis or in the imitation of the antique first emerged in Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects of 1550, and more fully in the enlarged edition of 1568. It was manifested in

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a nascent sense of individual and regional style that became the foundation of an exceptional hypothesis, that of a period style. These represent two distinct levels of ambition. Vasari’s predecessors could grasp the individuality of an artist by induction, without caring to formulate the style of a period. The concept of a period—apart from the gross distinctions of antiquity, darkness, and rebirth—was a historian’s invention, an artifact, an abstraction of certain features selected from individual instances. Vasari’s style-determined period and sequence of periods have been the motivator of modern art history, and have been established as the only plausible way to construct an image of what has occurred over time in the production of what we call art. But while it is legitimate to see the invention of period style as historically important in the formation of modern historical practice, its relevance and utility probably ended with the eclipse of modernism. Contemporary art and criticism have made it no longer relevant, or possible. The earliest Renaissance commentators on art have been keenly examined by Michael Baxandall in his book Giotto and the Orators, a fundamental study of humanist views on art and their relation to the classical rhetorical tradition. He begins with a fourteenthcentury text, Filippo Villani’s De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus of 1381–1382, which celebrates the distinguished citizens of the author’s city and reviews the painting of the preceding century in terms already suggested by Dante and Boccaccio. So let it be proper for me . . . to introduce here the excellent Florentine painters, men who have rekindled an art that was pale and almost extinguished. First among whom John, whose sur-

tonly straying far from the likeness of nature. . . . After John, the road to new things now lying open, Giotto—who is not only by virtue of his great fame to be compared with the ancient painters but is even to be preferred to them for skill and talent, restored painting to its former worth . . . for images formed by his brush agree so well with the lineaments of nature as to seem to the beholder to live and breathe. . . . Many people judge . . . that painters are of a talent no

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

name was Cimabue, summoned back with skill and talent the decayed art of painting, wan-

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lower than those whom the liberal arts have rendered magistri. As from a most copious and pure spring, glittering brooklets of painting followed from this admirable man and brought about an art of painting that was once more a zealous imitator of nature.2 Villani’s passage continues with accounts of a number of more recent painters, stimulated by Giotto, who consolidated the salvation of the art. The whole sequence is presented in what Baxandall calls the Prophet-Savior-Apostle mode. It is not quite a historical method, but also it is not simply a medieval chronicle; the metaphors—the road to new things that lies open, the brooklets issuing from a spring—suggest a new ambition, to give the sequence of events a common purpose. This common purpose is to explore all aspects of the imitation of nature, an undertaking so demanding that those who succeed in it must be regarded as the equal to university graduates in the liberal arts. From the very start, the new effort to endow art with its own history is linked with the identification of a category of craftsmen as fine artists, and with their social empowerment—their escape from the guild and the stigma of belonging to the artisan class. What is notable in this passage is not only that painters are represented as equivalent to scholars, but that they appear in a chronicle of contemporary events, which implies that their works are historical events. The most ample model for this proto–art history and for the motivating mechanism of mimesis had been found in the accounts of Pliny the Elder, written as a section of his encyclopedic Natural History in the first century A.D., where one artist after another surpasses his predecessors in achievement measured by the attainment of verisimilitude. Pliny’s account, which had been known in the Middle Ages, did provide a working vocabulary for the discussion of painting and sculpture, which Lorenzo Ghiberti appropriated in his Commentarii. Pliny’s evolutionary historical framework was implicit in his simplistic conception of the aims of art: since art moved ahead as it came closer to nature, it could be discussed in the same way as the history of technology, each successive achievement representing an advance toward a goal and in some way rendering its predecessors obsolete.

4

Pliny’s lengthy chronicle had been anticipated in a paragraph written two generations earlier by Cicero, who contributed perhaps more than any ancient writer to the formation of Renaissance art historical consciousness. E. H. Gombrich has called attention to this passage in Cicero’s Brutus, an essay on oratorical style, which was to be lifted essentially verbatim by Vasari in the preface to the second section of his Lives. What critic who devotes himself to the lesser arts does not recognize that the statues of Canachus are too rigid to reproduce the truth of nature? The statues of Calamis again are still hard, and yet softer than those of Canachus. Not even Myron achieved enough truth though one would not hesitate to call his work beautiful. Still more beautiful are the works of Polycleitus, and in my opinion, even quite perfect. The same may be seen in painting . . . and I take it to be true of all the other arts.3 An important difference between the antique historical models and Villani, and subsequently Vasari, is that the ancients represented only a steady forward progress (Pliny, writing centuries after the perfection of Polycleitos, wrote: “Art has made extraordinary progress, in technique first and afterwards in audacity”),4 while Villani and Vasari recognized that something had happened after the moment of perfection which, while it was not exactly a decline, was primarily an exploitation of the achievements of the great master or masters. There are numerous texts in Pliny and other writers on ancient art intended to illustrate the achievement of perfect mimesis. In one, horses led past a series of horse paintings submitted to a competition neighed only at that of Apelles. In a competition between flew onto the stage to peck at them; elated by this verdict, he turned to his rival and asked him to remove the curtain that covered his work, and was told that the curtain was the work. Zeuxis forthwith ceded the palm, saying that it was far more prestigious to deceive a painter than a bird.5 Stories of this kind, which are mythical in character, must have lingered on from an earlier time when artists were simply craftsmen, either

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

Zeuxis and Parrhasios, the former exhibited a picture of grapes so convincing that birds

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more or less skilled. It is odd that a culture that pursued discriminations of the subtlest kind in discussing the nuances of rhetorical and poetic style could be so literally birdbrained about the potentialities of visual art. Such an unsophisticated representation of the purpose of painting and sculpture sufficed for most early Renaissance commentaries on the visual arts. This was not only because the formula had the prestige of anything ancient, but also because it fit the sense of pride felt at having overcome the imagined deficiencies of medieval art, particularly with respect to the command of verisimilitude. Gothic art was referred to as German and Byzantine painting as Greek, the most disapproving terms Renaissance Italians could devise. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentarii were written while he was finishing the second of his two bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery in 1447–1448.6 They are preserved in an unpublished and incomplete manuscript of three books, the first on the art of antiquity, the second on Italian and some transalpine figural art from the time of Giotto to his own oeuvre (though he avoided discussion of any other fifteenth-century art), and the third on optics, light, anatomy, and proportions. Ghiberti’s aim and preparation were entirely different from Villani’s. Being a successful painter and sculptor who had had contact with Florentine humanist scholars, he knew not only the reputation of earlier Italian and transalpine artists but their individual works. Though he was a craftsman trained in the medieval tradition—which explains some of his critical vocabulary—he was of the first generation that sought to emerge from the artisan class to a higher social status; his book was, in a sense, a bid to be accepted as an intellectual on a par with contemporary humanists.7 In contrast to Villani, who discussed artists only as celebrated Florentines, Ghiberti presents figural art as a distinct enterprise, though not in a historical context since he does not address the problem of change in time. Though he boasts of his exceptional achievement, he does not suggest that it represents an advance over the art of the preceding century.8

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Ghiberti did not arrange Book II in a strictly chronological order (he discusses Ambrogio Lorenzetti before Duccio, and Giovanni before Andrea Pisano), and the century and a half between Giotto’s work and his own Baptistery doors is not represented in terms of an evolution. It was simply the post-“Greek” time in which painting began to arise (sormontare). In spite of his adherence to Pliny’s history of ancient art, of which he provides virtually a condensed version in his first book, Ghiberti avoided Pliny’s concept of a progressive command of imitation as a motivating device. In fact, in cases where Pliny had credited an individual with having advanced the history of his art, Ghiberti omits that portion of the account; he also omits or emends anecdotes in which artists demonstrate their mimetic skill. While he praises the command of perspective and the illusion of relief, especially in his own second Baptistery doors, he never suggests that this signals progress; it is evidence of individual talent, skill, and learning.9 Though he mentions contemporaries (Brunelleschi, della Quercia, etc.) as competitors, they are not included in his commentary. The reason was probably rivalry. While the decision, from our historical point of view, resulted in placing him with the “old guard” of Trecento artists, Ghiberti’s ahistorical disposition makes this observation irrelevant. Just as Pliny’s view of the aims of art had led to an evolutionary historical structure, so Ghiberti’s—that command of theoretical learning was the most exalted ambition of the artist—encouraged, if it did not mandate, a nonevolutionary structure.10 Much of Ghiberti’s extensive critical vocabulary comes from Pliny (diligente, doctrina, finito, nobile, perfetto, perito, copioso, dignità) rather than from Cennini and other writers with workshop backgrounds. It is used primarily to indicate characteristics of the work or artist rather than the impact on the viewer (bello appears only once). Several artists are characterized as dotto because Ghiberti wants to underscore the intellectual nature the Commentarii. In the first book he often adds glosses to Pliny’s account attributing to an artist undocumented theoretical writings. Little of this critical vocabulary survived in later writers; it gave way to a more affective one—to some extent already employed by Alberti—deriving from rhetoric, particularly the works of Cicero and Quintilian.

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

of his vocation, its need of the kind of learning and theory he is seeking to exemplify in

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Humanist contemporaries of Ghiberti, most of whom were at best dilettantes of the visual arts, nevertheless began to use the vocabulary of ancient rhetoric to establish a critical apparatus that greatly influenced the future discourse on art. An early example is a letter in verse of around 1427 from Guarino of Verona, who writes of the painter Pisanello: When you paint a nocturnal scene you make the night-birds flit about and not one of the birds of the day is to be seen; you pick out the stars, the moon’s sphere, the sunless darkness. If you paint a winter scene everything bristles with frost and the leafless trees grate in the wind. If you set the action in spring, varied flowers, the trees, and the hills bloom; here the air quivers with the songs of the birds.11 Although Guarino may have written the same kind of thing about other artists, what he says is particularly apt for Pisanello, who made the most advanced nature studies of his time, as his Florentine contemporaries did not. Among these, birds figure significantly, and it seems that Guarino might have had a feeling for individual style. A notable extension of the Plinian scheme appears in a volume of 1456 called De viris illustribus by Bartolomeo Fazio, which included a section on four famous painters and three sculptors, preceded by an introduction which reads in part: No painter is accounted excellent who has not distinguished himself in representing the properties of his subjects as they exist in reality. . . . There is hardly one of the other crafts that needs greater discretion, seeing that it requires the representation not only of the face or countenance and the lineaments of the whole body, but also, and far more, of its interior feelings and emotions.12 Baxandall, who introduced Fazio to art historians, has shown how the addition of a significant psychological and affective element to his predecessors’ more simple-minded prescriptions for naturalism is the result of reading the prologue to the Imagines of the Greco-Roman third-century writer Philostratus the Younger, a book of detailed de-

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scriptions, called ekphrases, of individual works of art that emphasized the interrelation of motion and emotion.13 But Fazio lacked the ability to exercise critical judgment about the visual arts; he was a literary man who does not appear to have looked hard enough at actual works of art to see much besides their subject matter.14 Fazio wrote twenty years after the publication of the most important theoretical work on the visual arts of the early Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura, released in Florence in 1435 (followed by his Italian translation, 1436). The naturalistic tradition of the ancients is examined in Book II, in which Alberti examines another of the mimesis anecdotes that had been repeated ad nauseam in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, because it represented a marginally higher level of subtlety than the norm. In this story, Zeuxis of the grapes, commissioned by the town of Croton to make an image of Helen of Troy, asked to see the handsomest girls in town; but rather than selecting the most beautiful one as his model, he chose five and took from each her most attractive feature. Alberti may have had the story from Cicero’s De inventione, but introduces it with these words: The early painter Demetrius failed to obtain the highest praise because he was more devoted to representing the likeness of things than to beauty. Therefore excellent parts should all be selected from the most beautiful bodies, and every effort should be made to perceive, understand and express beauty.15 This helped to distinguish the work of art from a mirror and to implant the concept that the artist has something more to offer than his manual skill at reproduction. But unless the perception of beauty is innate, which Alberti expressly excludes by saying that eftiful bodies or their excellent parts. Alberti himself resolved that mystery in his treatise on architecture, completed around 1450, where he proposes that a man might prefer a thinner or a fuller woman:

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

fort is required to attain it, it remains a mystery how one identifies either the most beau-

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What it is that causes us to prefer one above all the others, I shall not inquire. But when you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the working of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind [animis innata quaedam ratio].16 This probably is related to the passage in Cicero’s Orator: We can imagine things more beautiful than Phidias’s sculptures, which are the most beautiful we have seen in their genre, and those pictures which I have spoken about; and indeed that artist, when he produced his Zeus or his Athena, did not look at a human being whom he could imitate, but in his own mind there lived a sublime notion of beauty; this he beheld, on this he fixed his attention, and according to its likeness he directed his art and hand.17 Alberti’s later characterization of judgment in the arts was surely influenced by the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, who came to Italy in about 1395 and taught many of the humanists Greek.18 In a letter cited by Baxandall, written to an Italian colleague during Alberti’s early childhood, he wrote: We admire not so much the beauties of the bodies in statues and paintings as the beauty of the mind of their maker. This, like well-molded wax, has reproduced in the stone, wood, bronze or pigments an image which it grasped through the eyes to the soul’s imagination.19 These opinions may seem to resemble the key theme of Neoplatonic art theory, which Marsilio Ficino and friends were developing in the mid-fifteenth century, that ideal images are reflected in the mind of the maker. But whereas for Chrysoloras this is by virtue of a personal gift or genius, and for Alberti it is by virtue of the rational faculty of any educated man, for a Neoplatonist it has to be the reflection of a supernatural idea that merely travels through the artist on the way to being incompletely reflected in the base material of the physical work of art.

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Alberti’s discussion in De pictura is restricted to beautiful figures and doesn’t extend to the whole composition in which they appear, which he calls the historia. But in one passage, separate from the one quoted above, Alberti indicates that something more is involved than choosing the best of what nature offers: The principal parts of the work are the surfaces, because from these come the members, from the members the bodies, from the bodies the historia, and finally the finished work of the painter. From the composition of surfaces arises that elegant harmony [concinnitas] and grace in bodies which they call beauty.20 So the artist, in putting together the surfaces of bodies, controls, independently of the model, whether the result will or will not be beautiful. That is a foot in the door to criticism, but not one that influenced anyone. In Alberti’s construction, the historia as a whole would be judged not in the formal terms implied by the references to female beauty, and thus be translatable into a concept of individual style, but rather by how effectively and appropriately it is dramatized through the expressiveness of its action. That is probably the source of Fazio’s identification of beauty with the representation of “interior feelings and emotions.” On this score, Giotto would have seemed hard to beat in Alberti’s time, so the only aspects of Alberti’s innovations that could lend themselves to treatment in terms of historical evolution are those in his Book I: light, color, and perspective. These were inventions and concepts that could be treated like innovations in science and technology, which in Renaissance terms could responsibly be seen as pro-

It results from Alberti’s propositions that as a result of the selection process and harmonic construction of surfaces, a work of art can be more perfect than nature. Jan Bial-ostocki has pointed out that this did not bring an end to claims that the work of art must imitate nature; it merely gave impetus to the distinction between natura naturata, nature as it appears to us, and natura naturans, nature as an active force that rules the universe and creates.21

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

gressing regularly from darkness to light.

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The path to the recognition of individual style leads to Cristoforo Landino, a Florentine humanist who wrote the first major commentary on Dante’s Divine Comedy, in 1480. Landino did not devote much space to art, but in the paragraph introducing his commentary he showed for the first time a willingness to reach beyond the formulas of Pliny and Cicero, and he emerged as the earliest writer capable of transferring a rhetorician’s sensitivity to nuances of style to the visual arts.22 Masaccio was a very good imitator of nature, with great and comprehensive relief, good in composition, pure without being ornate because he devoted himself only to imitation of the truth and to the relief of his figures. He was certainly as good and skilled in perspective as anyone else at that time, and of great facility in working, being very young, as he died at the age of twenty-six. Fra Filippo Lippi was graceful and ornate and exceedingly skillful; he was very good at compositions and at variety, wielding the brush, relief, and very much at ornaments of every kind, whether imitated after the real or invented. Andrea del Castagno was a great exponent of design and of great relief; he was a lover of the difficulties of the art, and of foreshortenings, lively and very prompt [alert, vital] and at ease in working. The list of artists mentioned does not overlap at all with Fazio’s; Landino’s were all indebted to antique precedents to a greater degree than Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano. This is at least in part due to the fact that Fazio was writing in a court setting and Landino in mercantile Florence.23 The so-called classic age of Italian art that followed, identified since Vasari as beginning with the work of Leonardo da Vinci and encompassing Raphael and Michelangelo, fostered almost no theoretical activity. Leonardo’s extensive writings were still based on medieval Aristotelianism and prescribed an effort to reproduce inductively natura naturans, nature in the active sense, though some of his precepts sound like those of the ancient writers, e.g.: “Painting is most praiseworthy that has the most similarity to the thing reproduced, and I say this to refute such painters as want to improve upon the things of nature.”24

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Imitation, especially the imitation of ancient writers, pervades discussions of literature and of history writing in the early years of the sixteenth century: in particular, which ancients to imitate, and whether to choose one model or several. The question is extended to all the arts in a passage in Castiglione’s dialogue The Courtier, published in 1528.25 Castiglione’s major protagonist, Count Lodovico Canossa, raises the question of what part imitation might have played in the work of great writers like Homer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, who initiated an art which, if not entirely new, was far superior to that of their predecessors. Their master, he says, was ingegno combined with their own giudizio naturale. Further, there are many routes to excellence that are dissimilar one from another, as in the various modes of music (and here he unexpectedly compares the styles of two singers, one who inflames the spirit and the other whose soft harmony arouses a delightful passion). The same is true of visual art; Leonardo, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Giorgione “are all dissimilar in their way of working, but in such a way that none of them seems to lack anything in that manner [maniera] because one recognizes each to be perfect in his style [stilo].” The extension of stilo (and, in the following paragraph, stile) from the discussion of literature to that of painting is unprecedented. Speaking later of amateur literary critics, Castiglione dismisses those who aspire to judge i stili and to speak of numbers and of imitation but know nothing of them. Unfortunately, stilo and stili do not gain currency in sixteenth-century art criticism; the burden of supporting references to the character of the work of an individual, group, region, or period is carried by the vaguer term maniera, which could mean facture or formal style—or could designate the particular style later called mannerist.26

was Giorgio Vasari, writing long after the passing of the period he represented as having achieved perfection, who first drew together the scattered perceptions of the fifteenth century. Vasari, himself an architect and painter, defined a historical pattern in the sequence of artists from Giotto to his own time. He divided the Renaissance (he called it rinascità) into three “parts, or let’s call them ages [età] . . . on account of the manifest difference that one recognizes in each of them.” In the first, the three arts were

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

Maybe in ages of supreme self-confidence, art serves as its own theory. In any case, it

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“very far from their perfection, though they had something good,” while in the second “one sees clearly that matters had very much improved, in respect to inventions and to handling them with more [competent] design, with a better style and with greater technique, and in this way that rust of old age was removed.”27 The artists of the third età greatly expanded the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture, adding to the achievements of the first [età] rule, order [these two refer to architecture], measure, design, and style, if not in every respect perfectly, still at least near to reality, which the third, of whom we shall speak from here on, were able by virtue of that light to raise and to lead themselves to the highest perfection.28 And, describing the second age: But who would say that in that time an artist existed who was perfect in every respect, who had brought things to today’s level of conception, disegno, and coloring and who had managed the gentle diminution of figures in space with sureness of color and light falling only upon the relief surfaces? That praise must be reserved for the third age, in which I think I can say securely that art has done all that it is given to an imitator of nature to do; and that it has risen to such a height that one would more readily fear its fall into the depths than hope now for improvement.29 Vasari may have picked up the concept of the collapse of art after its peak from Michelangelo himself, whom he recalls as having expressed a similar concept in reaction to a medal by Alessandro Cesati with portraits of Pope Paul III and Alexander the Great: “and Michelagnolo Buonarroti looking at them himself in the presence of Giorgio Vasari, said that the moment of the death of art had arrived, since one could not see anything better.”30 Vasari’s three ages of postmedieval art constitute the first attempt to establish a structure for representing a history of the arts. His succession of età, each with a definable style or character and together leading to virtual perfection, constituted a new way to repre14

sent a history of art. A number of modern studies of Vasari, among them Erwin Panofsky’s, have suggested that this format is rooted in the work of those ancient and medieval historians whose accounts of historical development followed the biological life cycle (infancy-youth-maturity-decline).31 But the cyclical structure was atypical in Greek and Roman historiography; the majority of ancient historians dealt with recent, even contemporary, events and emphasized more or less accidental change—not progress— brought about by disruptive occurrences such as revolutions and wars.32 Moreover, while the cyclical tradition was revived by some early humanist historians such as Leonardo Bruni, it no longer informed the new history of Machiavelli and Guicciardini in the generation preceding Vasari’s.33 In any event, Vasari did not actually propose a cycle. Though his development reached an apex with the art of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, it did not decline from that point, because that would have relegated him and his contemporaries to an inferior position. He believed that his generation, like those that followed Giotto in the first “age” and Masaccio in the second, would just continue along at a high level which, if not as exalted as Michelangelo’s, nonetheless still qualified as belonging to the third age. His format for the individual lives also is not cyclical; he pays little attention to artists’ growth in effectiveness in the course of their careers (the account of Raphael having made forward steps by studying Leonardo and later Michelangelo is an exception) and only rarely says that an artist (e.g., Perugino) declined at the end of his career. Indeed, Vasari’s view of the historical process and of the età defined by achievements in a similar style does not appear to depend on earlier or contemporary historians but, like his criticism, on ancient rhetoricians, particularly Cicero. In Cicero’s De oratore, cial style (genus or stilus dicendi). Referring to the period between Pericles and Isocrates, he wrote: “Their uniformity of style could never have come about had they not kept before them some single model for imitation: . . . they all still retained the peculiar vigor of Pericles, but their texture was a little more luxuriant.”34 Cicero refers to each successive style as an aetas, which Vasari appropriated as età.35 Vasari must have seen the followers of Pericles as being in a position comparable to his own and that of his contemporaries.

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

Greek oratory is seen as a sequence of masters who formed schools based on their spe-

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Cicero’s writings were not consistent: his ideas about imitation changed radically from his early to his later work. He did sketch out a biological history of oratory in Tusculanus 2.6 (“atque oratorum quidem laus ita ducta ab humilii venit ad summum, ut iam quod natura fert in omnibus fererebus, senescat, brevique tempore ad nihilum ventura videatur”), but that work does not seem to have been read by Vasari and his contemporaries. Vasari’s construction of the history of art, then, was not so much a significant innovation as an inspired adaptation, by virtue of its capacity to turn a growing critical sophistication into an articulated historical evolution. It was derived more demonstrably from classical sources than most of the all’antica art of his time. To the extent that style became an index of historical development, Vasari’s system survived into modern art history, and the concept of style evolution—at least until some twenty years ago—remained central to art criticism. The connection was not inevitable; literary history and criticism, in spite of their common roots in rhetoric and their proprietorship of the term “style,” followed a quite different path. Although the evolution of styles is defined in terms of the familiar imitation of nature, this is understood in the sense anticipated by Alberti, as is clear from Vasari’s definition of the three rules of figural art: disegno, which I shall define in a moment, misura, which concerns primarily proportion with its connection to ideal harmonies, and maniera, which has to do with tirelessly developing one’s skill at drawing beautiful parts and combining them into beautiful figures (notice that the composition of the whole is not emphasized). Disegno, apart from being drawing, is what Vasari calls father of our three arts [which] draws a universal judgment from many sources, as if a form or idea of all things in nature. . . . And from this cognition is born a certain conception and judgment which, when formed in the mind, may then be expressed by the hands and is called disegno. One may conclude that this disegno is no other than a visible expression and declaration of the concept one has in the mind and which others have formed in their mind and built in the idea.36

16

As Svetlana Alpers showed in her incisive study of Vasari’s descriptions and critical standards, disegno is what drives his historical system.37 Though Vasari often implies that artistic progress is equivalent to the increasing capacity to reproduce nature, it is clear that it is disegno that progresses—the capacity to form beautiful elements for the work of art in the mind, and then to execute them. This resembles Platonic idealism to the same degree as Alberti’s precept, but it similarly avoids attributing the idea to any power other than the artist’s gift: Raphael, “studying the achievements of ancient masters and of the moderns, took the best from each and made a collection of them, whence nature was surpassed by his colors and invention came to him easily and was his alone.”38 This, incidentally, is a far cry from mimesis. At the same time, progress is measured by the overcoming of what Vasari calls “difficoltà,” as it would do in the history of technology. The best artists actually seek out difficulties in order both to impress viewers with having conquered them and to contribute to the progress of art. As Alpers pointed out, every artist has the obligation to do this. Nonetheless, although Vasari is sensitive to individual style—as suggested in the statement that Raphael’s invention was his alone—and to the development of style within the career of an individual, Vasarian history is not simply, as modernist history has been, an evolution of style. There is a strange disjunction between Vasari’s general characterizations of artists and periods and his approach to individual works. The latter he bases most frequently on the formulas of antique ekphrasis, which focus exclusively on narrative expression (which incidentally does not figure in his five basic rules). These encomiastic accounts do not suggest progress in time; indeed, they stand in conflict with the concept of the evolution of the art to a perfection in the age of Michelangelo and

Ekphrastic descriptions emphasize the action and emotion of the protagonists rather than the accuracy of representation, as in this description of Raphael’s Transfiguration: With the disciples below one sees a possessed boy who has been brought there to be freed by Christ; while he stretches himself out with a contorted pose, eyes popping, he shows his inner

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

Raphael.

17

torment in his flesh, in his veins and in the pulses poisoned by the spirit’s malignity; with pallid mien he makes that extreme and terrifying gesture. This figure is supported by an old man who . . . shows by raising his eyebrows and furrowing his brow at once power and fear, all the time watching the apostles, and it seems that his faith in them uplifts his spirit. And there is a woman, among many, the principal figure in the panel, who, kneeling before the others and turning her head toward them and moving her arms toward the possessed, indicates his misery. . . . And in truth, his figures and heads in this work, besides their extraordinary beauty, novelty, and variety, have been judged in the general opinion of artists [artefici] to be, among the many that Raphael has made, the most celebrated, the most beautiful, and the most divine.39 This is not unlike an account of a good theater performance; if you were to read this passage without knowing the author of the painting, you could not identify him other than as an artist that Vasari thinks is particularly good. But, according to this account, he could as plausibly have worked in the first or second period of the Renaissance as in the third. Vasari gives no comfort to the modern representation of the history of what we call High Renaissance art as classical. He is not interested in the structure of paintings. His account of some of the features of the third style as offering a “wealth of beautiful garments, the variety of many fanciful [inventions], the charm of the colors”40 might as well be a description of Pisanello’s work—no emphasis on the classical requisites of grandeur, equilibrium, or gravity. The concept of a classical art of the “High Renaissance” was not formed by those who made it. It could be seen as an invention of more recent art history calculated to get beyond the imitation of nature and to get out of the corner into which Vasari had painted himself by having his history terminate, or rather apotheose like the resurrected Savior, with Michelangelo.41 Following writers of the previous generation, starting with Ariosto, Vasari referred to Michelangelo as divino, even divinissimo.42 In passages cited

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above, he and Michelangelo entertained the possibility that after the age of perfection the whole enterprise could collapse or, we might say, stagnate (as it threatened to do with Vasari’s mannerist contemporaries), and he must have seen that his conception of history had encountered an insurmountable difficulty. But since he couldn’t condemn his colleagues to inferiority, as it would diminish them and equally his Medici patrons, he left this considerable problem unresolved. Later historians, however, could not escape their responsibility to incorporate baroque and ultimately modern art into some framework, and the invention of classicism proved useful in this task. I have tried to show that the first history and criticism of art could not have been conceived without certain steps in critical sophistication, the effect of which was to formulate a more complex definition of what it meant to imitate nature. There were four preparatory steps: that of Fazio, who added interior feelings and emotions to the external appearances that had to be emulated; that of Chrysoloras and Alberti, who suggested that the most important ingredient of a work of art was a beautiful idea or harmony originating in the mind of the artist; third, the postulation of natura naturans, which validated the inventiveness of artists on the grounds that it imitated nature in making things that did not previously exist; and last, that of Landino, who found terms for differences in style among artists of the same period. It remained for Vasari to apply Cicero’s proposition that styles evolve through “ages” each of which has its own general character. Further, in accepting and emphasizing the potential divinity of an artist Vasari also left a formidable legacy: the concept of creativity, a power previously conceded only to God, and one that could be used to glorify artists and to justify a history of art devised, like his own, in terms of the succession of works of great artists.

ing that art could have a history of a different kind from that of the ancient and medieval chroniclers and of technology and descriptive science, and also for suggesting that the three stages in this history manifested period styles. What Vasari may have known but did not say was that the “difficulties” resolved by artist after artist on their way to the perfection of his Raphael and Michelangelo were not immanent but had to be refor-

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

We are indebted to Vasari not for the specifics of the historical system, but for conceiv-

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mulated every time one of them was solved, so that history could not come to a halt; Jackson Pollock could be as much the heir to Raphael as Morandi. The greatest challenge to the Vasarian tradition occurred when antique art no longer was accepted as a paradigm; but essentials of Vasarian art history survived anyhow, at least through the middle years of the twentieth century.

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1 For the stages in the development of a con-

cept of individual style in the early Renaissance, see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford, 1971); Nicola Ivanoff, “Il concetto dello stile nella letteratura artistica del ‘500,” Quaderni dell’Istituto di Storia dell’Arte dell’Università degli Studi di Trieste 4 (1955), 5–15; Martin Warnke, “Praxisfelder der Kunsttheorie,” Idea: Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 1 (1982), 54–71; Martin Kemp, “Equal Excellences: Lomazzo and the Explanation of Individual Style in the Visual Arts,” Renaissance Studies 1 (1987), 1–26. Philip Sohm, in discussing the innovations of Vasari as a historian and critic, proposes that Vasari saw himself as the first to integrate an understanding of style (based on his experience as an artist) with historical narrative; the thesis is based on an interpretation of a passage in the Vite (ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols. [Florence, 1906], 7:681–682) in which he describes a (fictional?) meeting in which the project for the book is proposed to him by Cardinal Farnese, Paolo Giovio, and other humanists: Sohm, “Ordering History with Style: Giorgio Vasari on the Art of History,” in Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick, eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters (Cambridge, U.K., 1999), 40–54. In the same volume, see Carl Goldstein, “Writing History, Viewing Art: The Question of the Humanist’s Eye,” 285–296. I became aware of the following books relevant to my subject too late to take account of their contribution: Robert Williams, Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (New York, 1997); Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style (New York, 1999). 2 Baxandall, Giotto, 70ff. (translation); 146ff. (Latin text). 3 Cicero, Brutus 18.70; quoted in E. H. Gombrich, “Vasari’s ‘Lives’ and Cicero’s Brutus,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960), 309ff. Cicero effectively equates truth to nature (ad veritatem) with

4 5 6

7

8

beauty (his adjective is pulchra); Pliny does not refer to a uniform standard of beauty: Natural History 34.38. See Leonard Barkan’s penetrating analysis of the critical implications of the Zeuxis story: “The Heritage of Zeuxis: Painting, Rhetoric and History,” in Payne, Kuttner, and Smick, eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters, 99–109, and further analysis of Pliny’s achievement as a historian and critic in Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, 1999), 65–117. Pliny, Natural History 34.17.38. Ibid. 35.31.65. The standard edition is Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwürdigkeiten (I commentarii), 2 vols., ed. J. von Schlosser (Berlin, 1912). See Richard Krautheimer and Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti (Princeton, 1956), esp. ch. 20, “Ghiberti the Writer”; J. von Schlosser, “Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Denkwürdigkeiten: Prolegomena zu einer künftigen Ausgabe,” Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der K. K. Zentralkommission 4 (1910), 105ff.; Leonardo Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen Literatur, I: Die Literatur der Technik und der angewandten Wissenschaften vom Mittelalter bis zur Renaissance (Heidelberg, 1919), 88ff. The bid was not entirely successful; for example, the third book of the Commentaries has been shown to be a collage of unacknowledged quotations from ancient and medieval authors on the subject (G. ten Doesschate, “De deerde commentaar van Lorenzo Ghiberti in Verband met de Miedeeuwche Optiek” (diss., Utrecht, 1940); an exhaustive study of the sources has been published by Klaus Bergdolt, Der dritte Kommentar Lorenzo Ghibertis (Weinheim, 1988). This was observed by Janice Hurd, “The Character of Ghiberti’s Treatise on Sculpture,” in Lorenzo Ghiberti nel suo tempo: Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, 2 vols. (Florence, 1980), 302. Peter Murray, however, in the same publication (“Ghiberti e il suo secondo Commentario,” 284f.), refers to “quel

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

NOTES

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9

10

11 12 13

14

15

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senso di sviluppo storico che comincia ad emergere,” without offering evidence. In representing the decision of a jury on his competition panel for the first Baptistery doors (“A tutti parue auessi passato gl’altri in quello tempo sança veruna exceptione”; Commentarii, ¶19), I believe he is saying that his design “surpassed” those of the others (e.g., was qualitatively superior), not that it had “gone beyond” them as in Creighton Gilbert’s admirable translation (Italian Art, 1400–1500: Sources and Documents, 2d ed. [Evanston, 1991], 84). The scientific and theoretical sources cited in Ghiberti’s third book are ancient and medieval; he does not refer to Alberti’s “invention” of artificial perspective (described in De pictura, 1436), though he must have used it in the construction of panels in the second Baptistery doors. Quoted in Baxandall, Giotto, 93 (translation); 156 (Latin). Ibid., 103ff.; 163ff. Ekphrasis is a genre that comes to the fore in imperial late antique rhetoric; it is defined by Hermogenes of Tarsus in the Photogymnastica (see Baxandall, Giotto, 85). For other references, see Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart, 1959), 4:922ff.; its use to describe works of art is exemplified in the Imagines ascribed to Philostratus. See Rebekah Smick, “Vivid Thinking: Word and Image in Descriptive Techniques of the Renaissance,” in Payne, Kuttner, and Smick, eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters, 159–173. An instance of a subtler evaluation is Leonello d’Este’s discrimination of contrasts between portraits of him by Pisanello and Bellini, published by Baxandall, “A Dialogue on Art from the Court of Leonello d’Este,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1973), 325ff. Alberti, De pictura, 3.56; translation from Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), 98f. For Cicero’s version, see De inventione 2.1.3–4. An insightful study of the critical implications of the maids of Croton story has been published recently by Leonard Barkan: “The Heritage of Zeuxis: Painting, Rhetoric and History,” in Payne, Kuttner, and Smick, eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters, pp. 99–109.

16 Alberti, De re aedificatoria, ed. Giovanni Or-

17 18

19 20

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landi (Milan, 1966), 9.5.813; English translation from On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 302. Cicero, Orator 2.8–9. Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), has recently detailed how extensive was the influence of Chrysoloras on humanist thought, especially through his having introduced the later Greek rhetorical tradition into Italy. Baxandall, Giotto, 82; 151f. Alberti, De pictura, 2.35; translation by Grayson from Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, 73. Jan Bial-ostocki, “The Renaissance Conception of Nature and Antiquity,” in Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of Art History (Princeton, 1963), 19–30. He cites (p. 20) Plotinus, Enneads 5.8.1: “If somebody does not esteem the arts because they imitate nature, it should be said first that nature herself imitates. Then it should be borne in mind that the arts do not simply copy the visible things but draw from the principles that constitute the source of nature.” “Fu Masaccio optimo imitatore di natura, di gran rilevo universale, buono componitore et puro sanza ornato, perche solo si decte all’imitatione del vero, et al rilevo delle figure: fu certo buono et prospectivo quanto altro di quegli tempi, et di gran facilita nel fare, essendo ben giovane, che mori d’anni ventisei. Fu fra Philippo gratioso et ornato et artificioso sopra modo: valse molto nelle compositioni et varieta, nel colorire, nel rilevo, negli’ornamenti d’ogni sorte, maxime o imitati dal vero o ficti. Andreino fu grande disegnatore et di gran rilevo, amatore delle difficulta dell’arte et di scorci, vivo et prompto molto, et assai facile nel fare.” The passage is extensively discussed by Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford, 1972), 118ff. See also O. Morisani, “Art Historians and Art Critics, Cristoforo Landino,” part III, Burlington Magazine 95 (1953), 267–270. Landino’s critical approach, and some of his vocabulary, were adopted by the author of the much more extensive text Il libro di Antonio

Culture in Renaissance Mantua [Geneva, 1982], 84, doc. 92.) For an incisive investigation of Quattrocento critical terminology, see Martin Kemp, “From ‘Mimesis’ to ‘Fantasia’: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration, and Genius in the Visual Arts,” Viator 8 (1977), 347–398. Had I sufficient space, this account would include the verses of Giovanni Santi (Gilbert, L’arte del Quattrocento, 118ff.); Gilbert also cites (pp. 161f.) a letter assessing Florentine artists by the agent of the duke of Milan that shows an awareness of individual style comparable to that of Landino. 24 Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato (Vatican, Cod. Urb. Lat. 1270), fol. 133r; ed. Heinrich Ludwig (Vienna, 1882), ¶411; ed. A. Philip McMahon (Princeton, 1956), ¶433: “Quella pittura è più laudabile laquale ha più conformita co’la cosa imitata, questo propongo à confusione di quelli pittori li quali vogliano raconciare le cose di natura.” The brief biographies of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, and other artists by Paolo Giovio (ca. 1523–1527; in Paola Barocchi, Scritti d’arte del ‘500, 3 vols. [Milan and Naples, 1973], 1:3ff.) do not represent a significant advance in critical capacity over Landino’s. A short passage in a letter purportedly from Raphael to Castiglione would, because of its presumed author, carry great weight in this account if we could be sure of its authenticity: “In order to paint a beautiful woman I should have to see many beautiful women, and this under the condition that you were to help me with making a choice; but since there are so few beautiful women and so few sound judges, I make use of a certain idea that comes into my head. Whether it has any artistic value I am unable to say. I try very hard just to have it.” The authenticity has been questioned by a number of scholars, among them Wilhelm Wanscher, Rafaello Santi da Urbino: His Life and Works (London, 1926), 148; David Brown and Konrad Oberhuber, “Leonardo and Raphael in Rome,” in S. Bertelli and G. Ramakus, eds., Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore, 2 vols. (Florence, 1978), 2:84n. The most recent and thorough study of the document is John Shearman’s “Castiglione’s Portrait of Raphael,” Mitteilungen des kunst-

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

Billi, most recently edited by F. Benedettucci (Anzio, 1991), who dates the ms. 1506–1530. The definition of individual style was not exclusively the achievement of intellectuals. Martin Warnke (“Praxisfelder der Kunsttheorie”) discusses a number of instances from legal documents, contracts, and letters of the fifteenth and sixteenth century in which awareness by fellow practitioners of the unique style of an artist is discussed as a matter of course, as equivalent to handwriting, with no reference to antique precedent or philosophical positions. A key instance is the inquiry of 1457 mandated to determine which portions of the Ovetari chapel in Padua had been executed by Mantegna, as opposed to his deceased partner Pizzolo. The clerk records the testimony of an expert witness, a littleknown artist called Pietro da Milano: “Et pro ut ipse testis percepit ex dictis picturis, dicte hystorie et picture sunt manu dicti magistri Andree. Et dixit se scire eo qua ipse testis bene cognoscit picturas manu dicti magistri Andree, non tamen vidit ipse testis illas depingere, sed tamen ex longa pratica, quam habet in ea arte pingendi cognoscit, quod dicte picture sunt manu dicti magistri Andree, et quia inter pictores semper cognoscitur manu cuius sit aliqua pictura, maxime quando est manu alicuius sollemnis magistri.” (The text is transcribed in Creighton Gilbert, L’arte del Quattrocento nelle testimonianze coeve [Florence, 1988], 58.) Warnke ingeniously suggests that the humanist theorists did not want to make much of the distinctiveness of artists’ “hand” because they associated it with merely physical workshop activity, as against the more elevated achievement of conceiving a historia. Another document relating to Mantegna is in one of the letters of Lorenzo da Pavia, the agent of Isabella d’Este (July 16, 1504, from Venice), referring to the commissioning of a painting by Giovanni Bellini: “de invencione nesuno non pò arivare a messer Andrea Mantegna, che invero l’è ecelentisimo et el primo, ma Giovane Belino in colorir è ecelente, e tuti che abiano visto questo quadreto, ogneuno l’à comendato per una mirabile opera, et è ben finite quelecose è da vedere per sotile.” (Published by Clifford M. Brown and Anna Maria Lorenzoni, Isabella d’Este and Lorenzo da Pavia: Documents for the History of Art and

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25

26

27

28 29 30

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historischen Institutes in Florenz 38 (1994), 69–97. Baldassare Castiglione, Il cortegiano, 1.37, 38. See David Summers, The Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, 1987), 317–320. See Willibald Sauerländer, “From ‘Stilus’ to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion,” Art History 6 (1988), 257–259. These quotations are from the proemio to the second part of Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (1568), ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1906), 2:95–96: “parti, o vogliamole chiamare età per quella manifestissima differenza che in ciascuna di loro si conosce.” The first età: “molto lontane dalla loro perfezione; e come che elle abbiano avuto qualcosa di buono.” The second: “si veggono manifesto esser le cose migliorate assai e nell’invenzioni, e nel condurle con più disegno e con miglior maniera e con maggior diligenza; e così tolto via quella ruggine della vecchiaia.” I think vecchiaia does not imply the old age of the first style but its retention of medieval—especially Byzantine—traits. The development of a historical consciousness among writers on art has been discussed by E. H. Gombrich, “The Renaissance Conception of Artistic Progress and Its Consequences,” in his Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1966), 1–10. Vasari, Vite (1906 ed.), 4:7: proemio to Part III. Again from ibid., 2:95f.: proemio to Part II. Ibid., 5:385 (life of Valerio Vicentino). Eugenio Battisti identified this passage as indicating the source of Vasari’s statement on the future collapse of art (Battisti, “La critica a Michelangelo dopo il Vasari,” Rinascimento 1 [1956], 141). E.g., Erwin Panofsky, “The First Page of Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Libro,’” in his Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955; Chicago, 1982), 216–218, citing the Roman historian Annius Florus, Epitome rerum Romanorum, preface; published in Italian in 1546: “If one were to consider the Roman people as something like a human being and to survey their entire lifetime, how they began, how they grew up, how they attained, as it were, to the flower of maturity, and how they subsequently, in a manner of speaking, grew old, one may discover therein four stages or phases. The first

age was under the kings, lasting about two hundred and fifty years, when they fought with their neighbors about their own mother; this would be their childhood. The next age extends for another two hundred and fifty years . . . during which they conquered Italy; this was the period most intensely lived with men and arms, wherefore it may be called their adolescence. Then follow the two hundred years up to Augustus during which they subjected the whole world; this is the youth of the Empire and, as it were, its vigorous maturity. From Augustus up to our own day a little less than two hundred years have passed. During this time the Romans aged and boiled away, because of the Emperors’ lack of energy unless they put forth their strength under the leadership of Trajan, so that the old age of the Empire, against all hopes, revives as though it had regained its youth.” Florus, however, was an obscure historian, and not much discussed in Vasari’s time. 32 See Arnaldo Momigliano, “Tradition and the Classical Historian,” in his Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, Conn., 1977), 161–178. I am grateful to Daniel Sherer for the reference. 33 See Robert Black, “The New Laws of History,” Renaissance Studies 1 (1987), 126–154. Interest in historical theory, spurred by Pontano’s Actius of 1499, focused on the issues of the aims of history writing and of evidence rather than on explaining historical development. As in rhetorical and literary studies, the question of choosing one or many models was extensively discussed. Zygmunt Waz·bin´ski, “L’idée de l’histoire dans la première et la seconde édition des Vies de Vasari,” in Vasari storiografo e artista (Florence, 1976), 1–26, has shown that the “historical realism” of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, particularly in incorporating archival research, documentation, and interviews of individuals who recalled past events, influenced Vasari’s rewriting of the Vite between 1550 and 1568. The essay demonstrates the role of Vincenzo Borghini in influencing Vasari’s method of documenting the past; it is based on Waz·bin´ski’s book Vasari i jego dzieje “Sztuk rysunku” uwagi nad geneza nowozytnej biografiki artystycznej

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con pallida incarnazione fa quel gesto forzato e pauroso. Questa figura sostiene un vecchio, che . . . mostra, con lo alzare le ciglia ed increspar la fronte, in un tempo medesimo e forza e paura; pure mirando gli Apostoli fiso, pare che, sperando in loro, faccia animo a se stesso. Evvi una femina, fra molte, la quale è principale figura di quella tavola, che inginocchiata dinanzi a quelli voltando la testa loro e coll’atto delle braccia verso lo spiritato, mostra la miseria di colui. . . . E nel vero, egli vi fece figure e teste, oltra la bellezza straordinaria, tanto nuove, varie e belle, che si fa giudizio comune degli artefici che questa opera, fra tante quant’egli ne fece, sia la più celebrata, la più bella e la più divina.” 40 Ibid., 4:12 (proemio to Part III). 41 Ibid., 4:9. On this issue, see Hans Belting, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?, 2d ed. (Munich, 1984), part II; English ed., The End of the History of Art? (Chicago, 1987). 42 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso (1516), canto XXXIII, 2.4: “Michel, più che divino, angelo.” Other attributions of divinity to Michelangelo are discussed by Paola Barocchi in her edition of Vasari’s life of the artist (Milan and Naples, 1962), 2:21–22. The divinity of the artist already was claimed in Marsuppini’s epitaph for Brunelleschi (1446), and the concept of creativity was extensively discussed by Leonardo da Vinci, whose writings, however, were not published during the Renaissance; see Kemp, “From ‘Mimesis’ to ‘Fantasia’,” 376ff.

On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

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(Vasari et son histoire des arts de dessin à la source de la biographie artistique moderne) (Torun´, 1972, with French summary), and a work I have not found, also in Polish but cited by the author as: Vasari et l’historiographie artistique moderne (Warsaw, 1975). Cicero, De oratore 2.22: “Non potuisset accidere ut unum genus esset omnium, nisi aliquem sibi proponerent ad imitandum. Consecuti sunt hos Critias, Theramenes, Lysias. Multa Lysiae scripta sunt, nonnulla Critiae, de Teramene audimus; omnes etiam tum retinebant illum Periclis sucum; sed erant paulo uberiore filo.” Ibid., 2.90f.: “dicendi ratio voluntasque cuiusque aetatis.” In 91 he asks “what [besides imitation] has determined the special styles of oratory which characterize each successive generation?” (“Quid enim causae censetis esse, cur aetates extulerint singulae singula prope genera dicendi?”) Vasari, Vite, 1:168f.: “padre delle tre arti nostre . . . cava di molte cose un giudizio universale; simile a una forma ovvero idea di tutte le cose della natura, la quale è singolarissima nelle sue misure. . . . E perchè da questa cognizione nasce un certo concetto e giudizio, che si forma nella mente quella tal cosa che poi espressa con le mani si chiama disegno; si può conchiudere che esso disegno altro non sia, che una apparente expressione e dichiarazione del concetto che si ha nell’animo, e di quello che altri si è nella mente immaginato e fabbricato nell’idea.” See Svetlana Alpers, “‘Ekphrasis’ and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari’s ‘Lives’,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960), 190–215. Vasari, Vite, 4:11–12; proemio to Part III: “studiando le fatiche de’ maestri vecchi e quelle de’ moderni, prese da tutti il meglio; e fattone raccolta . . . laonde la natura restò vinta dai suoi colori; e l’invenzione era in lui . . . facile e propria.” Vasari, Vite, 4:371f.: “dove si vede condotto un giovanetto spiritato, acciocchè Cristo sceso del monte lo liberi; il quale giovanetto, mentre che con attitudine scontorta si prostende gridando e stralunando gli occhi, mostra il suo patire dentro nella carne, nelle vene, e ne’ polsi contaminati dalla malignità dello spirto, e

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TWO

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Part I: Villard de Honnecourt at Reims Cathedral

Among the Reims drawings of Villard are several that reflect a milestone in the formation of the conventions for the representation of architectural works and projects. The best way to understand the nature of a convention is to discover for what reason and under what circumstance it originated, and how it was modified in the course of time. We can find the roots of modern architectural representation in a large body of drawings surviving from the sixteenth century onward. The evidence is sparser from earlier times. Virtually nothing survives from antiquity and the early Middle Ages— some Egyptian papyruses, the marble plan of Rome, a newly discovered full-scale elevation of the pediment of the Pantheon, and the parchment plan of the abbey of St. Gall being notable exceptions. My interest was first sparked by Wolfgang Lotz’s study of the representational conventions of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century architectural interiors.1 Lotz showed that the major achievement of Renaissance architects had been to establish for architecture the convention of orthogonal drawing. The change was first called for in Leon Battista Alberti’s prescriptions for drawing: Between the drawing of a painter and that of an architect there is the difference that the former seeks to give the appearance of relief through shadow and foreshortened lines and angles. The architect rejects shading and gets projection from the ground plan. The disposition and image of the facade and side elevations he shows on different [sheets] with fixed lines and true angles as one who does not intend to have his plans seen as they appear [to the eye] but in specific and consistent measurements.2 Alberti was attacking the convention prevailing among Italian architects of representing at least projecting and receding features of a building in perspective.3 He first argued that

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perspectival representation was the affair of painters, that architects had to do their drawings orthogonally so that measurements could be taken from them. Lotz identified drawings by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger in the second decade of the sixteenth century as the first to meet Alberti’s demands.4 Later finished drawings by Antonio, Baldassarre Peruzzi, and Andrea Palladio, whether for their own projects or to illustrate existing buildings, were primarily orthogonal. In Palladio’s drawing reproduced in fig. 2.1, a vertical line separates an elevation of the facade from an elevation of the court and section

2.1 Andrea Palladio, elevation study for the facade and section through the court of Palazzo I. Porto, Vicenza, ca. 1550. London, Royal Institute of British Architects, Palladio XVII/3.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

of the side wing, revealing the relationship of the parts of the building to one another.

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2.2 Villard de Honnecourt, Reims Cathedral, exterior and interior elevation, ca. 1230. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 19093, p. 62.

Given the academic tendency to divide knowledge into “fields” and periods, it is understandable that few observers have noticed that the same problems and to some extent the same solutions had already been faced by Gothic draftsmen. It was an orthogonal representation of the exterior and interior elevation—likewise divided by a vertical line—of a bay of the Reims Cathedral choir in the album of Villard de Honnecourt, of about 1220–1235 (fig. 2.2), that drew me to look in Villard’s album for evidence of the early formation of the conventions of drawing.5

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We know little about Gothic architectural drawing. All but a few examples are lost; probably drawings were rarely made.6 In the absence of a concept of scale drawing, the utility of drawings as a means of communication between the designer and builder would have been minimal. Consequently, according to textual evidence, full-scale drawings (1:1) of plans for large edifices such as cathedrals were often drawn directly on the ground. Also, a few full-scale engravings of elevation details such as rose windows or spires were incised in the masonry of the building in which they have been found. We have to assume that architects and master masons were able to design in their heads and that they explained their ideas verbally and through models and templates. Prior to the invention of paper in the fourteenth century, architects did not normally develop ideas in sketches or put design solutions in graphic form. They could use parchment, but the difficulty of preparing it made it too expensive for everyday purposes and caused drawings, once they were no longer needed, to be scraped away so that the sheets could be reused.7 An example is the set of original drawings for the cathedral of Reims preserved in a volume of parchment leaves on which the drawings were made in layers, each successive one partly obliterating its predecessor.8 This situation explains the great interest aroused by an album of drawings executed on necourt. The 63 pages of this album, from which at least 8 sheets have been lost, are devoted to architectural and mechanical construction, measuring and surveying, and architectural sculpture. The choice of subjects and the inscriptions accompanying the drawings show that the volume was conceived as an instructional manual useful rather to lay readers interested in technology than to artisans and designers. Though some commentators on the album have represented Villard as an architect or master mason, he probably was a more modest technician, yet well enough trained to have worked out a theoretical project for a church choir with a double ambulatory with the architect of Cambrai Cathedral, Pierre de Corbie, “inter se disputandum.”9 The character of the album is closer to that of fifteenth-century and later compilations of machinery and military equipment than to architectural treatises.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

parchment in the early thirteenth century by the Picard draftsman Villard de Hon-

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Among the architectural drawings, the choir devised with Pierre de Corbie (fig. 12.3) is the only one that does not represent an existing contemporary building from the area around Villard’s birthplace. Although, according to his text, he was called to Hungary for an unspecified task and, whatever routes he may have taken going and returning, would have been exposed to a number of different late Romanesque and Gothic monuments, he recorded only a Hungarian pavement design and the rose window of the cathedral of Lausanne (which could have been copied from a drawing). Nor did he reveal knowledge of the important early and mature Gothic achievements at St. Denis, Paris, and Amiens, which he could easily have visited. The most exceptional sheet among Villard’s Reims drawings is the one in which exterior and interior elevations of one bay (with a portion of the flanking bay on either side) of the choir are joined side by side, separated at the center of the sheet by a thick vertical line.

