Updated: July 4, 2002
Joseph Connors, "Virtuoso Architecture in Cassiano's Rome,"
Cassiano Dal Pozzo's Paper Museum, London, 1992, vol. II
(Quaderni Puteani 3), pp. 23-40
.
According to Jacob Spon, curiosity was a contagious disease,
though not a fatal one....Architects too drank in the culture of
curiosity. They formed collections of naturalia and artificialia ,
ground lenses and made scientific instruments, engaged in excavations
and expanded the knowledge of antiquity. Curiosity came to leave its
mark on their work. There is a strain of baroque architecture that
can best be understood as virtuoso architecture, as a reflection of a
world seen through the lens of the curiosity cabinet.
When an architect visited one of the great encyclopedic
collections he would often find architectural curiosities among the
objects on display or filed in the library. The collection of coins
and medals assembled by Manfredo Settala in Milan was meant to be a
school in which architects could study the orders and appreciate the
magnanimity of ancient theaters, amphitheaters, hippodromes,
circuses, bridges and columns. Along with the collection went an
extensive numismatic library.
But there is another, quite different strain of baroque
architecture that can also be considered a product of virtuosity.
This is an architecture that is numismatic, optical, natural and
intricate. It takes wing in the second quarter of the Seicento and is
best exemplified in the work of Borromini and Martino Longhi the
Younger. It is the perfect mirror of the culture of curiosity.
But what matters most is that Borromini and a few others saw the
creative potential of the virtuoso cabinet and made a living
architecture out of it.
Clare Robertson, "Annibal Caro as Iconographer", Journal of
the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Volume 45, 1982
Annibal Caro to Giorgio Vasari, commissioning a painting of Venus
and Adonis: I also leave the invenzione to you, recalling another
similarity that painting has with poetry...that in each of them one
expresses one's own conceptions and ideas with greater feeling and
zeal than those of someone else. p. 172
[Annibal] Caro, on the other hand, carefully arranged the images
in his later programmes to reinforce their associations and
interrelations. The Camera dell' Aurora [at Caprarola] had a scheme
of calculated contrasts and symmetry. Thus the central compartment
of each lunette was made to correspond, with Quiete facing Vigilanza
and one antique sacrifice opposite the other. p.169
James S.
Ackerman. "Style," Distance Points: Essays in Theory and
Renaissance Art and Architecture. MIT Press, 1991. p. 3, 7.
Art historians are especially preoccupied with defining the nature
and behavior of style....One of the most stubborn and challenging
problems of art history is to explain the motivations and behavior of
change in style.
Alberto Pérez Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern
Science, MIT Press, 1990
Deprived of a legitimate poetic content, architecture was reduced
to either a prosaic technological process or mere decoration. p.11
It was now that style, that is, the articulation and coherence of
architectural "language," became a theoretical problem....The problem
"In which style should we build?" was not a problem of traditional
architecture; an invisible mathemata had guaranteed the value of its
work, and a symbolic intention had generated both structure and
ornament. p.12.
Before 1800 the architect was never concerned with type or
integrity of formal language as a source of meaning. p.12.
But Baroque perspective, in marked contrast to nineteenth-century
perspectivism, was a symbolic configuration, which allowed reality to
keep the qualities of traditional perception in an essentially
Aristotelian world. p.174.
Baroque architecture conveyed the almost tactile presence of a
space filled with life and light, with angels and mythological
figures. This contrasted vividly with the empty and homogenous
spaces suggested by Boullée and Ledoux. p.175
During the eighteenth century, craftsmen still operated with care;
they respected the natural order and were conscious of the
transcendent humility of action. The sacred nature of reality did
not encourage mindless exploitation. p.184
Such is the case in P. A. Barca's Avertimenti e Regole
(1620), which recommended the use of square, pentagonal, or hexagonal
fortifications since these figures were symbols of the relation
between the human body and the cosmos. God, the divine architect,
had created the heavens and the earth "with weight, number and
measurement," conforming everything to the circle, the most perfect
figure. Man, on the other hand, "is a small world....His flesh is
the earth, his bones are mountains, his veins are rivers, and his
stomach is the sea." p.207
For Vauban, only rational quantitative
considerations were to determine the choice of site for a new city.
