Origins, Imitation, Conventions

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

Origins, Imitation, Conventions

REPRESENTATION IN T HE VISUAL ARTS

JAMES S. ACKERMAN
 © 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 2001044155

vignettes by Jill Slosburg-Ackerman

For Anne, Tony, Sarah, and Jesse
This page intentionally left blank
 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’ en-
gagement 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 represen-
tation 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
dependence on preceding modes. Thus the term avoids, I hope, the strictures of Michel Fou-
cault and later Manfredo Tafuri (whom I regard as the outstanding architectural historian of

Preface
our time) against the presumption that a historical event can be shown to have had its ori-
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 architec-
tural 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

ix
 these astonishing graphic inventions had been achieved, they immediately became con-
ventions 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 wher-
ever 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 es-
says 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 in-
vestigations (which in some cases proved to be a detriment), and, like his contemporaries,
he pursued ancient themes in figural studies. His anatomical, mechanical, and cartograph-
ical 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 com-
munication between the artist and the viewer, but they are both more universal (being read-
able 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.

xi
This page intentionally left blank
Origins, Imitation, Conventions
This page intentionally left blank
 On the Origins of
Art History and Criticism

ONE
 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 far-
reaching dependence on ancient antecedents. But the achievement of a historical con-
sciousness 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 tech-
nology. 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 pur-
suing 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 rec-
ognized 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

2
a nascent sense of individual and regional style that became the foundation of an ex-
ceptional hypothesis, that of a period style. These represent two distinct levels of ambi-
tion. 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 forma-
tion 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 fourteenth-
century 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-

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

tonly straying far from the likeness of nature. . . . After John, the road to new things now lying
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

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

3
 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, stimu-
lated by Giotto, who consolidated the salvation of the art. The whole sequence is pre-
sented 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 em-
powerment—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 equiv-
alent to scholars, but that they appear in a chronicle of contemporary events, which im-
plies 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 sur-
passes 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 vo-
cabulary for the discussion of painting and sculpture, which Lorenzo Ghiberti appro-
priated 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 na-
ture, 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 pre-
decessors 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 forma-
tion 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 es-
sentially 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 subse-
quently 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 rec-
ognized 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
Zeuxis and Parrhasios, the former exhibited a picture of grapes so convincing that birds
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

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

5
 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 bird-
brained about the potentialities of visual art.

Such an unsophisticated representation of the purpose of painting and sculpture suf-

ficed for most early Renaissance commentaries on the visual arts. This was not only be-
cause 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 ac-
cepted 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

6
Ghiberti did not arrange Book II in a strictly chronological order (he discusses Ambro-
gio 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 pro-
vides 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 demon-
strate 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 sig-
nals progress; it is evidence of individual talent, skill, and learning.9 Though he men-
tions 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—encour-
aged, 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
of his vocation, its need of the kind of learning and theory he is seeking to exemplify in
the Commentarii. In the first book he often adds glosses to Pliny’s account attributing to
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

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.

7
 Humanist contemporaries of Ghiberti, most of whom were at best dilettantes of the vi-
sual arts, nevertheless began to use the vocabulary of ancient rhetoric to establish a crit-
ical 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 proper-

ties 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 sig-
nificant 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-

8
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 mime-
sis 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 beau-
tiful 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 se-

lected 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 ef-
fort is required to attain it, it remains a mystery how one identifies either the most beau-
tiful bodies or their excellent parts.
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

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:

9
 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 fac-

ulty 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 col-
league 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 im-
ages 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.

10
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 pas-
sage, separate from the one quoted above, Alberti indicates that something more is in-
volved 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 crit-
icism, 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 ef-
fectively 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 per-
spective. 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-
gressing regularly from darkness to light.

It results from Alberti’s propositions that as a result of the selection process and har-
monic construction of surfaces, a work of art can be more perfect than nature. Jan Bial-o-
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

stocki 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

11
 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 com-
mentary 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 com-

position, 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 ex-

ponent of design and of great relief; he was a lover of the difficulties of the art, and of fore-

shortenings, 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 in-
debted 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, fos-
tered almost no theoretical activity. Leonardo’s extensive writings were still based on me-
dieval 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 re-
produced, and I say this to refute such painters as want to improve upon the things of
nature.”24

12
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 an-
cients 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 na-
turale. 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 de-
lightful passion). The same is true of visual art; Leonardo, Mantegna, Raphael, Mi-
chelangelo, 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 recog-
nizes each to be perfect in his style [stilo].”

The extension of stilo (and, in the following paragraph, stile) from the discussion of lit-
erature 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

Maybe in ages of supreme self-confidence, art serves as its own theory. In any case, it
was Giorgio Vasari, writing long after the passing of the period he represented as hav-
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

ing achieved perfection, who first drew together the scattered perceptions of the fif-
teenth 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

13
 “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 tech-
nique, 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 per-

fection.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 reac-
tion 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 Gior-
gio 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 repre-

14
sent a history of art. A number of modern studies of Vasari, among them Erwin Panof-
sky’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 con-
temporary, 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 Guic-
ciardini in the generation preceding Vasari’s.33 In any event, Vasari did not actually pro-
pose 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 gen-
eration, 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,
Greek oratory is seen as a sequence of masters who formed schools based on their spe-
cial style (genus or stilus dicendi). Referring to the period between Pericles and Isocrates,
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

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.

15
 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 videa-
tur”), 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 innova-
tion as an inspired adaptation, by virtue of its capacity to turn a growing critical so-
phistication 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—re-
mained 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 judg-

ment which, when formed in the mind, may then be expressed by the hands and is called di-

segno. 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 stan-
dards, 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 hav-
ing conquered them and to contribute to the progress of art. As Alpers pointed out, ev-
ery artist has the obligation to do this.

Nonetheless, although Vasari is sensitive to individual style—as suggested in the state-

ment 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 characteri-
zations 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 nar-
rative expression (which incidentally does not figure in his five basic rules). These en-
comiastic 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
Raphael.

Ekphrastic descriptions emphasize the action and emotion of the protagonists rather
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

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

17
 torment in his flesh, in his veins and in the pulses poisoned by the spirit’s malignity; with pal-

lid 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 mis-

ery. . . . 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 pas-
sage 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 ac-
count of some of the features of the third style as offering a “wealth of beautiful gar-
ments, 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 be-
yond 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 Ari-
osto, Vasari referred to Michelangelo as divino, even divinissimo.42 In passages cited

18
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 es-
cape 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 con-
ceived without certain steps in critical sophistication, the effect of which was to formu-
late 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 exter-
nal appearances that had to be emulated; that of Chrysoloras and Alberti, who sug-
gested 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 de-
vised, like his own, in terms of the succession of works of great artists.

We are indebted to Vasari not for the specifics of the historical system, but for conceiv-
ing that art could have a history of a different kind from that of the ancient and medieval
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism

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-

19
 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 chal-
lenge 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.

20
 NOTES
1 For the stages in the development of a con-
cept of individual style in the early Renais-
sance, 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 del-
l’Arte dell’Università degli Studi di Trieste 4
(1955), 5–15; Martin Warnke, “Praxisfelder
der Kunsttheorie,” Idea: Jahrbuch der Ham-
burger 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 experi-
ence as an artist) with historical narrative; the
thesis is based on an interpretation of a pas-
sage 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 Car-
dinal Farnese, Paolo Giovio, and other human-
ists: 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. Gom-
brich, “Vasari’s ‘Lives’ and Cicero’s Brutus,”
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti-
tutes 23 (1960), 309ff. Cicero effectively
equates truth to nature (ad veritatem) with
beauty (his adjective is pulchra); Pliny does not
refer to a uniform standard of beauty: Natural
History 34.38. See Leonard Barkan’s penetrat-
ing 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 achieve-
ment as a historian and critic in Unearthing the
Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Mak-
ing of Renaissance Culture (New Haven,
1999), 65–117.
4 Pliny, Natural History 34.17.38.
5 Ibid. 35.31.65.
6 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: Pro-
legomena zu einer künftigen Ausgabe,”
Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der K. K.
Zentralkommission 4 (1910), 105ff.; Leonardo
Olschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen Lite-
ratur, I: Die Literatur der Technik und der ange-
wandten Wissenschaften vom Mittelalter bis
zur Renaissance (Heidelberg, 1919), 88ff.
7 The bid was not entirely successful; for ex-
ample, the third book of the Commentaries
has been shown to be a collage of unac-
knowledged 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 Kom-
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism
mentar Lorenzo Ghibertis (Weinheim, 1988).
8 This was observed by Janice Hurd, “The Char-
acter of Ghiberti’s Treatise on Sculpture,” in
Lorenzo Ghiberti nel suo tempo: Atti del Con-
vegno internazionale di studi, 2 vols. (Flor-
ence, 1980), 302. Peter Murray, however, in
the same publication (“Ghiberti e il suo se-
condo Commentario,” 284f.), refers to “quel
21
 senso di sviluppo storico che comincia ad
emergere,” without offering evidence.
9 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”; Commen-
tarii, ¶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 ad-
mirable translation (Italian Art, 1400–1500:
Sources and Documents, 2d ed. [Evanston,
1991], 84).
10 The scientific and theoretical sources cited in
Ghiberti’s third book are ancient and me-
dieval; he does not refer to Alberti’s “inven-
tion” of artificial perspective (described in De
pictura, 1436), though he must have used it in
the construction of panels in the second Bap-
tistery doors.
11 Quoted in Baxandall, Giotto, 93 (translation);
156 (Latin).
12 Ibid., 103ff.; 163ff.
13 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 refer-
ences, see Reallexikon für Antike und Chris-
tentum (Stuttgart, 1959), 4:922ff.; its use to
describe works of art is exemplified in the
Imagines ascribed to Philostratus. See Re-
bekah Smick, “Vivid Thinking: Word and
Image in Descriptive Techniques of the
Renaissance,” in Payne, Kuttner, and Smick,
eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters, 159–173.
14 An instance of a subtler evaluation is Leonello
d’Este’s discrimination of contrasts between
portraits of him by Pisanello and Bellini, pub-
lished by Baxandall, “A Dialogue on Art from
the Court of Leonello d’Este,” Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1973),
325ff.
15 Alberti, De pictura, 3.56; translation from Leon
Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture,
ed. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), 98f. For Ci-
cero’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.
22
16 Alberti, De re aedificatoria, ed. Giovanni Or-
landi (Milan, 1966), 9.5.813; English transla-
tion from On the Art of Building in Ten Books,
trans. Joseph Rykwert et al. (Cambridge,
Mass., 1988), 302.
17 Cicero, Orator 2.8–9.
18 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 intro-
duced the later Greek rhetorical tradition into
Italy.
19 Baxandall, Giotto, 82; 151f.
20 Alberti, De pictura, 2.35; translation by
Grayson from Alberti, On Painting and On
Sculpture, 73.
21 Jan Bial-ostocki, “The Renaissance Conception
of Nature and Antiquity,” in Acts of the Twen-
tieth International Congress of Art History
(Princeton, 1963), 19–30. He cites (p. 20) Plo-
tinus, Enneads 5.8.1: “If somebody does not
esteem the arts because they imitate nature, it
should be said first that nature herself imi-
tates. 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.”
22 “Fu Masaccio optimo imitatore di natura, di
gran rilevo universale, buono componitore et
puro sanza ornato, perche solo si decte all’imi-
tatione del vero, et al rilevo delle figure: fu
certo buono et prospectivo quanto altro di
quegli tempi, et di gran facilita nel fare, es-
sendo 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.
23 Landino’s critical approach, and some of his
vocabulary, were adopted by the author of the
much more extensive text Il libro di Antonio
Billi, most recently edited by F. Benedettucci
(Anzio, 1991), who dates the ms. 1506–1530.
The definition of individual style was not ex-
clusively the achievement of intellectuals.
Martin Warnke (“Praxisfelder der Kunsttheo-
rie”) discusses a number of instances from le-
gal 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 mat-
ter 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 little-
known 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 pic-
tores semper cognoscitur manu cuius sit ali-
qua 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 hu-
manist theorists did not want to make much
of the distinctiveness of artists’ “hand” be-
cause they associated it with merely physical
workshop activity, as against the more ele-
vated 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 Man-
tegna, 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.” (Pub-
lished by Clifford M. Brown and Anna Maria
Lorenzoni, Isabella d’Este and Lorenzo da
Pavia: Documents for the History of Art and
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 Vo-
cabulary of Creation, Inspiration, and Genius
in the Visual Arts,” Viator 8 (1977), 347–398.
Had I sufficient space, this account would in-
clude 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 com-
parable to that of Landino.
24 Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato (Vatican, Cod. Urb.
Lat. 1270), fol. 133r; ed. Heinrich Ludwig (Vi-
enna, 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 sig-
nificant 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 ac-
count 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
On the Origins of Art History and Criticism
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. Ra-
makus, eds., Essays Presented to Myron P.
Gilmore, 2 vols. (Florence, 1978), 2:84n. The
most recent and thorough study of the doc-
ument is John Shearman’s “Castiglione’s
Portrait of Raphael,” Mitteilungen des kunst-
23
 historischen Institutes in Florenz 38 (1994),
69–97.
25 Baldassare Castiglione, Il cortegiano, 1.37, 38.
See David Summers, The Judgment of Taste
(Cambridge, 1987), 317–320.
26 See Willibald Sauerländer, “From ‘Stilus’ to
Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion,” Art
History 6 (1988), 257–259.
27 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 chia-
mare 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 vec-
chiaia does not imply the old age of the first
style but its retention of medieval—especially
Byzantine—traits. The development of a his-
torical consciousness among writers on art has
been discussed by E. H. Gombrich, “The Re-
naissance Conception of Artistic Progress and
Its Consequences,” in his Norm and Form:
Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London,
1966), 1–10.
28 Vasari, Vite (1906 ed.), 4:7: proemio to Part III.
29 Again from ibid., 2:95f.: proemio to Part II.
30 Ibid., 5:385 (life of Valerio Vicentino). Eugenio
Battisti identified this passage as indicating the
source of Vasari’s statement on the future col-
lapse of art (Battisti, “La critica a Michelangelo
dopo il Vasari,” Rinascimento 1 [1956], 141).
31 E.g., Erwin Panofsky, “The First Page of Gior-
gio Vasari’s ‘Libro,’” in his Meaning in the Vi-
sual 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 life-
time, 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 dis-
cover therein four stages or phases. The first
24
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 hun-
dred years up to Augustus during which they
subjected the whole world; this is the youth of
the Empire and, as it were, its vigorous matu-
rity. 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. Inter-
est 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 exten-
sively discussed.
Zygmunt Waz·biński, “L’idée de l’histoire dans
la première et la seconde édition des Vies de
Vasari,” in Vasari storiografo e artista (Flor-
ence, 1976), 1–26, has shown that the
“historical realism” of Machiavelli and
Guicciardini, particularly in incorporating
archival research, documentation, and inter-
views of individuals who recalled past events,
influenced Vasari’s rewriting of the Vite be-
tween 1550 and 1568. The essay demon-
strates the role of Vincenzo Borghini in
influencing Vasari’s method of documenting
the past; it is based on Waz·biński’s book Vasari
i jego dzieje “Sztuk rysunku” uwagi nad
geneza nowozytnej biografiki artystycznej
 (Vasari et son histoire des arts de dessin à la
source de la biographie artistique moderne)
(Toruń, 1972, with French summary), and
a work I have not found, also in Polish but
cited by the author as: Vasari et l’historiogra-
phie artistique moderne (Warsaw, 1975).
34 Cicero, De oratore 2.22: “Non potuisset ac-
cidere ut unum genus esset omnium, nisi
aliquem sibi proponerent ad imitandum. Con-
secuti sunt hos Critias, Theramenes, Lysias.
Multa Lysiae scripta sunt, nonnulla Critiae, de
Teramene audimus; omnes etiam tum retine-
bant illum Periclis sucum; sed erant paulo
uberiore filo.”
35 Ibid., 2.90f.: “dicendi ratio voluntasque
cuiusque aetatis.” In 91 he asks “what [be-
sides imitation] has determined the special
styles of oratory which characterize each suc-
cessive generation?” (“Quid enim causae
censetis esse, cur aetates extulerint singulae
singula prope genera dicendi?”)
36 Vasari, Vite, 1:168f.: “padre delle tre arti nos-
tre . . . cava di molte cose un giudizio univer-
sale; simile a una forma ovvero idea di tutte le
cose della natura, la quale è singolarissima
nelle sue misure. . . . E perchè da questa co-
gnizione 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 dichia-
razione del concetto che si ha nell’animo, e
di quello che altri si è nella mente immaginato
e fabbricato nell’idea.”
37 See Svetlana Alpers, “‘Ekphrasis’ and Aes-
thetic Attitudes in Vasari’s ‘Lives’,” Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23
(1960), 190–215.
38 Vasari, Vite, 4:11–12; proemio to Part III: “stu-
diando 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.”
39 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 gri-
dando e stralunando gli occhi, mostra il suo
patire dentro nella carne, nelle vene, e ne’
polsi contaminati dalla malignità dello spirto, e
con pallida incarnazione fa quel gesto forzato
e pauroso. Questa figura sostiene un vecchio,
che . . . mostra, con lo alzare le ciglia ed in-
crespar 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 inginoc-
chiata 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 co-
mune 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 His-
tory of Art? (Chicago, 1987).
42 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso (1516),
canto XXXIII, 2.4: “Michel, più che divino, an-
gelo.” Other attributions of divinity to Michel-
angelo 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 epi-
taph 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
25
This page intentionally left blank
The Origins of Architectural Drawing
in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

TWO
 Part I: Villard de Honnecourt at Reims Cathedral

Among the Reims drawings of Villard are several that reflect a milestone in the forma-
tion 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 ele-
vation 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 conven-
tions 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 Al-
berti’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

28
perspectival representation was the affair of painters, that architects had to do their draw-
ings orthogonally so that measurements could be taken from them. Lotz identified draw-
ings 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 ver-
tical line separates an elevation of the facade from an elevation of the court and section
of the side wing, revealing the relationship of the parts of the building to one another.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

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.