2.3 Villard de Honnecourt, Reims Cathedral, clerestory window. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 19093, p. 20.

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These are the only orthogonal elevations in Villard’s book, apart from details such as single windows, and no precedent survives from earlier times. There is no reason to believe that Villard invented this extraordinarily sophisticated and advanced mode of presentation; he must have copied the sheet from the drawing of one of the designers of the cathedral.10 This interpretation is also supported by the fact that the drawing could not have been done from the building itself, which, at the time Villard visited, had risen only to the triforium level. Moreover, the definitive design differed in numerous details from this drawing (what are drawn as crenellations are actually creneaux, small brackets to support narrow walkways while breaking the fall of water; the three blind arches on the lowest level of the side aisle wall were not built; the existing clerestory oculus is substantially larger than that of the side aisle windows). The drawing is distorted by lack of space on the page, which one supposes was not the case in the one from which it was copied. The elevations are not completely orthogonal. A kind of perspective affects the representation of one feature of the exterior: the setbacks of the ground-floor buttresses have an illusionistic thrust to the left; in an orthogonal drawing, the right sides would mirror the left, which would make it impossible to show—in the absence of a section—that the lower part projected forward. Exterior galleries are indicated by heavy dark lines at clerestory level (the position is better seen in the section: fig. 2.5), though they would ous pair of back-to-back L-shaped elements that presumably support the lower flyer; the spired tower that receives the outer flyers (cf. fig. 2.5) is not represented. At clerestory level, capital-like brackets indicate the upper supports of both the lower and the upper flyers. At the base of the clerestory windows, where the sill slants outward on the exterior toward the top of the side aisle roof, the socles of the colonnettes have no horizontal line to indicate their base. In the interior elevation, the springing of the vaults is only vaguely suggested; wavy lines at the vault level also either represent the rough inner face of the exterior wall, or simply symbolize the unknown. A more summary sketch of one side aisle window elsewhere in the album (p. 32; fig. 2.3)11 is described in the legend alongside: “Voici une des fenêtres de Reims, des travées de la nef, comme elles sont entre deux piliers. J’étais appelé en Hongrie, quand je la

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

not show in an orthogonal elevation. The flying buttresses are indicated only by a curi-

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dessinai; par ce que je l’aimais mieux.”12 It shows more of the framing than the full elevation, in which the nave piers incorrectly hide the edges of the window. The enframing arch and the two internal ones supporting the oculus spring from the same colonnette and capital (in the actual construction each has its own capital), and the principal transverse rib crossing the side aisle springs from an equally small colonnette and capital, which would have been improbable structurally. At the base of the central colonnette, Villard drew a horizontal section showing the actual window frame behind the colonnette. The same section appears among the profiles that Villard seems to have drawn directly from templates in the workshop (p. 63; fig. 2.8). In contrast to the elevations in fig. 2.2, that of fig. 2.3 must have been made from the building itself, a judgment supported by Villard’s statement that he “liked this window the best.” The fact that he could make substantial mistakes when drawing from the actual building supports the hypothesis that he was not an architect or master mason but an artisan with more limited capacities. The two pages preceding the elevation drawings are devoted to perspective elevations of the central apsidal chapel (p. 60; fig. 2.4: on p. 61 Villard has employed the same conventions for the exterior). These are seen in “perspective,” rather than orthogonally, in the sense that Villard attempted to reflect the recession of a wall curving away from and toward the observer, though not by having horizontals recede to a central point or axis so as to make more distant elements smaller. His convention has the effect of an orthogonal drawing made on a flat surface which is then bent into a semicylindrical form, so that horizontal and vertical measurements are not essentially altered. Only a few elements, like the arches and the width of the exterior buttresses, are distorted—the wrong way to suggest recession—by the curvature. The heavy dark bands by the supports of the interior clerestory again suggest passages through the piers that would not be visible in an orthogonal elevation. The vaults of the interior are not shown; the wavy lines used in fig. 2.2 appear in their place. Construction had not proceeded to that point, and in any case Villard probably had no convention for representing vaults in an elevation. In fig. 2.4 he indicates on the right side—but not the left—the springing of the rib vaults (incorrectly, since the outer ribs should support the window arches and frames).

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Bibliothèque Nationale, 19093, p. 60.

The orthogonal representation of curvilinear or polygonal elevations poses a much more difficult problem to draftsmen than flat walls, even those with protrusions. It conforms less well with visual experience, and cannot be done effectively without a measured plan—preferably one drawn on the same sheet directly below the elevation, so that lines can be run up to the elevation to mark the position of elements on surfaces receding from or advancing toward the forwardmost plane of the representation (fig. 2.20). Villard’s attempt to avoid distortions of horizontal and vertical measurements differentiates his cylindrical strategy from that of thirteenth-century efforts to suggest

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

2.4 Villard de Honnecourt, Reims Cathedral, interior of choir. Paris,

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perspective in painting and manuscript illumination, including other architectural representations by Villard. Page 64 of the album (fig. 2.5) is a conceptually highly sophisticated section at the clerestory level of the apsidal chapels of the choir showing the elevation of the flying buttress system. Comparison with a later Gothic section of the choir of the cathedral of Prague in which the conventions have already been completely worked out (fig. 2.6), and with a nineteenth-century section of Reims Cathedral (fig. 2.7), shows the extent to which the fundamental elements of contemporary drafting have already been worked out. Since the cathedral had not reached this height in Villard’s time, the drawing represents design proposals that differ from the existing building: the upper level of the outer buttress actually begins where the lower flyer meets the buttress, while its cornice is just where Villard shows that of the lower level; the inner buttress has the broad base with an internal passage shown by Villard, but it runs without interruption by cornices to the base of its capping, with no intervening spire; there is no passage at the midpoint or above the flyers. Other differences from the actual structure may be ascribed to misunderstanding or to the lack of sufficiently evolved conventions. All the passages indicated by Villard in dark wash are much higher than those executed, which gives the misleading impression that they are excessively narrow. The actual arches of the clerestory windows spring from capitals at the height of the lower flyers, where Villard has drawn capitals, but his capitals support the transverse and diagonal ribs of the nave. These ribs actually spring, as they must, from a considerably lower level, just above the base of the window. Villard did not indicate the window arches at all; he drew colonnettes extending from the base to the crown of the window, as if the window were not arched. The section above that level is confused but, at the base of the window, it reveals impressive progress toward resolving the problem of representing a cut through an elaborately articulated wall. Whether this sheet is a copy of previous drawings, Villard’s fantasy, or a mixture of the two, it documents further the high level of development of the technique of architectural figuration revealed in the paired elevations. A final Reims sheet, p. 63 (fig. 2.8), illustrates major and minor piers and a series of horizontal sections through supports that were taken from templates (Villard calls them 36

buttress elevation and nave section. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 19093, p. 64.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

2.5 Villard de Honnecourt, Reims Cathedral,

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2.6 Workshop of Peter Parler, section of the right choir side aisle of Prague Cathedral, ca. 1430. Vienna, Akademie der bildenden Künste, Kupferstichkabinett, no. 16821.

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Dictionnaire raisonné d’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1875), 2:318.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

2.7 Reims Cathedral, buttress elevation and nave section, engraving by Viollet-le-Duc, from

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molles); the text states (in modernized French), “Ici vous pouvez voir l’un des piliers de la tour de la cathédrale de Reims, et un des ceux situés entre deux chapelles, et il y a un du mur et un de ceux de la nef de l’église. Pour tous ces piliers, les liaisons sont indiquées come elles doivent être. [lower caption:] Voici les gabarits des chapelles de cette page, au-dessus, des baies et des verrières, des ogives et des doubleaux, et des formerets par-dessus.”13 The pier sections show a cut through the core and the engaged columns, the column bases, and the outlines of one or two levels of the podium so as to reveal three or four sections in the same drawing. The caption in the upper center says that one of these is a nave pier, though none of the drawings conforms to the elevation on p. 62 (fig. 2.2). They represent a kind of shorthand; what is of particular interest is the demonstration of the capacity to represent on one plane cuts at several levels. 2.8 Villard de Honnecourt, Reims Cathedral, pier sections and molding templates. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, 19093, p. 63.

The hypothesis that Villard copied the orthogonal elevations from parchment sheets executed by or for the architect of the first phase of construction at Reims raises the question of the purpose of the original drawings. Since they would not have been done to scale, and would probably also have been done on parchment, and hence have been small, it is unlikely that they were destined for use by builders. It is also unlikely that the architects would have wanted to display to others a preliminary project that was to be replaced by later solutions. Yet it must have conformed to a well-developed tradition: a mode of representation so highly refined and effective—one that Renaissance ar-

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2.9 Strasbourg Cathedral, facade elevation, fourteenth century. Strasbourg, Musée de l’Oeuvre de Notre-Dame, inv. 1.

chitects struggled to perfect over the course of a century (fig. 2.1)—is unlikely to have emerged fully matured in only one workshop without extended preceding experiment. We cannot know when such drawings originally appeared; Branner has plausibly sugsuggests that they were developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.14 Further evidence that Reims was an incubator for the maturation of architectural drawing and that Villard would have had models is provided by the survival of two project drawings for the cathedral facade on sheets that have been called “the Reims palimpsest.”15 The term refers to the fact that the drawings made on parchment were rubbed away around 1270 so that the sheets could be reused for a martyrology and obituary of the chapter, but, because they had been first incised with a stylus, their essential features were preserved after the erasure of the ink. The two drawings (in which the facade proper, exclusive of the side buttresses, measures a little over 30 centimeters, about one foot) are strictly orthogonal; they provide evidence that there were surviving project drawings in the chantier done by or for the executing architects. This removes doubt as to whether Villard’s drawings of the cathedral could have been copies.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

gested that the suitability of these conventions of representation to High Gothic style

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2.10 After Giotto?, project for the elevation of the campanile of Florence Cathedral, first quarter of the fourteenth century. Siena, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo (photo: Marvin Trachtenberg).

2.11 Detail of fig. 2.10.

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inv. nr. Q2 and Q3.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

2.12 Orvieto Cathedral, project for facade elevation, ca. 1320 (modern copy). Orvieto, Archivio dell’Opera del Duomo,

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In the century following the Reims drawings, Gothic masters developed an elegant technique for representing architectural elevations, a technique capable of describing the most intricate detail and the most complex shifts of plane that for comparable purposes has never been surpassed. The best examples of this are the series of facade drawings on parchment for the cathedral of Strasbourg, dated to the first third of the fourteenth century (fig. 2.9);16 a similar drawing was executed for the tower of the Münster of Freiburg.17 No comparable drawings were done in Italy. The elevation project for the campanile of the cathedral of Florence, of 1334 (fig. 2.10), shows many of the projecting elements in subjective perspective.18 For example, the consoles supporting the cornice at the transition from the square base to the octagonal spire are splayed out to the left on the left side and to the right on the right, to convey a perspectival effect (fig. 2.11). Paradoxically, the spire of Giotto’s design seems to have been influenced by that of the Freiburg Münster. The two facade elevation drawings for the cathedral of Orvieto, executed around 1320, have even more emphatic perspectival elements, at the entrance portal and in the spires (fig 2.12).19 A contract for the construction of a palace in Siena has similar incursions of perspective into an elevation; it may be the only surviving drawing for a Gothic domestic structure and is additionally interesting because of its accompanying descriptive text.20 Villard’s depiction of the Reims apse (fig. 2.4) seems to be the only surviving preRenaissance instance of the rendering of elevations of curved or polygonal exteriors or interiors, nor was there any thirteenth-century equivalent of his section (fig. 2.5), though a fourteenth-century drawing for Peter Parler’s cathedral in Prague (fig. 2.6) shows as complete a control of the conventions as do modern equivalents. The question posed by this material, for which I shall propose answers in the following part of this study, is how the final resolution of the problems in thirteenth-century northern Europe failed to leave a legacy that would permit early Renaissance architects to proceed on a far more sophisticated level than they did.21

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Part II: The Conventions of Late Gothic and Early Renaissance Drawing The High Gothic style in northern Europe replaced the massiveness of the Romanesque with an increasingly skeletal structure and expression that lent itself to a linear and orthogonal graphic image. The use of perspectival representation and modeling with light and shadow would have been poorly suited to conveying the character of Gothic buildings. The large elevation drawings for Strasbourg Cathedral document the refinement of the orthogonal elevation. For such late Gothic designs, with their exquisitely thin surface elements, this technique would have been mandatory. But the contemporary Italian designer of an ecclesiastical facade pursued entirely different aims, as illustrated by the project drawings for the facade of Orvieto Cathedral (fig. 2.12), which we see in a hand copy of the turn of the century (the recent restoration removed the overdrawing of earlier restorers and revealed lamentable deterioration). The famous drawing reputedly from Giotto’s design for the Florence campanile (figs. 2.10 and 2.11) has been represented as the first surviving orthogonal drawing in Italy, but its draftsman found the suggestion of depth irresistible when depicting the consoles below the cornice or the mullions of the balcony—both of which are treated perspectivally according to the method adopted by Giotto in the framing elements of the indicate a richly colored and historiated surface and they even adopt the basic shape of contemporary altarpiece frames. I recall the proposition of my first teacher, Henri Focillon, that in every age and place one art form dominates; he might have said that in the north it was architecture, and in the south, painting. The northern masters were trained in the mason’s lodges, while the Italians started as painters or sculptors.23 When the architect of San Petronio in Bologna, Antonio di Vincenzo, traveled to Milan to inspect its cathedral in 1390, he drew a plan (fig. 2.13) to which, according to Valerio Ascani, he later, on returning home, added a section. The plan he measured mostly in the Bolognese foot, and the section in the Milanese braccio. Drawn in the workshop where a war over theoretical and structural principles was waged vehemently between

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

large Assisi narrative frescoes.22 The Orvieto drawings too can be called pictorial; they

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2.13 Antonio di Vincenzo, Milan Cathedral, plan and partial nave section, 1390 (modern copy). Bologna, Archivio della Fabbrica di San Petronio.

transalpine and Italian masters,24 it illustrates the basic difference between Italian and northern graphic approaches in the late Gothic period. Antonio’s record is pictorial, in that the sculpted capitals and the bases are represented in perspective. A few years after the making of this drawing, the Italian Renaissance began gradually to overwhelm the northern Gothic graphic tradition. While surviving fifteenth-century northern drawings continue to represent structures in the Gothic style, the pictorial or perspectival impulse began to creep in from Italy. This is illustrated in the model book of Hans Hammer, from the library at Wolfenbüttel, which was compiled at the end of the fifteenth century (fig. 2.14).25 Its 34 leaves contain, in addition to a number of plans, vault designs, and pier sections of the kind encountered in other such Gothic books, a

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2.14 Hans Hammer, copies of machine drawings, late fifteenth century. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August

number of illustrations of construction machines, primarily hoists. This page is particularly interesting because the images appear to have been copied from two sources; one drawing, in the upper left, employs an older convention of representation, not advanced over the primitive mechanical illustrations of Villard, while the other two closely resemble the practice of contemporary Italian engineers, a practice initiated by Filippo Brunelleschi in a series of drawings of hoists to be used in the construction of the cathedral of Florence, and continued in the work of Mariano di Jacopo called Taccola and Francesco di Giorgio.26 Machinery posed a unique problem, different from architecture. The interaction of parts on different planes and levels made plans, elevations, and sections inadequate guides to carpenters assigned to build them, and a flexible kind of axonometric view, as in the drawings on the right and lower left of the sheet, provided the

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Bibliothek, sketchbook, f. 8r.

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2.15 Filarete, representation of a house, from his treatise (1464–1465?). Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Magliabecchianus II, IV, 140, detail of fol. 120r.

most useful information. In the image on the upper left, while the base of the hoist is shown in a primitive isometric fashion, the main shaft merges into an elevation; the weights being lifted are shown in the Byzantine fashion, expanding toward the rear, and the cogwheels and the frame that holds them are flattened to a plane and neither is connected to the hoisting ropes. I see this sheet as a record of the changing graphic conventions at the end of the fifteenth century in the north. What interests me in Hammer’s sheet is that it is one of the earliest unequivocal instances of the infiltration of Italian pictorial representation into the northern Gothic sphere. Although we may find occasional examples of a perspective detail or of shadow used to suggest depth in a late Gothic drawing in the north, it does not undermine the basically orthogonal representation that characterizes the drawing style. Here the transition from one to the other is documented on a single sheet, and from this time forward northern architectural drawing is progressively invaded by Italian pictorial perspective.

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The approach to perspective by Italian architects remained basically the same, as Gothic gave way to all’antica architecture in the fifteenth century—the same in the sense that recession and depth were represented not by the geometrical projection of perspectiva artificialis, but in an unrationalized, subjective way. This “subjective” perspective is not based on optical or mathematical principles; it often follows formulas that evolved for representing particular types of objects, but it could also be individual and ad hoc, like the perspective in much of the painting of the period. The approach is paradoxical, because a resistance to Alberti’s or Brunelleschi’s technique for perspective construction or projection of three-dimensional objects onto a plane is found, incongruously, in technical drawings—of architecture, machinery, topography, and cartography—in which one might expect rationalized methods to have the greatest appeal. The medieval Italian predilection for perspective drawing was reinforced in the Quattrocento by the text regarded as the ultimate authority throughout the Renaissance, that of Vitruvius. Vitruvius described three types of architectural drawing, the plan (ichnographia), elevation (orthographia), and scaenographia which was a version of perspective.27 Scaenographia he defined as “frontis et laterum abscendentium adumbratio ad circinique centrum omnium linearum responsus” (the facade and receding side and

The Renaissance understanding of this ambiguous passage has only recently been convincingly interpreted by Christof Thoenes, who cited as an example the image of a palace by Fra Giocondo; it also appears earlier in the treatise of Filarete, of the early 1460s (fig. 2.15).28 Prior to Thoenes’s interpretation, the Vitruvian passage was almost always understood to mean perspective construction of the kind known from Pompeiian painting that presumably was used in Roman stage design. But, if we accept Thoenes’s reading, the intention was more limited: the facade elevation was to be shown orthogonally, and a side elevation as receding toward an apparently arbitrarily selected point. Alberti, whose architectural treatise was completed in 1450, was the first to oppose the use of either perspective or modeling in light and shadow, on the grounds that they are pictorial, and contrary to the needs of architectural construction. He specifically

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

correspondence of all lines to the center of the circle).

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addressed the issue of elevations in the passage quoted at the outset of this study. The passage clearly states that to assure an accurate drawing of a proposed or existing building, architects must use only images in which all advancing or receding parts are projected onto the plane and are thus represented by a fixed measure, which is known today as orthogonal projection. This cannot be done if elements nearer the viewer appear larger than those farther off, or if circular elements like bases and capitals are drawn as curvilinear. Most Quattrocento draftsmen ignored Alberti’s advice; elevations by architects before the second decade of the sixteenth century had perspective elements, and subjective-perspective views were ubiquitous.29 Thoenes suggests that Alberti’s position is actually consonant with—or rather, a reversal of—his method of perspective construction as described in Della pittura, which combines in one image projections of a measured plan and elevation in order to get a rationally constructed illusion of a three-dimensional space.30 In doing this, Alberti also advises the preparation of separate sheets for the two. Similarly, most commentators on Brunelleschi’s lost perspective views of Florentine buildings as described by Manetti assume that he achieved the appearance of recession by combining measured plans and elevations.31 Alberti’s advice was followed by Raphael in the “Letter to Leo X,” proposing an illustrated survey of the monuments of ancient Rome, written toward the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century:

And because, by my way of thinking, many people mislead themselves about drawing buildings by emulating the Painter rather than the Architect, let me say how one ought to proceed so that one can understand all the measurements properly, and locate all the elements of buildings without error. The drawing of buildings is divided into three parts: first the plan, or flat drawing; second the exterior wall with its ornaments, and third the interior wall, also with its ornaments. . . . Indeed, with these three means one can minutely examine all the parts of every building, inside and out.32

50

Raphael’s addition of the interior elevation to Alberti’s pair does not alter the essential prescription—though, if he visualized as part of the third type a section through the walls showing both their thickness and the relationship of the interior to the exterior (as in fig. 2.20), it would represent a significant advance over his predecessor, and would indeed make it possible to “examine all the parts of every building.”33 The issue manifested itself most vividly in representations of circular or polygonal interiors and exteriors.34 Italian Quattrocento drawings demonstrated a rather more sophisticated though unrationalized perspective effect in rendering curvilinear or polygonal elevations. Giuliano da Sangallo’s parchment studio book of the early years of the next century (fig. 2.16) was the Renaissance equivalent of a collection of architectural photographs, intended

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

2.16 Giuliano da Sangallo, Roman tombs, before 1514. Vatican, Codice Vaticano Barberiniano Latino 4424, fol. 37r.

51

2.17 Sebastiano Serlio, Bramante’s project for the cupola of St. Peter in the Vatican. From Tutte le opere d’architettura (1540), Book III, f. 66v.

52

for reference and diversion, and thus served a different purpose than the drawings Alberti recommended. But a representation like this is in some ways superior to the photograph: not only can it show the building’s inside and outside in a single image, but it can interpret, by imagining missing parts, at the same time as it makes clear in a protoromantic way that the structures are ruins and that they belong to a lost era. While we speak of taking a photograph, we speak of making a drawing. Giuliano’s approach was transitional; he built up his image from the plan but did not draw with geometrical rigor; the interior details would not be measurable for construction. Drawings done from historic buildings are a different kind of representation from those done to prepare a working design. While some Renaissance examples were meant to be seen only by the draftsman, most are intended to be seen by others, and therefore tend to fulfill the expectations and to respond to the reading ability of the viewer. This made them conservative and resistant to significant change. Serlio’s illustration of the dome of St. Peter (fig. 2.17) resolves Giuliano’s problem of representing orthogonally in one image the interior and exterior of a round structure according to the prescription of Alberti and Raphael. It dates from 1540, by which time the technique was widespread, but Thoenes plausibly proposes that it was a copy of contemporary with Giuliano’s drawing. If this is so, which is likely, it may have been the first proper orthogonal drawing in Italy of a nonrectilinear building raised from a plan. Bramante and those assisting him in the fabbrica of St. Peter—notably Antonio da Sangallo the Younger—opened a new era in which architects demanded precisely measured and proportioned drawings both for recording the classical remains and for developing new projects. But among amateurs and patrons, pictorial effect continued to be more important than precision of measurement, as illustrated in a depiction of the Pantheon (fig. 2.18) from a volume of the second decade of the century recording the major ancient and modern monuments of Rome. The author, Bernardo della Volpaia, showed a half-interior and a

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Bramante’s original drawing for the cupola, perhaps from 1505–1506,35 and thus nearly

53

2.18 Bernardo della Volpaia, perspective/section of the Pantheon, ca. 1515. London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Codex Coner, f. 32v.

54

2.19 Baldassarre Peruzzi, longitudinal section of the Pantheon, 1531–1535. Ferrara, Biblioteca Comunale, Ms. Classe I, 217r.

mostly imagined section of the Pantheon; it is not projected systematically and is a par-

Some twenty years later, Baldassarre Peruzzi drew, also freehand, strictly orthogonal longitudinal sections of the Pantheon (fig. 2.19), one of which was copied by his pupil Sebastiano Serlio in the third book of his architectural treatise, where he wrote: One should not wonder at all if in those things that relate to perspective, one doesn’t see any recession or thickness or plane, for which reason I have decided to remove them from the plan and to show only the heights in scale so that foreshortening should not distort the measurements as a result of the foreshortened lines36 Nonetheless, Serlio’s plate shows the apsidal chapel in perspective, and he models with shadow.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

adigmatic example of subjective perspective.

55

The designers who overcame the pull of perspective in representing receding and projecting elements were the first ones who were trained as architects rather than as figural artists: Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Palladio.37 Antonio’s drawing for a church at Monte Moro (fig. 2.20) demonstrates—except for its use of shading—the Albertian principle, adding the refinement of presenting the section to the left of center, and the exterior elevation to the right; of necessity it is paired vertically with the building plan because an orthogonal projection has to be constructed from the plan with a T-square or triangle, and can be constructed and then properly read only in combination. The technique of translating from one plane to another is essentially the same as the construction of foreshortened projections of figures in Piero della Francesca’s De prospettiva pingendi (fig. 2.21), in that the result is produced by joining the original to the final projection by as many parallel lines as there are changes in plane.38 It is an engaging paradox that Piero’s advanced investigation of painters’ perspective should have provided architects with the capacity to overcome their addiction to subjective perspective. Palladio almost invariably rendered curvilinear interiors and exteriors orthogonally and in relation to the plan; unlike Antonio and consistently with Alberti, he rarely used shadow for relief rendering. Most northern draftsmen did not return to orthogonal rendering in the sixteenth century. Hermann Vischer, as Lotz showed,39 visited Rome in 1515–1516 and made drawings influenced by the northern orthogonal tradition, but they were amateurish and ill adapted to building. In drawing the Colosseum, for example, he was unable to represent its curving exterior orthogonally and simply drew it as flat. But Albrecht Dürer provided sophisticated exceptions to this rule (fig. 2.22) in fortification woodcuts published in 1527 in his Etliche Underricht von Befestigung.40 He must have learned the projection of a curved surface up from a plane in Italy, which he visited early in the century, before any surviving Italian examples of this kind of drawing and before Serlio’s publication. The impression of relief is not produced by shading but by the rendering of the joints in the masonry, which would have been progressively constricted as the bastion receded toward the curtain wall.

56

and section, ca. 1526. Florence, Uffizi, Arch. 173.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

2.20 Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, church of Monte Moro presso Montefiascone, project for plan, elevation,

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2.21 Piero della Francesca, foreshortening of the human head. From De prospettiva

pingendi (ca. 1490). Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS 576, book 3, proposition 8, f. 64r.

Leonardo da Vinci, in depicting a human skull in strikingly effective drawings of the late 1480s and 1490s (see fig. 6.2, top), approached the problem architecturally, as if the skull were a dome, showing its vertical section and interior, and a horizontal section in perspective that constitutes a plan.41 Curiously, a technical advance in architectural representation was made by Leonardo in the discipline of human anatomy, but it is not surprising, considering that, at the same time, as we saw, a related advance—the raising of an elevation from a plan—was made by Piero della Francesca in examining exactly the same object, the disembodied human head (fig. 2.21).

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From Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett,

Schloss und Flechten (1527), unnumbered plate.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

2.22 Albrecht Dürer, project for elevation and plan of a fort.

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One very small sketch of 1505–1506 by Leonardo (fig. 3.5), of one of his central-plan fantasies, is unique in joining a perspective/section of the rear half of a chapel with a plan of the forward half which projects toward the viewer. Although it was not geometrically constructed in the strict sense, a base line was drawn first to mark the intersection of the plan and section, and two diagonals were drawn across it to establish the plane of the plan, so that while the drawing was loosely drawn freehand, the artist adopted a shortcut version of geometric perspective. Conceptually, it is a short step from Leonardo’s two drawings to a more highly developed form in a unique perspective drawing by Baldassarre Peruzzi of his project for St. Peter in Rome (fig. 2.23).42 The perspective is the first to be constructed according to another method devised by Piero, in which an off-center vanishing point is arbitrarily selected—not associated with the position of the eye—and orthogonals converge toward it.43 A receding rectangle with a base line/intersection that is farther back than the picture plane provides a reference for drawing the differing levels of the building. It is a hypothetical bird’s-eye view with cuts at three different levels perpendicular to the plane of projection and an idiosyncratic treatment of the vaults and dome. It represents a mix of what had been constructed at that date, what Peruzzi planned, and even some elements that had already been constructed but shown here according to preceding designs. A number of other geometrically constructed perspective drawings by Peruzzi have been preserved. The question posed by this material is how the final resolution of the problems in thirteenth-century northern Europe failed to leave a legacy that would permit early Renaissance architects to proceed on a far more sophisticated level than they did. Why did Alberti have to exhort his colleagues not to render elevations with light and shadow in imitation of painters (he did not even consider subjective perspective drawings worthy of mention)? I suggest three answers to this question. The first is that Vitruvius, who was universally read by fifteenth-century architects, had, by recommending scaenographia, justified illusionism in architectural drawing, and encouraged even orthographic elevations to be given relief by the simulation in wash of light and shade. The second was that

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2.23 Baldassarre Peruzzi, project for continuing construction at St. Peter in the Vatican, in bird’s-eye perspective,

figural artists of the early Renaissance were intent on achieving greater naturalism by the simulation of relief and spatial recession, and, in contrast to the preparation of Gothic architects or master masons in the north, all of the Italian architects had been trained as figural artists. As a corollary to this, the northern architects focused on structural elements and thought of facades as screens, while the Italian architects conceived buildings in terms of mass.44 In modern times, under the influence of the theorists, we have perceived Renaissance architecture primarily in terms of proportion and of the all’antica style. Perhaps my interpretation of Italian late medieval and Renaissance architectural representation as pictorial, in contrast to the linear emphasis of northern Gothic images, could lead to an expansion of our critical perspective on Renaissance architecture.

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1534–1535. Florence, Uffizi, 2Ar.

61

N OT E S

1

2

3

4

5

62

An earlier version of part I was published in memory of Carolyn Kolb. Wolfgang Lotz, “Das Raumbild in der Architekturzeichnung der italienischen Renaissance,” Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 7 (1956), 193–226; English version in Lotz, Studies in Italian Renaissance Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 1–65. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria (published 1490), 2.1 (ed. Giovanni Orlandi [Milan, 1966], 99): “Inter pictoris atque architecti perscriptione hoc interest, quod ille prominentias ex tabula monstrare umbris et lineis et angulis comminutis elaborat, architectus spretis umbris prominentias istis ex fundamenti descriptione ponit, spatia vero et figuras frontis cuiusque et laterum alibi constantibus lineis atque veris angulis docet, uti que sua velit non apparentibus putari visis, sed certis ratisque dimensionibus annotari.” Cf. the alternative reading of the last phrase in Leon Battista Alberti: On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), “he is one who desires his work to be judged not by deceptive appearances but acording to certain calculated standards.” The perspective employed, almost never geometrically projected, was subjective and variable. In an orthogonal drawing, every part is projected onto a single plane so that the distance from the observer is not a factor. Only in this way can a drawing be made to scale. Lotz cited figure 2.20 (Uffizi A173) as one example, and a longitudinal section for St. Peter in the Vatican (Uffizi A66). He also refers to orthogonal drawings by Hermann Vischer of 1515, which he believes to have been grounded in late Gothic northern drawings. Lotz’s observations have been admirably expanded by Christof Thoenes, “Vitruv, Alberti, Sangallo,” in A. Beyer et al., eds., Hülle und Fülle: Festschrift für Tilmann Buddensieg (Alfter, 1993), 565–584. Facsimiles of Villard’s album with commentary: H. R. Hahnloser, Villard de Honnecourt:

6

7

8

9

10

Kritische Gesamtausgabe des Bauhüttenbuches, ms. fr. 19093 der pariser Nationalbibliothek (Vienna, 1935); A. Erlande-Brandenburg et al., Carnet de Villard de Honnecourt (Paris, 1986); F. Bucher, Architector: The Lodge Books and Sketchbooks of Medieval Architects, vol. 1 (New York, 1979). For commentary, see Roland Bechmann, Villard de Honnecourt: La pensée technique au XIIIe siècle et sa communication (Paris, 1991); Carl F. Barnes, “Le problème Villard de Honnecourt,” in Roland Recht, ed., Les bâtisseurs des cathédrales gothiques (Strasbourg, 1989), 209–223. On medieval drawings, see Robert Branner, “Villard de Honnecourt, Reims and the Origin of Gothic Architectural Drawing,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 61 (1963), 129–146; Branner, “Drawings from a Thirteenth-Century Architect’s Shop: The Reims Palimpsest,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 17 (1958), 9–21; Stephen Murray, “The Gothic Façade Drawings in the ‘Reims Palimpsest’,” Gesta 17 (1978), 51–55. For recent treatments of Gothic architectural drawings, see Recht, ed., Les bâtisseurs, chap. 5, “Le dessin”; Roland Recht, “Sur le dessin d’architecture gothique,” in Sumner Crosby, ed., Etudes d’art médiéval offertes à Louis Grodecki (Paris, 1981), 239ff.; Wolfgang Schöller, “Le dessin d’architecture à l’époque gothique,” in Recht, ed., Les bâtisseurs; Schöller, “Rittzeichnungen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Architekturzeichnungs im Mittelalter,” Architectura 19 (1989), 36–61; H. Koepf, Die gotischen Planrisse der wiener Sammlungen (Vienna, 1969). Parchment is also inhospitable to the development of scale drawing, as it may be affected by environmental conditions. See the studies on the Reims palimpsest by Robert Branner and Stephen Murray cited in note 6. Inscription on p. 29 of the album. There is also a generic plan of the Cistercian church type on p. 28. Branner, “Villard de Honnecourt, Reims,” ar-

12

13 14

15

16

17

18 19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

partial section of the nave and side aisles of Milan Cathedral (fig. 2.13) reflects northern practice, but is not strictly orthogonal; see the discussion below. Another drawing related to the cathedral of Florence is one by Giovanni di Ghirardo, a humanist rather than an architect, showing a proposal, dated by a payment of 1426, for the plan and section of the cupola and a geometrical scheme for calculating the profile. The section has perspective recession at the base and in the rendering of the ring and the lantern at the crown. See Howard Saalman, “Giovanni di Gherardo da Prato’s Designs Concerning the Cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence,” Journal of the Society of Architetural Historians 18 (1959), 11–20. I do not emphasize here the influence of the invention of artificial perspective because, as I shall indicate below, the great majority of “perspective” representations of architecture throughout the Renaissance were subjective, not based on a geometrically consistent construction with a determinate “vanishing” point and distance point. Valerio Ascani, “I disegni architettonici attribuiti ad Antonio di Vincenzo,” Arte medievale 1 (1991), 105–114. See also C. Ferrari da Passano, A. M. Romanini, et al., Il duomo di Milano, 2 vols. (Milan, 1973), 1: fig. 154; James S. Ackerman, “‘Ars sine Scientia Nihil Est’: Gothic Theory of Architecture at the Cathedral of Milan,” Art Bulletin 12 (1949), 84–111. See François Joseph Fuchs, “Introduction au ‘Musterbuch’ de Hans Hammer,” Bulletin de la Cathédrale de Strasbourg 20 (1992), 11–67. A unique subjective perspective interior of the choir of San Juan de los Reyes in Toledo is an example of probable Italian influence in Hammer’s book. It has vertical cuts at two different depths but avoids indicating the thickness of the walls. Etienne Hamon, “Un dessin de la fin du moyen âge pour San Juan de los Reyes à Tolède,” Bulletin Monumental 151 (1993), 420f. See Paolo Galuzzi, ed., Prima di Leonardo: La cultura delle macchine a Siena nel Rinascimento (Milan, 1991). Technical drawings in general are discussed by Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and

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11

gued effectively that project drawings were not made before Villard’s time and that these elevations could not therefore be copied from proposals preserved in the workshop; no such drawing has survived, and it is difficult to explain how they would have been used. Yet evidence throughout the album convinces me that Villard was not a qualified architect and that he lacked the skill or imagination required to invent the orthogonal elevation. I assume the window to have been intended for the clerestory, since we see the springing of the transverse and diagonal ribs. Its oculus has the design of the actual ground-floor windows, but, at the time of Villard’s drawing, the same may have been intended for the clerestory as well. Translation into modern French from ErlandeBrandenburg et al., Carnet, 122. The concluding phrase of the original reads “por ço l’amai jo miex.” From ibid., 126. Branner, “Villard de Honnecourt, Reims,” emphasized that Gothic drawings corresponded effectively with the style of the architecture. See Branner, “Drawings from a ThirteenthCentury Architect’s Shop,” and Murray, “Gothic Façade Drawings.” On the Strasbourg drawings, see Recht, ed., Les bâtisseurs, catalogue, part III, C1–C15, 381–404. R. Liess, “Der Rahnsche Riss A des freiburger Münsterturms und seine strassburger Herkunft,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft 44 (1990), 7ff. Marvin Trachtenberg, The Campanile of Florence Cathedral (New York, 1971), 3–20. See Harald Keller, “Die Risse der orvietaner Domopera und die Anfänge der Bildhauerzeichnung,” in Festschrift Wilhelm Pinder zum sechzigsten Geburtstage (Leipzig, 1938), 195–222; more recently Antje Middeldorf Kosegarten, Die Domfassade in Orvieto (Munich and Berlin, 1997), 37ff. Published with a valuable commentary by Franklin Toker, “Gothic Architecture by Remote Control: An Illustrated Building Contract of 1340,” Art Bulletin 56 (1985), 67–94. The drawing is one of the earliest instances of the use of paper. Antonio di Vincenzo’s late fourteenth-century

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27

28

29

30

31

32

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Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), esp. chap. 5. Vitruvius, De architectura 1.2.2. Why Vitruvius placed that point at the center of a circle is not clear. Facsimile edition with translation and commentary by John Spencer, Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, 2 vols. (New Haven, 1965), fol. 120r. Christof Thoenes, in a brilliant recent study of Renaissance architectural drawing (“Vitruv, Alberti, Sangallo”), was the first to make the connection in a discussion of the similar illustration of a palace in Fra Giocondo’s 1511 edition of Vitruvius. The appearance of such an image there certifies the assumption that this is the way Vitruvius’s scaenographia was understood in the Renaissance. See also Maria Teresa Bartoli, “Orthographia, ichnographia, scaenographia,” in Studi e documenti di architettura 7 (1978), 197–208; Christoph Frommel, “Reflections on the Early Architectural Drawings,” in H. Millon and V. Lampugnani, eds., The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture (Milan, 1994), 101–121. According to Thoenes, “Vitruv, Alberti, Sangallo,” 566, Alberti’s passage does not represent a criticism of Vitruvius, who did not claim that scaenographic projection was accurate, but of contemporary practice (for example, in the drawings of Filarete or in Ciriaco d’Ancona’s drawing of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople; see C. Smith, “Ciriaco d’Ancona’s Seven Drawings of Santa Sofia,” Art Bulletin 69 [1987], 16–32). Alberti, De pictura, 1.19–20, in Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and on Sculpture, ed. and trans. C. Grayson (London, 1972). The methods of Alberti and Brunelleschi are persuasively analyzed in Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (New Haven, 1990), 11–23, 344f. From Raffaello Sanzio, tutti gli scritti (Milan, 1956), 60, 62; transcription from the first draft of the letter: “e perchè, secondo il mio giudicio, molti s’ingannano circa il disegnare le edificj; che in luogo di far quello che appartiene al Architettore, fanno quello che appartiene al Pittore, dirò qual modo mi pare che s’abbia a tenere, perchè si possano intendere tutte le misure giustamente; e perchè si sappiano

trovare tutti li membri degli edificj si divide in tre parti; delle quali la prima è la pianta, o voliamo dire disegno piano; la seconda è la parete di fuori, con li suoi ornamenti; la terza è la parete di dentro, pure con li suoi ornamenti. . . . In somma, con questi tre modi si possono considerare minutamente tutte le parti di ogni edificio dentro, e fuori.” According to Christof Thoenes (“La ‘lettera’ a Leone X,” in C. Frommel and M. Winner, eds., Raffaello a Roma, il convegno del 1983 [Rome, 1986], 373–381; see also Thoenes, “Vitruv, Alberti, Sangallo,” 566), other available transcriptions (and Camesasca’s principal text) are from a second draft written about a year later (1520?); see “Lettera a Leone X,” in Scritti rinascimentali di architettura, ed. Renato Bonelli (Milan, 1978), 482. In the second version, the last sentence is canceled and a passage inserted explaining how to make perspective drawings, after Alberti’s Della pittura. Thoenes suggests that the first version (probably 1519), perhaps written with Baldassare Castiglione, reflected the collaboration of Raphael’s coarchitect at St. Peter, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, who was the first architect to consistently employ orthogonal projection. Antonio was the only early sixteenth-century architect to have been trained as such, rather than as a figural artist. The letter is also discussed in John Shearman, “Raphael, Rome and the Codex Escurialensis,” Master Drawings 15 (1977), 107–116, where the date proposed is 1514–1516. 33 Thoenes, “Vitruv, Alberti, Sangallo,” assumes that Raphael meant an orthogonal section as in fig. 2.20, even if he did not say as much. If Sangallo the Younger did contribute to the writing of this passage, as Thoenes believes, such a conclusion would be likely, since he was the principal developer of the method in his generation. See also Bartoli, “Orthographia, ichnographia, scaenographia.” Daniele Barbaro, in his translation of and commentary on Vitruvius, 1.2 (I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruvio [Venice, 1567], p. 29), proposes the same repertory as Raphael (he is clearer about the need for a section to be combined with the interior elevation), intentionally mistranslating the passage as having said sciographia, meaning orthogonal section, rather than

35

36

37

38

39 40

41

elevation of the skull with a section/interior (fig. 6.22) is divided down the center by a vertical line, precisely as later architects represented the elevation and section of buildings. 42 My brief interpretation is indebted to conversations with Wolfgang Jung and Paola Poggi. 43 See Piero della Francesca, De prospettiva pingendi, ed. G. Nicco Fasola (reprint, Florence, 1984), p. 129. 44 I am grateful to Dr. Myra Nan Rosenfeld for the latter observation.

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scaenographia. See the discussion of Barbaro’s theory in chapter 9 below, especially the citation in note 29. First discussed by Lotz in “Das Raumbild in der Architekturzeichnung der italienischen Renaissance.” Thoenes, “Vitruv, Alberti, Sangallo,” 567. Frommel, “Reflections on the Early Architectural Drawings,” suggests that the date of Bramante’s drawing is later. On the following page, Serlio illustrated the plan of the cupola. In the original drawing, the plan must have been drawn directly underneath the elevation/section so that the latter could be constructed by running up perpendiculars from it. Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte le opere dell’architettura (Venice, 1584), 3.52; p. ix in the original edition of 1540: “Non si maravigli alcuno se in queste cose che accennano alla prospettiva, non vi se vede scorcio alcuno, ne grossezze, nè piano: percioche ho voluto levarle dalla pianta dimostrando solamente le altezze in misura, accioche per lo scorciare le misure non se perdino per causa de i scorci.” See Howard Burns, “A Peruzzi Drawing in Ferrara,” Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 11 (1966), 249–270. Arnold Nesselrath has suggested (“Raphael’s Archaeological Method,” in Raffaello a Roma, 357–372) that a few drawings of the 1490s, notably one by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, are done in orthogonal elevation, but they do not appear to be geometrically constructed. After writing this I found an impressive treatment of the relevance of Piero’s foreshortening methods, especially of heads, in Robin Evans, The Projective Cast (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), chap. 4, “Piero’s Heads.” Wolfgang Lotz, in Miscellanea Bibliothecae Hertzianae (Munich, 1961), 167–174. Albrecht Dürer, Etliche Underricht von Befestigung der Statt Schlosz und Flecken . . . (Nuremburg, 1527), unnumbered pages; the illustration is on p. 27 of the text. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, no. 19057r, of 1489. Possibly the sectioning technique had been developed by anatomists prior to Leonardo for demonstration purposes (though not for graphic illustration, which, prior to Canano and Vesalius, was still in a primitive state). Leonardo’s companion frontal

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THREE

Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

An unforgettable image among Leonardo da Vinci’s early anatomical studies is on a sheet of the late 1480s that presents two human skulls sawed through for instructional purposes, perhaps by the artist himself (fig. 6.2). Comparison to anatomical illustrations in medical texts of the early sixteenth century shows how extraordinary this achievement is. What gives the Leonardo skulls their special vividness is the exceptional and inventive use of techniques that had been developed during the previous generation of the fifteenth century and among Leonardo’s contemporaries—artificial perspective and foreshortening, proportion and chiaroscuro, and the handling of gradations of light and shadow. The uppermost skull depends on perspective projection to draw the eye into depth along the cuts, while the lower skull is held in a proportional grid. All sparkle with light, giving an inescapable impression of three-dimensionality. They seem so real that it is hard to believe that the lower drawing is completely inaccurate: the spine is depicted as hollow to accommodate the flow of a spiritual effluvium from the heart, in accordance with the ancient medical text of Galen rather than with observed evidence. In his early work, Leonardo was often more impressed by written authority than by the evidence of the eye; also, when he made this drawing, he obviously had a pair of skulls detached from the skeleton, as tends to happen, so he had to improvise for the spinal column. The skull drawings could be used as a lesson in architectural draftsmanship, if the cranium is visualized as a dome. Indeed, they illustrate the three principal types of architectural drawing: plan, indicated in the perspective foreshortening of the horizontal cut, elevation, shown in the exterior profile of the skull, and section, represented by the vertical cut through the lower skull. I do not know of a comparably accomplished section with a view of the interior in any architectural drawing prior to 1480. This serves to introduce the relatively large corpus of Leonardo’s studies for churches— some 50–60 sheets—the majority of which were central-planned, domed structures. Few of them can be confidently associated with a particular commission. Indeed, apart from a series of studies from 1487–1490 for covering the tiburio of the cathedral of Milan, they lack the characteristics of designs intended for execution. Leonardo rarely suggests alternative solutions for a particular project or design detail, and the drawings are

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mostly too small in scale to favor further study. A large proportion are plans accompanied by perspectives; some are single plans, and a small number are single perspectives. Among the latter are a number of interior views. Medieval churches had mostly been longitudinal, with a long nave terminating in a chancel with the high altar and often a choir, and many chapels along the side. This was suited to the Roman liturgy, to preaching, and to the celebration of private masses that would not disturb celebrations in the main chapel. But, starting with Brunelleschi’s Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence (1434), Renaissance architects and their humanist patrons bent every effort to impose on a reluctant clergy round, square, and polygonal churches because they conformed to perfect, Platonic geometrical figures and represented a microcosm of God’s conception of the universe. No matter that priests and monks could no longer be kept in areas isolated from the lay public as their rules required, or that there was no place for the choir; the idealist nature of Renaissance art was to be imposed on a religious practice that had not experienced a Renaissance. What was reborn in the Renaissance was primarily pagan culture. In practice, the obsessive program of the architects was not particularly successful; central-plan churches rarely got off the drawing board unless they were private chapels or memorial or pilgrimage churches, types that had been round since early Christian times. (Apart from baptisteries, the central plan was rarely adopted in the Middle Ages.) Indeed, the impracticality of many of Leonardo’s central plans, particularly with respect to the proliferation of autonomous radiating chapels, is partly due to the fact that such designs would not have been responsive to ecclesiastical functions (Vitruvius’s utilitas) anyhow; Leonardo was free to indulge his fantasia. Leonardo’s architectural drawings are almost all rapid sketches that were conceived not contemporary architectural repertory, but often of new potentialities in the modeling of space and mass. He almost never developed a concept from the initial inspiration into more studied schemes, and he was generally indifferent to the structural viability of his designs. Most of the drawings are more vivid than those of his predecessors (few of which survive, apart from those of Francesco di Giorgio Martini) and more evocative of

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as initial proposals for building but rather as explorations, sometimes of the past and

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the solidity of buildings and the palpability of interior spaces. Leonardo could not have intended his architectural drawings to be illustrations for a treatise, as has been suggested; they are not theoretical, they do not cover more than a narrow range of architectural issues, and most are not accompanied by written texts. The great majority of the surviving drawings are ground plans and exterior and interior perspectives, and are executed with pen and ink on paper, each occupying only part of the sheet, which usually contains other drawings, in some cases not architectural. Most of the exterior perspectives depict the building as if seen from a height and in a strong light that emphasizes its three-dimensionality. Occasionally rendering extends onto the pavement surrounding the church (Institut de France, Codex B, 17v [fig. 3.1], 18v, 24r [fig. 3.3]). With two exceptions—an interior (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, 547v/205v [fig. 3.5]), and an exterior (Codex B, 17v [fig. 3.1]), in which a receding horizontal plane with its four corners marked a, b, c, and d passes through the building at the level of the roof of the ground floor—the perspectives are not constructed geometrically, as one might expect in an age that enthusiastically developed perspective techniques. They are simply done freehand without a vanishing point; this is true of almost all architectural perspectives in the fifteenth century, and indeed throughout the remainder of the Renaissance. Elevations, which, together with plans, are an essential convention for practicing architects, are virtually absent from Leonardo’s repertory. Most other Renaissance architects followed the ancient Roman treatise of Vitruvius in employing three types of drawing: ichnographia (plan), orthographia (elevation), and scaenographia (perspective) (see chapter 2 above). The last two might be combined, as in fig. 3.11, but only when the elevation was planar, which excluded both the exteriors and the interiors of all the central plans of Leonardo. Although Leon Battista Alberti, in his treatise De re aedificatoria (completed ca. 1450), advised the coordination of elevations and plans and argued against the use of perspective drawings, since they distort measurements, the majority of architects ignored the latter advice. A potent graphic innovation of Leonardo in the rendering of plans, to which I shall refer in discussing fig. 3.7, is shading, by cross hatching, of the interior voids. This demonstrates a consciousness, not evident in earlier architectural drawing, of space as

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3.1 Leonardo da Vinci, central-plan church designs, perspective views, 1487–1490. Paris, Institut de France, Codex B, 17v.

having a positive form, and demonstrates the opportunity to initiate a composition with a focus on spatial volumes rather than supports and walls.

ing on Milan), Richard Schofield demonstrates convincingly that few of his drawings were related to building commissions, that none of these eventuated in the construction of a building, and that almost none of his projects was carried beyond initial sketches of a concept. The study leaves the impression that Leonardo’s efforts in the field of architecture were not of much interest; as Schofield wrote in 1990 (pp. 93–95):

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In the most recent and thorough study of Leonardo’s architectural career (1991: focus-

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If no building designed by Leonardo survives; if we cannot guarantee that he was responsible for any projected building; if he was comparatively uninterested in the antique, and only fitfully interested in contemporary architecture and in the most up-to-date styles, what then remains? A central fact, revealed by the documents, is that his livelihood did not depend on architecture, but rather—one guesses—on painting, for which there are contracts and other documents, state scenery, costume design, perhaps mechanical devices, but especially on making maps of canals, towns, and drawings of fortifications for strategic purposes. His interest in architecture was spasmodic, occurring particularly in the 1480s and thereafter sporadically, with a flourish in the 1510s in Florence, a little in Rome, and more in France at the end of his life. . . . It tended to be a mirror, where it was like contemporary architecture: rather than a trend setter, sometimes up to date, but often stuck in the past. I approach the drawings from quite another perspective, seeing them—despite their disassociation from the interest in ancient Roman architecture that characterized Leonardo’s most inventive contemporaries—as evidence of the transition from the small-scaled and planar architecture of the Quattrocento to the monumental wall-andmass architecture of Bramante and his sixteenth-century followers, who brought about a major evolutionary leap in architecture during Leonardo’s lifetime. Two historically important designs appear on fol. 52r of Codex B in the Institut de France, of 1490 (fig. 3.2). The plan for a longitudinal basilica in the lower half, and a related rapid sketch at upper left, propose a particularly inventive solution to the problem of joining a central-plan crossing and choir to a longitudinal nave—a problem that had been undertaken by Leon Battista Alberti with limited success in functional terms at San Francesco in Rimini (1450) and SS. Annunziata in Florence (1470). Leonardo’s design, while acknowledging its descent from the cathedral of Florence, anticipates Bramante’s solution to St. Peter in Rome in placing the crossing within a square which extends into three wide apsidal terminations with ambulatories, and in proposing a fluid linkage between the nave and crossing. As in virtually all of Leonardo’s churches, a

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Codex B, 52r.

