Innocence Lost 1

ANALECTA ROMANA

INSTITUTI DANICI

OFFPRINT

XXXIII

2008

ROMAE MMVIII

ANALECTA ROMANA INSTITUTI DANICI XXXIIIAccademia di Danimarca Via Omero, 18 - 00197 Rome© 2008 Accademia di Danimarca

Analecta Romana Instituti Danici. — Vol. I (1960) — . Copenhagen: Munksgaard. From 1985: Rome, «L’ERMA» di Bretschneider. From 2007 (online): Accademia di DanimarcaISSN 2035-2506

RedaktIonskomIté/scIentIfIc BoaRd/comItato scIentIfIco

Ove Hornby (Bestyrelsesformand, Det Danske Institut i Rom)

Jesper Carlsen (Syddansk Universitet)Astrid Elbek (Det Jyske Musikkonservatorium)Karsten Friis-Jensen (Københavns Universitet)

Helge Gamrath (Aalborg Universitet)Hannemarie Ragn Jensen (Københavns Universitet)

Mogens Nykjær (Aarhus Universitet)Gunnar Ortmann (Det Danske Ambassade i Rom)

Marianne Pade (Aarhus Universitet)Bodil Bundgaard Rasmussen (Nationalmuseet, København)

Lene Schøsler (Københavns Universitet)Poul Schülein (Arkitema, København)

Anne Sejten (Roskilde Universitet)

RedaktIonsudvaLg/edItoRIaL BoaRd/comItato dI RedazIone

Erik Bach (Det Danske Institut i Rom)

Patrick Kragelund (Danmarks Kunstbibliotek)Gert Sørensen (Københavns Universitet)Birgit Tang (Det Danske Institut i Rom)

Maria Adelaide Zocchi (Det Danske Institut i Rom)

The journal ANALECTA ROMANA INSTITUTI DANICI (ARID) publishes studies within the main range of the Academy’s research activities: the arts and humanities, history and archaeology.

Intending contributors should get in touch with the editors. For guidelines, cf. home-page.Accademia di Danimarca, 18 Via Omero, I - 00197 Roma, tel 0039-06 32 65 931 fax 06 32 22 717. E-mail: accademia@acdan.it

Contents

antoneLLa mezzoLanI: I materiali lapidei nelle costruzioni di età fenicia e punica a Cartagine

gItte LønstRup: Constructing Myths: The Foundation of Roma Christiana on 29 June

Jens vIggo nIeLsen: ”L’Esistenzialismo non è un umanesimo” La dialettica come approccio all’esistenzialismo di Luigi Pareyson

LIse Bek: Innocence Lost. Symbolism to Rhetoric in Architecture and the Renais-sance Concept of Invention

7

27

65

91

Introduction: Renaissance, a rebirth of an-cient values or the birth of a new mentality and outlookGenerally speaking, the concept of renais-sance has often been associated with the rebirth of pagan antiquity, or it has been re-garded as more or less synonymous with the rehabilitation and regeneration, albeit in a new Christian guise, of the arts and letters of the ancient era. In a yet more sharply fo-cused perspective, Antiquity has been seen to have played a merely majeutic role in the emergence of quite a new way of Man’s thinking, talking and acting in his surround-

ing world, a hitherto unseen alertness to his fellow-men as well as to his visible and physical environments as a whole. One of the consequences of this new orientation was that, from now on, the self-sufficiency of the subject and the exclusivity of the ob-jects as unique exponents each in their own right, of divine creation, characteristic of the Middle Ages, had to make way for a mutual inter-relatedness between anyone and any-thing existing in the earthly sphere. And to grasp visually this changed order of things, a new way of seeing was also required.

On a deeper level, however, it followed

Innocence Lost

Symbolism to Rhetoric in Architecture

and the Renaissance Concept of Invention

by LIse Bek

Abstract.The point of departure being the assumption that renaissance brought about a total change in human men-tal structure, the effects of this new attitude on architecture are investigated. So on the one hand, the redefinition of the visual appropriation by Man of his visible surroundings from the focusing on the solid object to the perspec-tival measuring of spatial extension is seen as having caused a change in the role of the beholder, of art and archi-tecture, too, from a passive awareness of the whole to an active deciphering of the variety of elements made visible in it. The difference in the mode of sight, on the other hand, is understood as a prerequisite to the differentiation of meaning adhered to in the present investigation between the two concepts of symbolic form and rhetorical figure respectively. The giving up of the former, so it is further argued, led to a totally new conception of the work of art. Especially in architecture, the function of the building was defined, thus, no longer that of in symbolical form making an invisible reality visible to the beholder, but of constituting a worthy enframement of the spatially laid out setting for the uses to which it was to be put to its users. But as far as rhetoricizing in architecture is concerned, it is demonstrated to have been, at the same time, an outcome of the new humanist concept of artistic invention. Antiquity in this context is seen, thus, not as a model to be imitated, but as the medium of renaissance architectonic eloquence. However, the hypothesis will be that the change in question was not limited to affecting the age of the Renaissance proper, but that all later cultural innovations owe a great deal to its impact.

92 LIse Bek

that priority was more than previously given to concentrated thought on matter-of-fact problems of human relevance rather than to abstract theological speculation and in speech to the communicative faculty of lan-guage instead of the magical power of the word. Action was likewise directed towards a definite goal, the achievement of a given result, whereas it had hitherto been but one aspect of life, the lesser one, that of contem-plation being the better one.

Such a radical shift in orientation, howev-er, could not have been brought about with-out a similar alteration of mental structure in people of the time. The resulting change in outlook and lifestyle is observable in rela-tion to almost all matters and questions from those concerning natural phenomena to those to do with human civilisation and cul-ture, that is to say economic and social life, politics and religion not to mention the vari-ous kinds of artistic activity. In fact, it hap-pened to be a change through which the Re-naissance was singled out in relation to both Antiquity and the Middle Ages inasmuch as in those two periods, the temporal world was a symbolical form of a reality which in itself was of a higher, mythical or mystical order of divine constancy.

To Renaissance man, indeed, God’s cre-ation of the universe was as indisputable as it was to his medieval fellows. But unlike them he estimated neither himself nor his surroundings to be merely passive reflec-tions or faintly mirrored images of higher divine reality. On the contrary, they were part and parcel of the same reality, the geo-

metric order of which permeated both na-ture and the human beings as the universal structuring principle. For the same reason, the cultural expressions of mankind also had to be brought within a formula to match this principle. Creation, to be more specific, was understood as a manifestation of divine ra-tionality.

Now, thanks to his human rationality, a token of his divine offspring, Man would be capable of perceiving this order and hence of creating for himself, by means of construc-tion, a similar but fictitious reality. In art and letters it meant a new freedom for artists and poets to choose and change on their own be-half the elements they wanted to use or re-use in their works, be it in texts, painting or architecture. It was a freedom equally used in their paraphrasing of those in former ages and by authors of former times, in respect of which they took the same freedom.

This led to a totally new conception of the work as a personal invention of the art-ist, a universe of fiction, perfect in its com-position and with its own inherent purpose, its definite scopus in the humanist ego, its own intrinsic meaning or story to be told.

Especially in architecture, such concep-tual renewal gave way to a reconsideration of its structural and functional aspects, and in architecture as in the pictorial arts this led to a search for new models in which a genu-ine formal and contentual constitution could replace the symbolic one of the Middle Ages. The model most readily to hand was, as it were, to turn out to be that of rhetoric, the discipline already long favoured by the

Innocence Lost 93

humanists. So following in the footsteps of painting, architecture also not only became a frequent subject of rhetorical exposés as argued so convincingly by Christine Smith.1

Far more, it came to be conceived of as a rhetorical construction itself, as will be more thoroughly elucidated in the follow-ing pages.

However, the hypothesis will be that the change in question was not limited to af-fecting the age of the Renaissance proper, but that all later cultural innovations owe a great deal to its impact. Meanwhile, in order to be able to pinpoint the character-istics of architectural innovation during the Renaissance and, further, to argue in favour of its wider significance, meanwhile, it will be sufficient to outline the background on which it is to be seen.

The imagery of sight and architecture as symbolic formSince sight is a prerequisite for Man’s un-derstanding of his situation in the world, it may be assumed that just as the way of life in older times was more or less unchanged for long periods, it is tempting to conclude that neither did the way of visually perceiv-ing the surroundings change to any consid-erable extent.2

So, for thousands of years, Man has con-centrated his gaze directly upon the solid objects within his field of vision as being of the greater interest and importance to him. Consequently, the object seen stood out clearly, as an isolated form in the vertical plane of his visual sphere, or in a later, more

advanced conception of optical theory, as the mere image of such form unfolding on the screen-like plane of sight. The void in between the objects seen was on the other hand of minor value, if any, since it was re-garded as a negation of existence. So, it was incapable of being furnished with either form or matter.

However, in the Greek philosophers there is no doubt that the object is their main concern in both thinking and seeing. Thus Aristotle in his Physics argues that the place, topos, is nothing in itself, but only in its capacity of being the place of something, of some solid form.