No thought was spent on the traditional question of the place's
"meaning." p.212
It should be remembered that ornament had never been perceived as
superfluous by Renaissance or Baroque architects. Regardless of
theoretical discussions about the specificity of structure and
ornament, the latter was always perceived as an integral part of a
building's meaning. p.256
Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of
the Text. Chicago, 1993.
I laid out pebbles for numbers, and I marked out the pavement with
black coals and, by a model placed right before my eyes, I plainly
showed what difference there is between an obtuse-angled, a
right-angled, and an acute-angled triangle. Whether or not an
equilateral parallelogram would yield the same area as a square when
two of its sides were multiplied together, I learned by walking both
figures and measuring them with my feet. Hugonis de Sancto Victore
Didascalicon, de Studio Legendi: A Critical Text Charles Henry
Buttimer, VI, 3 pp.114-15, cited in Illich, p.30
"To order" means
neither to organize and systematize knowledge according to
preconceived subjects, nor to manage it. The reader's order is not
imposed on the story, but the story puts the reader into its order.
The search for wisdom is a search for the symbols of order that we
encounter on the page. p.31
Hoc visibile imaginatum fugurat
illud invisible verbum stands in the caption of one of these
[medieval manuscript] miniatures: "this visible image represents that
invisible truth." p.109
Finally, the illustration of books before
the thirteenth century has a practical-now often forgotten-mnemonic
purpose. Hugh [of St. Victor] speaks of reading as a journey. He
advances physically from page to page. The ornaments that line the
rows of letters place the words into the landscape through which this
journey leads. On no two lines does the reader meet up with the same
view, no two pages look alike, no two initial "A"s are identically
colored. The foliage and grotesques in combination with the lines
reenforce the power of remembrance: they support the reader's recall
of the voces paginarum in analogy to the scenery of the road
that brings back the conversation which took place on the stroll.
p.109-110
"All nature is pregnant with sense, and nothing in all of
the universe is sterile." In this sentence, Hugh brings centuries of
Christian metaphor to their full maturity....Nature is not just like
a book; nature itself is a book, and the manmade book is its
analogue. Reading the manmade book is an act of midwifery. Reading,
far from being an act of abstraction, is an act of incarnation.
Reading is a somatic, bodily act of birth attendance witnessing the
sense brought forth by all things encountered by the pilgrim through
the pages. p.123
Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of
Matteo Ricci,
The paradoxical man appears paradoxical in
comparison to other men, but he is a companion to heaven. Confucius,
as translated by Ricci/Spence, p. 127
Rudolf Wittkower, Art and
Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750, Pelikan History of Art series, p.392
...terraces,
grand undulating staircases, and water combine to wed the house to
the landscape. Staircases and terraces extend from the house into
the landscape like enormous tentacles. Man's work ennobles the
landscape without subduing it; this is as far from the French method
of making the landscape subservient to the will of man as it is from
the 'natural' English landscape garden....
