Aeolian Winds and the Spirit in Renaissance Architecture: Academia Eolia Revisited

Aeolian Winds and the Spirit in Renaissance Architecture Aeolian Winds and the Spirit in Renaissance Architecture introduces new dimensions of thinking about architectural theory. Investigating Renaissance pneumatic architecture with respect to other disciplines of arts and sciences, the collected essays substantiate the thesis that pneuma – air, wind, spirit, soul – is a fundamental link in establishing harmony between the human body, a building and the cosmos. While much of the modern scholarship of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been devoted to the mathematics of ideal architecture, this book recontextualizes essence, wind and ventilation as principles of classical building, and shows that one of the primary goals of Renaissance architects was to harness the powers of pneuma so as to foster the art of well-being. This volume, written by leading architectural historians and scholars, delineates ancient and Renaissance theories and practices of pneumatology, and indicates a link to contemporary environmental questions. It examines Anaximenes, Hippocrates, Galen, Trento, Romano, Alberti, Serlio, Palladio, Scamozzi and other thinkers and humanists. The essays also illustrate the most famous examples of hygienico-therapeutic villas, including Rotonda, La Rocca Pisana and Eolia, a pneumatic model of Renaissance Venetian architecture. Barbara Kenda is a Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame. She is the author of several articles on pneumatic architecture. Recently, she was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University.

To Alexander

ii

Aeolian Winds and the Spirit in Renaissance Architecture Academia Eolia Revisited

Edited by Barbara Kenda

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 selection and editorial matter: Barbara Kenda; individual chapters: the contributors This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Aeolian winds and the spirit in Renaissance architecture : Academia Eolia revisited / edited by Barbara Kenda. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Winds and architecture–Italy. 2. Architecture, Renaissance–Italy. 3. Architecture–Environmental aspects–Italy. 4. Architecture–Psychological aspects. I. Kenda, Barbara. NA2542.9.A36 2006 724'.12–dc22 2006001181 ISBN10: 0-415-39803-7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-39804-5 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-39803-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-39804-6 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-96714-3 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-96714-0 (ebk)

Contents

1

Illustration credits

vi

List of contributors

vii

Acknowledgements

ix

Foreword Joseph Rykwert

x

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture: Academic Eolia revisited Barbara Kenda

2

Chasma gês: Delphic pneuma and the cult of Asklepios Richard M Economakis

3

“Study the warm winds and the cold:” Hippocrates and the Renaissance villa Matthew Hardy

4

1

22

48

The role of the winds in architectural theory from Vitruvius to Scamozzi Alessandro Nova

70

5

Making visible the invisible: signs of air in architectural treatises Paul Emmons and Marco Frascari

87

6

Poetry and “spirited” ancient sculpture in Renaissance Rome: Pomponio Leto’s Academy to the sixteenth-century sculpture garden Kathleen Wren Christian

103

The winds in the corners: Giulio Romano, the elements and the Palazzo Te’s Fall of the Giants David Mayernik

125

7

8

The breath of cities Rebecca Williamson

150

Index

167

Illustration credits

A. Nova ©, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 Archaeological Museum, Rhodes ©, 2.10, 2.11, 3.1 Art Resource, New York ©, 6.2, 6.3, 6.7 David Mayernik ©, F.1 Economakis 2001 ©, 2.5 F. Brady, in Roux ©, 2.6 after Harrison ©, 2.2, 2.13 Mark E. Smith ©, 1.1, 1.2 Mediacolours/Painet ©, 2.8 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ©, 2.1 Ministerio per I Beni Culturali e Ambientali, Rome ©, 6.6, 6.9 National Archaeological Museum, Athens ©, 2.14, 2.15, 2.17 Patte ©, 8.5 Peter Aspian ©, 5.8 after Roux 1976 ©, 2.4 Scala/Art Resource ©, 2.3, 2.7 Service Photographique, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris ©, 2.9 State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg ©, 2.5, 2.12

Contributors

Barbara Kenda is professor at the school of architecture, University of Notre Dame. She is the author of several articles on pneumatic architecture. Recently, she was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University. Richard M Economakis is associate professor of architecture at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of the books Acropolis (2003, London: Altmedia Press) and Nisyros: History and Architecture of an Aegean Island (2001, Athens: Melissa Publishing House). His edited book Acropolis Restoration (London: Academy Editions) received a special mention by the Runciman Foundation, London, in 1995. Dr Matthew Hardy RAIA is secretary of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU). He has lectured and published widely in support of INTBAU, and in 2000 and 2001 was visiting professor with the University of Notre Dame London summer program in architecture and urban design. He has also maintained a practice in architecture and urban design since registering in South Australia in 1983. Dr Hardy holds a PhD in architectural history from the University of Wales and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Adelaide and is an alumnus of The Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture. Alessandro Nova has published and edited numerous books on Italian art of the Early Modern period; he has also published many articles in the most important art historical international journals (Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine, Master Drawings, Paragone, Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte). He was a member of the faculty at Stanford University from 1988 until 1994 and has been teaching at the J.W. Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt am Main since 1995. Besides many international awards, he was visiting professor in Berlin (Humboldt Universität) and Paris (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales – CEHTA, Centre d’histoire et théorie des arts). Paul Emmons holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is an architect with a Master’s of Architecture from the University of Minnesota. He is currently an associate professor at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech and coordinates the PhD program in architecture. vii

Contributors

Marco Frascari was born under the shadow of the dome of Alberti’s Sant’Andrea in Mantua and completed a Dottore in Architettura in Venice. After receiving a PhD in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, he has published widely, taught in several institutions and presently is the director of the school of architecture at Carleton University. Kathleen Wren Christian is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her dissertation at Harvard University in 2003 and is preparing a book on collections of antiquities in Rome before 1527. Christian has held postdoctoral fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks and the Getty Research Institute. David Mayernik is a practicing urban designer, architect, painter and author. In 1995 he was named one of the top 40 architects in the United States of his generation. He is the co-editor with Taeho Paik of the online Humanist Art Review (www.humanistart.net). Mayernik studied fresco with renowned restorer Leonetto Tintori in Tuscany and has painted frescoes for his own buildings in Switzerland as well as for churches there and in Italy. In addition to teaching with the University of Notre Dame in South Bend and Rome, he has taught in the Graduate Fine Art program of the New York Academy of Art, with the Institute for the Study of Classical Architecture, and with the University of Virginia’s Erasmus-Jefferson Scholars Summer in Tuscany program. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Rebecca Williamson is an architect and architectural historian based in Paris. She has practiced, taught and written about architecture, urban design and related topics. Her recent work has focused on movement in architecture and the urban context.

viii

Acknowledgements

This book was conceived in 1986 when I was first granted permission to visit private villas, gardens and caves of Costozza and when I learned about Francesco Trento’s academic circle. In 2004, I organized the symposium Academia Eolia Revisited to share the ‘wonders’ of Costozza with my colleagues and to discuss the topic of pneumatology with them. This current project is the direct result of the symposium. I would like to thank the countess Liliana di Thiene Agostinelli and the count dr. Gino Panizzoni from Villa Trento-Carli, the counts Alvise da Schio and Giulio da Schio from Villas Garzadori-da Schio, Trento-da Schio and Ca’Molina-da Schio, and Luca Chemello and Luca Vanin of Villa Eolia, for holding symposium, in their private buildings, gardens and caves. Special acknowledgement goes to all of the contributors to this volume, as well as to distinguished scholars, Professors Joseph Rykwert, Margaret Bent, Dalibor Vesely, Giuseppe Barbieri, Alexander Blachly, Peter Gabrijelcic, Rev. Richard Bullene and to Brette Johnson, all of whom also presented their papers on pneuma at the Academia Eolia Revisited. The symposium participants were honored by listening to the addresses of the counts Giulio da Schio and Gino Panizzoni. Thank you also to the Mayor of Longare, Bruno Maistro for his help and participation. The art photographer Mark E. Smith has produced illustrations included in the introduction and my colleague David Mayernik has shared a great deal of information on the topic and has given valuable editing comments. I owe a great debt of gratitude to The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation (New York), to Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard University, D.C.) and to the Graham Foundation (Chicago) for giving generous financial support to this book and to my research on pneumatic architecture. I am also very grateful to the Samuel Kress Foundation (New York), to Robert and Daryl Davis (on behalf of the Seaside-Pienza Institute) and to the Copyright Agency of Slovenia, for financially supporting the symposium itself. Barbara Kenda

ix

Foreword

That good health is like good proportion was a fundamental notion of Hippocratic thinking and all the medicine that derived from it. Good health depended on the well-tempering of the body, and tempering resulted from the harmonious mixing of the four uncreated and immortal elements, the áãÝííçôá óôïé÷åéá, the roots, ñéîùìáôá, of which all matter is made up: air, fire, earth and water. These four are in constant flux, kept apart by strife but attracted to each other by love. Health was harmony between them. Their balance had to be constantly adjusted to the body’s individuality, to its age as well as to its place in the scheme of things. This idea, based on the fundamental distinction between matter and force or energy, was first clearly formulated by the Sicilian democrat and magus, scientist and (pace Aristotle) poet1, Empedocles of Akragas, who was probably a disciple of Pythagoras. Although the medical school he founded in Sicily was in rivalry with the more famous one of Hippocrates – centered on the Ionic island, Kos – his fourfold scheme influenced not only ancient and medieval medicine, but the general understanding of the physical structure of the world.2 Empedocles’ two poems – one “on nature,” the other “on ritual purifying” – were not a good read: repetitive and pedestrian (Aristotle had a point there), they have survived in 127 fragments of varied length, and seem to have been about a fifth of their original length.3 He wrote his books sometime between 470 and 440 BC, and in them he formulated ideas which were to influence the sciences – indeed, most thinking – for some 2,000 years and more. The fourfold scheme was taken up by Plato in the Timaeus and criticized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics. Echoes of it can be heard in many philosophical and literary works as well as scientific ones – in the church fathers and in medieval philosophy. Dante placed Empedocles in the limbo of the unbaptized, with Plato and Socrates and Aristotle (maestro di color che sanno) and the other great ancient philosophers.4 It was in his free translation of Plato’s Timaeus5 that Cicero claims to have coined the word proportio to translate Plato’s term áíáëïãéá – to signify that third term that unites two dissimilars, as water and earth. That which unites dissimilars, even opposites, becomes the analogue of that Empedoclean love that draws the elements to each other. Proportion could therefore be

x

Foreword

assimilated to the primal power of Eros, or to Aphrodite, or just öéëßá. As the term ‘proportion’ passed into common usage, so these cosmic and mythic connections lost some of their exalted glamour.6 To Palladio, as to Vitruvius, it is the measurable relation of the parts to each other and of all of them to the whole building or project that matters. Yet the proportion of each of the four elements in the mix that makes up the nature of each of us, called ìéîéò by Empedocles, becomes êñáóéò in later literature; unfortunately the two ancient books on the mixture – the one by the rhetorician Alexander of Aphrodisias and the other by the great medical authority Galen – are often used to describe the temperature, and the temperament, of a human being as well as of the climate. Although medieval thinking and medieval medicine were familiar with such ideas, as I have already suggested, it was with the early modern revival of antiquity that they became enormously popular and a dominant theme in Western literature.7 To take a salient example: Thus all these fower (the which the groundwork bee Of all the world and of all living wights) To thousand sorts of Change we subject see... The Fire to Aire and th’Ayre to Water sheere And Water into Earth; yet Water fights With Fire, and Aire with Earth, approaching neere: Yet all are in one body, and as one appeare.8 writes Edmund Spenser in his unfinished book “on Mutability,” which was to close his great epic; John Dryden echoes him, very much more resoundingly a century later: When nature underneath a heap Of jarring Atomes lay And cou’d not heave her head The tuneful Voice was heard from high Arise, ye more than dead! Then cold and hot and moist and dry In order to their Stations leap And MUSICK’S pow’r obey From Harmony, from heavenly Harmony This universal Frame began From Harmony to Harmony Through all the Compass of the Notes it ran, The Diapason closing full in Man.9

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Foreword

F.1 David Mayernik’s Analytique of Villa Eolia, watercolour

The dominance of one Empedoclean element over the others determined the four qualities of hot and cold, moist and dry; which in turn also corresponded to the four basic human temperaments: choleric and phlegmatic, sanguine and melancholy, as they did to the four cardinal directions or the four seasons of the year – and many other fourfolds which help us to map the world, including even such seemingly humble ones as those of taste: sweet and sour, bitter and salty. Since melancholy is one of the common distempers of mankind,

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Foreword

so the great compendium to the subject, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy provided remedies for it10 – both dietary and aerial. For diet and climate – on this all ancient medicine is agreed – are the foundations of human well-being. If either diet or climate prove unfavorable, human resources can modify, even correct circumstance. A change of place, if one can afford it, would be recommended – or more humbly, staying enclosed and warm if the air is cold and windy; if it is hot and still, we need movement and cooling. Such commonsense notions are, as it happens, perfectly Empedoclean. The appropriate climate is very important in his scheme of things, since he also taught that the body – as indeed all matter – was porous; breathing is therefore done not only with mouth and nose, but with all the pores of the skin – and we now know that he was right. Good ventilation is therefore one of the crucial factors in well-being. For the architects of the sixteenth century, proportion became almost exclusively a matter of number and geometry. It was a theoretical subject, a science – while ventilation was a pragmatic matter, and belonged to the arts, to craft and workmanship. Everyone in the business of building knew that ars sine scientia nihil, but it was science that was written and talked about, while art, which was the handyman’s business, was often barely mentioned by the theorists. Vincenzo Scamozzi, the Vicentine architect and writer closest to the gentlemen whose summer villas at Costozza are the starting point of this book, had much to say about climate, air and winds in the twelfth to sixteenth chapters of his second book. There were, according to the title page, to be “classically” ten of them, but only eight were printed in the great first edition of 1615; nor did the manuscript of the remaining two come to light later. At any rate, Scamozzi rigorously separated the theoretical and “speculative” part of his work from the empirical “art” part – as he made (perhaps over-emphatically) clear at the beginning of his seventh book, and as his title page announced figuratively. In the speculative part of his work he enumerates the qualities of climate as well as of the winds and discusses the etymology of their names in several languages. We will never know whether he intended to discuss ventilation; if he intended to do so, it would have been in the practical – the “art” side of his book. Since Scamozzi’s treatise was published a few months before his death, we shall probably never know what he would have proposed to improve matters if wind and climate were found to be unfavorable. As it happens, the Covoli di Costozza seem to interest him primarily as quarries (VII, 11; vol. II p. 208. VIII 27; p. 360) though he marvels at their vast size and knows that they have fresh waters running through them and that they were used for cool storage – particularly wine, as it happens. But he seems to have used forced ventilation at least once: in his best-known house, the Villa Pisani – La Rocca, at Lonigo, some 20 km away – xiii

Foreword

he talks of the windows used to create a through draft, cosi per le vedute, come per purificar l’aria.11 He does praise the views and the climate of Lonigo generously but he does not mention the central opening in the floor of the central domed hall, which is covered with a pierced circular stone – much like those at Costozza. Whatever the intricate connections between Scamozzi, the architects and the patrons at Costozza, or yet the activities of the Eolian Academy to which they subscribed,12 its members would surely have formulated their quite extraordinary achievement in the context of the great cosmological notions which inspired so many of them – and the most brilliant of their contemporaries. Joseph Rykwert

Notes 1

Poet I, 8 (1447b... Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the metre – so it would be right to call the one a poet, the other a physicist. For Empedocles, I have used the text edited by Carlo Gallavotti: Empedocle, Poema Fisico e Lustrale, Milan 1975; my first quote is from öíóéêá á fr 1, 5.