At about that time, Euclid, who was only a generation younger, himself a follower of the Plato’s teaching, and one of the foremost men of natural science of the Hellenistic pe-riod, formulated in his Optics the theory of vision that was to remain unchallenged al-most until the early Renaissance. According to this theory, the act of seeing is regarded as a sense process initiated through the ex-tension from the eye to the object seen of a conical bunch of visual rays, the basis of which is identical with the front of the ob-ject. As each object had its individual cone of vision there would be no focus on their mutual relationship or intermediary space, or to put it differently, their situation in the field of vision would be one of juxtaposi-tion rather than of interrelationship.

As time passed, the character of image of the thing seen became increasingly clear and according to the visual theory adopted by Plotinos and his followers, sight was ef-

94 LIse Bek

fected through the transportation, via the vi-sual rays, of this image to the eye, or the im-age was hovering in the air midway between object and eye.

So, as a result of the way in which it was visually perceived, the individual object tended to become a self-contained formal unit reflected in the visual image and thus to lend itself willingly to be understood and used as a visual sign or symbol imbued with a meaning different from or even of higher quality than that of simple functionality.

Within the architecture of the Mediter-ranean cultures and especially in Greek and Roman antiquity, a range of elements was consequently developed, each with its spe-cific reference to the religious sphere of life and each with its significance as symbolic form: the temple with its colonnade and ped-imented front, the dwelling of the god; or the fortified gateway, the entrance to the sacred area of the city or palace – not to forget its variation, the triumphal arch. Furthermore, there were the separate forms, the dome, a monumentalization of the baldachin car-ried over the ruler in procession, but at the same time the symbol of the universe, and its relative, the apse, the vaulted enframe-ment of the divine or divinified person or his image. Last but not least, the column should be added, the supporting element, that also functioned as a supporter of meaning par ex-cellence.3

Characteristically, these elements were very likely to be subjected to architectonic modification as a result of which they not infrequently underwent a certain alteration,

though never to such an extent as to affect their main aspect as visual signs. So from the peripteral Greek temple the Romans and their Etruscan neighbours borrowed the front with its open porticus and pointed pediment, the symbolic form to be identified from now on with the dignified housing of the divinity.

Neither did the transfer of the same ar-chitectonic elements from the domain of sacred to profane architecture lead to an abolishment of their symbolical content, on the contrary. So, far from being an instance of secularization, the utilization of temple fronts and the like in private houses was a means of imposing an aura of sanctity on the architectonic frame of daily life.4

In many of the houses and villas belong-ing to the affluent citizens living in the Ro-man towns and provinces, the painted and sculptured decoration helped symbolise the sacred nature of the place by virtue of its religious and mythological subject. In fact, an architectonic arrangement is often found at the rear of the building complex thought to be evocative of the imagery associated with the cult of Diana, one of the old fertil-ity cults undoubtedly still practised in many private homes.

In the House of the Stags in Herculane-um, a large domus from the 1st century BC, for instance, the rear façade facing the peri-style garden where the sculpture group of the Diana stags was situated, has the appear-ance of a temple front. And in the House of the Labyrinth in Pompeii one of the dining rooms, the 1st-century BC so-called Corin-

Innocence Lost 95

thian oecus has been transformed through its decoration into the open cella or courtyard of a temple of Diana surrounded by fluted Corinthian columns as required for the sanc-tuaries of this goddess. On the three walls backing the colonnade, a series of painted views are offered of another three temples of Diana, this time in the form of tholoi. The small circular buildings are painted, as it were, in the same illusionist technique as is described by the Roman architect Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture, De Architectu-ra, probably written about 26 BC.5 Here, in a passage concerning the execution of sce-nic backdrops for the theatre, he explains, entirely in accordance with Euclidean op-tics, how the effect of alternating protrusion and recession of columns and niches is to be obtained on the flat surface (De Arch. VII, Intr. 11).

So thanks to the symbolical significance of form and imagery visualized in architec-ture and decoration, the visitors to the gar-den and company dining are transposed to a higher sphere of life which is that not only of an idealized, but of a mythical reality. How-ever, it is a reality glimpsed only momen-tarily by the beholder when standing at the exact place for the optical effect as achieved by this image, and so the entire scene would be one of frozen immobility or a tableau.

In the same way as the profane build-ing was thus disguised as a sacred place of worship, however, it would, by means of il-lusion, be given the stamp of architectural perfection appropriate to the sacred temples. This is in a certain sense confirmed by Vit-

ruvius. To him, as is stated in the chapter of his treatise relating to architectural planning, the building must, in order to be perfect, re-spond to the symmetria or specific scheme of proportions and measures given for each type of architecture just as it is laid down in the whole universe as well as in Man himself as the essence of true form and the imprint of existence (De Arch. I, II, 1-2). In architecture, symmetria is thus the quantita-tive aspect of correct planning, from which the basic module is also to be deduced. So the symmetria will determine the whole of the future building, both numerically and in its geometric layout, as stipulated in the measured drawings in reduced scale of its ground plan and façade, ichnographia and orthographia, respectively.

The quality of the building, for its part, depends upon the proper collocation of all elements in the artistic execution, as Vitruvi-us says in his exposé on the category of dis-positio. But even in the cases, such as in the private house, where, for practical reasons, symmetria could not be achieved, it had to be visualized symbolically, which could be done by adding to or subtracting from the form proper as Vitruvius advises (De Arch. VI, II). In this way it was possible to cre-ate, if only a visual illusion of the building’s existence as true form. So the third, and, ac-cording to Vitruvius, at the same time the most conspicuous of the architectural draw-ings needed in planning, the scaenographia, is the representation of the completed build-ing, be it a temple or a dwelling house, as visible form, as the illusory image of sight

96 LIse Bek

(De Arch. I, II, 1-2). It is the beauty of this visual image as the momentary illusion of perfection embodied in the category of eu-rythmia, also termed venusta species, the appearance of beauty that every building has to reflect whether its form is one of true reality based on exact symmetria as in the case of the temple or brought about by ma-nipulation.

From this it emerges that although the es-sence of architecture as a symbolic reflec-tion of the universal structuring principle is conveyed by its inherent symmetria it is in the visual image formed by the building in the beholder’s field of vision that its potenti-ality as symbolic form is realized. And since erection prevails over layout, it follows that, in buildings other than the temples, it does not matter if the symbolical core of symme-tria should be absent in the latter provided it is only visualized in the former.

The legacy of Antiquity in Christian inter-pretation When Christianity came to pervade the Ro-man Empire as the only permitted religion, a number of symbolical elements pertaining to the cult of the divinified emperor as pan-tokrator, the sovereign ruler of the world, were taken over by those confessing the new faith.6 Instead of inventing their own sym-bolism based on shapes different from those of pagan origin, they contented themselves with re-using not only the forms but also the meaning attached to them, but with the difference that the reality symbolized was no longer that of earthly but of heavenly

lordship. Thus, the architecture of the new churches was based on the reception areas of the imperial palace, its aula or audience hall being the assembly room of the congre-gation, the triclinium, the dining room the place where the bread and wine of the Eu-charist were received etc. In the same way the dome still signified a reference to the universe though in a wider sense than that of the realm of the worldly ruler. The apse, too, retained its former function as enframement of the person or image of his majesty, inso-far as its vault was inevitably adorned with the awe-inspiring motif of the enthroned or triumphant Christ or of Mary, Queen of Heaven.7 As for the gateway, finally, it was in the form of the triumphal arch, that it had its primary symbolic function in medieval church architecture. To this end it was taken out of its original urban setting and concrete role as the portal of honour of the victorious emperor on his entrance either to the central or rather the sacred area of the conquered town or to the via sacra of Rome itself. In fact, it was transmuted into an interior ele-ment and placed at the entrance to the sa-cred area of the choir and altar to symbolise the archway through which Christ passed on Palm Sunday on His triumphant entry into the city of Jerusalem.

Over time, in fact, the church building it-self tended more and more symbolically to incarnate as visible form the divine proto-type of the secular city, the heavenly Jerusa-lem. That the church building was thus con-ceived of as a symbolical visualisation of the imagined city described in the Biblical Book

Innocence Lost 97

of Revelations as well as of the Augustinian Civitas Dei,8 came to be clearly observable in its exterior. It is true of Romanesque and subsequently even more of Gothic churches. Here, there was in a sense a resort to the an-cient tradition of portraying in the coinage issued by a specific city its towered gateway as pars pro toto. In the same way the church façade was seen to represent, in its architec-tural guise, the city gate, the triple doorways flanked by the pair of towers or opening be-neath the single structure soaring above the mass of the building.

As is seen from the above examples the symbolization of the Middle Ages adopted a similar concrete or figurative form to that of antiquity and was as such bound up with the specific visual convention of the period, still dependent on Euclidean optics, that is to say, on the perception of the objects seen as singular forms, whose images were to be outlined as directly viewed in the verti-cal plane of the field of vision. For the same reason, an unfolding of the towering façade like a screen before the eyes of the beholder was an effect sought in the so-called view planning of the later Middle Ages.9

In passing it must be admitted, however that yet another kind of figurative symbol-ism was favoured by the medieval church builders and their theological advisers. For light, too, was exploited as a more genuine Christian symbol in contrast to antiquity, where light was either a functional element or otherwise considered to be not a sign of, but identical with the divine, viz. the sun or the emperor as sun god.