29
 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 un-
derstandable 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

30
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 draw-
ings (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 de-
velop ideas in sketches or put design solutions in graphic form. They could use parch-
ment, 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
parchment in the early thirteenth century by the Picard draftsman Villard de Hon-
necourt. The 63 pages of this album, from which at least 8 sheets have been lost, are de-

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

voted 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 al-
bum is closer to that of fifteenth-century and later compilations of machinery and mil-
itary equipment than to architectural treatises.

31
 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 mon-
uments, 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 re-
veal 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.

32
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 walk-
ways 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 repre-
sentation 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 mir-
ror 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
not show in an orthogonal elevation. The flying buttresses are indicated only by a curi-
ous pair of back-to-back L-shaped elements that presumably support the lower flyer;

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

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

33
 dessinai; par ce que je l’aimais mieux.”12 It shows more of the framing than the full ele-
vation, in which the nave piers incorrectly hide the edges of the window. The enfram-
ing 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 prin-
cipal 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 ele-
vations in fig. 2.2, that of fig. 2.3 must have been made from the building itself, a judg-
ment 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 con-
ventions 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 or-
thogonal 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 el-
ements, 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 sup-
ports 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).

34
 The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
2.4 Villard de Honnecourt, Reims Cathedral, interior of choir. Paris,
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 con-
forms less well with visual experience, and cannot be done effectively without a meas-
ured 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 reced-
ing 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

35
 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 but-
tress 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 pro-
posals 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 pas-
sage shown by Villard, but it runs without interruption by cornices to the base of its cap-
ping, 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 capi-
tals 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 architec-
tural figuration revealed in the paired elevations.

A final Reims sheet, p. 63 (fig. 2.8), illustrates major and minor piers and a series of hor-
izontal sections through supports that were taken from templates (Villard calls them

36
 The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

2.5 Villard de Honnecourt, Reims Cathedral,

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

37
 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.

38
 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
Dictionnaire raisonné d’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1875), 2:318.

39

2.8 Villard de Honnecourt, Reims
Cathedral, pier sections and
molding templates. Paris,
Bibliothèque Nationale,
19093, p. 63.
40
molles); the text states (in modernized French), “Ici
vous pouvez voir l’un des piliers de la tour de la cathé-
drale 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 in-
diquées 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 partic-
ular interest is the demonstration of the capacity to
represent on one plane cuts at several levels.
The hypothesis that Villard copied the orthogonal el-
evations 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 draw-
ings. Since they would not have been done to scale,
and would probably also have been done on parch-
ment, and hence have been small, it is unlikely that
they were destined for use by builders. It is also un-
likely 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-
 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 sug-
gested that the suitability of these conventions of representation to High Gothic style
suggests that they were developed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.14

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Further evidence that Reims was an incubator for the maturation of architectural draw-
ing and that Villard would have had models is provided by the survival of two proj-
ect 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 obit-
uary of the chapter, but, because they had been first incised with a stylus, their essen-
tial 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.

41
 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.

42
 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,
inv. nr. Q2 and Q3.

43
 In the century following the Reims drawings, Gothic masters developed an elegant tech-
nique 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 cen-
tury (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 project-
ing elements in subjective perspective.18 For example, the consoles supporting the cor-
nice 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, exe-
cuted 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 ac-
companying descriptive text.20

Villard’s depiction of the Reims apse (fig. 2.4) seems to be the only surviving pre-
Renaissance 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 follow-
ing 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

44
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 or-
thogonal graphic image. The use of perspectival representation and modeling with light
and shadow would have been poorly suited to conveying the character of Gothic build-
ings. The large elevation drawings for Strasbourg Cathedral document the refinement
of the orthogonal elevation. For such late Gothic designs, with their exquisitely thin sur-
face elements, this technique would have been mandatory.

But the contemporary Italian designer of an ecclesiastical facade pursued entirely dif-
ferent 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 restora-
tion removed the overdrawing of earlier restorers and revealed lamentable deteriora-
tion). 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
large Assisi narrative frescoes.22 The Orvieto drawings too can be called pictorial; they
indicate a richly colored and historiated surface and they even adopt the basic shape of

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

contemporary altarpiece frames. I recall the proposition of my first teacher, Henri Focil-
lon, 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 Vale-
rio 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

45
 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

46
 2.14 Hans Hammer, copies of machine drawings,
late fifteenth century. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog-August
Bibliothek, sketchbook, f. 8r.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

number of illustrations of construction machines, primarily hoists. This page is partic-
ularly 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 re-
semble 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 cathe-
dral 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 sec-
tions inadequate guides to carpenters assigned to build them, and a flexible kind of ax-
onometric view, as in the drawings on the right and lower left of the sheet, provided the

47
 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 con-
nected to the hoisting ropes. I see this sheet as a record of the changing graphic con-
ventions 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 in-
stances 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 tran-
sition from one to the other is documented on a single sheet, and from this time for-
ward northern architectural drawing is progressively invaded by Italian pictorial
perspective.

48
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, be-
cause 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 tech-
nical 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 Quat-
trocento by the text regarded as the ultimate authority throughout the Renaissance, that
of Vitruvius. Vitruvius described three types of architectural drawing, the plan (ichno-
graphia), elevation (orthographia), and scaenographia which was a version of perspec-
tive.27 Scaenographia he defined as “frontis et laterum abscendentium adumbratio ad
circinique centrum omnium linearum responsus” (the facade and receding side and
correspondence of all lines to the center of the circle).

The Renaissance understanding of this ambiguous passage has only recently been con-

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

vincingly 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 un-
derstood 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

49
 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 build-
ing, architects must use only images in which all advancing or receding parts are pro-
jected 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 ap-
pear 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 ele-
ments, and subjective-perspective views were ubiquitous.29

Thoenes suggests that Alberti’s position is actually consonant with—or rather, a rever-
sal of—his method of perspective construction as described in Della pittura, which com-
bines 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 as-
sume 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 draw-

ing; second the exterior wall with its ornaments, and third the interior wall, also with its orna-

ments. . . . Indeed, with these three means one can minutely examine all the parts of every

building, inside and out.32

50
2.16 Giuliano da Sangallo, Roman tombs, before 1514. Vatican, Codice Vaticano Barberiniano Latino 4424, fol. 37r.

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Raphael’s addition of the interior elevation to Alberti’s pair does not alter the essential pre-
scription—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 unra-

tionalized 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

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 Al-
berti recommended. But a representation like this is in some ways superior to the pho-
tograph: 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 proto-
romantic 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 rep-
resenting orthogonally in one image the interior and exterior of a round structure ac-
cording 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
Bramante’s original drawing for the cupola, perhaps from 1505–1506,35 and thus nearly
contemporary with Giuliano’s drawing. If this is so, which is likely, it may have been the

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

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 San-
gallo 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

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-
adigmatic example of subjective perspective.

Some twenty years later, Baldassarre Peruzzi drew, also freehand, strictly orthogonal

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

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 re-
cession 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.

55
 The designers who overcame the pull of perspective in representing receding and pro-
jecting 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 con-
struction 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 pro-
jection by as many parallel lines as there are changes in plane.38 It is an engaging para-
dox that Piero’s advanced investigation of painters’ perspective should have provided
architects with the capacity to overcome their addiction to subjective perspective. Pal-
ladio 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 cen-
tury. Hermann Vischer, as Lotz showed,39 visited Rome in 1515–1516 and made draw-
ings 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 repre-
sent its curving exterior orthogonally and simply drew it as flat. But Albrecht Dürer pro-
vided 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 cen-
tury, 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
 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,
and section, ca. 1526. Florence, Uffizi, Arch. 173.

57
 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 rep-
resentation was made by Leonardo in the discipline of human anatomy, but it is not sur-
prising, 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).

58
 The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
2.22 Albrecht Dürer, project for elevation and plan of a fort.
From Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett,
Schloss und Flechten (1527), unnumbered plate.

59
 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 geomet-
rically constructed in the strict sense, a base line was drawn first to mark the intersec-
tion 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 devel-
oped 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 to-
ward 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 ele-
ments that had already been constructed but shown here according to preceding de-
signs. 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 thir-
teenth-century northern Europe failed to leave a legacy that would permit early Renais-
sance 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 eleva-
tions to be given relief by the simulation in wash of light and shade. The second was that

60
2.23 Baldassarre Peruzzi, project for continuing construction at St. Peter in the Vatican, in bird’s-eye perspective,
1534–1535. Florence, Uffizi, 2Ar.

figural artists of the early Renaissance were intent on achieving greater naturalism by the

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

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 ele-
ments and thought of facades as screens, while the Italian architects conceived build-
ings 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’an-
tica style. Perhaps my interpretation of Italian late medieval and Renaissance architec-
tural representation as pictorial, in contrast to the linear emphasis of northern Gothic
images, could lead to an expansion of our critical perspective on Renaissance architec-
ture.

61
 N OT E S
An earlier version of part I was published in
memory of Carolyn Kolb.
1 Wolfgang Lotz, “Das Raumbild in der Ar-
chitekturzeichnung der italienischen Renais-
sance,” Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen
Institutes in Florenz 7 (1956), 193–226; En-
glish version in Lotz, Studies in Italian Renais-
sance Architecture (Cambridge, Mass., 1977),
1–65.
2 Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria (pub-
lished 1490), 2.1 (ed. Giovanni Orlandi [Milan,
1966], 99): “Inter pictoris atque architecti per-
scriptione hoc interest, quod ille prominentias
ex tabula monstrare umbris et lineis et angulis
comminutis elaborat, architectus spretis um-
bris prominentias istis ex fundamenti descrip-
tione 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 di-
mensionibus annotari.” Cf. the alternative
reading of the last phrase in Leon Battista Al-
berti: 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.”
3 The perspective employed, almost never geo-
metrically projected, was subjective and vari-
able. In an orthogonal drawing, every part is
projected onto a single plane so that the dis-
tance from the observer is not a factor. Only in
this way can a drawing be made to scale.
4 Lotz cited figure 2.20 (Uffizi A173) as one ex-
ample, 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 ex-
panded by Christof Thoenes, “Vitruv, Alberti,
Sangallo,” in A. Beyer et al., eds., Hülle und
Fülle: Festschrift für Tilmann Buddensieg
(Alfter, 1993), 565–584.
5 Facsimiles of Villard’s album with commen-
tary: H. R. Hahnloser, Villard de Honnecourt:
62
Kritische Gesamtausgabe des Bauhütten-
buches, ms. fr. 19093 der pariser Nationalbi-
bliothek (Vienna, 1935); A. Erlande-Branden-
burg 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, Vil-
lard de Honnecourt: La pensée technique au
XIIIe siècle et sa communication (Paris, 1991);
Carl F. Barnes, “Le problème Villard de Hon-
necourt,” in Roland Recht, ed., Les bâtisseurs
des cathédrales gothiques (Strasbourg, 1989),
209–223.
6 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 Archi-
tect’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, “Rittzeichnun-
gen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Architek-
turzeichnungs im Mittelalter,” Architectura 19
(1989), 36–61; H. Koepf, Die gotischen Plan-
risse der wiener Sammlungen (Vienna, 1969).
7 Parchment is also inhospitable to the develop-
ment of scale drawing, as it may be affected
by environmental conditions.
8 See the studies on the Reims palimpsest by
Robert Branner and Stephen Murray cited in
note 6.
9 Inscription on p. 29 of the album. There is also
a generic plan of the Cistercian church type
on p. 28.
10 Branner, “Villard de Honnecourt, Reims,” ar-
 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 ex-
plain how they would have been used. Yet ev-
idence 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.
11 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 win-
dows, but, at the time of Villard’s drawing, the
same may have been intended for the
clerestory as well.
12 Translation into modern French from Erlande-
Brandenburg et al., Carnet, 122. The conclud-
ing phrase of the original reads “por ço l’amai
jo miex.”
13 From ibid., 126.
14 Branner, “Villard de Honnecourt, Reims,” em-
phasized that Gothic drawings corresponded
effectively with the style of the architecture.
15 See Branner, “Drawings from a Thirteenth-
Century Architect’s Shop,” and Murray,
“Gothic Façade Drawings.”
16 On the Strasbourg drawings, see Recht, ed.,
Les bâtisseurs, catalogue, part III, C1–C15,
381–404.
17 R. Liess, “Der Rahnsche Riss A des freiburger
Münsterturms und seine strassburger
Herkunft,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins
für Kunstwissenschaft 44 (1990), 7ff.
18 Marvin Trachtenberg, The Campanile of Flor-
ence Cathedral (New York, 1971), 3–20.
19 See Harald Keller, “Die Risse der orvietaner
Domopera und die Anfänge der Bildhauer-
zeichnung,” in Festschrift Wilhelm Pinder zum
sechzigsten Geburtstage (Leipzig, 1938),
195–222; more recently Antje Middeldorf
Kosegarten, Die Domfassade in Orvieto (Mu-
nich and Berlin, 1997), 37ff.
20 Published with a valuable commentary by
Franklin Toker, “Gothic Architecture by Re-
mote 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.
21 Antonio di Vincenzo’s late fourteenth-century
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.
22 Another drawing related to the cathedral of
Florence is one by Giovanni di Ghirardo, a hu-
manist rather than an architect, showing a
proposal, dated by a payment of 1426, for the
plan and section of the cupola and a geomet-
rical 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 Ar-
chitetural Historians 18 (1959), 11–20.
23 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 con-
struction with a determinate “vanishing”
point and distance point.
24 Valerio Ascani, “I disegni architettonici at-
tribuiti ad Antonio di Vincenzo,” Arte me-
dievale 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.
The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
25 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 Ham-
mer’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.
26 See Paolo Galuzzi, ed., Prima di Leonardo: La
cultura delle macchine a Siena nel Rinasci-
mento (Milan, 1991). Technical drawings in
general are discussed by Samuel Y. Edgerton,
The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry: Art and
63
 Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), esp. chap. 5.
27 Vitruvius, De architectura 1.2.2. Why Vitruvius
placed that point at the center of a circle is not
clear.
28 Facsimile edition with translation and com-
mentary 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 Gio-
condo’s 1511 edition of Vitruvius. The appear-
ance of such an image there certifies the
assumption that this is the way Vitruvius’s
scaenographia was understood in the Renais-
sance. See also Maria Teresa Bartoli, “Or-
thographia, 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 Rep-
resentation of Architecture (Milan, 1994),
101–121.
29 According to Thoenes, “Vitruv, Alberti, San-
gallo,” 566, Alberti’s passage does not repre-
sent 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’An-
cona’s drawing of Hagia Sophia in Constan-
tinople; see C. Smith, “Ciriaco d’Ancona’s
Seven Drawings of Santa Sofia,” Art Bulletin
69 [1987], 16–32).
30 Alberti, De pictura, 1.19–20, in Leon Battista
Alberti, On Painting and on Sculpture, ed. and
trans. C. Grayson (London, 1972).
31 The methods of Alberti and Brunelleschi are per-
suasively analyzed in Martin Kemp, The Sci-
ence of Art (New Haven, 1990), 11–23, 344f.
32 From Raffaello Sanzio, tutti gli scritti (Milan,
1956), 60, 62; transcription from the first draft
of the letter: “e perchè, secondo il mio giudi-
cio, molti s’ingannano circa il disegnare le edi-
ficj; 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
64
trovare tutti li membri degli edificj si divide in
tre parti; delle quali la prima è la pianta, o vo-
liamo 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 orna-
menti. . . . In somma, con questi tre modi si
possono considerare minutamente tutte le
parti di ogni edificio dentro, e fuori.” Accord-
ing to Christof Thoenes (“La ‘lettera’ a Leone
X,” in C. Frommel and M. Winner, eds., Raf-
faello a Roma, il convegno del 1983 [Rome,
1986], 373–381; see also Thoenes, “Vitruv,
Alberti, Sangallo,” 566), other available tran-
scriptions (and Camesasca’s principal text) are
from a second draft written about a year later
(1520?); see “Lettera a Leone X,” in Scritti ri-
nascimentali di architettura, ed. Renato
Bonelli (Milan, 1978), 482. In the second ver-
sion, the last sentence is canceled and a pas-
sage inserted explaining how to make
perspective drawings, after Alberti’s Della pit-
tura. Thoenes suggests that the first version
(probably 1519), perhaps written with Baldas-
sare Castiglione, reflected the collaboration of
Raphael’s coarchitect at St. Peter, Antonio da
Sangallo the Younger, who was the first archi-
tect to consistently employ orthogonal pro-
jection. 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 Escurialen-
sis,” 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 Bar-
baro, 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 mistranslat-
ing the passage as having said sciographia,
meaning orthogonal section, rather than
 scaenographia. See the discussion of Bar- elevation of the skull with a section/interior
baro’s theory in chapter 9 below, especially the (fig. 6.22) is divided down the center by a ver-
citation in note 29. tical line, precisely as later architects repre-
34 First discussed by Lotz in “Das Raumbild in der sented the elevation and section of buildings.
Architekturzeichnung der italienischen Re- 42 My brief interpretation is indebted to conver-
naissance.” sations with Wolfgang Jung and Paola Poggi.
35 Thoenes, “Vitruv, Alberti, Sangallo,” 567. 43 See Piero della Francesca, De prospettiva pin-
Frommel, “Reflections on the Early Architec- gendi, ed. G. Nicco Fasola (reprint, Florence,
tural Drawings,” suggests that the date of 1984), p. 129.
Bramante’s drawing is later. On the following 44 I am grateful to Dr. Myra Nan Rosenfeld for
page, Serlio illustrated the plan of the cupola. the latter observation.
In the original drawing, the plan must have
been drawn directly underneath the eleva-
tion/section so that the latter could be con-
structed by running up perpendiculars from it.
36 Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte le opere dell’architet-
tura (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,” Mit-
teilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in
Florenz 11 (1966), 249–270.
37 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.
38 After writing this I found an impressive treat-

The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

ment of the relevance of Piero’s foreshorten-
ing methods, especially of heads, in Robin
Evans, The Projective Cast (Cambridge, Mass.,
1995), chap. 4, “Piero’s Heads.”
39 Wolfgang Lotz, in Miscellanea Bibliothecae
Hertzianae (Munich, 1961), 167–174.
40 Albrecht Dürer, Etliche Underricht von Befesti-
gung der Statt Schlosz und Flecken . . .
(Nuremburg, 1527), unnumbered pages; the
illustration is on p. 27 of the text.
41 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

65
This page intentionally left blank
Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

THREE
 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 pur-
poses, 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 inven-
tive use of techniques that had been developed during the previous generation of the fif-
teenth 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 de-
picted as hollow to accommodate the flow of a spiritual effluvium from the heart, in ac-
cordance 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 ev-
idence 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 cra-
nium is visualized as a dome. Indeed, they illustrate the three principal types of archi-
tectural 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 ver-
tical 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 Mi-
lan, they lack the characteristics of designs intended for execution. Leonardo rarely sug-
gests alternative solutions for a particular project or design detail, and the drawings are

68
mostly too small in scale to favor further study. A large proportion are plans accompa-
nied 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 repre-
sented 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 re-
quired, 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 baptister-
ies, 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
as initial proposals for building but rather as explorations, sometimes of the past and
Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

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

69
 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 sug-
gested; they are not theoretical, they do not cover more than a narrow range of archi-
tectural 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 hor-
izontal 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 geomet-
rically, as one might expect in an age that enthusiastically developed perspective tech-
niques. 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 re-
mainder 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 eleva-
tions 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 re-
fer 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

70
 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.

