2. 1. On Humanism and Perspective
2. On Space and Conquest
3. On Beauty and Harmony
Break
4. On Central Plan Church
5. On Church Facade
6. On Cities as Monuments
5. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
1. On Humanism and Perspective
8. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Homo faber ipsius fortunae
Man is the architect of his own fate
Appio Claudio Cieco c. 340 BC – 273 BC
Man is the measure of all things
Protagoras, c.450 BC
9. 'Carta della Catena' (Chain Map) Panorama of Florence | Italian School, XV century
14. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
It is not too much to claim that a pattern of tiles used in
this sense represents the modern 'systematic space' in
an artistically concrete sphere, well before it had been
postulated by abstract mathematical thought… Once
again this perspectival achievement is nothing other than
a concrete expression of a contemporary advance in
epistemology or natural philosophy... abandoning the
Scholastic idea of a cosmos with the middle of the earth
as its absolute center and with the outermost celestial
sphere as its absolute limit; the result was the concept of
infinity. The vision of the universe is detheologized.
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form
17. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
To make clear my exposition in writing this brief
commentary on painting, I will take first from the
mathematicians those things with which my subject is
concerned.
Leon Battista Alberti, Della Pittura
27. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
I have given myself more honor and my souls more
satisfaction by having spent money than by having
earned it, above all with regard to the building I have
done.
Rucellai
30. Santa Maria del Fiore, dome | Filippo Brunelleschi, 1419-1446
31. Santa Maria del Fiore, dome | Filippo Brunelleschi, 1419-1446
32.
33. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
2. On Space and Conquests
35. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres)
1543 | Nicolaus Copernicus
36. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
People gave ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that
the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and
the moon... This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of
astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us [Joshua 10:13] that
Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.
Martin Luther
41. Earliest surviving chart showing the explorations of Columbus to Central America, Corte-
Real to Newfoundland, Gama to India and Cabral to Brazil | The Cantino planisphere, 1502
42. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
“The Egyptian delegation to the Eighth International Congress of
Orientalists, held in Stockholm in the summer of 1889, travelled to
Sweden via Paris and paused there to visit the World Exhibition.
...
Characteristic of the way Europeans seemed to live was their
preoccupation with what the same Egyptian author described as
intizam al-manzar, the organisation of the view. The Europe one reads
about in Arabic accounts was a place of discipline and visual
arrangement, of silent gazes and strange simulations, of the
organisation of everything and everything organised to represent, to
recall like the exhibition some larger meaning … Beyond the exhibition
and the department store, everywhere that non-European visitors went
– the museum and the Orientalist congress, the theatre and the zoo,
the countryside encountered typically in the form of a model farm
exhibiting new machinery and cultivation methods, the very streets of
the modern city with their deliberate façades, even the Alps once the
funicular was built – they found the technique and sensation to be the
same. Everything seemed to be set up before one as though it were
the model or the picture of something. Everything was arranged before
an observing subject...”
Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt
43. French commentary on the Berlin Conference of 1884: Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of
Germany, is portrayed wielding a knife over a sliced up cake marked 'Africa' | 1884
44. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Absolute space is fixed and we record or plan events within its
frame. This is the space of Newton and Descartes and it is
usually represented as a pre-existing and immoveable grid
amenable to standardized measurement and open
to calculation. Geometrically it is the space of Euclid and
therefore the space of all manner of cadastral
mapping and engineering practices. It is a primary space of
individuation - res extensa as Descartes put it -
and this applies to all discrete and bounded phenomena...
Socially this is the space of private property and other bounded
territorial designations (such as states, administrative units, city
plans and urban grids).
David Harvey, Space as a Key Word
46. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Fundamental ideas about human bodies, gender differences,
and the process of reproduction informed the notion of artistic
creation prevalent among both women and men. Most important
were concepts inherited from the ancient Greeks, especially the
natural philosopher Aristotle, who drew an essential distinction
between formative male seed and receptive female matter,
making woman's contribution to reproduction less vital.
Masculinity was characterized by activating, generative heat,
but women were naturally inferior (a view reinforced by the
notion that Eva was born from Adam's side and hence
dependent and secondary) … Biological and physiological
theories bolstered social preconceptions about the inferiority of
women… Female reproductive material lacked, in Aristotle's
terms, the vital constituent of "the principle of Soul" and thus
"the female is as it were a deformed male."
Patricia Simons, The Sex of Artists in Renaissance Italy
48. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
3. On Beauty and Harmony
49. De Re Aedificatoria (On the Art of Building in Ten Books), c.1450 | Leon Battista Alberti
50. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Ut sit pulchritudo quidem certa cum ratione concinnitas
universarum partium in eo cuius sint: ita ut addi, aut diminui,
aut immutari possit nihil, quam improbabilius reddat.
[Beauty is] the harmony and concord of all parts achieved in
such a manner that nothing could be added or taken away or
altered except for the worse.