2

On Empedocles’ physics, see S. Sambursky, The Physical World of the Greeks, London 1963, pp. 19ff; on Empedocles, Hippocrates and ancient medicine, see Werner Jaeger, Paideia, Oxford 1945, III, pp. 16ff.

3

Empedocles is also credited with twenty-four plays (probably mistakenly) as well as more ‘books’ of his work on nature and on purification – and a separate work on medicine.

4

Plato Tim. 31 B ff. Aristot. Metaph. I, 7; 989 a ff. Dante, Inf. IV, 131, 138. On Plato’s much debated debt to Empedocles, see W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Cambridge 1977–81, V, pp. 266ff. On the Chalcidius translation, ibid p. 241ff.

5

The medieval Plato was largely the Timaeus, through the fifth-century translation and commentary by Chalcidius; this kept the fourfold familiar at a time when there were very few Greek readers.

6

M.T.Cicero, De Coelo; although in fact M.T. Varro (de Lingua Latina X, 86), who was some ten years older than Cicero, used the words almost interchangeably – and certainly considered proportio as a word in common usage. Although it was not that frequent, Varro did use it himself and explained its relation to analogia: de L. L. IX, 62; X, 2, 35ff. It is also taken up by Quintilian De Inst. Or. I, 6. Pliny the Elder tends to use ad portione instead of pro portione. Vitruvius (III, 1, I) uses the word in the Ciceronian sense; it is one of his fundamental compositional devices (see Pierre Gros (ed.) Paris 1990, pp. 58ff.). Vitruvius imposes it on the theoretical – and technical – discourse of architecture.

7

On this revival see S.K. Heninger Jr, Touches of Sweet Harmony, San Marino, Cal. 1974.

8

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book VII, vii, 25.

9

John Dryden, A Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 22 November 1687, Strophe I.

10

Democritus Junior (Robert Burton), The Anatomy of Melancholy … In Three Partitions, London 1652 (New York 1870).

11

Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della Architettura Universale, Venice 1615, at the expense of the author, vol. I, p.272.

12

The Aeolian Academy is not mentioned in the Index of Emblems of the Italian Academies based on Michele Maylender’s Storie delle Academie d’Italia by Jennifer Montagu, London 1988.

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Chapter 1

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture Academia Eolia revisited Barbara Kenda

This book identifies a long unfamiliar subject of early scientific theory – pneumatology (from pneuma, meaning air, wind, spirit, soul) – which has been curiously overlooked in the well-explored field of Renaissance architecture. Re-introducing a once central aspect of architectural theory, the chapters investigate sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pneumatic architecture and its relations with other disciplines in the arts and sciences, demonstrating how pneuma sheds light on a wide range of artistic production. While much of modern Renaissance scholarship has emphasized the mathematics of ideal architecture, this book recontextualizes essence, wind and ventilation as principals of classical building, and shows that one of the primary goals of Renaissance architects was to enhance the powers of pneuma so as to foster the art of well-being. Therefore this book substantiates the thesis that pneuma was a fundamental link for establishing harmony between the human body, architecture and the cosmos, and that a building was envisioned as a mediator between the inhabitant’s soul and the anima mundi, the soul of the world. The most distinctive examples of Renaissance pneumatic architecture are the villas of Costozza in the Veneto, above all Villa Eolia. This remarkable edifice stands as a model of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century pneumatic

1

Barbara Kenda

villas, and serves as a basis for further studies on the topic of architecture infused by air, wind and soul-stimulating spirit, as developed by the contributing authors. In several poems and texts, the caves of Costozza in the Vicentine Berici Hills have been considered representations of the cosmos and sources of poetic inspiration.1 Conceived as indispensable to the cosmic continuity between God and man, the subterranean world was glorified in verse by Pulice and Conforto Petrarch’s (poet-friends), praised by Benedictine monks, and celebrated by several Renaissance humanists. Like Pythagoras, who was reported to meditate for many days in the cave of Ida in his search for enlightenment, these poets and scholars observed that the caves were a place of divine revelation, a point of cosmic insight and a wonder where “winds originate, flow like water and generate fresh air.”2 Just as the caves below served as the literal foundation for the villas, the pneuma of these caves became the spiritual basis for the Renaissance architects at Costozza. Villas Trento-Buoni Fanciulli, Trento-Carli, Eolia, Trentoda Schio, Ca’Molina-da Schio and Garzadori-da Schio are linked underground by the caves and wind-channels that circulate pneuma among their halls, transforming them into ensouled edifices, or ville spiritali, and promoting the science of therapeutic architecture. Consequently, these hygienico-pneumatic villas were praised by Palladio and Scamozzi, and were later described by the eighteen-century priest-historian Francesco Barbarano as a “delightful place, because … during the summer heat, fresh, gentle wind issues from the caves and flows through certain canals … proportionally to the habitations to comfort their dwellers … As I have experienced, nothing but a Terrestrial Paradise is sensed in these freshly ventilated rooms.”3 In the sixteenth century, pneuma was considered a fundamental condition for establishing harmony among the human body, architecture and the universe. Thus, one of the central goals of Renaissance architects was to augment the vigor of air, wind and vital spirit and therefore the inhabitants’ physical and spiritual state. The idea of a building embodied by air, vital spirit and soul and pervaded by a life-force was of crucial importance to the architects of the pneumatic villas at Costozza. Above the entrance door to the cryptoporticus of Villa Eolia, an inscription reads: AEOLUS HIC CLAUSO VENTORUM CARCERE REGNAT AEOLIA (Aeolus rules over Aeolia by way of this prison of winds.) In the nearby Villa Garzadori-da Schio, this Virgilian verse from Aeneid I is engraved on the wall, above the statue of Aeolus that stands in front of the cave: HIC VASTO REX AEOLUS ANTRO/LUCTANTES VENTOS. TEMESTATESQUE SONORAS/IMPERIO PREMIT. AC VINCLIS ET CARCERE FRAENAT./ILLI INDIGNANTES MAGNO CUM MURMURE MONTIS/CIRCUM CLAUSTRA EREMUNT. CELSA SEDET AEOLUS ARCE./SCEPTRA TENENS: MOLLITQUE ANIMOS, ET TEMPERAT IRAS. (Here in his vast cavern, Aeolus, 2

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture

their king, keeps under his way and with prison bonds curbs the struggling winds and the roaring gales. They, to the mountain’s mighty moans, chafe blustering around the barriers. In his lofty citadel sits Aeolus, sceptre in hand, taming their passions and soothing their rage.)4 Both texts refer to the ancient myth of the god Aeolus who guarded the imprisoned winds in a cave on the island Aeolia. Mythological winds have their origin in the etymology of the Greek word pneuma (pgeuma) which derives from pnein, to blow, and means ‘breath’ or ‘wind’ as well as the vital spirit, the soul. Pneuma, thought to be an essence animating the universe and the true originator of human existence, had been one of the major speculative subjects among ancient thinkers. Anaximenes (sixth century BC) was probably the first of the pre-Socratics to formulate the theory that the world breathes and that Air is the spiritus mundi.5 However, Renaissance pneumatic architecture is primarily based on medical pneuma which ancient pneumatists largely associated with the breath diffused throughout the body. Medical axioms in architecture, especially those advocating salubrious climates, sites and the buildings’ natural ventilation, and those prescribed to restore the physical and mental state of the human body, appear most explicitly in the writings of Hippocrates (fifth century BC). In fact, the practice of Renaissance villas is influenced largely by the theories of Hippocrates, whose treatises Airs, Waters, Places6 and Breaths7 were broadly disseminated, and whose discoveries on pneuma, both within and outside the human body were highly respected in the age of humanism. [The cities] that lie towards the risings of the sun are likely to be healthier than those facing the north and those exposed to the hot winds… In the first place, the heat and the cold are more moderate. Then the waters that face the risings of the sun must be clear, sweetsmelling, soft and delightful, in such a city. For the sun, shining down upon them when it rises, purifies them. The…inhabitants are of better complexion and more blooming than elsewhere, unless some disease prevents this. They are clear-voiced, and with better temper and intelligence than those who are exposed to the north, just as all things growing there are better. A city so situated is just like spring, because the heat and the cold are tempered; the diseases… are both fewer and less severe… [The cities] that lie towards the settings of the sun, and are sheltered from the east winds, while the hot winds and the cold north winds blow past them – these cities must have a most unhealthy situation… In the summer, cold breezes blow in the morning and there are heavy dews; for the rest of the day the sun as it advances towards the west thoroughly scorches the inhabitants, so that they are likely to be pale and sickly, subject to all the diseases.8 3

Barbara Kenda

Hippocratic theories relating to the influence of environments on the human body, as well as his statement that “all disease is caused by pneuma” were often reiterated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architectural treatises and seem to have been critical for the invention of the therapeutic villas under study here. The transmission of the Hippocratic tradition to the Renaissance period was largely due to the Pneumatic school in Rome9 – Athenaeus, Chrysippius, Herodotus, Archigenes, etc. – and above all, Galen (second century 10 AD) who wrote a commentary on Airs, Waters, Places and who expanded the observations on climate, air and wind as well as their relation to housing and ways of life. Galen’s humoral pathology, based on the Hippocratic doctrine of four humors, advocated that health depended upon the eucrasia of all the temperaments, disease upon a distemper of these same qualities. Renaissance architects firmly believed in this theory, since sixteenth-century edifices were required to be tempered on the analogy with the human body. In fact, the well-known bodybuilding metaphor extended beyond its physical correspondence based on proportional systems: it also embraced the analogy between the internal and spiritual functioning of the human body and a building. In his De Architectura, the sole surviving ancient treatise on architecture, Vitruvius follows Hippocratic advice while discussing the medical aspects of pneuma. In Book I, Chapter IV, on the salubrity of sites, Vitruvius repeats certain passages from Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, Places, in particular the information about the influence of climatic effects on the human body. In Book I, Chapter VI, on town planning, Vitruvius calculated and graphically represented his own octagonal wind-dial. Inspired by the octagonal Tower of the Winds built in Athens by Andronicus of Cyrra around the second century BC, the diagram determined the laying out of the alleys in such a way that the violent winds are dispelled, “for if cold, they are unpleasant; if hot, they infect; if moist, they are injurious … By the exclusion of the winds and by a moderate climate, the disease will be more quickly cured.”11 Also superimposed on the octagonal wind-dial geometry is Villa Eolia (Figure 1.1), built in 1560 by the Vicentine humanist Francesco Trento (1528–1583/84?). Eolia is a cubical pavilion with a modest exterior and opulent interior: the villa’s cryptoporticus (Figure 1.2) is based on an ancient Roman octagonal mosaic which vertically mirrors both an octagonal stone grating (Figure 1.3) centered in the floor of Eolia’s hall above and an octagon centered in the villa’s dome. The subterranean chamber contains eight niches under which are carved the names of eight local winds: Borea, Euro, Sirocho, Austro, Garbin, Zefiro, Maestro and Tramot. This octagonal wind-dial corresponds to the eight images of mythical gods, representing seven planets and an allegory of love, frescoed on the dome of Eolia’s hall. The images converge toward a central figure described by the local Renaissance poet and writer, P. Francesco Ruggeri as Prometheus (Figure 1.4): 4

1.1 Villa Eolia

1.2 Eolia, cryptoporticus

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture

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Barbara Kenda

1.3 Villa Eolia, floor grating

1.4 Villa Eolia, frescoes

and in the apex of the arch there is displeased Prometheus, threatening with a fierce eye, as if putting an end to the winds blowing against him. The torch would have been extinguished by the violent blowing of those winds was it not for the charm of the building and for the feasts which were prepared there by Trento-Apollo.12

6

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture

Mythological Prometheus – the carrier of fire to humanity – is related to the ancient theories on pneuma, which was regarded by some philosophers as referring to fire, as well as air. Cleanthes (third century BC), for instance, described pneuma as a fiery breath which, in the form of sunrays, penetrated into the cosmos to provide life. Similarly, Seneca maintained that the human soul was a part of the constellations’ creative fire. In ancient Greece, both air and fire had a dominant place and were linked with the spirit that became a world force and even a living divine reason. Fire or pneuma was, however, not always a dissolving agent but, as demonstrated in the technical arts, had a power of uniting, constructing and tempering: “…in the fiery flame that lends Its aid to every art.”13 In Trento’s villa, Prometheus holds a fiery torch as a representation of pneuma that simultaneously alludes to tempering the winds and to the ideal temperature of the hall, as well as to the harmonious proportions and to the union of arts (and science) employed in Eolia. Archival evidence as well as primary literary sources reveal that Francesco Trento was not only a renowned humanist, but was also involved in

1.5 Villa Eolia, wind-channel

the designs of his villas in Costozza.14 In fact, in many historical texts, Trento has been referred to as the builder of a complex system of subterranean windchannels to provide a natural ventilating system for his buildings. From the Cave of the Winds, the air is conducted through a large channel (Figure 1.5) to Eolia’s cryptoporticus and is further issued through the octagonal grating into the hall above. Similarly, Villa Trento-Carli (Figures 1.6, 1.7) is connected to the Cave of the Winds by a wind-channel and a series of floor gratings (Figure 1.8), as well as by a large tunnel (Figures 1.9, 1.10) which is directly linked to 7

Barbara Kenda

1.6 Villa Trento-Carli

1.7 Villa Trento-Carli, entrance hall

one of the halls. The most sophisticated natural air-conditioning system was originally executed in Trento-Buoni Fanciulli. The villa engaged not only an underground wind-channel but also vertical vents installed within the building’s walls.15

8

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture

1.8 Villa Trento-Carli, floor grating

1.9 Villa Trento-Carli, hall with wind tunnel

9

Barbara Kenda

1.10 Villa Trento-Carli, entrance to wind tunnel

At Villa Eolia, a system of wind-channels, wind-dial geometry, and the iconographic program for Eolia all substantiate the thesis that Trento’s primary concern was to enhance the pneumatic concepts and therefore the therapeutic powers of his edifice. For his invention of pneumatic architecture, Trento found inspirations in both ancient and contemporary theories and practices of pneumatology. Indeed, Trento seemed to look favorably on the texts 10