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3.2 Leonardo da Vinci, longitudinal church design and preaching theater, 1487–1490. Paris, Institut de France,

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3.3 Leonardo da Vinci, longitudinal church design, 1487–1490. Paris, Institut de France, Codex B, 24r.

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dome of eight segments is supported by an octagonal drum, as illustrated in the small sketch at the upper left with the note “edifizio al proposito del fondamento figurato di socto.” Leonardo, recognizing that the columns intended to support the dome would have been inadequate in size, enlarged those nearest the choir, but these too appear to risk instability, unless the church were quite small. An external open aisle screens the exterior of the basilica, columnar on the sides and with piers along the front; there is no clue as to how this would have appeared in elevation. A variant of this drawing appears on Codex B, 24r (fig. 3.3), in plan and perspective. Because the apses are here reduced to the size of chapels, so that on the interior they are closer in size to the four chapels placed on the two diagonal axes, the cubic mass is accentuated more strongly on the exterior. The facade is flanked by two towers; in the plan, but not in the perspective, a fivebay colonnade flanks the nave. This version is still more indifferent to problems of structure than fig. 3.2; like several of the central-plan sketches, it is more an exercise in geometry than a plausible architectural project. On the top of fig. 3.2 appears the plan of a structure labeled “teatro da predicare.” It is not a church, but a circular arena with three radial access stairways that create two quadrants in the lower half of the circle; circular rows of seats are drawn in the quadrant on the left. Wall pilasters or buttresses are indicated on the exterior of this quadrant. In the center, a tall cylindrical element, presumably a pulpit (though out of scale for this purpose), is drawn in perspective. Initially Leonardo had drawn the plan as a full circle, perhaps with the intention of seating the audience all around the center, but on second thought he drew in the upper half of the building an entrance or narthex divided by columns into three aisles, the central one terminated by semicircular apses. Whether intentionally or not, the narthex takes the form of an ancient Roman basilica.

grated into a basilical church resembling the one just discussed. Here the crossing, with the altar and podium at its center, is square rather than octagonal (no dome could have been intended), with piers at the four corners; this is placed within a larger square on three sides of which are placed three semicircular banks of seats the width of the lesser square. These are separated from the ample outer apses by annular ambulatories.

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The “teatro” concept is developed further on Codex B, 55r, where the seating is inte-

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Seating is not indicated in the entrance arm, where Leonardo initially drew a longitudinal nave, and subsequently a fourth hemicycle harmonizing with the three others. His ambivalence with respect to the longitudinal and central models for this church foreshadows Bramante’s in the earliest St. Peter plans. What, then, did Leonardo intend by suggesting in these two drawings the transformation of the church into a theater? It was a radical idea: it would completely disrupt liturgical practice, causing a confusion between the pulpit and the altar, and it would give a prominence to preaching that did not harmonize with Roman liturgy in the preReformation period. No such building was constructed in the Renaissance. The idea may have been stimulated by reports of the preaching of Savonarola in Florence at this time, preaching that departed from contemporary practice and was virulently antagonistic to the church hierarchy and the Pope. Central-plan, predominantly octagonal churches constitute the largest body of Leonardo’s ecclesiastical studies. Almost all of these are covered by ribbed masonry domes on high drums with round windows on each face. The domes are derived in structure and form from the cathedral of Florence (which in turn was based on a fourteenth-century model); they have the elevated profile of the Gothic arch. But other cupola types appear: one, with eight planar trapezoidal facets and without ribs, is derived from the Florence Baptistery (British Library, Codex Ashburnham 2037, 4r; Codex B, 39v, 97r; quick sketches on Codex Atlanticus, 205v a, 271v d, 362v b); another, more in harmony with early sixteenth-century Roman practice (e.g., Bramante’s Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio, ca. 1508–1512; Raphael’s Sant’Eligio degli Orefici—not completed during Leonardo’s lifetime), is hemispherical. But this type appears mostly in small, rapidly sketched studies that reveal nothing of the materials or structure (Codex Ashburnham 2037, 3v [fig. 3.4]; Codex B, 21r, 25r; Codex Atlanticus, 37r a, 205v a, 352r b; Royal Library, Windsor, 19134v). On some of the hemispheres, lines suggesting ribs rise toward the lantern, but in others, two or three horizontal lines are added, giving the dome the appearance of half a terrestrial globe marked with longitudes and latitudes. They do not appear to represent structural elements.

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Codex Ashburnham 2037, 3v.

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3.4 Leonardo da Vinci, design for a central-plan church, 1487–1490? London, British Library,

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3.5 Leonardo da Vinci, design for a central-plan church, ca. 1507? Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, 547v/205v, detail.

The central space of the dome in these churches gives onto a belt of radial chapels: eight in most cases. These, covered with hemispherical domes or half-domes, are independent of medieval or early Renaissance precedents and, in themselves and in their relationship to the central space, are the chief focus of Leonardo’s inventiveness. The most inventive of the type with respect to the development of conventions of architectural representation is a small, rapidly executed pen sketch of the interior of a church on Codex Atlanticus, 547v/205v (fig. 3.5), dated 1507 by Pedretti on questionable documentary grounds. It makes use of techniques similar to those utilized in the skull drawing of fig. 6.2 to show in one image the plan, section, and interior elevation of the circular central area and two of the four attached circular chapels; an exterior perspective is sketched alongside. What makes this sketch particularly effective is the device of establishing the plane of perspective projection not, as was usual, between the viewer and the building, but at the plane of the section—which is marked by a horizontal line. This permitted a half-plan to be extended toward the viewer—a practice not authorized in the costruzione legittima (painters’ perspective). The horizontal line is intersected by a diagonal that helps the draftsman to establish the degree of recession required to make the interior perspective effective. The technique is related to one of those

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described in the perspective treatise of Piero della Francesca, of about 1480; it does not appear to have been employed in architectural drawing before Leonardo’s time. The building, with its hemispherical domes and all’antica pilasters and pedimented apertures, no longer echoes medieval or Brunelleschian precedents. Although the design proposed in the exterior perspective is structurally inadequate—because the drum lacks the density to support the dome—the section suggests what might be a much thicker drum that could do the job, and the plan shows a massive support in the form of a thick ring of masonry penetrated, in emulation of the Pantheon in Rome, by alternating hemicyclical and rectangular chapels at ground level. Another folio of Codex B (22r; fig. 3.6), representing a centralized church in plan and perspective, is among the most impressive in the corpus. The perspective is a variant of the type most used by the artist, a cube topped by a version of the Florence Cathedral drum and cupola. Like several other central-plan designs by Leonardo in which the dome is raised over a cubic mass—and minor domes are set on the four corners—the exterior articulation of the cube is more Milanese than Florentine, with tall arched bifore lights on the lower level and tondi above a thin projecting course. The invention of an entrance consisting of a domed cylinder half-extending onto the exterior with a fivearched opening is ingenious. But a more striking innovation occurs in the plan, which has none of the geometric manipulations characteristic of many of Leonardo’s centralized drawings; it is seen much more as an integrated whole. In particular, Leonardo adopts here a unique graphic convention in representing, by the device of cross hatching, the space within and without the structure as palpable, a positive element of design. The trace of the supports remains white. These graphic techniques contributed to the visualization of enclosed spaces and to bringing into being a new, volumetric archihere there are no interior walls, but rather compound masses fitting around the shapes of the voids, as if the latter had been carved into their bodies. A similar conception, with respect to both the positive delineation of the space and the use of a compound pier, appears on Codex B, 21v, applied to a large chapel or sacristy attached to a circular church.

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tecture. While in fifteenth-century buildings planar walls support ceilings or vaults,

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3.6 Leonardo da Vinci, church design,1487–1490. Paris, Institut de France, Codex B, 22r.

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3.7 Donato Bramante, project for St. Peter, Vatican, 1505. Florence, Uffizi, A20.

This kind of compound support was to be the most original and influential feature of Bramante’s first studies for the basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican, of 1505; he sketched it in various suggestions for the crossing piers on his earliest surviving drawing, Uffizi A20 (fig. 3.7), in which the spatial volumes, while not cross-hatched, are decidedly the generating force. In the famous parchment plan for St. Peter, Uffizi A1, and the related foundation medal, the design had clearly evolved into a central rotunda within a cube with corner cupolas. Bramante’s adoption of the compound sculptural support must have been influenced by his first contact, on moving from Milan to Rome (where he arrived in 1502), with the massive monuments of antiquity, particularly the baths. The grandeur of these remains, combined with his papal commissions for the new St. Peter, the Cortile del Belvedere at the Vatican, and the Palazzo dei Tribunali, called for architecture on an entirely different scale and public presence than any in the fifteenth century. But in the last two decades of the fifteenth century, when he and Leonardo were in contact in Milan—both worked at the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie—and Leonardo, perhaps while painting the Last Supper, made a sketch of the plan of the Sforza tribune there (not, as has been claimed, of Bramante’s project), Leonardo’s church projects could have planted the seed that sprouted in Rome; the compound pier was not a feature of Bramante’s Milanese work. Whether or not Bramante saw Leonardo’s notebooks or spoke with him about his architectural ideas, the project of fig. 3.6 and a few others with similar features (especially Codex B, 21v, 30r) document the latter’s prescience, just as his anatomical drawings, which were even less likely to have been known to any contemporary, anticipated the achievement of Vesalius and other masters of anatomical illustration. Another prophetic drawing is the perspective of a palace on the embankment of a river, usually associated with the Romorantin designs for Francis I, which anticipates the design of the Louvre as seen from across the Seine. The development of techniques for communicating spatial volume is revealed in interior perspectives as well as in plans. The most evocative example is on a sheet with many quick sketches including several relating to cast shadows, Codex Atlanticus 104r/37r b, dated 1506–1508 by Pedretti. In the lower left of the folio, Leonardo drew the interior of a longitudinal church in perspective (fig. 3.8); we see the forward and rear column of the domed crossing, a square-plan chancel beyond with an altar on a podium, ap-

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3.8 Leonardo da Vinci, church designs, ca. 1507. Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, 104r/37r b.

parently covered by a barrel vault, and beyond, a hemicyclical apse with a quarter dome in the form of a shell (a device adopted by Bramante for his first Roman commission, at Santa Maria del Popolo, 1505–1507). The scheme does not appear to be viable strucand the thrust of the chancel vault would have had little to counteract it. But the drawing is distinguished by its evocation of the visual experience of entering the space; receding orthogonals lead the eye to the altar and apse, but a higher vanishing point/ horizon is adopted for the ring of the cupola and the triforium arcade above it, so as to evoke the experience of the visitor who, in advancing along the nave toward the cross-

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turally: the crossing columns could not have sustained the load of the drum and dome,

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3.9 Milan, San Lorenzo, plan (after Giuliano da Sangallo, drawing of ca. 1500). Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, S.IV.8, fol. 18v, detail.

ing, is gradually able to bend his or her head back in order to see into the space of the dome (in fig. 3.7, Bramante hastily sketched a view of this sort in the upper left corner). The most original proposal with a hemispherical dome—supported on a cylindrical drum—is that of Ashburnham 2037, 3v (fig. 3.4: variants in Codex B 25r, 57v, and 91v; Codex Atlanticus, 28r/7v b and 733v/271v d). While the plan echoes that of one of the most ancient churches in northern Italy, the fourth-century San Lorenzo in Milan (fig. 3.9), and the exterior has features of the fifteenth-century Portinari Chapel also in Milan, the concept is, paradoxically, among the most innovative in terms of form and space. The basic form is a square, the sides of which extend into ample hemicyclical apses. Beneath the cupola are sketched four square piers of modest dimensions that are clearly insufficient to support a masonry dome—perhaps not even a wooden one. There is no section to indicate how they might function. The proposal is strikingly similar to 84

Vicenza.

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3.10 Todi, Santa Maria della Consolazione, begun 1508. Courtesy Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura,

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3.11 Leonardo da Vinci, design of a longitudinal church, ca. 1515. Venice, Accademia, 238v.

the pilgrimage church of Santa Maria della Consolazione in Todi (Cola da Caprarola, executive architect, 1508; fig. 3.10), one of the most impressive examples of the transition from the fifteenth-century style to that of the Roman Renaissance. A small drawing of the facade of a longitudinal church (Venice, Accademia, no. 238v; fig. 3.11) was sketched on the verso of a sheet the recto of which contains notes and sketches relating to mechanics. Marani has suggested that the sheet originally belonged to one of the Madrid sketchbooks, which can be dated to 1493–1495, and that fig. 3.11 must have been done in the same period. This date seems more likely than those ranging into the early 1500s offered by other scholars. A vaguely defined version of a similar design appears in an unfinished portion of the background of the St. Jerome, painted in the 1480s. The drawing calls to mind the solutions proposed by the major architects who were involved in a competition for the commission to build the facade of San

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3.12 Vatican, Hospital and Church of Santo Spirito in Sassia, ca. 1535–1547.

Lorenzo in Florence in 1515–1518 (Antonio and Giuliano da Sangallo, Andrea and Jacopo Sansovino, Raphael, and Michelangelo, whose project was chosen for execution), but that is insufficient reason for dating Leonardo’s sketch to that period, as Pedretti has done. Like the plans foreshadowing St. Peter, this drawing anticipated what was to become the standard facade type for longitudinal churches in the sixteenth century, the canonical the Vatican, of 1537–1545 (fig. 3.12). The significant features were an elevation of two stories divided by an entablature, a pedimented upper story articulated by four pilasters with a central light and niches in the side bays, and volutes making a visual transition from the broader lower story to the narrower upper. The lower story is articulated by four or six pilasters on podia and niches flanking the central portal, and has one or three pedimented portals.

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example being Antonio da Sangallo the Younger’s design for Santo Spirito in Sassia in

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3.13 Leonardo da Vinci, church design, 1487–1490. Paris, Institut de France, Codex B, 25v.

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3.14 Leonardo da Vinci, wheel with ball bearings, 1492–1499. Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, Codex I, 20v.

The principal challenge to a Renaissance architect attempting to design the front of the basilical type of church was that, for functional and liturgical reasons, it had retained a medieval profile, with a tall central nave and lower side aisles (to which side chapels were often added). The form was ill suited, by virtue of the pronounced verticality of the central section, to the proportions of the classical orders. Michelangelo, in his many drawings for San Lorenzo in Florence, struggled with this problem, which he ultimately resolved by inserting (as did the other competitors) a high attic between the two stories the solution of Leon Battista Alberti at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, by applying an extremely extended classical order to the lower of the two stories. He reveals the dilemma in this compromise in having to put the pediments of the portals far above the lintels. Nevertheless, Leonardo’s drawing is no reversion to the period of Alberti, but is a first step toward a resolution that basically survived through the baroque period.

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and by making both stories the same width. Leonardo attempted in fig. 3.11 to adapt

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On the upper right of fol. 25v of Codex B (fig. 3.13; see a similar quick sketch on Codex Atlanticus, 1010v/362v b), Leonardo drew one of his octagonal plans encased in a ring of circular chapels that are almost independent structures, with only narrow entrances onto the central space, each with eight radiating chapels of its own. A bird’s-eye perspective is sketched alongside. While the project is one of the least functional of its kind—lacking even access from the exterior—its remarkable similarity to a drawing in the Madrid Codex I, fol. 20v, showing a mechanism employing ball bearings to reduce the friction in circumferential movement (fig. 3.14), has been cited by André Chastel as offering a decisive instance of Leonardo’s will to affirm the bonds that tie human endeavor to the forces of nature. The virtual equivalence of the two sketches brings us back in a full circle to the image of the skull (fig. 6.2) that is conceived and represented as an architectural design.

Conclusion My discussion of Leonardo’s architectural drawings has emphasized what may seem to be a paradox, that while some aspects of a particular design may refer back to the Middle Ages or early Renaissance, others anticipate the architectural achievement of the sixteenth century, which departed decisively from this tradition. But to Renaissance artists, scholars, and scientists in all fields, imitation was seen (under the influence of ancient rhetoricians) to be an integral, essential element in their work. Not only did they refine their skills by studying and copying the best of the past, but, when that past was antique, they revered it as the foundation of their culture. Today the fusion of imitation and invention may appear paradoxical only because it is a commonplace of romantic and modernist criticism that in order to be truly innovative—and innovation has been represented as a mark of eminence—an artist must discard tradition and set out on uncharted paths. Leonardo, who had no opportunity to study ancient architecture until his move to Rome in 1513, most often chose the buildings of Brunelleschi—several of which he drew—as his primary stimuli. My observations have been based on the conviction that Leonardo’s capacity to question certain crucial elements of early Renaissance architecture—such as emphasis on the

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planar surface, thin walls, and columnar supports—and to anticipate the Roman architecture of the early sixteenth century, was a major creative achievement. This claim is problematic in the face of recent criticism of traditional historical narrative, because it seems to assume an advance from a preparatory stage in the fifteenth century to what used to be called the “High Renaissance.” That construct originated in Vasari’s three età: stages in the evolution of art from Giotto to Michelangelo echoing human development through childhood, youth, and maturity; and it is no longer valid. But I am proposing neither a teleology nor a natural evolution of style, but rather an attainment that partially accomplished ambitions widely held by artists in Leonardo’s time: first, to realize what painters called rilievo (the illusion of solidity), and second, to emulate the achievements of antiquity—an antiquity known to the Renaissance almost exclusively from its grandest public monuments. Moreover, the transition from the architecture of the fifteenth century to that of Leonardo, Bramante, and their followers is a response to altered social and political environments. The buildings of the early Renaissance accommodated the needs and financial capabilities of small city-states, republics, and dukedoms; those of the sixteenth century the ambitions of larger, more powerful and richer governments, notably that of the Church, the resources of which were provided and extorted from all of Christendom. Thus the transition promoted or reflected by Leonardo’s sketches was driven not by an autonomous evolution of style within the arts but by the ambitions and conditions of both artists and society at the turn of the six-

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teenth century.

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Bruschi, Arnaldo. 1969. Bramante architetto. Bari. Chastel, André. 1987. “Les problèmes de l’architecture de Léonard dans le cadre de ses théories scientifiques.” In P. Galluzzi, ed., Léonard de Vinci, ingénieur et architecte (Montreal), 193–206. Firpo, Luigi. 1963. Leonardo architetto e urbanista. Turin. Guillaume, Jean. 1987. “Léonard et l’architecture.” In P. Galluzzi, ed., Léonard de Vinci, ingénieur et architecte (Montreal), 207–286. Guillaume, Jean. 1988. “Léonard et Bramante: L’emploi des ordres à Milan à la fin du XVe siècle.” Arte lombarda 86–87: 101–106. Heydenreich, Ludwig H. 1971. Die Sakralbau-Studien Leonardo da Vinci’s. 2d ed. Munich. Lotz, Wolfgang. 1977. “The Rendering of the Interior in Architectural Drawings of the Renaissance.” In Lotz, Studies in Italian Renaissance Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.), 1–65. Maltese, Corrado. 1954. “Il pensiero architettonico di Leonardo.” In Leonardo: Saggi e ricerche. Rome. Marani, Pietro. 1987. “Léonard, l’architecture de fortification et ses problèmes de structure.” In P. Galluzzi, ed., Léonard de Vinci, ingénieur et architecte (Montreal), 303–314. Pedretti, Carlo. 1962. A Chronology of Leonardo’s Architectural Studies after 1500. Geneva. Pedretti, Carlo. 1978. Leonardo architetto. Turin. Sartoris, Alberto. 1952. Léonard architecte. Paris. Scaglia, Gustina. 1987. “Une typologie des mécanismes et des machines de Léonard.” In P. Galluzzi, ed., Léonard de Vinci, ingénieur et architecte (Montreal), 145–161. Schofield, Richard. 1990. “Leonardo and Architecture.” In Francis Ames-Lewis, ed., Nine Lectures on Leonardo da Vinci (London), 88–95. Schofield, Richard. 1991. “Leonardo’s Milanese Architecture: Career, Sources and Graphic Techniques.” Achademia Leonardi Vinci 4: 11–150.

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Thoenes, Christof. 1972. “Sostegno e adornamento. Zur sozialen Symbolik der Säulenordnung.” Kunstchronik, 343ff. Italian translation in Thoenes, Sostegno e adornamento: Saggi sull’architettura del Rinascimento: disegni, ordini, magnificenza (Milan, 1998), 67–76. Thoenes, Christof. 1988. “S. Lorenzo a Milano, S. Pietro a Roma: Ipotesi sul ‘piano di pergamena.’” Arte lombarda 86–87: 94–100. Thoenes, Christof. 1993. “Vitruv, Alberti, Sangallo.” In A. Beyer et al., eds., Hülle und Fülle: Festschrift für Tilmann Buddensieg (Alfter), 565–584.

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Thoenes, Christof. 1994. “Neue Beobachtungen an Bramantes St.-Peter-Entwürfen.” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 45: 109–132.

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FOUR

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The refinement of photographic processes during the 1830s culminated in the announcement to the public in 1839 of two quite different techniques—originating in France and England—for producing a permanent positive image. Both involved the use of a homemade camera box with a lens.1 That of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, which captured the object on a silver-plated metal ground (the daguerreotype), achieved a significantly greater precision of detail but was limited to unique positive images. That of William Henry Fox Talbot, based on the production of a paper negative from which large numbers of positive prints could be made, was more effective in providing multiple copies and thus widespread access to visual information.2 In the early years of photography, when long exposures were required, architecture and landscape subjects were favored partly because they did not move, but also because they satisfied a growing interest among the bourgeoisie in the world beyond everyday experience, manifested as well in an increase in travel—previously the prerogative of a privileged minority. Talbot capitalized on this feature of his work by publishing books of photographic prints (e.g., Sun Pictures of Scotland, 1845) that appealed to the current culture of romanticism and to the proponents of medieval revival: castles, ruined abbeys, ancient country houses, and the undisturbed moors and downs celebrated by Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott, whose castle Abbotsford appears in three of Talbot’s prints. My interest in early architectural photography grew out of my studies on the beginnings of post-antique architectural drawing. I found that the basic conventions of architectural drawings were established already in the thirteenth century, and that, in spite of the great diversity of architectural styles from that time to the present, there were, prior to the introduction of computer-aided design, no fundamental changes in the materials and conventions of drawing; the plan, the elevation, the transverse section, and the perspective, realized with a hand-held drafting instrument, constituted the basic vocabulary of the architectural image.3 This investigation prompted me to examine the origins of architectural photography, which likewise appeared at a particular date and likewise manifested fixed conventions that remained relatively stable in the course of over a cen-

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tury and a half, though the evolution of photographic technology permitted a periodic improvement in the potential of the craft. A first topic of interest is how the first photographers, equipped with a new means of representation, decided how buildings ought to be depicted: they had to rely, of course, on the preexisting representation of buildings by graphic means. Then, because the function of most early architectural photographs was to document buildings, we need to examine when and how a photograph may be identified as a document, and when and if such a photograph may become also a work of art. We might further consider what determined the photographers’ (or their employers’) decision to record certain buildings and not others, at home and abroad—a search that leads to issues of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism. Talbot wrote in 1877, “In the summer of 1835 I made in this way [i.e., with the use of small camerae obscurae and short-focal-length lenses] a great number of representations of my house in the country, which is well suited to the purpose, from its ancient and remarkable architecture. And this building I believe to be the first that was ever yet known to have drawn its own picture.”4 Like many early photographers, Talbot, a mathematician, physicist, and chemist who kept in close contact with the scientific community, was unaware of—or unwilling to admit—the extent to which photographic images cannot be defined simply as reflections of reality, but must depend on various elements of choice (of subject, position, framing, lighting, focus, etc.) that reflect and address the ideology and taste of their time. He must, however, have appreciated the degree to which the techniques of photography themselves imposed certain expressive results (for exthe use of paper negatives, the tonal effects of colored objects, which are altered as they are transferred to the black-and-white gradations of photographic emulsion, etc.). The photographs of 1835 have not survived; probably they preceded the discovery of the essential fixing chemical. But in 1844 Talbot included several images of Lacock Abbey in a volume entitled The Pencil of Nature (fig. 4.1). They are casual in their choice of viewpoint and, as is emphasized in the accompanying text, were intended less as a record of

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ample, the speed of exposure, the capacities of the lenses, the graininess resulting from

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4.1 William Henry Fox Talbot, Lacock Abbey, from The Pencil of

Nature (1844–1846).

an architectural subject than as an evocation of a romanticized medieval past. On the one hand, they are simply experiments with the medium and its materials; on the other, they are offered as evidence of the author’s taste and status.5 Books and paintings had nurtured interest in romantic and medieval subject matter since the early years of the nineteenth century. Large-scale, often multivolume publications on medieval architecture with engraved illustrations and extensive historical and descriptive texts were widely available in England and France. Augustus Charles Pugin, father of the influential spokesman for the Gothic revival Augustus Welby N. Pugin, devoted his career to making drawings for the cutting of engraved plates in such publications (e.g., The Architectural Antiquities of Normandy, London, 1827–1828; fig. 4.2). Illustrations of this type established conventions of architectural representation that were adopted, no doubt unconsciously, by photographers (fig. 4.3): the positions from which to shoot the facades and apsidal ends of churches, the interiors, the choice of details.

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(London, 1827–1828).

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4.2 Augustus Charles Pugin, Caen, St. Etienne, view, engraving from The Architectural Antiquities of Normandy

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4.3 Anonymous French photographer, second half of the nineteenth century, Caen, St. Etienne, view.

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Courtesy Richardson Archive, Loeb Library, Harvard University.

Church interiors presented other challenges to early photographic representation; I offer an engraving from Henry Gally Knight’s An Architectural Tour in Normandy, with Some Remarks on Norman Architecture, of 1841 (fig. 4.4), to be compared with Roger Fenton’s photograph of the ruins of Fountains Abbey (fig. 4.5). Most churches with intact vaulting would have been too dark to photograph with the early lenses. The engravings were inevitably more interpretive than early photographs: the technique, requiring incising fine lines into metal plates, could not convey the nuanced effects of light and shade available to the photographer, and the style and “hand” of the engraver usually exerted a greater influence on the way the object was interpreted than the disposition of the photographer. On the other hand, the camera had—and still has—limitations that did not affect the draftsman: for example, it frequently could not capture the whole of a large-scale church facade with its towers as seen from ground level—or an interior with its vaults—without distortion due to the nature of the lens, especially in sites cramped by surrounding buildings (the engraver could simply eliminate irrelevant obstructions at will). When possible, the photographer sought elevated positions on the upper floors of neighboring buildings. He could not, prior to the invention of artificial illumination, capture ornamental and structural detail in poorly lit places. In the end, both techniques were profoundly affected by convention and manner; they involve misrepresentation as well as representation. The photograph prevailed over the engraving, however, because it could be produced and distributed more rapidly, and hence in greater quantity, more cheaply, and by practitioners less arduously trained. The paired images I have illustrated (figs. 4.2–4.5) sustain my conviction that the new has to be based on the old, that innovation is invariably tempered by convention. Anwhile the options for finding a position suited to representing church exteriors and interiors are limited, the more panoramic type of presentation shown here (a view of the Acropolis in Athens from the area of the Agora) would permit the photographer a very wide range of positions both in lateral extension and forward-and-back. Yet the Greek photographer Dmitri Constantin in the 1860s (fig. 4.7) hit upon almost exactly the same vantage point for his camera as the draftsman responsible for the equivalent view in the widely acclaimed Antiquities of Athens (fig. 4.6), the first volume of which was

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other comparison (figs. 4.6, 4.7) makes the point even more persuasively, because,

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4.4 Henry Gally Knight, Jumièges, nave interior, from An Architectural Tour in Normandy, with Some Remarks on

Norman Architecture (1841).

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4.5 Roger Fenton, Fountains Abbey, nave of church, interior, 1854. Courtesy Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

published a century previous by two British architects, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. Like other model books of the eighteenth century, this one was devoted entirely to carefully drawn details presented in elevation and intended primarily for use by architects designing in the classical style; this view was one of a small number in the third volume. The similarity is probably attributable not only to architectural conventions; both images reveal a debt to classical landscape painting in the tradition in which a dis-

Indeed, the architectural photographers’ models are found not only in the work of architects. The long tradition of elegiac landscape painting incorporating architectural elements, with roots in the mid-seventeenth century in the work of artists such as Claude Lorrain, working in Italy, and Jacob van Ruisdael in Holland, had stimulated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a taste for what theorists of architecture and landscape design called “picturesque.” And landscape and topographic subjects, a large portion of which involved the representation of notable buildings, especially medieval

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tant view is framed on one or both sides by a temple in the foreground.

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4.6 The Acropolis at Athens, from the Agora, from James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities

of Athens, vol. 3.

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4.7 Dmitri Constantin, the Acropolis at Athens, with the Temple of Jupiter. Courtesy George Eastman

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House (GEH 36642).

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4.8 Roger Fenton, Ely Cathedral, view across the close, late 1850s. Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal.

ones, became a major genre of British painters, particularly watercolorists, in the early years of the nineteenth century. Early British photographers, from Talbot on, echoed the paintings of J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, especially in their approach to ecclesiastical monuments. When Roger Fenton chose, in photographing the cathedral of Ely (fig. 4.8), to favor foliage over architecture in such a way that one can find out very little about the building, he must have had in mind John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral rather than the interests of archivists or architectural historians (fig. 4.9). It is impossible for these reasons to distinguish clearly a “documentary” style of early architectural photographs from an interpretive one. Many photographers practicing the medium in its first decade would have agreed with the statement by Talbot that photographs make themselves—that is, that they are transparent records of what is in the world, and that this is what gives them their special status among images. Indeed, the attempt, widespread after the mid-nineteenth century, to discuss and exhibit as works of art those photographs in which personal taste or style is found would, I believe, have struck the early practitioners as an attempt to deny them the uniqueness of their enter106

4.9 John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral, View across the Bishop’s Grounds, 1822–1823. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum.

prise.6 In effect, from the early photographers’ point of view, photographs were, by virtue of the conditions of their making, all documentary. Today photography is universally included in the roster of the fine arts, and it is the concept of a class of images defined as “documentary” that remains unresolved. I suggest that, while some photographs may be used as documents, and while some photographers and those that commission their work may wish to produce documents, this intention does not suffice to differentiate their work from other photographic images; the documentary character

In the early years of the medium many photographers were engaged, particularly in France and England, to carry out programs documenting national monuments. In 1851, the French government launched the Missions Héliographiques,8 assigning each of five specified regions to one of the pioneer photographers chosen by the Historic Monuments Commission (Edouard Baldus, Henri Le Secq, Hippolyte Bayard, O. Mestral, and Gustave Le Gray). This is an example of the production of photographs defined as documentary by the nature of a commission. Baldus also was employed in the

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is not intrinsic to the image. It is or is not in the eye of the beholder.7

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4.10 Edouard Baldus, Toulon, train shed, 1860s. Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal.

1860s to provide a survey of structures serving the national railway system; his image of the shed of the station at Toulon (fig. 4.10) is characteristic in its simplicity and clarity and in the photographer’s capacity to see in industrial architecture a striking new category of building, comparable to the new category of image in which it was represented. Since the purpose of the documentation programs was to assemble archives of permanent relevance, the photographer was obliged to restrain as far as possible personal inclination and appeal to the taste of his time. This is implied by the statement issued in 1857 on the founding of the Architectural Photographic Association in England, on the model of the French Société Héliographique, calling for the “procuring and supplying to its members photographs of architectural works of all countries,” with an eye to benefiting “the architectural profession by obtaining absolutely correct representations of these works, and . . . the public, by diffusing a knowledge of the best examples of architecture and thereby promoting an increased interest and love of the art.”9

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Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal.

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4.11 Auguste Salzmann, Jerusalem, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, portal, 1854.

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A recent study has revealed one of the most intriguing instances of the ambiguity of the concept of documentation: the commission awarded by the French Ministry of Public Instruction to a painter and amateur photographer, Auguste Salzmann.10 Salzmann was engaged in 1854 to produce a set of calotype photographs of the architectural monuments of Jerusalem intended to validate a hypothesis of his friend, the archaeologist Ferdinand de Sauley (fig. 4.11). De Sauley’s argument rested on evidence of chronology provided by the coexistence in certain sites of Jewish, Roman, and Christian masonry and construction, and these were to be the object of the photographer’s attention. Salzmann returned to France with 150 prints, which he gathered in a publication of 1856 accompanied by an explanatory text; it was his only substantial production as a photographer. Beginning shortly after this work appeared, and with increasing fervor in the course of the twentieth century, Salzmann’s photographs were discussed by critics as works of art the quality of which was attributed to the author’s exceptional sensitivity to form, texture, and composition. Yet to Salzmann the photographs were nothing more than evidence; he insisted that they were “not narratives but facts endowed with a conclusive brutality.” Moreover, over a third of the plates were the work of his assistant; not only did Salzmann fail to distinguish these from his own, but subsequent connoisseurship, though fixed on the auteur interpretation, has failed to separate the two bodies of work. The expositions of the mid-nineteenth century revealed the ambivalence about whether photographs were to be seen and exhibited as triumphs of technology or as a new category of the fine arts. Photographs were included in the great Exhibition of the World’s Industry in the Crystal Palace in London, 1851, the account of which by John Tallis tells of a “vast number of sun-drawn pictures, on various sorts of surfaces.”11 He mentions talbotype landscapes and daguerreotypes of the moon taken through a telescope by two different Boston exhibitors. The most extensive and admiring section of the review is the description of a medal-winning device for recording what he describes as the “horary and diurnal variations of the barometer, thermometer [or] hygrometer” by casting a pencil of light onto a roll of sensitive paper on a moving cylinder. Tallis concludes with an account of the first experiments in color photography. The celebrated journalist and

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editor Horace Greeley wrote the equivalent commentary on the New York Exhibition of Art and Industry, also held in a “Crystal Palace” in 1853–1854.12 His chapter devoted to “Daguerreotypes” appears between those on artificial flowers and on hats. In addition to plates on allegorical and dramatic themes, he discusses images of the passions, the moon, Niagara Falls, and a panorama of Galena, Illinois. The French photographic critic Ernest Lacan published a book in 1856, Esquisses photographiques, 103 pages of which are devoted to a review of photographs exhibited in the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1855), a celebration of scientific and technological progress modeled on the London Crystal Palace exposition.13 The curators included a vast array of photographs, the largest ever assembled, arranged according to subject, favoring themes such as plant and animal species, races of the world, types of mental and physical illness, current events, military campaigns, and disasters. The section assigned to landscape and monuments prompted Lacan to speculate on photography’s claim to be defined as a fine art. While he concluded that it cannot be “placée au rang des arts d’inspiration,” he wrote of the photographer that it is “absolument nécessaire qu’il ait le sentiment du beau, c’est à dire, qu’il soit artiste.” Also intended as “objective” images were many of the photographs of monuments and frequented sites made commercially for mass distribution by entrepreneurs like LouisDésiré Blanquart-Evrard, who established in 1851–1852 a printing and marketing establishment to produce books, albums, and individual prints that could be ordered from a catalogue, which tended to repress idiosyncratic approaches in order to attract a variety of buyers.14 Photographs were used also to document the building history of of the new wing of the Louvre in Paris, and left thousands of prints, including a number of impressive panoramic images, in the archives; the same occurred in the construction of a major Second Empire enterprise, the Paris Opéra. Charles Marville was commissioned to record the huge demolition work carried out under Baron Haussmann in his urban renewal scheme for the city of Paris.

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important structures. Baldus, for example, was employed to track the building process

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4.12 Henri Le Secq, Paris, Church of the Madeleine, south facade, 1851–1853. Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal.

Those charged with refurbishing medieval buildings also recognized the value of photography as a support for the restoration and conservation of historic monuments. When Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was appointed in 1847 to restore Notre-Dame in Paris, he ordered large numbers of daguerreotypes to document the existing state of the building, because of the exceptional capacity of the process to record fine detail; for his purposes, the fact that the images could not be reproduced in multiples was no drawback. Of course, many photographs—knowingly or not—exploited the aesthetic potential of the medium and portrayed architecture expressively. In contrast to Le Secq’s relatively “straight” record of the Church of the Madeleine in Paris (fig. 4.12) stands Bayard’s im-

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Courtesy George Eastman House (GEH 14357).

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4.13 Hippolyte Bayard, Paris, Church of the Madeleine, interior of facade portico, 1846–1848.

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age of the aisle behind the facade (fig. 4.13). The graininess is due to the author’s use of the calotype, in which he had been an unrecognized pioneer, having invented a process for producing direct positive prints. The photograph would not have recalled the impression of most visitors to the building; it is the record of a personal response, and its subject is as much the play of light and shadow as it is the church. This does not imply that fig. 4.12 is a definitive record of the church; like the majority of architectural photographers of his time, Le Secq chose an elevated viewpoint that would not have been available to the casual visitor, so as to avoid parallax. (I do not believe, as has been suggested, that this typical decision was influenced by the orthogonal elevation standard in architectural drafting.) The “documentary” and the expressive photograph, however, were not necessarily the work of different photographers: Charles Nègre claimed that when visiting an architectural site he would take three kinds of photographs: for the architect, a general view “with the aspect and precision of a geometric elevation”; for the sculptor, close-up views of the most interesting details; and for the painter, a picturesque view capturing the “imposing effect” and “poetic charm” of the monument.15 Photography was closely linked to the strengthening of European nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. The programs launched to document particular aspects of each country’s architecture underscored the nationalistic tendencies of the time; subjects were chosen, perhaps subliminally, to reinforce a particular conception of the significance of certain periods of the past. In France and England, later medieval architecture was emphasized; British photographers did not show much interest in Anglo-Saxon buildings, although those would best have represented an indigenous achievement emphasizing architectural independence from France. This might be explained by the emphasis placed on late medieval sources by the contemporary promoters of the Gothic revival. Renaissance, baroque, and contemporary architecture attracted less attention in Britain and France, except for major public enterprises in the capital cities, though in Italy the Renaissance style, regarded as one of the major cultural achievements of the peninsula, accounted for a large proportion of the output. Italian photographers focused on urban architecture in major centers; few of the tourists who bought their prints ventured into the countryside looking for abbeys and villas.

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Tourism, in fact, was a guiding force in the increasing demand for architectural photographs. The huge production of images, particularly of Greece and the Middle East, in the mid-nineteenth century was in part the result of a great growth in the culture and industry of tourism. During the eighteenth century, most travelers, especially those of Great Britain, were persons of rank and wealth who frequently embarked on a Wanderjahr, a year spent, primarily by young noblemen, moving about the more familiar parts of the world to absorb foreign cultures and languages. Travel for pleasure and knowledge required both the economic and the cultural disposition to move beyond the borders of one’s own homeland; it anticipated nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism, an initial possession of other places and peoples. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the growth of industry and commerce attendant on the Industrial Revolution gave an expanding bourgeoisie a means of emulating on a more modest scale the predilections of the aristocracy: if not in the mold of the Wanderjahr, at least in vacation excursions. Photographic studies of non-European lands, like those of national monuments, were anticipated in illustrated publications of the early years of the century, from the time of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt, reported in the Description de l’Egypte, ou recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été faites en Egypte pendant l’expédition de l’armée française (Paris, 1809–1822).16 The favored sites were Egypt, with a focus on ancient monuments (fig. 4.15), and the Middle East, with an emphasis on places in the Holy Land known from the Bible (fig. 4.11).17 Greece (principally Athens) and Rome (principally the city) were represented by a lesser volume of prints, and Turkey, despite its treasure of Byzantine monuments, was barely noticed.18 The photographers followed saw their subjects in the light of Orientalism,19 as strange and exotic echoes of a fardistant past now in the control of decadent and indolent peoples (many photographs of native costumes and customs were produced alongside those of architecture). Where human beings appear in the photographs they almost invariably appear to be laborers, ne’er-do-wells (fig. 4.14), or nomads, far removed from the self-presentation of enterprising western Europeans. Maxime Du Camp, who traveled to Egypt with his camera in the company of Gustave Flaubert in 1849, used figures to indicate the scale of the

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the trail of colonial conquest and the fashions of newly developed bourgeois travel and

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4.14 Anonymous French photographer, temple in Palmyra, ca. 1880–1900. Photo: Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

monuments (fig. 4.15). Not trusting the local inhabitants to hold still for long exposures, he regularly impressed a young Muslim sailor from his crew, for whom he provided suitably Oriental costumes.20 Two functions of the architectural photograph particularly relevant to my purpose are its use by the historian of architecture and by the architect as a resource in designing new buildings employing reference to historical styles. For the architectural designer, photographs can provide a rich resource and stimulus. The fact that photography became available at the height of the medieval revival and of the taste for the “picturesque” makes this especially evident. In contrast, architects working in the classical revival style (which continued to be practiced alongside the medieval revival) found measured plans, sections, and elevations in the tradition of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1762) and Charles-Louis Clérisseau’s Antiquités de la France (1778; on the Roman remains at Nîmes) more useful than photographs, because the strict rules of classical composition and proportions could be conveyed more effectively in precisely measured architectural renderings. Publications addressed to the growing interest in the medieval 116

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4.15 Maxime Du Camp, Abu Simbel, colossal statue, published 1852. Courtesy George Eastman House (GEH 24469).

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revival and picturesque architecture emphasized pictorial effects of massing, contrasts of light and shadow, texture and color, richness of ornament, all of which could be captured more effectively by the camera than by the draftsman and engraver. But possibilities for early architectural photography had already been suggested during the first three decades of the nineteenth century by new techniques of printing—the lithograph, the aquatint, and the mezzotint—which were employed increasingly to convey these aspects of architecture, and were the principal vehicles for the diffusion of the picturesque: most of the villa and landscape publications employed these techniques (e.g., J. B. Papworth’s Rural Residences of 1813). Photographs provided a resource that not only expanded the designer’s knowledge of familiar historical traditions but extended the scope of his knowledge to a wide spectrum of historical styles less accessible at first hand, especially those of Egypt, Byzantium, and the Middle East. In France, the influential Second Empire style promoted by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts employed a rich amalgam of ancient, Renaissance, baroque, and rococo elements and ornamental motifs that made photographic archives a virtual necessity for practitioners. In the second half of the nineteenth century, architects increasingly became the patrons of photographers, as it became evident that photographic portfolios could serve as a way of spreading awareness of their works and attracting clients. Shortly after the journal American Architect began to illustrate buildings with photographs in 1876, the architect Henry Hobson Richardson began to sponsor photographic campaigns surveying his major buildings. He was the first designer to be published in the Monographs of American Architecture, started in 1886; two years later, Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer published Henry Hobson Richardson and His Works, the first study of an architect illustrated with large-scale photographs (fig. 4.16), and at the same time the first scholarly historical-critical study of a contemporary architect.21 The photographs of the buildings of Richardson and his contemporaries lack the vividness and imagination of architectural images prior to midcentury. The excitement of the new technique had worn off, and almost all the painters and engaged amateurs of the

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4.16 Woburn, Massachusetts, Winn Memorial Public Library, from van Rensselaer,

The Architecture of H. H. Richardson (1888).

first decades had gone on to other interests, leaving the field to commercial establishments devoted to recording buildings on the demand of architectural firms and trade publications. Moreover, while propagandists had insisted on establishing photography as a fine art, it never was more than a complex of techniques, though one that a few practitioners could utilize for artistic purposes. The camera by itself, with the aid of someone to place it and open its shutter, could record buildings, people, or scientific data effectively without expressive enrichment. Of course, a painter or sculptor can employ the art and nothing else, while the commercial photographer employs the available technology to produce a useful record that need not be more than that. The photographic archive of Richardson, an impassioned collector—largely of medieval French architecture—was employed to stimulate and to give authenticity to his characteristic Romanesque revival style; the majority of prints were commissioned from local photographers, most of whom probably made a living from portraits and weddings.22 They are dull, but they served him well.

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tools of the artist without achieving expressive enrichment, but the result is just bad

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Toward the end of the century, innovative photographers (Frederick H. Evans, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Eugène Atget) turned away from a documentary approach and employed architectural subjects in the expression of a distinct personal style. For modernist architects, beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, images of historical architecture were of less concern, but powerful photographs of contemporary work, particularly buildings by the most eminent architects (notably those of the Bauhaus at Dessau taken by Lucia Moholy), affected the spread of the style. The modern history of architecture had its origins in western Europe at about the time when photographs of buildings became available to scholars.23 Photographs did not create the discipline, but without them opportunities for the development of sophisticated research methods would not have been available to scholars who previously had had access only to drawings and traditional prints. A method grounded on systems of classification could not be developed without the capacity to make comparisons between buildings and groups of buildings. Photographs are fundamental to the practice of historical research and interpretation because they give the scholar an almost infinitely expandable collection of visual records of buildings and details of buildings in his or her area of research. With the development after the mid-nineteenth century of fine longfocus lenses and increasingly sensitive negatives permitting rapid exposure, many aspects of buildings could be revealed in photographs that were not accessible to the naked eye, whether due to their distance from the ground or the obscurity of detail in dark interiors. On the other hand, photographs mislead in many ways, beginning with their incapacity to represent size objectively and the ease with which the lens may be moved laterally, raised or lowered, tilted and swung in relation to the sensitized plate. But, while there can be no effective substitute for experiencing buildings at first hand, our memory is incapable of storing all of the visible aspects of any one, much less the entire achievement of a particular body of work. Perhaps under the influence of the taxonomic method in science (e.g., in the botany of Linnaeus and others), photographs must have stimulated the classification of works of art according to style—the style of a historical period, a nation, an area, or an individ-

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ual designer. This required a method based on comparison—establishing a class of production through the determination of common traits among different objects. Comparative judgments with respect to style were also necessary to support a narrative of evolutionary change that already had been a feature of literary and art criticism in antiquity and the Renaissance. To this end, photographs became indispensable in ways that drawings and engravings could not be; in consulting a graphic work we have no way of determining how accurate a record it is, while the photograph, though by no means a transparent reproduction, contains some clues as to its degree of documentary reliability. It is difficult to define precisely the motivations underlying the early photographers’ choice of architectural subject, because we cannot be sure what portion of the photographic work of the period has been preserved. Moreover, we who are nonspecialists know of early photography primarily through publication, which has emphasized the achievement of only a few countries, and two of them, England and France, to a disproportionate degree. But, accepting these limitations, we can still see in the early history of architectural photography two basic principles. First, that modes of representation are not significantly altered when new techniques are discovered, but perpetuate preexisting conventions; and second, that representation itself is not a reflection of some “reality” in the world about us, but is a means of casting onto that world

On the Origins of Architectural Photography

a concept—or subliminal sense—of what reality is.

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N OT E S

1 The following writings have been especially

2

3 4

5

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helpful to this esssay: Carol Armstrong, Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); Michel Frizot, ed., A New History of Photography (Cologne, c. 1998); Peter Galassi, Before Photography (New York, 1981); Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschman, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present (Cambridge, Mass., and New York, 1986); Edward Kaufman, “Architecture and Travel in the Age of British Eclecticism,” in Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman, eds., Photography and Its Image, exh. cat. (Montreal, 1989), 58–85; Richard Pare, Photography and Architecture 1839–1939 (Montreal, 1982); Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History (Cambridge, U.K., 1997). Talbot’s prints were originally called talbotypes but were soon renamed calotypes. At about the same time Hippolyte Bayard in Paris produced direct positive prints in the camera that could be reproduced in multiples only by photographing them again. But because Bayard, who was an exceptional photographer, lacked the ability or interest to promote his invention effectively, he was given less credit than the others. In the course of the 1840s rapid improvements in paper “film” techniques were developed, especially in France. See Claude Gautrand, Hippolyte Bayard, naissance de l’image photographique (Amiens, 1986). See chapters 2 and 12 in this volume. William Henry Fox Talbot, “Early Researches in Photography,” as quoted in Mike Weaver, ed., Henry Fox Talbot: Selected Texts and Bibliography (Oxford, 1992), 50; originally published in Gaston Tissandier, A History and Handbook of Photography (London, 1878). Carol Armstrong devotes chapter 2 of her admirable book to a discussion of The Pencil of Nature, including the Lacock Abbey pictures, emphasizing the author’s revelation of upperclass nationalism and pride in the ownership of

6

7

8

9

10

property evocative of medieval history and myth. See, for example, Bill Jay and Dana Allen, eds., Critics, 1840–1880 (Phoenix, 1985), an anthology of early English criticism from the photographic journals. Almost all of the selections, driven by naive efforts to establish photography as a fine art, are unclear about what qualifies any production for that designation. John Ruskin, a more sophisticated critic, was enthusiastic about the use of daguerreotypes as an aid to his early researches in Venetian architecture and sculpture, but later turned against photography, insisting that it had nothing to do with art. See Michael Harvey, “Ruskin and Photography,” Oxford Art Journal 7 (1985), 25–33; Karen Burns, “Topographies of Tourism: Documentary Photography and The Stones of Venice,” Assemblage 32 (1997), 22–44. For a similar judgment, see Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” London Quarterly Review (1857), reprinted in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, 1980), 39–68. My thinking about the problem of “documentary” photography was clarified particularly by the study of Joel Snyder, “Documentary without Ontology,” Studies in Visual Communication 10 (1984), 78–90. Information on the Missions and on Baldus is from the invaluable monograph by Malcolm Daniel and Barry Bergdoll, The Photographs of Edouard Baldus (New York and Montreal, 1995). See also Philippe Néagu, La Mission héliographique: Photographies de 1851 (Paris, 1980). For a prephotographic survey of national monuments, see Charles Nodier et al., Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (Paris, 1820–1825). As quoted by Robert Sobieszic, “This Edifice Is Colossal”: 19th Century Architectural Photography (Rochester, 1986), 3. See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “A Photographer in Jerusalem, 1855: Auguste Salzmann and His Times,” in her Photography at the Dock (Minneapolis, 1991), 150–168.

12

13 14

15

16

17

the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851 (London and New York, 1853), 134–138. Horace Greeley, Art and Industry as Represented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, New York, 1853–4 (New York, 1853), 171–176. Ernest Lacan, Esquisses photographiques (Paris, 1856), 76ff. Isabelle Jammes, Blanquart-Evrard et les origines de l’édition photographique française (Geneva and Paris, 1981). Quoted from notebooks in the Archive Nationale, in Daniel and Bergdoll, Photographs of Baldus, 32. Another early example is Carsten Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und anderen umliegende Ländern (Amsterdam, 1774–1778). The volume Syria, the Holy Land, Asia Minor &c., Illustrated in a Series of Views Drawn from Nature by W. H. Bartlett, William Purser &c., with Descriptions of the Plates by John Carne Esq. (London, 1836) primarily provides spectacular panoramas in the tradition of the classical landscape, but dramatized by a taste for the sublime; most of the architectural views emphasize receding angles and affective contrasts of light and dark. The influence of Piranesi is evident in Bartlett’s plates. On photographic campaigns in the Middle East, see Yeshayahu Nir, The Bible and the Image: The History of Photography in the Holy Land, 1839–1899 (Philadelphia, 1985); Nissan Perez, Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East, 1839–1885 (New York, 1988); Bernd Busch, “Peaceful Conquests: The Photographic Conquest of the Orient,” Daidalos 66 (1997), 100–109; and the essay by Julide Aker for the exhibition catalogue Sight-Seeing: Photography of the Middle East and Its Audiences, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass., 2000). Carol Armstrong’s chapter 4, “Photographed and Described: Traveling in the Footsteps of Francis Frith,” in Scenes in a Library, pp. 277ff., indicates the need to interpret photographs in illustrated books (particularly Frith’s volumes on the Middle

18

19

20

21

22

East) as they interact with the text. Frith presented his text as illuminating his images, rather than the reverse. An exception (in prephotography years): John Frederick Lewis, Lewis’s Illustrations of Constantinople, Made During a Residence in That City in the Years 1835–6 (London, n.d.). See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago, 1994), and other studies in that volume; Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America (1983), 119–131; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York, 1992); Edmund Swinglehurst, The Romantic Journey: The Story of Thomas Cook and Victorian Travel (London, 1974); and Wallace Cable Brown, “The Popularity of English Travel Books about the Near East, 1775–1825,” Philological Quarterly 15 (1935). See Elizabeth Anne McCauley, “The Photographic Adventure of Maxime Du Camp,” in Dave Oliphant and Thomas Zigal, eds., Perspectives on Photography (Austin, 1982), 9–32, and Julia Ballarini, “The In Visibility of Hadji-Ishmael: Maxime Du Camp’s 1850 Photographs of Egypt,” in Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon, eds., The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance (Cambridge, U.K., 1993), 147–160. Du Camp wrote that he secured the sailor’s immobility by telling him that the camera was a cannon that would shoot him if he moved. See Mary N. Woods, “The Photograph as Tastemaker: The American Architect and H. H. Richardson,” History of Photography 14 (1990), 155–163. The Richardson photographic archive of some 3,000 prints is preserved in the Loeb Library of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. The architect studied in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the early 1860s, which did not encourage emulation of the Romanesque style. His interest in that period developed after his return to America, and he assembled his photographic archive by ordering from across the Atlantic; the major French photographers discussed above are not represented.