Alberti, De re aedificatoria, Book VI
52. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Aedium compositio constat ex symmetria, cuius rationem
diligentissime architecti tenere debent. ea autem paritur a
proportione, quae graece ἀναλογία dicitur. proportio est ratae
partis membrorum in omni opere totiusque commodulatio,
ex qua ratio efficitur symmetriarum.
The design of Temples depends on symmetry, the rules of
which Architects should be most careful to observe.
Symmetry arises from proportion, which the Greeks call
ἀναλογία. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the
different parts to each other and to the whole; on this
proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Vitruvius, De Architectura, III, 1
54. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
All the new elements introduced by Alberti in the facade, the
columns, the pediment, the attic, and the scrolls, would remain
isolated features were it not for the all-pervading harmony which
formed the basis and background of his whole theory. Harmony,
the essence of beauty, consists in the relationship of the parts to
each other and to the whole, and, in fact, a single system of
proportion permeates the facade, and the place and size of every
single part and detail is fixed and defined by it. Proportions
recommended by Alberti are the simple relations of one to one,
one to two, one to three... which are the elements of musical
harmony and which Alberti found in classical buildings...
The whole facade of S. Maria Novella can be exactly
circumscribed by a square. A square of half the side of the large
square defines the relationship of the two stories. The main story
can be divided into two such squares, while one enclose the upper
storey. In other words, the whole building is related to its main
parts in the proportion of one to two...
Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism
56. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
If Nature, therefore, has made the human body so that the different
members of it are measures of the whole, so the ancients have, with
great propriety, determined that in all perfect works, each part should be
some aliquot part of the whole; and since they direct, that this be
observed in all works, it must be most strictly attended to in temples of
the gods, wherein the faults as well as the beauties remain to the end of
time.
Vitruvius, De Architectura, III, 1
57. Five Books of Architecture, Sebastiano Serlio, c.1537 | The Five Orders
58. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Beauty will result from the beautiful form and from the correspondence
of the whole to the parts, of the parts amongst themselves, and of these
again to the whole; so that the structures may appear an entire and
complete body, wherein each member agrees with the other and all
members are necessary for the accomplishment of the building”
Palladio, Book 1, chap. 1
75. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Deus est sphaera infinita, cuius centrum est ubique,
circumferentia nullibi.
God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere
and circumference nowhere.
Nicolò Cusano, De Docta Ignorantia, 1440
81. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Le più belle, e più regolate forme, e dalle quali le altre
ricevono le misure, sono la Ritonda e la Quadrangulare...
la Ritonda... sola tra tutte le figure è semplice, uniforme,
eguale, forte e capace, faremo I Tempij rotondi.
...è attissima a dimostrare la Unità, la Infinita Essenza,
la Uniformità, et la Giustizia di Dio.
The most beautiful and most regular forms and from
which the other receive their measure are the round and
the quadrangular. The round... it is the only one among
all the figures that is simple, uniform, equal, strong, and
spacious. Therefore let us make our temples round”
Palladio, Book I, chap 1
86. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
This building is a reconstruction by Bramante of an ancient
Roman circular temple – or so it seems at first.
He mounts it [the theme of the circular temple] on three
steps and sets a continuous moulded plinth under the
order. This plinth gives the little building a sudden and
auspicious 'lift' – enough to ratify its sanctity. And each
Doric column has an answering Doric pilaster on the wall
of the inner building – what is called the cella. This cella
rises higher than the colonnade and is covered with a
hemi-spherical dome. Now, is this a literal reconstruction of
a Roman temple or is not? Clearly not. It is an extension of
an idea borrowed from the Romans. The plinth and the
vertical penetration of the central cylinder up and through
to a hemi-spherical dome are Bramante's inventions and
highly successful ones to judge by the numbers of times
they have been imitated.
John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture
87. The Four Books of Architecture | San Pietro in Montorio in Palladio's drawing
95. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
5. On the Churches Facade
97. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
Far from leaving the orders out when they [the Romans] built vaulted
amphi-theatres, basilicas and triumphal arches, they brought them in, in
the most conspicuous way possible, as if they felt that no building could
communicate anything unless the orders were involved in it. To them the
orders were architecture... The Romans took this highly stylized but
structurally quite primitive kind of architecture and married it to arched
and vaulted multi-storey buildings of great elaborations. And in doing so
they raised architectural language to a new level...
...all major Roman buildings other than temples were designed on the
basis of arches and vaults, whereas the orders belong strictly to the
more primitive system of 'trabeation'. To marry the two in the sense of
giving the old types of temple column the job of carrying arches could
work up to a point but it was never satisfactory... So what did the
Romans do? The Colosseum at Rome answers the question at once...
every row of arches is framed inside a continuous colonnade. The
colonnades have no structural purpose – or very little. They are
representations of temple architecture carved, as it were, in relief on a
building which is not a temple, which is multi-storeyed and is built as a
system of arches and vaults.
John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture
98.
99. Five Books of Architecture, Sebastiano Serlio, c.1537 | The Colosseum
115. Proportion is a due adjustment of the size of the different parts to each other and to
the whole; on this proper adjustment symmetry depends.
6. On Cities as Monuments