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture

1.11 Villa Rotonda, cryptoporticus

and practical works of Renaissance “pneumatists”: Marsilio Ficino’s cosmic spiritus theory; Leonardo’s geometrical studies of both a centralized church and a human skull within which he investigated the concepts of sensus communis; Girolamo Cardano’s spiritus vitalis theory and his notion on the flow of pneuma within the human body; in Alvise Cornaro’s Villa Odeon in Padua and his books on architecture and health. Although the doctrines and practical works of 11

Barbara Kenda

1.12 Villa Rotonda, floor grating

ancient and Renaissance pneumatists are not very explicit in architectural treatises, the implementation of pneuma into the practice of Renaissance villas reveals it to be one of the principal constituents of sixteenth-century architecture. Andrea Palladio, in his treatise The Four Books of Architecture, described the villas of Costozza as marvelous architectural devices and referred to

12

the

“excellent

1.13 Villa Rotonda, central hall

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture

Signor Francesco Trento” who invented “the prison of the winds” called Eolia.16 Following Palladio, Vincenzo Scamozzi, recorded by Trento, equally impressed in his L’Idea dell’Architettura Universale: “…from the mountain caves exhale the Winds which have made Costozza famous since antiquity … These breezes are conducted through certain canals, called Ventiducts, to cool the rooms and to establish a delightful atmosphere during the summer time.”17 Palladio and Scamozzi evidently studied Trento’s natural ventilation mechanisms and, modeled on Eolia, applied the principles of pneumatic architecture to their own villas. Villa Rotonda near Vicenza, for instance, is presumably situated on a network of underground galleries and corridors, and uses a sophisticated ventilating principle. Besides the maximal horizontal ventilation due to the four cardinally and axially arranged entrances, the air also circulates vertically, from the underground chamber (Figure 1.11), through an elaborately designed floor rosetta (Figure 1.12) to Rotonda’s central hall (Figure 1.13). Further, the oculus of the villa’s dome was originally open, allowing the wind to move in vertical and centrifugal mode, providing admirable cross-ventilation. An almost identical ventilation system, based on the models of Eolia and Rotonda, is utilized in Scamozzi’s La Rocca Pisana in Lonigo near Padua. The villa sits on an immense labyrinth of subterranean caverns that emit pneuma through a large carved stone rosetta in the main hall. From there, air travels to the villa’s other rooms before exiting through an open oculus in La Rocca’s dome. Also based on Trento’s principles of natural ventilation is a group of da Schio villas of Costozza, in particular, Garzadori-da Schio (Figures 1.14, 1.15), one of the most remarkable examples of late Renaissance architecture in the Veneto. Constructed around 1686 by the bishop Alberto Garzadori, the villa is built on the steep slope of Garden da Schio (Figure 1.16) and is partially embedded in the Grotto of Marinali (Figure 1.17), which served as a workshop for the famous sculptor Orazio Marinali. Garzadori-da Schio conveys air directly, without the use of wind-channels, from the grotto to the main hall of which one wall and a part of a ceiling are made of natural rock (Figure 1.18). The pneumatic concept and aeolic character are emphasized by the villa’s iconography and iconology, representing Aeolus (Figure 1.19), the west wind Zephirus (Figure 1.20) and the planets which are harmoniously integrated with one wall and the ceiling, both cut from the living rock.18 As pneuma maintained the essential bodily tissues, bones, flesh, skin, etc. in ancient and Renaissance physiology, so pneuma was also responsible for uniting and sustaining the disciplines of the arts and sciences. Inspired by these pneumatic properties, Francesco Trento – who was himself wellversed in several disciplines – established in his villa an academic circle of wellknown humanists whose letters, poems and other texts commended both the inspirational powers and medical advantages of Costozza. The Vicentine poet and painter Giambattista Maganza regarded on Eolia’s movement of air as an 13

Barbara Kenda

1.14 Villa Garzadorida Schio

agent of purification, and the first condition to establish inspiration, while Girolamo Fabrizio Acquapendente, one of the most famous sixteenth-century physicians, recommended Eolia as a therapeutic chamber for those suffering from heat. Likewise, Torquato Tasso identified Trento with Homer’s Aeolus, Angelo Beolco (Ruzante) predicted eternal fame to him and Luigi Grotto, the blind poet from Adria, explicated the villa as a “terrestrial Paradise” and Costozza as a “place of auspicious breeze.”19 A few decades after Trento’s death, Galileo Galilei visited and admired Eolia, and P. Francesco Ruggeri praised the villa as “the eighth wonder of the world”: What were you thinking, Trento… when you guided the winds, unwilling though they were, into your dwelling, by means of that noble and almost unnatural invention… when you were building that most magnificent prison for those same winds… and what were you

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Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture

1.15 Villa Garzadorida Schio

1.16 Garden da Schio

thinking when you were adorning your dwelling Museum with ancient embossed works of Phidian skill, with carefully worked manuscripts, musical instruments, with the most noble statues of the most outstanding geometers, mathematicians, astronomers, and with the remarkable, original and ingenious buildings?20 Delineating Trento’s humanistic attainments and practical inventions, these texts are testimony to a vigorous cultural activity developed in

15

Barbara Kenda

1.17 Grotto of Marinali

1.18 Villa Garzadorida Schio

16

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture

1.19 Statue of Aeolus, entrance to Grotto Marinali, Villa Garzadori-da Schio

Costozza. Indeed, the documents substantiate the existence of an active humanistic circle there. Moreover, they support the hypothesis that Trento established his own academy and one of the numerous academic circles founded in Renaissance Italy. The following chapters, investigating the question of essence or pneuma in Renaissance architecture, are an outcome of the symposium 17

Barbara Kenda

Academia Eolia Revisited which took place in the villas, gardens and underground landscape of Costozza in May 2004. In an attempt to recreate Trento’s academy, the essays explore several aspects of Renaissance pneumatology as it informs architecture with regard to other disciplines in the arts and sciences. At the same time, the essays signify the importance of the novel theme of pneumatology in Renaissance architecture, and seek to demonstrate that for these architects and patrons, pneuma was fundamental for establishing physical and spiritual harmony between the human body, a building, and the cosmos. The work that follows presents the reader with various aspects of the idea of wind, air, breath, spirit and soul embodied in the Renaissance art of building. The essay by Richard Economakis introduces us to similarities between the planning of Renaissance villas and the temple of Apollo at Delphi, ancient descriptions of which would have been familiar in the Italian seicento; Economakis analyzes the Delphic cult of Apollo and associated ancient oracular and therapeutic practices as possible sources of inspiration for Renaissance pneumatic architecture. Similarly focusing on the ancient medicine, Matthew Hardy’s chapter explores the Hippocratic idea that disease emanated from the earth and was spread by the winds. Further, it demonstrates the impact of Hippocrates’ theory on the Renaissance domestic design of the four treatisewriters Alberti, Serlio, Palladio and Scamozzi.

18

1.20 West wind Zephirus, frescoe on natural rock, Villa Garzadori-da Schio

Aeolian winds and the spirit of Renaissance architecture

Alessandro Nova investigates the winds in architectural treatises from a different point of view. Contrary to Vitruvius’ theory of correspondence between the winds and the cosmos, the early modern humanists discussed the winds’ physical characteristics and qualities as demonstrated most clearly by Leon Battista Alberti. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, Vincenzo Scamozzi rejected both Vitruvius’ wind rose and Alberti’s approach to the matter. Scamozzi was interested instead in the practical aspects of the phenomenon and above all in the interaction between the climate and the planning of a city as well as between the winds and the planning of a house. The contribution by Paul Emmons and Marco Frascari further considers the physical presence of air and its architectural representation through effects such as wind, clouds, flags, smoke, evaporation, sound and perfume. Kathleen Christian investigates the relationship between the visual arts and spirit in Renaissance Rome, and focuses on the competition between poetry and sculpture in garden collections of antiquities as the impetus for a broader interest in “inspirited” and inspiring works of art. Contrary to the preceding authors, David Mayernik explores the other face of the Renaissance’s understanding of the elements: not as beneficent gifts but as agents of Jupiter’s wrath. Wind, water and fire not only humble the giants in Giulio Romano’s frescoes at the Palazzo Te, they apparently shake the very foundations of the building itself. Likewise embracing the darker side of pneuma are Rebecca Williamson’s explorations of air in relation to the design, planning, and maintenance of cities. Her study charts how Renaissance ideas of well-being through proper ventilation relate to efforts to address urban insalubrity and airborne illnesses, and how these notions continue to inform urban design perceptions in later periods. The hygienists, we learn, remove the spirit from the air, and hence from cities and architecture. Focusing on the Renaissance period, the chapters look simultaneously in two directions. First of all, they establish links with ancient theories of pneumatology. Second, they serve as a basis for a future collection of texts addressing the relevance of historical pneumatic themes to architectural practice today. Finally, the essays revitalize concerns about ethics and health in the architectural profession. With the recent revival of interest in environmentally sustainable architectural styles, there is now an opportunity to revive the therapeutic aspects of building well, so fundamental for the art of living well.

Notes 1

The underground landscape of Costozza is informed by its complex structure of caves where limestone has been excavated since Roman times to provide material for the monuments, bridges and defensive walls of the Venetian cities.

19

Barbara Kenda

2

Barbarano, 1762. Book VI, p. 137.

3

Ibid.

4

Virgil, 1999, pp. 266–267.

5

Kirk, Raven and Shofield, 1983.

6

Hippocrates, MCMXXIII, Vol. 1.

7

Hippocrates, 1981, Vol. II.

8

Ibid, p. 81.

9

Allbutt, 1910.

10

Wasserstein, 1982.

11

Vitruvius, MCMLXXXIII.

12

Ruggeri, 1625, Declamationum oratoriarum Pars altera.

13

Allbutt, 1910.

14

da Schio, Ms, Biblioteca Bertoliana, Vicenza, 2575/24–9–11; Francesco Tommasini, Genealogica Historia delle Famiglie Nobili Vicentine. Ms, Biblioteca Bertoliana, Gonz. 26.8.3, 3336–3337. “Storia Genealogica della Famiglia Trento, nobili di Vicenza e di Padova.” fols. 1– 283.

15

For more elaborate description on Trento’s invention of natural ventilation see Kenda (1998). For precise calculations of the temperature and air flow in the caves and villas of Costozza see Cazzaniga et al. (1981).

16

Palladio, 1997.

17

Scamozzi, 1615, p. 140.

18

For precise description on villa Garzadori-da Schio see Bevilacqua, 1983.

19

For more elaborate list of humanists whose texts glorify Trento, see Barbieri, 1984; also see Kenda, 2004.

20

Ruggeri, 1625.

Bibliography Allbutt, Sir T. Clifford, 1910. Greek Medicine in Rome. The Fitzpatric Lectures on the History of Medicine delivered at the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1909–1910 with other historical essays. Benjamin Blom, Inc. Barbarano, Francesco, 1762. Historia ecclesiastica della Citta, Territorio e Diocese di Vicenza. Book VI. Vicenza. Barbieri, Giuseppe, 1984. “Il vento e la lege. Francesco Trento e il circolo di Villa Eolia.” Studi Veneziani, n. VII. Pisa: Giardini Editori e Stampatori. Bevilacqua, Alessandro, 1983. “Richerche e notizie per una storia artistica di Costozza, Longare e Lumignano.” Costozza: Territorio, immagini e civilta nella storia della Riviera Berica Superiore. Costozza, Tramonte-Praglia: Cassa Rurale e Artigiana. Cazzaniga, A., Furlaneto, L. and Molon, M.D., 1981. Il sistema di Reffreddamento naturale delle ville di Costozza. Venezia: Istituto Universitario di Architectura. da Schio, Giovanni. Ms, Biblioteca Bertoliana. 2575/24–9–11. Vicenza. Hippocrates, LTD, MCMXXIII. Book on Airs, Waters, Places. (Trans.) W.H.S. Jones, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. London: William Heinemann. Hippocrates, 1981, Book on Breaths (De flatibus). (Trans.) W.H.S. Jones, Vol. II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. London: William Heinemann. Kenda, Barbara, 1998. “On the Art of Well Being: Pneuma in Villa Eolia.” RES 34, Autumn. Cambridge: The Peabody Museum, Harvard University. _______, 2004. “Architectural and Academic Aspirations of the Renaissance Humanist Francesco Trento,” Piranesi, No. 19/20, Vol 11, Autumn. Slovenia.

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Kirk, G., Raven, J.E. and Shofield, M., 1983. The presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palladio, Andrea, 1997. The Four Books of Architecture. (Trans.) R. Tavernor and R. Schofield. Cambridge: MIT Press. Ruggeri, Francesco, 1625. Declamationum oratoriarum Pars altera. Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 1615. L’Idea dell’Architettura Universale. Venezia. Tommasini, Francesco. Genealogica Historia delle Famiglie Nobili Vicentine. Ms, Biblioteca Bertoliana, Gonz. 26.8.3, 3336–3337. “Storia Genealogica della Famiglia Trento, nobili di Vicenza e di Padova.” fols. 1–283. Virgil, 1999. Aeneid, Book I. (Trans.) H. R. Fairclough. Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press. Vitruvius, MCMLXXXIII. De Architectura. (Trans.) Frank Granger. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. London: William Heinemann. Wasserstein, Abraham, 1982. Galen’s Commentary on the Hippocratic Treatise Airs, Waters, Places, VI, 3. Ed. with introduction, English translation and notes. In the Hebrew translation of Solomon he-Me’ati. Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

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Chapter 2

Chasma gês Delphic pneuma and the cult of Asklepios Richard M Economakis

When entertaining the notion of pneuma, that ambiguous Greek word meaning physical breath or divine Spirit, one is led reflexively to ponder that most ancient and mysterious essence that was at once material and godly, the Delphic pneuma, which inspired the priestess Pythia in delivering the god Apollo’s prophecies at his great oracular temple on the foothills of Mount Parnassus. While often deliberately vague (in some instances famously),1 the mantic pronouncements that issued from the shrine of “far-shooting Phoebus” were interpreted as ultimate, god-given truth. The divine Delphic emanation is today sometimes compared to the ‘Spiritus Sanctus’ that has guided church doctrine for nearly two millennia, the similarities being so close as to prompt some modern scholars to speak of Delphi as a kind of “Vatican of antiquity.”2 As the historians Parke and Wormell have suggested: “Even the Delphic claim that their oracle was without deceit answered to the dogma of Infallibility.”3 The ancient sanctuary was a veritable hierapolis, a holy city that at the time of its decline in the fourth century AD had been dedicated for more than a thousand years to moral teachings on matters of religion and politics (Figure 2.1).4 Antique literary sources abound with descriptions of Delphi. The works of some of the great Greek and Roman authors, among whom we may count Aeschylus, Plato, Euripides, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, and Cicero,5 convey a clear impression of this curious cult, with its tripod-enthroned priestess, egg-shaped 22