In its Christian version, now, light was utilized primarily as a reference to God or to Christ or as the opponent of darkness. So in the Romanesque period the struggle be-tween good and evil, God and the Devil was visualised in the dramatically sharpened light-dark contrasts. In the many churches moreover, built all over Europe by the Cis-tercians in the 12th and 13th centuries, the white light is symbolic of Divine rationality, whereas, in the cathedrals of the same pe-riod, the broken sunbeams that penetrate the interior through the stained glass windows symbolise the coming of Christ to earth as its lux nova, to quote Suger, the Abbot of the monastery of St. Denis outside Paris and one of the pioneers of Gothic architecture.10

However, medieval light mysticism found an adequate medium of expression in the lighting of the church interior, but attention is nevertheless paid to light in its tangible form, as an object, and as perceptible image. It therefore must be said to be as figurative in its symbolical function as was the case with the concrete architectonic elements ex-emplified above.

Apart from this metaphorical symboli-sation, so to speak, however, the ancient concept of symmetria was still alive and efficient as a means to allow the structure of the universe to be reflected symbolically through the canonically proportioned lay-out of the building. Here again, however, a completely new theological interpretation was required to legitimise the ultimately Pythagorean-Platonic metaphysics of num-bers and geometry as an aspect of Christian

98 LIse Bek

mysticism.In the early centuries of Christianity a

few manuscripts of the De Architectura were certainly preserved in various monas-tic libraries, an example being the Carolin-gian codex in the library of St. Gallen. In the sources relating to building projects of the time, a vague echo of Vitruvian terminology can be heard, notably in respect to that re-lating to symmetria.11 But the Pythagorean sequence of harmonious relations listed by Vitruvius was also brought into play in Ro-manesque and Gothic architecture, although with a preference for the octave, while the quadrangle, the formula of the true mea-surements or vera mensura of the universe as Divine creation, was the most frequently used among the regular polygones related to by Plato as the innate formal principles of the elements.12 This selectivity was evident-ly due to the specific Christian symbolism incarnated in the quadriform and its multi-plication.13 It should incidentally be noticed that from this figure all other geometric figures in the building system could be de-duced by geometric construction, primarily the triangle, the sign of the Trinity.

Closely linked, as they were, to the late Antique and early Christian theory of music as presented in Saint Augustine’s treatise De Musica,14 the rules of architecture were de-vised for the benefit of its meaning as a sym-bol rather than of its functionality or quality as a work of art. So by using the right pro-portions or true measure, it was conjectured, it would be possible in the building to make visible the celestial perfection that the musi-

cal harmony of the spheres made audible.Thus, there had to be an absolute co-

herence between the form realized and the beauty striven for, and there would be no place any longer for the eurythmic illusion of perfection in the standing building cher-ished by Vitruvius. On the contrary, ground plan and erection were in principle equal in their capacity as media for the symbolical content to be conceived, just as the form taken on by the symbol would be identical in both.

These were ideas developed by the zeal-ous theologians of the Chartres school, to which Saint Bernard of Clairveaux, Suger and other builders of monasteries and cathe-drals in the new Gothic style of the 12th and 13th centuries were also indebted.

In their architecture and even more in the architectural drawings left from the period such as those by the French architect, Vil-lard de Honnecourt,15 the concrete quality of the image produced by the object seen in the vertical plane of the field of vision is reduced to a linear abstraction of geometric configurations on the plane surface of wall or parchment. In this way, architectonic form was sublimated from a sheer image of sight to form a visual mantra of contemplation, a symbolical form to be acknowledged intel-lectually rather than as sensual enjoyment.

“The compass in the eye”,16 the construction of space and the perspectival way of seeingSo the ingredients of a spatial conception of its roofed in area was already present in the architecture of the High and Late Middle

Innocence Lost 99

Ages, but sleeping, as it were, in the two-di-mensionality sought as the ideal of symbol-ic form. As early as from the 13th century, however, an intense study of the phenom-enal world and of the optical phenomenon in particular had begun, a study in which the idea of distance became a key concept, the distance of the objects both to the be-holder and in relation to each other. But this led ultimately to a total redefinition of the visual appropriation by Man of his visible surroundings.

This new or renewed interest in optics or perspectiva, as was its Latin term, was one of the more fruitful results of the con-tact with Arab culture, provoked by the crusades. However, the manuscripts on medicine, mathematics etc., partly by the ancient Greek scientists and partly by their Arab commentators, which reached Europe at this time, attracted attention not so much for their strictly scientific as for their theo-logical content. Thus, it was especially by members of the new mendicant orders, not least the Franciscans, and as an aspect of light mysticism that the subject was taken up.17 So perspective was originally seen as the distortion of the objects viewed caused by the imperfection of human sight.

It was not, in fact, until the beginning of the 15th century, and not among the theo-logians either, that human sight was recog-nized as a sense following its own physical laws. It was in the artistic circles instead, that the rules of perspective were first laid down, as happened in the 1410’s and 1420’s when the Florentine artists began to explore,

in painting and relief, the depth dimension that it was possible to bring about on the pic-ture surface by means of compass and ruler. Nevertheless, it took the architect, Phillippo Brunelleschi, to figure out the exact geo-metric calculation of the depth diminution involved. At least, this was in all probabil-ity the problem he set out to solve in his ex-ecution of a couple of drawings or paintings now lost, showing measured views of two of the most famous buildings to be found in Florence, the Baptistry and the Signoria Palace.18 Characteristically, Brunelleschi ar-rived at his solution on the basis of the Gothic method of architectural design just referred to above. Less in line with the Gothic mas-ter builders, however, he did not through his constructions intend to visualise the abstract form structure of God’s metaphysical realm. Far from that, he took his refuge in repre-senting buildings that not only existed in reality, but were even commonly known to his fellow citizens. Apparently, he did so be-cause he wanted the beholder, on seeing the two views, to be able to check the accuracy of his construction by comparison.

A decade later, in his 1435/36 treatise on painting entitled De Pictura,19 his younger colleague, the humanist polymath Leon Battista Alberti provided these experiments with a theoretical foundation. Here, he re-defined the act of seeing from the Euclidean way of directly gazing at the singular object positioned in the vertical field of vision to that of perspective. Its point of departure was sight’s perception of the spatial distance between beholder and horizon, the plane of

100 LIse Bek

vision thus being turned by 90 degrees.Consequently, from having been non-ex-

istent, spatial extension now became of the utmost significance as the exactly defined and outlined container of a certain number of objects and so as the condition for their common existence. On the picture surface, then, space might be represented in perspec-tive just as, it could in reality be calculated rationally in its entirety as embraced by sight. Furthermore, the fact that the object was embedded in the spatial continuum had as its consequence that it was no longer pos-sible to insist on their singularity either as form or in content. So as an instance of visu-al perception or in their symbolic capacity, everything, whether really seen or depicted, would have to compete with other objects and other meanings for the beholder’s atten-tion. In the long run, this led to the fusion of all the individual objects seen with their sur-roundings, and a new conception of Man’s natural environment, that of landscape, had come into being as an aesthetic category in reality as well as in art.20

In the Netherlandish painting of the 15th century a state of transition between the two modes of understanding and, hence of de-picting the objects seen, as symbols or as fictions of a given reality, is very clearly demonstrated in its so-called disguised sym-bolism.21

Superficially regarded, it was a consequence drawn from the theological doctrine of the influential religious movement of that time, the devotio moderna. In it, the so-called nominalism of the late Middle Ages

reached an extreme in so far as anything in the human world was claimed to pertain to world created by God as a direct reflection of Divine reality. But on a deeper level it was symptomatic of the dilemma between the notion common to medieval thinking of the singularity of the object as symbolical form and the new way of conceiving of it as part of man’s visible surroundings on equal terms with all other things within the field of human vision. Thus, there is a contrast between the way in which the multitude of everyday objects are painted side by side in the picture, each with a meticulous delicacy in the realistic rendering of its details just to maintain its uniqueness as a symbol with reference to a reality far beyond the one vi-sualised in the objects as such and their uni-fication in the atmospheric veil of temporality.

In Italian art, on the other hand, the intro-duction of the linear perspective resulted in a radically new way of visually perceiving as well as mentally appropriating the picture on the part of the beholder being made ac-cessible.22 Hitherto, the motif had been built up by means of a solitary figure or figure group. They were normally placed in the front plane of the picture in a frontal posi-tion so that their clearly outlined form stood out against the golden ground of the panel or shining glass of the window pane or was framed by the neutrality of relief ground. So the figures of the enthroned Christ or Madon-na or those of standing apostles and saints constituted in the beholder’s field of vision the predominant object to be conceived vi-sually, not unlike the towering façade of the

Innocence Lost 101

church or palace building. It is true that fig-ures were not thought of as representing a reality seen, but had instead symbolically to reflect the Divine reality otherwise invisible to the human eye.23

Thanks to perspective, the picture was now, through the three dimensional coor-dinate system of converging lines, trans-formed into a fictitious construction of a reality caged in space and time. Hence, the scene was prepared for the figures to par-ticipate in the fiction’s game of as if..., and they were little by little forced to give up their symbolic integrity to become involved in the physical and psychological interplay with the other actors in the dramatic or sig-nificant incident depicted,24 that is to say as a compositio, to use the term Alberti bor-rowed from rhetoric.

In other words, the subject of the picture was focused not on the singular figure in its objective reality, but on the interrelation between the total number of figures in the situation to be represented, the historia told - again in Alberti’s terms - being their com-mon scopus (De Pict. II, 39).