Edgar Wind,
Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, New York, W.W. Norton,
1968
"As Dionysius says, the divine ray can not reach us unless it
is covered in poetic veils." Egidio da Viterbo, quoted in,
p.14
They were designed for initiates, hence they require an
initiation. p.15
[Allegory] releases a counterplay of imagination
and thought by which each becomes an irritant to the other, and both
may grow through the irksome contact.... p.27
Only by looking
towards the Beyond as the true goal of ecstasy can man become
balanced in the present. Balance depends upon ecstasy. p.48
As
Ficino was never tired of repeating, the trouble about the pleasures
of the senses is not that they are pleasures but that they do not
last. p.55
The frequent allusions to the passions of lovers, by
which Plotinus paraphrased the mystical ecstasy, encouraged Ficino in
his belief that voluptas [pleasure] should be reclassified as a noble
passion. p.68
"This is what the fable of Mars and Venus suggests,
of whom the latter corresponds to Empedoclean friendship, the former
to Empedoclean strife.... And with this agrees what is transmitted by
other poets, that Harmony was born from the union of Mars and Venus:
for when the contraries, high and deep, are tempered by a certain
proportion, a marvellous consonance arises between them". Plutarch in
De Homero, according to Xylander, quoted in, p. 87
For mixed
is the origin of this world, and its frame composed of contrarious
powers. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, quoted in, p.87
[F]estina
lente ('make haste slowly') became the most widely cherished
Renaissance maxim; and those who chose it as a device made sport of
expressing the same idea by an unlimited variety of images. A
dolphin around an anchor, a tortoise carrying a sail, a dolphin tied
to a tortoise, a sail attached to a column, a butterfly on a crab, a
falcon holding the weights of a clock in its beak, a remora twisting
around an arrow, an eagle and a lamb, a blindfolded lynx,-these and
innumerable other emblematic combinations were adopted to signify the
rule of life that ripeness is achieved by a growth of strength in
which quickness and steadiness are equally developed. pp98-99
By
one of the accidental conjunctions that Hegel might have ascribed to
the cunning of history, the ancient monuments with which Renaissance
Platonists were faced exactly suited their predisposition. Most of
the objects were of a late date and lent themselves to a mystical
reading, for with rare exceptions Greek art was inaccessible, and
works of the classical period were virtually unknown. p. 152
The
mutual entailment of the gods was a genuine Platonic lesson....With
every shift of argument a new harmony or discord may thus be
discovered between the gods, and it was expected of the Renaissance
humanist, when he contrived the programme of a new mythological
image, that his genius would surprise, enlighten, and satisfy the
spectator by the persuasive twist of his 'invention'. p. 198
In Ben
Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, a sequence of 'knots'
is introduced by the dancing master Dædelus, who interweaves the two
opposites in a perfect maze; and his labyrinthian designs are
accompanied by a warning that, while the 'first figure' should
suggest the contrast of Virtue and Pleasure as in the Choice of
Hercules, it is the purpose of the dance to 'entwine' Pleasure and
Virtue beyond recognition.... p. 206
Giancarlo Maiorino, The
Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, University
Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990
"Our nature
consists in motion." p. 80 Pascal. Pensees
As the act of
shaping or giving form, formation is a future-oriented gerundive that
best captures the forward thrust of creative activity. p.80
The
axiom that less is more was as significant to the baroque mind as its
counterpart, that of cornucopian abundance. p.83
Likewise
"luminismo" in the visual arts intensified details that became
symbolic of reality at large. p.83
...the Italian substantive
barocco indicates a metaphysical-intellectual-polemical reality
vis-à-vis tradition. From atoms and stones to eggs and pearls,
irregularity undermined uniformity. p.49
"God createth harmony out
of sublime contraries." p.63 Bruno, Infinite
"We soar on
stronger wings: we penetrate Beyond the cloudy pathways of the
winds, By power of vision - that is enough for us." p.72
Bruno
Actually, it was a twisted and bent cone, the cornucopia,
that embodied a baroque line of beauty. p.65
As a supernal unity,
essence calls for representation. Devoid of unity, existence in turn
reaches out toward transcendence.1
Umberto Eco, Art & Beauty
in the Middle Ages, Yale
On the other hand, the theory of
musica mundana led also to a more concrete conception of beauty-of
beauty in the cycles of the universe, in the regular movements of
time and the seasons, in the composition of the elements, the rhythms
of nature, the motions and humours of biological life: the total
harmony, in short, of microcosm and macrocosm. p.32
Symbolical
interpretation basically involves a certain concordance and analogy
of essences. p.56
It was a kind of polyphony of signs and
references. p.57
Visual sensations are complemented by memory,
imagination, and reason, and the synthesis of all these is swift,
almost instantaneous. p.69
Art belonged to the realm of making,
not of doing. p.93
Art was not expression, but construction, an
operation aiming at a certain result. p.93
Umberto Eco,
Foucault's Pendulum page numbers follow
The opportunity of
combining fragments of other stories spurred him to write his own.