2.1 Model of the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi

Richard M Economakis

2.2 Red-figure image showing Apollo seated on the Delphic omphalos (center), with the Pythia on her oracular tripod

2.3 Michelangelo, the Delphic Sibyl, Sistine Chapel ceiling

24

Chasma gês

omphalos or navel stone marking center-of-earth, and golden statue of Apollo (Figure 2.2). It would thus have been familiar to Renaissance scholars like Luigi Cornaro, the brothers Daniele and Marcantonio Barbaro, Giangiorio Trissino and the many others who immersed themselves in the writings of the ancients. Michelangelo himself was no stranger to the tradition when he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the first decade of the sixteenth century. There, alternating beside Old Testament prophets, are represented the great Sibyls – Delphic, Cumaean, Libyan, Persian and Erythraean – oracular priestesses of antiquity who were thought by Christian authors to have prophesized the coming of the Messiah. Though it is likely that Michelangelo derived much of his own knowledge of the Sibyls from a book by Filippo Barbieri which was dedicated to Pope Sixtus IV, builder of the Sistine Chapel,6 his Delphica (Figure 2.3) projects an almost Hellenic spirit in her heroic, restrained pose. The billowing cloak and windswept hair of this mantic priestess has been interpreted as an attempt by the artist to represent the material presence of pneuma, divine Spirit.7 Even a cursory reading of the ancient descriptions conveys something of the unique nature of the Delphic Temple of Apollo. Besides straddling a natural ventiduct of sorts – the chasma gês – a geological fissure from which the pneuma, a real, but divinely charged gaseous emanation is said to have issued forth,8 the temple also seems to have incorporated a subterranean aqueduct that channeled the oracular waters of the Cassotis spring beneath the cella (Figure 2.4).9 In developing their ideas for a “pneumatic architecture” in the villas they built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which involved the subterranean channeling into buildings of naturally temperate air and sources of

2.4 Plan of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, with subterranean aqueducts in the sixth century BC foundations

25

Richard M Economakis

water, humanists Alvise Cornaro, Francesco Trento – author of the Villa Eolia in Costozza in the Veneto10 – architects Andrea Palladio, Vincenzo Scamozzi, and others, are likely to have noted these features in the ancient texts, and perhaps also the unique way by which the temple brings together the four opposite elements earth, water, air and fire. We are reminded, however, that Renaissance interest in the elements centered above all on their therapeutic effects.11 The question then arises: to what extent were the oracular cult of Apollo and that of the ancient healing god Aesculapius, or Asklepios, actually related? Or further yet, considering the revival of interest in antiquity that was part of humanist culture, what links might we trace between Asklepios and Christ in their roles as Healers and Saviors? In order to shed some light on these questions, a fuller understanding is necessary of the origin and nature of Pythian Apollo, and particularly the chthonic (subterranean) connections of oracular and therapeutic cults. In ancient Greece, Apollo was associated principally with the Dorians, remembered historically as “northern invaders” who overran the old Homeric kingdoms sometime in the late twelfth century BC, after the conclusion of the Trojan War. Modern scholarship tends to see them as a martial, patriarchal people related to the Mycenaean Greeks who preceded them, who in their descent abolished or suppressed the earlier Aegean chthonic cults centering on a mother goddess, and asserted the supremacy of their own sky gods.12 At Delphi, however, a curious symbiosis of the male god and his female predecessor, Ga, or Earth, appears to have been deliberately forged. The story of Apollo’s slaying of the Python, an enormous she-dragon or serpent, at the site of his future oracular shrine likely reflects an original Dorian suppression of local goddess-worship.13 In the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (eighth century BC), the name of the serpent is linked to the verb pythomai, “to rot or decay,” used by the god in his boastful pronouncement as he stood over the slain dragon: “Now rot here” (entauthoi nyn pytheu), said he, “on the nourishing earth.”14 Yet despite Apollo’s conquest of Ga and, presumably, the female principle that she represented, it was a priestess who actually served as his mouthpiece. The dramatic manner by which the Pythia delivered her prophetic responses to supplicants’ questions has served to underscore, on the one hand, the survival of the earlier cult of Earth, while reminding us, on the other hand, of the triumph of the Olympian gods over their chthonic predecessors. In her oracular sessions, the Pythia is said to have entered a state of mantic frenzy (enthousiasmos, or divine possession) while seated on a tripod over the chasma gês, that was located on the grounds of the old temenos of the goddess Earth.15 Like an enormous reliquary, the temple of Apollo now straddled this sacred precinct, entirely containing it and ensuring control of Ga’s prophetic emanations. The Pythia’s oracular powers were thus derived from an earthly influx, the pneuma, delivered by Ga, yet conveying Apollo’s directives. 26

Chasma gês

According to Pausanias, the Delphic Sibyl called herself the “wedded wife of Apollo,”16 a relationship identical to that of Poseidon and Ga. Poseidon’s very name is thought by some etymologists to mean “husband of Earth” (Posis-Da: Da being a Dorian variant of Ga).17 Though later assuming the specific role of a sea god, Poseidon was originally a deity of sources of water – as at the Athenian Acropolis. Hence he represents the male principle, which fertilizes the receiving earth. As god of subterranean sources, his presence at Delphi, with its numerous sources of water – most celebrated of which are the Castalia and Cassotis springs – was recognized by the Apollonian priesthood, who maintained an altar dedicated to him within the temple’s cella.18 Sanctuaries of Earth were almost always prophetic, and incorporated at least one inspirational source of water.19 At Delphi, the Cassotis spring was thought to surge from the river Styx, which gave it its special oracular properties.20 The Pythia augmented her prophetic powers by drinking from the waters of Cassotis and bathing in the Castalia spring.21 The Delphic pneuma was thus conveyed both by air – vaporous emanations from the chasma gês – and water – the subterranean streams that wound their way through the site. When French archaeologists excavated the temple of Apollo in 1892, they were surprised to find the building’s adyton, or inner sanctum, apparently stripped of all its paving stones, and without a trace of its famous sacred accoutrements.22 These were, principally, the omphalos or navel stone, the naïskos or aedicule in which it was displayed, the mantic tripod, statue of Apollo, laurel tree, tomb of Dionysos, and the oikos, or consultation chamber. Most surprisingly, they found no evidence of the chasma gês, over which the Pythia’s tripod is said, in the ancient accounts, to have been placed. Though at first it was presumed that the stones were removed by Christians in an attempt to obliterate the older shrine, or perhaps by the Apollonian priesthood itself in order to prevent such sacrilege, their absence has been more plausibly explained as a deliberate exposure within the temple of the Parnassian earth, and the grounds of the old sanctuary of Ga. Other oracular sites in Greece, like the sanctuary of Trophonios at Lebadeia23 or the shrine of Earth at Aegira in Achaea,24 are known to have incorporated unpaved areas. At the oracular sanctuary of Zeus at Dodonna, the priests slept directly on the earth and never washed their feet, in order to maintain contact with the earth and so continue to receive their divinatory abilities.25 Ancient accounts appear to describe the Delphic Temple of Apollo’s adyton as a sunken area at the far end of the cella, which was at once separate yet visible from the building’s entrance. In Aeschylus’ Eumenides,26 there is a scene in which, immediately upon entering the cella, the Pythia perceives the asylum-seeking Orestes inside the adyton, clasping the omphalos. Nearby, asleep on the consultation benches, were the terrible dog-faced Erinnyes, or Furies who hounded the tragic hero in punishment for his matricide. Taking his 27

2.5 Apulian bell crater showing Orestes clinging to the omphalos in the pedimented naïskos inside the Delphic Temple of Apollo, surrounded by the sleeping Erinnyes, or Furies; the Pythia recoils in horror

28

Chasma gês

2.6 Reconstruction of the adyton in the cella of the Temple of Apollo, Delphi, showing the exposed earthen floor and the Pythia seated on her tripod next to the sacred Daphne, or laurel tree; the long stoa-like structure on the right with curtains drawn is the oikos or consultation chamber (adapted by the author from a drawing by F. Bady in Roux 1976: 135, fig. 8; the naïskos is here shown with a pediment and the omphalos sits on a stepped podium, consistent with the depiction on the Apulian bell crater [Fig. 2.5])

cues from such literary descriptions as well as representations of Orestes at Delphi on late classical pottery (Figure 2.5), Georges Roux’s 1976 reconstruction of the adyton shows the oikos as a small stoa-like structure containing the consultation benches27 (Figure 2. 6). A curtain is drawn across the oikos to hide the Pythia during the course of the oracular session. On the western wall of the cella, the naïskos, or sacred aedicule, frames the omphalos, and beside it stands the golden statue of Apollo. Seated on her mantic tripod is the Pythia herself, beneath the god’s sacred laurel tree, the Daphne, which had once been the living daughter of the Thessalian river god Peneios.28 As Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne famously depicts (Figure 2.7), this unfortunate mountain nymph, who some say as priestess of Mother Earth,29 was turned into a tree in order to escape the amorous god’s attentions. The historical accounts of a laurel tree inside the temple’s adyton, as shown in Roux’s perspective view, are consistent with an unpaved, perhaps even unroofed inner sanctum. The tree both signified the presence of the god, and provided the Pythia with leaves, which some ancient authors say she burned and even chewed, to heighten her mantic powers.30 Parke and Wormell have argued that markings on a particular block of stone found in the temple’s adyton indicate that it may once have held the mantic tripod.31 Though it is not possible to confirm this, it is nevertheless likely that the tripod was secured to a solid base that was placed directly on an earthen floor, and that it was associated with a stomion, a kind of stone-built well-head straddling the chasma gês, from which emanated the Delphic pneuma.32 But what of the chasma itself? The failure by the French excavators to locate a natural fissure beneath the temple led to a reinterpretation of historical descriptions of gaseous emissions as metaphorical – which would have Strabo’s pneuma enthousiastikon, or the Elder Pliny’s exhalatione temulenti, refer to a purely spiritual, as opposed to a physical, if divine, emanation.33 This was the accepted view until recently, when it was challenged by an interdisciplinary team led by University of Louisville archaeologist John Hale and Wesleyan University geologist Jelle de Boer.34 The team, which also included a chemist and a toxicologist, ascertained that the Temple of Apollo’s cella was built directly over the conjunction of two geological faults in the underlying bituminous limestone of Mount Parnassus. The limestone was found to have a high content of petrochemicals, which may once have vaporized as a result of friction along the moving faults. The ancient descriptions of an actual chasm in the temple’s adyton, argued the team, “may have been a gaping fissure that extended into the layer of clay above the faulted bedrock.” Samples of limestone from the site, as well as water from the spring that traverses the temple, revealed the presence of methane, ethane and ethylene, which are known hallucinogens. Modern science would therefore appear to support our earlier observation, based on ancient belief, that the Delphic pneuma was conveyed by 29

Richard M Economakis

2.7 Apollo and Daphne by Bernini

way of air and water. These, of course, represent just two of the four elements that were thought by the fifth-century BC philosopher Empedokles to constitute the material world, and which some Greek physicians believed to be the chief constituents of the human body, namely: earth (dryness), water (damp), air (cold) and fire (heat).35 An examination of the layout and sacred contents of the Temple of Apollo, however, reveals that divine manifestations of all four elements were in fact worked into it. Air and water we have already identified in Apollo’s prophetic breath and Poseidon’s subterranean sources. Earth, too, we 30

Chasma gês

have noted as present in the exposed soil of the sunken adyton, and the goddess Ga whose sanctuary was thus revealed. The fourth element, fire, is equally present in the sacred hearth of the goddess Hestia, which stood in the center of the cella. Although it has not survived the destruction of the temple, this hearth is a main feature in the ancient accounts of mantic consultations. Upon entering the cella, the Pythia is said to have scattered laurel leaves and barley flour on the undying flame, which was of such importance as to serve as a source of fire for numerous other shrines.36 Whether or not the conjunction of the four opposite elements at Delphi was deliberate, it is likely that, with the rise in prominence of the healing god Asklepios in the late fifth century BC, it was noted by members of the priestly clan of physicians known as the Asklepiadae, and linked to the Asklepian rites, which developed out of the cult of Apollo Epicurius, or ‘Healer’. Apollo was known by many epithets, and, perhaps more than any other god, his worship took on a broad and complex range of aspects.37 As Phoebus he shone in majesty and awed his worshippers, but sometimes, too, he cut them down in wrath, as when he brought pestilence on the Greek camp at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad.38 As Epicurius he dealt with illness and disease, responding to supplicants by restoring them to health. It was to Apollo the Healer that his temple at Bassae was built between 420 and 417 BC by Ictinos, architect of the Parthenon in Athens.39 The temple combines all three Greek orders, Doric on the exterior with an engaged Ionic interior colonnade, and, for the first time in the archaeological record, a Corinthian order, freestanding and located on center-axis at the southern end of the cella. In the forms of its capital, of course, the Corinthian order makes use of the acanthus plant, to which, it is important to note, the Greeks ascribed healing properties. As John Onians has pointed out, ambiguous etymologies were popular among the Greeks40 – for example, the word pneuma. Thus, while ak-anthos really means “thorn-flower”, it seems that the similarity of the first component of this composite word to the verb akein, or “healing”, encouraged the rise of the alternative reading “healing flower”. We are also reminded that, as in Vitruvius’ story of the origin of the Corinthian capital in the forms of an acanthus-enveloped grave basket,41 in Greek symbology this plant is associated with tombs, and is thus connected with notions of life and death, and the chthonic realm of the underworld. The presumed chthonic nature of two other unusual fourth-century sacred buildings – namely the Tholos at Delphi (Figure 2.8), built by the architect Theodoros of Phocaea around 375 BC,42 and the Tholos at the sanctuary of Asklepios the Healer at Epidauros, erected a few years later43 (Figure 2.9) – would likely explain the incorporation of the Corinthian order on their interiors. Vincent Scully notes that chthonic cults typically made use of circular altars, as at the temple of Demetra at Akragas and, it appears, at the 31

2.8 View of the Tholos at the Sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, Delphi

2.9 Restored section through the Tholos at Epidauros by A. Defrasse (1891–3), showing the interior Corinthian colonnade and labyrinthine basement; the impluvium roof is conjectural

Tholos of Delphi, raising the interesting possibility that tholoi were deliberately conceived to recall these structures.44 This may explain why the Tholos at Epidauros was known simply as Thymele, which means altar, or place of sacrifices.45 It has been suggested that the curious, labyrinthine ring-walls that make 32

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2.10 Round Hellenistic serpent-entwined altar from Rhodes

up the foundations of this building were intended to house sacred serpents,46 which we know to have represented chthonic deities. It is here worth noting a type of round altar, associated principally with the Hellenistic period, around the cylindrical drum of which a chthonic serpent is shown coiling (Figure 2.10).47 With the Tholoi of Delphi and Epidauros we have established a possible architectural connection between the two sanctuaries, one of which was oracular, the other therapeutic. As we shall see, the serpent will also provide us with a link, this time more directly by way of Apollo. In Greek iconography, the serpent often 33