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

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 ar-
chitecture were not of much interest; as Schofield wrote in 1990 (pp. 93–95):

71
 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 fit-

fully interested in contemporary architecture and in the most up-to-date styles, what then re-

mains? 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 mak-

ing 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-and-
mass 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 prob-
lem 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 Bra-
mante’s solution to St. Peter in Rome in placing the crossing within a square which ex-
tends 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

72
 Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

3.2 Leonardo da Vinci, longitudinal church design and preaching theater, 1487–1490. Paris, Institut de France,
Codex B, 52r.

73
 3.3 Leonardo da Vinci, longitudinal church design, 1487–1490. Paris, Institut de France, Codex B, 24r.

74
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 ex-
terior. The facade is flanked by two towers; in the plan, but not in the perspective, a five-
bay 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 quad-
rants 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 pur-
pose), is drawn in perspective. Initially Leonardo had drawn the plan as a full circle, per-
haps 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 col-
umns into three aisles, the central one terminated by semicircular apses. Whether in-
tentionally or not, the narthex takes the form of an ancient Roman basilica.

The “teatro” concept is developed further on Codex B, 55r, where the seating is inte-
Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

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.

75
 Seating is not indicated in the entrance arm, where Leonardo initially drew a longitudi-
nal nave, and subsequently a fourth hemicycle harmonizing with the three others. His
ambivalence with respect to the longitudinal and central models for this church fore-
shadows Bramante’s in the earliest St. Peter plans.

What, then, did Leonardo intend by suggesting in these two drawings the transforma-
tion of the church into a theater? It was a radical idea: it would completely disrupt litur-
gical 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 pre-
Reformation 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 antago-
nistic 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 four-
teenth-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 de-
rived 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); an-
other, 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 Ore-
fici—not completed during Leonardo’s lifetime), is hemispherical. But this type ap-
pears 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 lon-
gitudes and latitudes. They do not appear to represent structural elements.

76
 Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

3.4 Leonardo da Vinci, design for a central-plan church, 1487–1490? London, British Library,
Codex Ashburnham 2037, 3v.

77
 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 indepen-
dent of medieval or early Renaissance precedents and, in themselves and in their rela-
tionship 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 ar-
chitectural 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 question-
able 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 per-
spective is sketched alongside. What makes this sketch particularly effective is the de-
vice 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 hori-
zontal 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 in-
tersected by a diagonal that helps the draftsman to establish the degree of recession re-
quired to make the interior perspective effective. The technique is related to one of those

78
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 de-
sign 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 alter-
nating 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 bi-
fore 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 five-
arched 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 central-
ized 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 hatch-
ing, the space within and without the structure as palpable, a positive element of de-
sign. 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 archi-
tecture. While in fifteenth-century buildings planar walls support ceilings or vaults,
Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

here 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, ap-
pears on Codex B, 21v, applied to a large chapel or sacristy attached to a circular church.

79
 3.6 Leonardo da Vinci, church design,1487–1490. 3.7 Donato Bramante, project for St. Peter,
Paris, Institut de France, Codex B, 22r. Vatican, 1505. Florence, Uffizi, A20.

80
 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 ar-
rived 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 archi-
tecture on an entirely different scale and public presence than any in the fifteenth cen-
tury. 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 pre-
science, 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 inte-

rior 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-

82
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 struc-
turally: the crossing columns could not have sustained the load of the drum and dome,
Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

and the thrust of the chancel vault would have had little to counteract it. But the draw-
ing is distinguished by its evocation of the visual experience of entering the space; re-
ceding 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-

83
 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 Mi-
lan, 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
 Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

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

85
 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, ex-
ecutive 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 rang-
ing into the early 1500s offered by other scholars. A vaguely defined version of a simi-
lar 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

86
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 Ja-
copo 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
example being Antonio da Sangallo the Younger’s design for Santo Spirito in Sassia in
Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

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.

87
 3.13 Leonardo da Vinci, church design, 1487–1490. Paris, Institut de France, Codex B, 25v.

88
 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
and by making both stories the same width. Leonardo attempted in fig. 3.11 to adapt
Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

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.

89
 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 per-
spective 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 en-
deavor 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 six-
teenth 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 an-
tique, 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 un-
charted 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

90
planar surface, thin walls, and columnar supports—and to anticipate the Roman archi-
tecture 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 par-
tially 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 achieve-
ments of antiquity—an antiquity known to the Renaissance almost exclusively from its
grandest public monuments. Moreover, the transition from the architecture of the fif-
teenth century to that of Leonardo, Bramante, and their followers is a response to al-
tered 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-
teenth century.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

91
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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 (Mon-
treal), 193–206.

Firpo, Luigi. 1963. Leonardo architetto e urbanista. Turin.

Guillaume, Jean. 1987. “Léonard et l’architecture.” In P. Galluzzi, ed., Léonard de Vinci, in-
génieur 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 Re-
naissance.” 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 struc-

ture.” 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.

92
Thoenes, Christof. 1972. “Sostegno e adornamento. Zur sozialen Symbolik der Säulenord-
nung.” 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 perga-
mena.’” 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.

Thoenes, Christof. 1994. “Neue Beobachtungen an Bramantes St.-Peter-Entwürfen.”

Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 45: 109–132.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Church Designs

93
This page intentionally left blank
 On the Origins of
Architectural Photography

FOUR
 The refinement of photographic processes during the 1830s culminated in the an-
nouncement 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 sig-
nificantly 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 mul-
tiple 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 expe-
rience, manifested as well in an increase in travel—previously the prerogative of a priv-
ileged 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 architec-
tural 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 per-
spective, realized with a hand-held drafting instrument, constituted the basic vocabu-
lary 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-

96
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 nation-
alism, 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 representa-
tions 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 math-
ematician, physicist, and chemist who kept in close contact with the scientific commu-
nity, 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 ex-
ample, the speed of exposure, the capacities of the lenses, the graininess resulting from
the use of paper negatives, the tonal effects of colored objects, which are altered as they
On the Origins of Architectural Photography

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 es-
sential 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 view-
point and, as is emphasized in the accompanying text, were intended less as a record of

97
 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 ca-
reer 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.

98
 On the Origins of Architectural Photography

4.2 Augustus Charles Pugin, Caen, St. Etienne, view, engraving from The Architectural Antiquities of Normandy
(London, 1827–1828).

99
 4.3 Anonymous French photographer, second half of the nineteenth century, Caen, St. Etienne, view.

100 Courtesy Richardson Archive, Loeb Library, Harvard University.

Church interiors presented other challenges to early photographic representation; I of-
fer 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 vault-
ing 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 tech-
niques were profoundly affected by convention and manner; they involve misrepresen-
tation as well as representation. The photograph prevailed over the engraving, however,
because it could be produced and distributed more rapidly, and hence in greater quan-
tity, 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. An-
other comparison (figs. 4.6, 4.7) makes the point even more persuasively, because,
while the options for finding a position suited to representing church exteriors and in-
On the Origins of Architectural Photography

teriors 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

101
 4.4 Henry Gally Knight, Jumièges, nave interior, from An Architectural Tour in Normandy, with Some Remarks on
Norman Architecture (1841).

102
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 ar-
chitects 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-
tant view is framed on one or both sides by a temple in the foreground.

Indeed, the architectural photographers’ models are found not only in the work of ar-
On the Origins of Architectural Photography

chitects. The long tradition of elegiac landscape painting incorporating architectural el-
ements, 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

103
 4.6 The Acropolis at Athens, from
the Agora, from James Stuart and
Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities
of Athens, vol. 3.

104
4.7 Dmitri Constantin, the Acropolis
at Athens, with the Temple of
Jupiter. Courtesy George Eastman
House (GEH 36642).
On the Origins of Architectural Photography

105
 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 eccle-
siastical 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 ar-
chitectural photographs from an interpretive one. Many photographers practicing the
medium in its first decade would have agreed with the statement by Talbot that pho-
tographs 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 enter-

106
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 uni-
versally 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 pho-
tographs 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
is not intrinsic to the image. It is or is not in the eye of the beholder.7
On the Origins of Architectural Photography

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. Mes-
tral, and Gustave Le Gray). This is an example of the production of photographs de-
fined as documentary by the nature of a commission. Baldus also was employed in the

107
 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 clar-
ity 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 repre-
sented. Since the purpose of the documentation programs was to assemble archives of
permanent relevance, the photographer was obliged to restrain as far as possible per-
sonal 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 En-
gland, 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

108
 On the Origins of Architectural Photography

4.11 Auguste Salzmann, Jerusalem, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, portal, 1854.
Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture, Montréal.

109
 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 archaeol-
ogist 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 Chris-
tian 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 pub-
lication of 1856 accompanied by an explanatory text; it was his only substantial pro-
duction 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 pho-
tographs 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 cate-
gory 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 “ho-
rary 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

110
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 pho-
tographiques, 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 pro-
gress modeled on the London Crystal Palace exposition.13 The curators included a vast
array of photographs, the largest ever assembled, arranged according to subject, favor-
ing 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 Louis-
Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, who established in 1851–1852 a printing and marketing es-
tablishment 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
important structures. Baldus, for example, was employed to track the building process
of the new wing of the Louvre in Paris, and left thousands of prints, including a num-
On the Origins of Architectural Photography

ber of impressive panoramic images, in the archives; the same occurred in the con-
struction 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.

111
 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 pho-
tography 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-

112
 On the Origins of Architectural Photography

4.13 Hippolyte Bayard, Paris, Church of the Madeleine, interior of facade portico, 1846–1848.
Courtesy George Eastman House (GEH 14357).

113
 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 im-
pression 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 pho-
tographers 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 sug-
gested, 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 ar-
chitect, 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 pic-
turesque 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 as-
pects 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 ar-
chitecture 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 ex-
plained by the emphasis placed on late medieval sources by the contemporary promot-
ers 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.

114
Tourism, in fact, was a guiding force in the increasing demand for architectural pho-
tographs. 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 Wander-
jahr, 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 knowl-
edge 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 va-
cation 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 ob-
servations 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 (prin-
cipally 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
the trail of colonial conquest and the fashions of newly developed bourgeois travel and
saw their subjects in the light of Orientalism,19 as strange and exotic echoes of a far-
On the Origins of Architectural Photography

distant 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 enter-
prising 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

115
 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 expo-
sures, he regularly impressed a young Muslim sailor from his crew, for whom he pro-
vided 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 be-
came 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 re-
mains at Nîmes) more useful than photographs, because the strict rules of classical com-
position and proportions could be conveyed more effectively in precisely measured
architectural renderings. Publications addressed to the growing interest in the medieval

116
 On the Origins of Architectural Photography

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

117
 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 cap-
tured more effectively by the camera than by the draftsman and engraver. But possibil-
ities 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 as-
pects of architecture, and were the principal vehicles for the diffusion of the pic-
turesque: 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 spec-
trum of historical styles less accessible at first hand, especially those of Egypt, Byzan-
tium, 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 Amer-
ican Architecture, started in 1886; two years later, Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer pub-
lished 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 histor-
ical-critical study of a contemporary architect.21

The photographs of the buildings of Richardson and his contemporaries lack the vivid-
ness 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

118
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 establish-
ments 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 effec-
tively without expressive enrichment. Of course, a painter or sculptor can employ the
tools of the artist without achieving expressive enrichment, but the result is just bad
art and nothing else, while the commercial photographer employs the available tech-
On the Origins of Architectural Photography

nology to produce a useful record that need not be more than that. The photographic
archive of Richardson, an impassioned collector—largely of medieval French archi-
tecture—was employed to stimulate and to give authenticity to his characteristic
Romanesque revival style; the majority of prints were commissioned from local pho-
tographers, most of whom probably made a living from portraits and weddings.22 They
are dull, but they served him well.

119
 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 contempo-
rary 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 cre-
ate the discipline, but without them opportunities for the development of sophisticated
research methods would not have been available to scholars who previously had had ac-
cess only to drawings and traditional prints. A method grounded on systems of classi-
fication could not be developed without the capacity to make comparisons between
buildings and groups of buildings. Photographs are fundamental to the practice of his-
torical research and interpretation because they give the scholar an almost infinitely ex-
pandable 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 long-
focus lenses and increasingly sensitive negatives permitting rapid exposure, many as-
pects 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-

120
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 an-
tiquity 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 photo-
graphic 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 dis-
proportionate degree. But, accepting these limitations, we can still see in the early his-
tory 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 re-
flection of some “reality” in the world about us, but is a means of casting onto that world
a concept—or subliminal sense—of what reality is.

On the Origins of Architectural Photography

121
 N OT E S
1 The following writings have been especially
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 Photog-
raphy (Cologne, c. 1998); Peter Galassi, Be-
fore Photography (New York, 1981); Cervin
Robinson and Joel Herschman, Architecture
Transformed: A History of the Photography
of Buildings from 1839 to the Present (Cam-
bridge, 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 Cul-
tural History (Cambridge, U.K., 1997).
2 Talbot’s prints were originally called talbo-
types 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 multi-
ples 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, es-
pecially in France. See Claude Gautrand, Hip-
polyte Bayard, naissance de l’image
photographique (Amiens, 1986).
3 See chapters 2 and 12 in this volume.
4 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).
5 Carol Armstrong devotes chapter 2 of her ad-
mirable book to a discussion of The Pencil of
Nature, including the Lacock Abbey pictures,
emphasizing the author’s revelation of upper-
class nationalism and pride in the ownership of
122
property evocative of medieval history and
myth.
6 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 desig-
nation. John Ruskin, a more sophisticated
critic, was enthusiastic about the use of da-
guerreotypes 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: Documen-
tary Photography and The Stones of Venice,”
Assemblage 32 (1997), 22–44. For a similar
judgment, see Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Pho-
tography,” London Quarterly Review (1857),
reprinted in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic
Essays on Photography (New Haven, 1980),
39–68.
7 My thinking about the problem of “docu-
mentary” photography was clarified particu-
larly by the study of Joel Snyder, “Documen-
tary without Ontology,” Studies in Visual
Communication 10 (1984), 78–90.
8 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).
9 As quoted by Robert Sobieszic, “This Edifice
Is Colossal”: 19th Century Architectural Pho-
tography (Rochester, 1986), 3.
10 See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “A Photogra-
pher in Jerusalem, 1855: Auguste Salzmann
and His Times,” in her Photography at the
Dock (Minneapolis, 1991), 150–168.
11 John Tallis, Tallis’s History and Description of
the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the
World’s Industry in 1851 (London and New
York, 1853), 134–138.
12 Horace Greeley, Art and Industry as Repre-
sented in the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace,
New York, 1853–4 (New York, 1853),
171–176.
13 Ernest Lacan, Esquisses photographiques
(Paris, 1856), 76ff.
14 Isabelle Jammes, Blanquart-Evrard et les ori-
gines de l’édition photographique française
(Geneva and Paris, 1981).
15 Quoted from notebooks in the Archive Na-
tionale, in Daniel and Bergdoll, Photographs
of Baldus, 32.
16 Another early example is Carsten Niebuhr,
Reisebeschreibung nach Arabien und an-
deren 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) pri-
marily provides spectacular panoramas in the
tradition of the classical landscape, but dra-
matized 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.
17 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, “Pho-
tographed and Described: Traveling in the
Footsteps of Francis Frith,” in Scenes in a Li-
brary, pp. 277ff., indicates the need to inter-
pret photographs in illustrated books
(particularly Frith’s volumes on the Middle
East) as they interact with the text. Frith pre-
sented his text as illuminating his images,
rather than the reverse.
18 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.).
19 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 Ori-
ent,” 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,” Philo-
logical Quarterly 15 (1935).
20 See Elizabeth Anne McCauley, “The Photo-
graphic Adventure of Maxime Du Camp,” in
Dave Oliphant and Thomas Zigal, eds., Per-
spectives 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.
21 See Mary N. Woods, “The Photograph as
Tastemaker: The American Architect and
H. H. Richardson,” History of Photography
14 (1990), 155–163.
22 The Richardson photographic archive of
some 3,000 prints is preserved in the Loeb Li-
brary of the Graduate School of Design at
Harvard University. The architect studied in
On the Origins of Architectural Photography
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 ma-
jor French photographers discussed above
are not represented.
123
 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 pho-
tography. 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.

