FROM THE EDITOR: RETHINKING THE

WESTERN HUMANIST TRADITION IN ARCHITECTURE

The purpose of this issue of Design Book Review is to reconsider two widely held views about Italian Renaissance humanism. The first is that it was an almost mythopoeic golden age for architecture, 'extending from Leon Battista Alberti to Andrea Palladio, an era when Western culture glided along on automatic pilot, serenely delivering masterpiece after masterpiece. It seemed fueled only by a revivalist, historicist cult of neoplatonism, of holistic, theocratic, microcosmic- macrocosmic correspondences, of harmonious proportional systems, and of formulas borrowed from antiquity. This interpretation has been largely associated with Rudolf Wittkower's 1949 classic Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism.¹

Of course, this interpretation was never universally adhered to among historians of Italian Renaissance architecture. Many studies suggested there was more to humanism. As early as 1949, James Ackerman demonstrated in an article published in the Art Bulletin how, rather than relying on pre- established rules, early Renaissance builders invented new methods to carry out their work. Nine years later, writing in the same journal, Henry Millon showed that Francesco di Giorgio was not as orthodox in his application of proportional systems as Wittkower had argued. More recently, Howard Burns has argued that aritique authority was not considered sacrosanct. Need we mention Piero Sanpaolesi's monumental studies of Filippo Brunelleschi's stupendously innovative science of engineering, as yet untranslated into English? And more than any other survey, Ludwig Heydenreich's inexplicably overlooked history of the period stressed the innovation rather than the conservatism of Quattrocento architecture.²

Following in the tradition of Edgar Wind, Eugenio Garin, and Paolo Rossi, all of whom observed the decidedly irrational side of humanist thought, Eugenio Battisti's brilliant (and also still untranslated, unfortunately) L 'anti-rinascimento established that the fantastic, the wild, and even the magical were at the very heart of Renaissance humanist art and architecture. Manfredo Tafuri's early writings dismissed Wittkower's image of the Renaissance as "utopian," arguing that it-and the work of Alberti in particular-was the product of an intense social and political crisis provoked by the triumph of nascent tyrannies over humanist republics. (He takes up this point up in his last book, Ricerca del Rinascimento, reviewed here by Richard Ingersoll.) Even Wittkower himself seems to have been dissatisfied with his original interpretation and has written about Alberti's propensity for totally innovative design? Nevertheless, so overwhelming was the appeal of Wittkower's paradigm, so comforting, inspiring, and even therapeutic to a culture attempting to recover from its own barbarity as evidenced during World War II, that it remained curiously impervious to such challenging studies.

Only recently, in the books reviewed in this issue of DBR, has this interpretation begun to be supplemented by others, with the result that, to use James Ackerman's words about Christine Smith's Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism, "the veils of habit [are beginning to be] lifted from our eyes." Indeed, the Quattrocento is beginning to appear to be perhaps the most inventive period in the history of Western architecture, technically and socially as well as visually-a view that is beginning to take shape in many studies. Smith, for instance, has outlined Alberti's theory of composition, as put forth in one of his early treatises, Profigiorum ab aerumna (Flight from distress), and in his plan for the city of Pienza which, far from being orderly and neoplatonic, is full of surprises and variety. And Joseph Rykwert certainly dwells on Alberti's utopian impulses in our featured interview with him. (The exhibit "Leon Battista Alberti," which he curated with Robert Tavernor, is currently being held at the Palazzo Te in Mantua.) New studies on Francesco di Giorgio and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, reviewed here by Alexander Tzonis, reveal a similar innovative spirit, as does Henry Millon and Vittorio Lampugnani's exhibition "Rinascimento da Brunelleschi a Michelangelo," held at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice earlier this year. (The show and its catalog, which focus on the novel representation techniques of the Renaissance, are reviewed in this issue by Uonello Puppi.) Kurt Forster's reflections on the relationship between painting and architecture, exemplified by the Mantuan tradition of the camera picta, also fit squarely within this new vein of interpretation.