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11 John Tallis, Tallis’s History and Description of

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23 I am indebted to Ralph Lieberman for many

insights into the role of photography in the history of art, the dangers of historians’ overdependence upon it, and, in general, the limits of representation in architectural photography. See his essay “Thoughts of an Art Historian/Photographer on the Relationship of His Two Disciplines,” in Helene Roberts and Mary Bergstein, eds., Art History through the Camera’s Lens (Langhorne, Pa., 1995), 217–246.

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FIVE

Imitation

The concept of imitation informs and connects almost all of the studies in this volume; it was one that preoccupied makers in all disciplines during the Renaissance—writers, historians, artists, and others concerned with invention. More than an issue of orienting the maker to his natural and cultural milieu, it was a way of grasping history and the difference of the past from the present, a way of formulating a structure for explaining cultural evolution, a foundation for education, and finally a way of defining the limits and the opportunities of invention; it is central to understanding the arts and letters in antiquity and the Renaissance. Though developed mainly by writers on poetics and rhetoric, it could be applied to invention in a wide spectrum of disciplines. Here I shall review the major contributors to the dialogue on imitation in the ancient world and in the Renaissance up to 1550, emphasizing the principal differences of opinion, and shall conclude by commenting on the implications of its merging in the modern era into the concept of influence.1 Imitation was understood in two senses during antiquity and the Renaissance: the imitation of nature or human behavior, and the imitation of preceding writers and artists. The latter was the most common concern in antiquity, especially in Rome, and among Renaissance humanists; it was addressed in the context of rhetoric, in particular in discussions of style, structure, and exposition. Aristotle was the principal source of the idea of the former sense of imitation, imitation as mimesis; in his Poetics, which dealt primarily with drama, art is the mirror of nature in the sense of human behavior. In this sphere Plato did not generate nearly as much discussion, because he had proposed the imitation of ideas, which was not open to extended interpretation and debate. Aristotelian imitation dominated discourse on the subject throughout antiquity, and extended, for example in the elder Pliny’s history of the fine arts, to the representation of the visible world in general. Renaissance humanists and theorists followed this path, reiterating that art copies nature, both in the Aristotelian sense of human action and in the sense of representing the ambient world. Both natures were to be represented not exactly as they are but as they ought to be, though the rationale for this was almost never made explicit. Jan Bial-ostocki, in a brilliant essay of 1963, discussed this in terms of the duality of imitating natura naturata (created nature; nature as it was) and natura naturans (nature as creator; nature as it might become).2

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The imitation of preceding makers, however, was the subject of a vast literature in both periods. That is to be expected, because if nature has to be bettered by the maker, the work of predecessors would be the only external guide to how to better it. For this reason rhetorical texts advised would-be Roman orators to ingest the written records of their predecessors’ speeches, and Renaissance artists and humanists to absorb the remains of antiquity and the best moderns. So the two imitations were inextricably linked. Modern commentators, especially on the fine arts, have segregated the two meanings of imitation, as if working from nature and working from preceding artists and writers were unrelated.3 But even in the visual sphere, the double meaning is ambiguous only to us; critical commentary throughout the Renaissance takes for granted that one learns and practices verisimilitude from art as well as from nature. The bond between Roman and humanist writers—as we have neglected to stress sufficiently—was cemented by the similarity of their historical position. Both were engaged in a Renaissance, the Romans responding to their Greek predecessors in almost the same ways as humanists later did to the Romans.4 In his early writing, Cicero, whose texts and style dominated the discussion of imitation, focused on the lessons of Greek oratory, and only later dealt with those of his Latin predecessors. Cicero was inconsistent in his answer to the question of whether to imitate many orators or to focus on one model. In the early De inventione he wrote that in composing the work he “had culled the flower of many minds.”5 He prefaced this discussion in the introduction to Book II by an example from painting: a story repeated by Alberti and incessantly through the Renaissance, of the painter Zeuxis who, when commissioned to do a painting for the Temple of Juno in Croton, chose to depict Helen of Troy; because Croton was famed for its beautiful women, he decided to seek as a model not the most beautiful one, but several, from each of whom he would select the most beautiful feature. Cicero commented that even the best in Nature—or presumably in oratory—would have some flaw.6 Cicero’s pairing of rhetorical and figural imitation was at least as important for practice as the more frequently cited Horatian ut pictura poesis.

formed schools based on their special style.7 Cicero refers to each successive style as an

Imitation

In Cicero’s De oratore, however, Greek oratory is seen as a sequence of masters who

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aetas (age, era), which Vasari appropriated in his three età marking the historical evolution of Renaissance art. In this way, Cicero’s review of imitation in Greece served also as the model for Vasarian art history and, in a sense, the art history of succeeding centuries. Even Cicero’s two last rhetorical texts, which are contemporary, differ on the issue of using one or many models: in the Brutus, Demosthenes and Attic style in general are the recommended model,8 while in Orator the argument becomes Platonic, and the orator imitates an image (species) presented in the mind.9 Horace provides a more personal reflection on the issue, closer to praxis, when replying to criticism that he had leaned too heavily on his predecessors: “I was the first to plant free footsteps on virgin soil; I walked not where others trod; who trusts himself will lead and rule the swarm. I was the first to show to Latium the iambics of Paros, following the rhythms and spirit of Archilocus.”10 This implies first that the reading public did not approve of borrowings that were too close (Horace himself was derisive of his imitators), and second that borrowings from great Greek predecessors would have been more acceptable than from Romans, as in the Renaissance borrowings from Rome were always considered acceptable. Because Cicero had left a mixed message, Quintilian’s work on rhetorical education, the Institutione oratoria, was to become the principal source for those Renaissance writers— a majority—who favored combining the most admirable features of the finest predecessors, though Quintilian emphasized that the best qualities of any maker—ingenium, inventio, vis, facilitas—are inimitable.11 What is imitable seems to be style: he speaks of the brevity of Sallust, the fullness of Livy.12 But mere imitation is too easy, the path of lazy people; one must above all be inventive. A view of imitation as the motivator of artistic evolution came readily to the Roman writers of the Augustan age and their immediate followers, but already in the course of the first century before our era a sense of decline from that peak had crept into the discussion and undermined its rationale. Cicero observed of Greek oratory after Isocrates that “after these men had disappeared, the memory of all of them gradually was obscured and

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vanished and another mode of oratory came into being that was softer and more lax.”13 Pliny was even more severe in assessing late Hellenistic sculpture, though, when he wrote bluntly that “art stopped” (in the third century B.C.), he was using “art” in the sense of technique, and was referring to the capacity to realize large-scale bronze casting.14 The elder Seneca, who was born during Cicero’s lifetime, wrote in his Controversiae: “You should not imitate one man, however distinguished, for an imitator never comes up to the level of his model. Moreover, you can by these means judge how sharply standards are falling every day, how far some grudge on nature’s part has sent eloquence downhill. Everything . . . reached its peak in Cicero’s day.”15 The better-known son of this despondent gentleman, Lucius Seneca, following Horace and Virgil, advised the maker to imitate bees, gathering pollen from many flowers.16 But he was the first to ask in this context whether pollen is itself sweet or whether it is transformed to sweetness by the bee’s breath: the breath being, of course, the inventiveness of the maker. Despite the various ways ancient authors cast their discussions of imitation, all agreed that it is inevitable, and desirable to the extent that the imitator recasts his source and appropriates it to his own inventive capacity; only in this way can the art evolve and avoid decline. The discussion of imitation became a major enterprise of the humanists from the fourteenth century on, starting with Petrarch’s review of the Ciceronian arguments. After Petrarch, the theme was addressed by most of the major humanists, sometimes in the framework of a particular genre of dialogue, an exchange of letters in which one writer argues for imitation of a single model and another for selecting from many. The earliest of the exchanges was between Lorenzo Valla, who had discovered Quintilian’s work before 1428, and Poggio Bracciolini,17 followed before 1490 by Angelo Poliziano and Paolo Cortesi. Cortesi was a young man at the time and articulated an academic “Ciceronian” (single-model) position. As one would expect, the proponent of imitating many sources favors innovation and the autonomy of the maker, and the proponent of

Imitation

the single source is more authoritarian and disposed to establish rules. The latter group

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were referred to as “Ciceronians” not because they followed Cicero’s views (which we have seen to be ambiguous), but because they chose him as the single model for imitation.18 Poliziano annihilates his correspondent with vigor and humor: There is one question of style on which I take issue with you. If I understand you, you approve only those who copy the features of Cicero. To me the form of a bull or a lion seems more respectable than that of an ape, even if an ape looks more like a man. Nor, as Seneca remarked, do those most highly regarded for eloquence resemble each other. Quintilian ridicules those who think themselves Cicero’s brothers because they end their sentences esse videatur. Horace scolds those who are imitators and nothing else. Those who compose only on the basis of imitation strike me as parrots or magpies bringing out things that they do not understand. Such writers lack strength and life; they lack energy, feeling, character; they stretch out, go to sleep, and snore. . . . And they have the temerity to pass judgment on the learned, whose style has been enriched by abstruse erudition, broad reading and prolonged practice.19 The most detailed and extensive exchange, written in about 1512, was that of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and Pietro Bembo.20 Pico was the first to answer the question of how those who picked from many sources ever arrived at a consistent style; he adapted the Neoplatonic principle of the Idea, proposing that every inventive maker innately has an Idea of personal expression; it is the essence of the maker’s ingegno and gives a focus to his various borrowings and to his power of invention. (This Idea, however, was not truly Neoplatonic because it was individual and had no transcendental reference. What Michelangelo had to say on imitation was in harmony with Pico, though the Neoplatonic aspect was stronger.)21 Bembo had no confidence in individual gifts and was convinced that to buzz about like a bee was a formula for chaos. He demanded concentration on one model because he believed that style in a given genre couldn’t be compounded from many sources; one must rather go to Cicero for expository prose, Virgil for dramatic poetry, and, in the vernacular, Petrarch for the lyric. Bembo was the first to identify style (stilus), in the sense of tone or voice, as the essential trait to be sought and

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emulated, whereas his predecessors—Pico included—had focused on content and structure.22 Indeed, the bees gathering pollen, like the painter choosing individual features from the maidens of Croton, concerned quantities, not qualities, or to put it more simply, the raw materials of imitation. The literary term stilus, incidentally, did not take root in discourse on the visual arts until after the Renaissance; its role was assumed by the vaguer term maniera, probably because the original meaning of stilus was the instrument of writing.23 Bembo’s position was moral as well as critical; he saw in the authority of tradition and its great figures a civilizing force and a framework for education. Bembo was in the main a conservative, though he left room for innovation and personal character, as many Ciceronians did not; his precepts were more restrictive than those of his adversary Pico. Yet he was the only individual in the sixteenth century to anticipate aspects of the definition of the classic that was to be formulated in the mid-1600s—the focus on formal style, the establishment of permanent principles.24 We can find in the Pico-Bembo dialogue the roots of the major cultural issues of the ensuing centuries—the battle of the ancients and the moderns, the psychological awareness that led to the birth of aesthetics, even the classic-romantic duel of the nineteenth century. It is paradoxical that if Bembo was the harbinger of classicism, the art academies, and especially that of the Carracci at Bologna, which did most to promote a classical style, instituted a curriculum based on the imitation of many ancient and modern models. I am not prepared to resolve the paradox now, but I would like to see more investigation of the relationship of art education to the dialogue on imitation.25 Preoccupation with imitation was not limited to oratory and literature; it was central in discussions of the writing of history.26 Poliziano in 1490 gave a series of lectures on Suetonius and published the introductory one in which he recommended establishing laws of history; his preferred models, besides Suetonius, were Herodotus, Thucydides, Sallust, and Livy. The major text of the period on history writing, Pontano’s Actius, of 1499, writer’s taste.

Imitation

recommends the imitation of different authors according to the subject and to the

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In the new century, historical theory began to focus more on method—particularly the choice and use of sources. Machiavelli proudly used Livy as a framework, and in the Prince referred to another kind of mimesis: “walking in the paths beaten by great men and those who were most excellent to imitate.”27 Thus, the actions portrayed by ancient historians could be used as exempla for modern readers; early Renaissance historians claimed that history is philosophy taught through example.28 In one field, architecture, three types of imitation were pursued. The imitation of preceding architectural literature was simplified by the fact that only one model was available, Vitruvius, as in painting there was only Pliny. Alberti’s treatise on building exemplifies the creative imitation of Vitruvius’s text. But this discipline focused on the imitation of ancient structures and ornament, incessantly recording and reconstructing the remains. The case of the five orders is paradigmatic of creative imitation; they were studied from Vitruvius’s enigmatic text and from a vast array of surviving and inconsistent examples, but the canons devised by Serlio, Vignola, and Palladio in the midsixteenth century revised the models to conform with individual disposition and their need for rationalized order.29 The third kind of imitation, of the forms and functions of nature—an example from Alberti is the imaging of vaults as sustained by bones (piers) that are bound by ligaments (ribs)30—is unique to architecture. Leonardo da Vinci was the only Renaissance writer who disapproved of all imitation in the classical sense. He wrote of it: “No one should ever imitate the maniera of another because he will be called a nephew and not a child of nature with regard to art. Because things in nature exist in such abundance, we need and we ought rather to have recourse to nature than to those masters who have learned from her.”31 As a corollary to this, he says: “That painting is most praiseworthy which conforms most with the thing imitated, and I propose this to confound those painters who want to improve [raconciare] natural things.”32 But who would claim that Leonardo’s painted figures and landscapes are mere reproductions of visual percepts? Lodovico Dolce, writing in the mid-sixteenth century, no longer felt the need to sound like a naturalist:

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In part also one should imitate the lovely marble or bronze works by the ancient masters. Indeed, the man who savors their incredible perfection and fully makes it his own will confidently be able to correct many defects in nature itself, and make his paintings noteworthy and pleasing to everyone. For antique objects embody complete artistic perfection and may serve as exemplars for the whole of beauty.33 Even if idealizing is not one’s goal, one can approach nature only through the formulas one has learned, according to what Gombrich called matching.34 Nature and earlier representations of nature are in practice inseparable. Baldassare Castiglione’s dialogue The Courtier, published in 1528, offers a bridge between literary theory and the figural arts. The dialogue rejects Bembo’s position. Its major protagonist, Count Lodovico Canossa, expresses an unexpected coolness toward imitation.35 To borrow certain features from great predecessors—as Virgil did from Homer—is acceptable, but every artist has his own character and gift that imitation should not be allowed to compromise, lest he risk being diverted from the path that would have brought him profit—certainly not a classical position. Castiglione himself may well have been the author of the famous letter supposedly written to him by Raphael, on the imitation of nature: it updates the story of the maidens of Croton to conform with the demand that nature be improved by a unified vision, as well as indicating that the individual artist must determine what is beautiful in nature, as in Pico’s letter: In order to paint a beautiful woman I should have to see many beautiful women, and this under the condition that you were to help me with making a choice; but since there are so few beautiful women and so few sound judges, I make use of a certain idea that comes into my head.

Imitation

Whether it has any artistic value I am unable to say. I try very hard just to have it.36

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Vasari, the outstanding critic of sixteenth-century art, while agreeing that Raphael used a variety of models in nature, focused more on what the painter had learned from preceding artists. He effectively translated the imitation theory of Quintilian, Poliziano, and Gianfrancesco Pico to apply to painting. Painters learned by imitation of preceding painting and thereby developed their unique style. “Studying the works of the old [ancient] masters,” he says of Raphael, “and those of the moderns, he took the best features from all and made a collection of them. . . . Thus nature was vanquished by his colors; and invention came easily to him and he made it his own.”37 Following Cicero’s early injunction that the students of great orators imitate their masters, Vasari tells how Raphael, “having in his youth imitated the maniera of Pietro Perugino his master, and having made it much better in design, color, and invention . . . recognized as he got older that he was too far from the truth.”38 He then, by Vasari’s account, began to study Michelangelo’s work, and from being almost a master became again a student.39 While Raphael had to work hard on his imitation to achieve autonomy, Michelangelo did not, because he got his artistic individuality direct from God. Nonetheless, Vasari recounted with admiration how a couple of his early works were such skillful imitations of Roman sculptures that they were mistaken for antiques. What was meant by imitation in Vasari’s time was described by Vincenzo Danti in his Primo libro del trattato delle perfette proporzioni (Florence, 1567): “The difference . . . between imitation and il ritrarre [simple copying] will be that the latter presents things perfectly as they are seen and the other perfectly as they ought to be seen.”40 In the practice of the early sixteenth century, this difference is illustrated by drawings from living models that are employed in finished compositions in a form mediated by the artist’s conception of the “ought.” Lodovico Dolce, the theorist who defended the painterly qualities of the Venetians as opposed to Florentine disegno promoted by Vasari, seems to endorse the depiction of unimproved raw nature when he writes: “The task of the painter is to represent with his

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technique whatever there is, so like the various works of nature that it appears true. And the painter who fails to achieve that likeness is no painter; and in contrast the best and most excellent painter is one whose paintings most fully resemble natural things.”41 I quoted Dolce above, however, as recommending the imitation of ancient sculpture since it was already idealized. There was no Italian Renaissance writer apart from Leonardo who did not state that imitation involved improving on the visual percept. One way of interpreting the critical relevance of the ancient and Renaissance fixation on imitation is to see it as the equivalent in those times to the modern critic’s and historian’s fixation on influence. Both are concepts that explain the relationship of an artist or writer to the antecedents whose work figured in his or her development. The main difference is that imitation was, in premodern times, an explicit principle of creative formation and procedure, while influence has been a relationship that has oppressed the modern maker. Michelangelo was probably the first artist who contrived to erase his debt to his teacher (Ghirlandaio) and others from whom he borrowed, but he was exceptional among Renaissance and baroque artists. Harold Bloom, in his subtle book The Anxiety of Influence, attributes the abandonment of imitation to “the post-Enlightenment passion for Genius and the Sublime [when] there came anxiety too.”42 In fact, Joshua Reynolds was probably the last champion of imitation. Emerson spoke for a new generation’s view of its precursors in his essay “Self Reliance”: “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole lifetime’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession.”43 Everything changes when Nature includes not only the outer world but the inner; if one is presenting one’s self, then the imitation of others seems less important, though it may provide models. Imitation fostered sustenance and security; influence, competition and anxiety. But while modern makers did not think of their dependence on predecessors as raising their stature, critics and historians embraced influence as a primary tool of interpretation, and the search for influences became all the more intriguing because they usually had

Imitation

to be ferreted out without the aid of the artist under discussion.

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Imitation as the premoderns saw it operated forward; while the student was expected to copy one or more canonical masters of the past, the mature artist moved ahead from this experience into new and individualized expression. The curriculum at the classical academies, which was based on drawing from ancient and modern models, was seen as the necessary preparation for emulation, the step forward into creative self-realization, as if in competition with one’s antecedents.44 But influence, in a way, moves backward. It did not affect art training after the decline of the classical academies—the modern educational ideal has been to encourage self-determination from the start—and that encouraged even the student to think of imitation as shameful. Interest in influence begins after a work has been completed and made accessible. Then the interpreters start to work backward from it and from preparatory notes and sketches to discover which earlier and contemporary works are relevant to the discussion of it. Indeed it’s hard not to tire of the often mindless search for artistic ancestry that supposedly validates many books and dissertations.45 Undoubtedly the change in attitude in modern times has made more difficult our understanding of imitation and our capacity to perceive its benefits and its ties to Renaissance inventiveness. For the ancients, imitation provided also the structure for articulating the history of an art or technique; imitation was what kept an art or technique moving on. The approach must not be confused with a principle of continuous progress, such as was articulated in the elder Pliny’s chapters on the history of art, or in Cicero’s brief account of Greek sculpture, and generally in modern histories of technology or science. In discussions of imitation, the model of the great antecedents is always represented as exemplary; if those who follow alter the model, they are not necessarily surpassing it but translating it into their own voice. The possibility of decline is always on the horizon, particularly in the wake of a brilliant period such as Cicero identified with Isocrates or Demosthenes and later Vasari did with Raphael and Michelangelo.46 That posed a problem for an ongoing historical theory. Influence, needless to say, does not offer an adequate historical framework, since it is reflexive; there is nothing about being influenced by one’s predecessors that gives structure to an artistic evolution, pace

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Clement Greenberg,47 particularly when the typical artist prior to postmodernism rarely admitted to having been influenced. Some postmodern artists have introduced, by appropriation, objects that re-present preceding works of art, dissolving the authority in authorship; and deconstructive criticism has proposed an “intertextual” relationship of the maker to his or her forebears in which the similarly dissolved “author” serves as a vehicle for the processing of all prior and present verbal acts. In one sense this view of making bears a greater affinity to imitation than to influence, because both propose a community of past and present and give the maker a pursuit beyond the expression of his or her individual identity. The affinity is limited, but contemporary artistic and critical innovations and controversies help us to overcome barriers to an understanding of ancient and Renaissance concepts of imitation. In trying to explain why the imitation of predecessors should have so preoccupied the artists, writers, and critics of the Renaissance, I have asked myself whether the incessant dialogue on the subject, which—Leonardo apart—never entertained the possibility of not imitating, might have come from a presentiment of the failure of the capacity to match or to surpass the ancients.48 If the dominance of Petrarch over Cinquecento lyric poetry held out the hope that the moderns could compete with the ancients, it also raised the specter that even early moderns could oppress the present, a specter that Vasari rekindled when he mused on what possible progress could be anticipated after the age of Michelangelo and Raphael: “I think I can say securely that art has done all that it is given to an imitator of nature to do; and that it has risen to such a height that one would more readily fear its fall into the depths than hope now for improvement.”49 Imitation stressed community, the solidarity that the maker of the present experiences with his ancestors and teachers—ancestors whom he engages in a contest of skill and imagination. No major writer of the ancient or Renaissance worlds meant it to promote

Imitation

the sort of frozen authority we call academic.

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NOTES

1 The large bibliography on this subject is fo-

cused primarily on literature; I have found most useful Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven, 1982); Ferruccio Ulivi, L’imitazione nella poetica del Rinascimento (Milan, 1959); and Giorgio Santangelo, Il Bembo critico e il principio d’imitazione (Florence, 1950). For the visual arts the basic reference is Eugenio Battisti, “La dottrina d’imitazione nel Cinquecento,” Commentari 7 (1956), 86–104, 249–262, republished in his Rinascimento e barocco (Turin, 1960); for the later period, not covered in this discussion, Rensselaer Lee, “Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” Art Bulletin 22 (1940), 197–269 (reissued as a book [New York, 1967]), esp. part I; and for the eighteenth century, the overview of Rudolf Wittkower, “Imitation, Eclecticism and Genius,” in Earl R. Wasserman, ed., Aspects of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1965), 143ff. Since my original study was completed, Alfons Reckerman has published “Das Konzept kreativer ‘imitatio’ im Kontext der Renaissance Kunsttheorie,” in Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger, eds., Innovation und Originalität (Tübingen, 1993), 98–132. 2 Jan Bial-ostocki, “The Renaissance Concept of Nature and Antiquity,” in The Renaissance and Mannerism: Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art (Princeton, 1963), 19–30; republished in his The Message of Images: Studies in the History of Art (Vienna, 1988), 64–68. The terms themselves, which had medieval roots, were rarely used in Renaissance writing. 3 This separation may have had its origin in Pliny (Natural History 34.19.62) who wrote, for example, that when Lysippos was asked which of his predecessors he followed, “indicated a crowd of men, saying that it was nature itself and not an artist that should be imitated.” The discussion of Lysippos also records him as having said that while others made men as they are, he made them as they seem to be. 4 See Salvatore Settis, “Did the Ancients Have an Antiquity? The Idea of Renaissance in the

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5

6

7 8 9

History of Classical Art,” in Alison Brown, ed., Language and Images of Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1995), 27–50; Settis cites Gerhard Rodenwaldt, “Über das Problem der Renaissancen,” Archäologischer Anzeiger (1931), 318–338. Cicero, De inventione 2.2.4: “non unum aliquod proposuimus exemplum cuius omnes partes, quocumque essent in genere, exprimendae nobis necessarie viderentur, sed omnibus unum in locum coactis scriptores, quod quisque comodissime praecipere viderentur, excerpsimus et ex variis ingenias excellentissima quaeque libavamus?” The essay by Leonard Barkan, “The Heritage of Zeuxis: Painting, Rhetoric and History,” in Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick, eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), 99–109, is devoted to this story. It was told a generation later by Pliny the Elder (Natural History 35.64), who located it in Agrigentum and identified the portrait as that of Hera, so we may assume that Cicero was the main source for Renaissance writers, e.g., Alberti, De pictura, 56 (and briefly in De statua, 12). In this work of the mid-1430s Alberti was not yet prepared to explain how the artist determined what was more or less beautiful; by midcentury, in his architectural treatise (De re aedificatoria, 9.5), he had an articulated aesthetic system (see above, chapter 1, at note 16). Cicero, De oratore 2.22 (see above, chapter 1, at note 34). E.g., Cicero, Brutus 7.35. Cicero, Orator 2.8–9: “We can imagine things more beautiful [than Phidias’s sculptures], which are the most beautiful we have seen in their genre, and similarly those pictures which I have spoken about; and indeed that artist, when he produced his Zeus or his Athena, did not look at a human being whom he could imitate, but in his own mind there lived an exceptional image [species] of beauty; this he beheld, on this he fixed his attention, and according to its likeness he directed his art and hand.”

11 12 13

14

15 16

17

18 19

20

Light in Troy, 68f. Quintilian, Institutione oratoria 10.2.12. Ibid., 10.1.32: “illa Sallustiana brevitas; . . . Livii lactea ubertas.” Cicero, De oratore 2.95: “Postquam, extinctis his, omnis eorum memoria sensim obscurata est et evanuit, alia quadam dicendi molliora ac remissiora genere vigiuerunt.” See also his Tusculanus 2.6: “atque oratorum quidem laus ita ducta ab humilii venit ad summum, ut iam quod natura fert in omnibus fererebus, senescat, brevique tempore ad nihilum ventura videatur.” Pliny, Natural History 24.19.52: “cessavit deinde [after the 121st Olympiad, 295–292 B.C.] ars ac rursus Olympiade CLVI [156–153 B.C.] revixit, cum fuere longe quidem infra praedictos probati tamen: Antaeus, Callistratus, etc.” The reading of ars as “technique,” the correct one for ancient and medieval Latin, was reiterated by Settis, “Did the Ancients Have an Antiquity?” A. Seneca, Controversiae 7.8, cited by Greene, Light in Troy, 72. L. Seneca, Letters 84.3, 4: “Apes, ut aiunt, debemus imitari, quae vagantur et flores ad mel faciendum idoneos diende quicquid attulere, disponunt ac per favos digerunt et, ut Vergilius noster ait ‘liquentia mella.’ Stipant et dulci distendunt nectare cellas. . . . De illis non satis constat, utrum sucum ex folibus ducunt, qui protinus mel sit sit, an quae collegerunt in hunc saporem mixitura quadam et proprietate spiritus sui mutent.” See Horace, Carmina 4.2.27–32 (23 B.C.). This discussion was brought to my attention in an unpublished paper by Salvatore Camporeale, who kindly sent me a copy. It came to a climax at midcentury with Valla’s Elegantiae, Antidota, and Apologus, and in Poggio’s Orationes in Vallam. See R. Sabbadini, Storia del ciceronismo e di altre questioni letterarie (Turin, 1885). Translation by Greene, Light in Troy, 150, from Eugenio Garin, ed., Prosatori latini del Quattrocento (Milan, 1953), 902–904. Edited by Giorgio Santangelo, Le epistole ‘De imitatione’ di Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mirandola e di Pietro Bembo (Florence, 1954). Bembo’s letter is discussed, in relation to his Prose della volgar lingua, by Santangelo in Il

21 22

23

24 25

26 27

28

29

Bembo critico. Excellent brief assessments of the exchange are given by Greene, Light in Troy, 171–176; Ulivi, L’imitazione, chap. 2; and Eugenio Battisti, “Concetto,” Commentari 7 (1956), 175–190. See, for example, poem no. 9 in Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rime, ed. E. Girardi (Bari, 1960), 6. Santangelo, Il Bembo critico, 70ff., 82ff. See also Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua, ed. C. Dionisotti-Casalone (Turin, 1931), 72. See Willibald Sauerländer, “From ‘Stilus’ to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion,” Art History 6 (1988), 257–259. See, for example, Henri Peyre, Qu’est-ce que c’est que le classicisme? (Paris, 1942). See Charles Dempsey, “Some Observations on the Education of Artists in Florence and Bologna During the Later Sixteenth Century,” Art Bulletin 42 (1980), esp. 564ff.; Rudolf Wittkower, “Imitation, Eclecticism, and Genius,” in Wasserman, ed., Aspects of the Eighteenth Century, 143ff. Robert Black, “The New Laws of History,” Renaissance Studies 1 (1980), 126–156. Machiavelli, Il principe, 6.1: “Non si maravigli alcuno se, nel parlare che io farò de’ principati al tutto nuovi e de principe e di stato, io addurò grandissimi esempli; perchè, camminando li uomini quasi sempre per le vie battute da altri, e procedendo nelle azioni loro con le imitazioni, né si potendo le vie d’altri al tutto tenere . . . debbe uno uomo prudente intrare sempre per vie battute da uomini grandi, e quelli che sono stati eccelentissimi imitare, acciò che, se la sua virtù non vi arriva, almeno ne renda qualche odore.” A position opposed by Guicciardini and Montaigne; see G. W. Pigman III, “Limping Examples: Exemplarity, the New Historicism, and Psychoanalysis,” in David Quint et al., eds., Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene (Binghamton, 1992), 281–285. Hubertus Günther and Christof Thoenes, “Gli ordini architettonici: Rinascità o invenzione?,” in M. Fagiolo, ed., Roma e l’antico nell’arte e nella cultura del Cinquecento (Rome, 1985); Jean Guillaume, ed., L’emploi des ordres dans l’architecture de la Renaissance (Paris, 1992); John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Princeton, 1988); Christof

Imitation

10 Horace, Epistles 1.19.19ff. Cited by Greene,

139

30 31

32

33

34 35

36

37

38 39

40

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Thoenes, “Vignolas ‘Regola delli cinque ordini’,” Römische Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983), 345–376. In the past fifteen years there has been an unprecedented amount of publication on the orders during the Renaissance. Alberti, De re aedificatoria 3.14. Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato (Vatican, Cod. Urb. Lat. 1270), 39v; translation from Martin Kemp, Leonardo on Painting (New Haven, 1989). Ibid., 133r; see the edition of A. Philip McMahon (Princeton, 1956), 433; or that of H. Ludwig (Jena, 1909), 411. Dialogo della pittura di M. Lodovico Dolce intitolato l’aretino (Venice, 1557), quoted from the transcription of Mark Roskill, Dolce’s “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York, 1968), 138 (ms. p. 28). E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, 1960), 186–189, 356–358, and passim. Castiglione, Il cortegiano 1.37, 38: “credo, se l’uomo da sè non ha convenienza con qualsivoglia autore, non sia ben sforzarlo a quella imitazione; perchè la virtù di quell’ingegno s’ammorza e resta impedita, per esser deviata dalla strada nella quale avrebbe fatto profitto, se non gli fosse stata precisa.” See David Summers, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge, U.K., 1987), 317–320. The attribution to Raphael has been questioned by a number of scholars; see above, chapter 1, note 24. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori, proemio to the third età in the edition of Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 9 vols. (Florence, 1976–1979), 4:11. Ibid., 4:204. Ibid., 4:205: “e levatosi da dosso quella maniera di Pietro per apprender quella di Michelagnolo, piena di difficultà in tutte le parti, diventò quasi di maestro nuovo discepolo.” In Paola Barocchi, ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento (Turin, 1979), 7:1573f. Vasari also offered a midway position; represent things just as they are: “Il disegno fu lo imitare il più bello della natura. . . . La maniera venne poi la più bella dall’aver messo in uso il frequente ritrarre le cose più belle; e da quel più bello o mani o teste o corpi o gambe aggiungnerle insieme” (Vite, 3:377).

41 Dolce, Dialogo della pittura (ed. Roskill), 99

42 43

44

45

46

(ms. p. 8). The speaker is Pietro Aretino. On the previous page, he had said, “I say that painting is nothing other than the imitation of nature; and the closer to nature a man comes in his works, the more perfect a master he is.” Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York, 1973), 27. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York, 1983), pp. 278f. The sentiment is more extensively expressed in the essay “The American Scholar,” of 1837: “Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. . . . The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two hundred years. . . . Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments . . . when he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” Essays and Lectures, 58. But the idea is older than Emerson; a century before, Edward Young had written in “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759) of the danger presented to the modern author by the ancients: “They engross our attention, and so prevent a due inspection of ourselves; they prejudice our judgment in favor of their abilities, and so lessen the sense of our own; and they intimidate us with the splendor of their renown.” (Reprinted in Walter Jackson Bate, ed., Criticism: The Major Texts [New York, 1952], 242.) Young’s position cannot be interpreted as proto-romantic but exemplifies an attack in the battle of the ancients and the moderns. I am indebted to Joel Porte for locating this source, which I had found attributed to Emerson. I regret that I cannot deal adequately with the history of the concept of emulation—which already was an issue in antiquity—in a paper of this length. See the critique “Excursus against Influence” by Michael Baxandall, in his Patterns of Intention (New Haven, 1985), 58–62. See the quotation from Vasari at the close of this essay. Vasari’s problem of evaluating his contemporaries without admitting that they represented a decline from the age of those great masters is discussed by Hans Belting, “Vasari and His Legacy,” in his The End of the History of Art?, trans. Christopher Wood (Chicago, 1987), 65–94.

47 I refer to the thesis that American painters of

Imitation

the 1940s and ‘50s were propelled forward by the impetus and destiny of cubism. 48 That fear was perhaps more haunting for writers and for architects than for painters and sculptors, because the ancient models were so formidable in the formers’ fields—Cicero, Virgil, the Pantheon were surely more daunting competitors than the Apollo Belvedere. 49 Vasari, Vite, 3:6f. (proemio to the second età): “mi par potere dir sicuramente che l’arte abbia fatto quello che ad una imitatrice della natura è lecito poter fare, e che ella sia salita tanto alto, che più presto si abbia a temere del calare a basso, che sperare oggimai più augmento.” Vasari’s fear of decline (discussed in chapter 1 above) may derive in part from Quintilian, De institutione oratoria 12.11.28: “quod optimum sit idem ultimum esset.” The theme appears also in Tacitus, De oratoribus.

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SIX

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

6.1 Leonardo da Vinci, landscape, inscribed 1473. Florence, Uffizi. Photo: Art Resource.

One of the earliest surviving drawings by Leonardo da Vinci is a landscape on which he inscribed the place and date, 1473 (fig. 6.1); it depicts a cultivated plain seen from hills above, and reveals the artist’s interest in the representation of space through a sophisticated use of the new technique of painters’ perspective employing both the overlapping planes of the hills in the foreground and the receding orthogonals of the agricultural layout of the plain. It does not have the look of a drawing after nature; it probably was invented in the studio. In some early discussions of perspective, the technique is called prospettiva rather than the more common perspettiva, suggesting that the construction is not so much received as projected, outward from the eye (Kuhn, 1995). The eye was for Leonardo the primary tool of learning, and the drawing was not just the primary vehicle for recording what the eye had taken in, but a path to new and unexpected visions. He saw drawing as a way of experiencing the world, a way of understanding it, a way of conceiving what had not been there before, and a way of conveying the knowledge he gained through images so palpable and intense as to fix themselves indelibly in the mind of viewers. 144

6.2 Leonardo da Vinci, skull in profile and section, 1489. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 19057r. By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

Leonardo’s approach to drawing evolved from one that may be called conceptual, in the sense that his ideas controlled what he could see, to one that may be called perceptual, in the sense that he could record visual experience with a minimum of intellectual interference. Accordingly, the early, more conceptual drawings are sharply defined, with more emphatic lines and edges (figs. 6.2, 6.3, 6.22), while later, perceptual ones are more sensuous, with soft transitions and attention to atmosphere and light (fig. 6.5). Similarly, the scientific observation of Leonardo’s early years is compromised, as in fig. 6.2 (see below), by the written word of the—mostly ancient—authorities, while later images result from empirical investigation.

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

However, in the course of his career of 46 years following the landscape sketch,

145

6.3 Leonardo da Vinci, studies of flowers, ca. 1483. Venice, Accademia, no. 237. Photo: Art Resource.

The sheet of flower studies done in dark ink over metalpoint—a technique particularly adapted to fine delineation—in Leonardo’s early Milanese years (fig. 6.3) has a precision comparable to that of the skull studies, without being ordered by any geometrical principles; besides its exceptional elegance of form, the drawing describes the object so effectively that the species can be identified exactly. Both the aesthetic and the scientific achievement are underscored by comparing the drawing to an illustration (fig. 6.4) from a contemporary herbal (Gart der Gesundheit, of 1485). The two pages of the latter represent two stages in the development of descriptive naturalism: that on the left is evidently an example, typical in the fifteenth century, of an image copied from manuscript manuals in which illustrations originating in late antiquity degenerated progressively as copyists reproduced the work of preceding copyists without ever returning to nature. The image on the right evidently records original observation, though with a less acute perception than Leonardo’s.

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6.4 Plate from Gart der Gesundheit (Mainz, 1485).

A sheet executed in red chalk, over twenty years after the metalpoint drawing of fig. 6.3, represents a branch with oak leaves and another plant alongside (fig. 6.5). Red chalk, which was rarely used before the sixteenth century, is virtually the softest of all drafting media, and was adapted to entering into a new kind of relationship with ambient nahave been caught at a particular moment (by contrast to fig. 6.3, in which there is no indication of light and shadow); the artist seems to have been a passive recipient of an impression. The drawing illustrates the artist’s note: “Painting compels the mind of the painter to transform itself into the very mind of nature, to become an interpreter between nature and art. It explains the courses of nature’s manifestations as compelled by its laws” (Trattato, 24v [ed. McMahon, #55]). But Leonardo did not engage with plant life only as an artist; he also initiated botanical study and research, recording in verbal

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

ture, one that focused on atmosphere, light and shadow, time; the oak branch seems to

147

6.5 Leonardo da Vinci, oak leaves, dyer’s greenweed, ca. 1505–1508. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 12422. By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

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and visual notes his observations on the patterns of branching peculiar to each species, and he attempted to establish a taxonomy for certain species. Like all artists and writers of the Renaissance, Leonardo claimed that his mission was the convincing imitation of nature. “Benign nature,” he wrote, “so provides that throughout the world you will find something to imitate” (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale 2038, fol. 31v). What the ancient world and the fifteenth and sixteenth century meant by imitation was not the bald mirror reflection of what was out there (see chapter 5), but, as Aristotle had defined it for poetry, the capacity to play the role of the creator, in conceiving an ideal world based on experience of the actual one. For artists of Leonardo’s time, surviving ancient sculpture provided a second nature, which taught not only how figures looked but also how they could be idealized. But Leonardo, unlike other Renaissance artists, was interested only peripherally in ancient art, and he subjected every traditional approach to reexamination. His approach to the world was rooted in the Aristotelian tradition of empirical investigation of the limitless variety of the natural world. The question of whether he was more a scientist or an artist is a modern one; in his time, science meant theoretical knowledge and art meant technical skill. Science in our sense of the word was descriptive, so that artists could engage in furthering it. Leonardo made the faculty of vision, or more precisely the gift and patience for intensive observation, the foundation of both his scientific investigations and his work as a but he brought to his investigation of the natural world not only an extraordinary artistic imagination that led him to innumerable original discoveries, but also a unique and idiosyncratic intellectual position that helped him to circumvent the mental blocks of his contemporaries. Science in the century preceding Leonardo was based almost entirely on texts surviving from antiquity; experimentation and the pursuit of new challenges were rare. Scholastic writers, primarily within the Church, had sustained the Aristotelian scientific

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

figural artist. He was a proto-scientist in the modern sense of what constitutes science,

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tradition. Humanist scholars, a new class of teachers, poets, and court secretaries, sought to rediscover and edit Greek, Roman, and ultimately Hebrew texts and to improve literary style in these languages; while their primary interests were literary and historical, they also made available—often as editors for the new printing houses—what had remained of mathematical and scientific treatises and their epitomes, such as those of Euclid and Archimedes, Galen and Ptolemy. They restored to circulation, in Latin translations, medieval Arabic texts: in the discipline of optics alone, those of Avicenna and Ibn-al-Haitham and their later Western heirs, Bacon, Vitellius, and Pelacani. The fields in which progress was made were those that could be investigated with the eye: anatomy, botany, cartography, zoology, and ornithology. Copernicus stood virtually alone in the two centuries prior to Galileo and Kepler in being productively engaged in theoretical science. Leonardo, trained as a painter, sculptor, and designer of machines, was no humanist, and at the start of his career he was unable to read the texts on which he would have to base his scientific knowledge. He admitted that he had the reputation of an omo sanza lettere (an illiterate), meaning that he did not have a good command of Latin. During the 1490s in Milan he struggled to improve his Latin and, as a result of this and the availability of an increasing number of Italian epitomes, he acquired as much information as he needed in the innumerable fields of his interest. An astonishing number of studies and notebooks, only part of which have survived, record Leonardo’s almost obsessive drive for total knowledge of creation on the model of Aristotle. Like Aristotle, he was an empiricist, in contrast to adherents of the Platonic tradition who worked with logic and mathematics on abstract hypotheses conceived intellectually. Leonardo started from books, but in almost every field of investigation he moved from traditional explanation to one based on his own experiments and experience. His early notes were often copied from traditional texts; it is not always certain whether a statement that he writes down was his own, or even whether he believed it. The extraordinary anatomical sketch of a human skull dating from 1489 (fig. 6.2) vividly records the fusion of science and art in his work, and also reveals the influence of received concepts on his early anatomical studies. The drawing gives an initial im-

150

pression of being an unequivocally precise record of an investigation prepared by sawing the skull horizontally and vertically at midpoint, but one sees on careful inspection that it is also a study of linear ratios; the object is held in a geometric framework that illustrates how it conforms to ideal proportions of the sort that absorbed architects of the time. Moreover, the drawing illustrates the medieval doctrine that the vertical and horizontal axes of the skull must cross at the site of the sensus communis, or common sense, where all perceptions—of sight, sound, touch, etc.—were believed to be gathered, and which was considered the seat of the soul. According to Plato and Hippocrates, whom Leonardo quotes, the soul must activate the entire body, and in particular must transmit seeds for reproduction from the brain to the genitals. So the spine is shown with a large interior channel, which Leonardo would not have found in his skeleton (Kemp,

6.6 Leonardo da Vinci, viscera of

1971). If in this instance books triumphed over vision,

a woman, ca. 1509. Windsor

the representation is radically innovative in its em-

Castle, Royal Library,12281r.

ployment of techniques of foreshortening that were

By gracious permission of

just being devised at the end of the fifteenth century.

H. M. the Queen.

tunity to perform dissections in Florence, he drew the internal organs of a woman on an exceptionally large sheet (fig. 6.6: over 18 by 13 inches). The technique—ink and wash over black chalk—helps to achieve a more perceptual, softer image than that of the skull. Comparison to a woodcut in a German medical text of 1522 (fig. 6.7) shows how exceptional Leonardo’s strategy was, presenting not a crudely cut

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

Twenty years later, after Leonardo had had the oppor-

151

6.7 Viscera of a woman, from Gregorius Reisch, Margarita philosophica nova (Strasbourg, 1522), fol. 102v.

cadaver on the dissecting table but a transparent figure that anticipates those in modern medical and science museums. The drawing is an anomaly in Leonardo’s work in compromising this brilliance in conception with a lapse in his habitual acuteness of observation: anatomically, the innards of Leonardo’s lady are scarcely more reliable than those of the woodcut; the uterus is that of a sow, the form and function of the Fallopian tubes and the lungs are misrepresented. An anatomist has described this image as “a quasimythical creature” (Ron Philo in Clayton, 1992). But, had contemporaries known it, its graphic inventions would have changed the course of anatomical illustration.

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6.8 Leonardo da Vinci, winch, in exploded perspective, 1485–1488? Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Codex Atlanticus, 30v/8v b.

In his Milanese years, when he served the Sforza duke Ludovico il Moro more as an engineer than as an artist, Leonardo was also engaged intensely in the design of machines. A graphic ingenuity comparable to that of the anatomical drawings is revealed in many of these studies, such as the extraordinary drawing of a winch (fig. 6.8). This is shown pulled apart to show, in what is called an “exploded” view, each of the interlocking wheels with its cogs and teeth. The conception anticipates a practice that became familiar only in the nineteenth century, and is a universal convention of machine manuals today. Leonardo wrote many instructions for representing his designs with maximum clarity in a notebook, now in Madrid, that focuses on the design of machines: All such instruments will generally be presented without their armatures or other structures that might hinder the view of those who will study them. These same armatures shall then be

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

assembled (in a more-or-less axonometric projection) on the left and, on the right, is

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6.9 Leonardo da Vinci, plan of Imola, 1502. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 12284. By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

described with the aid of lines, after which we shall describe the levers by themselves, then the strength of the supports. (Madrid Codex I, fol. 82r) A third instance of Leonardo’s astonishingly fertile capacity to create new standards of imagery is the plan reproduced in fig. 6.9. He was called in 1502 to Imola, a town in the territory of the Papal States, the stronghold of the notorious Cesare Borgia, commander of the papal forces and nephew of Pope Alexander VI Borgia, with a commission to modernize the town’s fortifications. He began by making the survey—of which several portions are preserved, with measurements of each block of buildings—that culminated in a plan of the city and its immediate surroundings within a circle. It was unique 154

in its time; no Renaissance draftsman had ever drawn an ichnographic (i.e., flat) city plan, and so far as I know, no such surveyed plan was attempted in Italy in the remaining 98 years of the sixteenth century; city representations were always done as bird’seye perspectives. Evidently, the degree of abstract thought required to visualize a settlement built on uneven terrain as if it were absolutely level, and as if its buildings could be represented as sliced through at ground level, was just not possible for any Italian other than Leonardo. In addition to making the conceptual leap required, Leonardo also got the proportions of the buildings and city blocks right, although obviously measuring either with a tape or by pacing could distort distances on hills and valleys. A drawing in the Codex Atlanticus represents a machine devised by Leonardo for measuring distances—a bicycle-sized wheel that, when pushed by a long handle, causes a marble to drop into a box at each revolution; distances are thus recorded by multiplying the number of marbles by the circumference of the wheel. The plan is drawn within a circle with the eight divisions of the traditional wind rose which Vitruvius discussed in relation to city plans (each quadrant is in turn divided by incised lines, to yield eight segments); surveying tables at the time, equipped with compasses and lines of the winds, were also circular. The lively representation of the river, colored blue, in the lower portion introduces the issue of motion in Leonardo’s thought and draftsmanship. The images just discussed all represent stable objects; Leonardo was also intently concerned with the depiction of motion in the broad sense implied by the Italian word moti, that the good painter has to paint two principal things, that is to say, man and the intention of his mind. The first is easy and the second difficult, because the latter has to be represented through gestures and movements of the limbs, which can be learned from the dumb, who exhibit gestures better than any other kind of man.

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which means both physical movement and emotion. This meant, in depicting people,

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Perhaps the most widely known drawing by Leonardo illustrates a passage on proportions in Vitruvius’s architectural treatise of the first century B.C. proposing that a man with arms outstretched fits into a square, and that proportional divisions within the square correspond to parts of the body. Leonardo’s drawing, which adds a circle to the square, effectively represents the Vitruvian principle but is actually in conflict with his own convictions about proportions, which vigorously opposed the Roman straitjacket. He saw that the body in motion defeats the attempt to fix the ratios of its parts. As humans engage in different activities, the proportions of their parts change, as Leonardo illustrated in a number of sheets filled with sketches of men engaged in strenuous work (fig. 6.10). Interest in movement was expressed almost obsessively in studies of the flow of water, which seemed to him to be at once the clearest and the most complex

6.11 Leonardo da Vinci, hydraulic study,

illustration of motion in nature. Hydraulic studies fill

ca. 1507–1509. Windsor Castle,

two substantial notebooks: Ms. A. of the Institut de

Royal Library, 12660v. By gracious

France, and the Leicester Codex (now the property of

permission of H. M. the Queen.

aborted projects to publish treatises on subjects that interested him. Among innumerable sheets examining the effects of interposing an obstacle into a stream, the one reproduced in fig. 6.11 shows an impressive capacity to find graphic equivalents for effects that are so instantaneous that no moment in the process can be fixed and recorded.

6.10 Leonardo da Vinci, men in vigorous action, ca. 1503. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 12644r. By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

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Bill Gates); probably these represent one of his many

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6.12 Leonardo da Vinci, chaos, after 1513. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 12382. By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

Probably the painstaking care taken in observing the movement of water throughout the artist’s career laid the groundwork for the late series of drawings depicting an earthly chaos, an Armageddon, in which the exploding landscape takes on equivalent forms (fig. 6.12). Toward the end of his life, Leonardo was preoccupied with visions of impending destruction, which he also articulated in powerful prose passages. The theme is atypical in the Renaissance in that the release of cosmic forces is motivated by the power of “nature,” and not by the (anthropocentric) wrath of the gods. And this nature, Leonardo believed, was manifest in comparable ways throughout its extent: “If a man,” he wrote, “has a lake of blood in him whereby the lungs expand and contract in breathing, the earth’s body has its oceanic sea which likewise expands and contracts every six hours as the earth breathes” (Ms. A, fol. 564v). He goes on to associate underground springs with veins. These are the type of observations that support Foucault’s characterization of sixteenth-century proto-science as based on similarities and analogies. Leonardo makes great claims for experiment, experience, and observation to distance himself from the scholastics and humanists who commented chiefly on texts, but in re158

6.13 Leonardo da Vinci, project for a weir in the Arno River, 1502? Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 12680. By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

ality he was strongly directed by the textual tradition, and constantly sought—and only rarely found—formulations of the causes of the effects he observed. The hydraulic studies of the type of fig. 6.11 led to proposals for the control of water; fig. 6.13 beautifully illustrates a proposal for avoiding erosion on the banks of the Arno river by interposing a weir; here again the water is rendered in a blue wash that inten-

Another Arno project of the same period is perhaps related to an unfunded proposal from the city of Florence (during the 1504 siege of Pisa?) to study the possibilities for making the river navigable (fig. 6.14). It represents the foothill area between Florence and the sea. The scheme was not practical: without locks, the channel would have to have been excavated 100 meters down from the surface in the hilly areas. But the drawing is informed with a vital energy that reveals the author’s enthusiasm about the process of making: the movement of the hand, reminiscent of Asian calligraphy, the pen and colored washes, the almost abstract design.

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sifies at the place where the obstruction creates a whirlpool.

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6.14 Leonardo da Vinci, project for a canal from Florence to the sea, 1504. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 12677. By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

Leonardo wrote of similar problems in controlling rivers: A river that has to be diverted from one place to another ought to be coaxed and not coerced with violence; and in order to do this it is necessary to build a sort of dam projecting into the river and then pitch another one below it projecting farther; and by proceeding in this way with a third, a fourth, and a fifth, the river will be caused to discharge itself into the channel allocated to it, or by this means may be turned away from the place where it has caused damage, as happened in Flanders according to what I was told by Niccolò di Forzore. (Codex Leicester, fol. 13r). Pushing such observations still farther, he undertook to apply to the animal figure the turbulent spiraling action that he had tried to fix in his studies of water and of chaos (figs. 6.11, 6.12). Studies of cats in fig. 6.15, informed by the same kind of torsion, are among the most energy-charged in the history of Renaissance draftsmanship. Maybe it was the unprecedented vitality of the cats that led him to mix experience with invention to include a dragon. 160

By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

6.15 Leonardo da Vinci, study of cats and a dragon, after 1513? Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 12363.