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represents the vital forces of Mother Earth: fertility, premonition, immortality; or earth-bound chthonic deities, like Cecrops and Erichthonios in Athens; or, it is the incarnation of a hero, especially one linked to healing and who has been deified, like Asklepios or Amphiaraos; finally, it may be an agent of health in the service of the gods.48 The snake’s ability to shed its skin appeared to give it the power of regeneration, and the shedding of infirmity; it was thus linked at once to death, through its venom, and life, through its frequent rebirth.49 At the same time, its continual emergence and disappearance in and out of crags and fissures, made it a creature of the earth, chthon. To the ancients the serpent was unmistakably chthonic, a visitor from the subterranean world of spirits, ancestors, and dead heroes,50 as illustrated in the Hellenistic funeral monument depicting a serpent coiling around a rose (Figure 2.11).51 In his survey of Greek religion, Arthur Fairbanks explains that the serpent was regarded as an incarnation of a dead hero or ancestor, and, “if properly worshipped he would help defend the land against enemies, stop pestilence, heal the sick, foretell the future.”52 We have encountered the serpent at Delphi in the form of the Python, guardian of the goddess Earth’s sanctuary. Ancient accounts variously claim that its rotting carcass was buried beneath the omphalos, or entombed within the mantic tripod’s bowl, the holmos, that served as seat for the Pythia.53 But for this single attestation, however, the serpent does not otherwise figure in the mythology and historical records at Delphi. By contrast, snakes figure prominently in Asklepian sanctuaries, and especially Epidauros. In Asklepian healing, the creatures were made to appear before patients during incubation, which involved a drug-induced, semi-wakeful sleep.54 The significance here of the serpent goes beyond a mere epiphany of a deity or chthonic spirits, and links the patient with primitive, earthly healing processes. As one modern psychotherapist observes: Snakes are a common symbol of transcendence – the emergence from darkness into light. In psychological terms, transcendence implies particularly the movement from the unconscious into the consciousness. When the snake is present in a patient’s dream work, earth powers – in particular, instinct, the body, sensuality, sexuality, the feminine, the mystical, the irrational – are coming forward into the light of conscious awareness.55 Asklepios’ single snake-entwined staff (Figure 2.12) became the recognized symbol of medicine after the establishment of his cult in Rome in 291 BC. It was only in the Renaissance, due principally to a printer’s error on the covers of medical texts, that the familiar caduceus, the Greek kerykeion, attribute of Hermes, god of communication, commerce, and thieves, is thought to have substituted the Asklepian emblem.56 Though the caduceus came to prevail as the emblem of medicine, the Asklepian single snake and staff was 34

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2.11 Hellenistic funeral monument from Rhodes, depicting a chthonic serpent coiled around a rose surmounted by a fascia with decorative wreaths

long established as a representation of the “life force moving up the spine,” hence well-being and physical health.57 The apparent similarity of the human spinal column to a snake may also have given rise to the belief that serpents, as agathoi daimones, or “good spirits,” were reincarnations of dead heroes and demigods.58 One such demigod was Asklepios himself, son of Apollo. Apollodoros tells us that Apollo sired Asklepios on the mortal Coronis, whom he slew in her pregnancy after discovering that she had admitted the Arcadian prince Ischys to her bed.59 Filled with remorse as he gazed at her beautiful corpse on the funeral pyre, the god motioned to Hermes to remove the living child from her womb. Apollo then gave Asklepios to the wise old centaur Cheiron, who raised him and instructed him in the healing arts. Aided by a gift from the 35

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2.12 Asklepios with his serpent-entwined staff

goddess Athena of two magical vials of blood from the serpent-maned gorgon Medusa, Asklepios roamed the earth, seeking to eradicate illness and disease, until his fame as a healer surpassed that of his father, Apollo. At last he managed to restore a man to life. Hades, god of the underworld, complained to Zeus that he was being robbed of the souls of the dead; and so Asklepios was cut down by a thunderbolt. He was, however, restored to life soon afterwards in order to fulfill a prophecy that he would rise again as a god. The myth is instructive to us in a number of ways. First, Asklepios is given the same powers of life and death that were normally associated with serpents. His death and resurrection, involving a descent to the subterranean realm of Hades, reinforce his chthonic associations, and justify his frequent representation as an enormous serpent, or agathos daimon. In that sense, he is linked to Earth, or Ga, in the same way that the Python had been at Delphi. The point here being made needs to be stressed, for Asklepios came in fact to be identified with Python, the servant of Ga. This association is especially evident on Pergamene coins (Figure 2.13) in which his benign, bearded face appears on the one side, while on the obverse the Delphic serpent is shown coiling around the omphalos.60 A Pompeiian fresco from the House of the Vetii shows an almost identical representation of the Python coiled around the omphalos, 36

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although here moments after its death at the hands of Apollo.61 In the words of mythologist Jane Ellen Harrison: Asklepios himself then is a snake-daimon, twined round the omphalos of G(a). He is but the daimon of the fertility of the Earth. As such he never passes wholly to the upper air of the Olympians. He remains a Saviour and a healer, loved of the dream-oracle, very near to earth and to man.62 A sculptural relief from Athens showing Asklepios receiving supplicants while an enormous snake coils behind him reinforces the god’s serpent aspect (Figure 2.14). His dual nature is here manifest; in this image “the simple truth is patent: the god in human form leans on his staff awaiting his worshippers, the holy snake behind him is his equal in stature and in majesty.”63 Asklepios’ serpent nature is, however, most irrefutably conveyed in the story of his coming to Rome in 291 BC, as recorded in Ovid.64 Prompted by a plague that ravaged Rome in 295–293 BC, a Roman delegation traveled to Delphi, and was told “Seek help from Apollo’s son and not Apollo.” An ambassador, Q. Ogulnius, was sent to Epidauros in a trireme, and requested the sanctuary to send the god to Rome. As the Epidaurians considered their response, Ogulnius had a dream in which Asklepios told him: “I’ll journey with you across the open sea. Take notice of the serpent on my staff, who coils around it … for he shall be myself tomorrow morning, larger than life as divine beings are.” In the morning an enormous golden snake was seen to slither slowly out of the temple of Asklepios, and make its way to the harbor, where it boarded the awaiting Roman ship. Days later, as the trireme made its way up the River Tiber, the serpent disembarked at the Isola Tiberina. There the Romans founded a sanctuary to Asklepios and, to commemorate the arrival of the god in a seagoing vessel, transformed the island into the shape of a ship. Of Asklepios’ late mythological and iconographic associations with Delphi there can be no doubt. The cultic and ritualistic connections, however, are less evident, and require some elaboration. In this respect it is important to note that, as at Delphi, care was taken to situate Asklepian sanctuaries close to sources of water.65 Water played a central role in the rites of purification preceding and following incubation, and often the springs from which it surged were considered to be sacred. The purificatory use of water is confirmed at Delphi by ancient accounts of the Pythia bathing ceremonially in the Castalian spring and performing ablutions with the waters of the Cassotis spring before mantic sessions at Delphi. As at the Delphic Temple of Apollo, Asklepian shrines also typically incorporated a sunken area within the cella.66 It is thought that worshippers seeking a cure placed offerings in the pit, perhaps even were required to 37

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2.13 Coin of Pergamon showing the face of Asklepios, and on the obverse, the Delphic Python coiling around the omphalos

descend into it for ritualistic purposes. There can, however, be little doubt that such a depression in the earth was intended as a link with the god’s chthonic nature. It was from a subterranean hollow that the god in his serpent aspect emerged at the Temple of Asklepios in Epidauros, on his way to Rome. As an earth-bound deity Asklepios served the goddess Ga, just as the Python once did at Delphi. And through Ga came knowledge of all things corporeal, and the curative power of the elements. Like the Delphic adyton, or “place of no entry,” Asklepian sanctuaries contained an abaton, which is to say an area of restricted passage. Typically the abaton, which was also known as the enkoimeterion, or “sleeping chamber,” was a long stoa-like structure within the sanctuary grounds, where the sick,

2.14 Late fifth-century BC marble relief from the Asklepieion in Pireaus, showing Asklepios receiving supplicants

38

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2.15 Marble thankoffering showing the patient Archinos attended by the healing god Amphiaraos; note the serpent, acting on the sleeping man as in Asklepian incubation rites

after bathing ceremonially, donned white robes and presented themselves to the healing priests or therapeutes, who induced them to sleep with the aid of drugs. This ritual, which was known as enkoimesis or incubation, required the infirm to fall asleep in specially constructed subterranean chambers. During this pannychis, or “healing night,” in their drug-induced state of semi-wakefulness, patients would be visited by priests in the guise of Asklepios and his daughters Hygieia (Health), Iaso (Healer) and Panaceia (All-curing), who advised them on possible cures;67 they would then experience the god’s epiphany in his theriomorphic form, as serpent (Figure 2.15). It is thought that an actual harmless snake was released into each chamber, and its presence and healing touch would be vaguely remembered upon awakening. The associated dreams, which patients were instructed to make every effort to remember, were interpreted by the therapeutes, and the appropriate regimen prescribed. The Asklepian abaton, then, is to be understood quite literally as the womb of Mother Earth or Ga, guarded by a serpent (Asklepios) that wielded power over life and death. If beseeched in a right, respectful way, the serpent would consent to transmit the wisdom of Ga through dreams, in the same way that the Python would inspire the oracular revelations of Apollo’s priestess, the Pythia, who sat enthroned above the chasma gês to receive the divine pneuma. The practice of enkoimesis, or incubation, is characteristic of cults where the relation to the earth is charged with positive values and permits access to the divine.68 Healing dreams, then, are properly understood as Earth-inspired forms of divination, similar to oracular pronouncements. Sanctuaries of

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Asklepios were in fact dream oracles, “shrines in which the sick… obtained knowledge of the future through dreams.”69 There is therefore a clear link between therapeutic and oracular rites in ancient Greece. Asklepieia were directly related to Apollo’s oracular shrines, particularly his temple at Delphi, and we may thus better comprehend the late classical association of Asklepios with the Delphic Python. The opening lines of the Hippocratic Oath now assume greater meaning: “I swear by Apollo Physician, and by Asklepios (and his daughters) Hygieia and Panaceia, and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgement, this oath and this indenture.”70 The fifth-century BC physician and father of medicine, Hippocrates of Cos, was a member of the priestly clan of the Asklepiadae, who as descendants of Asklepios, and thus of Apollo his father, had a special relationship to Delphi. It is recorded that, on one of his frequent visits to Delphi, Hippocrates himself dedicated a bronze skeleton to Apollo.71 Galen too – the second-century AD physician and friend of emperor Marcus Aurelius – was a member of the clan who learned the art of healing at the famous Asklepieion in his home town of Pergamon, in Asia Minor. Like Hippocrates, Galen believed the human body to be regulated by four humors, or body fluids, that needed to be balanced; these were blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.72 As we have seen, some ancient physicians and followers of the philosopher Empedokles believed the body to be comprised of four opposite elements, namely: earth, water, air and fire, which are manifest in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.73 It is very likely that a direct connection was made in antiquity between the humors and the opposite elements, as it later was by Bartholomaeus Anglicus (fl. c. 1220–1240), the Franciscan encyclopaedist who in his De Proprietatibus rerum also linked these to the four principal winds, so that we have the equation: Boreas = earth = black bile; Auster = air = blood; Favonius = water = phlegm; Subsolanus = fire = yellow bile.74 Greek sanctuaries are notoriously asymmetrical in layout, the buildings and monuments they comprised having been placed opportunely according to the particularities of the site and individual design strictures, like large freestanding sculptures. These usually included temples, treasuries, gateways, fountain houses, stoas, baths, workshops, odeia, and council houses. It is important to note, however, that in the fifth and fourth centuries BC that most characteristic of all Greek buildings, the theater, was found almost exclusively at sites associated with oracular or healing rites. Its development as a particular architectural type, of course, is closely linked to the yearly festival of Dionysos in Athens and its associated dramatic contests. Dionysos, however, is known to have had his own oracular healing shrines, for instance among the Satric Bessoi 40

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in Thrace, and at Amphikleia in Phokis, where incubation was practiced.75 Thus, as in Athens, theaters were integrated into the mantic sanctuaries of Apollo at Delphi and Corinth, and Zeus at Dodonna, and the therapeutic sanctuaries of Asklepios at Epidauros and Pergamon and Amphiaraos at Oropos. They are, however, conspicuously absent at the sanctuaries of Zeus at Olympia, Poseidon at Isthmia, Hera at Argos, and the Great Goddesses at Eleusis, which were associated with neither prophecy, nor cures. It is commonly held that the incorporation of theaters at therapeutic sanctuaries is indicative of a holistic attitude in ancient healing rites. Certainly the patient was treated more integrally than is typically the case in modern medicine; however, the theater had less to do with achieving psychosomatic balance in the modern sense, which is to say the simultaneous cultivation of cultural, physical, intellectual, aesthetic and other sensibilities, and more with psychological catharsis through collective rites of moral recognition. “Catharsis,” according to psychotherapist E. Tick, “is the powerful emotional, psychological, and physical process that consists of bringing to the surface, intensifying, and purging emotions, (especially) pity and fear.”76 Greek tragedy, he tells us: parades our archetypes and their core conflicts and struggles before us. We see the forces and characters of our cosmos personified in gods and goddesses, kings and queens, their messengers and helpers, soldiers and prophets, and the chorus of ordinary people like ourselves…. Greek tragedy enacts not a personal story, but a story of our collective unconscious. Tragedy is a collective dream or rite.77 Thus, dramatic performances at ancient healing sanctuaries were an integral aspect of the healing process, a kind of mass incubation. Above all others, therapeutic and oracular cults in ancient Greece demanded strict moral behavior on the part of worshippers and supplicants; the incorporation of theaters within these types of sacred enceintes in particular was intended to engender a heightened state of moral awareness, and psychological catharsis. Although the worship of Asklepios had faded by the end of the fourth century AD, and the serpent was transformed by Christians into a symbol of harm and evil, the Early Church maintained the value of dream healing, as in the cult of St. Thekla of Ikonion in Asia Minor, around whom an incubation center arose, which was Asklepian in all but name.78 The ancient healing god survived into Christian times in other ways, too. In the fourth century his bearded visage was identified with that of Christ. Like Christ, he was a gentle, mendicant healer and teacher, son of a god and human mother, who died and was resurrected, and came to be worshipped as Soter, or Savior.79 The association of Asklepios with Christ survives especially in the Eastern Orthodox Church, where 41

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2.16 Eighteenth-century Greek iconostasis with icons of Christ the Savior and Virgin Hodegetria with Child, bedecked with Asklepian ex-votos; note the preponderance of ex-votos around the icon of the Virgin

the image of Christ the Savior on the iconostasis is often bedecked with Asklepian ex-voto images of healed limbs and other ailing parts of the body (Figure 2.16).80 A distant cultural recollection of the original source of healing in Mother Earth, or Ga, is seen in the similarly bedecked image of Mary, Mother of God, who holds the infant Messiah tenderly in her arms. Byzantine Mother-and-Child iconography, especially of the “Hodegetria” and “Brephokratousa” types, may have a precursor in images of the infant Asklepios in the arms of his caretaker, the nymph Epidauros. In one 42

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2.17 Recently discovered fragmentary redfigure image of the young Savior god Asklepios, held by the nymph Epidauros in a manner reminiscent of later Hodegetria and Brephokratousa icons

recently discovered fragmentary attic red-figure dish attributed to the Meidias painter, (Figure 2.17)81 the young Savior god conveys his Christ-like promise of salvation, but he is as yet fully dependent on the care and nourishment of woman – in other words, the feminine principle that is associated with the earth, and the chthonic realm of the serpent. Asklepios stares intently at the viewer: his message is directed at us individually. Surrounding the scene is a wreath of inspirational bay leaves, symbol of Apollo, worn also by the young god around the head.82 In the background, lest we forget Asklepios’ joint Apollonian and chthonic origins, stands the Delphic tripod on a column. While the actual connections between the oracular cult of Apollo at Delphi and the Asklepian healing cult would have been more obscure in the Renaissance, the ancient belief in the curative effects of air, water, earth and fire, as well as dreams, is known to have been carefully studied and in large measure revived.83 The designers of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century “pneumatic” villas of the Veneto are likely to have been as familiar with descriptions of the Temple of Apollo as they were with Hippocratic medicine and the Galenic theory of humors, and their origin in the cult of Aesculapius / Asklepios. While they do not allude directly to Delphic pneuma in their iconographic schemes, the mythological themes in the frescoes, statuary and other artwork with which they ennobled their buildings transport us across time and culture to a remote Hellenic antiquity where cures and prophetic visions continued to issue from the subterranean realm of Ga. As we peer into the dark ventiducts and breezy, labyrinthine caverns beneath the villas of Trento, Palladio, and Scamozzi, we might imagine hearing the distant cries of the Pythia and the mantic

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proclamations of the Delphic priesthood, carried on gusts of wind that still today play gently on our senses.