Just as Brunelleschi turned to real build-ings to convince his beholder of the reli-ability of his perspective construction, so Alberti made use of the same perspective in his picture to provide an air of reliability to a fictitious reality.

However, at the same time as Alberti freed the object as form in space he banished linear perspective from the field of architec-ture in order to transfer it to that of the picto-rial arts.

His reason for doing so was the short-comings of linear perspective in relation to geometry and true measurement. For here, even he had to pay homage to the Gothic ar-chitects. To him, as to them, the precision of geometric form, achieved through exact measurements for lines, angles and surfaces, was the hallmark of architecture, as he says in his treatise on the art of building, De Re Aedificatoria, dating from the mid-century (I, II).25

When he goes on to argue that all the dimensions in the building have to be con-tained in its lay-out or delineamentum (De Re Aed. I, I), it might at first glance seem to express a similar concept of architecture to that of the previous period. But to Alberti, as distinct from his Gothic predecessors, this does not mean an equality of design on all surfaces, but a unity of dimensions relat-ing to the length, breath, and height of the space enclosed by those surfaces. They then tend to become surfaces of some object, not merely flat screens that function as sign boards bearing a symbolic meaning revealed in their sanctioned and sanctified numeric and geometric order.

This is also the point when, later in his trea-tise, Alberti sees the building as a living being, animans, also structured according to the same proportional and geometric principles as those on which God created the universe and human beings (De Re Aed. IX, V), but created by the architect as a construct in the same way as the painter was able in his imagination to create human beings, animals and the like in painting them (De Pict. II, 25).

102 LIse Bek

As for the architectural creation, it should be admitted that the concept of organicity, far from its modern biological meaning, was still connected with the geometric concep-tion of the universe, and so the form sought was not the concrete organic one, but one of abstract geometry.

In other words, the spatial dimension of the building is about to be recognized as the core and kernel of architecture, or rather, the purpose of architecture was defined no longer that of in symbolical form making an invisible reality visible to the beholder, but of constituting a worthy enframement of the spatially laid out setting for the uses to which it was to be put by its users. So in contrast to the effect of tableau institutional-ized in Antiquity as the ideal to be aimed at in architectural framework, a device also ad-hered to in the Middle Ages, to the Renais-sance architects and their clients, the theatri-cal stage became the ideal model instead. In the same way, the relationship of the figures taking part in the performance to be staged in the perspective-based, constructed setting of the picture was the essence of its compo-sition.

Just as the change in the way of seeing from the Euclidean to the perspective mode brought about a shift of focus in the picture from the solitary figure on the picture plane to the interplay of figures in pictorial space, so in architecture it had as its consequence that weight was shifted from form to space and from the symbolic meaning of the for-mer in respect to the beholder to the func-tionality of the latter in relation to the user.

Moreover, being an architectural creation in just the same way as the picture was an artistic fiction, nor was the building obliged to embody a pre-defined and codified sym-bolism, but was allowed to take on the shape and appearance best suited to its enframing function. It was thus ready to be invested with various kinds of meaning, not to say messages according to the intention of the architect himself or his client.

Liberated from the obligation of architec-ture as symbolic form, the road lay open to choose more or less freely among the codes of meaning already at hand as applied to buildings of various types and times. And here it was natural to the architects of the Renaissance, influenced by the new human-ist culture, to turn their backs on the imme-diately preceding Christian medieval tradi-tion in order to direct their attention to that of Antiquity.

From the rhetoric of painting to that of ar-chitectureIn order to discover what this new way of staging architecture was meant for it would be relevant once more to seek an explana-tory model in Alberti’s treatise on painting. But before doing so it might be appropriate to clarify the differentiation adhered to in the present investigation between the two concepts of symbolic form and rhetorical figure respectively.

It might be said that the architectural symbol can be defined as a form, the use of which in a certain sense is forced upon the architect to convey to his building the incon-

Innocence Lost 103

trovertible expression of a certain idea, most often of superhuman reality and thus of a religious character and normally common to a whole group of men living in the same epoch of civilization and sharing the same imaginations and beliefs.

When, on the other hand, such a form is taken out of its original context to be used individually by architects of another age and culture as expressive of an ideal or even ide-ology of a les universal character, its func-tioning becomes one of rhetorical figure.

Seen from this point of view, it should be remarked that even before the Renais-sance the instances of renovatio proclaimed through the reutilization of antique elements and style, as in the two best planned and spectacular of these manifestations during the 1st Christian millennium, the so-called Sistine renaissance and the Carolingian era, their point of departure is more akin to that of Medieval symbolism than to Renais-sance rhetoric, insofar as the purpose is the symbolization of an uninterrupted continu-ity of tradition to Christianity through the legacy of the holy Roman Empire.26 As for the rhetorical figure, on the other hand, the various architectonic elements to be re-used will be consciously selected and purposely connected as the branding of the mode of life and thinking of a minor group or class of people, often those making up the social elite or cultural avant garde of the time if not as the stamp of a political or direct per-sonal programme of a single individual. Their proclaimed aim, moreover, will be to facilitate the persuasion of the beholder in

a visual communication whose message is as intentionally thought out by its author as it is critically received by the addressee, as opposed to the submissive way in which the symbolical form imposes itself upon the be-holder’s awe-stricken gaze.

To return to the Albertian treatise, howev-er, a novelty here too was that, unlike in the symbolic image when the artist was required strictly to obey the scheme of iconography extant for each figure and object in order not to dismantle its intrinsic meaning, it was now left to him how to let his story be rep-resented most convincingly. In this respect, it would be crucial for him to single out not the characteristics of every detail, but rather the moment of its epic or dramatic sequence best suited to his purpose. And in Alberti’s eyes this choice is brought about through the artist’s inventiveness in just the same way as the invention of the plot in the drama or the argument in the speech was due to the in-ventiveness of the poet and orator (De Pict. III, 53).

In his enumeration of such inventions and the manner in which they might be rendered in painting, Alberti lists a host of examples, all but one taken from Greek mythology or Roman history, and their treatment of Antiq-uity in literature and painting.

Reading Alberti’s booklet leaves one in no doubt that his main inspiration was drawn from ancient rhetoric. From there he has taken not only the many examples and anec-dotes flavouring his account, but also the set of rules for painting drawn up to replace the range of concrete exempla and iconograph-

104 LIse Bek

ic conventions that were to be followed by the artists of the previous period. In short, in order to liberate the painter from these restrictions, Alberti did make of the art of painting into an ars rhetorica, a concept that was forecast, however, almost prophetically about a century earlier by Dante Alighieri.

In the Tenth Song of the Purgatory in the Commedia, he describes three reliefs, which, as God’s own creations, are of a kind never seen on earth.27 In their motifs, they actually constitute the traditional medieval triad of an Old and a New Testament subject which together with a motif borrowed from the legendary texts throw light on a common theme, in this case the virtue of humility.

In spite of this, the poet does not hesi-tate to refer to these reliefs as Divine inven-tions to be admired for their novelty, as a cosa nova not to their heavenly master, but to the human beholder. Since Suger’s days, one might say, the quality of novelty has de-scended from God’s Son to His work, and from that a further descent had to be made by Alberti. In point of fact, the reliefs, had they been real, would have represented a novel trend in the pictorial arts of that time. Its point was to make not the figure per se, but the mutual interrelation between two or more figures in dialogue or action the main subject of the representation. It is this re-lationship that is termed by Dante, “visible speech”, visibile parlare.

Similarly to Alberti, novelty, novitas, must be a quality of the picture, now clearly testified to be a prerequisite to arouse in the beholder the feeling of surprise that was the

source of delight, as was generally accepted in humanist aesthetics, and invention was an indispensable condition if something new were to be created.

In his annexation of the Dantean concept, Alberti here goes a step further towards the ideal of humanist eloquence insofar as he substitutes not only the human artist for the Divine Creator, but, far more importantly, he replaces the religious universe of icon-ographically predicted Christian imagery with that of pagan Antiquity to be chosen and treated precisely according to the indi-vidual artist’s wishes and intentions.

In being virtually virgin territory at the time, the ancient repertoire was not yet bound up with the pictorial tradition and so, as his personal invention, could be treated with even greater freedom by the artist.

What Alberti was trying to do was, in fact, twofold. First of all, he wanted to re-place the given symbolical content of the picture referring to the Divine sphere with one relating to the sphere of human life. The subject matter, the figures and the ob-jects depicted thus became different in kind from the traditional symbolic imagery, more flexible but at the same time more limited in their meaning in comparison with the sym-bol’s stringency in the relationship between sign and thing on the one hand and its flex-ibility concerning the breadth and depth of its content.

Secondly, he wanted to upgrade the pic-ture from being a mainly functional requi-site of religious practice to its new function partly as an aesthetic object for the enjoy-

Innocence Lost 105

ment of the senses and partly as a tool for the humanistic didactics, bearing an ethical rather than a religious meaning. And clearly, the picture as Alberti saw it, formally as a composition - a carefully calculated constel-lation of various elements - and in content as a historia - an event dramatically enacted - did require on the part of the beholder quite another way of reacting from what it did as a piece of furniture for meditative devotion.

In the latter case, his reaction would be one of submission to the Divine vision re-vealed to him, his eyes fixed in staring im-mobility upon its image. In the former case, on the contrary, he himself would be the sovereign judge of the portrayal exposed to his critical study by systematically allowing his eyes to move over the focal plane of the picture (De Pict. II, 40).