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6.16 Pisanello, Cat. Paris, Louvre, Codex Vallardi, 48. Photo: Art Resource.

The naturalism of Leonardo’s studies of plants and animals had been a feature of drawing and painting in the courts of northern Italy for a generation before Leonardo; artists there, less oppressed by the weight of classical remains, retained a taste for mimesis from late Gothic art in central Europe. Pisanello, in drawing a cat (fig. 6.16), was not at all interested in motion, and must have waited for his subject to sleep (he apparently made many of his studies of wild animals from dead subjects); his attention was focused on the fur, which he rendered hair by hair; he was attracted to minute detail, whereas Leonardo attempted to make individual objects reveal the workings of nature at large. Leonardo’s spiraling figures did not appear only in random sketches; the experiments led him to use the device in developing schemes for paintings, as he did in a late study for a Madonna and Child with a Cat, of ca. 1513–1514 (fig. 6.17). Unlike most of the drawings previously discussed, this sketch does not reflect careful observation of nature. It was composed of generic figures the particularities of which are subordinated to an a priori conception of a certain kind of motion. Here the extreme twisting-about of the Child and the squirmings of the cat give the artist a foundation for a new dynamic in figural composition. It is a kind of contrapposto, less restrained (as a sketch can afford to be) than the poses Michelangelo adapted from ancient sculpture (the Doni Holy Family, the Madonna in the Medici Chapel). This drawing, like the earlier one in fig. 6.18, exemplifies an approach to sketching that Leonardo discussed in his Treatise on Painting (fol. 62r): 162

Now have you never thought about how poets compose their verse? They do not trouble to trace beautiful letters nor do they mind crossing out several lines so as to make them better. So, painter, rough out the arrangement of the limbs of your figures and first attend to the movements appropriate to the mental state of the creatures that make up your picture rather than to the beauty and perfection of their parts.

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

6.17 Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna and Child with a Cat, ca. 1513–1514. London, British Museum, 1856.6.21.1.

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This was to be elaborated further by Giorgio Vasari, in his Le vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori e architettori of 1568 (ed. Gaetano Milanesi [Florence, 1906], 1:174): We call sketches the first sort of drawing, which is made for finding the character of gestures, and it is the first component of the work and this type is made in form of a stain, and set out by us in a single trial of the whole composition. And since from the furor of the maker they are expressed rapidly with the pen or other tool, or charcoal, just as a test of the maker’s spirit, one calls them sketches. Leonardo had stretched the practice of furor—an unchained creative force—far beyond the limits acceptable to his predecessors and contemporaries, and he may have influenced Vasari’s definition. It was a concept scorned by Plato and antithetical to 6.18 Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna and

St. Anne with the Infant Christ and St. John, ca. 1498–1499. London, British Museum, 1875.6.12.17.

the classical ambitions of most Renaissance artists, in particular those of Leonardo’s younger contemporary Raphael. Furor is epitomized in a study for the Madonna and St. Anne with the Infant Christ and St. John (fig. 6.18), which culminated in the famous full-scale cartoon in the National Gallery (fig. 6.19). The expression of emotion through motion was so important to Leonardo that he wanted to fix the dynamic of a composition before freezing the figures, and the result was a sketch so densely worked as to be almost unintelligible; the author had to draw over

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National Gallery. Photo: Art Resource.

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

6.19 Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna and Child with St. Anne and the Infant St. John, ca. 1498–1499. London,

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6.20 Fra Bartolommeo, Virgin and Child with St. John, Angels, and Donor. London, British Museum, 1875.6.12.1.

his final version with a stylus so that he could read its form on the back of the sheet. It exploded out from the center, like the depictions of chaos, and only after its completion did the artist suggest where the frame might be. Characteristically, the remaining area of the sheet, besides being used to reexamine the gesture of the Child, was employed to make doodles of machines and a reinforcing wall. The uniqueness of Leonardo’s sketch can be appreciated by comparing it to a contemporary drawing of a similar subject by Fra Bartolommeo that is characteristic of later fifteenth-century compositions (fig. 6.20). Here, while there is a grouping around the Virgin, each figure plays a contributing though autonomous part and the participants occupy four different planes in depth; they are not, Like Leonardo’s, caught up in a vortex that absorbs them into a conical mass.

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6.21 Leonardo da Vinci, a copse of trees, ca. 1500. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 12431. By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

The Leonardo sketch evolved in two stages, the cartoon (or full-scale preparatory drawing) of fig. 6.19, and a painting in the Louvre. The former retains the essential movements and cohesiveness of the sketch while clarifying the actions of the four figures, ful psychological dramatization. While the sketch of fig. 6.18 is still related to Leonardo’s study and theory of natural forces, the cartoon (fig. 6.19) had to come to terms with the conventions for preparing an altarpiece and with antecedent interpretations of the apocryphal theme. The contrast is a clear illustration of the roles of convention and imitation. These images illustrate the richness and complexity of Leonardo’s fusion of art and science in drawing. I want to focus in conclusion on a small sketch of a copse of trees of around 1500 (fig. 6.21—in red chalk, which was used also in fig. 6.5). It must have

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

developing a consistent and unifying play of light and dark (chiaroscuro) and a power-

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served in planning a landscape within a painting. The sketch is a token of one of the most consequential changes in the history of Western art. Medieval and fifteenthcentury drawn and painted trees, like those of Fra Angelico or Botticelli or Leonardo’s own early Annunciation, are discrete solid objects which you can count, and which are distinguished from neighboring trees; they are as concrete as Leonardo’s skulls (figs. 6.2, 6.22) and come from a pictorial tradition that isolates every figure by its outline and local color. Leonardo approached the copse optically; he tried to catch the visual continuum at a particular time of day, as Monet would do four hundred years later. The trees are not individuals but the common recipients of a particular light and atmosphere. The intensity of observation that contributed to this image is revealed in two of the artist’s notes, both on the verso of drawings: The trees of the landscape stand out but little from each other because their illuminated portions come against the illuminated portions of those beyond and differ little from them in light and shade. (ca. 1508–1510, British Museum 114r) The part of a tree, which has shadow for background, is all of one tone, and wherever the trees or branches are thickest they will be darkest, because there are no little intervals of air. But where the boughs lie against a background of other boughs, the brighter parts are seen lightest and the leaves lustrous from the sunlight falling on them. (Royal Library, 12431v) It is instructive to compare this late sheet with the earliest series we have seen, of skulls (figs. 6.2, 6.22), because both in their own fashion are indelibly memorable images. But I should describe the skulls, though marvels of draftsmanship unsurpassed as such, as being of a much lesser ambition. They seek to give drawing the palpability of sculpture and architecture, to make the pen virtually replace the skull itself. But conceptually they belong to the previous generation, with their concern for accommodating the object to external geometrical rules of perspective and proportion. Skulls, furthermore, human as they are, are inanimate objects, not different in essence from spheres with penetrations; in fact, they communicate nothing of the function of the human body. One feels

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By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

6.22 Leonardo da Vinci, a skull sectioned, 1489. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 19058v.

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6.23 Leonardo da Vinci, the heart of an ox, 1512–1513. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 19074v. By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

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that the artist invented the light and shade in order to get effects that will best reveal the solids and voids. Fig. 6.22, far from being the record of a single visual experience, records two separate experiences, one of the integral skull, and one after the front had been sawed. The central vertical line not only divides the two moments, but also probably represents a cut in depth that permitted a look at the cross section. The skull is among Leonardo’s earliest anatomical drawings; fig. 6.23 is one of the latest, the heart of an ox, made shortly after the animal’s slaughter and represented with such immediacy and vividness that one can experience its softness and viscosity. I am tempted to say that the anatomical drawing is objective in recording the heart as it really looks, and that the drawing of the copse is subjective, in conveying a differentiated continuum of light and shade as experienced by an individual observer in particular temporal and physical conditions. But the image of the heart is also informed by those particularities, and anyhow one’s visual and psychological faculties do not shift at will from an objective to a subjective mode of reception. I would rather suggest that the two are more alike than different in revealing the willingness of the artist to replace a conceptual approach to the world with an experiential one, in the one sheet toward the end of a new art, and in the other toward the end of a new science. My description of the tree drawing as optical is meaningless in one sense: every representation of nature could be called optical. But I want again to contrast optical to conceptual representation, which shows an object as one believes that one knows it to be, not as it appears at a particular moment. In works like fig. 6.21, Leonardo removed in the world and made it the record of a personal and unique response to effects of light and air. Leonardo’s voyage of discovery decisively established the enterprise of art as the communication of visual experience, and brought the inner life of the artist and the viewer into concert with the ephemeral manifestations of nature.

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drawing and painting from the attempt to explain what was supposed to exist out there

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman, James. 1978. “Leonardo’s Eye.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41, 108–146. Clark, Kenneth. 1967. Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist. Harmondsworth. Clayton, Martin. 1992. Leonardo da Vinci: The Anatomy of Man. Houston. Clayton, Martin. 1996. Leonardo da Vinci: A Singular Vision. New York. Fehrenbach, Frank. 1997. Licht und Wasser: Zur dynamik naturphilosophischer Leitbilder im Werk Leonardo da Vincis. Tübingen. Garin, Eugenio. 1961. “Il problema delle fonti del pensiero di Leonardo.” In Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano (Florence), 388–401. Gombrich, Ernst. 1969. “The Form of Movement in Water and Air.” In C. O’Malley, ed., Leonardo’s Legacy (Berkeley), 131–204. Gombrich, Ernst. 1978. “Leonardo’s Method for Working Out Compositions.” In Gombrich, Norm and Form (London), 58–63. Keele, Kenneth D. 1983. Leonardo da Vinci’s Elements of the Science of Man. New York. Keele, Kenneth D., and Carlo Pedretti, eds. 1979. Leonardo da Vinci: Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle. New York. Kemp, Martin. 1971. “Il concetto dell’anima in Leonardo’s Early Skull Studies.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34, 115–134. Kemp, Martin. 1972. “Dissection and Divinity in Leonardo’s Late Anatomies.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35, 200–225. Kemp, Martin. 1977. “Leonardo and the Visual Pyramid.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40, 128–149. Kemp, Martin. 1981. Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man. Cambridge, Mass. Kuhn, Jehane. 1995. Paper presented at the symposium “Linear Perspective: The First Century,” Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, MIT, May 18–20, 1995.

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Leonardo da Vinci. 1938. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Ed. E. MacCurdy. London. Leonardo da Vinci. 1956. Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270) by Leonardo da Vinci. Ed. A. P. McMahon. 2 vols. Princeton. Leonardo da Vinci. 1970. The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. Ed. Jean Paul Richter. 3d ed. London. Republished with commentary by Carlo Pedretti, Oxford, 1977. Leonardo da Vinci. 1989. Leonardo on Painting. Ed. Martin Kemp. New Haven. Popham, A. E. 1946 (and later editions). The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. London. Shearman, John. 1962. “Leonardo’s Colour and Chiaroscuro.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 25, 13–47.

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Zwijnenberg, Robert. 1999. The Writings and Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci: Order and Chaos in Early Modern Thought. New York.

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SEVEN

The Aesthetics of Architecture in the Renaissance

All architectural discourse in the Renaissance is indebted in some sense to the De architectura of Vitruvius (first century B.C.), the only text on architecture to have survived from antiquity. Though Vitruvius offers rather an epitome of the treatises of the Hellenistic period than an original theory, he provides a mass of information on all aspects of building and design, and was particularly appreciated by Renaissance architects for his discussion of the orders and ornament on one hand, and of building techniques and machinery on the other. His three essential elements of the work of architecture—utilitas, firmitas (structural strength), and venustas (beauty)—were adopted throughout the Renaissance. But he was a frustrating master: his language was obscure, with many unexplained technical terms, his illustrations had been lost, and it was hard to check his observations against the monuments, since most of the accessible remains were of later—imperial—date. While theorists of the figural arts in the Renaissance sought to build their principles and vocabulary from Pliny the Elder’s history of ancient art and, more profitably, from the many ancient texts on rhetoric, those sources were only moderately helpful in constructing a base for an architectural aesthetic. The first and in many ways the most brilliant and influential architectural theorist of the Renaissance was the Florentine humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who had published small essays on painting and sculpture—as well as literary works and treatises on many other subjects—prior to the completion of De re aedificatoria about 1452 (first printed in Florence in 1485). This book, written in Latin and therefore addressed rather to patrons and intellectuals than to architects, followed Vitruvius’s work in its general structure and in its focus on antique forms, but is much more cohesive in its concepts. Alberti attempts to provide a rational ground for architecture based on his conception of the laws of nature. His rational orientation is expressed in his definition of beauty: “When you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind.” He proposes that the harmony of the universe is expressed in mathematical terms that can be emulated in architecture; thus architectural design should be based on three principles: number, proportion, and distribution. The proper employment of these three results in concinnitas: “it is the task and function of concinnitas to arrange according to precise laws parts that otherwise by their nature would be distinct from each

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other, so that they appear to be in a reciprocal relationship.” Alberti’s proof of the universality of nature’s harmony is in the fact that the numerical proportions required in musical theory to produce consonances (e.g., 2:3, the interval of a fifth) also produce pleasing ratios in architecture, and he applies them extensively to plans and elevations, for example at the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence, where he covered with an intricately proportioned facade a row of inharmonious old houses (Vitruvius had also employed musical consonances, but only in relation to acoustics in the theater). Proportion based on musical consonances would remain important throughout the Renaissance: the treatise of Andrea Palladio (I quattro libri dell’archittetura, Venice, 1570) reflects a more developed musical theory, the adaptation of which he illustrates in many woodcuts illustrating his own buildings, often with measurements that harmonize more perfectly than those of the buildings themselves. The Venetian nobleman and church dignitary Daniele Barbaro left the most scholarly application of musical theory to architectural design in his commentary on Vitruvius (Venice, 1556, 1567). At the close of the sixteenth century, proportion was given a preeminent role in the Neoplatonic theories of two painters who addressed architectural design in terms of the Idea, or principle of divinely inspired form: Gian Paolo Lomazzo and Federico Zuccaro (founder of the Roman Accademia del Disegno). Alberti did not join other fifteenth-century writers such as Antonio Averlino, called Filarete (unpublished treatise of ca. 1461–1464), or the author of the late fifteenthcentury Life of Filippo Brunelleschi, or later Palladio (in a letter on the completion of Gothic style that dominated the built environment of their time; indeed he wrote a sympathetic description of the Gothic cathedral of Florence. Nor did he, like Vitruvius, emphasize the human body as the primary source of architectural proportions, as did the Sienese Francesco di Giorgio (treatise in two principal versions, of which the last was ca. 1490), who proposed that not only the orders but also the elevations and plans of buildings could be based on the body. (At the same time, Leonardo da Vinci drew his famous illustration of the Vitruvian passage deriving a square and a circle from the body of a man with outstretched hands and legs. Michelangelo, whose only statement of ar-

The Aesthetics of Architecture in the Renaissance

the Gothic church of San Petronio in Bologna), in attacking the irrationality of the

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chitectural principles appears in a letter, says that architects must first be figural artists because buildings, in their symmetry and apertures, imitate the form and orifices of the human body; he was resolutely opposed to proportional systems, as was his student Vincenzo Danti.) In discussing architectural types, Alberti is particularly concerned with the design of churches (which he calls “temples”), because they embody the highest aspirations of the society. He favors the central plan, and particularly the circle (projects for San Francesco in Rimini, the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, for which there were many antique precedents of the post-Vitruvian period, most notably the Pantheon in Rome), since it reflects natural forms such as trees. Later writers, particularly Serlio and Palladio, also emphasize circular and polygonal plans for similar reasons, although they are particularly poorly adapted to the Christian liturgy, and records of clerical opposition begin with Alberti’s own circular tribune for the Annunziata in Florence. Theorists and architects of the early sixteenth century became committed to a more intensive examination of ancient architecture in an effort to visualize what ruined buildings might have looked like originally and to accommodate this knowledge to the Vitruvian text. The change is documented in the appearance of masses of measured drawings of ancient buildings (much more numerous than project drawings) and in a letter of 1516–1518 written to Pope Leo X by Raphael and Baldassare Castiglione proposing a systematic survey of the remains of ancient Rome and calling for legislation to preserve them from further destruction. The architecture of the period followed suit—Bramante’s new St. Peter, Raphael’s Villa Madama in Rome—employing Roman structural techniques and achieving a mass and volumetric grandeur not realized before. No theoretical writing appeared in the early years of the sixteenth century in either architecture or the figural arts, though—or maybe because—this was a time of great creative activity. The first printed architectural treatise after Alberti’s was that of Sebastiano Serlio, composed of several books published from 1537 to 1575. Serlio’s work was

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based on the ideas of his mentor, the Sienese architect Baldassarre Peruzzi, who had succeeded Raphael as architect of St. Peter in the Vatican. Serlio’s Tutte le opere dell’architettura introduces a polarity and tension in the aesthetics of architecture between decorum and license. Decorum was a Vitruvian term defining propriety but which Alberti and Francesco di Giorgio associated primarily with ornament (decoration). Later Renaissance writers used it to fuse the observance of tradition with the adjustment of architectural design to the purpose of a building, the character and status of a client, or the attributes of the deity or saint to whom a religious building is dedicated. License, on the other hand, was the freedom of invention without which a design could only be conventional. Serlio writes of a prima forma that establishes the base from which license departs; his Estraordinario libro is a book of gate designs that explicitly illustrate license. Other writers were more wary; Giorgio Vasari, author of the extraordinary cornucopia of biography, art history, and criticism, the Vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (1550; second edition 1568), says that license is essential to innovation in the arts, but warns of the dangers of excess, which he fears the work of Michelangelo—the Medici Chapel in Florence, the Porta Pia in Rome—might encourage. Palladio includes a chapter on “Abuses” (examples would be the pediment with a broken peak, a favorite device of Michelangelo, and the column bound in by stone bands, a favorite of Serlio’s) in which he writes: “Though variation and new things ought to please everyone, one should not do what is contrary to the precepts of art and against what reason shows us, when one sees that even the ancients varied [their designs] but never departed from certain universal and necessary rules.”

literature on ecclesiastical architecture. The major contribution was that of St. Carlo Borromeo, whose Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae (Milan, 1577) was intended as a manual for bishops involved in the construction or reconstruction of churches; in mandating forms supportive of the liturgy and expressive of Christian dogma—and incidentally in opposing Renaissance practices that impeded these goals—it represents a kind of Catholic functionalism, reflected in the work of Pellegrino Tibaldi such as San Fedele in Milan and the Collegio Borromeo in Pavia.

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In the atmosphere of the Counter-Reformation a new kind of decorum appeared in the

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Serlio treats architectural expression as a matter of language, proposing that the treatment of architectural elements—assembled according to a syntax—should evoke the use of the building, as, for example, a rusticated facade expresses defensive strength and is thus mandated for fortification and city gates, as illustrated in Michele Sanmicheli’s gates in Verona and fortifications for Venice and its colonies. Palladio enunciates a version of the imitation of nature (the principle of imitation being at the core of Renaissance criticism in all the arts) in which he calls on the architect to design the parts of the order to evoke the stresses created by gravity. For example, the swellings of the columnar base express the downward pressure of the columnar shaft, which itself, in its entasis (the curved profile diminishing the diameter toward the top), represents not the human body, as in the Vitruvian tradition, but again the response to weight. Vincenzo Scamozzi (Idea dell’architettura universale, 1615) further develops Palladio’s principle of imitation, adding a psychological aspect anticipating early modern architectural aesthetics (e.g., Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism, 1914) and describing elements in anthropomorphic terms (“weak,” “solid,” “swelling”); the viewer experiences the mechanical stresses of the building as if they were his own. Scamozzi also puts more emphasis than his predecessors on form as perceived by the senses, discarding the interpretation of decorum as the affirmation of tradition. Since he sees architecture as being primarily representational, he gives decorum a rhetorical character, as a kind of public address. But, as implied by his adoption of the Neoplatonic concept of the Idea, design must follow the “order” of nature and must avoid subjectivity. In establishing a canon of the orders—a prime enterprise of sixteenth-century theory— Serlio fixed the parameters (figs. 10.1, 10.2, 10.5, 10.6). Vitruvius’s description of the orders had permitted only a partial visualization of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, had failed to define the Tuscan, and did not discuss the Composite (which emerged later in imperial architecture). Fifteenth-century writers were not clear or consistent on the subject. Serlio set proportions for each order, providing detailed illustrations of the component parts and a plate showing the five columns and entablatures together. His canon arbitrarily combined Vitruvian measurements with those taken from a variety of ancient monuments, and others selected for convenience. It was not rationalized by a mathematical rule, as was that of Giacomo Barozzi, called Vignola, who published in 1562 a

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book exclusively devoted to Regole delli cinque ordini d’architettura, consisting of engraved plates (allowing greater precision and detail than the woodcut illustrations of most other texts). Vignola, who admitted that he had not arrived at his canon by following the best examples of ancient practice but “according to where my judgment took me,” coordinated the proportions of the orders within a uniform formula, explicitly deciphered only recently, that removed them still farther from Vitruvius and Roman precedent, and he solidified the canon for classical architecture of all later time. It is paradoxical that a convention of ornament should have been established by way of license. Vignola’s plates were copied in innumerable editions into the twentieth century; they influenced the canon of Daniele Barbaro and Palladio, who did not, however, preserve his proportional formula. The principal architectural publications of northern Europe during the Renaissance were devoted to the orders and to models of—mostly domestic—design or ornament (in Germany, Hans Blum, 1555; Wendel Dietterlin, 1598). The most substantive theoretical contribution was Philibert Delorme’s Le premier tome de l’architecture (Paris, 1567; he announced a second book on proportion but died before it was finished), which attempted to impart professional stature to the architect at a time when design was still in the hands of master masons (though Delorme still included a chapter on stereotomy [stone cutting], exemplified curiously in his château at Anet, that rarely figured in Italian treatises). He breaks from the Italian canon of the orders by adding a sixth, “French” order, claiming that since the orders evolved from nature they could not be fixed in number. He promotes a theory of proportion based on the dimensions of buildings treated in the Bible. Delorme’s utilitarian approach to design foreshadows the work of (Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des anciens [Paris, 1683]; Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve [Paris, 1684]). In summary, writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries formulated consistent themes in architectural discourse sparked by the treatise of Vitruvius, and focused on the polarity of decorum and license with respect to ancient precedent, but failed to match theorists of the figural arts in defining an overall aesthetic.

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the most innovative architectural theorist of the seventeenth century, Claude Perrault

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman, James S. 1983. “The Tuscan/Rustic Order: A Study in the Metaphorical Language of Architecture.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 42, 15–34. Revised in Ackerman, Distance Points (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 495–545. Blunt, Anthony. 1962. Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600. Oxford. Carpo, Mario. 1993. Alberti, Raffaello, Serlio e Camillo: Metodo e ordini nella teoria architettonica dei primi moderni. Geneva. Carpo, Mario. 1993. La maschera e il modello: Teoria architettonica ed evangelismo nell’Estraordinario libro di Sebastiano Serlio (1551). Milan. Carpo, Mario. 1998. L’architettura dell’età della stampa: Oralità, scrittura, libro stampato e reproduzione meccanica dell’immagine nella storia delle teorie architettoniche. Milan. Trans. as Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001). Germann, Georg. 1980. Einführung in die Geschichte der Architekturtheorie. Darmstadt. Guillaume, Jean, ed. 1988. Les traités d’architecture de la Renaissance. Paris. Günther, Hubertus. 1988. Deutsche Architekturtheorie zwischen Gotik und Renaissance. Darmstadt. Hart, Vaughn, with Peter Hicks, eds. Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Architectural Treatise. New Haven, 1998. Kemp, Martin. 1977. “From ‘Mimesis’ to ‘Fantasia’: The Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration and Genius in the Visual Arts.” Viator 8, 347–398. Klotz, Heinrich. 1969. “L. B. Albertis ‘De re aedificatoria’ in Theorie und Praxis.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 32, 93–103. Kruft, Hanno-Walter. 1994. History of Architectural Theory. Princeton. Millon, Henry A. 1958. “The Architectural Theory of Francesco di Giorgio.” Art Bulletin 40, 257–261. Mitrovic, Branko. 1990. “Palladio’s Theory of Proportions and the Second Book of ‘I quattro libri dell’architettura’.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 49, 279–292. Mitrovic, Branko. 1998. “Paduan Aristotelianism and Daniele Barbaro’s Commentary on Vitruvius’ ‘De architettura’.” Sixteenth Century Journal 29, 667–688.

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Mitrovic, Branko. 1999. “Palladio’s Theory of the Classical Orders in the First Book of I quattro libri dell’architettura.” Architectural History 42, 1–31. Pagliara, Pier Nicola. 1986. “Vitruvio dal testo al canone.” In Salvatore Settis, ed., Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana. Turin. Panofsky, Erwin. 1924. Idea: Ein Beitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie. Leipzig and Berlin, 1924. English trans. as Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph T. S. Peake (Columbia, S.C., 1968). Payne, Alina. 1998. “Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance.” Res 34, 21–38. Payne, Alina. 1999. The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture. Cambridge, U.K. Payne, Alina. 2000a. “Architectural Theories of Imitation and the Literary Debates on Language and Style.” In Georgia Clarke, ed., Architecture and Language: Constructing Identity in European Architecture, c. 1000–c. 1650. Cambridge, U.K. Payne, Alina. 2000b. “Ut Poesis Architectura: Tectonics and Poetics in Architectural Criticism circa 1570.” In Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick, eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters (Cambridge, U.K.), 145–156. Rowland, Ingrid. 1994. “Raphael, Angelo Colucci, and the Genesis of the Architectural Orders.” Art Bulletin 76. Schlosser, Julius von. 1956. La letteratura artistica. 2d Italian edition, rev. Otto Kurz. Florence and Vienna. Smith, Christine. 1992. Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics and Eloquence, 1400–1470. New York. Summers, David. 1981. Michelangelo and the Language of Art. Princeton.

Tafuri, Manfredo. 1968. Teorie e storia dell’architettura. Bari. English trans., Theories and History of Architecture. London, 1980. Tafuri, Manfredo. 1979. “Discordant Harmony from Alberti to Zuccari.” Architectural Design 49, 36–44. Thoenes, Christof. 1983. “Vignolas ‘Regola delli cinque ordini.’” Römische Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20, 345–376. Thoenes, Christof. 1995. “Anmerkungen zur Architekturtheorie.” In Bernd Evers, ed., Architekturmodelle der Renaissance: Die Harmonie des Bauens von Alberti bis Michelangelo

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Syndikus, Candida. 1996. Das Bauornament. Münster.

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(Munich, 1995), 28–39. Revised as “Notes on the Architectural Treatises of the Renaissance,” Zodiac 15 (1996), 13–31. Wittkower, Rudolf. 1949. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. London.

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EIGHT

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8.1 Florence from outside the walls, from Giuseppe Zocchi, Scelta di XXIV vedute della . . .

città di Firenze (Florence, 1754), frontispiece.

The ancient Romans affected the landscape of rural Italy in two distinct ways. The first is political and technological: the policy dictated from Rome for surveying and partitioning of urban and extra-urban land in the Italian peninsula and in colonies extended throughout western Europe. The second is through the written remains of antiquity, themselves of two distinct types: first, agricultural treatises, rediscovered in the Renaissance, and second, ideological reappraisals of the rural landscape, the principal source of all later Western romantic and picturesque tastes. The frontispiece of an eighteenth-century volume of views of Florence and its environs by Giuseppe Zocchi is a view of the city from the agricultural perimeter to the north (fig. 8.1).1 Even four hundred years after the building of the defensive perimeter, the city had not yet expanded beyond it; the countryside came right up to the walls. What is equally remarkable about these fields in cultivation is that they are divided by rows of trees and

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8.2 Diagrams of Roman surveying units. Drawing by Ernest Born, from Walter Horn and Ernest Born,

The Plan of St. Gall (Berkeley, 1979), 3:140.

shrubs into a precise rectilinear grid composed of equal units. These are the traces of the ancient Roman surveying and land development practice known as “centuriation,” and through the millennia the lines had survived.

sic unit of measurement was called the actus (fig. 8.2).2 In principle twenty acti constituted the side of a square “century,” though other multiples could be used. Whatever the proportions, the rectilinearity and the relatively modest size of the subdivisions was suited to the employment by one man of a plow drawn by horses or oxen. The bulk of Italian land division followed the military victories of Rome in the second century B.C., as the armies overcame local tribes and established camps that in the course of centuries became towns and cities. Centuriation normally began around a camp; the policy was to keep political control over the countryside by linking its roads

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The practice got its name from the manuals of the agrimensores—surveyors, whose ba-

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8.3 Depiction of centuriation in a ninth-century manuscript of the agrimensores (Vatican, Palatinus 1564). From Misurare la terra: Centuriazione e coloni nel mondo

romano (Modena, 1983?), fig. 62.

and waterways to administrative centers. The relationship is illustrated in an early medieval copy of one of the manuals of the agrimensores (fig. 8.3). Central Florence (fig. 8.4) even today retains the layout of the typical Roman military camp, which was laid out according to laws enacted under Julius Caesar, along two axes that cross in the center, where there would be a forum. The vertical road, called the cardo, would ideally mark the north-south axis, and the horizontal one—decumanus— the east-west, though local conditions could cause marked divergences: Florence is somewhat askew of the cardinal points, and in this case the centuriation in the surrounding agricultural zone (fig. 8.1) was based on an orientation determined by the topography of the Arno valley that differed from that of the urban grid.3 The rural units were often parceled out to soldiers as a reward for the arduous service in the wars of conquest, and as an effective way of keeping them out of the cities where they could cause disruption. The countryside, however, was not all divided into small units; there were large estates called latifundia on which agriculture was a major business enterprise.

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8.4 Florence, aerial view.

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The centuriation did not always derive its orientation from a colonial town. Major roads, such as the Via Aemilia, could give the surveyors the basic decumanal setting.4 At different points in the road, the inclination of the centuriation could change. In many places changes of a similar sort could have been caused by natural obstacles such as small hills that were later flattened, or waterways that were later redirected; they could also be determined by the need to benefit from the declination of land for the sake of drainage. In recent years, study of aerial photography has greatly improved the detection of centuriation. In a zenithal photo of the town of Imola and its territory (fig. 8.5), the town still preserves the form of the Roman camp (compare Leonardo’s plan, fig. 6.9); the lines of centuriation can be followed to the northeast of the city (upper right in the photograph). At a varying distance they are no longer visible, partly because of the waterways and the irregular terrain. Many areas of the Veneto, in which the villas of Venetian and terraferma (mainland) nobility are concentrated, also retain the conformation to Roman centuria-

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8.5 Aerial survey photograph of Imola and vicinity. From Misurare la terra, fig. 283. 8.6 Aerial survey photograph of the area northwest of Padua. From

Misurare la terra: Centuriazione e veneto (Modena, 1984), fig. 136.

8.7 Map of the area covered in fig. 8.6 with lines of centuriation indicated. From Misurare la terra: Il caso

veneto, fig. 135.

tion. Figures 8.6 and 8.7 represent an area between Padua and Treviso where the pattern is clearly retained. Elsewhere, for example to the south of Padua, the Romans probably did not farm, because the deltas of the Adige and Po made the land unsuitable for agriculture prior to the large-scale reclamation projects of the early sixteenth century.

a landscape with hills overlooking a plain. It may be the earliest pure landscape representation in modern times. Those who have discussed this drawing, including myself, have usually interpreted the converging pattern of lines in the plain as being an exercise in painter’s perspective, a technique invented earlier in the same century, which required establishing a checkerboard pattern on the floor in order to measure the recession of space. Now, in the light of the evidence from the air, it seems possible that it represents a pattern of centuriation, or at least of the survival of the principle of centuriation. Indeed, the lines are not properly perspectival because they recede to different points on the horizon.

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The earliest surviving drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, which he dated 1473 (fig. 6.1), is

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A photograph of Palladio’s Villa Emo, built in the mid-sixteenth century west of Venice (fig. 8.8), shows a paradigmatic Palladian country mansion, with a kind of temple front as an entrance, and behind it a stretch of land under cultivation in which the ancient centuriation has survived, either literally or in the imitative sense we have observed in the nearby Paduan area (fig. 8.6). Since this photograph was taken, the separate plots behind the villa have been merged into one; the older divisions are incompatible with the operations of modern agricultural machinery. The physical survival of Roman land divisions is complemented by the influence of Roman agricultural texts. The written record is of two kinds. The first, earliest in origin,

8.8 Fanzolo, Villa Emo, ca. 1555–1560, view from the air. Photo: Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura, Vicenza.

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8.9 Antonio da Sangallo for Raphael, project drawing for Villa Madama in Rome, 1519–1521. Florence, Uffizi, A314r. Photo: Art Resource.

consists of practical manuals of agronomy or husbandry directed to the urban reader interested in starting or improving a farming operation. The principal texts known to modern readers are the treatises of Cato, Varro, Columella, and Palladius. An edition of these four in one volume was published in Venice in 1472 and reedited there by Aldus in 1514.5 The second class consists of descriptions and evocations of villas and villa life, particularly of the pleasure they afford to the owner; these are concerned only marginally with agricultural matters. They are ideological constructs, written to be read as belles-lettres and purveying a particular attitude toward nature and relaxation (otium) and premodern Italy, to own country estates which were exploited for enjoyment as well as for profit. The best-known examples of the genre are the letters of the younger Pliny describing exceptionally luxurious villas designed to sustain the ideal of otium,6 but there are others, exemplified in the poetry of Horace and epigrams of Martial, extolling, but not really describing, a modest place of refuge from the irritations and tensions of life in Rome. Some examples of the second class of Roman villa sustained profitable agricultural activities, but to this aspect the descriptions did not devote much attention. Pliny’s letters influenced the conception of some papal and ducal villas in central Italy, most apparently the suburban Villa Madama in Rome, commissioned by a Medici car-

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available to a limited class of wealthy and educated men, those most likely, in ancient

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dinal who later became pope, which was described—perhaps by one of the designers— in the vocabulary of Pliny’s letters on his two major villas at Laurentinum and Tusci.7 An architects’ plan shows the vast complex (overlooking the Tiber bridge connecting Rome with the north), including a full-scale theater, only a portion of which was completed (fig. 8.9). The impact of the agricultural treatises was not felt throughout the peninsula. In central Italy, particularly in Rome and Florence, wealthy aristocrats and high-ranking churchmen who built country estates were not interested in exploiting the land except by the creation of gardens. Venice, however, was a mercantile republic, and even the wealthiest citizens wanted to profit from every investment, while at the same time enjoying their privilege of periodic escape from the city. They were customers not only for reprints of the ancient agricultural manuals but for new north Italian publications based on them, those of Agostino Gallo, Alberto Lollio, Bartolomeo Taegio, Giuseppe Falcone, and Giovanni Saminiati, with titles such as The Twenty Days of True Agriculture, and Pleasure of the Villa and The New, Charming, and Delightful Villa.8 Although the classical treatises consist primarily of practical and even technical information on agronomy, the titles revealingly emphasize pleasure. All of the manuals begin with a discussion of the choice of a site for the villa, and all express essentially the same opinions, starting with the obvious dictum that the place be healthy, free of noxious air, that the climate be favorable and the soil fruitful. The conformation of the terrain is to be sloping rather than flat for reasons of drainage, preferably at the foot of a hill, and facing south (the residence, however, should face east, to benefit from the heat in winter and cool in summer).9 Renaissance architectural writers who discuss the villa, from Leon Battista Alberti on, follow the same instructions, often in the same order, indicating their dependence on the Romans.10 Economic considerations are foremost in the discussion of the larger context, beginning with proximity of major roads and of a river for irrigation and transport. The villa also should be near a town, which, Varro writes, provides a source of artisans such as physicians, who therefore need not be on the permanent payroll; towns also function as mar-

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kets for garden produce and flowers, and increase protection from brigandage.11 These principles also informed the rules for centuriation. Neither the Roman nor the Cinquecento agricultural manuals are explicit about villas in the restricted sense of the proprietor’s dwelling. Cato and Columella advise simply that the dwelling should be as comfortable as the means of the owner allow, so that he will be more willing to spend time there. “Build the villa urbana,” Cato wrote, “within your means. If you build well on a good estate, placing the house in a good situation so you can live comfortably in the country, you will visit it often and with more pleasure. The farm will run better, with less wrongdoing, and will produce more. The forehead is better than the hindhead.”12 Both the ancient and the modern writers address their works to urban readers who do not live permanently on the land. The author of The Twenty Days has a characteristically Italian recasting of Cato’s last sentence: “l’occhio del patrone ingrassa il cavallo” (The eye of the boss fattens the horse). Yet, with Cato as a model, the ancient manuals present the villa as a place of honest labor and frugality, the core of an ethic of simplicity and self-control that was difficult to realize in an urban environment. The authors give the impression that they wielded the shovel and labored with hired hands and slaves. There was also substantial literary support for the rustic utopia: in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which was known already to Alberti in the fifteenth century, Virgil’s Georgics, and, in the same century, the Rusticus and Le selve of Poliziano.

cratic ethic of otium, which was practiced in hunting, fishing, walking for pleasure, and above all in reading and writing; this was the prevailing ethos of the Roman villas of imperial times. And, particularly in his descriptions of the seashore villa at Laurentinum and the one in the hills of Tuscany, he powerfully evokes, in a way that anticipates romantic descriptions of scenery, the pleasures of the view: the ethic of Cato merges into an aesthetic. Of the Tuscan villa he writes:

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Pliny, on the other hand, while sharing the anti-urban bias, speaks for the more aristo-

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8.10 Fiesole, Villa Medici, mid-1440s. From a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio, 1486–1490.

Imagine to yourself an amphitheater of immense proportions, such as could be formed only by the hand of nature. A wide extended plain is surrounded by mountains whose summits are covered with tall ancient woods, stocked with game for all kinds of hunting. [The description goes on to praise the richness of the land under cultivation and the beauty of the fields and vineyards.] You would be much delighted were you to take a prospect of this place from a neighboring mountain, as you could scarcely believe you were looking upon a real country, but a landscape painting drawn with all the beauties imaginable; with so charming a representation and such a variety of agreeable objects will your eyes be regaled, whichever way they turn. My house, although built at the foot of a hill, has a view as if it stood upon the brow of it. . . . Behind it, but at a distance, is the Apennine mountain range, from whence it is refreshed with continual breezes.13

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8.11 Artiminio, Medici villa, in a view by Giuseppe Zocchi, from Vedute delle ville e d’altri luoghi della Toscana (Florence, 1744).

The first modern villa structure, that is, one without links to the medieval fortified retreat, was built in Fiesole in the mid-fifteenth century by the powerful—but at that time still republican—Medici family (fig. 8.10).14 It was quite divorced from the agricultural landscape and sited at great expense exclusively to take advantage of the view. Apart from the fact that the panorama centered on the city of Florence because it was the seat

Over a century later, the same family were grand dukes of Tuscany and built palaces in the countryside within a setting of formal gardens. The eighteenth-century draftsman who had depicted Florence from outside the walls put one of the later villas, at Artiminio, in a characteristic picturesque landscape, wild and irrational (fig. 8.11). It would have pleased Pliny. In eighteenth-century England the designers of great estates began actually to design landscapes in imitation of raw nature; it was part of a movement that posed the first radical challenge to the rationalized classical treatment of the environment. Italians were, however, too attached to their ancient heritage to try to imitate natural disorder in their landscapes.

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of Medici power, the impetus for the choice was not far from that of Pliny and Horace.

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8.12 Pliny’s Tuscan villa in a reconstruction by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, from Restaurationen vom Tuscum und

Laurentinum des Plinius (Berlin, 1861), unnumbered plate.

In the sixteenth century, the Paduan gentleman Alvise Cornaro, in his Discorso intorno alla vita sobria, conveys an ethic in harmony with that of the manual writers; his interest is in the fruitfulness of the land, for which, as a leader in land reclamation—that is, draining and filling vast areas of the Po delta west of Venice—he was partly responsible.15 But he was also keenly aware of the beauties of “madre Natura,” as he shows in his words about the excursions he makes to visit his friends: “But above all I enjoy going on, and coming back from, a trip, where I can consider the beauty of the sites and of the landscapes on the way, passing by some on the plain, others along the hills, near rivers, or fountains, with many beautiful habitations with gardens around.”16 Cornaro, however, is unique among both ancients and moderns in not stressing the opposition of country and city; he could, at least in old age, regard each with favor. On the subject of the residence, the letters of Pliny are more informative than the agricultural texts. But on this point Pliny had no relevance to the economic and cultural situation in the Veneto, where, even in the unlikely event that an owner should be rich

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enough to afford Plinian luxury, he would have been constrained by the ethic of Venetian republicanism and of the mercantile tradition.17 Given these constraints, however, it still is not apparent why, in an age obsessed by the urge to recreate ancient architecture, designers and their patrons did not make more of the evidence available in the texts, for example by attempting to build more modest versions of the complexes described by Pliny. Pliny’s letters are specific enough about the buildings, gardens, and natural settings of his villas to have encouraged innumerable imaginative reconstructions from the Renaissance to the present day. The Berlin architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, in interpreting the Tuscan villa in a drawing of around 1800 (fig. 8.12), offers a proto-romantic in-

8.13 The Roman villa according to

terpretation of the text in which the buildings are vir-

Vitruvius, as interpreted by Palladio.

tually embraced by imposing mountains.

From I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570), Book II, 16 (p. 70).

Pliny must be read with the realization that his letters are artificial constructs, polished up to be published and read for pleasure, and that this description is itself a kind of landscape painting. It is of value preenvironment that prevailed among the urban privileged classes in Augustan and imperial Rome, and exercised an incalculable influence in the post-medieval world. Some of the architectural theorists attempted to reconstruct the villa residence on the basis of the inadequate description of Vitruvius (fig. 8.13),18 but these images were not adopted as models for actual structures.

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cisely because it articulates an ideology of a country

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8.14 Roncade, Villa Giustianian, in a view of ca. 1508. Courtesy of Douglas Lewis. 8.15 Luvigliano, Villa dei Vescovi, 1529. Photo: Ralph Lieberman.

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As late as the first decade of the sixteenth century, villas such as that of the Giustinian family at Roncade (fig. 8.14), on the coast northeast of Venice, could represent a feudal heritage.19 The defensive walls, moat, and drawbridge are not intended to be functional, but to evoke memories of a past closer than that of antiquity. Nostalgia of this sort was rejected by patrons and designers after the all’antica “revolution” of the second quarter of the sixteenth century, starting with Villa dei Vescovi in Luvigliano of 1529 (fig. 8.15) which, probably unconsciously, adopted the model of the Roman “platform villa” which was built on a high podium to give it greater prominence and to provide a level base on irregular

8.16 Settefinestre, Roman villa, as reconstructed by Andrea Carandini,

or sloping terrain. The first-century B.C. villa at Set-

Settefinestre: Una villa schiavistica

tefinestre (fig. 8.16) is an example of the type.20 At

nell’Etruria romana (Modena, 1985).

Luvigliano, as later in most of Palladio’s villas, the vocabulary is Roman but not the plan or typology of representation. I believe that the major reason for this rejection of the evidence is that the irregularity, asymmetry, and all other Roman villas discovered in postRenaissance times—did not conform to the Renaissance image of ancient architecture. As with the creation of a canon of the orders, the revival of antiquity became obligatory, but only so long as the ancient models did not break Renaissance rules. Columella described three principal structures in the villa, the villa urbana, housing the owner, the villa rustica for major agricultural functions such as

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dispersion of the Plinian villa—and, incidentally, of

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8.17 Marano, province of Vicenza, bird’s-eye view of the villa complex, from an eighteenth-century survey. From Martin Kubelik, Die Villa

im Veneto, vol. 1, plate facing p. 52.

wine and oil pressing and storage, and the villa fructuaria for the storage of grain, fodder, and produce.21 We now know that these were built close together, as at Settefinestre. Close proximity of the residence and the utility structures was also normal in Quattrocento practice. The Quattrocento villa residence at Marano (fig. 8.17) is part of a corte entered from the road by a gate, and is surrounded by the utility structures of the farm.22 I think this is more likely to represent a survival of pre-Renaissance practice than an emulation of the juxtaposition of the villa urbana, villa rustica, and villa fructuaria. This would harmonize with the late Gothic architectural details in most such complexes. In fact, there is no evidence that the ancient writers influenced the form of Quattrocento villas, though they may have influenced the ideology that attracted Venetian city dwellers to the land.23 In any case the sixteenth-century villa complexes known for the architecture of their residences avoided this coexistence.

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8.18 Maser, Villa Barbaro, 1557–1558, facade. Photo: Ralph Lieberman.

The well-known Palladian Barbaro villa at Maser (fig. 8.18) followed both Pliny and the rule of the ancient agricultural treatises by being sited on a declivity of steep hills, overthe water that issues from a fountain behind the villa fills a fishpond and passes from there into the kitchen and then serves to irrigate the garden.24 Also in conformity with the treatises, the villa is sited near waterways adapted to transport and a small town. Decorative landscapes painted by Paolo Veronese within this villa (fig. 8.19) invite the owner and visitors to look through the architecture onto ideal landscapes that would be Plinian were it not for the appearance of Roman ruins. These are not depictions of existing ruins but fictions, modeled perhaps on stage scenery. The paintings express a mixture of nostalgia for a great past and meditations on the ephemerality of all human achievement.

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looking cultivated fields on a slope adapted to drainage. In fact, Palladio describes how

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8.19 Paolo Veronese, Landscape with Roman Ruins, in Villa Barbaro, Maser. Photo: Art Resource.

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8.20 Vicenza, Villa Rotonda, late 1560s. Photo: Philip Trager.

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In his treatise of 1570, Palladio described the site of the Villa Rotonda on the outskirts of Vicenza (fig. 8.20) as a teatro, perhaps an homage to Pliny’s amphitheatrum. The site is one of the most appealing and delightful that one could find, because it is on the top of a little hill [monticello] that is very easy to climb, and is bathed on one side by the Bacchiglione, a navigable river, and is surrounded on the other by other most appealing hills, which give the impression of a very large theater.25 The Villa Rotonda was not intended to be a farm center; it was rather a place for otium and entertainment, close to the city. Divorced from an agricultural base, it was closer in its function to the villas of central Italy, and unique for the north. It could be placed conceptually in the tradition of Cornaro’s Euganean retreat, but in form and in its immodest address to the outer world, it was vastly different. It also differed from other designs of Palladio, except perhaps for the unrealized villa at Meledo, and provided the transition to the radical position of Scamozzi. The hills and waterways that attracted both Cornaro and Palladio are common features of landscape drawings and paintings made for the class of Venetians who were Palladio’s patrons. Italian landscape painting enjoyed a particularly enthusiastic vogue in Venice; settings focused on the scenery to be found in the foothills of the Alps, which occupied the whole northern area of Venice’s land possessions (fig. 8.21). Few wealthy Venetians would have wanted to wander in the wilds of the Republic’s northern borders, but they enjoyed depictions of them on palace walls. The agricultural landscape of the flat Po valley did not attract them. This is not because city-dwellers have a natural disposition to enjoy rugged nature. Such an assumption is disproved by landscape paintings made for Dutch burghers a century later, which have no disposition for hilly and irregular terrain. Ways had to be found to arrive at a compromise between the elegant country mansions of the patrons and accommodation for the mundane work and storage places necessary to a profitable farm. Palladio dealt with the issue in the Quattro libri:

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Two types of building are needed on the estate, one for the owner and his family to live in, and the other in which to organize and look after the produce and the animals of the farm. The site, however, must be arranged in such a way that neither the former nor the latter interferes with one another. The house of the owner must be built taking into account the family and their status in the same ways as is customary in towns.26

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

8.21 Domenico Campagnola, Landscape. Florence, Uffizi Gallery. Photo: Art Resource.

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8.22 Fanzolo, Villa Emo, ca. 1555–1560, rear view. Photo: Ralph Lieberman.

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The change was certainly due to the concept of conditione, referring to the social status of the owner, and a perception of the need for him to hold himself above the toil, dust, and odor of agricultural industry while remaining close enough to supervise effectively. My suggestion that Venetian owners found the model of the luxury villa of imperial times too ostentatious does not mean that they were, in contrast, motivated by the practical precept of providing moderate comfort as proposed by Cato and Columella. The highest priority of the affluent Venetian proprietor was not comfort but representation. His villa was designed to be seen and admired by others. Its most impressive features faced outward toward the access road; characteristically, the side and rear were as unadorned as the utility structures (compare the facade and the rear of Villa Emo at Fanzolo, figs. 8.8 and 8.22). Here, as in many of Palladio’s villas, the principal facade is marked by a pediment on engaged columns, as if it were an ancient temple; the architect explained: In all the buildings for farms and also for some of those in the city I have built a tympanum [frontispizio] on the front facade where the principal doors are, because tympanums accentuate the entrance of the house and contribute greatly to the grandeur and magnificence of the building, thus making the front part more imposing than the others; furthermore, they are perfectly suited to the insignia or arms of the patrons, who usually put them in the middle of facades.27

1615, implemented this with a call for an imposing entrance drive and piazza: In order to encourage a greater awareness of buildings in the suburbs and of villas, the roads that lead to them should reveal their principal aspect and facade, particularly because this part is always the most noble and magnificent and also more ornate and beautiful than the others. At the head of these roads and before the palaces or important structures, there is a need for some ample and spacious piazza; both because it lends majesty as is proper and affords commodity.28

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

Vincenzo Scamozzi, in his L’idea della architettura universale, published in Venice in

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The owners of luxurious ancient villas wanted it to be known that they had lavished great sums on their residences, but the design indulged their private whims and was not addressed to the outside world. There is no evidence of an iconography of the Roman villa residence comparable to the employment of temple fronts on those of the Renaissance. Scamozzi devotes two chapters of his second book to the siting of villas. His knowledge of the luxury complexes referred to in ancient historical and literary writings is impressive (for example, he discusses the villas on the periphery of the Bay of Naples, which earlier treatise writers had overlooked), but he makes little use of the manuals that were fundamental to the villa ideology of the previous century. He aims to build support for his thesis that the powerful individuals of antiquity and modern times built their villas on hilltops. The architect must assure particularly that the most noble edifices and those of major importance be suitably placed and displayed in eminent places and likewise set off in some beautiful site, so that, besides the many conveniences that this will afford, it may achieve greater grandeur and majesty so that it may be looked [up] to by everyone.29 Among the modern examples he cites, in addition to the papal villas around Rome and the villas of the Medici, are those of the kings, dukes, and princes of France in the region of Paris and elsewhere, who built “almost always” on hills,30 a claim that is exaggerated if not false. Scamozzi no longer addresses issues of agriculture, nor even Palladio’s simpler strategies of personal representation, but the communication of power (“grandezza e maestà”) and public recognition of the power (“venghino reguardato da ogni uno”). His models are royal, papal, and aristocratic. The Rocca Pisana (fig. 8.23) is the one Scamozzi residence that fully realizes this ambition; it is on a high hill commanding distant views and may be seen from far off. But almost all of his built villas are in fact on level ground, suggesting that tradition exerted a stronger influence on his patrons than social ambition. Scamozzi’s theoretical approach, which veers decisively from the path

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The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

8.23 Lonigo, Rocca Pisana, 1576. Vincenzo Scamozzi, architect. From Giuseppe Mazzotti, Ville venete (Rome, 1957).

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taken by his predecessors, is that of a courtier; his book is dedicated to Maximilian, archduke of Austria, and he no longer has use for the ancient writers whose precepts informed the Cinquecento villa. All of the Roman treatises were addressed to urban investors in agricultural property entering the field for the first time. They would not have been needed by either career farmers or provincials of the middle class like the family of Virgil, for whom agriculture was the sole source of income. The majority of Venetian villa proprietors were by the accidents of history also city dwellers who for economic and cultural reasons became aware of the advantages of rural investment; they acquired farmland after the conquest of the terraferma, with funds earned in Venice and its satellite cities, primarily in trade. What emerges from this overview of the influence of the ancient texts is that they affected the ideology more than the physical form of the terraferma villa. But there was an irresolvable conflict within the ideology. Cato and the manual writers had called for productivity assured by hard work, constant attention to husbandry and management, and frugal comfort in the design of residences. Pliny and others reporting on villas of the imperial age promoted the enjoyment of otium in sumptuous settings, the pleasures of varied views of nature, hunting, and fishing, with only sufficient attention to farm management to avoid financial loss. The two were congruent only in representing the villa as a curative for urban stress, a place to realize physical and mental health. The sixteenth-century authors of agricultural manuals followed the structure established by Cato (and the rich resources of technical information from all the manuals), but rejected his Republican virtues in order to construct a rural utopia that incorporated those aspects of Pliny’s ideology that were consistent with the financial means of their readers, which were closer to those of Cato and Varro. Their vision reflected that of the proprietors of villas in the Veneto,31 who had to seriously exploit their property but could also attempt to realize utopias and to illustrate them in the mural decoration of their more elegant residences. These residences and their dependencies did not conform to the Roman texts, not only because these were insufficiently instructive, but also

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because the Renaissance concept of form and space, notwithstanding the rhetoric of revival, was not consistent with the Roman. Finally, Venetian proprietors were motivated by the priorities of their own time and place; they insisted that their establishments convey to the outside world the message of their status and ambitions. I have proposed what, in simple terms, could be called the technological and the ideological aspects of the Roman legacy on the Italian rural landscape. Inevitably the first, by virtue of establishing practical divisions of the land for agricultural purposes, had for long the more visible impact. Yet in modern times it has become increasingly concealed, because, with the transition from the use of a plow drawn by a team to the employment of large farm machinery for preparing the soil and gathering produce, the confines have had to be erased. The ideological attitudes toward the landscape, however, have survived with vigor; they are rooted in the culture of the privileged urban dwellers who, whether or not they know of their Roman or Renaissance antecedents, retain or acquire rural es-

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

tates in order to enjoy the contemporary equivalent of otium.