p.406
"A map is not the territory." p.456 A. Kozybski, Science
and Sanity
To arrive at the truth from the painstaking
reconstruction of a false text. p.459
What is he saying-that my
idea is an idea others have had? So what? It's called literary
polygenisis. p.377
Tzonis and Lefevre, Classical Architecture,
the Poetics of Order, MIT, 1985
Rhythm employs stress,
contrast, reiteration, and grouping in architectural elements. By
using these aspects of formal organization, metric patterns emerge.
p.118
In classical music the problem of termination of a phrase or
sentence, the so-called cadence, is also central to the fusion of
taxis and symmetry, rhythmic and periodic schemata. p.129
But, as
in Mozart's Quartet [C Major, K465], as soon as the disjointed
introduction is over, the piece rushes to confirm the classical
canon....We pass from anomaly to ambiguity as the conjunct elements
join in a larger, formal whole ...The triumph of coherence can be
recognized as the surrounding and mounting tympana resound over the
temple entrance, nave, aisles, and high altar in figures of
parallelism, analogy and alignment. p.166
Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations, page numbers follow
Horace:
He has
gained every vote who has mingled profit with pleasure by delighting
the reader at once and instructing him. 256-9 Horace, Ars
Poetica
Ut Pictura Poesis. 256-11, Ars
If you drive nature out
with a pitchfork, she will soon find a way back. 257-2
Epistles
Inter Silvas Academi 257-16
Why should I exchange my
Sabine valley for wealth which adds to trouble? 259-17
Odes
Michael Drayton, ""To Henry Reynolds, of Poets and Poesy", I.
106
For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should
possess a poet's brain.
Marx, Capital: A spider conducts
operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame
many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what
distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this,
that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he
erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a
result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its
commencement.
Leonardo, from The Literary Remains of Leonardo Da
Vinci, ed. J.P. Richter (London: Sampson & Low, etc., 1883) in The
Portable Renaissance Reader, ed. J.B. Ross & M.M. McLaughlin, NY,
Penguin, 1983
And if you, O poet, tell a story with your pen, the
painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler
completeness and less tedious to be understood....for, though petry
is able to describe forms, actions, and places in words, the painter
deals with the actual similitude of the forms, in order to represent
them. Now tell me which is the nearer to the actual man: the name of
the man or the image of the man? The name of man differs in
different countries, but his form is never changed but by
death.
Nicholas Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Orbium
Celestium, in The Portable Renaissance Reader. 1543
In
the middle of all dwells the Sun. Who indeed in this most beautiful
temple would place the torch in any other or better place than one
whence it can illuminate the whole at the same time? Not ineptly,
some call it the lamp of the universe, others its mind, others again
its ruler - Trismegistus, the visible God, Sophocles' Electra the
contemplation of all things....We find, therefore, under this orderly
arrangement, a wonderful symmetry in the universe, and a definite
relation of harmony in the motion and magnitude of the orbs, of a
kind it is not possible to obtain in any other way.
Nicholas of Cusa, in de Concordantia Catholica, in The Portable
Renaissance Reader, 1433
All concordance, however, is the
concordance of differences.
