Architectonics of Humanism: Essays on Number in Architecture

Abstract

Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, published in 1949, marks the beginning of the modern attempt to understand Renaissance architecture in its own terms. As Wittkower so effectively points out, those terms are not our terms. To understand them now requires a conscious act of the imagination. Among his most striking observations is this: spatial proportions occurring ubiquitously in architectural designs, such as 3:2, or 4:3, would have been understood then as “musical intervals”, and could even be called diapente or diatessaron (the names for the musical fifth and fourth, respectively) without any misunderstanding or incongruity. Familiar as this idea may be now, having stood the test of the intervening fifty years, it is still not entirely clear what it means. Wittkower was careful to say that it does NOT mean that such designs were simply translations of music into architecture. Rather, both musical and architectural theory in this period seem to rest on a Pythagorean faith in the importance of number: music demonstrates the importance of number in the most immediate way, but informed architecture can do so as well. As Palladio said, “The proportions of the voices are harmonies for the ears; those of the measurements are harmonies for the eyes. Such harmonies usually please very much, without anyone knowing why, excepting the student of the causality of things”.[Wittkower 1949: 100] Lionel March, author of Architectonics of Humanism, the remarkable book under review, read Wittkower as an architecture student at Cambridge in the 1950s. Now, nearly 50 years later, he returns to its problems, having never really forgotten them. A nagging question, first encountered as a Cambridge examination problem, described in the prologue, frames the book: what is the significance of the dimensions of the cruciform hall in Villa Malcontenta, 46-1/2 x 32? This does not look like a musical interval! Anyone who rashly skips to the epilogue out of curiosity will find that a great deal has happened in the intervening pages. What did number and proportion MEAN in the Renaissance? This question is examined, investigated, and turned every way in Architectonics of Humanism. The range of investigation

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