Thus, a change was made in the role of the beholder, from a passive awareness of the picture as a whole to an active decipher-ing of the variety of elements made visible in it.

In his architectural treatise, Alberti simi-larly recommends the beholder to proceed in the same way when visually inspecting the building he stands before (De Re Aed. IX, IX). His task here should not be to de-cipher any symbolic meaning, but to detect the regularity and symmetry, the harmony and unity of the totality already observ-able in the façade, its diversity and variety notwithstanding. And by stepping over the threshold, he should continue his investiga-tion in its interior. So by entering the villa, he was summoned to follow its main axis on

which its array of reception rooms was lined like beads on a string to display their variety of geometric forms (De Re Aed. IX, II). A result of this changed manner of perceiving the building, moreover, was a coincidence of the two categories of symmetria and eu-rythmia which were more or less kept apart in Antiquity, and, in the case of the latter, neglected in the Middle Ages. This became a key feature of architecture throughout the classical era.

Now, as he passed through each room, the visitor to the house was expected to notice its individual form, though not as a manifes-tation of any symbolical meaning like that revealed in Gothic design. Thanks to his be-ing an integrated part of the geometrically structured universe, he was held, instead, to be enabled to duely appreciate the beauty of geometry made visible in architecture, too.

Thus, in fact, an entirely new function was assigned to the layout as instrumental in arousing in the beholder the quality of delight so eagerly sought in humanist aes-thetics. And as in relation to the picture, here again, this was best done by means of surprise It was, however, a different kind of surprise from the moment of unease caused in the beholder by his sudden visual en-counter with the unexpected revelation of a phenomenon, a situation turned in the late Middle Ages into an aesthetic experience. Rather it resulted in the delight in variety and abundance thought by the humanists to be a natural human faculty.28

So the geometric shapes were encour-aged to exchange their intrinsic symbolical

106 LIse Bek

values for the extrinsic effects pertaining to the rhetorical figures, those glittering high-lights of sparkling eloquence, and thereby also to make a contribution to the human-ist doctrine of aesthetics formulated in the phrase varietas et copia. Similarly, Alberti had already in his Book IV proposed to de-sign the main street of a city in the form of a gently curving river, so that, in walking along it, one would every now and then be confronted with yet new palace façades (De Re Aed. IV, V), just like Dante when pro-ceeding from one relief to another, be struck with surprise at their ever changing aspects. The procedure described inevitably brings to mind the flow of eloquent language. In addition, it may be asked whether this si-multaneous progression of body and eyes, so different from standing still before the sole towering façade might not have been intended as the formula for the design of the corso of Pienza whether or not that was an Albertian invention.29

To return to Alberti’s description in Book IX of the villa, his and the cultural elite’s ideal living place,30 it is, in other words, a perfect example demonstrating the new at-titude to the work of architecture devised by the humanist theoretician to the delight of his equally humanistically-minded reader and beholder.

Architectonic articulation, a mode of hu-manist eloquenceIn his architectural practice, on the other hand, Alberti was not the first to exploit the architectural symbols of former times to suit

his own rhetorical purposes or rather those of his clients. Brunelleschi before him had done the pioneering work. In his religious build-ings, especially, he seems like Alberti later in his treatise to have wanted to recall the sim-plicity of the early Christian liturgy by bor-rowing the model for its architectonic frame-work from the churches of that period.

Those churches must have been well known to him from the time he spent as an expert on hydraulics in Ravenna and else-where as well as in his youth studying, prob-ably, as told by his biographer, Antonio di Tuccio Manetti, the architectural wonders surviving from Rome’s past glory.31

From the early Christian building prac-tice he annexed the basilical lay-out with the arcaded colonnades as partitions between nave and aisles, the clear lightening through the two rows of plain clerestory windows just beneath the cassetted ceilings etc. Fur-thermore, the relatively short and broad pro-portions of the central nave directly focussed on the altar, as not least exemplified in the fairly late church of S. Spirito in Florence, its rebuilding begun in 1436, probably reveal an agreement avant la lettre to Alberti’s sup-port in his treatise for the centrally planned church, the ground plan of which was in the form of a circle, a quadrangle, an octagon or some other regular polygon, (De Re Aed. VII, III). But he is likely to have reflected also Alberti’s opinion upon the preference, by his countrymen of early Christian time, for the basilical church room with a flat tim-bered ceiling because of its being more suit-ed for hearing the sermon than the vaulted

Innocence Lost 107

one (De Re Aed. VII, V). Thus, the author seems to have seen the members of the first Christian communities on Italian soil as ac-tive participants in the service, if not as the audience listening to an oration and, conse-quently, as a linkage back to Antiquity and as worthy kinsmen of the humanists of his own days as well.

So it is not without a critical eye that Alberti looks on the Gothic churches, the greater part of whose longitudinal nave with its lofty vaulting was reserved for the numerous clergy, whereas the laiety had ac-cess only to the bays closest to the entrance out of sight and hearing width of the service enacted.

In the Albertian text, there is no doubt about his indignation, as the good humanist he was, at the liturgical practice of the High Middle Ages and its architectural setting as well as at its entire ecclesiastic institution. Alternatively, he refers to early Christian us-age as an ideal model to be followed in his own day.

At that time, however, he must have been acquainted with Brunelleschi’s mode of so to speak implementing the same usage in the material form of church architecture. So he would have noticed that, in the use of his planning and execution of the architec-tonic framework around the contemporary liturgy, elements of early Christian style, Brunelleschi might be said already to have represented the same ideal for which Alberti himself would argue.

But although in his churches and chapels Brunelleschi starts out from early Christian

architecture, he is not content to imitate the Paleochristian style. Instead, he examined the various elements in detail to bring them up to the standard of ancient art as studied by him in the Roman ruins. Thus, first and foremost the Corinthian column in his slen-der grey-blue pietra serena version comes to stand out cleansed of all superfluous detail as a type model of the antique column even in spite of its being almost synonymous with Tuscan Early Renaissance style.

As a rhetorical figure in the Brunelles-chian architectural eloquence, as it were, its function seems to be that of providing the auctoritas, which in his entourage of learned humanists was brought about through their more or less manipulated quotations from Cicero and the other classical authors.

As far as rhetoricizing in architecture is concerned, it was again Alberti, however, who took full advantage of the new possibil-ities offered by Antiquity to be exploited for elements capable of conveying the equally new spatial concept of architecture as a scene for the adequate staging of its func-tioning, the significance proper to the activ-ity and the persons involved.

Such elements were clearly regarded by Alberti as belonging to the Ornamenta of architecture to be treated in the second part of his treatise as opposed to its Structura, the theme of its first part. Consequently, he gives a detailed description in his VII Book of the orders and proportioning of columns and other elements (De Re Aed. VII, VI-IX). His precepts, here listed for the first time since Antiquity, appear to be moulded

108 LIse Bek

on those found in the Vitruvian treatise (De Arch. IV), to Alberti a source of inspiration and a subject to criticism alike.

Alberti, however, is not very explicit con-cerning the concrete utilisation of the ele-ments of ornamentation except for sporadic statements such as that relating to the deco-ration of the church, which ought to be noth-ing but philosophia, an apparent rejection of the conventional religious symbols (De Re Aed. VII, III). Elsewhere in his treatise, he admonishes the burgher not to violate his status by adorning his house with pediments (De Re Aed. IX, II). From this it might be deduced that to Alberti the new type of ar-chitectonic articulation was imbued with a capacity to signify both social and individu-al distinction.

In his earliest architectural works, the palace commissioned by the Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai, together with the façade of his parish church, S. Maria Novella, both from 1456-1470, Alberti now seems to in practise have prefigured or per-haps drawn the consequences of the theories he has already formulated.

Rather like Brunelleschi in his churches, in the church façade Alberti subordinates Christian religious tradition, here repre-sented by S. Miniato al Monte outside Flor-ence with its so-called proto-Renaissance marble incrustation, to the stringency of classical order and proportioning. But un-like Brunelleschi he does not restrict himself to use a few elements separately such as the Corinthian column, but introduces the front

Fig. 1. Leon Battista Alberti, S. Maria Novella in Florence executed 1456-70. The façade with the temple motif of its marble incrustation (photo: Johan Vatke).

Innocence Lost 109

of a quattro style temple as the dominant motif of the façade. Foreshadowed in the four giant pilasters in its lower section, the motif is fully developed in the upper one. But all is silhouetted as a dark pattern of flat bands in the marble incrustation, more like an architect’s drawing on his sketch sheet or the graphic illustration in a building hand-book than as functional architectonic ele-ments or perhaps as glosses in a Latin dic-tionary rather than a full-fledged Latin text (Figs. 1-2).

In doing this, Alberti nevertheless suc-ceeds in redefining church architecture for centuries to come, and he does so by super-imposing on its medieval structure a clas-sical stamp of pagan sacred form, just as, in his treatise, he consistently designates the church as templum. As far as the mean-ing of the church is concerned, however, this was no less than an abandonment of the idea, preserved throughout the Middle Ages, of the church building as a symbolic image of the Heavenly Jerusalem, in favour of the broader designation of it as a sanctu-ary by means of the rhetorical figure bor-rowed from Antiquity.