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N OT E S

1 Giuseppe Zocchi, Vedute delle ville, e d’altri luoghi 2

3

4

5

6

7

8

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della Toscana (Florence, 1744), frontispiece. See Jesper Carlsen et al., eds., Landuse in the Roman Empire (Rome, 1994); E. Sereni, Storia del paesaggio agrario italiano (Bari, 1966); Pierluigi Tozzi, Memoria della terra: Storia dell’uomo (Florence, 1987). See Olinto Marinelli, “La carta topografica e lo sviluppo di Firenze,” Rivista geografica italiana 28 (1921), 18–38; Ferdinando Castagnoli, “La centuriazione di Fiorentia,” L’universo 22 (1941), 361–368; Colin Hardie, “The Origin and Plan of Roman Florence,” Journal of Roman Studies 55 (1965), 122– 140. See Misurare la terra: Centuriazione e coloni nel mondo romano: Il caso modenese (Modena, 1983?), with extensive bibliography on centuriation; for the Via Aemilia, see p. 106. Below, I cite a later edition of this collection: Libri de re rustica: M. catonis lib. I; M. Terentii Varronis lib. III; L. Iunii Moderati Columellae lib. XIII . . . Palladius lib. XIIII (Zurich, 1528). Pliny the Younger described Laurentinum and Tusci in his Letters, 2.17 and 5.6. The reconstructions of these are surveyed in Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey, The Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity (Chicago, 1994). P. Foster, ed., “Raphael on the Villa Madama: The Text of a Lost Letter,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 11 (1968), 308–312. On Villa Madama, see C. L. Frommel, S. Ray, and M. Tafuri, eds., Raffaello architetto (Rome, 1984), 343–356, with full bibliography. Alberto Lollio, Lettera . . . nella quale . . . egli celebra la villa e lauda molto l’agricoltura . . . (Venice, 1544); Giuseppe Falcone, La nuova, vaga, et dilettevole villa (Brescia, 1559); Bartolomeo Taegio, La villa: Dialogo di M. Taegio (Milan, 1559); Agostino Gallo, Le dieci giornate della vera agricoltura, e piacere della villa (Brescia, 1564;Venice, 1566), followed by Le vinti giornate . . . (Turin, 1569). Saminiati’s manuscript “Trattato d’agricoltura,” ca. 1580, is transcribed in I. Belli Barsali, La villa a Lucca dal XV al XIX secolo (Rome, 1964). The work of Anton Francesco Doni, Le ville del Doni (Florence, 1566), is not a manual but a courtly literary representation of the several levels of pleasure villa suitable to proprietors of different social and economic classes. I have interpreted these writers from another point of view in the chapter “The Image of Country Life

9 10

11

12

13 14

15

in Sixteenth-Century Villa Books,” in The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (London and Princeton, 1990), 108–133, and they are discussed by Reinhard Bentmann and Michael Müller, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur, 2d ed. (Frankfurt, 1992), the original edition of which (1970) influenced the orientation of my book. Bentmann and Müller’s book has been published in English as The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1992). Cato, 1.3–7; Varro, 1.6.2, 1.7.1, 1.12.1; Columella 1.2.3f. Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria 9.2 (p. 793 in the edition by Paolo Portoghesi, Milan, 1966); Alberti (attrib.),“La villa,” in Opere volgari, ed. Cecil Grayson, 3 vols. (Bari, 1960–), 3:359ff. Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570) 2.12 (p. 45); cf. Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale (Venice, 1615) 3.15 (pp. 282f.). The same precepts appear in the Renaissance agricultural manuals cited in note 9. My investigation has been much aided by the collection of excerpts from the relevant ancient and Renaissance texts by Bentmann and Müller, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur, in a valuable appendix, “Materialen zur italienischen Villa der Renaissance.” Varro, 16.1–2. Columella, 1.1.19f. and 1.2.1, advises the proprietor to have the villa near the town in which he resides so that he can supervise the operations, and in 1.3.3ff. discusses roads and waterways. Alberti, “La villa”; Scamozzi, Idea 3.12 (p. 270). Cato, 4.1; Columella, 4.4.6–8, adds that comfort will encourage the owner’s wife to accompany him. Palladius, 1.8, cautions against sumptuousness.The view is echoed in Alberti (attrib.),“La villa,” 360 (the style, the use of Italian, and the content raise doubts about the attribution, but the ms. is bound with other works by Alberti and is in the hand of his brother), but not in De re aedificatoria nor in the treatises of later Renaissance writers, in which the concept of magnificentia, or at least the affirmation of social status, outweighs both comfort and frugality. Scamozzi, Idea 3.12 (p. 270), 2.6 (p. 119). Pliny the Younger, Letters 9.36. See my study “The Medici Villa in Fiesole,” in Il se rendit en Italie: Etudes offertes à André Chastel (Rome, 1987), 49–56. I have used the transcription of the Discorso in

17

18 19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

29 30

31

and Muraro,“Feudo e ville venete,” Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura 20 (1978), 203–223. Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura 2.14 (p. 51). Ibid. 2.3 (p. 18). Ibid. 2.13 (p. 46): “Del compartimento delle case.” Ibid. 2.16 (p. 69). Scamozzi, Idea 3.21 (pp. 322f.); discussed by Bentmann and Müller, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur, 185, n. 145. Scamozzi, Idea 1.2.6 (pp. 117f.). Ibid.: the villas of “i Rè passati, e Duchi, e Prencipi particolari nella Francia così appresso . . . Parigi, come là d’intorno à que’stati, oue si ritrouano luoghi, e siti riguardeuoli, e molto ameni, e diletteuoli, per la maggior parte, come habbiamo osseruato, sono quasi tutti sopra piaceuoli Colli de’ quali ne è molto abbondante quel Regno.” On the culture and ideology of the Venetian villas, see Bentmann and Müller, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur; B. Rupprecht, “Villa, Geschichte eines Ideals,” in Wandlungen des Paradisischen und Utopischen, Probleme der Kunstwissenschaft, II (Berlin, 1966), 210–220; and Michelangelo Muraro, Civiltà delle ville venete (Udine, 1986; English ed. New York, 1986).

The Influence of Antiquity on Itaiian Renaissance Villas

16

Giuseppe Fiocco, Alvise Cornaro: Il suo tempo e le sue opere (Vicenza, 1965), 171ff. For the significance of Cornaro’s views of agriculture and reclamation, see the essays by V. Fontana and E. Concina in Alvise Cornaro e il suo tempo, exh. cat., ed. Lionello Puppi (Padua, 1980). Fiocco, Alvise Cornaro, 179. In the previous paragraph, Cornaro had written:“Ho ancora, oltre a questo, un altro modo di sollazzarmi, ch’io vo l’aprile e maggio, e così il settembre e l’ottobre, per alquanti giorni a godere un mio colle, che è in questi monti Euganei, e nel più bel sito di quelli, che ha le sue fontane e giardini, e soprattutto comoda e bella stanza, nel qual luogo mi trovo ancora alcune fiate a qualche caccia conveniente alla mia etade [83 years], comoda e piacevole.” On Venetian attitudes of the early sixteenth century, see Girolamo Priuli, Diarii, cited by Alberto Tenenti, “The Sense of Space and Time in the Venetian World,” in John Hale, ed., Renaissance Venice (London, 1973), 11.Alvise Cornaro speaks with pride of his association with farmers, craftsmen, and architects (Discorso intorno alla vita sobria, transcribed in Fiocco, Alvise Cornaro, 179). Vitruvius, De architectura 6.5.3. Carolyn Kolb Lewis, The Villa Giustinian at Roncade (New York, 1977). The villa at Settefinestre, on the Tuscan coast, may have influenced also the design of Poggio a Caiano outside Florence. Its outer wall and its cylindrical towers were drawn by a late fifteenth-century visitor. A. Carandini, ed., Settefinestre: Una villa schiavistica nell’Etruria romana, 3 vols. (Modena, 1985); I have discussed the drawing in The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, 85. In the later sixteenth century, excavations at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli began to reveal discrete elements in that complex; see William L. MacDonald and John Pinto, Hadrian’s Villa and Its Legacy (New Haven, 1995). Lucius Junius Columella, De re rustica 1.6.1. See Martin Kubelik, Die Villa im Veneto. Zur typologischen Entwicklung im Quattrocento, 2 vols. (Munich, 1977), 2:164f., figs. 652–660: Marano, Cà Alta, dated (by dendrochronology) to 1487–1490; illustration facing 1:53. See also Renato Cevese, Ville della Provincia di Vicenza, vol. 2 (Milan, 1971), 468f. But so may a nostalgia for feudal privileges and status, as in the Villa Repeta at Campiglia, a feudal holding purchased by a Venetian family together with its imperial title. See Michelangelo Muraro,“La villa palladiana dei Repeta a Campiglia dei Berici,” Campiglia dei Berici: Storia di un paese veneto (Campiglia, 1980),

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NINE

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

9.1 Paolo Veronese or assistant, portrait of Daniele Barbaro. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

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The Venetian patrician Daniele Barbaro, Patriarch-Elect of Aquileia (1514–1570), is represented in a portrait (fig. 9.1) wearing ecclesiastical vestments and seated at a table on which is propped his book on perspective while he opens another volume to an illustration showing an architectural monument. In 1556 he published his translation and commentary on Vitruvius, which he revised and expanded for two editions of 1567, one in Latin and one in Italian.1 The translation was the most accurate and informed of the Renaissance, and the commentary was the first to be based on a thorough knowledge of the Roman remains.2 It is a major instance of the Renaissance appropriation of antiquity and of the discourse on the nature of artistic invention. Barbaro is also interesting to us because of his friendship and collaboration with Andrea Palladio, whom he took with him on a trip to Rome in 1556 and engaged shortly after, together with his brother Marcantonio, as the designer of their villa at Maser, near Asolo. Later he helped to secure major commissions for Palladio in Venice. Barbaro acknowledges in the commentary Palladio’s help in providing illustrations and advice,3 and I start with the assumption that many of his opinions would have been shared by the architect. To test this possibility, I focus my attention in this essay on Barbaro’s aesthetic and theoretical principles. A major strength of the commentary is Barbaro’s capacity to clearly structure confused passages in Vitruvius’s text and to put them into a simple philosophical framework that synthesizes Platonic and Aristotelian principles—Platonic in locating the source of the architect’s inspiration in the immanent order and harmony of the natural world, and Aristotelian in the articulation of architectural practice.4 I shall discuss under separate headings the principal ways in which Barbaro departed from or supplemented Vitruvius.

The intellect, Barbaro says, has two modes (habiti) of arriving at truth, one deriving from necessity and one contingent.5 Necessary truth is revealed by science, intellect (which apprehends truth through divine rays, and leads to understanding), and knowledge (sapienza). Contingent truth includes the arts,6 which do not achieve necessary truth be-

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

The First Principles

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cause they are dependent on human will. Some relate to union and conversation, some to utility and universal convenience; the former are ruled by prudence, the moderator of human and civil action (judges, legislators, etc.), and the latter by craft, which rules works that require some external material (architects, soldiers, farmers, craftsmen).7 While Barbaro follows Vitruvius in emphasizing the many disciplines required of the architect, he recasts the process of composition in Aristotelian terms. The architect must know the end (fine) to which his work is directed, and must distinguish the beginning and the middle. Consciousness of the end must precede action, which precedes form, which in turn precedes material. “In [material] one expresses that which is in the mind”:8 this exposition derives from basic causes in nature as described in Aristotle’s Physics,9 where the fine is the final cause, the agente the efficient cause, which two are realized in formal and material causes. Barbaro’s use of the term “expressed” is unique in his time, and appears to mean the same as it does today; it is consistent with his ideas on signification, which I shall discuss shortly. While Vitruvius limits the meaning of Arte to manual skill, Barbaro elevates it to a branch of learning. Vitruvius (1.1.2) distinguishes three types of artificer: the first has manual skill but lacks culture (sine litteris); the second possesses only theory and learning (ratiocinatibus et litteris), and therefore follows a shadow rather than the thing itself. The third commands both, and gains authority and influence. Barbaro develops these distinctions into a three-level hierarchy, the lowest being experience, the next Arte, and the highest, knowledge. Arte originates in experience10 but is superior to it, “because things presented to the senses are not principles of the crafts, but incidents.” Still, the experts (i.e., those who have experience), because they are familiar with the defects of materials, have better results than those who grasp only the universals of things.11 “Yet Arte is more worthy than experience because it is nearer to knowledge, understanding causes and reasons. And the manifest sign of knowledge is the capacity to teach others.” I know of no preceding or subsequent differentiation of Arte from manual skill or technique. It had been placed commonly in tandem with theory in a dual system—Barbaro

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himself says elsewhere that architecture, like natural conception, requires (only) two sexes, fabrica and discorso.12 Finally, the artisan is represented as the imitator of nature not because his works resemble natural phenomena but because “the human intellect has a great similarity with that of nature, which is an intelligence.”13

Barbaro and Venetian Architecture Perhaps Barbaro’s distinction of craft from expertise reflected his negative opinion of Jacopo Sansovino’s work on the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, which collapsed in 1545 because the vaults were insufficiently buttressed (Sansovino being an example of one who possessed Arte but lacked esperienza).14 But, as Manfredo Tafuri demonstrated,15 Barbaro’s primary interests were in form and signification; his strongest criticism was reserved for the Venetian patrons and architects who rejected all’antica design (as represented by works such as the Library and those of Palladio) in favor of the traditional Venetian style:

And if I may plead, I plead and plead again, especially with those of my country, that they remember that, as they do not lack wealth and the power to achieve honorable things, they must . . . persuade themselves that they don’t know that which indeed they don’t know—nor can they know it without practical experience, labor, and learning. And if it seems to them that the tradition of their buildings is superior, they fool themselves greatly, because, in fact, it is a too faulty

which I too concede, at least they should be content to permit a moderation of that tradition by one who understands, because one can adjust a thing and temper it in such a way that the faults are removed and it can be modified to a rational and tolerable form, with advantages in use, convenience, and beauty. . . . An architect is not born but needs to learn and to know and to

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

and poor tradition: and if, on the other hand, they want to concede to usage certain things,

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manage himself with reason—which he who trusts his ingegno [talent] abandons and never discovers the beauty of things, but instead judges the ugly to be beautiful, the bad to be good, and the poorly made to be in order and regulated.16

No other theoretical work of the Renaissance suggests that ingegno can lead an artist astray. It is always seen as one of the prerequisites for invention in the arts, as it is in other passages by Barbaro himself.17 In this passage, ingegno becomes the enemy of reason, the expression of an artist’s self-absorption and lack of public responsibility. Barbaro’s championing of classical architecture in Venice and his ambivalence about talent in design are of a piece; both were part of an effort to introduce the Roman Renaissance. But neither he nor his collaborator Palladio was a strict classicist. The Villa Barbaro, for example, apart from the message conveyed by the temple front motif of the central block, and the garden nymphaeum, has few antique precedents and is a stunning example of Palladio’s ingegno.18

The Architect Barbaro outdoes Vitruvius in giving the architect an exalted position, controlling the crafts, including painting and sculpture: The dignity of architecture appears to be equivalent to knowledge and to be a heroic virtue residing at the center of all the crafts, because it alone grasps the causes, it alone embraces beautiful and elevated things, it alone . . . joins with the most certain sciences such as arithmetic, geometry, and many others, without which, as is said, all craft [Arte] is vile and without repute.19 Barbaro moves from these abstract considerations of the architect’s role to his relations with clients,20 an issue rarely mentioned in Renaissance theoretical literature. In his view, the patron prepares the program and the architect is to be left free to carry out the design, but with the proviso that he neither flatter nor avoid the patron and that he tell

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him the truth so that he can avoid wasting money. In his commentary on Vitruvius’s sixth book Barbaro writes of the clients of houses and palaces: And if they want a certain number of windows in a room, they should be satisfied to let them be put in the proper place, with the rules of art, because it matters greatly to the beauty, and the use is not impaired. And if I can put them [the windows] at a distance from the corners, will it not be better than putting them at the corners and weakening the house? The father of the family should . . . say I want so many rooms, and so many living spaces, these for me and for my wife, those for the children, and these others for the servants, still others for services, and then leave the arranging to the architect so that he may place things as he determines in accordance with order, disposition, measure, as seems fitting.21 In affirming the authority of the architect, Barbaro gives an example in which traditional Venetian practice might be replaced by all’antica design on remodeling: in traditional Venetian dwellings, windows were frequently placed near the corners.

Signification and Design Barbaro’s passage on signification in architecture is a clear instance of how he imposes his own order on an otherwise meaningless passage of Vitruvius. In discussing the training of architects, Vitruvius writes that in all things, but most of all in architecture, there is a signified and a signifier. He muddles the sense of this proposition, adding that the architect ought to have experience in both, and that he acquires the first by talent (ingenium) and the second by discipline. Barbaro makes sense of the semantic terms, iden-

There are two aspects: One is the signified, the proposed work; the other is the signifier, that is, manifest reason [dimostrativa ragione]. All effects, then, all works or labors of the Arts, all conclusions of all the sciences are signified things; but the reasons, the proofs, the causes of these

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

tifying the signified with the architectural program and the signifier with the project:

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are signifiers, because the sign refers to the signified thing: the effect to the cause, the conclusion to the proof. To signify is to demonstrate by signs, and signing is to impress the sign. When the work has been controlled by reason and finished with drawing [disegno], the Artificer has impressed his sign, that is, the quality and the form that was in his mind. . . . This is more true of architecture than other arts because it is necessary to form the concept in relation to the intention, and this is proper signifying.22 Modern semiotics has given the terms of signification loaded content, but here their meaning is simple. Barbaro is saying only that architectural invention impresses the rational intellect on the design process. That process is described as “discourse”—Discorso—which is Barbaro’s rendering of Vitruvius’s ratiocinatio.23 This alteration of the original meaning is revealing, since the Vitruvian term implies only reasoning, while Barbaro’s “discourse” is a more complex interaction of the final cause (the “program,” in today’s terminology), the mind of the maker, the form proposed, and the material. Discorso is the equivalent of disegno, a term much more widely used at the time, which is most effectively defined by Barbaro’s contemporary Vasari as denoting not only the process of drawing but the conception of any work of art.24 Barbaro’s “discourse” suggests an action and, still more, an ongoing interaction, a process. It suggests, as disegno does not, an affinity of architecture to rhetoric. This is explicitly stated in the third book.25 Barbaro uses the term disegno in the restricted sense of “drawing”: “the skill with delineation that serves painters, sculptors, etc.”26 and involves establishing scale and dimension, the termination of things with respect to size and limits. In commenting on Vitruvius’s passage about drawing,27 which describes three types—plan (ichnographia), elevation (orthographia), and perspective (scaenographia)—Barbaro rejects, as Leon Battista Alberti had,28 the third (perspective rendering), which he says relates to scene paint-

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ing, replacing it with the orthographic section, which he calls sciographia. His aversion to perspective drawings is such that he alters even Vitruvius’s original in translating the passage: “Le idee della dispositione sono queste: la pianta, lo in piè, il profilo [= section].” 29

Historical Structure Barbaro does articulate a general view of the history of the arts, but applies it only to their evolution in antiquity: “Every art has its childhood, its adolescence, the flower of age, and maturity, as with architecture, which broke forth in the first centuries, grew in Asia, attained its vigor in Greece, and finally in Italy achieved perfect and mature dignity.”30 Some Roman historians and early humanists had modeled history on the natural life cycle, but they always concluded with a phase of old age and decline. In avoiding the downward path of the curve, Barbaro accords with Vasari, whose Lives, first appearing in 1550, represented the modern history of the arts as a steady progress, in three stages, from Giotto to perfection in Michelangelo. There is no reason to believe that Barbaro got his structure from Vasari, or from any other source; it may simply have suited his argument by exalting Roman imperial architecture. He did not apply it to contemporary architecture, though it could have been used to support his desire to have all’antica design replace the prevailing Venetian Renaissance practice.31

Decorum and License Though the balance of decoro (propriety) and licenza (license) is a theme that permeates Renaissance architectural discourse,32 Barbaro pays less attention to it than Vitruvius had. At Vitruvius’s first reference to decoro, Barbaro comments that he uses the word to refer to both ornament and decorum; later he defines it only as “respect for dignity and for the status of persons.”33 Barbaro is concerned particularly for propriety in the design ter of each of the gods mandates the adoption of the suitable order (from among the three major ones) for temples consecrated to them, he observes:

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

of contemporary ecclesiastical buildings, and when Vitruvius explains how the charac-

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Inasmuch as we do not have false and fraudulent gods, there is no dearth of opportunity to serve decorum in the churches consecrated to the true friends of the true God, and also to his majesty; and because there are many of them [probably meaning the Virgin and the Saints] that differ as much in the splendor of various virtues as the stars in Heaven differ in brilliance, he [the architect] can surely use every suitable style that is appropriate to the attributes of each. . . . It is within the power of a circumspect and prudent architect to compose with rational measurements many other styles, observing decorum and not submitting to his own caprices.34 Here Barbaro’s decorum refers only to appropriateness and not to custom. This must have been because he saw tradition as a barrier to good all’antica design. But Barbaro’s “power to compose many other styles” is equivalent to license, even if it is constrained by the demands of an undefined propriety. But Barbaro’s aversion to tradition (that is, to the conservative tastes of Venetian patricians) did not temper his demand for canonical applications of the orders; he criticizes even ancient buildings for license in that respect.35 On the application of canonical proportions, he is more flexible: I want now to alert certain [readers] who marvel that Vitruvius himself, not to speak of other ancient architects, departed a bit from these measurements. . . . [Similarly] in music . . . there are certain sounds that come to the ears with sweetness, which however are not placed among the consonances. But I say that everyone ought to stop marveling on finding the measurements in many works somewhat divergent from the precepts, so long as they are kept sufficiently between the greater and the smaller extreme and vary the means with judgment and subtlety of feeling.36

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Vitruvius’s explanation of the proportional and decorative differences among the three major orders by a simile based on gender—Doric is masculine, Ionic matronly, and Corinthian maidenly—is avoided by Barbaro, who attributes the differences to the variety of forms and dimensions in nature, which produces gracious and thin bodies, more solid ones, and, in between, beautiful and appealing ones. Barbaro’s moderation of rigid canons of measurement hardly amounts to what his contemporaries would have called license. Even Vitruvius admitted adjustment—limited to the orders—to special conditions of size, site, and environment. Nothing in Barbaro’s text could be read to justify the excesses of some of the distortions of classical precedent in Palladio’s later work, such as the truncated pilasters on the outer bays of the Palazzo Valmarana in Vicenza (fig. 10.13) or the use of the triglyph motif on the balcony brackets of the Loggia in Vicenza (1570; fig. 10.14).37

Proportions Vitruvius does not clearly differentiate his three types of architectural proportions—proportio, symmetria, eurythmia. The first two are virtually interchangeable, even when they are used in the same sentence (e.g., 1.2.2: “membrorum operis commoditas separatim universeque proportionis ad symmetriam comparatio”); symmetria essentially means proportion, and does not acquire its modern denotation until the seventeenth century. Barbaro clears up the confusion, making proportion a general principle (“the comparison of two quantities within the same type”),38 symmetry the application of a rational proportional system to the architectural orders, and eurythmy the proportioning of the main features of the building itself. In Barbaro’s words,

tione]. It is not enough to order measurements one after the other, but it is necessary that these measurements be in concordance [convenienza], that is, that they be in some proportion; and further, where there will be proportion, there can be nothing superfluous.39

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

Symmetry is the beauty of the order, as eurythmy is the beauty of the composition [disposi-

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In Vitruvius’s definition, “The beautiful [application of] number called eurythmy is a gracious appearance and convenient form in the composition of the members; it is achieved when the members of the work are concordant; that is, the height to the width, the width to the length, and, in sum, [when] everything corresponds to its placement [compartimento].” Barbaro’s commentary emphasizes less number than harmony, which applies to other arts as well as architecture: Every well-wrought work, then, should be like a beautiful verse, in which, according to the best consonances, the parts follow each other until they arrive at the determined end. . . . As in singing, a concert of voices is required in which, apart from the voices themselves being right, and apart from their joining in consonances, a certain tempering is required that makes the whole harmony sweet and smooth.40 Vitruvius discusses musical harmony in one of the chapters on the ancient theater (5.4); he chose this place because he associated the subject with acoustics, and did not apply the principles of musical harmony to the proportioning of buildings. His use of Greek terminology for tones and intervals made this section of his work particularly difficult to translate, and Barbaro’s solution was simply to eliminate the words without Latin equivalents, basing his extensive commentary on his study of the musical theory of his time. Barbaro, like Alberti in De re aedificatoria (9.5), related the application of proportion in architectural design to musical harmony; both derived from a universal mathematical order. This would give their proper use a transcendental authority beyond the mere aesthetic preference of architects,41 and constituted a further confirmation of the rule of number in determining choices in architectural design.

Conclusion The immanent authority that guides the designer in Barbaro’s theory is the rational, mathematical rule of natural processes. Although Barbaro was a high-ranking ecclesi-

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astic, this basic principle was Platonic, and was not Christianized by Neoplatonic thought. My hope that a close reading of Barbaro would illuminate the critical thinking of his collaborator Andrea Palladio has not been supported by this account; Barbaro was too preoccupied with correct practice to have offered much stimulus. Still, he must have had a substantial influence on Palladio’s views on proportion, a subject that he pursued with much more than an amateur’s interest (and one to which Palladio was particularly attracted), but as a specialty in itself, in a way that had little impact on architectural theory (other than to affirm the importance of proportion). The same is true of surveying, and to a lesser degree of machinery (books IX and X). Moreover, Barbaro’s views of the mission of the architect and the ethical goals of the profession surely influenced Palladio. Certainly the sophistication of Barbaro’s translation, in which his (and Palladio’s) knowledge of Roman monuments was a significant factor, made Vitruvius more acces-

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

sible to all architects and amateurs.

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NOTES

This essay is an homage to Richard Krautheimer’s stimulating article “Alberti and Vitruvius,” in Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1969), 323–332. 1 The revised Italian edition is I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruvio tradotti e commentati da Mons. Daniele Barbaro (Venice, 1567). Translations in this study will be from that edition unless otherwise indicated. Barbaro added text to this edition and in some cases changed the wording. On Barbaro, see the article in the Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome, 1960–), sub voce; P. Laven, “Daniele Barbaro, PatriarchElect of Aquileia,” Ph.D. diss. (London, Courtauld Institute, 1957), which I have not consulted; Manfredo Tafuri, “Daniele Barbaro e la cultura scientifica veneziana del ‘500,” in Giovanni Battista Benedetti e il suo tempo: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Istituto Veneto de Scienze Lettere e Arti (Venice, 1987), 55–81; the essays by Manfredo Tafuri and Manuela Morresi in the facsimile of the 1567 edition of Barbaro’s Vitruvius (Milan, 1987); Manuela Morresi, “Treatises and the Architecture of Venice in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Vaughan Hart with Peter Hicks, eds., Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise (New Haven, 1998), 263–280; Bruce Boucher, “The Last Will of Daniele Barbaro,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979), 277–282; Branko Mitrovic, “Paduan Aristotelianism and Daniele Barbaro’s Commentary on Vitruvius’ De architectura,” Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998), 667–688. On the Vitruvius commentary, see Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, 1962), esp. 66ff. and 107ff.; Vincenzo Fontana, “‘Arte’ e ‘Isperienza’ nei trattati d’architettura veneziani del Cinquecento,” Architectura 8 (1978), 49–72; Fontana, “Il ‘Vitruvio’ del 1556: Barbaro, Palladio, Marcolini,” in Trattati scientifici nel Veneto fra il XV e XVI secolo: Saggi e studi (Vi-

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cenza, 1985), 39–72; P. N. Pagliara, “Vitruvio dal testo al canone,” in Salvatore Settis, ed., Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana (Turin, 1986), 49–72; Annette Becker, “Anmerkungen zu Barbaros Vitruv,” Ph.D. diss. (Mainz, 1991); Pamela Long, “The Vitruvian Commentary Tradition and Rational Architecture in the Sixteenth Century: A Study in the History of Ideas,” Ph.D diss. (Johns Hopkins University, 1979). 2 The only preceding commentary was that of Cesare Cesariano (Como, 1521), a provincial Lombard architect who had some contact with designers and scholars in central Italy who were making great progress in the knowledge and understanding of Roman architecture, but who himself had not visited Rome. In his essay on Cesariano’s edition, Manfredo Tafuri characterized the text thus: “Romanticismo archeologico e sforzo erudito, intenti metodologici e evasione fantastica, antistoricismo e tentativo di entrare in un rapporto critico con l’antico si fondono dunque . . . nell’intera opera del Cesariano” (in Scritti rinascimentali di architettura, ed. Arnaldo Bruschi et al. [Milan, 1978], 429). 3 Barbaro, I dieci libri 1.6.13 (p. 64): “Non mi è venuto fatto, ne i disegni delle figure importanti io ho usato l’opere di M. Andrea Palladio Vicentino Architetto, il quale ha con incredibile profitto tra quanti io ho conosciuto di uista, & per fama . . . acquistato gran nome sì nelle fortissimi, & uaghi disegni delle piante, e gli alzati, & de i profili, come nelle eseguire, & fare molti, & superbi edificii, sì nella patria sua, come altroue & publici, & priuati, che contendono con gli antichi, danno lume a moderni, daranno merauuiglia a quelli che uerranno.” Other references to Palladio appear on 1.5.1 (p. 65); 5.10 (p. 264); 6.10 (p. 303); 7.4 (p. 319). 4 Mitrovic, in his admirable study “Paduan Aristotelianism,” 680f., minimizes the Platonic aspect of Barbaro’s thought and proposes that his position (described as “conventionalist”), which attributed architectural elements,

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the statement to Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.3–8, a work that Barbaro had edited. He implies, however, that Barbaro refers to “the arts,” which is likely to lead the modern reader to a misunderstanding of Barbaro’s meaning. Barbaro, I dieci libri, proemio (p. 4) (while Vitruvius’s passage appears in 1.1.2, Barbaro’s commentary follows the proemio): “Quanto alla forza et efficacia dell’operare gli esperti hanno effetto maggiore, che quelli i quali hanno la ragione universale delle cose, e però spesso avviene che lo Artefice inesperto, avvenga Dio che egli habbia la ragione nella mente de gli Artefici, erra però, e pecca bene spesso, non per non sapere, ne perche la ragione sia men vera, ma perche non conosce i difetti della materiale, che molte fiate non risponde all’intenzione dell’Arte. Con tutto questo, l’Arte è piu eccellente, & piu degna della isperienza, perche piu vicina al sapere, intendendo le cause, & le ragioni delle cose, ladoue la isperienza opera senza ragione. . . . La onde l’Arte è alla sapienza, che è habito nobilissimo, piu uicina.” I discussed a classic instance of its traditional use in my first article, “‘Ars sine Scientia Nihil Est’: Gothic Theory of Architecture at the Cathedral of Milan,” Art Bulletin 31 (1949), 31–111. In the texts discussed there, arte meant craft or technique, scientia theory. Barbaro, I dieci libri 1.3 (p. 37): “L’arte quanto puo imita la natura: Et questo aduiene per che il principio dell’arte, che è lo intelletto humano, ha gran simiglianza col principio, che muove la natura, che è una intelligenza, dalla simiglianza delle uirtù, & de i principii nasce la simiglianza dell’operare, che per hora chiameremo imitatione. . . . Conueneuolmente l’Architetto imitando il fattor della natura deue riguardare alla bellezza, utilità, & fermezza delle opere.” (Note the disinclination to Christianize il fattor. ) As suggested by Fontana, “‘Arte’ e ‘Isperienza’ nei trattati d’architettura veneziani del Cinquecento.” Tafuri, introduction to the facsimile of Barbaro’s 1567 Vitruvius commentary (Milan, 1987), xix ff.; and Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento (Turin, 1985). Barbaro, I dieci libri 6.10 (p. 303): “Et se io

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

5

forms, and relationships to usage and experience, contrasted markedly with that of Palladio, which attributed them to immanent principles and essential meanings. Barbaro, I dieci libri, commentary to the proemio (p. 3). Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics 6.2–3, lists art and science as two of five ways of arriving at truth (the others being prudence, wisdom, and reason). Barbaro’s dual division cannot have derived from this source. My translation of Arte in this instance as “the arts” seems justified by the context, although in the following phrase, and elsewhere in the commentary, it is used in the more traditional sense of “craft” or “technique.” Both Plato (Republic 416–419) and Aristotle (Politics 6.7, 1321a; 7.8, 1328b) separate artisans, farmers, etc. from the guardians of the state, putting them in a lower social class. Barbaro’s division suggests equality of status and echoes the elevation of architects, farmers, and other artisans by his Venetian (Paduan) predecessor of the previous generation, Alvise Cornaro (Scritti sull’architettura, ed. P. Carpeggiani [Padua, 1980]); see Giuseppe Fiocco, Alvise Cornaro, il suo tempo e le sue opere (Vicenza, 1965). Barbaro, I dieci libri 1.1.1 (p. 9): “Et da queste parole si dimostra la utilità che era conditione dell’Arte. Ma perche con . . . pensiero affaticarsi . . . ? non per altro che per manifestare in qualche materia esteriore la forma, che prima era nel pensiero, & nella mente.” (Commenting on Vitruvius’s text which he translates: “Fabrica esser continuo, & essercitato, & come uia trita, & battuta da passaggieri frequentato pensiero d’indrizzare le cose a fine conueniente.”) Again in 2.1.8 (p. 71): “la materiale è principio non dell’Architettura, perche l’Architettura non è fatta di legno, nè di pietra, ma delle cose, che sono dall’Arti formate, & fabricate. & è principio, & soggetto, nel quale si esprime quello, che è nella mente dello Artefice, cioè l’ordine, la dispositione, la distributione, la simmetria, la gratia & il decoro, & in somma, il perche, la ragione, il discorso, la cosa significante.” Aristotle, Physics 193ff. Wittkower, Architectural Principles, 67, traces

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posso pregare, prego & riprego specialmente quelli della patria mia, che si ricordino, che non mancando loro le ricchezze, & il poter fare cose honorate, uoglino anche prouedere, che non si desideri in essi l’ingegno, & il sapere. Il che faranno, quando si persuaderanno di non sapere quello, che ueramente non sanno, nè possono sapere senza pratica, & fatica, & scienza. Et se gli pare che l’usanza delle loro fabriche gli debbia esser maestra, s’ingannano grandemente, perche in fatti, è troppo uitiosa, & mala usanza: e se pure uogliono conceder all’uso alcuna cosa, il che anch’io concedo, di gratia siano contenti di lasciar moderare quell’uso da chi se ne intende, perche molto bene con pratica, & ratione si può acconciare una cosa, e temperarla in modo, che leuatole il male, ella si riduca ad una forma ragioneuole, e tolerabile, con auantaggio dell’uso, della commodità, e della bellezza. . . . [304] uenirà una certa concorrenza tra gli huomini di far bene, con biasmo dello loro male, & inuecchiate usanze, & conferisceranno, che non si nasce Architetto, ma, che bisogna imparare, & conoscere, & reggersi con ragione, dalla qual chiunque fidandosi dello ingegno suo, si parte, non conosce mai il bello delle cose, anzi stima il brutto bello, il cattivo buono, & il mal fatto ordinare, & regolato. Voglio ancho esortare gli Architetti, & Proti, che non uoglino applaudere, & assentire a padroni; Anzi, che gli dichino il vero, & gli consiglino bene, & amoreuolmente, & che pensino bene prima, che gli facciano spendere i dinari, come altrouue, s’è detto, perche cosi facendo, ueramente meriteranno laude, & nome conveniente alla loro professione.” Another instance is 3.Preface.4 (p. 96): “Qui [in ecclesiastical design] l’ordine ha luogo, qui la dispositione disegna, qui la simmetria, & il decoro, & la gratia fanno proua, que si sente la utilità della distributione. Nelle quale cose il ualore dello Architetto, la forza dell’arte, l’acutezza delle ingegno riluce.” See chapter 10 below. Barbaro, I dieci libri 1.1.1 (p. 6). Ibid. 6.2.5 (p. 282). Ibid. 6.10 (pp. 303f.; unchanged from the 1556 text): “& se uogliono un determinato numero di finestre in una stanza, siano contenti di lasciarle porre al suo luogo, con gli or-

dini dell’arte perche importa molto alla bellezza, & non uiene impedito l’uso di quelle. E se io potro porle lontane da gli angoli, non sarà egli meglio, che porle sopra gli angoli & indebolire la casa? Deue il padre di famiglia, conoscendo quello gli fa bisogno, dire io voglio tanti stanze, e tante habitationi, queste per me, & per la moglie, quelle per li figliuoli, quelle altre per li serui, quell’altre per la commodità: e poi lasciar allo Architetto, che egli le compartisca, & ponga al luogo suo, secondo l’ordine, dispositione, & misura, che se conviene.” 22 Ibid. 1.1.3 (Vitruvius’s passage): “Quare videtur utraque parte exercitatus esse debere, que se architectum profiteatur. Itaque eum etiam ingeniosum oportet esse et ad disciplinam docilem. Neque enim ingenium sine disciplina aut disciplina sine ingenio perfectum artificem potest efficere.” Barbaro’s commentary is on p. 11: “E però due cose sono, l’una è la significata, & proposta opera, e l’altra è la significante cioè dimostratiua ragione. Tutti gli effetti, opere, lauori delle Arti, le conclusioni di tutte le scienze sono le cose significate; ma le ragioni, le proue, le cause di quelle sono le cose significanti. . . . Il segno si riferisce alla cosa significata: lo effetto alla cause: La conclusione alla proua . . . significare è per segni dimostrare, & segnare è imprimere il segno. La doue in ogni opera da ragione drizzata, & con disegno finita, è impresso il segno dello Artefice, cioè la qualità & la forma, che era nella mente di quello, percioche lo Artefice opera prima nello intelletto, & concepe nella mente, & segna poi la materiale esteriore, dello habito interiore [specialmente nell’architettura] perciòche ella sopra ogni arte significa cioè rappresenta le cose alla virtù, che conosce, & concorre principalmente a formare il concetto secondo la sua intentione: & questo è proprio significare.” 23 Ibid. 1.1 (pp. 9f.). 24 Disegno, “padre delle tre arti nostre, architettura, scultura e pittura, procedendo dall’intelletto cava di molte cose un giudizio universale simile a una forma overo idea di tutte le cose della natura.” Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori e architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, 1906), 1:196. The use of disegno in the passage quoted in note 22 above

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32 As persuasively illustrated by Alina Payne, The

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Architecural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture (Cambridge, U.K., 1999). The first reference appears in I dieci libri 1.2.5 (p. 34), and the later definition in 6.8 (p. 96): “Decoro, che altro non è, che un rispetto alla dignità, & allo stato delle persone. Fatta adunque la distintione delle persone bisogna a ciascuna secondo il grado suo fabricare, & pero altro compartimento hauera la casa d’un Signore, altro quella del nobile, altro quelo del populo.” Barbaro also comments at 1.2.5 (p. 35): “Delle parole di Vitr. il prudente Architetto puo trarre molti belli documenti cerca il Decoro, & i adornamenti, che conuengono alle fabriche de i nostri tempi.” Ibid. 1.2.5 (p. 35). Ibid. 1.2.7 (p. 35): “Proprio è nel gocciolatoio Ionico scolpire i dentelli; questi se nella opera Dorica saranno traportati come fece colui il quale fabricò il Theatro, che Augusto fece fare in nome di Marcello suo nipote offenderà gli occhi assuefatti ad altra ueduta.” In the following paragraph (p. 37) Barbaro confirms Vitruvius’s discussion of a “natural decorum” deriving from the proper choice of a site and a design “seruando l’usanza, & la commodità della natura.” In a discussion of decorum in the planning and furnishing of churches, at 4.9 (4.8 in Barbaro’s numbering; p. 201), Barbaro provides the first record of Counter-Reformation innovations. Ibid., 4.1.10 (p. 165; the passage is absent from the Latin edition): “Voglio far hora auuertiti alcuni, i quali si marauigliano, che Vitru. istesso non pur altri, che hanno fabricato tra gli antichi Architetti, s’habbia alcuna fiata scostato dalle dette misure. Io ho detto di sopra con l’auttorità di Vitru. che la ragione delle cose è in se uera, & durabile, onde con la proportione sene uiue, & sta senza oppositione, ma non sempre diletta quel sentimento dell’animo nostro, il quale forse piu a dentro per ascosa forza di natura penetrando non consente a gli occhi, che la pura è [e?] semplice proportione alcuna fiata diletti. ma dalla materia delle cose, dalla grandezza, dalla distanza (come ho detto) richiede alcuna maniera, &

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(“la doue in ogni opera da ragione drizzata, & con disegno finita, è impresso il segno dello Artefice”) could be interpreted in the Vasarian sense, but I have translated it “drawing.” Barbaro, I dieci libri 2.2.1 (p.115; placed by Barbaro in 1.1): “& si come la oratione ha forme, & idee diuerse per satisfare alle orecchie, cosi habbia l’Architettura gli aspetti, & forme sue per satisfar a gli occhi.” Ibid. 1.1.4 (p. 13). Vitruvius, De architectura 1.2.1, explaining the types of dispositio that the Greeks call ideae. Alberti’s rules for architectural drawing are discussed in chapter 2 above. Barbaro, I dieci libri 1.2 (p. 29). Also in the Latin edition of 1567, p. 18, sciographia is not only used in the commentary but replaces scaenographia in what purports to be Vitruvius’s text as well. In the 1556 edition, Barbaro explains, pp. 19f.: “Il Profilo detto Sciographia dal quale infinita utilità ne prende l’Architetto . . . rende conto delle grossezze de i muri, de gli sporti, delle ritrattioni d’ogni membro, & in questo l’architetto come Medico dimostra tutte le parti interiori, & esteriore dell’opere . . . però è necessario il Profilo, detto Sciographia, perche in questo modo leggerei Vitru. & non Scenographia. . . . Ma che utilità sia della Prospettiua, che rileui molto in questo fatto, io nol uedo.” In spite of this, the traditional type of perspective views of entablatures and cornices are preserved in some of the woodcuts in the 1556 (e.g., on pp. 106, 118, 119, 120), the 1567 (pp. 190f), and in the Latin edition (e.g., p. 129). Barbaro, I dieci libri 2.1.4 (p. 69): “ogni arte habbia la sua pueritia, la sua adolescentia, il fior della età, & la maturità, come l’architettura, che nei primi secoli hebbe i suoi sgossamenti, crebbe in Asia, ottenne in Grecia il suo uigore, & finalmente in Italia conseguì perfetta & matura dignità.” To translate hebbe . . . sgossamenti as “broke forth” is to stretch to its limits the modern meaning of sgozzare, “to cut the throat (of)” I am reluctant to attribute the historical structure of either Barbaro or Vasari to Pliny the Elder (Historia naturalis), who represented the figural arts of Greece and Hellenism as progressively advancing in verisimilitude (see chapter 1 above). Pliny did not present his chronicle as an instance of a general historical pattern.

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forma, che acconci quello gratiosamente, che troppo simplicemente ci porge la misura, & proportione, come nelle statue antiche si uede, altre di noue, altre di dieci, altre tra noue & dieci teste formate. Et nella Musica finalmente ci sono alcuni suoni, i quali uengono alle orecchie con dolcezza, che però non son tra le consonanze collocati. Però dico, che ognuno deue cessare dalla merauiglia, quando ritroua in molte opere la misura alquanto uariata dai precetti, perche egli è a bastanza tra’l maggiore, & minore eccesso contenersi, uariando i mezi con giudicio, & sottigliezza d’auuertimento.” On 6.2 (p. 282), Barbaro observes that optical distortions and effects of distance and light may call for departures from strict proportions. See chapter 10 below. Barbaro, I dieci libri 3.1 (p. 98): “però dicemo, che porportione altro non è, che una terminata habitudine, respetto, o comparatione di due quantità compreso sotto un’istesso genere.” Ibid. 1.2.5 (p. 34): “La simmetria è la bellezza dell’ordine, come è la Eurithmia la bellezza della dispositione. Non è a bastanza ordinare le misure una dopo l’altra, ma necessario è, che quelle misure habbiano convenienza tra se, cioè siano in qualche proportione; & però dove sarà proportione, ivi non puo essere cosa superflua.” Ibid. 1.2.3 (p. 33). Vitruvius’s text is translated: “Il bel numero detto Eurithmia, è aspetto gratioso, & commoda forma nella compositione dei membri, questa si fa quando i membri dell’opera sono convenienti, come dell’altezza alla larghezza, della larghezza alla lungezza, & in fine ogni cosa risponda al suo compartimento proprio.” Barbaro comments: “Deve esser adunque ogni artificioso lavoro a guisa d’un bellissimo verso, il quale se ne corra secondo le ottime consonanze succedendo le parti l’una all’altra, sin che pervenghino all’ordinato fine. . . . Come nel cantare si richiede il conserto delle voci, nel quale oltra che le voci sono giuste: oltre che convengono nelle consonanze, bisogna anche un certo tempermento, che faccia dolce, & soave tutta la armonia.” The nature of Barbaro’s harmonic theory is too complex to summarize here; in any event, it

has been effectively interpreted in the context of Renaissance architectural theory by Wittkower, Architectural Principles, part IV: “The Problem of Harmonic Proportion in Architecture,” pp. 101–154. Wittkower proposed that harmonic proportions—as indicated in the measurements provided in the woodcuts illustrating Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura, 1570—were applied by Palladio in his design of buildings, not only in dimensioning plans and elevations but in a “fugal” system that integrated harmonies througout a building. Questions have been raised about the fugal system in subsequent studies, e.g., Deborah Howard and Malcolm Longair, “Harmonic Proportion in Palladio’s Quattro libri,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 41 (1982), 116–143; Branko Mitrovic, “Palladio’s Theory of Proportions and the Second Book of I quattro libri dell’architettura,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 49 (1990), 272–292; Alina Payne, “Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53 (1994), 322–342.

TEN

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

This study originated as the keynote address to the opening of the annual “Corso Palladiano” sponsored by the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura in Vicenza. My thoughts on this subject were stimulated by two admirable former addresses in the series, by Cesare Brandi and Mario Praz. Both were indebted in turn to one of the great contributions to Palladian criticism, Giulio Carlo Argan’s “Palladio e la critica neoclassica,” of 1930.1 The two more recent writers distinguished Palladio from the neoclassicists; only Argan suggested that Palladio was not even a classical architect. I want to build on this perception, less from the perspective of Argan’s aesthetic interpretation than from a historical and historiographical position, and I hope that what I propose may help us to see Palladio in a new way. I intend to examine the evidence we have for Palladio’s view of his goals: first in his written works, then in his buildings, and finally in his drawings. The term “classical” as we understand it has no objective correlative. It is an invention of post-Renaissance times that was cast back onto ancient and Renaissance art by critics who had their own sensibilities and agendas. Further, it initiated a confusion that still persists between “classical” as designating the art and culture of the Greeks and Romans and “classical” as referring to a particular attitude toward form, structure, and content (often with reference to the ancients). The ancient Romans used classicus to designate members of the privileged classes, as distinct from the proletariat; the modern idea of a classical style appropriately originated in the age of absolute monarchy, as an identification of a manner that would appeal to or be an analogue to the elite as opposed to the mob. As classicism came to be defined in the course of the Seicento, it incorporated the two distinct aspects I referred to: adherence to the vocabulary and forms of ancient Roman art—what Renaissance writers referred to as working all’antica—and the prescription of a certain approach to design that may or may not be related to antique practice, an approach characterized by Argan as “an objective and absolute perfectibility in the relationship of elements, rationally interpreted.”2 Renaissance writers did not use the term “classical”; when we use it in reference to their work, we impose upon them a formula they would have found foreign. Obviously all interpretation imposes the attitudes of the

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interpreter on its object, but the almost universal tendency to discuss Palladio, or Raphael or Michelangelo, as classical has obscured from us much of what mattered to them. The problem of establishing principles for architectural ornament, which amounted essentially to the design of the orders, was how to impose order on the vast variety of examples preserved from antiquity (see chapter 7). The De architectura of Vitruvius, the sole text on architecture surviving from antiquity, was the principal source of all Renaissance architectural theory, and Vitruvius’s account of the orders was unclear and incomplete. Furthermore, it had been written in the first century B.C., before the imperial era when most of the buildings of which remains survived into the Renaissance were built. In studying and measuring these remains, architects of the sixteenth century

10.1 The five orders according to

discovered a great variety of interpretations of the or-

Sebastiano Serlio, 1539. From

ders, and practices that conformed neither with Vitru-

Regole generali di architettura

vius nor with each other. One thing they learned for

(Venice, 1584), 127.

certain was that invention and variety in Roman architecture were not confined by strict rules. Yet Renaissance theorists knew that some constraint was necessary, both because custom and propriety (in and character of a building) had to be respected, and because they were writing books and publishing images to instruct patrons and practitioners about the basics of architectural design.3 Thus, Palladio’s predecessors, Sebastiano Serlio in 1537 and Giacomo

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

the sense of using the proper order for the purpose

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10.2 The five orders according to Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, as reconstructed by Christof Thoenes.

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Barozzi da Vignola in 1562, published versions of the five orders with measured illustrations, rationalized to an easily grasped and easily copied formula. Serlio was the first writer to formalize the canon into five orders and to provide a complete system of proportions for each (fig. 10.1). Vignola’s system differed in many respects; his measurements were more precise, but more importantly, as Christof Thoenes only recently rediscovered, he imposed a single proportional system for all five orders, based on the module of the column base, which perhaps explains why his text became a Bible of the orders right into the twentieth century (fig. 10.2).4 Although both Serlio and Vignola took the elements of their system from ancient sources, their overall canon was modern, not an instance of rinascità. Vignola’s became classical by virtue of being adopted and adapted by the classical theorists and practitioners of the seventeenth century. Palladio’s description of the orders added only variations in details, and in fact borrowed extensively from Vignola in the design of his illustrations, without acknowledgment.5 Palladio’s architectural theory or philosophy is more hidden than apparent in the Quattro libri; much of it is concentrated in a short section in the first Book, entitled “De gli abusi,” in which he details what architects should not do and why. In essence, this section offers a theory of the imitation of nature in the design of architectural structure and ornament—a version of the theory of imitation that dominated discourse on painting throughout the Renaissance.6 While the theory follows Vitruvius in attributing the origin of the orders to early wood construction, its principal focus is on observance of the laws of statics as determined by gravity, as applied not to wood but to masonry. A column should emulate a tree, which can be narrower toward the top because that part bears less weight; the columns of upper stories must always be over the supports of the story below; apertures must be above apertures; Ionic and Corinthian columns must be placed above Doric not primarily for convention’s sake but because they are more slenis to shed rain and snow (this is, however, not so much an offense to statics as to utility, a Vitruvian category).