These camere picte constitute the subject of several new and superb books that offer a spectacular glimpse into a period when architecture and painting were part of an indistinguishable whole. New York publisher George Braziller's new series on the most famous of the painted chambers reveals how the richness of the visual culture of architecture during the Italian Renaissance exceeded that of any other period. The series, which has an extremely affordable format, includes Bruce Cole's Giotto: The Scrovegni Chapel, Andrew Landis' The Brancacci Chapel, James Beck's Raphael: The Stanza della Segnatura, and Randolph Starn's Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Special mention should also be made of Carlo Bertelli's Piero della Francesca and William Hood's Fra Angelico at San Marco (both from Yale University Press, 1993). The reproductions of Paolo Uccello's Chiostro Verde in Santa Maria Novella in Florence (which uses a terra-verde palette intended to imitate bronze high-relief, with chromatic nuances expressed in claylike red, black, and white) in Franco and Stefano Borsi's Paolo Uccello (Paris: Hazan, 1992; London: Thames and Hudson, 1994; New York: Harry Abrams, 1994), along with the amazing Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes by Giuseppe Basile (New York: Abrams, 1993; London: Thames and Hudsonl993; Milan: Electa, 1993), and the equally astonishing Andrea Mantegna's Camera degli Sposi (Milan: Electa, 1993; New York: Abbeville, 1993) prove that Italian printing is the best in the world. Even if mechanical reproduction can never replace the real thing, these publications are proof that it has at least been elevated to a remarkable art form in itself; in a way that Walter Benjamin could not have imagined when he criticized it in its formative stages. If it does vulgarise the work of art, it also offers unique advantages: these books allow audiences an infinite amount of time to study and admire these rare works, to partake in the immensely pleasurable act of examining them in detail by providing access to information that is increasingly reserved for a small elite (as in many instances general visitors are no longer allowed to visit the actual sites). Moreover, at no previous time, even during the 15th century, were viewers able to get the close-up views afforded by these publications.

In this issue of DBR. the new emphasis of modern scholarship on the value of invention during the Renaissance characterizes studies of both the immediate forerunners of Quattrocento humanism (for example, Chiara Frugoni's A Distant City, which deals with the unbuilt and often unbuildable imaginaire of 13th- and 14th-century European cities, reviewed by Robert Harbison), and of the Cinquecento. In essence, the same emphasis on newness is found in several recent important publications on 16th-century architects, revealing their work to be more innovative than previously suspected. Myra Nan Rosenfeld points this out in her review of Mario Carpo's writings on Sebastiano Serlio, as does Daniel Sherer in his review of Claudia Conforti's and Leon Satkowski's studies of Giorgio Vasari, and Alberto Perez-G6mez in his comments on Juan Antonio Ramirez's Dios arquitecto. Giulio Carlo Argan and Bruno Contardi's studies of Michelangelo focus on his "transgressive originality," as reviewer Paolo Berdini puts it. And recent work on Dutch urban history reveals the roots of a particularly humane strand of Renaissance theories of town planning, as Nancy Stieber observes.

But was the architecture of the Renaissance, and, more specifically, of the early Quattrocento, really a kind of Icarus flight into the unknown? Probably no more than it was a ploddingly pedestrian and rote repetition of time-worn formulas. More likely, it was something in between. This brilliant insight is put forward in Tafuri's last book, Ricera del Rinascimento, in which he argues that the paradigm of humanism is janus-faced, characterized by both an attachment to tradition and an urge to innovate and experiment - a view which he himself attributes to the Soviet Renaissance historian Leonid Batkin.⁴ This perspective perhaps comes close to the one put forth in Salvatore Settis' three-volume compendium, L 'usa del antico (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), on the novel uses to which Renaissance culture put antique prototypes.

This view is correct, but it could be to an even greater degree. Of course humanism was janus-faced. But it is wrong to see the double-sided episteme as an exclusive feature of the Renaissance. As Ernst Robert Curtius pointed out in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Bollingen, 1953), the opposition between ancient and modem already existed in Latin culture. In fact, there is no culture in which the old is not juxtaposed with the new, in which tradition is not set in opposition to experimentation, rule-making, rule-breaking. The difference with the Renaissance is that, for the first time, the balance tips in favor of the modem, of the new, of progress. Stasis is broken. The body to which the Janus face belongs gets up and moves. The effect is as explosive as the opening of Pandora's box. All of a sudden, a culture came into being where there was no absolute authority. The impact on architecture was drastic. It has been one long relativity theory ever since. As a result, humanist architecture is a fantastically creative dream-machine, and a nightmare, in potentia.⁵

Quid tum? What now? This was Alberti's motto. It could not have been the motto of any architect prior to him, but it could be the motto of every Western architect since. The episteme of Renaissance humanist architecture is something in between, an ambivalence, a dilemma, an insurmountable problem constantly outpacing its solutions, infinitely open to recategorisation, re-evaluations, rethinkings-of its relation to other fields of visual thinking such as painting, sculpture, and drawing, and to the sciences, to engineering, to new technologies, to language and music, to political power, to divine experience, to gender, to natural order, to civic society and urbanity, to region- al and universal culture, to domesticity, to morality, to dreams, to reason, and, last but not least, to passion. This brings us to the cognitive nature of creativity in architecture.⁶

This also brings us to the second misconception of the Renaissance, which this issue of DBR aims to redress: that Renaissance humanism is over. It is generally presumed to have ended with Claude Perrault, whose endorsement of architectural innovation on the grounds that the rules "of the ancients" were arbitrary rather than absolute signalled the advent of "post-Renaissance" or "post-humanist" thought. In fact, Perrault was simply restating a position that Alberti had already propounded over two hundred years earlier.