124
Imitation

FIVE
 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 orient-
ing 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 imi-
tation 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 dis-
cussions 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 pri-
marily 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. Aris-
totelian imitation dominated discourse on the subject throughout antiquity, and ex-
tended, 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, re-
iterating 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 ex-
actly 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 natu-
rans (nature as creator; nature as it might become).2

126
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 rea-
son rhetorical texts advised would-be Roman orators to ingest the written records of
their predecessors’ speeches, and Renaissance artists and humanists to absorb the re-
mains 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 suffi-
ciently—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 inconsis-
tent 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 sev-
eral, 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 Ci-
cero’s pairing of rhetorical and figural imitation was at least as important for practice as
the more frequently cited Horatian ut pictura poesis.

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

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

127
 aetas (age, era), which Vasari appropriated in his three età marking the historical evolu-
tion 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 us-
ing 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 ap-
prove 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 ac-
ceptable 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 prede-
cessors, 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 writ-
ers 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 discus-
sion 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

128
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 stan-
dards 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 four-
teenth century on, starting with Petrarch’s review of the Ciceronian arguments. After Pe-
trarch, 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 be-
fore 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 “Ci-
ceronian” (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
the single source is more authoritarian and disposed to establish rules. The latter group
Imitation

129
 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 imita-
tion.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 re-

spectable 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 Gian-
francesco 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, how-
ever, was not truly Neoplatonic because it was individual and had no transcendental ref-
erence. 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 con-
centration on one model because he believed that style in a given genre couldn’t be com-
pounded 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

130
emulated, whereas his predecessors—Pico included—had focused on content and
structure.22 Indeed, the bees gathering pollen, like the painter choosing individual fea-
tures 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 in-
strument 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 Ci-
ceronians 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 def-
inition 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 dia-
logue 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 aesthet-
ics, 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 Sue-
tonius and published the introductory one in which he recommended establishing laws
of history; his preferred models, besides Suetonius, were Herodotus, Thucydides, Sal-
lust, and Livy. The major text of the period on history writing, Pontano’s Actius, of 1499,
recommends the imitation of different authors according to the subject and to the
writer’s taste.
Imitation

131
 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 pre-
ceding architectural literature was simplified by the fact that only one model was avail-
able, 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 inconsis-
tent examples, but the canons devised by Serlio, Vignola, and Palladio in the mid-
sixteenth 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] natu-
ral 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:

132
In part also one should imitate the lovely marble or bronze works by the ancient masters. In-

deed, 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 pleas-

ing to everyone. For antique objects embody complete artistic perfection and may serve as ex-

emplars 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 rep-
resentations of nature are in practice inseparable.

Baldassare Castiglione’s dialogue The Courtier, published in 1528, offers a bridge be-
tween literary theory and the figural arts. The dialogue rejects Bembo’s position. Its ma-
jor 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 writ-
ten 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 un-

der the condition that you were to help me with making a choice; but since there are so few beau-

tiful 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.36
Imitation

133
 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 pre-
ceding 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 [an-
cient] 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 mas-
ters, Vasari tells how Raphael, “having in his youth imitated the maniera of Pietro Pe-
rugino 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 ac-
count, 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 . . . be-
tween 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 prac-
tice 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

134
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 pas-
sion 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 gen-
eration’s view of its precursors in his essay “Self Reliance”: “Insist on yourself; never im-
itate. 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 extempora-
neous, 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
to be ferreted out without the aid of the artist under discussion.
Imitation

135
 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 ed-
ucational ideal has been to encourage self-determination from the start—and that en-
couraged 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 ear-
lier 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 ben-
efits 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

136
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 crit-
icism 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 im-
itation 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
the sort of frozen authority we call academic.
Imitation

137
 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’imi-
tazione 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 Rinasci-
mento e barocco (Turin, 1960); for the later
period, not covered in this discussion, Rensse-
laer 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 cen-
tury, the overview of Rudolf Wittkower, “Imi-
tation, Eclecticism and Genius,” in Earl R.
Wasserman, ed., Aspects of the Eighteenth
Century (Baltimore, 1965), 143ff. Since my
original study was completed, Alfons Recker-
man has published “Das Konzept kreativer
‘imitatio’ im Kontext der Renaissance Kunst-
theorie,” 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 Interna-
tional Congress of the History of Art (Prince-
ton, 1963), 19–30; republished in his The
Message of Images: Studies in the History of
Art (Vienna, 1988), 64–68. The terms them-
selves, 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 ex-
ample, 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 hav-
ing 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
138
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 Renais-
sancen,” Archäologischer Anzeiger (1931),
318–338.
5 Cicero, De inventione 2.2.4: “non unum
aliquod proposuimus exemplum cuius omnes
partes, quocumque essent in genere, expri-
mendae nobis necessarie viderentur, sed om-
nibus unum in locum coactis scriptores, quod
quisque comodissime praecipere viderentur,
excerpsimus et ex variis ingenias excellentis-
sima quaeque libavamus?”
6 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 (Cam-
bridge, 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 Al-
berti was not yet prepared to explain how the
artist determined what was more or less beau-
tiful; by midcentury, in his architectural treatise
(De re aedificatoria, 9.5), he had an articulated
aesthetic system (see above, chapter 1, at note
16).
7 Cicero, De oratore 2.22 (see above, chapter 1,
at note 34).
8 E.g., Cicero, Brutus 7.35.
9 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 im-
itate, but in his own mind there lived an ex-
ceptional image [species] of beauty; this he
beheld, on this he fixed his attention, and ac-
cording to its likeness he directed his art and
hand.”
10 Horace, Epistles 1.19.19ff. Cited by Greene,
Light in Troy, 68f.
11 Quintilian, Institutione oratoria 10.2.12.
12 Ibid., 10.1.32: “illa Sallustiana brevitas; . . .
Livii lactea ubertas.”
13 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 ven-
tura videatur.”
14 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, Callistra-
tus, etc.” The reading of ars as “technique,”
the correct one for ancient and medieval
Latin, was reiterated by Settis, “Did the An-
cients Have an Antiquity?”
15 A. Seneca, Controversiae 7.8, cited by
Greene, Light in Troy, 72.
16 L. Seneca, Letters 84.3, 4: “Apes, ut aiunt,
debemus imitari, quae vagantur et flores ad
mel faciendum idoneos diende quicquid at-
tulere, 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 propri-
etate spiritus sui mutent.” See Horace,
Carmina 4.2.27–32 (23 B.C.).
17 This discussion was brought to my attention
in an unpublished paper by Salvatore Campo-
reale, who kindly sent me a copy. It came to a
climax at midcentury with Valla’s Elegantiae,
Antidota, and Apologus, and in Poggio’s Ora-
tiones in Vallam.
18 See R. Sabbadini, Storia del ciceronismo e di
altre questioni letterarie (Turin, 1885).
19 Translation by Greene, Light in Troy, 150, from
Eugenio Garin, ed., Prosatori latini del Quat-
trocento (Milan, 1953), 902–904.
20 Edited by Giorgio Santangelo, Le epistole ‘De
imitatione’ di Giovanfrancesco Pico della Mi-
randola e di Pietro Bembo (Florence, 1954).
Bembo’s letter is discussed, in relation to his
Prose della volgar lingua, by Santangelo in Il
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,” Commen-
tari 7 (1956), 175–190.
21 See, for example, poem no. 9 in Michelangelo
Buonarroti, Rime, ed. E. Girardi (Bari, 1960), 6.
22 Santangelo, Il Bembo critico, 70ff., 82ff. See
also Pietro Bembo, Prose della volgar lingua,
ed. C. Dionisotti-Casalone (Turin, 1931), 72.
23 See Willibald Sauerländer, “From ‘Stilus’ to
Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion,” Art
History 6 (1988), 257–259.
24 See, for example, Henri Peyre, Qu’est-ce que
c’est que le classicisme? (Paris, 1942).
25 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 Ge-
nius,” in Wasserman, ed., Aspects of the
Eighteenth Century, 143ff.
26 Robert Black, “The New Laws of History,” Re-
naissance Studies 1 (1980), 126–156.
27 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 ad-
durò grandissimi esempli; perchè, cammi-
nando li uomini quasi sempre per le vie
battute da altri, e procedendo nelle azioni
loro con le imitazioni, né si potendo le vie d’al-
tri al tutto tenere . . . debbe uno uomo pru-
dente intrare sempre per vie battute da
uomini grandi, e quelli che sono stati eccelen-
tissimi imitare, acciò che, se la sua virtù non vi
arriva, almeno ne renda qualche odore.”
28 A position opposed by Guicciardini and Mon-
taigne; see G. W. Pigman III, “Limping Ex-
amples: Exemplarity, the New Historicism, and
Psychoanalysis,” in David Quint et al., eds.,
Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renais-
sance Literature in Honor of Thomas M.
Greene (Binghamton, 1992), 281–285.
29 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 Classi-
cal Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and
the Renaissance (Princeton, 1988); Christof
Imitation
139
 Thoenes, “Vignolas ‘Regola delli cinque or-
dini’,” Römische Jahrbuch für Kunst-
geschichte 20 (1983), 345–376. In the past
fifteen years there has been an unprecedented
amount of publication on the orders during
the Renaissance.
30 Alberti, De re aedificatoria 3.14.
31 Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato (Vatican, Cod. Urb.
Lat. 1270), 39v; translation from Martin
Kemp, Leonardo on Painting (New Haven,
1989).
32 Ibid., 133r; see the edition of A. Philip McMa-
hon (Princeton, 1956), 433; or that of H. Lud-
wig (Jena, 1909), 411.
33 Dialogo della pittura di M. Lodovico Dolce in-
titolato l’aretino (Venice, 1557), quoted from
the transcription of Mark Roskill, Dolce’s
“Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cin-
quecento (New York, 1968), 138 (ms. p. 28).
34 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton,
1960), 186–189, 356–358, and passim.
35 Castiglione, Il cortegiano 1.37, 38: “credo, se
l’uomo da sè non ha convenienza con qual-
sivoglia 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 Sum-
mers, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge,
U.K., 1987), 317–320.
36 The attribution to Raphael has been ques-
tioned by a number of scholars; see above,
chapter 1, note 24.
37 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.
38 Ibid., 4:204.
39 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 disce-
polo.”
40 In Paola Barocchi, ed., Scritti d’arte del Cin-
quecento (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 ri-
trarre le cose più belle; e da quel più bello o
mani o teste o corpi o gambe aggiungnerle in-
sieme” (Vite, 3:377).
140
41 Dolce, Dialogo della pittura (ed. Roskill), 99
(ms. p. 8). The speaker is Pietro Aretino. On the
previous page, he had said, “I say that paint-
ing is nothing other than the imitation of na-
ture; and the closer to nature a man comes in
his works, the more perfect a master he is.”
42 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New
York, 1973), 27.
43 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance,” in
Emerson, Essays and Lectures (New York,
1983), pp. 278f. The sentiment is more exten-
sively expressed in the essay “The American
Scholar,” of 1837: “Genius is always suffi-
ciently the enemy of genius by over influence.
. . . The English dramatic poets have Shake-
spearized now for two hundred years. . . .
Man Thinking must not be subdued by his in-
struments . . . 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 cen-
tury before, Edward Young had written in
“Conjectures on Original Composition”
(1759) of the danger presented to the mod-
ern author by the ancients: “They engross our
attention, and so prevent a due inspection of
ourselves; they prejudice our judgment in fa-
vor of their abilities, and so lessen the sense of
our own; and they intimidate us with the
splendor of their renown.” (Reprinted in Wal-
ter Jackson Bate, ed., Criticism: The Major
Texts [New York, 1952], 242.) Young’s posi-
tion cannot be interpreted as proto-romantic
but exemplifies an attack in the battle of the an-
cients and the moderns. I am indebted to Joel
Porte for locating this source, which I had found
attributed to Emerson.
44 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.
45 See the critique “Excursus against Influence”
by Michael Baxandall, in his Patterns of Inten-
tion (New Haven, 1985), 58–62.
46 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
the 1940s and ‘50s were propelled forward by
the impetus and destiny of cubism.
48 That fear was perhaps more haunting for writ-
ers and for architects than for painters and
sculptors, because the ancient models were so
formidable in the formers’ fields—Cicero, Vir-
gil, 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 opti-
mum sit idem ultimum esset.” The theme ap-
pears also in Tacitus, De oratoribus.

Imitation

141
This page intentionally left blank
 Art and Science in the
Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

SIX
 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 sophisti-
cated 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.

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

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

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 in-
terference. 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.

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 preci-
sion 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 rep-
resent two stages in the development of descriptive naturalism: that on the left is evi-
dently 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.

146
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 na-
ture, one that focused on atmosphere, light and shadow, time; the oak branch seems to

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

have been caught at a particular moment (by contrast to fig. 6.3, in which there is no in-
dication of light and shadow); the artist seems to have been a passive recipient of an im-
pression. 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 be-
tween 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

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.

148
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 Na-
zionale 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 chap-
ter 5), but, as Aristotle had defined it for poetry, the capacity to play the role of the cre-
ator, 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, un-
like 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 investi-
gation 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 inten-
sive observation, the foundation of both his scientific investigations and his work as a
figural artist. He was a proto-scientist in the modern sense of what constitutes science,

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

but he brought to his investigation of the natural world not only an extraordinary artis-
tic 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. Scho-
lastic writers, primarily within the Church, had sustained the Aristotelian scientific

149
 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 im-
prove 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 avail-
ability 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 hori-
zontally 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 illus-
trates how it conforms to ideal proportions of the sort
that absorbed architects of the time. Moreover, the
drawing illustrates the medieval doctrine that the ver-
tical 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 be-
lieved 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 en-
tire body, and in particular must transmit seeds for re-
production from the brain to the genitals. So the spine
is shown with a large interior channel, which Leo-
nardo 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
H. M. the Queen.
just being devised at the end of the fifteenth century.

Twenty years later, after Leonardo had had the oppor-

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

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 tech-
nique—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

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 com-
promising this brilliance in conception with a lapse in his habitual acuteness of obser-
vation: 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 quasi-
mythical creature” (Ron Philo in Clayton, 1992). But, had contemporaries known it, its
graphic inventions would have changed the course of anatomical illustration.

152
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 en-
gineer 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
assembled (in a more-or-less axonometric projection) on the left and, on the right, is

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

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 fa-
miliar only in the nineteenth century, and is a universal convention of machine man-
uals 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

153
 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 culmi-
nated 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 remain-
ing 98 years of the sixteenth century; city representations were always done as bird’s-
eye 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 Ital-
ian 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 mea-
suring 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 mea-
suring 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 multiply-
ing 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 com-
passes 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 con-
cerned with the depiction of motion in the broad sense implied by the Italian word moti,
which means both physical movement and emotion. This meant, in depicting people,

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

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 ges-

tures better than any other kind of man.

155
 Perhaps the most widely known drawing by Leonardo
illustrates a passage on proportions in Vitruvius’s ar-
chitectural 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 cor-
respond to parts of the body. Leonardo’s drawing,
which adds a circle to the square, effectively repre-
sents 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 ac-
tivities, 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 obses-

sively 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,
Royal Library, 12660v. By gracious
two substantial notebooks: Ms. A. of the Institut de
permission of H. M. the Queen.
France, and the Leicester Codex (now the property of
Bill Gates); probably these represent one of his many

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

aborted projects to publish treatises on subjects that
interested him. Among innumerable sheets examin-
ing 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.
157
By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.
 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 im-
pending 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 breath-
ing, 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 charac-
terization 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 re-

158
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-
sifies at the place where the obstruction creates a whirlpool.

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

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 draw-
ing is informed with a vital energy that reveals the author’s enthusiasm about the pro-
cess of making: the movement of the hand, reminiscent of Asian calligraphy, the pen
and colored washes, the almost abstract design.

159
 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 allo-

cated 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
 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.
By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

161
 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 draw-
ing 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 com-
position. 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 ap-
proach to sketching that Leonardo discussed in his Treatise on Painting (fol. 62r):

162
 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.

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 move-

ments appropriate to the mental state of the creatures that make up your picture rather than

to the beauty and perfection of their parts.

163

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.
164
This was to be elaborated further by Giorgio Vasari,
in his Le vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori e ar-
chitettori 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 char-
coal, 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 ac-
ceptable to his predecessors and contemporaries,
and he may have influenced Vasari’s definition. It
was a concept scorned by Plato and antithetical to
the classical ambitions of most Renaissance artists,
in particular those of Leonardo’s younger contem-
porary 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 dy-
namic 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
 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,
National Gallery. Photo: Art Resource.
165
 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 contem-

porary drawing of a similar subject by Fra Bartolommeo that is characteristic of later fif-
teenth-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 vor-
tex that absorbs them into a conical mass.