Notes 1

Herodotos tells of the Lydian king Croesus, to whom it was prophesized that a great kingdom would be destroyed if he marched against the Persians. As it turned out, that kingdom was his own. Fairbanks 1910: 62.

2

Ibid: 64.

3

Parke and Wormell 1956: 416.

4

Andronikos 1995: 6.

5

A thorough listing of ancient authors who make mention of the Delphic Oracle can be found in Fontenrose 1978: index locorum 451–458.

6

Hartt 1964: 82.

7

Ibid. Here of course, Hartt is referring to the Christian Holy Spirit.

8

Burkert 1985: 116.

9

Roux 1976: 138, fig. 9. Ancient accounts of the presumed connections of the temple’s adyton to the Cassotis spring are discussed in Parke and Wormell 1956: 27. Pausanias (10.24.7) tells us that the water of the Cassotis spring “plunges underground and in the innermost sanctuary of the god makes the women prophetic.”

10

Kenda 1998: 103–104.

11

Ibid: 113

12

Burkert 1985: 17.

13

Morford and Lenardon 2003: 231. See also Graves 1960: 80.

14

Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo, 363 (2002, Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library: 350). It is also possible that ‘Python’ is linked to the verb pynthanomai, which means ‘to ask’, or ‘inquire’.

15

Extreme depictions of the Pythia’s raving are found in Plutarch, Mor. 438b (“At her very first remarks it became evident from the roughness of her voice that she was not in control of herself… Finally, becoming totally hysterical, she raised an unintelligible and fearful shout…”), and Lucan, BC 5.165–174 (“Finally possessing the Delphian breast Apollo never more abundantly invaded his priestess’s body. He expelled her former mind and bade her human nature yield her breast wholly to him. She rages madly about the cave, her neck no longer her own; and Phoebus’ bands and garlands loose in her bristling hair, her head shaking, she circles about the temple’s empty spaces and scatters the tripods in her way; she seethes with great fury, bearing you, Phoebus, in her rage”), and BC 5.190–193 (“Then mad frenzy flows through her foaming lips, groans and loud panting cries; and then when the maiden was at last subdued a dismal wail and finally words sounded in the vast caves”). Parke and Wormell (1956: 12–13) see a possible origin of the Pythia’s enthousiasmos in the cult of Dionysos, in which female devotees engaged in frenzied orgiastic rites. This would appear to be supported by ancient descriptions of the Temple of Apollo’s adyton, which contained a Tomb of Dionysos. The authors also suggest a survival, in the “excited element” of Delphic prophesy, of pre-Hellenistic cultic frenzy as represented on Minoan gems.

16

Burkert 1985: 117.

17

Roux 1976: 30.

18

Ibid: 29.

19

Ibid: 28.

20

Ibid: 141–2. Plutarch (De Pythiae Oraculis, 17.402 D-E) refutes the tradition that the waters of the Cassotis spring surge from the Styx.

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21

Parke and Wormell 1956: 30–1.

22

Amandry 2000: 20.

23

Roux 1976: 112–113. A description of the sanctuary of Trophonios is found in Pausanias, IX, 39, 5–14.

24

Parke and Wormell 1956: 10.

25

Roux 1976: 27.

26

Aeschylus, Eumenides, 39–40. The implications of this passage with regard to the layout of the adyton are discussed in Roux 1976: 101–102.

27

Roux 1976: 134–135, figs. 7 and 8.

28

Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.452ff. A discussion is found in Brewster 1997: 38–39.

29

Graves 1960: 78, proposes that Daphne was in fact a priestess of Mother Earth.

30

Parke and Wormell 1956: 26. The leaves of some laurel species are known to contain prussic acid, which when consumed in abundance can have an intoxicating effect. Some modern mythologists, especially ritualists like Frazer, Harrison, and Graves, have suggested that in preHellenic times the rustlings of sacred oak and laurel trees were the principal divinatory devices. At Delphi, the conjunction of a sanctuary of Ga; Daphne, a tree once personified by a priestess of Mother Earth; and Apollo, conqueror of Ga and nemesis of Daphne, lends additional credence to the theories of a violent overthrow of an older matriarchal society and its chthonic cults.

31

Parke and Wormell 1956: 29.

32

Roux 1976: 110–117.

33

Strabo, Geographia, 9.3.5; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 2.95.208. A good discussion of the various ancient descriptions of the Delphic pneuma can be found in Fontenrose 1978: 197–199.

34

Hale, de Boer, Chanton and Spiller 2003: 67–73.

35

Hippocrates, Vol. I, xlvii (1948, Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library).

36

Fairbanks 1910: 163. Burkert (1985: 61) reminds us that after defeating the Persians at Plataea, the Greeks “all decided to fetch new fire from Delphi; thereafter, on the basis of certain signs, the Athenians repeatedly sent a Pythian mission to Delphi to bring fire to Athens in a tripod cauldron.”

37

Apollo’s name appears to be etymologically associated with the verb apollynai, “to destroy”. Among his most familiar epithets were Phoebus (radiant), Delian (of Delos), Pythian (of Pytho), Smyntheus (mousy), Lykios (wolf-like) and Delphinios (dolphin-like, a name he asked the Cretan sailors, who became his first priests at Delphi, to use when praying to him; whence the name for Delphi is said to derive). See Morford and Lenardon 2003: 226–256.

38

Homer, Iliad, I.43–67 (1988, Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library).

39

Onians 1988: 19.

40

Ibid.

41

Vitruvius (IV: 9). See Rowland and Howe 2003: 55; also Smith 2003: 115–117.

42

As mentioned by Vitruvius (VII: 12). Roux (2000: 192) makes the argument that the circular cella contained chryselephantine statues.

43

Pausanias tells us that Polykleitos the Younger designed this last building (Lawrence 1983: 241), but some (Themelis 1980: 82–83) think it to have been the work of Theodoros, on the basis of its formal similarities with its counterpart at Delphi. Theodoros is known to have been the architect of the nearby Temple of Asklepios at Epidauros, which was built around 380–75 BC.

44

Scully 1979: 78, 111. The particular deities to whom the Tholoi at Epidauros and Delphi were dedicated are unknown to us but both are thought to have been chthonic.

45 46

Lawrence 1983: 390, note 4. Dinsmoor 1975: 235. It is possible that the Tholos at Epidauros was a heröon, or tomb of the deified mortal physician Asklepios. See also Pollitt 1999: 164–166.

47

Constantinopoulos 1977: 122–123, exh. no. 229, figure 203.

48

Verbanck-Piérard 1998: 155–159.

49

Macrobius, Saturnalia, I.20.

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50

Fairbanks 1910: 165.

51

Constantinopoulos 1977: 71–73, exh. no. 117, figure 102.

52

Fairbanks 1910: 165–166.

53

Roux 1976: 120; Fontenrose 1978: 225. The tripod was originally a simple cooking utensil, useful for boiling meats; it became a prize at early games, probably in connection with the cult of Apollo. Its use as a seat at Delphi is unusual, and the possible reasons are much debated. The Pythagoreans believed that the three legs symbolized the past, present and future, which gave the tripod mantic qualities. This is likely to be a later mystical rationalization.

54

Fairbanks 1910: 124.

55

Tick 2001: 225. The author is grateful to his late wife, Elena Ponte, for this source.

56

Ibid: 255; Verbanck-Piérard 1998: 154–155. In archaic times the caduceus was crowned simply by a figure-of-eight motif, but by the fourth century BC it was substituted by affronted, intertwined serpents representing life and death, presumably in connection with Hermes’ role as psychopompos, or guide of souls to the underworld.

57

Tick 2001: 256.

58

Harrison 1962: 260–271.

59

Apollodoros, iii.10.3.

60

Harrison 1962: 384, fig. 107; see also Verbanck-Piérard 1998: 155; 254–255, figures II, 21–22.

61

Harrison 1962: 127, fig. 127.

62

Ibid: 384.

63

Ibid: 382.

64

Ovid, Metamorphosis, XV, 433; quoted in Tick 2001: 101.

65

Armpis 1998: 167.

66

Ibid: 169.

67

Fairbanks 1910: 124–126, 164.

68

Verbanck-Piérard 1998: 156.

69

Fairbanks 1910: 58.

70

Hippocrates, Vol. I, Oath (1948, Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library: 298–299).

71

Roux 1976: 198.

72

Appelboom 1998: 13.

73

Hippocrates, Vol. I (1948, Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library: xlvi-li).

74

Kenda 1998: 111, note 30.

75

Fontenrose 1978: 228–229.

76

Tick 2001: 7.

77

Ibid: 11.

78

Tick 2001: 142; Miller 1994: 117; Tertullian, On Baptism, 17.

79

Asklepios’ name is difficult to derive etymologically; Graves (1960 Vol. 1: 176, 2), who appears to be interpreting Pindar, believes it means “unceasingly gentle”, while others (Tick 2001: 17) see an origin in the verb askeo, meaning “to practice, to exercise”. Harrison (1962: 381, note 4), points to another interpretation by way of the verb skalapazo, which Hesychios explains as “coiling around”; this brings to mind the images on Pergamene coins of Asklepios as the serpent Python, wrapping itself around the Delphic omphalos.

80 81

Economakis 2001: 19, 29, figure 19; 87, figure 161 (photographs by Cornelis de Vries). ‘Asclépios: II. 7. Plat attique à figures rouges’, in Aux Temps d’Hippocrate, 1998: 239–243. While the askalaphos, or short-eared owl (see note above) is not normally associated with Asklepios, it is tempting to see owl-like attributes, “ears and all”, in this portrait of the young god.

82

Ibid.

83

Kenda 1998: 107–111, see especially note 30.

46

Chasma gês

Bibliography Amandry, P. (2000) ‘La Vie Religieuse à Delphes’, Delphes: Cent Ans Après la Grande Fouille, Essai de Bilan, Actes du Colloque International Organisé par l’École Francaise d’Athènes, AthènesDelphes 17–20 Septembre 1993, Paris: Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, Suppl. 36 (Ed. Jacquemin, A), 9–21. Andronikos, M. (1995) Delphi, Athens: Ekdotike Athenon. Appelboom, T. (1998) ‘La Therapeutique au Temps d’Hippocrate’, Aux Temps d’Hippocrate: Médecine et Société en Grèce Antique, Morlanwelz: Mariemont, 13. Armpis, E. (1998) ‘L’Organisation des Asclepieia’, Aux Temps d’Hippocrate: Médecine et Société en Grèce Antique, Morlanwelz: Mariemont, 167. Brewster, H. (1997) The River Gods of Greece, London: I. B. Tauris Publishers. Burkert, W. (transl. 1985) Greek Religion, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Constantinopoulos, G. (1977) Mouseia tes Rhodou: I, Archaiologiko Mouseio, Athens: Apollo Editions. Dinsmoor, W.B. (1975) The Architecture of Ancient Greece, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Economakis, R. (2001) Nisyros: History and Architecture of an Aegean Island, Athens: Melissa Publishing House. Fairbanks, A. (1910) Greek Religion, New York: American Book Company. Fontenrose, J. (1978) The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations, Berkeley: University of California Press. Graves, R. (1960) The Greek Myths, London: Penguin Books. Hale, J., de Boer, J.Z., Chanton, J.P. and Spiller, H.A. (2003) ‘Questioning the Delphic Oracle’, Scientific American Journal, New York: Scientific American. Harrison, J.E. (1962) Epilegomena & Themis, New York: University Books. Hartt, F. (1964) Michelangelo Buonarroti, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Kenda, B. (1998) ‘On the Renaissance art of well-being: Pneuma in Villa Eolia’, RES 34, Cambridge: The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Lawrence, A.W. (1983) Greek Architecture, London: Penguin Books. Miller, P.C. (1994) Dreams in Late Antiquity, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Morford, M. and Lenardon, R. (2003) Classical Mythology, New York: Oxford University Press. Onians, J. (1988) Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Princeton, Cambridge University Press. Parke, H.W. and Wormell, D.E.W. (1956) The Delphic Oracle, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Pollitt, J.J. (1999) Art and Experience in Classical Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roux, G. (1976) Delphes: Son Oracle et ses Dieux, Paris: Société d’édition ‘Les Belles Lettres’. Roux, G. (2000) ‘L’Architecture à Delphes: Un Siècle de Découvertes’, Delphes: Cent Ans Après la Grande Fouille, Essai de Bilan, Actes du Colloque International Organisé par l’École Francaise d’Athènes, Athènes-Delphes 17–20 Septembre 1993, Paris: Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, Suppl. 36 (Ed. Jacquemin, A), 181–199. Rowland, I. and Howe, T. N. (2003) Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture, New York: Cambridge University Press. Scully, V. (1979) The Earth, the Temple and the Gods: Greek Sacred Architecture, New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, T.G. (2003) Vitruvius: On Architecture, New York: The Monacelli Press. Themelis, P. (1980) Delphi, Athens: Ekdotike Athenon. Tick, E. (2001) The Practice of Dream Healing, Wheaton, IL: Quest Books. Verbanck-Piérard, A. (1998), ‘Dieux Guérisseurs: La Maladie et le Sacré’, Aux Temps d’Hippocrate: Médecine et Société en Grèce Antique, Morlanweltz: Mariemont, 156.