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

der and hence lighter. Pediments must not be broken at the top, because their purpose

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10.3 Sebastiano Serlio, gate, 1551. From Tutte l’opere d’achitettura, Book V, 23.

Palladio’s imitation theory deals more with appearances than with engineering. It is essentially rhetorical, because the purpose of imitating nature is to persuade the viewer of the resolution of load and support. His first example is the column base, which, with its bastoni and cavetti (protrusions [toruses] and channels [scotia]), extends outward from the column shaft appearing, he says, to express “the great weight it carries.” This is not an analogy to the human body, as Michelangelo would have made it, but a reference to our awareness of gravity.7

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Appearances also explain his objection to the practice illustrated in fig. 10.3, making columns seem to be split by binding them about with a number of rings and garlands that appear to hold them together and to keep them firm; one must avoid this as much as one can because the stronger and more solid columns show themselves to be, the better they appear to serve the function for which they are put there, which is to make the work secure and stable.8 Obviously, the mid-Cinquecento architects who used such columns were able to make them stand up. What mattered to Palladio was that columns should seem to have the effect (paiano far l’effetto) of stability. I don’t know how he justified the pilasters he designed for Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza or the columns of the Sarego villa at Santa Sofia (fig. 10.4), which are encased in the anelli he objects to; this practice never was admitted by the stricter classicists, though it did survive into the nineteenth century. Palladio further objects to use of “cartocci” or volutes to support cornices because they seem too

10.4 Santa Sofia di Pedemonte, Villa Sarego, court portico by Andrea Palladio, 1565–1569. Photo: Phyllis Massar.

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

pliant to carry such weight.

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10.5 Teofilo Gallaccini, portal, from manuscript of

Trattato sopra gli errori degli architetti (ca. 1621). London, British Library, Ms. Kings 281. Photo courtesy of Alina Payne.

Palladio’s rules were adopted by the architectural amateur Teofilo Gallaccini, a physician and mathematician who can be seen as the first classical theorist, whose Trattato sopra gli errori degli architetti was written around 1621 (fig. 10.5) and published only in 1767 (fig. 10.6).9 But Gallaccini abandoned the theory of imitation, justifying the rules, and adding many of his own, by claiming antique precedent. He did not know or want to know how often ancient buildings departed from his norms. Gallaccini had a narrow vision of the permissible, like later neoclassical theorists, and no taste for license, which was encouraged in all sixteenth-century theory. An example is his objection to columns that support nothing but projections from the entablature, as in fig. 10.5. Palladio was more relaxed about this; he reconstructed Vitruvius’s Basilica at Fano with such a combination, and used it in the frontispiece of his own book (fig. 10.7). License, in the sense of evasion of rules or the exercise of independent judgment, was a necessary corollary to the demand for ingegno (inventiveness), fantasia, grazia, and other constants in Renaissance architectural theory. Vignola had written in 1562 that his approach to the rules was “not like [that of] Zeuxis among the Crotonians, but follow-

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10.6 Teofilo Gallaccini, pediments and entablatures, from Trattato (Venice, 1787), 2:43.

ing my judgment I chose from all the orders, taking them simply from all the ancients together.”10 Similarly, Palladio explains his adoption of Attic bases for the Ionic order betect is not prohibited from departing occasionally from common practice so long as the variation be pleasing and seem natural.”12 I have already cited one instance of Palladio’s evasion of his own rules; another may be found in the title pages of the Quattro libri, which feature broken pediments crowned by soft volutes (fig. 10.7); whether this is due to the presumption of the publisher or to the fact that title pages don’t have to shed rain

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

cause “I like them better” (a me più piacciono).11 His general principle is that “the archi-

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10.7 Andrea Palladio, frontispiece to I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570).

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I can’t say, but it shows a relaxation on Palladio’s part about his rules inconceivable in Gallaccini or in other theorists we can confidently identify as classical. The closest Palladio ever came to making a statement that would be fully endorsed by the classicists of the seventeenth century was when he argued for the use of the ancient Roman tradition rather than the Gothic in the completion of the facade of San Petronio in Bologna: I don’t know in what German author these [other architects] have ever seen architecture described, which is nothing other than a proportion in the members of a body such that one [corresponds] to the other and the others with the one symmetrically and in correspondence, and that they harmoniously produce majesty and decorum. But the German [= Gothic] style may be called confusion and not architecture, and it is this that these gentlemen have learned, and not the good [style].13 The statement is not original; almost all Renaissance theorists from Alberti on would have said something of the sort. The term simmetriati is worth commenting upon because simmetria had a different meaning than it does today. It was understood in the Cinquecento in the Vitruvian sense, as proportion or harmony—essentially the same as Vitruvius’s eurythmia. This is clearly articulated by Daniele Barbaro in his commentary on Vitruvius, which Palladio helped to illustrate (see chapter 9).14 Symmetry in the modern sense, meaning reflection of one side to another in breadth and depth about the axes of a building, is a keystone of the later definition of classicism. It was defined first in this sense in 1668 by Claude Perrault in his commentary on Vitruvius:

relation which the elements on the right have with those on the left and that those above have with those below and those in front with those behind in size, form, height, color, and number.15

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

One understands another thing by the word Symmetry in France, because it signifies the

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10.8 Lonedo, Villa Godi, facade, before 1542. Andrea Palladio, architect. Photo: Phyllis Massar.

One of the aims of French theory in the age of Louis XIV was to appropriate the term “classical” for France, and the project became fixed in the historiography of French architecture. The standard history of French postmedieval architecture is entitled Histoire de l’architecture classique en France. Palladio’s buildings and projects themselves show his exceptionally profound and wideranging knowledge of ancient Roman architecture; no Renaissance architect would have been more aware of what did and what did not adhere to ancient practice, so that he would never have departed from it without a purpose. Yet he consistently invented forms with no ancient precedent. On the one hand these consisted in simplification to the point of abstraction, evident already in the earliest work: the villa designs that led to what might be called the stripped style of Villa Godi at Lonedo (figs. 10.8, 10.9), in which the wall surface is uninterrupted by any moldings or other elaboration and simple piers are used rather than the classical orders. This mode culminates in Villa Emo at Fanzolo, where there are no classical details or orders apart from the central porch (fig. 8.8) and the rear facade is totally bare (fig. 8.22). It conforms with the plain style of Venetian Cinquecento architecture that had been adopted not only for utilitar246

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

10.9 Andrea Palladio, villa project, before 1540. London, Royal Institute of British Architects Library, XVII, 15r.

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10.10 Venice, Church of the Redentore, apse and dome, 1577. Andrea Palladio, architect. Photo: Phyllis Massar.

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10.11 Venice, Church of the Redentore, dome and bell towers, detail, as engraved by Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi, Le fabbriche e i disegni di Andrea Palladio raccolti e illustrati, 2d ed.

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

(Vicenza, 1786), vol. 4, pl. 4.

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ian structures but also, as Manfredo Tafuri has pointed out, for the palace designs commissioned by patrons who favored Venetian tradition and isolation from Papal Rome.16 The rejection of ornament is not peculiar to Palladio’s agricultural structures; a similar minimalism is found in the totally unarticulated buttresses about the lanterns of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Redentore in Venice (fig. 10.10) and the Barbaro chapel at Maser (fig. 10.14). Palladio’s neoclassical interpreter Bertotti Scamozzi could not believe that these were intentional, and gave each of the buildings proper volutes with moldings (fig. 10.11)—covering their nakedness, as it were.17 In the later work, on the other hand, Palladio’s license takes a more fantastic and irreverent form. On the facade of Palazzo Valmarana (fig. 10.12), the majestic colossal order of pilasters is interrupted in the end bays by caryatid figures that appear to weaken the 10.12 Vicenza, Palazzo Valmarana,

support system, abandoning Palladio’s own principle

facade, 1566. Andrea Palladio,

of the imitation of nature through expression of struc-

architect. Photo: Phyllis Massar.

ture; moreover, a mezzanine window breaks through the entablature as if it were an afterthought. These features were severely criticized by the neoclassical theoretician Francesco Milizia, who wrote in 1781: Everyone can see that this combination of colossal and small pilasters that spring from the same level, and the intersection of the cornice by the colossal pilasters, are not in a pure taste. The worst is that at the corners there are only

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Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

10.13 Vicenza, Loggia del Capitaniato, 1571–1572, detail. Andrea Palladio, architect. Photo: Phyllis Massar.

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10.14 Maser, Villa Barbaro, chapel. Andrea Palladio, architect. Photo courtesy Fogg Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

Corinthian pilasters up to the first story, and on the second only a soldier with his back to the wall.18 The surfaces of the Loggia in Vicenza (fig. 10.13) are covered with stucco relief that obscures the wall, and the window balconies are supported on brackets that appropriate the triglyph of the Doric frieze, which again violates Palladio’s natural law; this kind of unclassical revision must have been inspired by Michelangelo, whose Porta Pia of 1561, a decade earlier than the Loggia, reveled in affronts to the antique—among them, the transposition of the triglyph—and were severely censored by Gallaccini.19 The sensuous balusters of Palladio’s Loggia balconies, while not a misappropriation of Roman practice, are as contrary to the antique principles as a Venus by Titian. The chapel of the Barbaro family alongside the villa at Maser, often compared to the Pantheon, is closer to the “Temple of Romulus” alongside the Circus of Maxentius on the Via Appia, as this appears in a drawing by Palladio (figs. 10.14, 10.15). Actually, noth-

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London, Royal Institute of British Architects Library, VIII, 1.

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

10.15 Andrea Palladio, “Temple of Romulus” on the Via Appia, plans and elevations.

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10.16 Andrea Palladio, Baths of Agrippa, studies of the plan. London, Royal Institute of British Architects Library, VII, 6.

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ing remained of this tomb above the level of the foundations; everything in the drawing is the fruit of Palladio’s gift for invenzione except for the plan colored in wash and its measurements. This is an instance, of which there were many, in which the architect virtually created the ancient model for one of his designs. The building itself is almost rococo in its luminosity and richness; the fruity swags that hang from the capitals are a witty importation from Roman decorative stucco reliefs, not from architectural precedents. The two campaniles that rise up behind the pediment are perhaps a playful variation on the two-tower facade that contemporaries occasionally had designed for longitudinal churches. They had an illustrious progeny: Carlo Maderno put such towers on the Pantheon, for which he was vigorously criticized—one critic called them “asses’ ears”—before they were torn down in the late nineteenth century.20 Palladio’s have been more admired, but not because they were held to be classical. These are examples of license taken with ancient practice; a different kind of freedom from tradition is exemplified in the rear portions of the Redentore in Venice (fig. 10.10). The severe, planar character of the apse could be said to descend from the minimal ornamental treatment given to those parts of Roman buildings that were not meant to be seen, for example the exterior periphery of the Roman Pantheon apart from its porch. But the building of a Byzantine-style dome over a wood scaffold, and the paired campaniles that—in spite of the pilasters framing the arches—remind one of Muslim minarets, relate to the nonclassical tradition in Venetian architecture, and especially to its ties to the Byzantine past and the Ottoman present. Our understanding of Palladio’s approach to the classical past is enriched by his many drawings after and reconstructions of ancient monuments.21 Most of these are based on study and measurements of the remains that show exceptional respect for accuracy and distinct types: first, records of his own investigation of the remains either in the protoarchaeological form of recording the surviving evidence or in the form of reconstructions of the original buildings, such as those prepared for publication in the Quattro libri

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

responsibility to convey trustworthy information to others. There are, however, three

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10.17 Andrea Palladio, fantasy reconstruction of Palestrina, Temple of Fortuna Primigenia, plan and elevation. London, Royal Institute of British Architects Library, IX, 7.

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and in Barbaro’s edition of Vitruvius; second, copies from the drawings of other architects; and third, capricci based on ancient buildings. The last category is especially relevant to my theme in this study; many of the sheets reflect the architect’s engagement with design issues current in his practice. An initial sheet of studies (fig. 10.16) and a final plan of the Baths of Agrippa exemplify this fascinating type.22 Even in Palladio’s time there was hardly anything left of this bath complex behind, and perhaps connected with, the Pantheon, and modern plans show almost nothing we can identify in Palladio’s sketch. The sketches have the spontaneity of the first jottings for an original composition, as they play with different combinations of vaulted hall, atria, and rotundas. To the extent that they appear authentic, they are derived from the remains of the Baths of Caracalla. At the top left and center right, and in the final version, the thermal structures are attached to the rear of the Pantheon. The studies surely contributed to Palladio’s conception of the plan of the Redentore in Venice.

10.18 Palestrina, Precinct of Fortuna Primigenia, modern reconstruction. Courtesy of Pelican Books.

Another instance of the capriccio on an ancient theme is the series of studies of a monumental temple complex on a hillside, inspired by the Precinct of Fortuna The drawing shown here (fig. 10.17) cannot be called a reconstruction: the fantastic complexity and repetition dissolves the substance of Roman elements (fig. 10.18) into a pictorial, even theatrical fantasy. The temple at the summit of this drawing has the essential

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

Primigenia in Palestrina and the Theater at Verona.23

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10.19 Andrea Palladio, project for Villa Trissino at Meledo, 1568. From I quattro libri dell’architettura, Book II, 15 (p. 60).

parti of the Rotonda in Vicenza (fig. 8.20), with slightly deeper porches, and the buildup of treated loggias is related to the design of Villa Trissino at Meledo, as it is shown in the Quattro libri (fig. 10.19). Both of these suites of drawings, then, appear to cast back onto antiquity Palladio’s concerns with his own building designs. Capriccio is an apt term for the Rotonda, which was not designed as an agricultural center but as a pleasure retreat, the function of which was to provide a setting for entertainments. It is such a familiar building that we forget how fantastic and spiritoso, how grandiloquent was the decision to surround a cube set on top of a hill with four temple fronts, how absolutely contrary to ancient practice. The Rotonda does not exemplify the kind of anticlassicism that might—like the facade of the Palazzo Valmarana—have been called mannerist a couple of decades ago. It is not perverse or ambivalent, but informed with the architect’s delight in the site, which he compared in the Quattro libri to a theater; it is indeed theatrical architecture, and pictorial in its manipulation of light, shade, and color, as Argan wrote so effectively. 258

10.20 Venice, Convent of the Carità, 1561. Andrea Palladio, architect. Photo: Phyllis Massar.

I cannot conclude without adding that not all of Palladio’s buildings are capriccioso by any means. Many are sober, decorous works in the Roman Republican tradition of Vitruvius or the Theater of Marcellus that do not exercise licenza or fantasia; for example, the court of the Convent of the Carità in Venice with its unadorned rendition of the orders (fig. 10.20). This is the type of Palladian work that was to be identified with classicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Palladio would have explained that its purpose demanded a certain sobriety and reserve that could best be expressed in

Thus there is an ambivalent answer to the question posed in the my title, “Palladio: Classical in What Sense?” In the strictest sense, he would not have understood the question because the concept of classicism had not yet been formed in his time. But it would be more useful to criticism and interpretation today to answer that there were two aspects of Palladio’s ingegno both in his relation to the classical past and in his approach to

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

straightforward forms with a minimum of sculptural detail and texture.

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design. The first is his concern to establish rules of architectural propriety in conformity with Vitruvius and with his experience in measuring ancient monuments, and to design modern buildings such as the Convent of the Carità exemplifying these rules. But his fertile imagination was also attracted to licenza, to overthrowing and to surpassing the rules in surprising ways that could be anathema to the classicists, as in the Palazzo Valmarana, the Rotonda, and the Loggia, or in the drawings of the Baths of Agrippa and the Roman hillside complexes like the Temple of Fortune at Palestrina. When later criticism identified virtually all of Palladio’s buildings as classical, it obscured the subtle variations in the architect’s adaptations of and departures from antique practice and reduced our understanding of the wealth of his invention.

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1 Cesare Brandi, “Perchè Palladio non fu neo-

6 See the excellent study of Palladio’s theory and

classico,” summarized in Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura 2 (1960), 9–13, and the full text in Douglas Fraser et al., eds., Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolf Wittkower (London, 1967), 116–121, and in Brandi’s Struttura e architettura (Turin, 1971). Mario Praz, “Palladio e il neoclassicismo,” Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura 13 (1971), 9–27. Giulio Carlo Argan, “Palladio e la critica neoclassica,” L’arte, n.s. 1 (1930), 327–346. For an introduction to Palladio’s work, see my Palladio (Harmondsworth, 1966 and later eds.); Lionello Puppi, Andrea Palladio (English ed., Boston, 1975; revised Italian ed., Milan, 1999). Excellent illustrations of the buildings and drawings may be found in Bruce Boucher, Andrea Palladio: The Architect in His Time (New York, 1994). “Una perfettibilità oggettiva e assoluta di un rapporto di elementi, razionalmente interpretato”: Argan, “Palladio e la critica neoclassica,” 341. Hubertus Günther and Christof Thoenes, “Gli ordini d’architettura: Rinascità o invenzione?,” in Marcello Fagiolo, ed., Roma e l’antico nell’arte e nella cultura del Cinquecento (Rome, 1985), 261–310. Christof Thoenes, “Vignolas ‘Regola delli cinque ordini,’” Römische Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 20 (1983), 345–376; Thoenes, “La regola delli cinque ordini del Vignola,” in Jean Guillaume, ed., Les traités d’architecture de la Renaissance (Paris, 1988), 269–280; Hubertus Günther, “Palladio e gli ordini di colonne,” in André Chastel and Renato Cevese, eds., Andrea Palladio: Nuovi contributi (Milan, 1990), 182–197; Branko Mitrovic, “Palladio’s Theory of the Classical Orders in the First Book of I quattro libri dell’architettura,” Architectural History 42 (1999), 1–31. Mitrovic, “Palladio’s Theory,” esp. 12ff. The debt to Vignola was first brought to my attention by the research of one of my students, Scott Opler, since tragically deceased, in a seminar on Palladio.

its relation to his practice in Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture (Cambridge, U.K., 1999), esp. 170–213; also Eugenio Battisti, “Il concetto d’imitazione nel Cinquecento,” Commentari 7 (1956), 86–104, 249–262, republished in his Rinascimento e barocco (Turin, 1960), 175–215. Other treatments of imitation are cited above in chapter 5, note 1. Palladio reiterates naturalist theory in a letter of 1578 to Giovanni Pepoli, overseer of the project to complete the facade of San Petronio in Bologna: cf. Andrea Palladio, Scritti sull’architettura (1554–1579), ed. Lionello Puppi (Vicenza, 1988), 133ff. Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570), 1.20 (p. 51). Ibid. (p. 52): “il fingere le colonne spezzate co’l far loro intorno alcuni anelli, & ghirlande, che paiano tenerle unite, & salde; si deve quanto si può schifare: perche quanto più intiere, e forti si dimostrano le colonne, tanto meglio paiano far l’effetto, al quale elle sono poste, che è di rendere l’opera sicura, e stabile.” See Alina Payne, “Architectural Criticism, Science, and Visual Eloquence: Teofilo Gallaccini in Seventeenth-Century Siena,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58 (1999), 146–154; also Eugenio Battisti, “Osservazioni su due manoscritti intorno all’architettura,” Bollettina del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura 1 (1959), 28–38. Professor Payne kindly permitted me to use her photograph from Gallaccini’s manuscript in the British Library (reproduced here as fig. 10.5). For the printed version of Gallaccini’s work, I used the facsimile edition Trattato sopra gli errori degli architetti (Farnborough, U.K., 1970). “A talchè, non come Zeusi delle Vergini fra’ Crotoniati ma come ha portato il mio giudizio ho fatta la scelta di tutti gli ordini, cavandogli puramente dagli antichi tutti insieme.” Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura (1562), introduction: “A i

2

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4

5

7 8

9

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Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

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11 12

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lettori”; I have used the transcription edited by Maria Walcher Casotti in Pietro Cataneo and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Trattati (Milan, 1985), 516. “Zeuxis of the virgins of Croton” refers to the legend, recorded by Pliny the Elder and Cicero, that this painter, commissioned by the city of Croton to make an image of Helen of Troy, asked to see the most beautiful girls in the city and that, rather than selecting as his model the most beautiful of these, he chose the most beautiful feature of each and combined them. (See above, chapter 5, p. 127.) Palladio, Quattro libri 1.16 (p. 31). “Non è vietato all’ Architetto partirsi alcuna volta dall’uso commune, pur che tal variatione sia gratiosa, & habbia del naturale.” Palladio, Quattro libri 4.24 (p. 95). Palladio, Scritti, ed. Puppi, 132: “nè so in che autori tedeschi abino mai veduto descrita l’architetura, qual non è altro che una proporzion dei membri in un corpo, cussì ben l’uno con gli altri e gli altri con l’uno simetriati e corrispondenti, che armonicamente rendino maestà e decoro. Ma la maniera todesca si può chiamare confusione e non architettura, e quella dice aver questi valentuomini imparato, e non la buona.” I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruvio tradotti et commentati da Monsignor Barbaro (Venice, 1556), p. 34 in edition of 1567: “Il compartimento è rispondenza delle misure detto simmetria, è convenevole con sentimento da i membri dell’opera, & dalle parti separate alla forma di tutta la figura, secondo la rata portione, come si vede nel corpo humano, il quale con il cubito, co’l piede, col palmo, col dito, & con le altre parti è commisurato, cosi adiviene nelle perfettioni dell’opere.” Barbaro’s work is discussed more extensively in chapter 9 above. “ . . . on entend autre chose par le mot de Symmetrie en France, car il signifie le rapport que les parties droites ont avec les parties gauches, & celuy que les hautes ont avec les basses et celles de devant avec celles de derrière, en grandeur, en figure, en hauteur, en couleur, en nombre.” Claude Perrault, Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve corrigez et traduits nouvellement en françois, 2d ed. (Paris, 1684), 11n. See also his Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes (Paris, 1676), preface; Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’ar-

16

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18

19 20

21

22

23

chitecture (Paris, 1771–1777), combines the Vitruvian meaning with a symmetry based on the human body. See especially Manfredo Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinascimento (Turin, 1985). For Sansovino’s buildings in the plain style see Deborah Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, 1975). Le fabbriche e i disegni di Andrea Palladio raccolti ed illustrati da Ottavio Bertotti-Scamozzi (Vicenza, 1776), tav. IV, VII. The same buttresses appear on the lantern of drawings for a central-plan church, often associated with the Redentore: Royal Institute of British Architects, Drawing Collection, XIV, 14, 15. “Ognun vede, che questa combinazione di pilastri maggiori e minori nascenti da uno stesso piano, e quell’intersezione di corniciame, che fanno i pilastri grandi, non è d’un gusto puro. Il peggio è, che alle cantonate non vi sono che pilastri corinti fin al primo piano, ed al secondo una statua di soldato colla schiena al muro.” Francesco Milizia, Memorie degli architetti antichi e moderni (Parma, 1781); in the edition I consulted (Bologna, 1827), p. 57. The work was originally published anonymously as Le vite de’ più celebri architetti d’ogni tempo precedute di un saggio sopra l’architettura (Rome, 1768). Gallaccini, Trattato, 43. Howard Hibbard, Carlo Maderno and Roman Architecture, 1580–1630 (London, 1971), 231; in the past, most critics attributed the towers to Bernini who, in fact, did not approve of them. Giangiorgio Zorzi, I disegni delle antichità di Andrea Palladio (Venice, 1959); Heinz Spielmann, Andrea Palladio und die Antike (Munich and Berlin, 1966). Besides that reproduced in fig. 10.16, there were several other studies for the final proposal for the plan, including Vicenza, Museo Civico, no. D.33r. They are catalogued in Spielmann, Andrea Palladio, 166ff. and figs. 100–106. Other such studies (besides fig. 10.17 here) include Royal Institute of British Architects, Drawing Collection, IX, 6, 8 (an imaginary hillside complex); IX, 1, 2, 5 (Palestrina); and IX, 4, 10, 11 (Verona). See the commentary by Howard Burns in Renato Cevese, ed., Mostra del Palladio (Vicenza, 1973), 142f.

ELEVEN

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

Jefferson was a humanist, in the old sense of one who cultivated those fields, not only the humanities, on which ancient writings had survived, and in the eighteenth-century sense of being, like his contemporaries Diderot, Voltaire, and Goethe, an exemplar of the Enlightenment. Six years of study in Greek and Latin grammar and literature formed the basis for a perennial engagement with ancient writings.l He considered the works of ancient writers and artists to be the foundation of modern knowledge, whether in law, rhetoric, architecture, or history. As a founding father his roots were in British culture. His intellectual formation was scarcely distinguishable from that of a mid-eighteenthcentury English gentleman, as testified by the contents of his library prior to his departure for Europe as ambassador plenipotentiary in Paris in 1784. He first learned architecture and landscape design from British books; he used British guidebooks and accounts of ancient and modern painting and sculpture in planning and acquiring a large art collection. This does not mean that Italy played a modest role in his vision. He received from English books not only an admiration for the literary, rhetorical, and artistic world of Roman antiquity but also a passion for the work of the great Vicentine architect of the mid-sixteenth century, Andrea Palladio, whose treatise, I quattro libri dell’architettura, was the inspiration for a major new movement in British architecture from around 1720 until Jefferson first tried his hand at design in the late 1760s. The Palladian style, initiated by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s, had been taken up a century later by Whig aristocrats led by Richard Boyle, Lord Burlington, who actually acquired a majority of the surviving drawings of Palladio.2 Jefferson knew about Palladianism through the books he had acquired; unlike the Burlingtonians and more like contemporary British architects such as Robert Adam and John Soane, his approach to vocabulary and composition was less deferential to Palladian models. “English architecture,” Jefferson wrote from Paris in 1786—referring to a moment before the emergence of Adam and Soane— “is in the most wretched style I ever saw, not meaning to except America, where it is bad, nor even Virginia, where it is worse than in any other part of America, which I have seen.”3 He wrote that architecture was the only art in which the new nation could express adequately its ideals, and he was dismayed at its failure to do so. The judgment probably was less aesthetic than political and ethical: his disapproval of contemporary

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11.2 Mount Airy, Virginia, 1758–1762, garden facade. Photo: Wayne Andrews/Esto.

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11.1 Carter’s Grove, Virginia, 1751–1753, garden facade. Photo: Wayne Andrews/Esto.

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Virginia plantation owners who “seated themselves below the tide water on the main rivers and lived in a style of luxury and extravagance” carried over to their plantation houses.4 These houses, such as Carter’s Grove on the banks of the James River (fig. 11.1), built in 1751–1753, are elegant and not particularly showy examples of their style, but it was a style that exemplified to Jefferson not only luxury and extravagance but Tory, antirepublican attitudes and a lack of classical culture.5 It was, incidentally, long out of date in England; though commonly called Georgian, it in fact predated the Hanoverians, peaking in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Jefferson must have assigned Washington’s Mount Vernon a place high on his list of wretched architecture; it was enlarged in stages from a simple farmhouse and its facade, on which masonry blocks are imitated in wood, is asymmetrical and lacking in distinct character. Only one Tidewater mansion, Mount Airy (fig. 11.2), of 1758–1762, overlooking the Rappahannock River, fully reflected more recent British Palladian design: it was based almost exactly on one of the most Palladian plates in James Gibbs’s Book of Architecture of 1728, and it is unique among surviving structures in being entirely in stone (which was not, incidentally, the case in any of Palladio’s buildings). Like Colonel Tayloe of Mount Airy, Jefferson formed his architectural taste initially from books, without which neither of these men would have been able to imagine alternatives to current colonial architecture. Jefferson, however, collected avidly, building an architectural library as rich as that of a British amateur of the midcentury.6 At the start, he favored Gibbs’s Book of Architecture, the editions of Palladio’s Quattro libri dell’architettura published in London and Paris earlier in the century (he later bought three other editions), and the Select Architecture of 1755 by the Palladian and classical theorist Robert Morris. His first notes on the construction of Monticello also refer to Claude Perrault’s edition of Vitruvius and to William Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings, etc. of 1757—the one work outside the classical tradition—from which he adapted the terrace balustrades.7 When remodeling Monticello after 1796, Jefferson depended rather on the more precise plates of two recent publications that he must have acquired in Paris

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in the 1780s, Fréart de Chambray’s Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne, in a revised edition of 1764–1766, and Desgodets’s Les édifices antiques de Rome, published in London in 1771 and 1795; in his copy of the former he made notes of his intention to use particular Roman orders and entablatures for the interiors of the house. Though Jefferson, advising the proprietor of Bremo, referred to Palladio’s book as “the Bible,”8 he used it as much for its version of the ancient orders as for its original dwelling projects. Following the initial stage of the Monticello design, in which the Palladianism is filtered mostly through Gibbs, he did not consistently adopt Palladian planning or elevation solutions.9 Unlike Tayloe, he was a gifted enough designer not to have to adapt model projects. He used his sources selectively, and the ultimate designs of Monticello and other houses of his late years are more original than those of any strictly Palladian English architect. Still, the name “Monticello” not only is Italian but also is precisely the

11.3 Charlottesville, Monticello, plan project for main floor, before August 1772 (K.32). Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

word used by Palladio in describing the elevated site of his Villa Rotonda in Vicenza.10

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11.4 Monticello, elevation project, before March 1772 (K.23). Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.

The building of the first house at Monticello began in the spring of 1769 and lasted nearly a decade. Jefferson wrote from there early in 1771 that he was living in a oneroom structure that may have been the basement of the future residence or the end pavilion of the southern terrace wing (fig. 11.3). Building progress was slow; when Jefferson married on January 1, 1772, the couple moved into the same tiny space. The early sketches for the house of 1768–1769 were variations on plans in Gibbs’s Book of Architecture, culminating in a plan that became the basis of the first elevations, fig. 11.4 being the last of these. The design combines the two-level central portico of the Villa Cornaro at Piombino Dese (fig. 11.5), between Padua and Castelfranco Veneto, with the flanking elevations of the illustration of the Villa Saraceno at Finale (fig. 11.6) from Palladio’s treatise. (My illustrations are taken from Giacomo Leoni’s 1716 London edition because that is the one Jefferson knew. He surely had never seen the 1570 original, the illustrations of which look quite different.)

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Thomas Jefferson and Italy

11.5 Piombino Dese, Villa Cornaro. From 1716 edition of Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura.

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11.6 Finale, Villa Saraceno. From 1716 edition of Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura.

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Thomas Jefferson and Italy

11.7 Monticello, elevation project, summer 1772. Courtesy Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

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11.8 Monticello, plan project, 1796? (K.150). Courtesy Massachusetts Historical Society.

The definitive project of the summer of 1772 is recorded on two plans (fig. 11.3 and a similar one of the basement level) and in a lively freehand elevation of the facade (fig. 11.7). These record changes that duplicate a very recent innovation in the design of small villas and hunting casinos in England representing an assimilation of French planning practice. Robert Morris’s Select Architecture has a design for a house with an octagonal parlor projecting on one side, which would have been too unorthodox for the true Palladians of the previous generation.11 Work on this project continued through the 1770s, though the Revolution slowed the pace, and it was essentially complete by the time Jefferson left for France. On Jefferson’s return to Monticello in 1794, following his resignation as secretary of state, he began to make studies for radical reconstruction and enlargement of the house; his fame and his circle of acquaintances had grown to the point that the retreat had become a place of pilgrimage, and larger accommodations were needed (fig. 11.8). He finished the drawings by 1796, when he was elected vice president, and began to remove the second story and to double the depth.

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11.10 Monticello, garden (west) front. Photo: Wayne Andrews/Esto.

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

11.9 Monticello, entrance (east) front. Courtesy Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation/James Tkatch.

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11.11 Paris, Hôtel de Salm, early 1780s, street front, from an early nineteenth-century engraving.

In the new building, the entrance front (fig. 11.9) retained a somewhat Palladian character, but the garden front on the west (fig. 11.10) is decidedly Frenchified, following Jefferson’s observation that “all the new and good houses are of a single story.” The best example of contemporary Parisian style is the Hôtel de Salm (fig. 11.11), by which Jefferson professed to be “violently smitten.”12 It departed from the Palladian practice of placing a dome over a circular central hall at the core of a cubic building. Here the dome is displaced to the exterior of one of the long sides of a rectangular building, surmounting a projecting salon of the same form as the drum. For interior details, Palladio was now set aside in favor of French books, which provided more accurately measured elements of Roman architecture as well as codifying contemporary academic practice. But Monticello remained American and individualistic; the home-made bricks and white painted wood detailing carved on the site distanced it from European models, as homespun differed from imported silks.

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11.12 Thomas Jefferson, competition drawing for the President’s House (K.126). Courtesy Maryland State Archives.

11.13 Vicenza, Villa Rotonda, facade. From 1716 edition of Palladio’s

I quattro libri dell’architettura.

In March 1792, the commissioners of the Federal District announced a competition for a design of the President’s House with an award of $500 to whomever should “produce to them the most approved plan, if adopted by them, for a presidents house to be erected in this city.” Jefferson himself entered this competition.13 At the time, he was regularly in Washington, serving as secretary of state in Washington’s cabinet; his notes on the disposition of spaces must have been made shortly after the announcement. An elevation, in the Maryland State Archives (fig. 11.12), is astonishingly similar to that of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda in Vicenza as represented in Leoni’s 1716 edition (fig. 11.13) of which Jefferson owned more than one copy. Leoni took considerable liberties with Palladio’s own woodcuts in the original 1570 edition, which in turn differed from the exeJefferson seriously sought to transport that suburban Vicentine retreat to serve as the most important residence in the new capital. (His design was not selected; the palm went to the Irish architect James Hoban, whose building was destroyed by the British in 1814. It was replaced by the present White House, which Hoban improved by adding

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

cuted version (cf. fig. 8.20), but his plan and elevation retained the stamp of Palladio;

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11.14 Charlottesville, University of Virginia, bird’s-eye view after 1853.

a portico designed by Latrobe.) Jefferson’s reengagement with Palladio after his return from Europe seems inconsistent with the evolution of his ideas for Monticello; he may have felt that a symbolic representative mansion had to remain neoclassical, avoiding the less traditional fashion he had encountered in Paris. The last major architectural project of Jefferson’s career was the University of Virginia, of which he was the founder and whose curriculum he formulated.14 He began to draw plans in 1817, visualizing what he described as “an academical village” (fig. 11.14) with symmetrically disposed pavilions, each serving a discipline and providing, below, the classroom in which it would be taught, and above, the residence of the professor. Students were assigned cubicles along the porticoes flanking the pavilions. No two pavilions were alike; each was differentiated in form and in the adaptation of an order from a Roman building, as interpreted by a modern author. The one on the left facing the Rotunda is taken from Leoni’s version of Palladio’s illustration of the Temple of Nerva in

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11.15 Marly-le-Roi, royal retreat, begun 1679, bird’s-eye view.

Rome. Jefferson claimed that the purpose was to provide examples for courses in architecture. The porticoes linking the pavilions may be derived from similar trabeated structures flanking the residence in Palladio’s villas. But Jefferson must have owed the concept of disposing pavilions symmetrically before a principal structure at one end to his visit during the 1780s to the royal villa at Marly near Versailles (fig. 11.15). The Library, called the Rotunda (fig. 11.16), another Palladian term, at the head of the the only ancient building to have survived virtually intact into modern times. The interior could not, of course, have followed the model; Jefferson adapted it ingeniously to the needs of an early nineteenth-century library. The building was burned in 1895 and replaced by McKim, Mead and White with a putative copy that fits better into their oeuvre than into that of Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

mall on the highest ground, is based on Palladio’s elevation of the Pantheon in Rome,

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11.16 University of Virginia, Jefferson’s elevation project for the Library. Courtesy Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

Jefferson’s list for the fine arts books to be acquired for this library shows a major turn toward Italian sources in his later years, and away from the British works that were his first guides to the figural arts; indeed, in this list, the only British titles are those illustrating antiquities in Italy, such as Rome, Pompeii, and Paestum.15 The majority relate to architecture and cover the major printed treatises of the Renaissance: Alberti, Scamozzi, Vignola, Palladio, Serlio. There are numerous guidebooks and collections of views of ancient and modern Rome, and a couple of Italian technical works on civil architecture. A significant new interest is in the multivolume sets of theoretical and biographical works featuring the figural arts published as Classici italiani in Milan in the early 1800s; they include Benvenuto Cellini, Vasari, and Filippo Baldinucci. Even Winckelmann appears in Italian editions. Prior to Jefferson’s sojourn in Paris (1784–1789), his knowledge of and taste for the fine arts was limited. But as a young man, at a time when he had seen hardly any paintings,

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drawings, or sculpture, he had scribbled down a list of works of art, mostly antique, that he hoped to acquire in copies.16 The list is headed by some of the most celebrated Roman sculptures: the Medici Venus and the Apollo Belvedere first, followed, below a horizontal line, by the Hercules Farnese; in all, thirteen works are listed, of which the last is The Rape of the Sabines by Giovanni da Bologna, in the Loggia de’ Lanzi in Florence. Next come six figural works, not identified by artist; the first, St. Paul Preaching at Athens, is recognizable as Raphael’s cartoon for the tapestry in the Sistine Chapel, a copy of which Jefferson later acquired. The initial inspiration for the acquisition of Renaissance and baroque paintings as well as antiquities must have come from his visit to Dr. John Morgan in Philadelphia in 1766, a much-traveled virtuoso of exceptional sophistication whose large collection included “two cartoons by Raphael.” Other Italian works in Jefferson’s list are an etching by the Venetian Giuseppe Zocchi and a fresco of Seleucis and Stratonice by Pietro da Cortona, an engraving of which Jefferson recorded in an 1782 inventory. He would have known these works from the English books on art he consulted most frequently, Jonathan Richardson’s An Account of Some of the Statues Bas Reliefs Drawings and Pictures in Italy &c. with Remarks, of 1722, Joseph Spence, Polymetis: or an Enquiry Concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Ancient Artists, of 1747, and Daniel Webb, An Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting, of 1760. As late as 1785 he wrote that his knowledge of the fine arts was acquired more through books than by observation.17 His taste, following the lead of his sources, was oriented on the one hand to the most celebrated works and on the other to those exhibiting noble behavior. His taste developed most in Paris during his sojourn as ambassador.18 There he had the opportunity to discuss the fine arts with connoisseurs, to whom he confessed his lack of expertise, as in a letter to Mme. de Tott urging her to see a painting by Drouay requesting her “judgment on it. It will serve to rectify my own, which, as I told you, is a where he described as “sublime” the meretricious story-telling paintings of that city which later were to exert a powerful influence on American genre painting.20 Trumbull said of the paintings by Wanderwerff, which Jefferson singled out for praise, “of all the celebrated pictures I have ever seen, [they] appear to me to be the very worst—mere

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

bad one, & needs a guide.”19 This is confirmed by his reactions on a trip to Düsseldorf,

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monuments of labor, patience and want of genius.”21 Indeed, even after having collected many paintings, Jefferson didn’t consider the endeavor important. He wrote in the 1780s that while “architecture is among the most important arts and it is desirable to introduce taste into an art which shows so much, painting and sculpture are too expensive for the state of wealth among us. It would be useless therefore, and preposterous, for us to make ourselves connoisseurs in those arts. They are worth seeing, but not studying.”22 Nonetheless, the fully expanded collection at Monticello, a list of which Jefferson wrote after his retirement in 1809, was unusually large for its time, and it included copies of numerous Italian works: Raphael’s Transfiguration and a Holy Family; St. Peter Weeping, by Carlo Lotti; The Virgin Weeping, by Maratta; and a Herodias with the Head of St. John by Guido Reni (fig. 11.17)—bought as a copy after Simon Vouet—and a St. John the Baptist after Leonardo da Vinci, along with works of Ribera, Poussin, and Rubens.23 A major strength of the collection in Jefferson’s eyes was in portraits of great men, and he saw to it that six of these should be copied for him in the Uffizi in Florence: four conquistadors, Columbus, Vespucci, Magellan, and Cortez, and two Italian men of arms, Castruccio Castracani, of whom he would have known from Machiavelli, and Andrea Doria. The presence of religious works, many with a distinctly Catholic message, is puzzling in the acquisitions of a man who was essentially a deist. Perhaps, like Renaissance humanists, he regarded the representation of biblical events as constituting history painting, the purpose of which was exhortation or moral inspiration. The fact that he did not resonate to the formal aspects of the works is surely due in part to the fact that they were all reproductions. A list of his collection made sometime after 1803 includes only one still life and one landscape;24 what is unexpected about the absence of landscapes is that the eighteenth-century British connoisseurs who had launched the fashion of the picturesque in landscape design that so appealed to Jefferson had depended on landscape paintings for their inspiration. Jefferson had one brief opportunity to measure the actual Italy against what he had read of it. In April of 1787 he left Paris to tour southern France and northern Italy, his primary purpose being to investigate agricultural practice and technology.25 Foremost in

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Thomas Jefferson and Italy

11.17 Guido Reni, Herodias with the Head of St. John (copy). Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation.

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his mind was a study of rice cultivation and processing, as he explained in a letter at the close of his trip to John Jay, who at the time was secretary of foreign affairs: I wished particularly to know whether it was the use of a different machine for cleaning which brought European rice to market less broken than ours, as had been represented to me by those who deal in that article in Paris. I was given to believe I might see it myself immediately on entering Piedmont. As this would require but about 3 wks, I determined to go and ascertain this point; as the chance only of placing our rice above all rivalship in quality as it is in colour, by the introduction of a better machine, if a better existed. I found the rice country to be in truth Lombardy, 100 miles further than had been represented, and that, tho’ called Piedmont rice, not a grain is made in the country of Piedmont. I passed thro the rice fields of the Vercellese, and Milanese, about 60 miles, and returned from thence last night, having found that the machine is absolutely the same as ours, and of course that we need not listen more to that suggestion. It is a difference in the species of grain, of which the government of Turin is so sensible that, as I was informed, they prohibit the exportation of rough rice on pain of death. I have taken measures however for obtaining a quantity of it, which I think will not fail, and I bought on the spot a small parcel which I have with me. As further details on this subject to Congress would be displaced, I propose on my return to Paris to communicate them, and send the rice to the society at Charlestown for promoting agriculture, supposing they will be best able to try the experiment of cultivating the rice of this quality; and to communicate the species to the two states of S. Carolina and Georgia if they find it answer. . . . The mass of our countrymen being interested in agriculture, I hope I do not err in supposing that in a time of profound peace as the present, to enable them to adapt their production to the market, to point out markets for them, and endeavor to obtain favourable terms of reception, is within the line of my duty.26 I don’t know if Jefferson’s enterprise led to changes in domestic rice production; if it did, he may have been responsible for a major impact of Italy on the taste of America in the form of an improved Carolina rice. In most of the notes taken along the way, Jefferson shows interest only in the agriculture and flora of the countryside. He virtually ignores the cities, both because he did not see the observation of urban culture as part of his mission, and because he hated cities

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and believed that they promoted all the sins, while the cultivation of the soil ennobled men and kept them free of contamination. One exception is a few notes about Milanese residences (though not about their architectural design). The following passage illustrates the scattered character of his observations and their focus on technology and agricultural economy: Among a great many houses painted, the Casa Roma and Casa Candiani, by Appiani, and Casa Belgiosa by Martin, are superior. In the second is a small cabinet, the ceiling of which is in small hexagons, within which are cameos and heads painted alternately, no two the same. The salon of the Casa Belgiosa is superior to anything I have ever seen. The mixture called Scaiola, of which they make their walls and floors, is so like the finest marble, as to be indistinguishable from it. The nights of the 20th and 21st instant the rice ponds froze half an inch thick. Drouths of two or three months are not uncommon in the summer. About 5 years ago there was such a hail as to kill cats. The Count del Verme tells me of a pendulum odometer for the wheel of a carriage. Leases here are mostly for nine years. Wheat costs a louis d’or, /the one hundred and forty pounds. A labouring man receives sixty livres, and is fed and lodged. The trade of this country is principally rice, raw silk, and cheese.27 The selection of houses and the focus on the decoration of their facades and interior decoration are evidently not related to Jefferson’s ambassadorial obligations, but reflect his anticipation of the changes he was to make at Monticello on his return, all of which would make the mansion less Palladian and more in harmony with eighteenth-century practice in England and France. The itinerary took Jefferson from Marseilles along the coast to Nice and from there (fig. 11.18). From Turin he proceeded to Milan by way of Vercelli, where he first encountered rice fields, and Novara. He continued thence south to Pavia and Voghera, Genoa being his destination. After a brief stay he left Genoa by boat as the coastal road was not then viable, suffering acute seasickness; he landed at Albenga and continued

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

through the foothills of the Alps to the northeast, toward Turin via Cuneo and Racconigi

283

thence to Ventimiglia by mule. He wrote of the great advantage that would accrue to the peninsula should a better road be built along this coast. Many of his observations, such as of the flora and ground cover and of diverse designs of trellises for vines, convey a vivid image of the eighteenth-century north Italian countryside, which, in fact, would change very little prior to the Second World War. This voyage was so driven by its instrumental concerns that Jefferson, one of two outstanding American architects of his generation (the other being Benjamin Latrobe, whom he consulted in designing the University of Virginia), seems to have given architecture short shrift, though at the start of this same journey, in March, he had written from Nîmes of “gazing whole hours at the Maison Quarré, like a lover at his mistress.”28 But this is in part a false impression conveyed by the character of his notes; he did in fact take with him maps and guidebooks of Turin, Milan, and Genoa, and in his previously unpublished “Account Book” (see appendix below) he recorded visits to Juvarra’s Superga and the royal hunting lodge of Stupinigi, though without comments; they may well have been too extravagant for his classical taste.29 He had little time for the cathedral of Milan, which he called “a worthy object of philosophical contemplation, to be placed among the rarest instances of the misuse of money. On viewing the churches of Italy it is evident without calculation that the same expense would have sufficed to throw the Appenines into the Adriatic and thereby render it terra ferma from Leghorn to Constantinople.”30 South of Milan he visited the fifteenth-century Carthusian monastery (Certosa) of Pavia, without comment,31 and in Genoa he mentioned only the sixteenth-century Palazzo Durazzo, where he noted only a couple of pieces of furniture, and the suburban gardens of Count Durazzo and Prince Lolmellino—“the finest I ever saw out of England.” 32 Writing of his voyage to Maria Cosway, the married painter with whom he was clearly in love, he said that he had taken

284

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

11.18 Map of Jefferson’s tour in Italy.

285

a peep only into Elysium; I entered it at one door and came out at another, having seen, as I past, only Turin, Milan and Genoa; I calculated the hours it would have taken to carry me on to Rome, but they were exactly so many more than I had to spare. Was that not provoking? In thirty hours from Milan I could have been at the espousals of the Doge and the Adriatic [referring to the annual ceremony of the marriage of Venice to the sea]. But I am born to lose everything that I love.33 While his own large collection consisted almost exclusively of copies, Jefferson’s response to original works of art could be enthusiastic, and in respect to architecture almost libidinous, as in the case of the Maison Carré and the Hôtel de Salm. It’s a pity that his Italian visit was so curtailed in extent, but what is important in the present context is that the origin of the largest portion of his collection, and the inspiration for most of his architecture and sculpture, was from surviving Roman works, and for most of his painting from pictures by Italian artists of the Renaissance and classical baroque. On the other hand, Jefferson, like other Anglo-American classicists of his time, did not clearly distinguish modern from ancient Italy. His vast collection of art and his list for the library of the University of Virginia included works on ancient and modern art and architecture in about equal measure. The architectural project for the university employed illustrations after Palladio in order to design versions of the Pantheon and the Temple of Nerva. Jefferson necessarily saw the classical tradition through the filters of Palladio and Desgodets, and Palladio through the filter of Leoni and Gibbs; like his British mentors, however, he conceived of the classical tradition as an inheritance in evolution, the roots of which were to be found alive on the Italian peninsula of the present as well as of the past.

286

APPENDIX

Notes on travel expenses in Italy by Thomas Jefferson, from “The Account Book Recording the Hire of Horses, 1783–1790,” Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, The Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Papers. Italy Money of Piedmont. the Louis of France = 20# 1 of Piedmont [Apr.] 13

. . . entt.2 Hot. de York. 45f Dominique Valet 8f8 Scavena dinn 4f15.

14

Sospello. Lodgs &c. 6f din. 15s Ciandola breakft 3f10.

15

Tende lodgs. &c. 6f. din 15s. Limone douane 12s muletier 87f horses to Coni 19f postilln & breakft, 5f sent. 10S. Coni. postllion from Limone 3f.

16

. . . entt à la Croix blanche 12f din 15s Racconigi. breakft 2f15. Turin. carrge & 3 horses from Coni 36#. comedie 12s1/2.

17

. . . seeing [sightseeing] 10f10 — maps 13f10 seeing 3f71/2 — comedy 1f.

18

. . . horses to Moncagliedri, Stupanigi, & Superga 33f — seeing 13f10 recd

19

. . . entt. hot. d’Angleterre 37f x 10 garçon 1f10 valet 9f Cigliani dinnr 4f10.

20

Vercelli rough rice 3f - entt. Hot. des 3 rois 12f10 — garçon 1f121/2.Novara. dinner 2f 15 sentts 12”12 . Buffalora. douane 3f. Sedriano. carriage, horses, postillion & ferrges [?] from Turin 96f. carriage & horses hence to Milan 13f. Milan. douane 1f10 postillion 1f10. Money of Milan 30# = 24# France = 20# Piedmont.

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

of Messr Tollot, pere et fils for Le Cleve &co on Grand’i Lre [letter?]600# 3

287

21

. . . seeing 20# — comedy 1f9.

22

. . . maps 5f — seeing 12f — coachman 3f wash. 5f valet 12f coffee 4f9.

23

. . . entt. Albergo reale 79f10 — garçon 3f breakft. 2f Casino. seeing rice mill 1f — teeth for a Rice pestil 5f10. Rozzano. seeing the making a Parmesan chees 1f. — Chartreux 4 seeing 3f. Pavia, seeing botanical garden &c. 3f.

24

. . . entt al Croce bianca 10# — garçon 1f5 Voghera dinnr 2f10 garçons 1f5.

25

Novi. entt á la Poste 3f garçon lf2F Campomorone. dinnr. á la rosa rossa 5f garçon 1f5. Genoa. douane 4f10 — the Livre here the same as at Milan carriage, horses & postillion from Milan 162# book 6#.

26

. . . entt ste Marthe 12f10 garçons & moving to Cerf 2f4 seeing 22f theater. . . . 1f.

27

. . . seeing 18f8 — horses and carriage to Sestri-Pagli-& Nervi 43f.10. 1. doz.[o]rtolans 6f wash 3f 19 — a entt au Cerf 38f21/2 seastons [?] 3f5 valet. . . . 1f5.

28

. . . garçons 6f portage to water side 1f 9.

29

Noli. entt 15f garçon 1f10 Albenga. the Capt on acct 72# of Genoa = 52f 18. . . .France.

30

. . . pd Capt on acct.36#. — entt.18# Oneglio. Capt of Felucca in full 57f — mules from Albengo 22f9. St Remo. lodging at the Auberge de la poste 9f.

May I

. . . sents 4f10 — Menton breakft & oranges 5f10 — garçon 6s Nice. mules from Oneglia to this place 46f of Piedmont.

288

[There follow, on the same page, five entries relating to the continuation of the trip in France.]

1

“#” = francs; Jefferson indicated a single horizontal dash.

2

“entt” = place of lodging.

3

A second payment, evidently on a loan, by Baron le Cleve on Mr. Grand’i letter, is noted at the foot of the page after Jefferson’s return to France.

4

Chartreux: the Certosa di Pavia.