166
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 draw-
ing) of fig. 6.19, and a painting in the Louvre. The former retains the essential move-
ments and cohesiveness of the sketch while clarifying the actions of the four figures,
developing a consistent and unifying play of light and dark (chiaroscuro) and a power-

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

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 interpreta-
tions of the apocryphal theme. The contrast is a clear illustration of the roles of conven-
tion and imitation.

These images illustrate the richness and complexity of Leonardo’s fusion of art and sci-
ence 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

167
 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 fifteenth-
century 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 lo-
cal color. Leonardo approached the copse optically; he tried to catch the visual contin-
uum 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 por-

tions 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 penetra-
tions; in fact, they communicate nothing of the function of the human body. One feels

168
 Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

6.22 Leonardo da Vinci, a skull sectioned, 1489. Windsor Castle, Royal Library, 19058v.
By gracious permission of H. M. the Queen.

169
 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.

170
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 prob-
ably 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 lat-
est, 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 re-
ally 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 con-
ceptual 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 repre-
sentation of nature could be called optical. But I want again to contrast optical to con-
ceptual 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
drawing and painting from the attempt to explain what was supposed to exist out there

Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

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.

171
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman, James. 1978. “Leonardo’s Eye.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti-
tutes 41, 108–146.

Clark, Kenneth. 1967. Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist. Har-
mondsworth.

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 cul-
tura 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 Gom-
brich, 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. Cam-
bridge, Mass.

Kuhn, Jehane. 1995. Paper presented at the symposium “Linear Perspective: The First Cen-
tury,” Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, MIT, May 18–20, 1995.

172
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 Kunst-
geschichte 25, 13–47.

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

Art and Science in the Drawingss of Leonardo da Vinci

173
This page intentionally left blank
The Aesthetics of Architecture
in the Renaissance

SEVEN
 All architectural discourse in the Renaissance is indebted in some sense to the De ar-
chitectura 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 Hel-
lenistic 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—utili-
tas, firmitas (structural strength), and venustas (beauty)—were adopted throughout the
Renaissance. But he was a frustrating master: his language was obscure, with many un-
explained 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 mod-
erately 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 archi-
tecture based on his conception of the laws of nature. His rational orientation is ex-
pressed 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 accord-
ing to precise laws parts that otherwise by their nature would be distinct from each

176
other, so that they appear to be in a reciprocal relationship.” Alberti’s proof of the uni-
versality 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 Re-
naissance: 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 ar-
chitectural 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 theo-
ries 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 Fi-
larete (unpublished treatise of ca. 1461–1464), or the author of the late fifteenth-
century Life of Filippo Brunelleschi, or later Palladio (in a letter on the completion of
the Gothic church of San Petronio in Bologna), in attacking the irrationality of the
Gothic style that dominated the built environment of their time; indeed he wrote a sym-
The Aesthetics of Architecture in the Renaissance
pathetic description of the Gothic cathedral of Florence. Nor did he, like Vitruvius, em-
phasize 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-

177
 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 particu-
larly 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 in-
tensive examination of ancient architecture in an effort to visualize what ruined build-
ings 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 be-
fore.

No theoretical writing appeared in the early years of the sixteenth century in either ar-
chitecture or the figural arts, though—or maybe because—this was a time of great cre-
ative 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

178
based on the ideas of his mentor, the Sienese architect Baldassarre Peruzzi, who had suc-
ceeded Raphael as architect of St. Peter in the Vatican. Serlio’s Tutte le opere dell’architet-
tura 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 Renais-
sance writers used it to fuse the observance of tradition with the adjustment of archi-
tectural 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 con-
ventional. Serlio writes of a prima forma that establishes the base from which license de-
parts; 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 ar-
chitettori (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 cer-
tain universal and necessary rules.”

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

literature on ecclesiastical architecture. The major contribution was that of St. Carlo
The Aesthetics of Architecture in the Renaissance
Borromeo, whose Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae (Milan, 1577) was in-
tended 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.

179
 Serlio treats architectural expression as a matter of language, proposing that the treat-
ment 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 ver-
sion of the imitation of nature (the principle of imitation being at the core of Renais-
sance 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 colum-
nar base express the downward pressure of the columnar shaft, which itself, in its enta-
sis (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 aes-
thetics (e.g., Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism, 1914) and describing ele-
ments 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 in-
terpretation of decorum as the affirmation of tradition. Since he sees architecture as be-
ing 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 sub-
ject. Serlio set proportions for each order, providing detailed illustrations of the compo-
nent 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 mathe-
matical rule, as was that of Giacomo Barozzi, called Vignola, who published in 1562 a

180
book exclusively devoted to Regole delli cinque ordini d’architettura, consisting of en-
graved 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,” coor-
dinated 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 so-
lidified the canon for classical architecture of all later time. It is paradoxical that a con-
vention 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 theo-
retical 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 at-
tempted 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 Ital-
ian 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
the most innovative architectural theorist of the seventeenth century, Claude Perrault
(Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des anciens [Paris, 1683]; Les dix
The Aesthetics of Architecture in the Renaissance
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.

181
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ackerman, James S. 1983. “The Tuscan/Rustic Order: A Study in the Metaphorical Lan-
guage of Architecture.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 42, 15–34. Re-
vised 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 ar-
chitettonica dei primi moderni. Geneva.

Carpo, Mario. 1993. La maschera e il modello: Teoria architettonica ed evangelismo nel-

l’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 Im-
ages 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 Cre-
ation, 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 quat-
tro 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.

182
Mitrovic, Branko. 1999. “Palladio’s Theory of the Classical Orders in the First Book of I quat-
tro 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 Renais-
sance.” Res 34, 21–38.

Payne, Alina. 1999. The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural In-
vention, Ornament, and Literary Culture. Cambridge, U.K.

Payne, Alina. 2000a. “Architectural Theories of Imitation and the Literary Debates on Lan-
guage and Style.” In Georgia Clarke, ed., Architecture and Language: Constructing Iden-
tity in European Architecture, c. 1000–c. 1650. Cambridge, U.K.

Payne, Alina. 2000b. “Ut Poesis Architectura: Tectonics and Poetics in Architectural Criti-
cism 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 Or-
ders.” Art Bulletin 76.

Schlosser, Julius von. 1956. La letteratura artistica. 2d Italian edition, rev. Otto Kurz. Flo-
rence 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.

Syndikus, Candida. 1996. Das Bauornament. Münster.

The Aesthetics of Architecture in the Renaissance
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 De-
sign 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., Ar-
chitekturmodelle der Renaissance: Die Harmonie des Bauens von Alberti bis Michelangelo

183
 (Munich, 1995), 28–39. Revised as “Notes on the Architectural Treatises of the Renais-
sance,” Zodiac 15 (1996), 13–31.

Wittkower, Rudolf. 1949. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. London.

184
The Influence of Antiquity on
Italian Renaissance Villas

EIGHT
 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 parti-
tioning 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 Renais-
sance, 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

186
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.

The practice got its name from the manuals of the agrimensores—surveyors, whose ba-
sic unit of measurement was called the actus (fig. 8.2).2 In principle twenty acti consti-

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

tuted 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

187
 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 me-

dieval 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 sur-
rounding agricultural zone (fig. 8.1) was based on an orientation determined by the to-
pography 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 busi-
ness enterprise.

188
 8.4 Florence, aerial view.

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

189
 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 dif-
ferent 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 cen-
turiation. 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-

190
 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 agri-
culture prior to the large-scale reclamation projects of the early sixteenth century.

The earliest surviving drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, which he dated 1473 (fig. 6.1), is
a landscape with hills overlooking a plain. It may be the earliest pure landscape repre-

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

sentation 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 re-
quired establishing a checkerboard pattern on the floor in order to measure the reces-
sion 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 cen-
turiation. Indeed, the lines are not properly perspectival because they recede to differ-
ent points on the horizon.

191
 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 Ro-
man 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.

192
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)
available to a limited class of wealthy and educated men, those most likely, in ancient
and premodern Italy, to own country estates which were exploited for enjoyment as well

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

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-

193
 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 church-
men 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 wealthi-
est 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 Plea-
sure of the Villa and The New, Charming, and Delightful Villa.8

Although the classical treatises consist primarily of practical and even technical infor-
mation on agronomy, the titles revealingly emphasize pleasure. All of the manuals be-
gin 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 nox-
ious air, that the climate be favorable and the soil fruitful. The conformation of the ter-
rain 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, in-
dicating 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 physi-
cians, who therefore need not be on the permanent payroll; towns also function as mar-

194
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 plea-
sure. The farm will run better, with less wrongdoing, and will produce more. The fore-
head 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’oc-
chio 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.

Pliny, on the other hand, while sharing the anti-urban bias, speaks for the more aristo-
cratic ethic of otium, which was practiced in hunting, fishing, walking for pleasure, and

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

above all in reading and writing; this was the prevailing ethos of the Roman villas of im-
perial 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 ro-
mantic descriptions of scenery, the pleasures of the view: the ethic of Cato merges into
an aesthetic. Of the Tuscan villa he writes:

195
 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 cov-

ered 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 vine-

yards.] You would be much delighted were you to take a prospect of this place from a neigh-

boring 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

196
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 re-
treat, 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
of Medici power, the impetus for the choice was not far from that of Pliny and Horace.

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 The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

who had depicted Florence from outside the walls put one of the later villas, at Arti-
minio, 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 environ-
ment. Italians were, however, too attached to their ancient heritage to try to imitate nat-
ural disorder in their landscapes.

197
 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 inter-
est 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 respon-
sible.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 go-
ing 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 agri-
cultural texts. But on this point Pliny had no relevance to the economic and cultural sit-
uation in the Veneto, where, even in the unlikely event that an owner should be rich

198
enough to afford Plinian luxury, he would have been
constrained by the ethic of Venetian republicanism
and of the mercantile tradition.17 Given these con-
straints, 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 at-
tempting to build more modest versions of the com-
plexes described by Pliny. Pliny’s letters are specific
enough about the buildings, gardens, and natural set-
tings 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 it-
self a kind of landscape painting. It is of value pre-
cisely because it articulates an ideology of a country
environment that prevailed among the urban privi-

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

leged classes in Augustan and imperial Rome, and ex-
ercised 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.

199
 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.

200
As late as the first decade of the sixteenth century,
villas such as that of the Giustinian family at Ron-
cade (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 re-
jected 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
8.16 Settefinestre, Roman villa, as
prominence and to provide a level base on irregular
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
dispersion of the Plinian villa—and, incidentally, of
all other Roman villas discovered in post-

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

Renaissance times—did not conform to the Renais-
sance image of ancient architecture. As with the
creation of a canon of the orders, the revival of an-
tiquity became obligatory, but only so long as the an-
cient 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

201
 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, fod-
der, 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 Quattro-
cento 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 em-
ulation 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.

202
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, over-
looking cultivated fields on a slope adapted to drainage. In fact, Palladio describes how
the water that issues from a fountain behind the villa fills a fishpond and passes from

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

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 ex-
isting 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.

203
 8.19 Paolo Veronese, Landscape with Roman Ruins, in Villa Barbaro, Maser. Photo: Art Resource.

204
8.20 Vicenza, Villa Rotonda, late 1560s. Photo: Philip Trager.

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

205
 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 Bac-

chiglione, 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 con-
ceptually in the tradition of Cornaro’s Euganean retreat, but in form and in its immod-
est 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 transi-
tion 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 Palla-
dio’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 bor-
ders, 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 nat-
ural 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:

206
8.21 Domenico Campagnola, Landscape. Florence, Uffizi Gallery. Photo: Art Resource.

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

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 sta-

tus in the same ways as is customary in towns.26

207
 8.22 Fanzolo, Villa Emo, ca. 1555–1560, rear view. Photo: Ralph Lieberman.

208
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 prac-
tical 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 un-
adorned as the utility structures (compare the facade and the rear of Villa Emo at Fan-
zolo, 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 archi-
tect explained:

In all the buildings for farms and also for some of those in the city I have built a tympanum [fron-

tispizio] 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

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

1615, implemented this with a call for an imposing entrance drive and piazza:

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

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 com-

modity.28

209
 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 ad-
dressed 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 impres-
sive (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 impor-

tance 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 re-
gion of Paris and elsewhere, who built “almost always” on hills,30 a claim that is exag-
gerated if not false.

Scamozzi no longer addresses issues of agriculture, nor even Palladio’s simpler strat-
egies 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 dis-
tant 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

210
8.23 Lonigo, Rocca Pisana, 1576. Vincenzo Scamozzi, architect. From Giuseppe Mazzotti, Ville venete (Rome, 1957).

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

211
 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 en-
tering 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 ac-
cidents 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 af-
fected 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 estab-

lished 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 con-
form to the Roman texts, not only because these were insufficiently instructive, but also

212
because the Renaissance concept of form and space, notwithstanding the rhetoric of re-
vival, 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 con-
vey 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 ideo-
logical 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-
tates in order to enjoy the contemporary equivalent of otium.

The Influence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas

213
 N OT E S
1 Giuseppe Zocchi, Vedute delle ville, e d’altri luoghi
della Toscana (Florence, 1744), frontispiece.
2 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).
3 See Olinto Marinelli, “La carta topografica e lo
sviluppo di Firenze,” Rivista geografica italiana 28
(1921), 18–38; Ferdinando Castagnoli, “La centuria-
zione di Fiorentia,” L’universo 22 (1941), 361–368;
Colin Hardie, “The Origin and Plan of Roman Flor-
ence,” Journal of Roman Studies 55 (1965), 122–
140.
4 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.
5 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).
6 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 Vil-
las of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity (Chicago, 1994).
7 P. Foster, ed., “Raphael on the Villa Madama: The Text
of a Lost Letter,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunst-
geschichte 11 (1968), 308–312. On Villa Madama, see
C. L. Frommel, S. Ray, and M. Tafuri, eds., Raffaello ar-
chitetto (Rome, 1984), 343–356, with full bibliog-
raphy.
8 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 gior-
nate della vera agricoltura, e piacere della villa (Bre-
scia, 1564;Venice, 1566), followed by Le vinti giornate
. . . (Turin, 1569). Saminiati’s manuscript “Trattato d’a-
gricoltura,” 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 (Flor-
ence, 1566), is not a manual but a courtly literary rep-
resentation 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
214
in Sixteenth-Century Villa Books,” in The Villa: Form
and Ideology of Country Houses (London and Prince-
ton, 1990), 108–133, and they are discussed by Rein-
hard Bentmann and Michael Müller, Die Villa als
Herrschaftsarchitektur, 2d ed. (Frankfurt, 1992), the
original edition of which (1970) influenced the orien-
tation of my book. Bentmann and Müller’s book has
been published in English as The Villa as Hegemonic
Architecture (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1992).
9 Cato, 1.3–7; Varro, 1.6.2, 1.7.1, 1.12.1; Columella
1.2.3f.
10 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 quat-
tro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570) 2.12 (p. 45); cf.
Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura univer-
sale (Venice, 1615) 3.15 (pp. 282f.). The same pre-
cepts 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 ap-
pendix, “Materialen zur italienischen Villa der Renais-
sance.”
11 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).
12 Cato, 4.1; Columella, 4.4.6–8, adds that comfort will
encourage the owner’s wife to accompany him. Palla-
dius, 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).
13 Pliny the Younger, Letters 9.36.
14 See my study “The Medici Villa in Fiesole,” in Il se ren-
dit en Italie: Etudes offertes à André Chastel (Rome,
1987), 49–56.
15 I have used the transcription of the Discorso in
 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).
16 Fiocco, Alvise Cornaro, 179. In the previous paragraph,
Cornaro had written:“Ho ancora, oltre a questo, un al-
tro 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 giar-
dini, 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 pia-
cevole.”
17 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 in-
torno alla vita sobria, transcribed in Fiocco, Alvise
Cornaro, 179).
18 Vitruvius, De architectura 6.5.3.
19 Carolyn Kolb Lewis, The Villa Giustinian at Roncade
(New York, 1977).
20 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 tow-
ers were drawn by a late fifteenth-century visitor. A.
Carandini, ed., Settefinestre: Una villa schiavistica nel-
l’Etruria romana, 3 vols. (Modena, 1985); I have dis-
cussed the drawing in The Villa: Form and Ideology of
Country Houses, 85. In the later sixteenth century, ex-
cavations at Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli began to reveal dis-
crete elements in that complex; see William L.
MacDonald and John Pinto, Hadrian’s Villa and Its
Legacy (New Haven, 1995).
and Muraro,“Feudo e ville venete,” Bollettino del Cen-
tro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura 20 (1978),
203–223.
24 Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura 2.14 (p. 51).
25 Ibid. 2.3 (p. 18).
26 Ibid. 2.13 (p. 46): “Del compartimento delle case.”
27 Ibid. 2.16 (p. 69).
28 Scamozzi, Idea 3.21 (pp. 322f.); discussed by Bent-
mann and Müller, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur,
185, n. 145.
29 Scamozzi, Idea 1.2.6 (pp. 117f.).
30 Ibid.: the villas of “i Rè passati, e Duchi, e Prencipi par-
ticolari 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 mag-
gior parte, come habbiamo osseruato, sono quasi tutti
sopra piaceuoli Colli de’ quali ne è molto abbondante
quel Regno.”
31 On the culture and ideology of the Venetian villas, see
Bentmann and Müller, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchi-
tektur; 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

21 Lucius Junius Columella, De re rustica 1.6.1.
22 See Martin Kubelik, Die Villa im Veneto. Zur typologi-
schen Entwicklung im Quattrocento, 2 vols. (Munich,
1977), 2:164f., figs. 652–660: Marano, Cà Alta, dated
(by dendrochronology) to 1487–1490; illustration fac-
ing 1:53. See also Renato Cevese, Ville della Provincia
di Vicenza, vol. 2 (Milan, 1971), 468f.
23 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 impe-
rial title. See Michelangelo Muraro,“La villa palladiana
dei Repeta a Campiglia dei Berici,” Campiglia dei
Berici: Storia di un paese veneto (Campiglia, 1980),

215
This page intentionally left blank
Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

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

218
The Venetian patrician Daniele Barbaro, Patriarch-Elect of Aquileia (1514–1570), is rep-
resented 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 illus-
tration 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 an-
tiquity and of the discourse on the nature of artistic invention. Barbaro is also interest-
ing 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 com-
mentary Palladio’s help in providing illustrations and advice,3 and I start with the as-
sumption 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 sep-
arate headings the principal ways in which Barbaro departed from or supplemented
Vitruvius.