It was not long before this identification of church and temple became a fact that architects had to take ad notam, and from the late 15th century onwards the motif was elaborated variously in church after church from its full orchestration in the free-stand-ing porticus, sometimes quadrupled to mark the four entrances of the central building, to the sculptural ones in high or low relief or the only rudimentary form left in a pedi-

mented gable or portal.In the Rucellai palace, for its part, Al-

berti follows much the same line. Here, he coats the facade, so to speak, with an equal-ly ornamental version of the theatre motif, so called because it has been drawn from the Roman theatrical architecture of the Flavian amphitheatre, the Colosseum built about 80 AD, and more explicitly from the rather older, but less prominent Marcellus Theatre. In their exteriors the free-standing colonnade of the peripteral temple has been reduced to an articulation of three rows of slender half columns of the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders, one above the other. So the sacred motif was brought into the

Fig. 2. The Temple of Portunus in Rome dating from the 2nd century BC. View of its tetrastyle front (pho-to: Johan Vatke).

110 LIse Bek

semi-sacred sphere of official imperial ar-chitecture.

A further reduction of its form to flat ornament was undertaken by Alberti when borrowing the motif for his palace façade (Figs. 3-4). But whereas one might suspect the Roman articulation to contain an im-plicit reference to its sacred origin in the temple, in the Albertian palace its raison d’être seems simply to have been of deco-rating the façade in the manner of the rhe-torical figure in a well composed speech. It may be asked whether the purpose of the articulation of the two Rucellai facades as such was of a purely rhetorical kind paying homage to the person commissioning them

as a man of learning and culture, an equal to Alberti himself and his fellow humanists, a person to whom one might communicate in the Latin language as well as architecture. In this case rhetoricising the latter would be a sign of the dignity bestowed upon this cli-ent through the ideal framing of his daily life as a good citizen and pious Christian as well.

When, in his later church façades of S. Francesco in Rimini and S. Andrea in Man-tova, both left unfinished on his death in 1472, however, Alberti drew on the trium-phal arch to make of one of the most sig-nificant architectural structures of imperial Rome their principal motif, his intention, was undoubtedly different. He did not only aim here to furnish a setting for the Malat-esta tyrant Sigismondo and the Gonzaga Duke, a setting referring to the Antique ideal in general in recognition of their de-votion to humanism. Far more that this, his re-use of the triumphal arch as an element of transition between the worldly sphere of the city and the heavenly of the church had an obvious ideological hint. There was a clear analogy between the Emperor’s ad-ventus to his Capital through his entrance to the Via Sacra and that of his princely commissioners to the holy city by entering the Via Crucis within their churches. In this way, he motif of the arch, already hinted at in Brunelleschi’s quasi graphic articulation of the whitewashed walls of the interiours in several of his buildings in Florence, was acknowledged for its specificity as pertaining to the vocabulary of a ruler’s rhetoric, not to

Fig. 3. Leon Battista Alberti, The Rucellai Palace in Florence, built 1456-70. View of the front with the ‘theatre’ motif of its articulation (photo: Johan Vatke).

Innocence Lost 111

say the panegyrics so lavishly uttered in courtly acts of homage. This might be the reason for its fairly rare appearance in later times as a ma-jor motif in church architecture in comparison with that of the temple front.

The new style in architecture as a rhetorical inventionAlberti’s admonition notwithstanding, from as early as the late 15th century the temple front became the favourite motif also in profane architecture. And a typical instance of its rhetoricizing in this connection is An-drea Palladio’s advocacy of its use in the private villa in the second of his Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, published in 1570 (II, XVI).32

As the pagan temples were originally built to house the gods, he argues, the form

given to them must have been that of the human dwelling, and so, in retracing the type of Antique villa no longer known, it will be legitimate to imitate the temple so richly represented in the Roman ruins. So, in his many villas on the Venetian soil, he elaborates on the motif, twisting it to sug-gest a closed front or the portico of an open garden façade and transforming it into the fourfold airy pavilions to enclose the Vil-la Rotunda near Vicenza, built in 1566-70 (Fig. 5). Admittedly, this fourdoubling of the temple front was a devise unseen in An-tiquity.

In doing so he evidently did not intend to dress up the villa as a temple, but through his construction to recreate the villa that had functioned as the ideal frame around Roman upper class life in a cultured sphere

Fig. 4. The Marcellus Theatre in Rome, dedicated in 11 or 3 BC. The exterior articulation with superimposed rows of half columns in Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian order respectively (photo: Johan Vatke).

112 LIse Bek

of leisure, an ideal to be maintained for his contemporaries, too.

In this respect Palladio, his mannerist tendencies notwithstanding, made common cause with his renaissance fellows, and in his architectural renewal of the villa he also followed the same trend as several archi-tects and writers of treatises before him.33 In point of fact, their reading of the ancient texts supplied them with a starting point for their own inventiveness, through which, in the guise of imitations of the ancients, they were able to establish an entirely new archi-tecture.

Based on uncompromising geometric

axial symmetry, as it was to be perceived as a spatially conceived entity in the perspec-tival mode of vision, it appeared to be an architecture totally different from the one created to suit the matrix of the Euclidean mode of sight and the eurythmic illusion of beauty. So in taking the ancient models as their point of departure, these architects ap-parently strove to achieve the ideal chosen by adding to the architectonic form and lay-out an absolute perfection alien to the origi-nal but typical of its transformation from plain symbol into a diligently constructed rhetorical figure - rather in the manner of the Brunelleschian Corinthian column.

Fig. 5. Andrea Palladio, Villa Rotonda outside Vicenza, dated 1566-70. View towards the exterior with two of the entrance pavillons in the form of temple fronts (photo: Rikke Lyngsø Christensen).

Innocence Lost 113

Not surprisingly, this initiative came from architects in contact with the learned entourage of the more prosperous human-ist-leaning courts such as the Montefeltrian in Urbino and the circle around the Curia in Rome. In this way, about 1500, a Francesco di Giorgio Martini, in his sketches and trea-tise illustrations, undertook a reconstruction of the ground plans of various Roman build-ings. He did so, however, not without sys-tematising their layout in keeping with the Renaissance preference for regularity and symmetry. This is seen in his plans of rooms in the Roman domus after the description in Vitruvius and of the Domus Flavia on the Palatine allegedly drawn after its ruins.34

Similarly, Donato Bramante designed the chapel of S. Pietro in Montorio from 1502, one of his first major works after his settling in Rome, in imitation of the ancient round temple (Figs. 6-7). It is possible that his model was the one presumed to be a Ve-nus temple standing on top of the sanctu-ary of Fortuna at Palestrina, a complex he is known to have drawn upon as a source of inspiration for his lay-out of the nearly con-temporary courtyard of the Belvedere in the Vatican, dated 1504-1505. Be it as it may, at any rate, Bramante was so successful in his reconstruction that Palladio, in his trea-tise, places il bel tempio di Bramante, that is the Tempietto, as it was designated later on, among the Roman examples presented by him as ideal models (Quatt. Lib. d’Arch. IV, XVII).

Also worthy of mention is Raphael, the darling of the same learned milieu. As is

demonstrated in the letter he wrote in 1518 to Pope Leo X to explain his intentions re-garding the planning of the papal villa on Monte Mario, the later Villa Madama, his aim was to recreate the ancient Roman vil-la.35

His procedure, however, was different from that subsequently followed by Palla-dio in his treatise. Instead of its architecton-ic articulation Raphael concentrates on the villa’s layout, and instead of pointing to the temple as the missing link to its origins he turns directly to the original.

An eye-witness account of the function-ality and charm of the authentic Roman villa

Fig. 6. Donato Bramante, The Tempietto at S. Pietro in Montorio in Rom, built 1502. View of its exterior with the surrounding Doric colonnade (photo: Johan Vatke).

114 LIse Bek

was left to posterity in the two letters writ-ten about 100 A. D. by Pliny the Younger to some of his friends. In them, two of his villas, one in the Tuscan Appenines and the other at Laurentum north of Rome, are mi-nutely described by their owner.36

The letters had been known and frequent-ly read in humanist circles since the days of Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccac-cio. Inspiration was similarly derived from them by several architects and clients dur-ing the following century for architectural and garden planning. In practising in these fields as well as in writing on such matters, Alberti indeed revealed himself to be one of the main exponents of this Plinian principle, not least as far as the above-mentioned lay-

out of the villa is concerned.In his letter to the Pope, Raphael for his

part also uses an abridged paraphrase of the Plinian letters as a starting point for his plan, selecting from both of them a number of motifs suited to his own purpose. Thus, the principal feature of the papal villa complex is suggested to be its mighty axial sweep from top to bottom of the hillside. This fea-ture can be seen as a dramatization of the long view through the Villa Laurentina, (Epist. II, XVII), the optical axis of which had also lent itself to Alberti as the principal motif for the lay-out of both house and gar-den in his treatise as well as in the projects ascribed to him.

In Raphael’s hands, it reappears in a sim-

Fig. 7. The Round Temple at the Forum Boarium in Rome, first temple from the end of the 2nd century BC (photo: Johan Vatke).

Innocence Lost 115

ilar geometric version. The same axial se-quence seems to have been repeated, though freely interpreted, in the axial subordination of the three garden terraces indicated in a plan drawing ascribed to him. As for the three garden sections themselves, they were obviously borrowed from the Tuscan Villa (Epist. V, VI).