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Chapter 3

“Study the warm winds and the cold” Hippocrates and the Renaissance villa Matthew Hardy

Airs, Waters, Places We are all familiar today with beach resorts, swamps have their interpretive centres, housing estates are developed on lakes and lagoon shores without a thought. But building in such locations would have been unthinkable for the architects of the past. Water, and air blowing over water, were thought to have very unwelcome properties. This chapter is an examination of the impact of these ancient ideas on the domestic architecture of the Renaissance. The Hippocratic text1 Airs, Waters, Places taught generations of physicians and others that air was the carrier of disease engendered in water and among vegetation. The texts build on the work of Empedocles2 and others to construct a pervasive theory of the origin of disease in emanations from the soil and rotting vegetation and its propagation by the air itself. Health, it was thought, depended on the effects of the air in a particular locality. Those suffering from the effects of malign air suffered from malaria and other diseases. The texts instruct those who would study medicine to ‘consider the effect of the seasons of the year and the differences between them, ‘to study the warm and the cold winds, both those which are common to every

48

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country and those peculiar to a particular locality’, and to consider the effect of water on the health: When… a physician comes to a district previously unknown to him, he should consider both its situation and its aspect to the winds.3 The texts draw particular attention to the role of water, which, it was believed affected the air. ‘Stagnant water from marshes and lakes’, the Hippocratic text reads, ‘is coloured, harmful and productive of biliousness’.4 The presence of water close to villas or settlements had various effects on human health, depending on the winds that commonly blew, ranging from head colds to tertiary and quaternary fevers and malaria. Renaissance architectural theorists reiterated the principles set out by Hippocrates and reported by Vitruvius, Alberti writing that ‘stagnant’ air wsa to be avoided. Heat and humidity were of themselves believed to be unhealthy, and the antidote to them was understood to be coolness and dryness. Accordingly, the architects of Renaissance villas sought to produce spaces that would keep their owners cool and dry on the hottest and most humid days. The response to these climatic concerns developed in Venice proved very influential. Traditional Venetian houses incorporate a central breezeway, the sala or pòrtego, to create a lofty, cool, dimly lit and well ventilated space at the heart of the house. After 1529, the Venetians gradually colonized their swampy hinterland, building villas as they went. Serlio travelled from Rome to the Veneto, bringing with him the fashions of the papal court, but he evidently learnt much from Venice, too. Many of his plans feature a large room placed in the centre of villa plans to be better sheltered from the sun. Palladio developed Serlio’s ideas, retaining a high, cool, breezy central room at the heart of each of his many villa plans. Openings were aligned to promote both beauty and cool breezes in the summer. Palladio’s sections on villa planning repeat familiar Vitruvian warnings about the proximity of marshes derived from Hippocrates, and it is while thinking of Hippocrates that Palladio warns of the danger of stagnant water, stressing that it is the architect’s job to find a healthy place for a new villa. In time, these Italian writers and their fashionable model villas found an audience far beyond their own shores. Hippocratic ideas profoundly influenced domestic architecture, both through architects studying their classical and Renaissance textbooks and from doctors remembering their reading of Hippocrates. The theory of disease transmission by air was very durable, and was not overturned until the discovery of water-borne disease in the 1840s and mosquito-borne disease late in the nineteenth century. It is also evident that it had very considerable effects on the planning of houses.

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Hippocratic villas of the Renaissance Hippocratic attitudes to locality, climate, health and ventilation are one of many factors leading to the emergence of the ‘Palladian’ villa as a building type in the Veneto of the sixteenth century.5 The printed treatises of Alberti (pub. 1486), Serlio (1537–75), Palladio (1570) and Scamozzi (1615) represent a crystallizing of thought about the villa: from Alberti’s attempt to reestablish antique virtù, through Serlio’s experimentation and Palladio’s epitomization of new plans, to Scamozzi’s formal codifications. Evidence for the currency of the Hippocratic notion that locality influenced health is clear from discussion of the siting of towns and villas in both treatises and other accounts of town building.6 Consideration of Serlio’s many plans illustrates his debt to Venice,7 and his writing displays a tentative relativism prompted by his wide travels. Prescriptions for orientation are caught between Platonic absolutes derived from consideration of the sun’s path and Aristotelian contingencies drawn from consideration of microclimatic effects. The interest in the human condition that characterized the Renaissance grew as the writings of the ancients became increasingly popular.8 Classical authorities had been known to mediaeval scholars, but now the ancients came to be seen as the measure against which the present age should be compared. For architects, the villa was an antique architectural form worthy of analysis and experiment. It provided a civilian alternative to the fortified città and the defensive rocca of the Italian countryside, and its study and refinement was a secular field of endeavour that carried the blessing of leading humanists. Personal comfort, too, became an issue for intellectual pursuit. Over the century after 1500, the villa first essayed by Sangallo for the Medici family was epitomized as a neat, compact, modish, upright building. Crossed by axes of light and ventilation, it was a cool, breezy, detached block, open to the landscape. The spectacular phenomenon of villa building in the sixteenth-century Veneto was influenced by many factors, not least the tumult and disease of city centres. Growing urban densities9 and the feuds between powerful families made cities unpleasant, when not actually dangerous. There were many minor outbreaks of plague less well known than the Black Death of 1346–50.10 The Peace of Bologna of 1529 guaranteed Venetian territorial security. The terrafirma could now be occupied in peace.11 After a war that had been expensive for both financier and trader, inland investment seemed a prudent alternative. While Venice’s importance as a trading nation declined,12 agriculture assumed great importance, as Alvise Cornaro’s idea of la santa agricoltura testifies.13 The enthusiasm for agriculture led to the formation in October 1556 of the Magistrati sopra i Beni Inculti, charged with promoting drainage in the hinterland. Schemes in the area around Palladio’s villas Poiana, Badoer, Pisani at 50

“Study the warm winds and the cold”

3.1 Palladio, Villa Saraceno at Finale (1548–56), South (entrance) front showing portico and opening to the central room

Montagnana and Pisani at Bagnolo transformed landscapes from uninhabitable marshland to the drained fields that characterize the Veneto today. The elevation and permeability to air that typifies the Venetian villa are in part simply a reaction to the swampy nature of the sixteenth-century Veneto.

Three villa architects For Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), building in a relatively limited geographical compass, design for climate was a matter of habituation, not of theory. Early in I quattro libri, he writes that he will ‘avoid being long-winded… and will make use of those terms widely used nowadays by craftsmen’.14 The reader is mostly

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told what to do, with the underlying theory given in gruff bursts, in which it is almost possible to hear the master speaking to the apprentice. The book is without Alberti’s long passages of discourse, and lacks Serlio’s relativism drawn from travel. Indeed, for Palladio, the matter of climatic adaptation is barely summarized. In the pressure of a busy architectural practice, Serlio’s profusion of ideas was transformed into a range of reliable ‘rules of thumb’ and patterns.16 But Palladio’s popular treatise gave the villa a fashionable appeal that in time carried the idea of the Venetian villa far beyond the area of its climatic relevance. Giovanni Domenico Scamozzi (1526–1582) was a surveyor and carpenter in Vicenza, but his son Vincenzo (1552–1616) progressed into an architectural career at the highest levels of society. The young Scamozzi worked initially in the office of the elderly Palladio and, after the latter’s death, completed many of his master’s projects, including the villa Almerico Capra ‘la Rotonda’ built c.1567– 91,17 the palazzos Porto Breganze (1571) and Thiene Bonin (c.1572–86),18 and the Teatro Olimpico (1580–4), a considerable body of work for any 34-year-old architect. Scamozzi was clearly aware of the success of Palladio’s treatise, and ventured early into print with Discorsi sopra l’antichita di Roma, a series of views of the ruins of Rome, in 1582.19 In the same year he was awarded the magnificent

52

3.2 Palladio, Villa Poiana Maggiore (1548–55). The villa is built well above the surrounding land, which was marshy until drained in the sixteenth century

3.3 Palladio, Villa Poiana at Poiana Maggiore (1548– 55). The cool draughty sala (hall) at the centre of the villa

“Study the warm winds and the cold”

commission for the Procuratie Nuove in Venice. And he and his father contributed to the first collected edition of Serlio’s books, published in 1584.20 Evidently Scamozzi intended his L’idea universale dell’architettura of 1615 to surpass both Serlio’s empiricism and Palladio’s borrowings from Alberti. Scamozzi’s book sets out to be exhaustive, referring to treatises by writers from all of Europe, including those of Johannes Blum, Philibert de l’Orme, and others,21 and far surpassing Vitruvius and Alberti in the minuteness of his discussion of every subject.22 Scamozzi’s idea of a universal approach to architecture was a bold move, and it gave his book a lot to live up to. The fact that it has been out of print for 390 years may give some idea of its popular success, if not of its undoubted quality.

Climate and the healthfulness of locality Villa builders, like city builders, are recommended by Alberti to choose a healthy site in a healthy region.23 It should be located, he writes, away from adverse climates, at the foot of mountains, in a well-watered and sunny spot, ‘where others have been enticed to settle by the fertility and climate’.24 Palladio too argues that a villa should be located in a healthy position, because ‘we stay in the country mainly in the summer when our bodies grow weak and sick because of the heat even in the healthiest spots’. Choice of site was a serious responsibility for the architect: ‘It is the business of the sensible architect to investigate and assess a convenient and healthy location with the greatest care and diligence.’25 Healthfulness was thought to depend on a number of factors including climate and the nature of the locality.26 Climate, Alberti writes, is affected by the relative angle of the sun to the earth, the ‘location and formation of the landscape’,27 and other mysterious factors. It influences ‘generation, growth, nourishment, and preservation’, and its effects, though annoying, are harmless: ‘either the sun is too excessive, the shade harsh, or the wind strong’. By contrast, the air associated with specific localities could be malign: ‘harmful vapours emanate from the ground’. Referring to the great concern of the ancients to ‘avoid a climate that might be disagreeable or unwholesome’, Albertini stresses that whilst ‘defects of land or water’ could be modified by a skilful architect,28 it was ‘hardly possible… to improve the climate by any human art’.29 Similarly, although sites by lakes and rivers were convenient for access and trade, water was believed to have injurious properties which could be carried some distance by air. Untreated water, Alberti writes, was responsible for a series of terrible afflictions:30 those without a clean supply would never enjoy a single day of happiness.31 Evidence for a general loathing of stagnant water is found in the comment that ‘any man of wisdom and experience would keep well away from a 53

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swamp or muddy and stagnant marsh’. However, unlike Varro – who had posited a theory of germs32 – Alberti does not comment on the mechanism of infection.33 Following Vitruvius, Alberti argues that a climate slightly windy, dry and cold34 is preferable to one still, hot or humid.35 Heat, it was thought, relaxed muscles and pores, allowing airborne poison to enter. Stagnant air, such as might be found in valleys, was not only unhealthy, but crucially, it ruins stored food and other goods.36 Places with ‘gloomy weather and murky days’ are thus to be avoided, likewise those with ‘sudden temperature changes from hot to cold’.37 Similarly, Alberti warns against coastal sites, explaining that the sea breeze ‘is noticeably coarse and heavy with salt… [and] excessively thick and almost mucuslike’. Sea salt ‘corrupts [the air] and causes it to give off a foul stench’. Admitting that a view of the sea ‘can be quite delightful’ and that the climate there is not always unhealthy, he nevertheless recommends a location high on cliffs, so that ‘any dense vapours that might arise will be broken down by the ascent’.38 These fears of seaside air remained constant until the modern craze for sea-bathing began in the early eighteenth century.39 Palladio also advises the architect to select as a precaution an elevated site, where ‘the earth, by its declivity, [is] purged of ill vapours and moisture… the inhabitants are healthy and cheerful, and preserve a good colour, and are not molested by gnats and other small animals, which are generated by the putrefaction of still fenny waters.’40 Written a century and a half after Alberti, Scamozzi’s Book II deals in detail with climate, but now in a more scientific matter. Climatic difference, Scamozzi says, follows from the relative angle of the sun to the earth’s surface, defining the five familiar global Zones corresponding to the seasonal path of the sun.41 Alberti had recommended that the architect ‘consider the quality and angle of the sun to which a locality is exposed’,42 but for Scamozzi the sun’s effects are universal. Thus by reason of latitude alone, the countries corresponding to the Roman Empire were by nature ‘endowed with goodness and beauty’,43 while other places in the world were either too hot or too cold.44 Rome, as it happened, was perfectly located at 45 degrees of latitude. However, although New Spain in the West Indies was known to be unpleasant, the climate in lands south of the Equator could be expected to be perfectly healthy: ‘living there is very comfortable, as is apparent through the experiences of discovering the New World’.45 Scamozzi’s mentions of the New World are not included for novelty’s sake,46 but to illustrate ‘the triumph of experience over authority’ that the age of navigation brought with it: an understanding that the causes and effects of climate are universal.47 Such relativism and universality was a marked change from the prescriptive nature of earlier authors, and may be seen as an early sign of Enlightenment in Italy. Although, by Scamozzi’s time, Cartesian processes of enquiry had brought a more detailed understanding of climate, healthiness of air was still 54

“Study the warm winds and the cold”

believed to follow upon the microclimatic effects of mountains, plains, seas, lakes or rivers.48 Scamozzi associates a wide variety of debilitating effects with unhealthy air: oppression of the head, swelling of the brain, slowing of the digestion, general debility, lassitude, tiredness, sloth and immobility. Positive effects followed from good air: the flowering of ancient Greek culture, for example, is explained as following from the good air which the Greeks enjoyed. Like Italy and much of France, Greece was a place where, ‘the Winds blow pleasantly[,] renovating the Air; so as to eliminate the bad and vitiating qualities, and leave it much better.’49 Because the malign effects of a locality could not be avoided, Scamozzi argues that the architect’s most important consideration is that the locality be healthy: ‘in any place, which suggests itself as the site for building, the greatest regard must be had, to the healthiness of the Air, which without doubt, is the second mother of the living, and conservor of everything.’50 Both comfortable living conditions and the preservation of food stocks in cellars and granaries were at stake. The architect’s role in the selection of a healthy locality for a villa was therefore based not on fears of an unattractive climate, but on the very survival of the inhabitants.