As Hans Baron pointed out in a 1959 essay that appeared in the journal of the History of Ideas, Alberti confessed in his famous dedication of his treatise, On Painting, that during his youth in exile, he had always assumed and deplored that the great ancient leaders of the arts and sciences had few, if any, equivalents in his day: "So I believed what I had heard many people affirm, namely that Nature had grown old and tired, and was no longer producing giants in body or mind. ...But when I returned from exile to our beautiful native city, I realised that talents, sufficient for any worthy task, are still alive in many people, in the first place in these, Filippo [Brunelleschi], but also in our dear friend Donato [Donatello], the sculptor, and others [including] Masaccio - talents that cannot be valued less in these arts than those of the famous ancients." He realised that industry and virtue could be more powerful than the gifts of time and nature, "for here in Florence we find arte and scientie that had never been seen or heard of be(pre, among them those employed in the erection ot Brunelleschi's dome"-abilities which "may not have been understood or known at all by the ancients."?

Alberti's defense of the idea of innovation was clearly more radical than Perrault's comparatively middling utterance. The search for the new seems to be at the very heart of the early Italian Renaissance itself. Perrault's real importance, as well as that of the French engineers, as Martha Pollack cogently points out in her review of the extensive writings of the young historian of architecture and engineering Antoine Picon, rests on the phenomenal pace at which new knowledge was produced in 17th- and 18th-century France. This was the result of the large-scale implementation in the new French academies and ecoles of the rational, scientific, empiricist paradigm of architecture first formulated by earlier humanists such as Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo da Vinci, and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. In this issue, Alexander Tzonis reviews a number of books in this tradition, including Christoph Frommel and Nicholas Adams' edition of the drawings of Antonio the Younger and a study of military engineering by Martha Pollak.

Renaissance humanism is a long-enduring phenomena. What Jacob Burckhardt said nearly one hundred and fifty years ago in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy still holds true today: the "civilization" of the Renaissance is "the mother of our own, and [her] influence is still at work among us." Sylvia Lavin's study of Quatremere de Quincy (reviewed here by Lily Chi), the entire tradition of French architecture books of the 16th to 19th centuries, commented upon by Dora Wiebenson (in a book reviewed by Denis Bilodeau), Robin Middleton's remarks on Nicolas Le Camus de Mezieres (reviewed by Richard Cleary) all reveal that the search for new rules went on unabated through the 19th century. And the 20th century is hardly an exception. Every- thing is an answer to the same question, Quid turn? Humanism has no end. It was invented by free- thinkers and is by definition a paradigm in the making, open-ended, risk-taking, and forward-looking in its attempt to formulate a better future without losing sight of those parts of the past that are worth preserving. Humanism cannot be kept still.

Liane Lefaivre Delft, The Netherlands

NOTES

1. R. Wittkower's Architecture in the Age of Humanism was originally published as volume 19 of the Studies of the Warburg Institute series (reprinted in 1952 by Tiranti). It was influenced by Erwin Panofsky's Idea, which was first published in German in 1924.

2. J. Ackerman, "Ars sine scientia nihil est," Art Bulletin 31 (1949): 84-116; H. Millon, "The Architectural Theory of Francesco di Gior- gio Martini," Art Bulletin 40, no. 3 (1958): 257-61; H. Burns, "Quattrocento Architecture and the Antique: Some Problems," in R. R. Bolgar, Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 293-312; P. Sanpaolesi, La cupola di S. Maria del Fiore (Rome, 1941), Brunelleschi (Milan, 1955), and La cupola di Brunelleschi (Florence, 1966); and L. Heydenreich, Architecture in Italy, 1400-1600 (Har- mondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 1-148.

3. E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Oxford, 1980); La Zodiaco della vita: La polemica sull'astrologia dal Trecento al Cinque- cento (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1976); P. Rossi, I filosofi e Ie macchine (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962); E. Battisti L'anti-rinascimento (Milan: Garzanti, 1962, reprinted 1989); andM. Tafuri, L'architettura dell'umanesimo (Bari: Laterza, 1969), pp. 55-56.

4. Leonid Batkin, Gli umanisti italiani: Stile de vita e di pensiero (Rome-Bari, 1990).

5. This view has its parallel in M. Nussbaum's criticism of H. Bloom in "Undemocratic Vistas," NYROB (January 1986). /)

6. This is the subject of A. Tzonis' book Creative Design (Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, forthcoming).

7. H. Baron, "Querelle of Ancients and Moderns," Journal of the His- tory of Ideas, vol. 20, no. 1 (1959). See also A. Buck, "Aus der Vorgeschischte der Querelle des anciens et des modemes in Mitte- lalter und Renaissance,. Bibliothtque d'humanisme et Renaissance (September 1959).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The guest editor would like to thank Cathy Ho for turning this collaboration into a pleasure, Alex Tzonis for his help, all the contributors for their hard work, Luca Melloni for his efficiency, and especially Richard Ingersoll for his support.