So to Raphael, even more than to his im-mediate predecessors and contemporaries, humanist architectural eloquence was not achieved by the application of selected ele-ments, be it the column or the temple front, from the Antique vocabulary to the body of the building as separate rhetorical figures.

Far more, the structure of the entire build-ing complex had to be imbued with the fla-vour of the ancient idiom, though adjusted to the more rational architectural syntax of the Renaissance (Figs. 8-9).

So in Raphael’s view as well as to that of his fellow artists, the rhetoricizing of archi-tecture through the rehabilitation of Antiq-

uity was a means of invoking the ideals of the pagan Roman past in the architectonic framework around human life in the same way as the rehabilitation of ancient rheto-ric in speech and writing to the humanists would be their contribution to mankind’s mental reawakening. As in humanist elo-

Fig. 8. Raphael and the members of the San Gallo family, idealized ground plan of the papal villa at Monte Mario in Rome, as illustrated in Sebastiano Serlio bolognese, Tutte l’opera d’architettura et prospettiva, In Venetia 1619 (facsimile New Jersey), Libro III (1640), fol. 120v., probably after Raphael’s early plan from about 1518.

116 LIse Bek

quence, so also in architecture, the mode and scope of the rhetoric depended in its formulation upon the inventiveness of the architect himself and was only to a slightly lesser extent indebted to the existence of a definite rhetorical code. So Raphael sets out in his letter as well as in plans and sketches of the villa to convince the Pope of the ex-cellence of his invention.

By the end of the Renaissance, whether that coincides with Raphael’s death in 1520 as thought by some scholars, or with the sack of Rome as is the opinion of others, things begun to change. So also in relation to both the rhetorical use of the architectural ele-ments borrowed from earlier ages, notably that of Antiquity, and to the very concept of invention as formulated by Renaissance hu-manism, the first signs of change were seen. So before we leave our subject we must take

a brief look at the further life of the classical tradition resulting from the renewal of archi-tecture during the Renaissance.

The institution of the classical code and its challengingIn respect to the re-use of Antique architec-ture as a means of forming if not formulating a new complex of architectural meaning in the guise of rhetoric, a characteristic of the Renaissance period proper is the generality of the rhetorical contents sought. In their purpose, the statements given and messages communicated are almost invariably identi-cal in conveying to the surrounding world - to guests, random passers-by or members of the household on seeing the building in question - the owner’s and architect’s belief in the common ideal of humanist culture.

During the late 15th and the 16th cen-

Fig. 9. Modern reconstruction proposed by the author of the ground plan of Pliny the Younger’s villa at Larentum north of Rome as described in his letter dated about 100 AD.

Innocence Lost 117

tury, on the contrary, architectural rhetoric was more often associated with the person commissioning a work and with a specific ideology of his whether of family, social, or political nature. Similarly in the same period, the painted decorations of villas and palaces as well as the formal lay-out and sculptural decoration of the new large garden complexes were realized according to specific iconographic programmes of an unmistakeably ideological character. Paral-lel to this the nature of the rhetorical figure itself began to change.

Until then, architects had eagerly studied the ruins of the Roman monuments in or-der to gather from them the motifs suited to the new manner of rhetorical articulation in their own works. This is seen from the many sketches left especially by the architects dis-cussed above or by what might be termed the second-generation Renaissance masters. Among others to be added to them are the members of the large Sangallo family, ac-tive until well into the 16th century over an area extending from Florence over Urbino to Rome. In their drawings, plans for new proj-ects are mingled with sketches of ancient buildings, some exact representations, some incorporating typical Renaissance amend-ments, and some probably freely invented, as exemplified in the Sangallo Sketchbook in The Vatican Library.37

As an aftermath of Alberti’s treatise, how-ever, it became almost customary among ar-chitects to write treatises of their own, and in all these books the catalogue of the five orders of columns, their proportions and or-

namentation was a sine qua non. A subject that was to be treated in continuation of as well as in opposition to Vitruvius, the origi-nator of the list, and with the beginning Vit-ruvianism of the 1500’s the supreme author-ity on the field.

The list was often in fact extended through the addition of other examples ei-ther local or of recent date. The columns and with them their insertion into the temple front now tended to become the main issue in the writings if not their sole concern, as in Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s Regole delli cinque ordini d’archittettura in 32 tavole 1562.

So, the use to which the orders were put and the form given to them, rather than be-ing founded in field studies and practical experience became scrutinised through the-oretical discussion with the aim of codify-ing the correct rules for their architectural employment.

So rigidly was the code eventually to be understood that its application did not de-mand the same inventiveness on the part of the architect as was previously the case, but it could be copied in the builders’ workshops or, as subsequently happened, taught in the academies.

Inventiveness, for its part, was a faculty drawn upon when the challenge of the archi-tectural code thus established as the guaran-tee of a good standard in architecture, was the subject of a general trend or of the indi-vidual architect. This was the way in which the Mannerist architects of the mid and late 16th century proceeded. So from a Giulio

118 LIse Bek

Romano in his Palazzo del Te outside Man-tua to a Pirro Ligorio in the Villa d’Este, or from a Giorgio Vasari in his Uffici complex in Florence to a Giacomo della Porta in the Michelangelesque dome of Saint Peter’s in Rome, just to mention a few, they over-turned the codified order of proportion and syntax, function and meaning of the classi-cal elements and discharged them of their liability as rhetorical figures of authority, only to use them in their exaggerations of or ironic commentaries on the architectural ideal of the Renaissance.38 Similarly, the category of novitas no longer referred to the renewal of architecture as such through its disguise all’antica, but to the manipulation of the classical code.

In the following century, the Baroque era saw a similar individualization of the general rules set up by their predecessors as valid for the elements drawn from Antiquity. This is seen not least in the suggestive and anything but orthodox way in which these elements were manipulated in the personal rhetoric of Francesco Borromini.39

Nevertheless, the architectonic elements originating from Antiquity retained their function and effect as rhetorical figures, yet increasingly in the service of ideology, and here in particular, the motif of the temple front was not treated preferentially. It ap-peared moreover to be of a flexibility that made of it the appropriate rhetoric of almost diametrically divergent ideologies.

As an ornament to the façade of a palatial residence associated with the elevated sta-tion of the ruler, it contradicted that of the

public building with its references to an-cient democracy. And even when referring to democracy, it had two different mean-ings, namely those of Greek oligarchy and Roman republic, as is indicated through an architectonic differentiation between Greek and Roman style seen in the architecture in the southern and northern states respectively in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Until about the same time, however, the original theme of the temple front as a rhe-torical figure closely related to the Renais-sance ideal of humanist culture was still kept alive thanks to the popularity enjoyed by the motif in private architecture. But here, too, its popularity was due not so much to archi-tectural inventiveness as to the quality of the models to be imitated, since it was largely through the impact of Palladianism that some of the original flavour of Renaissance rhetoric was maintained in the classical style well into the following century.

However, long before that, Romanticism had turned out to be a very serious challenge to the classical code which during the 17th and 18th centuries had won recognition as the cornerstone of European architectural rheto-ric. The aim of the Romantic movement was to establish a nationally and locally based counter-culture by means of a return to natu-ral as well as cultural roots. In architecture, a way would be to disregard the entire clas-sical tradition. This was viewed not only as the manifestation of a foreign culture, that of the Mediterranean, but also as a sophis-ticated product of Renaissance rationality, a point of view set forward already in 1772 by

Innocence Lost 119

the young Goethe, one of the forerunners of early Romanticism.40

Instead inspiration was sought in pre-Renaissance times, thought to have retained their original form, and in the unspoiled countryside at home. So the Gothic cathe-dral and the rural cottage became the two poles of the new architectural universe. But in spite of their best intentions, or precisely because of their intentionality, the Roman-tics failed in their idealistic enterprise to re-gain for architecture, as for culture in gen-eral, the innocence of medieval symbolical form. On the contrary, they had to content themselves with replacing Classicism with another code of architectural rhetoric, the code of Modernity.

And in truth, the Romantic or neo-Gothic rhetoric was as consciously conceived and as individually implemented by the archi-tects in their works as had been that of the Renaissance.

Conclusion: Innocence regained or the ir-reversibility of Renaissance innovationAs it has been the intention to demonstrate, the rediscovery in the Renaissance of an-cient architecture did not only provide the architects of the period with a new repertoire of formal elements in architectonic articula-tion. Far more, it was the source of inspira-tion for a new way of constituting meaning in architecture as opposed to the symbols of former ages, Antiquity itself included.

The new rhetorical concept of architec-ture was not, however, the outcome of a sheer shift in style, but had its background

in the new self-awareness of Man as a re-sponsible individual regarding his thoughts, speech, and activities. In the same way, the shift in the mode of visually experiencing the surroundings from the convention codified in Euclidian optics to that of perspective, far from being incidental, was symptomatic of the general change in culture brought about by the Renaissance.

Subsequent to this, things were of a dif-ferent order from previously and so, to the man of the new age, the architectonic work became his personal invention as a creation, consciously thought out and rationally planned to embody his ideas and ideals. But more than that, a premise for this new mean-ing imposed upon architecture was the al-teration of its functional aspect. From being an image in itself that would convey to the beholder a symbolic meaning, its purpose from now on was that of sufficiently adapt-ing the spatially constructed architectural reality to stage the activities of the user as a personal performance invented for the occa-sion to suit his wishes or ambitions.