John Onians, Bearers of
Meaning, Princeton
Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di
architettura, ingegneria e arte militare, II And, although in our
own day it is held to be unworthy and inferior to many other
mechanical arts, nonetheless anyone who reflects on how useful and
necessary it is for every human activity, whether for the process of
invention or for the exposition of ideas, whether for working
purposes or for art-and whoever considers too how closely related it
is to geometry, arithmetic, and optics [prospettiva]-will easily
judge, and with good reason, that drawing is a necessary means in
every theoretical and practical aspect [cognizione e opera] of
the arts. p.172
In Renaissance music theory the intonatione was
the tone or mode which, like the modern key, determined a series of
notes on which a composition was based....There can be little doubt
as to what [Francesco] Colonna [in the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili] would have seen as the architectural equivalent of
intonatione. The Classical orders with their similar tribal names
formed a comparable scale of alternatives. p. 210
Luca Pacioli, De
divina proportione, in Bearers of Meaning The Ionic or
so-called pulvinate capital is melancholic, since it does not raise
itself upwards, but makes a melancholic and mournful impression like
a widow.... p.221
Bramante should thus be seen not simply as
updating Vitruvius, but going beyond him,...Vitruvius only wished
that the orders should not be used inappropriately: Bramante wishes
them to be actively expressive. Vitruvius only wanted architecture
to conforma to the laws of nature: Bramante wanted architecture to
rival music. p. 235
The Fire in the Borgo is a powerfully
compressed image of the historical development which leads from
ancient to Medieval to modern Rome. The viewer standing in the room
would have been carried by the perspective system past the ruins of
the ancient city in the foreground and the simple structures of the
Medieval city in the middle ground to the modern façade of Saint
Peter's in the background, behind which was rising the new
church....The remarkable receding axis of the painting took the
viewer on a journey through time, with its conclusion, like the vanishing
point, invisible but certain. p.259
In both paintings (the Fire in
the Borgo and Peruzzi's Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple)
movement through the piazza represents movement through time; in both
the earlier religion is represented by simple trabeated structures,
and in both the new vaulted Corinthian architecture of the Christian
Church has to be imagined by the viewer for the contrast to be
effective. Such works, like those of other High Renaissance artists,
demand a level of participation and response which was usual in the
context of arts such as music and poetry but new in the context of
painting, sculpture, or architecture. p.262
There is a precise
parallel between Colonna's use of the musical modes and that of the
architectural orders: in both arts he is concerned with the choice of
an expressively appropriate style. p.213
Serlio begins [his
treatise] with the principles not of architecture but of
architectural drawing....As he says in the introduction to Book
II (18v), virtually all the great architects of his own century,
the century which had seen the first flowering of good architecture,
started out from precisely that background....He saw himself as the
spokesman of the modern approach to architecture as illustrated by
Bramante and his followers, and the first feature of this modern
approach was its starting point in the sphere of painting and
drawing. p.264
Serlio's basic values can be seen to be derived
from the already highly sophisticated world of literary criticism.
The qualities of being schietto, semplice, and above all bene inteso
are translated from Attic rhetoric to architecture....In
architectural theory Serlio, by turning to the analysis of the
operation of the sense of sight, could show that simplicity and
clarity might also be required for reasons internal to the art and
the way it was experienced....Just as Cicero and his contemporaries
developed their own rhetorical style by studying that of the period
and people whose speeches they most admired, so Serlio felt that the
sme could be done for architecture.....[T]he same approach leads him
at he beginning of Book IV to say explicitly that
"architecture in this our period {secolo} flourishes as did the Latin
language in the time of Julius Caesar and of Cicero" (126r).
p.269
"[T]he more coarsely the masonry is roughed out, as long as
it is still done with art {artificio} it will match the
character {severà il decoro} of the order, especially, that
is, when it is applied to the blocks which bind the columns and
keystones" (133v)." Serlio Book IV B.O.M. p.272
"[A]nd
the more robust {robusto} is the person, the more the detailed
handling should be solid {soda}, and if the man, although military,
still has something of the delicate {delicato} about him, then the
handling too can show some refinement {delicatezza}. (139r)."
Serlio Book IV, on the Doric order B.O.M. p. 272
[I]n the
solitude of Fontainebleau, in the company of wild beasts rather than
of men...a desire came into my mind to represent in visual form some
rustic portals. In a transport of architectural madness [furore
architectonico] I produced thirty...with new fantasies surging in my
mind....I {also} made twenty of more delicate workmanship. Serlio,
Libro Estraordinario B.O.M. p.280
But for anyone who wants
to see how clean {netto} and bright {candido} is his spirit, let him
look at his face {fronte} and his house; let him look at them, I say,
and he will see what calm and what beauty one can contemplate in a
house and in a face. Pietro Aretino, letter to Andrea Udone, B.O.M.
p. 299
Finally, it is worth pointing out that many of the greatest
residential buildings after the mid-sixteenth century, whether
palaces or villas, use few if any orders or decorations. p.322
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