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

Notes

289

N OT E S

1 Karl Lehmann, Thomas Jefferson: American

7 For the history of Monticello, see William H.

Humanist (Chicago, 1965). See Rudolf Wittkower, Palladio and Palladianism (London, 1974); John Summerson, “The Classical Country House in EighteenthCentury England,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 107 (July 1959), 539–587; John Harris, The Palladians (New York, 1982); James S. Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (Princeton, 1990), chap. 6: “The Palladian Villa in England.” On Palladianism in eighteenth-century American architecture, see Margherita Azzi-Visentini, Il palladianesimo in America e l’architettura della villa (Milan 1976); James Ackerman, “Il presidente Jefferson e il palladianesimo americano,” Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura 6 (1964), 39–48; Douglas Lewis, “Il problema della villa e le plantations americane,” Bollettino del Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura 12 (1970), 231–250. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al., 21 vols. (in progress) (Princeton, 1950ff.), 9:445. As quoted, without source, by Erik Erikson, Dimensions of a New Identity (New York, 1974), 19. On southern colonial architecture preceding Monticello, see William Pierson, American Buildings and Their Architects, vol. 1: The Colonial and Neoclassical Styles (Garden City, N.Y., 1970), chap. 3; Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (New York, 1922); Thomas T. Waterman, The Mansions of Virginia, 1706–1776 (Chapel Hill, 1946). On Jefferson’s library, see E. M. Sowerby, Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1952– 1959): books on architecture and other fine arts, 4:358–400; criticism, 5:38–58; and W. B. O’Neal, A Fine Arts Library: Jefferson’s Selections for the University of Virginia Together with the Architectural Books at Monticello (Charlottesville, 1976).

Adams, Jefferson’s Monticello (New York, 1983); Ackerman, The Villa, chap. 8, “Thomas Jefferson”; Fiske Kimball, Thomas Jefferson, Architect (Boston, 1916; facsimile ed., New York, 1968), 57–61, 68–73; Pierson, American Buildings, 287–316; Gene Waddell, “The First Monticello,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 46 (1987), 5–27; F. Nichols and J. Baer, Jr., Monticello: A Guidebook (Monticello, 1967). Reported in a letter of February 23, 1816, from Isaac Coles to John Cocke, proprietor of Bremo, cited by Fiske Kimball, “The Building of Bremo,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 67 (1949), 8. For Jefferson’s use of Gibbs, see Waddell, “The First Monticello.” “È sopra un monticello di ascesa facilissima.” Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570), 2.3 (p. 18). For Jefferson’s debt to Morris, see Clay Lancaster, “Jefferson’s Architectural Indebtedness to Robert Morris,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 10 (1951), 3–10. Letter of March 20, 1787 (Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:226). See Kimball, Thomas Jefferson, Architect, 154–157, and drawing nos. 127–129. On the university design, see ibid.,154–157; Pierson, American Buildings, 316–334. O’Neal, A Fine Arts Library. Seymour Howard, “Thomas Jefferson’s Art Gallery for Monticello,” Art Bulletin 59 (1977), 593f. On Jefferson’s engagement with the fine arts, see also A. Hyatt Mayor, “Jefferson’s Enjoyment of the Fine Arts,” Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.s. 2 (1943), 140–146; H. M. Kallen, “The Arts and Thomas Jefferson,” Ethics 52 (1943), 269–283; Marie Kimball, “Jefferson’s Works of Art at Monticello,” Antiques 59 (1951), 308ff.; Harold Dickson, “Thomas Jefferson, Art Collector,” in Thomas Jefferson and the Arts: An Extended View (Washington, D.C., 1976), 104–136.

2

3

4

5

6

290

8

9 10

11

12 13 14 15 16

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

pers of Thomas Jefferson, 18:568f.; quoted in G. G. Shackelford, “A Peep into Elysium,” in Jefferson and the Arts, 242. See Michel Benisovich, “Thomas Jefferson amateur d’art à Paris,” Archives de l’art français 22 (Etudes et documents sur l’art français du XIII au XIX siècle) (Paris, 1969), 231ff. Letter to Mme. de Tott, Paris, February 28, 1787, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11: 17f.; quoted by Marie Kimball, Jefferson: The Scene of Europe, 1784–1789 (New York, 1950), 95. “Memorandum on a Tour from Paris to Amsterdam, Strasburg and back to Paris” (March 3, 1788), in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 17:274; quoted without source by Mayor, “Jefferson’s Enjoyment of the Arts,” 142. John Trumbull, Autobiography, Reminiscences and Letters (New York, 1841), 137; quoted without source by Eleanor Berman, Thomas Jefferson among the Arts (New York, 1947), 74. “Notes on Objects of Attention for an American,” in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 13:269. At a later point he stated that the function of “the non-productive arts is to give a pleasing and innocent direction to accumulations of wealth”: letter to Thomas Sully, 1812, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Lipscomb and Albert Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1903), 18:281. The Lotti, the Reni, the Ribera Magdalen, and other works were bought at a large auction in February 1784 (Dickson, “Jefferson, Art Collector,” 111f.). A Crucifixion, which does not appear in other lists, is cited by Paul Wilstach, Jefferson and Monticello (Garden City, N.Y., 1925), 109, from the report of a visitor to Monticello in 1816 (Niles Register, 1817). The Jefferson Papers of the University of Virginia, ed. Constance Thurlow and Francis Berkeley, Jr., 38 (Charlottesville, 1950), no. 2958. Thomas Jefferson, “Notes of a Tour into the Southern Parts of France . . . and Northern Italy, in the Year 1787,” in Papers of Thomas

26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33

Jefferson, 11:415–464. See also the excerpts from Jefferson’s account book in the appendix to this chapter. Letter to John Jay, May 4, 1787 (Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:338f.); see also letters to John Adams, July 1, 1787 (Papers, 11:515ff.), to E. Rutledge, 1787 (Papers, 11:587ff.), and to William Drayton, July 30, 1787 (Papers, 11:644, with extensive discussion of the value of olive production). See also Jefferson’s Garden Book, ed. E. Betts (Philadelphia, 1944), 121–129; and the comparison between upland and swamp rice in 1808, the observation that cultivation on the African coast requires only rainwater, and the procurement of a 30-gallon cask for Charleston and Georgia, in The Jefferson Cyclopedia (New York and London, 1900), 778–779. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 18:194. Ibid., 11:226. These visits are recorded only in the note in Jefferson’s account book (see my appendix) recording the hire of horses. Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 13:272. See appendix, entry for April 23, 1787. Shackelford, “Peep into Elysium,” 245; see also Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:441. Letter to Maria Cosway, Paris, July 1, 1787, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:519f.; cited by Shackelford, “Peep into Elysium,” 253.

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17 Letter to Bellini, September 20, 1785, in Pa-

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TWELVE

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

By “a convention of architectural drawing” I mean the sign—made normally on a twodimensional surface—that translates into graphic form an aspect (e.g., the plan or elevation) of an architectural design or of an existing building. It is an arbitrary invention, but once established it works only when it means the same thing to an observer as it does to the maker; it is a tool of communication. Once an architectural convention is established, it maintains an astonishing consistency through time. Plans and elevations were common in Roman antiquity; almost all those we know represent existing or ideal buildings, though a full-scale project elevation for the pediment of the Pantheon was found recently incised on the pavement of the Mausoleum of Augustus. My first consideration is for the instruments and materials of drawing. Paper, to start with, when introduced into the West in the fourteenth century, opened up the possibility of recording rapid impressions, of sketching, for the first time. Parchment, used previously, was in general too expensive for any but definitive images, and not suited to sketching or experiment. Few parchment drawings survive; the cost and sturdiness of the material encouraged scraping away drawings to make the surface available for new drawings or texts (see chapter 2). Sheets of paper are not neutral with respect to the drawings done on them; they are generally cut in a rectangular format that promotes a certain range of orientation in the drawing—in particular, the lining up of straight orthogonal lines parallel to the paper’s edges. The format of paper was echoed in that of the drawing board, which permitted the introduction of the T-square and triangle. Almost all drawing boards and a high proportion of elevation and perspective drawings have a horizontal dimension greater than the vertical. This must be attributable to the nature of the human body, bringing the top of the sheet nearer to the draftsman and conforming to the favored action of the arm. On the other hand, plans, particularly those of longitudinal temples and churches, are often vertically oriented, perhaps so that the entrance is nearest to the draftsman. The drawing is affected also by the color, texture, size, and density of the support.

294

In perspective drawings, the rectangular sheet of paper is an analogue of the window through which an object is seen; there is an inevitable conformity between the technique of perspective projection described by Leon Battista Alberti in 1435, not long after the introduction of paper, and the format of the sheet. The introduction of tracing paper in the eighteenth century not only facilitated the development of project ideas by eliminating painstaking transferrals from one opaque surface to another (as by pricking the outlines with a needle), but facilitated interactions among plan, section, and elevation. An effort to codify the ways in which transparency influences the design process would only rigidify its open potentialities; it is sufficient to indicate its importance. Drawing instruments obviously affect not only the appearance of the drawing but also the character of the building they are used to represent. The quill pen, often used to ink in lines incised with a metal point, dominated the earliest drawings; it was joined around 1500 by a finely sharpened black chalk, a material similar to the modern Conte crayon. Michelangelo favored the much softer red chalk because it suited his more sculptural and textural orientation. Shortly after 1600, Borromini was the first to make extensive use of graphite—essentially the mineral encased in the modern pencil. This tool could be sharpened to a very fine point or used in other ways to communicate a wider range of texture and shadow. From the Renaissance on, ink washes were employed as an enrichment of line drawing to distinguish mass from void in plans and to creasingly, from the eighteenth century on, watercolor was adopted where pictorial effects were sought. Later innovations simply refined these choices, as with the substitution of the steel pen for the quill. The computer constitutes the only significant modern addition to the repertory. Drawing has not been the only means for communicating architectural form. For centuries designs and buildings have been represented in models, which have the advantage of vivid representation more accessible than the abstraction of drawings to clients,

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

emphasize contrasts of light and shadow in elevations, sections, and perspectives. In-

295

the public, and the mason or woodworker. Now twodimensional representations may be composed by computer-aided design, which is becoming progressively more flexible and responsive to the designer’s imagination.

The Plan Plans are arbitrary diagrams of a nonexistent footprint. Real buildings are not simply set down on flat surfaces like a model on a table. The fragment from the marble plan of ancient Rome (fig. 12.1) is even more arbitrary than most; being just lines and dots, it is the diagram of a diagram. 12.1 Fragment from the marble plan of Rome, A.D. 205–208.

But plans, apart from the fact that they indicate some-

Photo: Fine Arts Library,

thing literally invisible, are highly capricious. The rep-

Harvard University.

resentation in fig. 12.2 of the Erechtheion in Athens vividly illustrates the arbitrariness of the convention. The building has three quite different levels that are all represented here as if they were on the same plane. Even structures on relatively flat bases are shown as composites of different horizontal cuts, one at the base of the steps, one at the base of the columns, one at the bottom of the column shafts. The thirteenth-century plans from the lodge book of Villard de Honnecourt (fig. 12.3) are an early example of combining the footprint type of plan with what is called the “reflected” plan of the vaulting overhead. Moreover, the vaulting is represented as if it were on a flat surface, though actually it curves up toward an apex.

296

12.2 Athens, Erechtheion, plan. Photo: Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

12.3 Villard de Honnecourt, project (with Pierre de Corbie) for a chevet and plan of St. Etienne, Meaux, ca. 1230. Paris, Bibliothèque

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

Nationale, Ms. Fr. 29093.

297

The Section The section remained basically the same from its first appearance in the thirteenth century; that of Peter Parler for the fourteenth-century Prague Cathedral (fig. 2.6) is the earliest fully correct one I know, though the innovation is probably traceable to the Reims workshop in the 1220s. As with the plan, the section’s cut through the walls is unverifiable by eye; in most cases, it can be drawn only with the aid of the plan. From the start, parts of the building at some distance behind the vertical section were included in the representation—in this case, the flying buttresses. Some nonrectilinear designs of our own time make it difficult to make and to read a section, either because the structure is not rectilinear or because it has constant shifts of planes (fig. 12.4).

12.4 Hans Scharoun, Philharmonic Hall, Berlin, 1959–1963, longitudinal section. From Eckehard Janofske,

Arichtektur-Räume: Idee und Gestalt bei Hans Scharoun (Braunschweig and Wiesbaden, 1984).

12.5 Le Corbusier, project for the interior of Villa “Les Terrasses,” Garches. Photo by permission of Artists Rights Society.

298

The Perspective The Roman theorist Vitruvius recommended perspective drawings—rather ambiguously—and they have been employed since the fifteenth century to help designers to visualize their work in three dimensions or to make finished renderings for patrons, who understandably are almost always baffled by the abstractions of the conventions we have just examined, and to represent and reconstruct existing buildings. The major Renaissance theorists opposed the use of perspective as a means of architectural representation because the receding lines would inevitably be unmeasurable and therefore misleading. In practice, all the architects made perspectives anyhow (figs. 2.16, 2.18). But in the very period in which geometrically constructed central-point perspective had been invented and most exploited, architects paradoxically preferred to use ad hoc approaches to representing buildings in three dimensions. They thus avoided the rigidity of the fixed central eye point, and made it possible to put the observer in whatever horizontal or vertical position most favored their purpose. A few sixteenth-century architects, notably Baldassarre Peruzzi, employed geometrically constructed perspective in some drawings (fig. 2.23); it may have been his interest in the design of illusionistic stage sets that led him to a truly sophisticated control of projection, with the plane of projection placed behind the surface of the paper.

sections, lend themselves especially to rhetorical exposition (fig. 12.5). By rhetorical I mean that the aim is not simply to represent as faithfully as possible an architectural space or mass, but to present it to the viewer so as to emphasize the particular goal of the design; in short, to persuade. Le Corbusier’s interior perspective for a villa design is meant to exaggerate the depth of space and the interplay of abstract planes, and to emphasize the revolutionary contrast to middle-class living spaces of the late nineteenth century.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

A drawing by Le Corbusier illustrates how perspectives, unlike plans, elevations, and

299

12.6 Philibert Delorme, perspective section of the chapel, Château d’Anet. From Premier tome de

l’architecture (Paris, 1567).

300

The perspective section aims to give a readable impression of a building’s interior; it is used to represent round or polygonal interiors, or parts such as cupolas. (If the interior is rectilinear, it can be shown as an elevation, and perspective is not relevant.) Philibert Delorme in 1567 showed a cut through the chapel at Anet (fig. 12.6) in which we see, in an ad hoc perspective impression, the inside and outside simultaneously, and the thickness of the wall as well. The drawing would be useless as a guide to a builder or mason. The Renaissance opponents of perspective in the presentation of architectural

designs—notably

Alberti,

Raphael,

Palladio, and Barbaro—appealed for orthogonal elevations built up from the plan, in which all mea-

12.7 William Farrish, machine. From

surements are exact and can be used in building

“On Isometrical Perspective,”

(fig. 2.20). To make the kind of orthogonal eleva-

Philosophical Society 1 (1822), fig. 9.

tion or section of a circular or polygonal structure represented by fig. 2.20, it is practically essential to construct it from the plan, which is why, in the relatively few Renaissance drawings of such buildings that are orthogonal, the section is drawn directly

In the seventeenth century, military and mechanical engineers developed the technique of axonometric drawing, which permitted representations of constructions in three dimensions in which correct measurements could be retained in the receding planes (fig. 12.7). A nongeometrical, subjective form of axonometric had existed even before the Renaissance; Japanese painters of the

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

above the plan on the same sheet.

301

12.8 Tale of Genji, Japanese screen, 1677. Photo courtesy of Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

seventeenth century (fig. 12.8) frequently illustrated dwellings and town settings from an elevated viewpoint but without perspective diminution, as a way of facilitating their narratives—again for rhetorical purposes. In the Renaissance, a similar, unconstructed approach was found to be the most effective way of representing complex machines, but in this case the receding lines were normally bent around to whatever angle would reveal most about a particular part of the structure. The axonometric method proved to be particularly suited to the forms of twentiethcentury architecture, with its favoring of straight lines and flat planes. But it came into prominence through widely used texts on the history of ancient and medieval architecture by Auguste Choisy, beginning in the 1870s. Figure 12.9 shows the plan as well as the interior and exterior of a Roman vaulted structure. Painters of the early twentieth century also exploited the axonometric, adding to the basic graphic method the spatial potentialities of color. El Lissitzky, a Russian artist who

302

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

12.9 Auguste Choisy, Roman vault. From L’art de bâtir chez les romains (Paris, 1883).

303

worked in Germany, produced many exhibition designs, which he claimed to be his most important work; fig. 12.10 was drawn for an exhibit at Hannover in 1926–1927. Like many of his contemporaries, he held pseudo-scientific theories of an expanded space and time to be designed into his work. Parts of the drawing can be read as a projection from either below or above, and the figure is calculated to confuse the dual reading: the shifts are intended to actualize the viewer’s experience in time and space. In a series of house studies (fig. 12.11), Peter Eisenman has employed axonometric projections of increasing complexity not only to reveal the interpenetration of 12.10 El Lissitzky, project for the Cabinet of Abstraction in the

planes, but to explore the complexity and incoherence of spatial relations.

Provincial Museum, Hannover, Sprengel Museum.

Mies van der Rohe developed a unique form of architectural representation in which the structure itself could be represented as a void (fig. 12.12). Thus the Resor House project is represented by an interior elevation in which the wall, which is glass, is only a picturesque collage of photographs of a vast landscape beyond it (not even the one that would have been seen from the house) and two mullions, of blank paper; the broader white bands are steel columns. Although they reject perspective representation, Mies’s drawings of this kind in fact call upon the viewer’s understanding of perspective to visualize a readable space out of the void. Historically, they are allied to the minimalism of

12.11 Peter Eisenman, drawing for Guardiola House, Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz, Spain. Photo courtesy of the architect.

304

the 1960s in painting and sculpture.

12.12 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, study for the Resor House, 1937–1938. Photo: Museum of Modern Art, New York.

CAD: The Computer Image Computer-aided design is having a profound effect on architectural drawing (fig. 12.13). As a technological innovation in the field, its importance perhaps equals that of the introduction of paper. It is now almost indispensable in supporting the technical aspects of working drawings, such as those for lighting, heating, acoustics, ducting, and structural detailing. It moves easily between two- and three-dimensional imaging, allowing for visualization of forms and spaces previously worked out. Increasingly, it has grammed into the software. Recently new applications, facilitated by the software Form Z and Alias—and best known to the public in illustrations of the work of Frank Gehry, especially the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (fig. 12.14)—have permitted a great expansion in the ability to devise complex manipulations of planes in undulations and curves (extensions of what Robin Evans called ruled lines) beyond the capabilities of traditional stereotomy (in any case, now virtually a lost technique). Here the machine does not merely accelerate drawing processes that had previously been carried out only by hand, but opens up a potential not attainable on the drawing board, one with extraordinary potential for the extension of architectural form.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

the capacity of hand-made drawing to depart from the predetermined parameters pro-

305

12.13 Asymptote (Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture), interface study, Guggenheim Virtual Musuem, 1999. Photo courtesy of the architects.

306

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

12.14 Frank Gehry, study for Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Photo courtesy of the architect.

307

Hand and Mind As a sign, a convention refers to an aspect that is signified. If the drawing in which it is used represents an existing building or a finished project, then it relates to the signified somewhat as a verbal description relates to an aspect of the object it refers to. This is not to say that either the graphic or the verbal description “accurately” represents the signified, but only that it relates to it in some way that can be read. What are the different effects of a graphic and a written representation? What aspects of architecture are more communicable by drawing as opposed to words? A study by Michelangelo for the plan of the church of San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini in Rome, of 1559 (fig. 12.15), poses the question of what the graphic sign signifies in the case of a sketch or study for a possible structure that has not fully materialized in the designer’s mind. Is it then a sign for a mental image? That would be a possible explanation in terms of Cartesian psychology, which, I take it, would hold that the mental image is fixed and uninflected by the process of drawing. But architectural sketching is most often an interactive process in which an initial idea is put down and the mark suggests an extension of that idea, which then results in an altered mark. This is how Michelangelo’s plan became so heavily worked over; while it may have lost its initial clarity, it gained an expressive vitality that makes every element seem to be alive and in evolution. The interchange goes on until a resolution is found. Such sheets are particularly precious because they bring us closest to the moment of conception. An earlier proposal for the same building (fig. 12.16) by another architect, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, presents alternative proposals in a more readable way, though one (a longitudinal plan with side chapels) is quite inconsistent with the other (a circular plan with radiating chapels). Even marks aimlessly made can be organized by a draftsman into purposeful form. Leonardo da Vinci proposed that a painted composition be started from a stain made by throwing a sponge against a wall. Invention may thus be physical as well as mental, though neuroscientists today are questioning this distinction.

308

12.15 Michelangelo Buonarroti, project for San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini, Rome, 1559. Florence, Casa

12.16 Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, project for San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini, Rome, 1518–1519. Florence, Uffizi, A1292 (photo: author).

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

Buonarroti, 124.

309

12.17 Louis Kahn, Hypostyle Hall, Karnak. Collection Sue Ann Kahn.

The architect’s sketch in preparation for a work differs from the painter’s or sculptor’s. A basic convention of the former, such as a plan, bears virtually no visual relationship to the structure as built; one cannot even see the plan of a completed building. Yet most frequently the initial studies for a building are made in plan. The figural artist, on the other hand, makes preparatory sketches that relate directly to the appearance of the intended sculpture or painting—sometimes for the composition as a whole, sometimes for some part of it; he or she has virtually no conventional signs that are stand-ins for the final product (figs. 6.17, 6.18).

The Representation of Existing Buildings The rhetoric of drawing is perhaps best illustrated in representations of buildings that already exist (figs. 12.17–12.22). The draftsman chooses the building he or she wants to draw with a particular purpose in mind, and that purpose affects what is represented and how. An immense range of representations is available, from the surveyor’s or archaeologist’s orthogonal elevation to the watercolorist’s building set in a landscape and rendered 310

with its contours and details blurred by contrasts of light and shadow and of color. The surface and the instruments used are chosen in accordance with the purpose and the intended affect; in the first example, it may be a delicate line executed on drafting paper with a fine steel pen, or engraved on a metal plate; in the second, it may be loose brushwork applied to a variety of rougher surfaces. Not only does each representation seek to convey a particular message with the means best adapted to it, but each observation is the product of an individual’s way of perceiving, and of his or her way of conveying what he or she perceives. The latter involves individual traits of rendering, comparable to handwriting, and the style of the time and place of making. Therefore the “accuracy” of a depiction is entirely idiosyncratic; there are many potential “accuracies.” Louis Kahn sketched the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak in 12.18 Giovanni Battista Piranesi,

his career-long pursuit of the effects of light and of

moat of Castel Sant’Angelo,

monumental composition. Photographs of a building

Rome. From Le antichità

are inflected by the same personal and cultural forces that affect drawings (see chapter 4).

romane (Rome, ca. 1775), vol. 4, plate 9. Photo: Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

Piranesi’s etching of the base of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome (fig. 12.18) is an exercise in communicating the sublime; its intention is not to provide clues to the appearance of the building, but to overwhelm the viewer with what the artist saw as its awesome power. The representations of the results of modern archaeological excavation are certainly the drawings least

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

a wholly idiosyncratic way (fig. 12.17), as a moment in

311

12.19 Athens, Agora, plan. From Hesperia 37 (1968).

influenced by personal factors. We call them “objective” when the aspects the draftsman depicts correspond to our expectation of how the drawing can be most useful. In the plan of the Agora at Athens (fig. 12.19), we can follow a story of the palimpsest of culture in the course of time. But we could go with this drawing in hand to the site it describes and be totally unable to orient ourselves. The structures shown here are mental constructs hypothesized from scraps of evidence, much of which may have been destroyed in the finding, or covered over after being found. The reconstruction of destroyed or altered buildings tends to edge closer to Piranesi’s fantasy than to the measured plans. All are redolent of the historical moment in which they were made. A typical reconstruction of the Parthenon in Athens (fig. 12.20) selects a viewpoint calculated to dramatize the approach in a mid-twentieth-century way, seeking verisimilitude by the addition of actors in Greek costume. Another visitor to the Parthenon, before it had been blown up in the early fifteenth century, provided a quite different restoration (fig. 12.21). There also is a built-in unreliability in the presentation of the elevations and sections of existing buildings; there are no rules constraining the 312

12.20 G. P. Stevens, reconstruction of the Parthenon, Athens. From Restorations of Classical Buildings (Princeton, 1955). Courtesy of American School of Classical Studies, Athens.

draftsman; he or she may have arrived at the height of an entablature or the width of a wall by guessing. Guessing is the preferred method in representing the heights of Gothic cathedrals, which are mostly too tall to measure by affordable means. In early (pre-1500) drawings this alteration is usually due to an indifference to what we resent any kind of central-plan building as round, since the symbolism of centrality was more significant than the actual form. We know the Renaissance period for its devotion to the remains of antiquity, and for the astonishing number of drawings of ancient remains surviving from the hands of Renaissance architects and renderers. We would expect these drawings to provide as accurate a representation of ancient remains as the techniques and style of the time would have permitted. Not so; even, or perhaps especially, the most distinguished architects remade antiquity according to their own interests or carelessness. A reconstruction of the fourth-century Santa Costanza in Rome by Francesco di Giorgio Martini (fig.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

would call accuracy: Richard Krautheimer showed that medieval draftsmen might rep-

313

12.21 Ciriaco d’Ancona, facade of the Parthenon, Athens, 1436. Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Ms. Hamilton 254, fol. 85r.

314

12.22)—a structure that still stands in an exceptionally good state of preservation—presents the circular plan with eighteen pairs of columns around its central space, rather than the twelve that actually are there, and ignores the thick walls and niches. We might ask whether the representation of existing buildings is the same sort of signification as representation in painting and figural or landscape drawing. Portraits, like architectural representations (other than those intended for use), are normally expected to resemble the subject in some way, and they do observe or occasionally establish conventions current in their time (as early Renaissance portraits adopt the forms of ancient coins, medals, and busts). Like most architectural representations, they are substantially recast in the style and technique chosen by the artist and patrons. Portraits typically transmit not only what is observed but aspects of the sitter that can be inferred by

12.22 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, plan and section of Santa

symbolic clues: character, status, aspirations, etc. Ar-

Costanza, Rome, 1489ff.

chitectural representations are no less colored by so-

Turin, Biblioteca Reale,

cial and political forces, as is clear from the example by

Ms. Saluzzo 148, c. 88.

Daniele Barbaro (fig. 9.1) conveys the sitter’s gravity through his expression and his lack of contact with the painter and viewer; his position is indicated by the vestments of his office (as Patriarch-Elect of Aquileia), and his achievements by the prominent role of his published works. Attention is further directed to his architectural interests by the colossal column and an odd capital-like form alongside it.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

Piranesi discussed above (fig. 12.18). A portrait of

315

The Rhetoric of Drawing In sum, the architectural drawing is not just a document containing the required data, but inescapably bears the stamp of the author’s personal style and that of the time and place. (A practiced viewer can identify the draftsman—provided an adequate number of drawings by the same hand have been documented—or at least the approximate date, through evidence that is primarily of a formal character but can include the maker’s orientation toward what is presented.) Further, a drawing may be a graphic form of architectural theory, conceived not only to illustrate the designer’s principles but to persuade the viewer of the validity of his or her point of view (fig. 12.12). An architectural drawing may be not just a means to an end but an end in itself. Drawings can be the only way of presenting projects that are visionary or at least temporarily unrealizable. They can become promotional instruments (presentation drawings, competition drawings) or an object of fashion quite disconnected from the making of buildings, to the extent of being quite unbuildable (the fashion of drawing resembles that of clothes). In the past century many architects, particularly those most widely known, have built reputations on drawings prior to having built much of importance: Le Corbusier, having had few commissions in his early career, energetically produced and published architecture on paper. In recent years, Tschumi, Koolhaas, Eisenman, Coop Himmelblau, and Libeskind have exercised great influence on the profession and on architectural education primarily through drawings disseminated through books and periodicals, and in art galleries and museums. Since at least the eighteenth century, architectural drawings have been prized by collectors and exhibited as works of art and have acquired a value on the art market. Finally, the conventions are, in a sense, elements of a language; like words and sentences, they are invented or arrived at by mutual agreement and, once in place, remain with little change for centuries. Because they are a way in which an architect communicates basic aspects of his or her work with anyone interested in building and the art of architecture, altering or attempting to improve them can result only in confusion.

316

Therefore, unlike architectural styles or drafting techniques, they have almost no history. Radically new expressions can be realized with established conventions, as they were in the earlier twentieth century. Although it is interesting for a historian to examine the reasons, the ideology, and the conditions of the invention, issues of evolution are of only minor historical interest. This field of investigation, then, is more closely related to semiology than to standard architectural research. It is an alternative to architectural history as it has been practiced, and its appeal lies in the fact that it is pursued not in libraries and archives but with real works in hand, through visual experiences and the

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ruminations that follow them.

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INDEX

Adam, Robert, 264

Agora, 312

Agrimensores, 187

Erechtheion, 296, 297

Alberti, Leon Battista, 7, 16, 17, 19, 28, 195, 295, 301 De pictura, 9, 11, 50, 127, 295

Parthenon, 312, 313, 314 Avicenna (Ibn Sı¯na¯), 150 Axonometric drawing, 47, 301–304

De re aedificatoria, 9–10, 49–50, 51, 53, 56, 60, 70, 132, 176–178, 179, 194, 224,

Bacon, Roger, 150

228, 278

Baldinucci, Filippo, 278

Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, 177

Baldus, Edouard, 107–108, 111

San Francesco, Rimini, 72, 178

Barbaro, Daniele, 181, 218, 301, 315.

Santissima Annunziata, Florence, 72, 178 Alpers, Svetlana, 17

See also Maser: Villa Barbaro commentary on Vitruvius, 177, 219–229, 245, 257

American Architect, 118

Barbaro, Marcantonio, 219

Anatomical illustration, 29, 58, 60, 68, 82, 145,

Bartolommeo, Fra

150–152, 168–171 Ancients and moderns, battle of, 131, 140n43

Virgin and Child with St. John, Angels, and Donor, 166

Angelico, Fra (Guido di Pietro), 168

Bauhaus, 120

Antonio di Vincenzo, 45–46

Baxandall, Michael, 3–4, 8, 10

Archimedes, 150

Bayard, Hippolyte, 107, 112–114, 122n2

Architectural Photographic Association, 108

Beauty, 9–11, 127

Argan, Giulio Carlo, 236, 258

Bembo, Pietro, 130–131, 133

Ariosto, Ludovico, 18 Aristotelianism, 12

Bertotti Scamozzi, Ottavio, 249, 250 Bial-ostocki, Jan, 11, 126

Aristotle, 126, 149, 150, 219, 220, 231nn6,7,10

Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-Désiré, 111

Arno, river, 159

Bloom, Harold, 135

Arte (Barbaro), 220

Blum, Hans, 181

Artiminio

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 3

Medici villa at, 197 Ascani, Valerio, 45 Asymptote (Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture), 306

Bologna academy of the Carracci, 131 San Petronio, 45, 177, 245 Borgia, Cesare, 154

Atget, Eugène, 120

Borromeo, St. Carlo, 179

Athens

Borromini, Francesco, 295

Acropolis, 101–105

Botticelli, Sandro, 168 Index

Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 89

319

Bracciolini, Poggio, 129 Bramante, Donato, 72, 82, 91

Charlottesville University of Virginia, 276–278

Cortile del Belvedere, Vatican, 82

Chastel, André, 90

at Milan, 82

Chiaroscuro, 68, 167

Palazzo dei Tribunali, Rome, 82

Choisy, Auguste, 302, 303

St. Peter, Vatican, 53, 72, 76, 81, 82, 84, 178

Chrysoloras, Manuel, 10, 19

San Pietro in Montorio (Tempietto),

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 127–128, 130, 134, 136

Rome, 76 Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, 83

Brutus, 5, 128 De inventione, 9, 127

Brandi, Cesare, 236

De oratore, 15, 127–128

Branner, Robert, 41

Orator, 10, 128

Bremo plantation, 267 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 7, 47, 50, 90 Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence, 69

Tusculanus, 16 Cimabue, Giovanni (Cenni di Pepo), 3 Ciriaco d’Ancona, 314

Bruni, Leonardo, 15

City plans, 154–155

Burlington, Richard Boyle, Lord, 264

Classicism, in art, 18–19, 236–237, 245–246,

Byzantine drawing conventions, 48

259–260 Clérisseau, Charles-Louis, 116 Cola da Caprarola

Caen St. Etienne, 99, 100 Cambrai cathedral, 31

Santa Maria della Consolazione, Todi, 85, 86 Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus, 193, 195, 201–202, 209

Camera obscura, 97

Computer-aided design, 305–307

Campagnola, Domenico, 207

Concinnitas, 176–177

Capriccio, 257, 258

Constable, John, 106

Cardo, 188 Carracci, academy of, 131

Salisbury Cathedral, View across the Bishop’s Grounds, 106, 107

Carter’s Grove plantation, 265, 266

Constantin, Dmitri, 101, 105

Castagno, Andrea del, 12

Contrapposto, 162

Castiglione, Baldassare, 13, 23n24, 133

Coop Himmelblau, 316

“letter to Leo X,” 178 (see also under Raphael) Cato, Marcus Porcius, the Elder, 193, 195, 209, 212

Copernicus, Nicolaus, 150 Cornaro, Alvise, 198, 206, 231n7 Cortesi, Paolo, 129

Cellini, Benvenuto, 278

Cosway, Maria, 284

Cennini, Cennino, 7

Counter-Reformation, 179

Central-plan churches, 69, 178

Creneaux, 33

Cesariano, Cesare, 230n2 Cesati, Alessandro, 14 Chambers, William, 266

320

Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 96 daguerreotype, 96, 110, 111, 112

Dante Alighieri, 3, 12

Falcone, Giuseppe, 194

Danti, Vincenzo, 134, 178

Fano

Decorum, 179, 225–227 Decumanus, 188 Delorme, Philibert, 181 Château d’Anet, 181, 300, 301

basilica, 242 Fanzolo Villa Emo, 208, 209, 246 Farrish, William, 301

De Sauley, Ferdinand, 110

Fazio, Bartolomeo, 8–9, 11, 12, 19

Desgodets, Antoine, 267

Fenton, Roger, 101, 103, 106

Disegno (Vasari), 16–17

Ficino, Marsilio, 10

Dietterlin, Wendel, 181

Fiesole

Documentary photography, 107–110, 112, 121 Dolce, Lodovico, 132–133, 134–135 Domes, 52–54, 76 Drawing, architectural conventions of, 294, 296–317

Villa Medici, 196, 197 Filarete (Antonio Averlino) treatise on architecture, 48, 49, 177 Finale Villa Saraceno, 268, 270

medieval, 28–44

Flaubert, Gustave, 115

Renaissance, 28–29, 45–61, 224–225, 301,

Florence, 159, 186–187, 188, 189, 197

313–315 techniques of, 294–295

baptistery, 6, 7, 76 cathedral, 47, 79

Du Camp, Maxime, 115–116, 117

cathedral campanile, 42, 44, 45

Duccio di Buoninsegna, 7

Medici Chapel, 162, 179

Dürer, Albrecht, 56, 59

Palazzo Rucellai, 177 San Lorenzo, 87, 89

Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 118

Santa Maria degli Angeli, 69

Egypt, 115–117, 118

Santa Maria Novella, 89 Santissima Annunziata, 72, 178

Ekphrasis, 9, 17–18

Flying buttresses, 33, 36

Elevations, 33

Focillon, Henri, 45

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 135

Foreshortening, 68

Enlightenment, 264

Fortifications, 154, 180

Età (Vasari), 13–15, 91, 128

Foucault, Michel, ix, 158

Euclid, 150

Fountains Abbey, 101, 103

Eurythmia, 227–228, 245

Francesco di Giorgio, 47, 69, 177, 179,

Evans, Frederick H., 120

313, 315

Evans, Robin, 305

Francis I (king of France), 82

Exhibition of Art and Industry

Fréart, Roland, sieur de Chambray, 267

(New York, 1853–1854), 111 Exhibition of the World’s Industry (London, 1851), 110, 111 Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1855), 111

Freiburg Münster, 44 Furor, 164 Index

Eisenman, Peter, 304, 316

321

Galen, 68, 150

Ichnographia, 49, 70, 224

Galileo Galilei, 150

Imitation, 13, 15–16, 126–137, 240

Gallaccini, Teofilo, 242, 245, 252

Imola, 154–155, 190

Gallo, Agostino, 194

Influence, 126, 135–137

Gehry, Frank, 305

Isometric drawing, 48

Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 305, 307 Gentile da Fabriano, 12

Jay, John, 282

Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 6

Jefferson, Thomas, 264–288

Baptistery, Florence, 6

art collection of, 279, 280

Commentarii, 4, 6–7

Italian travels, 280–288

Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 135, 196

Monticello, designs for, 266–274, 283

Gibbs, James, 266, 267, 268

President’s House, project for, 275–276

Giocondo, Fra Giovanni, 49 Giorgione da Castelfranco, 13 Giotto di Bondone, 3, 7, 11, 13, 15 campanile, Florence cathedral, 42, 44, 45

University of Virginia, designs for, 276–278 Jerusalem architectural monuments, 109, 110 Jones, Inigo, 264

frescoes, Assisi, 45 Gombrich, E. H., 5, 133

Kahn, Louis I., 310, 311

Gothic architecture, 30–46, 177, 202, 245

Kepler, Johannes, 150

drawing conventions of, 44–46, 48, 56, 61

Knight, Henry Gally, 101, 102

Gothic revival, 98, 114

Koolhaas, Rem, 316

Greece, 101–105, 115. See also Athens

Krautheimer, Richard, 313

Greeley, Horace, 111 Greenberg, Clement, 137

Lacan, Ernest, 111

Guarino da Verona, 8

Lacock Abbey, 97–98

Guicciardini, Francesco, 15

Landino, Cristoforo, 12, 19 Landscape, representations of, 103, 106, 107,

Hammer, Hans, 46–48

Latifundia, 188

Herodotus, 131

Latrobe, Benjamin, 276, 284

Hesiod, 195

Laurentinum, Pliny’s villa at, 194, 195

Hippocrates, 151

Le Corbusier, 316

Historia (Alberti), 11 Historiography, 131–132 architecture, 120–121, 225 (see also Documentary photography) art, 2–20, 128 (see also Periodization) Hoban, James, 275 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 127, 128, 193

322

144, 186–191, 206, 207

Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 111

Villa “Les Terrasses,” Garches, 298, 299 Le Gray, Gustave, 107 Leonardo da Vinci, ix–x, 12, 13, 15, 29, 68–91, 132, 135, 137, 144–171, 177, 308 anatomical drawings, 58, 68, 82, 145, 150–152, 168–171 Annunciation, 168

chaos, drawing of, 158

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 15, 132

churches, studies for, 60, 68–87, 90–91

Machines, drawings of, 47–48, 49, 86, 89, 90, 153–154, 301, 302

drawing techniques, 144–149, 167–171 flower studies, 146–149

Maderno, Carlo, 255

hydraulic studies, 157–160

Manetti, Antonio di Tuccio, 50

landscape drawing, 144, 191

Maniera (Vasari), 13, 16

Last Supper, 82

Mannerism, 13, 19

machines, drawings of, 86, 89, 90, 153–154

Mantegna, Andrea, 13, 23n23

Madonna and Child with a Cat, 162, 163

Marani, Pietro, 86

Madonna and St. Anne with the Infant Christ

Marano, villa at, 202 Marly-le-Roi, 277 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis), 193

preaching theater, study for, 73, 75–76

Marville, Charles, 111

Romorantin, designs for, 82

Masaccio (Tommaso di Giovanni Guidi), 15

St. Jerome, 86

Maser

Treatise on Painting, 162–163

Villa Barbaro, 203, 204, 219, 222, 250, 252

Leoni, Giacomo, 268, 275, 276

Mason’s lodges, medieval, 45

Le Secq, Henri, 107, 112, 114

McKim, Mead and White, 277

Libeskind, Daniel, 316

Medici family, 19, 197, 210.

License, 179, 225, 227, 259–260. See also Capriccio Linnaeus, Carolus (Carl von Linné), 120 Lippi, Fra Filippo, 12

See also Florence: Medici Chapel Medieval revival, 114, 116 Meledo Villa Trissino (project), 206, 258

Lissitzky, El, 302, 304

Mestral, O., 107

Lithography, 118

Michelangelo Buonarroti, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18–

Liturgy, Roman, 69, 76 Livy (Titus Livius), 128, 131, 132

19, 130, 134, 135, 137, 177–178, 179, 240, 295

Lollio, Alberto, 194

Doni Holy Family, 162

Lomazzo, Gian Paolo, 177

Medici Chapel, Florence, 162, 179

Lonedo

Porta Pia, Rome, 179, 252

Villa Godi, 246 Lonigo Rocca Pisana, 210–211 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 7 Lorrain, Claude, 103

San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini, Rome, 308, 309 San Lorenzo, Florence, 87, 89 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 304 Resor House, 304, 305 Milan, 283

Lotz, Wolfgang, 28–29, 56

cathedral, 45–46, 68, 284

Luvigliano

Portinari Chapel, 84

Villa dei Vescovi, 200, 201

San Lorenzo, 84 Index

and St. John, 164–167 moti, representation of, 155–157

323

Santa Maria delle Grazie, 82 Milizia, Francesco, 250 Mimesis, 4–7, 9, 17, 126, 132. See also Imitation Missions Héliographiques, 107

influence on later centuries, 264–272, 275–277, 278 Loggia del Capitaniato, Vicenza, 227, 251, 252

Misura (Vasari), 16

Palazzo I. Porto, Vicenza, 29

Models, architectural, 295

Palazzo Thiene, Vicenza, 241

Moholy, Lucia, 120

Palazzo Valmarana, Vicenza, 227, 250, 258

Monet, Claude, 168

I quattro libri dell’architettura, 177, 178, 179,

Monticello plantation, 266–274, 283

180, 199, 206, 207, 209, 239–241, 243,

Morandi, Giorgio, 20

244, 255, 258, 264, 266, 268, 278

Morgan, Dr. John, 279

Redentore, Venice, 248, 249, 250, 255, 257

Morris, Robert, 266, 272

San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 250

Mount Airy plantation, 265, 266

Villa Barbaro, Maser, 203, 219, 222, 250, 252

Mount Vernon plantation, 266

Villa Cornaro, Piombino Dese, 268, 269

Myron, 5

Villa Emo, Fanzolo, 192, 208, 209, 246 Villa Godi, Lonedo, 246

Nationalism, 97, 114 Natura naturata and natura naturans, 11, 12, 126

Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, 205, 206, 258, 267, 275

Nègre, Charles, 114

Villa Saraceno, Finale, 268, 270

Neoplatonism, 10, 130, 177, 180

Villa Sarego, Santa Sofia, 241

Nîmes, 116 Maison Carré, 284, 286

Villa Trissino, Meledo (project), 206, 258 Palladius, Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus, 193 Panofsky, Erwin, 15

Orders of architecture, 132, 180–181, 227, 237–239, 267

Paper, 31, 294–295 Papworth, J. B., 118

Orientalism, 115–117

Parchment, 40, 41, 294

Orthogonal drawing, in architecture, 28–29,

Paris, 111

33–35

Hôtel de Salm, 274, 286

Orthographia, 49, 70, 224

Louvre, 82, 111

Orvieto

Madeleine, 112–114

cathedral, 43, 44, 45

Notre-Dame, 112 Opéra, 111

Palestrina Temple of Fortuna Primigenia, 256, 257 Palladio, Andrea, 29, 56, 132, 177, 181, 201,

Prague cathedral, 198 Patrons, architects’ relations with, 222–223

206, 219, 222, 229, 236–259, 264,

Pedretti, Carlo, 78, 82, 87

266, 301

Pelacani, Biagio, 150

Convent of the Carità, Venice, 259

324

Parler, Peter, 44

Periodization, in art history, 3–5, 13–16, 18, 91

Perrault, Claude, 181, 245, 266

Pontano, Giovanni, 131

Perspective, 36, 49–50, 78, 144, 295

Prague

in architectural drawing, 28, 34, 36, 49–50,

cathedral, 36, 38, 44

53–56, 60–61, 70, 78, 82–84, 224,

Praz, Mario, 236

299–301

Printmaking techniques, 118

costruzione legittima, 78

Proportion, 176–177, 226–228, 245

perspectiva artificialis, 49, 68

Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus), 150

prospettiva, 144

Pugin, Augustus Charles, 98, 99

Perugino (Pietro Vannucci), 15, 134

Pugin, Augustus Welby North, 98

Peruzzi, Baldassarre, 29, 55, 179, 299 project for St. Peter, 60, 61 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 129, 130, 137

Quercia, Jacopo della, 7 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 7, 128, 129, 130, 134

Philostratus the Younger, 8 Photography, architectural, 51, 53, 96–121

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 12, 13, 15, 17, 20, 23n24, 133, 134, 137, 164, 301

134 Picturesque, 103, 116, 118

“Letter to Leo X,” 50–51, 53, 178

Piero della Francesca

St. Peter, Vatican, 179

De prospettiva pingendi, 56, 58, 60, 79

San Lorenzo, Florence, project for, 87

Pierre de Corbie, 31–32

Sant’Eligio degli Orefici, Rome, 76

Piombino Dese

Transfiguration, 17–18

Villa Cornaro, 268, 269 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 311, 315 Pisanello, Antonio, 8, 12, 18 Cat, 162 Pisano, Andrea, 7

Villa Madama, Rome, 178, 193–194 Reims cathedral, 28, 30, 31–41, 44, 298 Revett, Nicholas Antiquities of Athens, 101, 103, 104, 116

Pisano, Giovanni, 7

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 135

Plato, 126, 151, 164, 219, 229, 231n7.

Rhetoric, 126

See also Neoplatonism Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus) Historia naturalis, 4–5, 7, 12, 126, 129, 132, 136, 176, 233n31 Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius

classical, 3, 5–6, 7–8, 15–16, 127–129 Richardson, Henry Hobson, 118, 119 Rilievo, 91 Rimini San Francesco, 72, 178

Secundus), 193–194, 195–196,

Ritrarre (Danti), 134

198–199, 201, 203, 206, 212

Romanesque revival, 119

Poliziano, Angelo, 129–130, 131, 134, 195

Rome. See also Vatican

Pollock, Jackson, 20

Baths of Agrippa, 254, 257

Polycleitos, 5

Baths of Caracalla, 257

Pompeii, 49

Colosseum, 56 Index

Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco, 130–131,

325

marble plan of, 296 Mausoleum of Augustus, 294 Palazzo dei Tribunali, 82 Pantheon, 53–55, 79, 178, 252, 255, 257, 277, 294

Sansovino, Jacopo Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, 221 project for San Lorenzo, Florence, 87 Santa Sofia di Pedemonte Villa Sarego, 241

Porta Pia, 179, 252

Savonarola, Girolamo, 76

San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini, 308, 309

Scaenographia, 49, 60, 70, 224

San Pietro in Montorio, 76

Scale drawing, 31

Santa Costanza, 313, 315

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 180

Santa Maria del Popolo, 83 Sant’Eligio degli Orefici, 76 Temple of Nerva, 276 “Temple of Romulus,” 252, 253 Theater of Marcellus, 259 Villa Madama, 178, 193–194 Roncade Villa Giustinian, 200, 201

Idea della architettura universale, 206, 209–212, 278 Rocca Pisana, Lonigo, 210–211 Scharoun, Hans Philharmonic Hall, Berlin, 298 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 198, 199 Schofield, Richard, 71–72 Scholasticism, 149–150

Ruisdael, Jacob van, 103

Scientific observation, 145–151, 158, 171

Ruskin, John, 122n6

Sciographia, 225 Scott, Geoffrey, 180

St. Gall, abbey, 28

Scott, Sir Walter, 96

Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus), 128, 131

Second Empire style, 118

Salzmann, Auguste, 109, 110

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Elder, 129

Saminiati, Giovanni, 194

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger, 129

Sangallo, Antonio da, the Elder

Serlio, Sebastiano, 132

project for San Lorenzo, Florence, 87 Sangallo, Antonio da, the Younger, 29, 53, 56 Monte Moro presso Montefiascone, church project for, 56, 57 San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini, Rome, project for, 308, 309 Santo Spirito in Sassia, Vatican, 87 Sangallo, Giuliano da, 84

Tutte le opere d’architettura, 52, 53, 55, 56, 178–179, 180, 240, 278 Settefinestre, Roman villa at, 201, 202 Sforza, Ludovico, il Moro, 153 Soane, Sir John, 264 Société Héliographique, 108 Species (Cicero), 128

architectural drawings, 51, 53

Steichen, Edward, 120

project for San Lorenzo, Florence, 87

Stieglitz, Alfred, 120

Sanmicheli, Michele, 180

Stilus (Bembo), 130–131

Sansovino, Andrea

Strasbourg

project for San Lorenzo, Florence, 87

326

Regole generali di architettura, 237

cathedral, 44, 45

Stuart, James Antiquities of Athens, 101, 103, 104, 116 Style, 128

Vatican Cortile del Belvedere, 82 St. Peter, ix, 52, 53, 60, 61, 72, 76, 81, 82, 84, 178, 179

Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius, 131 Surveying, Roman, 186–192 Symmetry, 227, 245

Santo Spirito in Sassia, 87 Veneto, 190–191 Venice

Taccola, Mariano di Jacopo, 47

agricultural interests, 194, 198, 206–209, 212

Taegio, Bartolomeo, 194 Tafuri, Manfredo, ix, 221, 230n2, 250

Biblioteca Marciana, 221

Talbot, William Henry Fox, 96–98, 106

Convent of the Carità, 259

The Pencil of Nature, 97, 98

Redentore, 248, 249, 250, 255, 257

Sun Pictures of Scotland, 96

San Giorgio Maggiore, 250

Talbotype, 96, 110

traditional architectural style, 221–222, 223, 226, 246, 250, 255

Tallis, John, 110 Tayloe, Colonel, 266, 267

Verona

Thoenes, Christof, 49, 50, 53, 238, 239

gates, 180

Thucydides, 131

Theater, 257

Tibaldi, Pellegrino, 179

Veronese (Paolo Caliari), 203, 204, 218

Todi

Vesalius, Andreas, 82

Santa Maria della Consolazione, 85, 86

Vicenza Loggia del Capitaniato, 227, 251, 252

Toulon train shed, 108

Palazzo I. Porto, 29

Tourism, 115

Palazzo Thiene, 241

Trumbull, John, 279

Palazzo Valmarana, 227, 250, 258

Tschumi, Bernard, 316

Villa Rotonda, 205, 206, 258, 267, 275

Turner, J. M. W., 106 Tusci, Pliny’s villa at, 194, 195–196, 198, 199

Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da Regole delli cinque ordini d’architettura, 132, 180–181, 238, 239, 242, 278

Utilitas, 69, 176

Villa fructuaria, 201

Ut pictura poesis, 127

Villani, Filippo, 3–4, 5, 6 Villard de Honnecourt, 28–44, 296, 297

Valla, Lorenzo, 129

Villa rustica, 201

Van Rensselaer, Mrs. Schuyler, 118, 119

Villa urbana, 201

Varro, Marcus Terentius, 193, 194, 212

Vinci. See Leonardo da Vinci

Vasari, Giorgio

Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 39, 112 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 130, 195, 212

91, 128, 134, 136, 137, 164, 179, 224,

Vischer, Hermann, 56

225, 278

Vision, 144–149, 168 Index

Vite (various editions), 2–3, 5, 12, 13–20,

327

Vitellius, 150

Washington, George, 266

Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus

Washington, D.C.

Barbaro commentary on, 177, 219–229, 245, 257

President’s House, competition for, 275–276

basilica, Fano, 242

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 278

De architectura, 49, 60, 69, 70, 132, 155,

Wordsworth, William, 96

157, 176–177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 199, 237, 239, 245, 259, 266, 299 Volpaia, Bernardo della, 53, 54

Zeuxis, 5, 9, 127 Zocchi, Giuseppe, 186, 197, 279 Zuccaro, Federico, 177

Warnke, Martin, 23n23

328