The First Principles

Daniele Barbaro and 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-

219
 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 ar-
chitect, 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 re-
alized 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 learn-
ing (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 tech-

nique. It had been placed commonly in tandem with theory in a dual system—Barbaro

220
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 re-
semble 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 Ja-
copo 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 re-

member 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 tra-

dition of their buildings is superior, they fool themselves greatly, because, in fact, it is a too faulty

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

which I too concede, at least they should be content to permit a moderation of that tradition by
Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

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

221
 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 rea-
son, 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 tal-
ent in design are of a piece; both were part of an effort to introduce the Roman Renais-
sance. 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 stun-
ning 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 re-

siding at the center of all the crafts, because it alone grasps the causes, it alone embraces beau-

tiful 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

222
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 ac-

cordance 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 train-
ing 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 (in-
genium) and the second by discipline. Barbaro makes sense of the semantic terms, iden-
tifying the signified with the architectural program and the signifier with the project:
Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

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

223
 are signifiers, because the sign refers to the signified thing: the effect to the cause, the conclu-

sion 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 in-

tention, 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 ra-
tional intellect on the design process.

That process is described as “discourse”—Discorso—which is Barbaro’s rendering of Vi-

truvius’s ratiocinatio.23 This alteration of the original meaning is revealing, since the Vi-
truvian 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” sug-
gests 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 delin-
eation that serves painters, sculptors, etc.”26 and involves establishing scale and dimen-
sion, 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 Bat-
tista Alberti had,28 the third (perspective rendering), which he says relates to scene paint-

224
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 pas-
sage: “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 dig-
nity.”30 Some Roman historians and early humanists had modeled history on the natu-
ral 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 ap-
pearing 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 Bar-
baro 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 contem-
porary architecture, though it could have been used to support his desire to have al-
l’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
of contemporary ecclesiastical buildings, and when Vitruvius explains how the charac-
Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

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:

225
 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 ratio-

nal 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 patri-
cians) 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 pro-
portions, 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 be-

tween the greater and the smaller extreme and vary the means with judgment and subtlety of

feeling.36

226
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 va-
riety 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 con-
temporaries 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 brack-
ets of the Loggia in Vicenza (1570; fig. 10.14).37

Proportions

Vitruvius does not clearly differentiate his three types of architectural proportions—pro-
portio, 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 compari-
son 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,

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

tione]. It is not enough to order measurements one after the other, but it is necessary that these
Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

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

227
 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 propor-
tion in architectural design to musical harmony; both derived from a universal mathe-
matical 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-

228
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 col-
laborator Andrea Palladio has not been supported by this account; Barbaro was too pre-
occupied 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 at-
tracted), but as a specialty in itself, in a way that had little impact on architectural the-
ory (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 Palla-
dio. 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-
sible to all architects and amateurs.

Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius

229
 NOTES
This essay is an homage to Richard
Krautheimer’s stimulating article “Alberti and
Vitruvius,” in Studies in Early Christian, Me-
dieval and Renaissance Art (New York, 1969),
323–332.
1 The revised Italian edition is I dieci libri dell’ar-
chitettura di M. Vitruvio tradotti e commentati
da Mons. Daniele Barbaro (Venice, 1567).
Translations in this study will be from that edi-
tion 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, Patriarch-
Elect of Aquileia,” Ph.D. diss. (London, Cour-
tauld 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, Isti-
tuto 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 Six-
teenth Centuries,” in Vaughan Hart with Peter
Hicks, eds., Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Re-
naissance Architectural Treatise (New Haven,
1998), 263–280; Bruce Boucher, “The Last
Will of Daniele Barbaro,” Journal of the War-
burg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979),
277–282; Branko Mitrovic, “Paduan Aris-
totelianism and Daniele Barbaro’s Commen-
tary 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 ‘Ispe-
rienza’ nei trattati d’architettura veneziani del
Cinquecento,” Architectura 8 (1978), 49–72;
Fontana, “Il ‘Vitruvio’ del 1556: Barbaro, Pal-
ladio, Marcolini,” in Trattati scientifici nel
Veneto fra il XV e XVI secolo: Saggi e studi (Vi-
230
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, “Anmerkun-
gen zu Barbaros Vitruv,” Ph.D. diss. (Mainz,
1991); Pamela Long, “The Vitruvian Commen-
tary 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 knowl-
edge and understanding of Roman architec-
ture, but who himself had not visited Rome. In
his essay on Cesariano’s edition, Manfredo
Tafuri characterized the text thus: “Romanti-
cismo archeologico e sforzo erudito, intenti
metodologici e evasione fantastica, antistori-
cismo e tentativo di entrare in un rapporto
critico con l’antico si fondono dunque . . . nel-
l’intera opera del Cesariano” (in Scritti rinasci-
mentali 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 impor-
tanti io ho usato l’opere di M. Andrea Palladio
Vicentino Architetto, il quale ha con incredi-
bile 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 con-
tendono con gli antichi, danno lume a mo-
derni, daranno merauuiglia a quelli che
uerranno.” Other references to Palladio ap-
pear 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 Aris-
totelianism,” 680f., minimizes the Platonic as-
pect of Barbaro’s thought and proposes that
his position (described as “conventionalist”),
which attributed architectural elements,
 forms, and relationships to usage and experi-
ence, contrasted markedly with that of Palla-
dio, which attributed them to immanent
principles and essential meanings.
5 Barbaro, I dieci libri, commentary to the
proemio (p. 3).
6 Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics 6.2–3,
lists art and science as two of five ways of ar-
riving at truth (the others being prudence, wis-
dom, 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.”
7 Both Plato (Republic 416–419) and Aristotle
(Politics 6.7, 1321a; 7.8, 1328b) separate arti-
sans, farmers, etc. from the guardians of the
state, putting them in a lower social class. Bar-
baro’s division suggests equality of status and
echoes the elevation of architects, farmers, and
other artisans by his Venetian (Paduan) pred-
ecessor of the previous generation, Alvise
Cornaro (Scritti sull’architettura, ed. P. Carpeg-
giani [Padua, 1980]); see Giuseppe Fiocco,
Alvise Cornaro, il suo tempo e le sue opere
(Vicenza, 1965).
8 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 affati-
carsi . . . ? non per altro che per manifestare in
qualche materia esteriore la forma, che prima
era nel pensiero, & nella mente.” (Comment-
ing 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 conue-
niente.”)
Again in 2.1.8 (p. 71): “la materiale è princi-
pio 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 signifi-
cante.”
9 Aristotle, Physics 193ff.
10 Wittkower, Architectural Principles, 67, traces
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.
11 Barbaro, I dieci libri, proemio (p. 4) (while Vi-
truvius’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 ra-
gione 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, in-
tendendo le cause, & le ragioni delle cose,
ladoue la isperienza opera senza ragione. . . .
La onde l’Arte è alla sapienza, che è habito no-
bilissimo, piu uicina.”
12 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.
13 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 hu-
mano, 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 chia-
meremo imitatione. . . . Conueneuolmente
l’Architetto imitando il fattor della natura
deue riguardare alla bellezza, utilità, & fer-
mezza delle opere.” (Note the disinclination to
Christianize il fattor. )
14 As suggested by Fontana, “‘Arte’ e ‘Ispe-
rienza’ nei trattati d’architettura veneziani del
Cinquecento.”
Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius
15 Tafuri, introduction to the facsimile of Bar-
baro’s 1567 Vitruvius commentary (Milan,
1987), xix ff.; and Tafuri, Venezia e il Rinasci-
mento (Turin, 1985).
16 Barbaro, I dieci libri 6.10 (p. 303): “Et se io
231
 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 quel-
l’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, & inuec-
chiate 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 esor-
tare 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 al-
trouue, s’è detto, perche cosi facendo, uera-
mente meriteranno laude, & nome conveniente
alla loro professione.”
17 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’a-
cutezza delle ingegno riluce.”
18 See chapter 10 below.
19 Barbaro, I dieci libri 1.1.1 (p. 6).
20 Ibid. 6.2.5 (p. 282).
21 Ibid. 6.10 (pp. 303f.; unchanged from the
1556 text): “& se uogliono un determinato
numero di finestre in una stanza, siano con-
tenti di lasciarle porre al suo luogo, con gli or-
232
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 com-
modità: e poi lasciar allo Architetto, che egli le
compartisca, & ponga al luogo suo, secondo
l’ordine, dispositione, & misura, che se con-
viene.”
22 Ibid. 1.1.3 (Vitruvius’s passage): “Quare vide-
tur 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 signi-
ficata, & proposta opera, e l’altra è la signifi-
cante 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 con-
clusione 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’ar-
chitettura] perciòche ella sopra ogni arte si-
gnifica 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, architet-
tura, scultura e pittura, procedendo dall’intel-
letto 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 Mi-
lanesi (Florence, 1906), 1:196. The use of di-
segno in the passage quoted in note 22 above
 (“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.”
25 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 orec-
chie, cosi habbia l’Architettura gli aspetti, &
forme sue per satisfar a gli occhi.”
26 Ibid. 1.1.4 (p. 13).
27 Vitruvius, De architectura 1.2.1, explaining the
types of dispositio that the Greeks call ideae.
28 Alberti’s rules for architectural drawing are dis-
cussed in chapter 2 above.
29 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 Vitru-
vius’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 entab-
latures 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).
30 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’architet-
tura, che nei primi secoli hebbe i suoi sgossa-
menti, 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)”
31 I am reluctant to attribute the historical struc-
ture of either Barbaro or Vasari to Pliny the El-
der (Historia naturalis), who represented the
figural arts of Greece and Hellenism as pro-
gressively advancing in verisimilitude (see
chapter 1 above). Pliny did not present his
chronicle as an instance of a general historical
pattern.
32 As persuasively illustrated by Alina Payne, The
Architecural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance:
Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Liter-
ary Culture (Cambridge, U.K., 1999).
33 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.”
34 Ibid. 1.2.5 (p. 35).
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 Bar-
baro’s numbering; p. 201), Barbaro provides
the first record of Counter-Reformation inno-
vations.
36 Ibid., 4.1.10 (p. 165; the passage is absent
from the Latin edition): “Voglio far hora au-
uertiti 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 so-
pra con l’auttorità di Vitru. che la ragione delle
cose è in se uera, & durabile, onde con la pro-
portione sene uiue, & sta senza oppositione,
ma non sempre diletta quel sentimento del-
l’animo nostro, il quale forse piu a dentro per
Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius
ascosa forza di natura penetrando non con-
sente a gli occhi, che la pura è [e?] semplice
proportione alcuna fiata diletti. ma dalla ma-
teria delle cose, dalla grandezza, dalla distanza
(come ho detto) richiede alcuna maniera, &
233
 forma, che acconci quello gratiosamente, che has been effectively interpreted in the context
troppo simplicemente ci porge la misura, & of Renaissance architectural theory by Witt-
proportione, come nelle statue antiche si kower, Architectural Principles, part IV: “The
uede, altre di noue, altre di dieci, altre tra Problem of Harmonic Proportion in Architec-
noue & dieci teste formate. Et nella Musica fi- ture,” pp. 101–154. Wittkower proposed that
nalmente ci sono alcuni suoni, i quali uengono harmonic proportions—as indicated in the
alle orecchie con dolcezza, che però non son measurements provided in the woodcuts illus-
tra le consonanze collocati. Però dico, che trating Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architet-
ognuno deue cessare dalla merauiglia, quando tura, 1570—were applied by Palladio in his
ritroua in molte opere la misura alquanto ua- design of buildings, not only in dimensioning
riata dai precetti, perche egli è a bastanza tra’l plans and elevations but in a “fugal” system
maggiore, & minore eccesso contenersi, that integrated harmonies througout a build-
uariando i mezi con giudicio, & sottigliezza ing. Questions have been raised about the
d’auuertimento.” On 6.2 (p. 282), Barbaro fugal system in subsequent studies, e.g.,
observes that optical distortions and effects of Deborah Howard and Malcolm Longair, “Har-
distance and light may call for departures from monic Proportion in Palladio’s Quattro libri,”
strict proportions. Journal of the Society of Architectural Histori-
37 See chapter 10 below. ans 41 (1982), 116–143; Branko Mitrovic,
38 Barbaro, I dieci libri 3.1 (p. 98): “però dicemo, “Palladio’s Theory of Proportions and the Sec-
che porportione altro non è, che una termi- ond Book of I quattro libri dell’architettura,”
nata habitudine, respetto, o comparatione di Journal of the Society of Architectural Histori-
due quantità compreso sotto un’istesso ans 49 (1990), 272–292; Alina Payne, “Rudolf
genere.” Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the
39 Ibid. 1.2.5 (p. 34): “La simmetria è la bellezza Age of Modernism,” Journal of the Society of
dell’ordine, come è la Eurithmia la bellezza Architectural Historians 53 (1994), 322–342.
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.”
40 Ibid. 1.2.3 (p. 33). Vitruvius’s text is translated:
“Il bel numero detto Eurithmia, è aspetto gra-
tioso, & commoda forma nella compositione
dei membri, questa si fa quando i membri del-
l’opera sono convenienti, come dell’altezza
alla larghezza, della larghezza alla lungezza, &
in fine ogni cosa risponda al suo comparti-
mento proprio.” Barbaro comments: “Deve
esser adunque ogni artificioso lavoro a guisa
d’un bellissimo verso, il quale se ne corra se-
condo le ottime consonanze succedendo le
parti l’una all’altra, sin che pervenghino all’or-
dinato fine. . . . Come nel cantare si richiede il
conserto delle voci, nel quale oltra che le voci
sono giuste: oltre che convengono nelle con-
sonanze, bisogna anche un certo temper-
mento, che faccia dolce, & soave tutta la
armonia.”
41 The nature of Barbaro’s harmonic theory is too
complex to summarize here; in any event, it

234
Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

TEN
 This study originated as the keynote address to the opening of the annual “Corso Palla-
diano” 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 se-
ries, 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 neoclas-
sica,” of 1930.1 The two more recent writers distinguished Palladio from the neoclassi-
cists; 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 crit-
ics 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 Ro-
mans and “classical” as referring to a particular attitude toward form, structure, and con-
tent (often with reference to the ancients). The ancient Romans used classicus to
designate members of the privileged classes, as distinct from the proletariat; the mod-
ern 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 op-
posed 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 ap-
proach characterized by Argan as “an objective and absolute perfectibility in the rela-
tionship 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

236
interpreter on its object, but the almost universal ten-
dency to discuss Palladio, or Raphael or Michelan-
gelo, as classical has obscured from us much of what
mattered to them.

The problem of establishing principles for architec-

tural 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 the-
ory, 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 measur-
ing 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 ar-

chitecture were not confined by strict rules.

Yet Renaissance theorists knew that some constraint

was necessary, both because custom and propriety (in
the sense of using the proper order for the purpose
and character of a building) had to be respected, and
Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

because they were writing books and publishing im-

ages to instruct patrons and practitioners about the
basics of architectural design.3 Thus, Palladio’s prede-
cessors, Sebastiano Serlio in 1537 and Giacomo

237
 10.2 The five orders according to Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, as reconstructed by Christof Thoenes.

238
Barozzi da Vignola in 1562, published versions of the five orders with measured illus-
trations, 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 pro-
portions for each (fig. 10.1). Vignola’s system differed in many respects; his measure-
ments 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 mod-
ern, 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. Pal-
ladio’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 Quat-
tro 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 sec-
tion 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 ori-
gin 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 col-
umn 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 slen-
der and hence lighter. Pediments must not be broken at the top, because their purpose
is to shed rain and snow (this is, however, not so much an offense to statics as to utility,
Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

a Vitruvian category).

239
 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 es-
sentially 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

240
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 ef-
fect (paiano far l’effetto) of stability. I don’t know how he justified the pilasters he de-
signed 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 admit-
ted 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
pliant to carry such weight.

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

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

241
 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 pub-
lished 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-

242
 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 be-
cause “I like them better” (a me più piacciono).11 His general principle is that “the archi-
tect is not prohibited from departing occasionally from common practice so long as the
Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

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

243
 10.7 Andrea Palladio, frontispiece to I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570).

244
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 de-

scribed, which is nothing other than a proportion in the members of a body such that one [cor-

responds] 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 be-
cause 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:

One understands another thing by the word Symmetry in France, because it signifies the
Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

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

245
 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 ar-
chitecture. 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 wide-
ranging 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 utilitar-

246
10.9 Andrea Palladio, villa project, before 1540. London, Royal Institute of British Architects Library, XVII, 15r. Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

247
 10.10 Venice, Church of the Redentore, apse and dome, 1577. Andrea Palladio, architect. Photo: Phyllis Massar.

248
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.
(Vicenza, 1786), vol. 4, pl. 4.

Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

249

10.12 Vicenza, Palazzo Valmarana,
facade, 1566. Andrea Palladio,
architect. Photo: Phyllis Massar.
250
ian structures but also, as Manfredo Tafuri has pointed
out, for the palace designs commissioned by patrons
who favored Venetian tradition and isolation from Pa-
pal Rome.16 The rejection of ornament is not peculiar
to Palladio’s agricultural structures; a similar minimal-
ism is found in the totally unarticulated buttresses
about the lanterns of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Re-
dentore 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 in-
tentional, and gave each of the buildings proper vo-
lutes 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 fa-
cade 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
support system, abandoning Palladio’s own principle
of the imitation of nature through expression of struc-
ture; moreover, a mezzanine window breaks through
the entablature as if it were an afterthought. These fea-
tures were severely criticized by the neoclassical theo-
retician 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 in-
tersection of the cornice by the colossal pilasters, are not in
a pure taste. The worst is that at the corners there are only
 Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

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

251
 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 ob-
scures 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 sensu-
ous 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 Pan-
theon, 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-

252
 Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

10.15 Andrea Palladio, “Temple of Romulus” on the Via Appia, plans and elevations.
London, Royal Institute of British Architects Library, VIII, 1.

253
 10.16 Andrea Palladio, Baths of Agrippa, studies of the plan. London, Royal Institute of British Architects Library, VII, 6.

254
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 mea-
surements. This is an instance, of which there were many, in which the architect virtu-
ally 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 Pan-
theon, for which he was vigorously criticized—one critic called them “asses’ ears”—be-
fore 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 or-
namental 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 cam-
paniles 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
responsibility to convey trustworthy information to others. There are, however, three
distinct types: first, records of his own investigation of the remains either in the proto-
Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

archaeological form of recording the surviving evidence or in the form of reconstruc-

tions of the original buildings, such as those prepared for publication in the Quattro libri

255
 10.17 Andrea Palladio, fantasy reconstruction of Palestrina, Temple of Fortuna Primigenia, plan and elevation.
London, Royal Institute of British Architects Library, IX, 7.

256
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 en-
gagement 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 any-
thing 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 ro-
tundas. 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 10.18 Palestrina, Precinct of
Fortuna Primigenia,
Pantheon. The studies surely contributed to Palladio’s
modern reconstruction.
conception of the plan of the Redentore in Venice.
Courtesy of Pelican Books.

Another instance of the capriccio on an ancient theme

is the series of studies of a monumental temple com-
plex on a hillside, inspired by the Precinct of Fortuna
Primigenia in Palestrina and the Theater at Verona.23
The drawing shown here (fig. 10.17) cannot be called
Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

a reconstruction: the fantastic complexity and repeti-

tion 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

257
 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 cen-
ter but as a pleasure retreat, the function of which was to provide a setting for enter-
tainments. 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 the-
ater; 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 Vi-
truvius 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 or-
ders (fig. 10.20). This is the type of Palladian work that was to be identified with clas-
sicism 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
straightforward forms with a minimum of sculptural detail and texture.

Thus there is an ambivalent answer to the question posed in the my title, “Palladio: Clas-
Palladio: Classical in What Sense?

sical 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

259
 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 Val-
marana, 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 varia-
tions in the architect’s adaptations of and departures from antique practice and reduced
our understanding of the wealth of his invention.

260
 NOTES
1 Cesare Brandi, “Perchè Palladio non fu neo-
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 Ar-
chitecture 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 Architet-
tura 13 (1971), 9–27. Giulio Carlo Argan,
“Palladio e la critica neoclassica,” L’arte, n.s. 1
(1930), 327–346. For an introduction to Palla-
dio’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).
2 “Una perfettibilità oggettiva e assoluta di un
rapporto di elementi, razionalmente interpre-
tato”: Argan, “Palladio e la critica neoclas-
sica,” 341.
3 Hubertus Günther and Christof Thoenes, “Gli
ordini d’architettura: Rinascità o inven-
zione?,” in Marcello Fagiolo, ed., Roma e l’an-
tico nell’arte e nella cultura del Cinquecento
(Rome, 1985), 261–310.
4 Christof Thoenes, “Vignolas ‘Regola delli
cinque ordini,’” Römische Jahrbuch der Biblio-
theca 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; Hu-
bertus Günther, “Palladio e gli ordini di
colonne,” in André Chastel and Renato
Cevese, eds., Andrea Palladio: Nuovi contributi
(Milan, 1990), 182–197; Branko Mitrovic, “Pal-
ladio’s Theory of the Classical Orders in the First
Book of I quattro libri dell’architettura,” Archi-
tectural History 42 (1999), 1–31.
5 Mitrovic, “Palladio’s Theory,” esp. 12ff. The
debt to Vignola was first brought to my at-
tention by the research of one of my students,
Scott Opler, since tragically deceased, in a
seminar on Palladio.
6 See the excellent study of Palladio’s theory and
its relation to his practice in Alina Payne, The
Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renais-
sance: 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 reit-
erates 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’ar-
chitettura (1554–1579), ed. Lionello Puppi (Vi-
cenza, 1988), 133ff.
7 Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura
(Venice, 1570), 1.20 (p. 51).
8 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.”
9 See Alina Payne, “Architectural Criticism, Sci-
ence, 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 photo-
graph 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 er-
rori degli architetti (Farnborough, U.K., 1970).
Palladio: Classical in What Sense?
10 “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.” Gia-
como Barozzi da Vignola, Regola delli cinque
ordini d’architettura (1562), introduction: “A i
261
 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 com-
bined them. (See above, chapter 5, p. 127.)
11 Palladio, Quattro libri 1.16 (p. 31).
12 “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).
13 Palladio, Scritti, ed. Puppi, 132: “nè so in che
autori tedeschi abino mai veduto descrita l’ar-
chitetura, 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 corrispon-
denti, 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.”
14 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 senti-
mento da i membri dell’opera, & dalle parti
separate alla forma di tutta la figura, secondo
la rata portione, come si vede nel corpo hu-
mano, il quale con il cubito, co’l piede, col
palmo, col dito, & con le altre parti è com-
misurato, cosi adiviene nelle perfettioni del-
l’opere.” Barbaro’s work is discussed more
extensively in chapter 9 above.
15 “ . . . 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 der-
rière, 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-
262
chitecture (Paris, 1771–1777), combines the
Vitruvian meaning with a symmetry based on
the human body.
16 See especially Manfredo Tafuri, Venezia e il Ri-
nascimento (Turin, 1985). For Sansovino’s build-
ings in the plain style see Deborah Howard,
Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage
in Renaissance Venice (New Haven, 1975).
17 Le fabbriche e i disegni di Andrea Palladio rac-
colti ed illustrati da Ottavio Bertotti-Scamozzi
(Vicenza, 1776), tav. IV, VII. The same but-
tresses appear on the lantern of drawings for
a central-plan church, often associated with
the Redentore: Royal Institute of British Archi-
tects, Drawing Collection, XIV, 14, 15.
18 “Ognun vede, che questa combinazione di pi-
lastri 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 an-
tichi 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 pre-
cedute di un saggio sopra l’architettura
(Rome, 1768).
19 Gallaccini, Trattato, 43.
20 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.
21 Giangiorgio Zorzi, I disegni delle antichità di
Andrea Palladio (Venice, 1959); Heinz Spiel-
mann, Andrea Palladio und die Antike (Mu-
nich and Berlin, 1966).
22 Besides that reproduced in fig. 10.16, there
were several other studies for the final pro-
posal for the plan, including Vicenza, Museo
Civico, no. D.33r. They are catalogued in
Spielmann, Andrea Palladio, 166ff. and figs.
100–106.
23 Other such studies (besides fig. 10.17 here) in-
clude Royal Institute of British Architects,
Drawing Collection, IX, 6, 8 (an imaginary hill-
side 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.
Thomas Jefferson and Italy

ELEVEN
 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-eighteenth-
century English gentleman, as testified by the contents of his library prior to his depar-
ture 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 En-
glish books not only an admiration for the literary, rhetorical, and artistic world of Ro-
man 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, initi-
ated by Inigo Jones in the early 1600s, had been taken up a century later by Whig aris-
tocrats 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 archi-
tects such as Robert Adam and John Soane, his approach to vocabulary and composi-
tion 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 ex-
press 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

264
11.1 Carter’s Grove, Virginia, 1751–1753, garden facade. Photo: Wayne Andrews/Esto.

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

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

265
 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, anti-
republican 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 as-
signed 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 alterna-
tives 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’ar-
chitettura 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 theo-
rist 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 ter-
race 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

266
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 so-
lutions.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 En-
glish architect. Still, the name “Monticello” not only is Italian but also is precisely the
word used by Palladio in describing the elevated site of his Villa Rotonda in Vicenza.10

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

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

267
 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 one-
room 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 Jef-
ferson 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 orig-
inal, the illustrations of which look quite different.)

268
 Thomas Jefferson and Italy

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

269
 11.6 Finale, Villa Saraceno. From 1716 edition of Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura.

270
11.7 Monticello, elevation project, summer 1772. Courtesy Alderman Library, University of Virginia.
Thomas Jefferson and Italy

271
 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 oc-
tagonal 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 be-
come a place of pilgrimage, and larger accommodations were needed (fig. 11.8). He fin-
ished the drawings by 1796, when he was elected vice president, and began to remove
the second story and to double the depth.

272
11.9 Monticello, entrance (east) front. Courtesy Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation/James Tkatch.

Thomas Jefferson and Italy

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

273
 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 char-
acter, 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 Jef-
ferson 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, sur-
mounting 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.

274
11.12 Thomas Jefferson, competition drawing for the President’s House 11.13 Vicenza, Villa Rotonda, facade. From 1716 edition of Palladio’s
(K.126). Courtesy Maryland State Archives. 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 reg-
ularly 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 el-
evation, 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 Pal-
ladio’s own woodcuts in the original 1570 edition, which in turn differed from the exe-
cuted version (cf. fig. 8.20), but his plan and elevation retained the stamp of Palladio;
Jefferson seriously sought to transport that suburban Vicentine retreat to serve as the
Thomas Jefferson and Italy

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

275
 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. Stu-
dents were assigned cubicles along the porticoes flanking the pavilions. No two pavil-
ions 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 Ro-
tunda is taken from Leoni’s version of Palladio’s illustration of the Temple of Nerva in

276
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 ar-
chitecture.

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
mall on the highest ground, is based on Palladio’s elevation of the Pantheon in Rome,
the only ancient building to have survived virtually intact into modern times. The inte-
Thomas Jefferson and Italy

rior 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 oeu-
vre than into that of Jefferson.

277
 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 illus-
trating 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 ar-
chitecture. A significant new interest is in the multivolume sets of theoretical and bio-
graphical 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,

278
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 Ro-
man sculptures: the Medici Venus and the Apollo Belvedere first, followed, below a hor-
izontal 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 Jef-
ferson’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 con-
sulted most frequently, Jonathan Richardson’s An Account of Some of the Statues Bas Re-
liefs 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 Re-
mains 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 ac-
quired 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 re-
questing her “judgment on it. It will serve to rectify my own, which, as I told you, is a
bad one, & needs a guide.”19 This is confirmed by his reactions on a trip to Düsseldorf,
where he described as “sublime” the meretricious story-telling paintings of that city
Thomas Jefferson and Italy

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

279
 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 ex-
pensive for the state of wealth among us. It would be useless therefore, and preposter-
ous, 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 Bap-
tist after Leonardo da Vinci, along with works of Ribera, Poussin, and Rubens.23 A ma-
jor 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 conquista-
dors, Columbus, Vespucci, Magellan, and Cortez, and two Italian men of arms, Cas-
truccio 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 hu-
manists, he regarded the representation of biblical events as constituting history paint-
ing, 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 pic-
turesque 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 pri-
mary purpose being to investigate agricultural practice and technology.25 Foremost in

280
 Thomas Jefferson and Italy

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

281
 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 en-
tering 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 ma-
chine is absolutely the same as ours, and of course that we need not listen more to that sugges-
tion. 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 so-
ciety at Charlestown for promoting agriculture, supposing they will be best able to try the ex-
periment 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 inter-
ested in agriculture, I hope I do not err in supposing that in a time of profound peace as the pres-
ent, 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 agricul-
ture 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

282
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 illus-
trates the scattered character of his observations and their focus on technology and agri-
cultural 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 indis-

tinguishable 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
through the foothills of the Alps to the northeast, toward Turin via Cuneo and Racconigi
Thomas Jefferson and Italy

(fig. 11.18). From Turin he proceeded to Milan by way of Vercelli, where he first en-
countered 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

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 coun-
tryside, 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 out-
standing American architects of his generation (the other being Benjamin Latrobe,
whom he consulted in designing the University of Virginia), seems to have given archi-
tecture 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 previ-
ously 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 philo-
sophical 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 subur-
ban 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 [refer-

ring to the annual ceremony of the marriage of Venice to the sea]. But I am born to lose every-

thing that I love.33

While his own large collection consisted almost exclusively of copies, Jefferson’s re-
sponse to original works of art could be enthusiastic, and in respect to architecture al-
most 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 em-
ployed 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 evo-
lution, 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

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

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
Thomas Jefferson and Italy

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.

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.]

Notes

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

289
 N OT E S
1 Karl Lehmann, Thomas Jefferson: American
Humanist (Chicago, 1965).
2 See Rudolf Wittkower, Palladio and Palladi-
anism (London, 1974); John Summerson,
“The Classical Country House in Eighteenth-
Century England,” Journal of the Royal Soci-
ety of Arts 107 (July 1959), 539–587; John
Harris, The Palladians (New York, 1982);
James S. Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ide-
ology 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 Inter-
nazionale 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 Architet-
tura 12 (1970), 231–250.
3 The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P.
Boyd et al., 21 vols. (in progress) (Princeton,
1950ff.), 9:445.
4 As quoted, without source, by Erik Erikson,
Dimensions of a New Identity (New York,
1974), 19.
5 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).
6 On Jefferson’s library, see E. M. Sowerby,
Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jeffer-
son, 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: Jeffer-
son’s Selections for the University of Virginia
Together with the Architectural Books at
Monticello (Charlottesville, 1976).
290
7 For the history of Monticello, see William H.
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; Pier-
son, 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., Mon-
ticello: A Guidebook (Monticello, 1967).
8 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.
9 For Jefferson’s use of Gibbs, see Waddell,
“The First Monticello.”
10 “È sopra un monticello di ascesa facilissima.”
Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architet-
tura (Venice, 1570), 2.3 (p. 18).
11 For Jefferson’s debt to Morris, see Clay Lan-
caster, “Jefferson’s Architectural Indebted-
ness to Robert Morris,” Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians 10 (1951), 3–10.
12 Letter of March 20, 1787 (Papers of Thomas
Jefferson, 11:226).
13 See Kimball, Thomas Jefferson, Architect,
154–157, and drawing nos. 127–129.
14 On the university design, see ibid.,154–157;
Pierson, American Buildings, 316–334.
15 O’Neal, A Fine Arts Library.
16 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,” Bul-
letin 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.
17 Letter to Bellini, September 20, 1785, in Pa-
pers of Thomas Jefferson, 18:568f.; quoted
in G. G. Shackelford, “A Peep into Elysium,”
in Jefferson and the Arts, 242.
18 See Michel Benisovich, “Thomas Jefferson
amateur d’art à Paris,” Archives de l’art fran-
çais 22 (Etudes et documents sur l’art
français du XIII au XIX siècle) (Paris, 1969),
231ff.
19 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.
20 “Memorandum on a Tour from Paris to Ams-
terdam, Strasburg and back to Paris” (March
3, 1788), in Papers of Thomas Jeffer-
son, 17:274; quoted without source by
Mayor, “Jefferson’s Enjoyment of the Arts,”
142.
21 John Trumbull, Autobiography, Reminis-
cences and Letters (New York, 1841), 137;
quoted without source by Eleanor Berman,
Thomas Jefferson among the Arts (New
York, 1947), 74.
22 “Notes on Objects of Attention for an Ameri-
can,” 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 ac-
cumulations of wealth”: letter to Thomas
Sully, 1812, in The Writings of Thomas Jef-
ferson, ed. Andrew Lipscomb and Albert
Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1903),
18:281.
23 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).
24 The Jefferson Papers of the University of Vir-
ginia, ed. Constance Thurlow and Francis
Berkeley, Jr., 38 (Charlottesville, 1950), no.
2958.
25 Thomas Jefferson, “Notes of a Tour into the
Southern Parts of France . . . and Northern
Italy, in the Year 1787,” in Papers of Thomas
Jefferson, 11:415–464. See also the excerpts
from Jefferson’s account book in the ap-
pendix to this chapter.
26 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 discus-
sion of the value of olive production). See
also Jefferson’s Garden Book, ed. E. Betts
(Philadelphia, 1944), 121–129; and the com-
parison 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 Cy-
clopedia (New York and London, 1900),
778–779.
27 Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 18:194.
28 Ibid., 11:226.
29 These visits are recorded only in the note in
Jefferson’s account book (see my appendix)
recording the hire of horses.
30 Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 13:272.
31 See appendix, entry for April 23, 1787.
32 Shackelford, “Peep into Elysium,” 245; see
also Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:441.
33 Letter to Maria Cosway, Paris, July 1, 1787, in
Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 11:519f.; cited
by Shackelford, “Peep into Elysium,” 253.
Thomas Jefferson and Italy
291
This page intentionally left blank
The Conventions and Rhetoric
of Architectural Drawing

TWELVE
 By “a convention of architectural drawing” I mean the sign—made normally on a two-
dimensional surface—that translates into graphic form an aspect (e.g., the plan or ele-
vation) 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 Mau-
soleum 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 possi-
bility 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 gen-
erally 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 pro-
portion 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 tech-
nique of perspective projection described by Leon Battista Alberti in 1435, not long af-
ter the introduction of paper, and the format of the sheet.