This implied, however, a change in man-kind’s state of mind, and it turned out that from this new mental habit there would be no return to the Eden of earlier days, just as the Fall of Man has so far appeared to be an irreversible process. So neither the Roman-tics in their looking back to the Middle Ages nor the Modernists in their search for the basic nature of form and meaning could get rid of this mental and artistic heritage from Renaissance humanism. In conclusion one might ask, whether in fact architecture has

120 LIse Bek

from that time been doomed never again to abandon rhetoric - be it of ancient or modern - as its means of expression.

Lise Bek Professor emeritus, Dr. Phil.

Parkvej 132DK-6710 Esbjerg V

JVV@KM.DK

Ackerman, J.S.1990 The villa: Form and Ideology of Country

Houses, London.

Ackerman, J.S.1999 Palladio, London.

Alberti L.B.1966 De re edificatoria: l’architettura I-II, Or-

landi, G. & Portughesi, P. (eds.), Milano [1485] .

Alberti L.B.1973 De pictura: Della Pittura in Opere volgari

III, Grayson, C. (ed.), Bari [1966].

Alighieri, D.1973 La Divina Commedia, Giacalone, G. (ed.),

Roma [1968].

Assunto, R.1982 Die Theorie des Schönen im Mittelalter,

Köln [1963].

Baldwin Smith, E.1956 Architectural Symbolism of Rome and the

Middle Ages, Princeton.

Baldwin Smith, E.1970 The Dome, Princeton.

Bek, L.1977 “Ideal to Reality: Aspects of Florentine

Renaissance Modernism Expressed through Alberti’s Ciceronianism and Brunelleschi’s Approach to Perspective”, ARID VIII, 159-166.

Bek, L.1980 Towards Paradise on Earth, Modern

Space Conception in Architecture. A Cre-ation of Renaissance Humanism, Odense.

Bek, L.

2003 Reality in the Mirror of Art, Aarhus.

Bek, L.2005 “Lo sguardo ampio, le lettere Pliniane, la

prospettiva, e Raffaello inventore del ve-dere paesaggistico”, ARID XXVI, 61-78.

Bentman, R. & Müller, M.1992 The Villa as Hegemonich Architecture,

London.

Brandi, C.1975 “San Ivo alla Sapienza a Roma”. In: Strut-

tura e architettura, Milano, 138-167 [1967].

Edgarton, S.1975 The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear

Perspective, New York.

Frommel, C.L.1994 “Living all’antica, Palaces and Villas from

Brunelleschi to Bramante”. In: Millon, H.A. & Lampugnani, V.M. (eds.), The Re-naissance from Brunelleschi to Michelan-gelo, the Representation of Architecture, Milano, 183-203.

Furnari, M.1995 Formal Design in Renaissance Architec-

ture from Brunelleschi to Palladio, New York.

Goethe, J.W.1942 Von deutscher Baukunst, Dessau [1771].

Hautecoeur, L.1954 Mystique et Architecture Symbolisme du

Cercle et de la Coupole, Paris.

Hiscock, N.2000 The Wise Master Builder Platonic Geom-

etry in Plans of Medieval Abbeys and Ca-thedrals, Ashgate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Innocence Lost 121

Holberton, P.1990 Palladio’s Villas, Life in the Renaissance Coun-

tryside, London.

Kessler, H.2000 Spiritual seeing: picturing God’s invisibility in

medieval art, Philadelphia.

Krautheimer, R.1942 “The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Ar-

chitecture”, Art Bulletin XXIV, 1-38.

Krautheimer, R.1961 “The Architecture of Sixtus III, a Fifth Century

Renaissance”. In: Meiss, M. (ed.), De Artibus Opuscula. 11 Essays in Honour of Erwin Panof-sky, New York, 291-302.

Lehmann, K.1945 “The Dome of Heaven”, Art Bulletin XXVII/1,

1-27.

Manetti, A. di Tuccio1970 La vita di Filippo di Ser Brunellesco: The Life of

Brunelleschi Saalman, H. (ed.), Park University P. A.

Onians, J.1988 Bearers of Meaning, the Classical Orders in An-

tiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Cambridge.

Palladio, A.1968 I quattro libri dell’architettura, Venezia Fac-

simile Hoepli (ed.), Milano [1570].

Panofsky, E.1979 Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis

and its Art Treasures, Princeton [1946].

Panofsky, E.1958 Early Netherlandish Painting, its Origin and

Character, Princeton [1953].

Panofsky, E.1969 Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art,

New York [1960].

Panofsky, E.1972 Gothic Architecture and Scolasticism, New

York.

Panofsky, E.1997 Perspective as Symbolic Form, Wood C.S. (ed.),

New York [1927].

Pliny the Younger1966 Epistolari libri decem, Nynos A.V.R. (ed.), Ox-

ford, Epist. II, XVII, 57-62 and Epist. V, VI, 137-145.

Ringbom, S.1984 Icon to Narrative the Rise of Dramatic Close-up

in Fifteenth Century Devotional Painting, Doornspijk Davaco.

Sangallo, G. da1910 Il Libro di Guiliano da Sangallo Codice Vatica-

no Barberiniano 4424, Huelsen C., (ed. Lipsia).

Serlio, S.1964 Tutte l’opera d’architettura et prospettiva di Se-

bastiano Serlio bolognese, In Venetia 1619, (fac-simile New Jersey).

Shearman, J.1990 Mannerism, Harmondsworth Baltimore

[1967].

Shearman, J.1992 Arts and the Spectator in the Italian Renais-

sance, Washington.

Simson, O. v.1989 (1974) The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Goth-

ic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order, Princeton.

Smith, C.1992 Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism,

Ethics, Aestethics, and Eloquence 1400-1470, New York-Oxford.

Smyth, C.H.1992 (1961) Mannerism and Maniera, Wien.

Vignola, G. Barozzi da1562 Regole delli cinque ordini d’architettura in 32

tavole, Roma.

Villard de Honnecourt1968 Album de, architecte du XIII siècle: Manuscrit

publié en fac-simile, ed. Lassus, M.J.B.A., Par-is.

Vitruvius1964 De architettura libri decem, Zehn Bücher über

die Architektur, Fensterbusch, C. (ed.), Darm-stadt.

Weiss, R.1969 The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiq-

uity, Oxford.

White, J.1993 Art and Architecture in Italy 1250-1400, Lon-

don [1960].

Zanker, P.1998 Pompeii, Public and Private Life, Harvard.

122 LIse Bek

I own my greatest gratitude to Professor Walton Glyn Jones for revising my English and to my husband Johan

Vatke for photographic and technical assistence.

1 Smith 1992.2 For a more detailed treatment of the history and historicity of sight, cf. Bek 2003, esp. Chapt. I.

3 Baldwin Smith 1970; Onians 1988.4 Zanker 1998; cf. also Bek 1980, Part III,1.5 Vitruvius 1964 Fensterbusch (ed.).6 Cf. Baldwin Smith 1956. 7 Lehmann 1945; Hautecoeur 1954; Lavin 1962. 8 See i.a. Simson 1989, 10-11.9 White 1993, 170. 10 For light mysticism in general, see Assunto 1982, 98-101; for Suger, see Panofsky 1979.11 Ibid. 21-25; cf. also Hiscock 2000, 118, 180-181. 12 Ibid.13 Simson 1989, 21-58. 14 Ibid.15 Villard de Honnecourt 1968; see also Panofsky 1972, 87-88. 16 A characterisation used, according to Vasari, by Michelangelo about the perspectival understanding of Lo-

renzo Ghiberti. 17 Simson 1989, 21ff.; cf. also Edgarton 1975, 74-78. 18 To-day, the two views are known only from a contemporary account, see Manetti 1970.See further Bek

1977, 159-66. 19 Alberti 1973.20 A study of the artistic and conceptual development of landscape is found in Bek 2003, Chapt. V, 6. 21 A designation coined by Panofsky 1958, 131-148.22 See also Shearman 1992.23 Kessler 2000. 24 Ringbom 1984.25 Alberti 1966.26 Panofsky 1969; Krautheimer 1942, 1-38; as well as Krautheimer 1961, 291-302.27 Alighieri 1973, Purgatorio Canto X, v28-102. 28 For the perception of art in general, see Shearman 1992; for the category of surprise, see also: Bek 2003,

Chapt. IV, 1. 29 Smith 1992, 98-129, Chapt. 6. “Varietas and the Design of Pienza in Architecture” contains a brilliant inter-

pretation of the Pientine urban concept, however, without commenting on just this aspect. 30 See also Ackermann 1990; Bentman & Müller 1992; Frommel 1994; Holberton 1990.31 Manetti 1970; Weiss 1969, 62-63. 32 Palladio 1968. 33 Ackermann 1999; Furnari 1995.34 Cf. Bek 1980, 206-209.

NOTES

Innocence Lost 123

35 Bek 2005, 61-78.36 Pliny the Younger, Epist. XVII, II (57-62) and Epist. V, VI (137-145). 37 Sangallo 1910; cf. also Bek 1980, 207. 38 Shearman 1990; Smyth 1992.39 Cf. Brandi 1975.40 Goethe 1942.