The introduction of tracing paper in the eighteenth century not only facilitated the de-
velopment of project ideas by eliminating painstaking transferrals from one opaque sur-
face 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 em-
ployed as an enrichment of line drawing to distinguish mass from void in plans and to
emphasize contrasts of light and shadow in elevations, sections, and perspectives. In-
creasingly, from the eighteenth century on, watercolor was adopted where pictorial ef-

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

fects 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 cen-
turies designs and buildings have been represented in models, which have the advan-
tage of vivid representation more accessible than the abstraction of drawings to clients,

295

12.1 Fragment from the marble plan
of Rome, A.D. 205–208.
Photo: Fine Arts Library,
Harvard University.
296
the public, and the mason or woodworker. Now two-
dimensional representations may be composed by
computer-aided design, which is becoming progres-
sively 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.
But plans, apart from the fact that they indicate some-
thing literally invisible, are highly capricious. The rep-
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 foot-
print 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 ac-
tually it curves up toward an apex.
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
Nationale, Ms. Fr. 29093.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

297
 The Section

The section remained basically the same from its first appearance in the thirteenth cen-
tury; that of Peter Parler for the fourteenth-century Prague Cathedral (fig. 2.6) is the ear-
liest 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 unveri-
fiable 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 sec-
tion, 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 ambigu-

ously—and they have been employed since the fifteenth century to help designers to vi-
sualize 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 architec-
tural 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 ob-
server in whatever horizontal or vertical position most favored their purpose.

A few sixteenth-century architects, notably Baldassarre Peruzzi, employed geometri-

cally constructed perspective in some drawings (fig. 2.23); it may have been his inter-
est 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.

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

sections, lend themselves especially to rhetorical exposition (fig. 12.5). By rhetorical I

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

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 em-
phasize the revolutionary contrast to middle-class living spaces of the late nineteenth
century.

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 im-
pression of a building’s interior; it is used to repre-
sent 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 rele-
vant.) 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 op-
ponents of perspective in the presentation of archi-
tectural designs—notably Alberti, Raphael,
Palladio, and Barbaro—appealed for orthogonal el-
evations 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 rel-
atively few Renaissance drawings of such buildings
that are orthogonal, the section is drawn directly
above the plan on the same sheet.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

In the seventeenth century, military and mechan-
ical engineers developed the technique of axono-
metric drawing, which permitted representations
of constructions in three dimensions in which
correct measurements could be retained in the re-
ceding planes (fig. 12.7). A nongeometrical, sub-
jective form of axonometric had existed even
before the Renaissance; Japanese painters of the

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 re-
veal most about a particular part of the structure.

The axonometric method proved to be particularly suited to the forms of twentieth-

century 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 architec-
ture 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 ba-
sic 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

12.10 El Lissitzky, project for the
Cabinet of Abstraction in the
Provincial Museum, Hannover,
Sprengel Museum.
12.11 Peter Eisenman, drawing for
Guardiola House, Puerto de
Santa María, Cádiz, Spain.
Photo courtesy of the architect.
304
worked in Germany, produced many exhibition de-
signs, 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 em-
ployed axonometric projections of increasing com-
plexity not only to reveal the interpenetration of
planes, but to explore the complexity and incoherence
of spatial relations.
Mies van der Rohe developed a unique form of archi-
tectural 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 ele-
vation in which the wall, which is glass, is only a pic-
turesque 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
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 as-
pects of working drawings, such as those for lighting, heating, acoustics, ducting, and
structural detailing. It moves easily between two- and three-dimensional imaging, al-
lowing for visualization of forms and spaces previously worked out. Increasingly, it has
the capacity of hand-made drawing to depart from the predetermined parameters pro-
grammed into the software. Recently new applications, facilitated by the software Form

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

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 ex-
pansion 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 ex-
traordinary potential for the extension of architectural form.

305
 12.13 Asymptote (Hani Rashid and Lise Anne
Couture), interface study, Guggenheim
Virtual Musuem, 1999. Photo courtesy
of the architects.

306
12.14 Frank Gehry, study for Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Photo courtesy of the architect.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

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 signi-
fied, but only that it relates to it in some way that can be read. What are the different ef-
fects 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 explana-
tion in terms of Cartesian psychology, which, I take it, would hold that the mental im-
age 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 sug-
gests 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 particu-
larly 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 longi-
tudinal 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
Buonarroti, 124.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

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

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 in-
tended 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 al-
ready 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 archaeolo-
gist’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 in-
struments used are chosen in accordance with the pur-
pose 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 con-
vey 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

a wholly idiosyncratic way (fig. 12.17), as a moment 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
romane (Rome, ca. 1775),
are inflected by the same personal and cultural forces
vol. 4, plate 9.
that affect drawings (see chapter 4). Photo: Fine Arts Library,
Harvard University.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

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 ap-
pearance of the building, but to overwhelm the viewer
with what the artist saw as its awesome power.

The representations of the results of modern archae-

ological excavation are certainly the drawings least

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 cul-
ture in the course of time. But we could go with this drawing in hand to the site it de-
scribes 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 de-
stroyed 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, seek-
ing 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

would call accuracy: Richard Krautheimer showed that medieval draftsmen might rep-
resent any kind of central-plan building as round, since the symbolism of centrality was

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

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 Re-
naissance architects and renderers. We would expect these drawings to provide as ac-
curate 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.

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 exception-
ally 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 represen-
tation in painting and figural or landscape drawing.
Portraits, like architectural representations (other than
those intended for use), are normally expected to re-
semble 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 architec-
tural representations, they are substantially recast in
the style and technique chosen by the artist and pa-
trons. Portraits typically transmit not only what is ob-
12.22 Francesco di Giorgio Martini,
served but aspects of the sitter that can be inferred by
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.

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

Daniele Barbaro (fig. 9.1) conveys the sitter’s gravity

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

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.

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. Draw-
ings can be the only way of presenting projects that are visionary or at least temporar-
ily 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 sen-
tences, 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 commu-
nicates 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 his-
tory. 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 exam-
ine 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 li-
braries and archives but with real works in hand, through visual experiences and the
ruminations that follow them.

The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing

317
This page intentionally left blank
INDEX

Adam, Robert, 264 Agora, 312

Agrimensores, 187 Erechtheion, 296, 297
Alberti, Leon Battista, 7, 16, 17, 19, 28, 195, Parthenon, 312, 313, 314
295, 301 Avicenna (Ibn Sı̄nā), 150
De pictura, 9, 11, 50, 127, 295 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.
Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 89 See also Maser: Villa Barbaro
Santissima Annunziata, Florence, 72, 178 commentary on Vitruvius, 177, 219–229,
Alpers, Svetlana, 17 245, 257
American Architect, 118 Barbaro, Marcantonio, 219
Anatomical illustration, 29, 58, 60, 68, 82, 145, Bartolommeo, Fra
150–152, 168–171 Virgin and Child with St. John, Angels, and
Ancients and moderns, battle of, 131, 140n43 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 Bertotti Scamozzi, Ottavio, 249, 250
Aristotelianism, 12 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 Bologna
Ascani, Valerio, 45 academy of the Carracci, 131
Asymptote (Hani Rashid and San Petronio, 45, 177, 245
Lise Anne Couture), 306 Borgia, Cesare, 154
Atget, Eugène, 120 Borromeo, St. Carlo, 179
Athens Borromini, Francesco, 295
Acropolis, 101–105 Botticelli, Sandro, 168
Index

319
 Bracciolini, Poggio, 129 Charlottesville
Bramante, Donato, 72, 82, 91 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 Brutus, 5, 128
Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, 83 De inventione, 9, 127
Brandi, Cesare, 236 De oratore, 15, 127–128
Branner, Robert, 41 Orator, 10, 128
Bremo plantation, 267 Tusculanus, 16
Brunelleschi, Filippo, 7, 47, 50, 90 Cimabue, Giovanni (Cenni di Pepo), 3
Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence, 69 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
Caen Cola da Caprarola
St. Etienne, 99, 100 Santa Maria della Consolazione, Todi, 85, 86
Cambrai Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus, 193, 195,
cathedral, 31 201–202, 209
Camera obscura, 97 Computer-aided design, 305–307
Campagnola, Domenico, 207 Concinnitas, 176–177
Capriccio, 257, 258 Constable, John, 106
Cardo, 188 Salisbury Cathedral, View across the Bishop’s
Carracci, academy of, 131 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) Copernicus, Nicolaus, 150
Cato, Marcus Porcius, the Elder, 193, 195, 209, Cornaro, Alvise, 198, 206, 231n7
212 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 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé, 96
Chambers, William, 266 daguerreotype, 96, 110, 111, 112

320
Dante Alighieri, 3, 12 Falcone, Giuseppe, 194
Danti, Vincenzo, 134, 178 Fano
Decorum, 179, 225–227 basilica, 242
Decumanus, 188 Fanzolo
Delorme, Philibert, 181 Villa Emo, 208, 209, 246
Château d’Anet, 181, 300, 301 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 Villa Medici, 196, 197
Dolce, Lodovico, 132–133, 134–135 Filarete (Antonio Averlino)
Domes, 52–54, 76 treatise on architecture, 48, 49, 177
Drawing, architectural Finale
conventions of, 294, 296–317 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 baptistery, 6, 7, 76
techniques of, 294–295 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
Eisenman, Peter, 304, 316 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 Freiburg
Exhibition of the World’s Industry Münster, 44
(London, 1851), 110, 111 Furor, 164
Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1855), 111
Index

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 University of Virginia, designs for, 276–278
Giorgione da Castelfranco, 13 Jerusalem
Giotto di Bondone, 3, 7, 11, 13, 15 architectural monuments, 109, 110
campanile, Florence cathedral, 42, 44, 45 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, 46–48 144, 186–191, 206, 207
Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 111 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 Villa “Les Terrasses,” Garches, 298, 299
Historiography, 131–132 Le Gray, Gustave, 107
architecture, 120–121, 225 (see also Leonardo da Vinci, ix–x, 12, 13, 15, 29, 68–91,
Documentary photography) 132, 135, 137, 144–171, 177, 308
art, 2–20, 128 (see also Periodization) anatomical drawings, 58, 68, 82, 145,
Hoban, James, 275 150–152, 168–171
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), 127, 128, 193 Annunciation, 168

322
 chaos, drawing of, 158
churches, studies for, 60, 68–87, 90–91
drawing techniques, 144–149, 167–171
flower studies, 146–149
hydraulic studies, 157–160
landscape drawing, 144, 191
Last Supper, 82
machines, drawings of, 86, 89, 90, 153–154
Madonna and Child with a Cat, 162, 163
Madonna and St. Anne with the Infant Christ
and St. John, 164–167
moti, representation of, 155–157
preaching theater, study for, 73, 75–76
Romorantin, designs for, 82
St. Jerome, 86
Treatise on Painting, 162–163
Leoni, Giacomo, 268, 275, 276
Le Secq, Henri, 107, 112, 114
Libeskind, Daniel, 316
License, 179, 225, 227, 259–260.
See also Capriccio
Linnaeus, Carolus (Carl von Linné), 120
Lippi, Fra Filippo, 12
Lissitzky, El, 302, 304
Lithography, 118
Liturgy, Roman, 69, 76
Livy (Titus Livius), 128, 131, 132
Lollio, Alberto, 194
Lomazzo, Gian Paolo, 177
Lonedo
Villa Godi, 246
Lonigo
Rocca Pisana, 210–211
Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 7
Lorrain, Claude, 103
Lotz, Wolfgang, 28–29, 56
Luvigliano
Villa dei Vescovi, 200, 201
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 15, 132
Machines, drawings of, 47–48, 49, 86, 89, 90,
153–154, 301, 302
Maderno, Carlo, 255
Manetti, Antonio di Tuccio, 50
Maniera (Vasari), 13, 16
Mannerism, 13, 19
Mantegna, Andrea, 13, 23n23
Marani, Pietro, 86
Marano, villa at, 202
Marly-le-Roi, 277
Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis), 193
Marville, Charles, 111
Masaccio (Tommaso di Giovanni Guidi), 15
Maser
Villa Barbaro, 203, 204, 219, 222, 250, 252
Mason’s lodges, medieval, 45
McKim, Mead and White, 277
Medici family, 19, 197, 210.
See also Florence: Medici Chapel
Medieval revival, 114, 116
Meledo
Villa Trissino (project), 206, 258
Mestral, O., 107
Michelangelo Buonarroti, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18–
19, 130, 134, 135, 137, 177–178, 179,
240, 295
Doni Holy Family, 162
Medici Chapel, Florence, 162, 179
Porta Pia, Rome, 179, 252
San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini, Rome, 308, 309
San Lorenzo, Florence, 87, 89
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 304
Resor House, 304, 305
Milan, 283
cathedral, 45–46, 68, 284
Portinari Chapel, 84
San Lorenzo, 84
Index
323
 Santa Maria delle Grazie, 82 influence on later centuries, 264–272,
Milizia, Francesco, 250 275–277, 278
Mimesis, 4–7, 9, 17, 126, 132. See also Imitation Loggia del Capitaniato, Vicenza, 227,
Missions Héliographiques, 107 251, 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 Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, 205, 206, 258,
Natura naturata and natura naturans, 11, 12, 126 267, 275
Nègre, Charles, 114 Villa Saraceno, Finale, 268, 270
Neoplatonism, 10, 130, 177, 180 Villa Sarego, Santa Sofia, 241
Nîmes, 116 Villa Trissino, Meledo (project), 206, 258
Maison Carré, 284, 286 Palladius, Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus, 193
Panofsky, Erwin, 15
Orders of architecture, 132, 180–181, 227, Paper, 31, 294–295
237–239, 267 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 Parler, Peter, 44
Temple of Fortuna Primigenia, 256, 257 Prague cathedral, 198
Palladio, Andrea, 29, 56, 132, 177, 181, 201, 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 Periodization, in art history, 3–5, 13–16, 18, 91

324
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 Quercia, Jacopo della, 7
Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 129, 130, 137 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), 7, 128,
Philostratus the Younger, 8 129, 130, 134
Photography, architectural, 51, 53, 96–121
Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco, 130–131, Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 12, 13, 15, 17, 20,
134 23n24, 133, 134, 137, 164, 301
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 Villa Madama, Rome, 178, 193–194
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 311, 315 Reims
Pisanello, Antonio, 8, 12, 18 cathedral, 28, 30, 31–41, 44, 298
Cat, 162 Revett, Nicholas
Pisano, Andrea, 7 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 classical, 3, 5–6, 7–8, 15–16, 127–129
Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus) Richardson, Henry Hobson, 118, 119
Historia naturalis, 4–5, 7, 12, 126, 129, 132, Rilievo, 91
136, 176, 233n31 Rimini
Pliny the Younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius 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

325
 marble plan of, 296
Mausoleum of Augustus, 294
Palazzo dei Tribunali, 82
Pantheon, 53–55, 79, 178, 252, 255, 257,
277, 294
Porta Pia, 179, 252
San Giovanni de’ Fiorentini, 308, 309
San Pietro in Montorio, 76
Santa Costanza, 313, 315
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
Ruisdael, Jacob van, 103
Ruskin, John, 122n6
St. Gall, abbey, 28
Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus), 128, 131
Salzmann, Auguste, 109, 110
Saminiati, Giovanni, 194
Sangallo, Antonio da, the Elder
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
architectural drawings, 51, 53
project for San Lorenzo, Florence, 87
Sanmicheli, Michele, 180
Sansovino, Andrea
project for San Lorenzo, Florence, 87
326
Sansovino, Jacopo
Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, 221
project for San Lorenzo, Florence, 87
Santa Sofia di Pedemonte
Villa Sarego, 241
Savonarola, Girolamo, 76
Scaenographia, 49, 60, 70, 224
Scale drawing, 31
Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 180
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
Scientific observation, 145–151, 158, 171
Sciographia, 225
Scott, Geoffrey, 180
Scott, Sir Walter, 96
Second Empire style, 118
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Elder, 129
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger, 129
Serlio, Sebastiano, 132
Regole generali di architettura, 237
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
Steichen, Edward, 120
Stieglitz, Alfred, 120
Stilus (Bembo), 130–131
Strasbourg
cathedral, 44, 45
Stuart, James Vatican
Antiquities of Athens, 101, 103, 104, 116 Cortile del Belvedere, 82
Style, 128 St. Peter, ix, 52, 53, 60, 61, 72, 76, 81, 82,
Suetonius Tranquillus, Gaius, 131 84, 178, 179
Surveying, Roman, 186–192 Santo Spirito in Sassia, 87
Symmetry, 227, 245 Veneto, 190–191
Venice
Taccola, Mariano di Jacopo, 47 agricultural interests, 194, 198, 206–209,
Taegio, Bartolomeo, 194 212
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,
Tallis, John, 110 226, 246, 250, 255
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
Toulon Loggia del Capitaniato, 227, 251, 252
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 Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da
Tusci, Pliny’s villa at, 194, 195–196, 198, 199 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
Vite (various editions), 2–3, 5, 12, 13–20, 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

327
 Vitellius, 150
Vitruvius Pollio, Marcus
Barbaro commentary on, 177, 219–229,
245, 257
basilica, Fano, 242
De architectura, 49, 60, 69, 70, 132, 155,
157, 176–177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 199,
237, 239, 245, 259, 266, 299
Volpaia, Bernardo della, 53, 54
Warnke, Martin, 23n23
328
Washington, George, 266
Washington, D.C.
President’s House, competition for,
275–276
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 278
Wordsworth, William, 96
Zeuxis, 5, 9, 127
Zocchi, Giuseppe, 186, 197, 279
Zuccaro, Federico, 177