Climate as a determinant of Renaissance plan form Throughout his Books VI and VII, Serlio threads a series of comments explaining the importance of climate as a determinant of form. A number of the plans in Book VII include a large central room isolated from the external walls, a strange sight to modern eyes accustomed to sunlit living rooms. Alberti had explained the rationale of such large hidden volumes: If it is impossible to arrange the parts as you might wish, reserve the most comfortable for the summer. To my mind, anyone who is constructing a building will construct it for summer use, if he has any sense; for it is easy enough to cater for winter: shut all openings, and light the fire; but to combat heat, much is to be done, and not always to great effect.51 A room of this nature forms the central space in Sangallo’s villa Medici at Poggio a Caiano of 1486. Serlio explains that the shadowy central hall or sala in his house plans was a useful retreat in the heat of the Italian summer. Of his eighth house he notes that:

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This house is very livable, and convenient, and on the other hand good for the summer: the sala will be very cold for being hardly struck by the Sun.52 Of another he observes that: Some will doubt, that this house will be well lit in the middle, due to the great length of the passage. Of this there is no [need] to doubt, because the doors will be open all day: further because there will be windows above it. Next, this dwelling is the sort you inhabit in summer. Because of that this [house] will be very cool, and the middle parts retired from the sun.53 Elsewhere in Book VII, Serlio suggests that terraces and loggias offered much more than just places to pause before entering. They were rather another defense against the sun:54 In the middle of the sala there is a door, through which one enters a terrace… This is uncovered, to give greater light to the sala, and is the

same 3.4 Serlio, Book VII, palazzo per fare alla villa. Note the central room B retired from the sun. A and L are terraces, H corridors.

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size as the loggia… In the other corner of the sala will be a matching camera and camerino and at the head of the sala a matching passage, and each passage will have its own entrance. In this manner the sala is always cool, and hidden from the Sun on each side.55 In his sixth book Serlio argues that the rules given by Vitruvius for determining room heights made rooms too high, excusing his departures from Vitruvian norms with the statement that ‘I have found my own rule from experience’.56 His own rule is very simple, and calculated to produce rather lower rooms. Entrances and loggias should be ‘twice as high as they are wide’, reception rooms, small rooms, and bedrooms ‘the same height [as width]’.57 Thus Serlio’s rooms are not as high as those of Vitruvius or Alberti; but they are still lofty. The twelfth house has ceilings of some 22 feet high over the main rooms – a sala in each wing and four camere – which he defends as follows: Such heights are made for two reasons, the first because such lodgings have to be adopted in summer, for great heat: and therefore we want the major rooms to be high. The other reason is, that I am going to [ammezzata = place a mezzanine in] a great part of the rooms: they will be higher to discharge the heat: and finally[,] if you don’t want so much height, lower the lot in proportion as is your wish.58 Palladio repeats Serlio’s seven desirable plan proportions59 with three methods for setting their height.60 Unlike Serlio, ceilings in Palladio’s houses are proportionately very lofty: never lower than the width of the room, and often higher.

Prescriptions for planning Serlio, Palladio and Scamozzi convey information in both by example – providing a plan and discussing its details – and by abstract theoretical prescriptions. Alberti had warned that the ‘compartition’ of the building into rooms was an exercise demanding the greatest skill and experience. The architect should draw a parallel with the ‘moderation shown by nature’, to create ‘a single, integral, and well-composed body’.61 Every element of a building was ‘born of necessity, nourished by convenience, dignified by use’, and every room should be ‘in the correct zone and position’, and ‘no larger than utility requires, no smaller than dignity demands, nor… strange and unsuitable, but right and proper, so that none could be better’.62

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Palladio, following Alberti, opens his treatise with a quotation of the Vitruvian triad.63 Like Alberti, Palladio equates ‘commodity’ with an Aristotelian idea of fitness for purpose: One must describe as suitable a house which will be appropriate to the status of the person who will have to live in it and of which the parts will correspond to the whole and to each other.64 It is within this broad framework of fitness for purpose that prescriptions about orientation are made. Alberti reports – while not endorsing – a Classical rule that ‘a villa must face the sunrise at equinox [i.e. East]’,65 and repeats Vitruvius’s recommendations for orientation of rooms, with the proviso that these may ‘vary from place to place, according to climate and regional characteristics’.66 For Alberti the issue of orientation is not absolute, but relative: ‘comments about the sun and the breezes vary from region to region’.67 Nevertheless his closing advice for house builders consists almost entirely of prescriptions for orientation. It seems that prescription always trumps a relativistic response to circumstances of location: Parts that require light until dusk, such as reception halls, passageways, and, in particular, libraries, should face the direction of the sunset at equinox [West]. Anything at risk from moths, mustiness, mould, or rust, such as clothes, books, tools, seed, and any form of food, should be kept in the east or south side of the house. Anywhere an even light is required by the painter, writer or sculptor should lie on the north side. Finally, all summer rooms to receive Boreas [North wind], all winter ones to the south; spring and autumn ones toward the sunrise [East]; make the baths and spring dining rooms face the sunset [West].68 Palladio, by contrast, blends Vitruvian prescriptions for orientation, Alberti’s idea of large and small rooms for summer and winter, and Serlio’s prescription for the design of summer rooms, to produce principles applicable to any room: It would also contribute to comfort if the summer rooms were large and spacious and oriented to the north, and those for the winter to the south and west and were small rather than otherwise, because in the summer we seek the shade and breezes, and in the winter, the sun, and smaller rooms get warmer more readily than large ones. Other rooms should be specialized for mornings, and for autumn and winter: 58

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those [rooms] we would want to use in the spring and autumn will be oriented to the east and look out over gardens and greenery. Studies and libraries should be in the same part of the house because they are used in the morning more than at any other time.69 For Palladio the proportioning of windows to the size of the rooms was also an important part of the climatic adaptation of the villa, because, If the windows are made smaller and less numerous than necessary, [the rooms] will be made gloomy; and if they are made too large the rooms are practically uninhabitable because, since cold and hot air can get in, they will be be extremely hot or cold depending on the seasons of the year, at least if the region of the sky to which they are oriented does not afford some relief.70 Nevertheless, he proceeds without further reference to orientation to rule that all the windows on a floor should be the same size as those of the largest room in the suite. Still, window widths obtained by his methods are relatively small, only 20–25 per cent of the width of the room.71 Scamozzi diverges from previous writers to discuss orientation in detail. Wherever possible, he says, the facades of both city houses and villas should face south because ‘in the greater part of the day you can go to it without being offended, or [having] the eyes dazzled by the Sun’s rays’, but also because ‘the building is conserved longer in its beauty, and purity, not being on this side so easily spotted [with mildew], nor corrupted, nor the ceramics and other delicacies ruined, as would be on the Northern side.’72 Desire for a southern aspect should, however, be balanced with consideration of the available views, and of the means of access. For this purpose, gentlemen builders should avoid north-south streets – which presuppose houses facing east and west – instead selecting streets ‘going from East to West’ in which ‘one part… has a southern aspect, and the other to the North.’73 Orientation is also explained by reference to the quality of the respective airs. Thus a northern aspect is recommended for summer rooms, as the northern air was always pure, light, and fresh, ‘whence they turn out very well for inhabiting in Summer time’. Eastern air was very temperate, and there the ancients ‘would make their habitations, [those] for the father, and mother of the family, libraries and similar places’. Western air, by contrast, was, ‘hottest in the Summer time and makes the Rooms difficult to inhabit: it gets hot towards the evening, and maintains them so the better part of the night, because of the impact already made by the Sun’.74

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3.5 Palladio, Villa Pisani at Montagnana (1552), shutters over the South (front) door. Scamozzi argues that orientation to the sun is more important than consideration of the winds, as shutters can easily be used to moderate the effects of harmful breezes

Southern air, as Alberti had noted, was still not considered healthy. Nonetheless, for Scamozzi it was the preferred orientation for the major spaces, although he notes that: In this aspect we make the entrance halls, the Loggias, the Halls, the Sitting rooms, and similar places: which are not inhabited continuously; but serve for entertainment some hours of the day; and for this reason might not receive much harm.75 The architect’s primary attention should thus be given to solar orientation: much more regard is to be had to the Sun’s path, of which the effects to the house are most times irremediable: because it heats up the ground, the Walls, and the roofs of the building, and even the Air. By contrast, for Scamozzi the winds were ‘accidental’, but it was ‘possible to moderate [their effects] by closing the windows, and other things’.77 Indeed, Italian practice has been to close shutters during daylight hours to stabilize internal temperatures, since Pliny’s time.78

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3..6 Palladio, Villa Badoera at Fratta Polesine (1548–55). East (entrance) front showing open breezeway through the central sala

“Study the warm winds and the cold”

3.7 Palladio, Villa Badoera at Fratta Polesine (1548–55). The entrance door, looking into the central sala. Unusually this villa faces east-west. Palladio shows a second loggia on the west (rear) face, never built, which would have further shaded the interior 3.8 Palladio, Villa Badoera at Fratta Polesine (1548–55). The alignment of doors and windows throughout the building provides both beauty and fresh air, according

Symmetry and ventilation By the early sixteenth century, reflective symmetry had become a ubiquitous principle for all types of buildings.79 For Palladio, unlike Vitruvius, reflective symmetry is not merely implied by allusion to the body, but frankly spelled out as a structural and climatic imperative. Palladio advises choosing an even number of columns – odd number of spaces – so that the front door may be in the centre of the façade: an arrangement which presupposes a symmetrical plan.80 In another passage he writes that rooms ‘must be distributed at either side of the entrance and the hall, and one must ensure that those on the right correspond and are equal to those on the left’, explaining it in terms of structural balance.81 But the reflective symmetry applies to more than rooms. Reflection tends to create alignment of openings, which facilitates ventilation: Windows at the right hand must correspond to those on the left and those in the upper storey must be vertically above those below; similarly all the doors must be vertically above one another so that there will be void above void and solid above solid; they should also face each another so that someone standing in one part of the house is

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3.9 Sangallo, Villa Ambra at Poggio a Caiano (1485–), designed by Lorenzo de’Medici and Giuliano da Sangallo, reportedly incorporating ideas from Alberti’s Ten Books on Architecture, then being published for the first time. The very high ceiling of the central sala was a model for Serlio, Palladio and others following them

able to see across to the other, which brings beauty and fresh air in summer and other advantages.82 Palladio was architect of some 95 projects in his working life,83 and the ubiquity of reflective symmetry in his plans – compared to those of his mason peers – reflects a change in the role of the architect, from supervising master 62

“Study the warm winds and the cold”

among masons, to detached professional with total control over the geometry of the design.84 The villa became a densely wrought geometrical exercise: a smooth exterior concealing a wealth of intricate mathematical relationships.85 I quattro libri, as with the many treatises which followed it, serves as notice to all aspirant architects to polish up their geometrical and mathematical skills. For Scamozzi too, a house should be symmetrical, and there should be a view from front through to the rear.86 Scamozzi, however, takes symmetry from the particular – room proportions – to the universal – plan grids. In L’Idea, although built houses are depicted ‘as built’,87 reconstructions are comprehensively geometrical, treated as an opportunity to introduce his principle of planning by the ‘method of spaces’.88 The ‘method of spaces’ simplifies the considerable problem of ensuring that windows are centred between pilasters externally, and in rooms internally. Scamozzi’s solution, in regular use in architectural practice to this day, is to centre all internal walls and all columns on a grid of invisible lines, with windows centred between them in turn.89 The principle is best illustrated in his reconstructions of Pliny’s villa, which he shows as a rigorously modular structure.90 The effect is to create precise alignments of openings throughout a building so planned, ensuring ventilation axes remain aligned however complex the arrangement of rooms. This was a striking advance of great influence on following generations of architects.

The detached house For all the four writers we have examined, the villa is a detached building, a resort to preserve health. The isolation which healthiness required provided an opportunity to perfect the relationship with climate. The many prescriptions for orientation and so on are typical of the central concern with absolute solutions which characterizes the architecture of the Renaissance.91 The legacy of published treatises ensured that curious visitors from northern Europe would come to investigate their built works, to contrast their absolute climatic principles with built models for a particular climate, to ponder the relative value of other cultures: to Enlighten themselves. The delicate, open, upright Venetian house, bred from the desire for sanitizing ventilation, rising above the unfamiliar soil, and grown soft in the luxury of an absolute lack of need for defence, became in time a model for colonial villas around the globe. The planning innovation of living space on one level surveying the surrounding landscape in all directions, cautiously essayed in the fifteenth century at Poggio Reale near Naples and at Poggio a Caiano outside Florence, was embraced with conviction in the relaxed Veneto villas of the sixteenth century.

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The hipped roof, an architectural symbol of detachment, became fashionable wherever Palladio’s treatise was read. The large cool central room and rigorously aligned openings became elements in the formal language of the Renaissance villa plan. Inevitably, given its high cultural associations, the built form of the Italian villa was of great persuasiveness. The stylishness of these villas was to carry the principles underlying their planning far beyond the places for which they had been designed. The idea it encapsulated, of a relaxed healthy suburban existence, was to colonize the cultures of the globe, including the England of Inigo Jones, and eventually the New World.

Building for health, not comfort The Hippocratic idea that disease was engendered in particular localities and transmitted by air persisted over two and a half millennia. As we have seen, swamps in particular were greatly feared, while heat and humidity were thought to be intrinsically dangerous. By opening the pores, the heat allowed disease to enter the body. Wise architects sought to create cool and dry conditions for summer by means of huge dimly lit rooms at the centre of the house plan. The implications of a belief in the healthfulness of locality had great influence on the plan form of villas in humid locations, particularly near swamps. In areas thought to suffer from bad air, villa designers sought to create a cool, dark and well-ventilated space at the heart of the house. Villas were, it seems clear, designed as much for health as for comfort.

Notes 1

While Hippocrates of Cos (c.460–337BC) is a historical figure, many texts are attributed to him that may not be authentic. Chadwick and Mann (trans.), Hippocratic Writings, 1978/93, introduction.

2

The working life of Empedocles was from c.477 to c.432BC. Wright, 1995, introduction.

3

Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places 1; in Chadwick and Mann, 1978/93, p 148.

4

Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places 7; in Chadwick and Mann, 1978/93, p 152.

5

Holberton, 1990, p 111, p 136–7, is one of the few recent writers on the villa to accord the matter any consideration. On p 88, he reports Alvise Cornaro’s comments on the benefits of draining swamps in averting the malaria which had devastated Torcello.

6

Vitruvius’s image of the ‘house as city, city as house’ means that discussion about the sites of cities is relevant to a discussion of houses and vice versa.

7

Studies of traditional Veneto building by Candida, 1959; Kubelik, 1977; Cevese, 1980; Kubelik, 1985; and Goy, 1989, make apparent the ubiquity of the ‘Venetian house’ plan pattern in buildings of the Early Modern period. Candida and other early authors have been criticized for a lack of historical analysis, for use of a narrow typological methodology and for presenting vernacular architecture as a homogeneous mass. Kubelik’s exhaustive historically based 1977 study of fifteenth-century Veneto villas appeared to resolve questions of chronology. However, despite

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Kubelik’s seemingly overwhelming evidence, this view is not accepted by all writers on the subject. Lazzaro, 1985, argues that it is an Italian rural type rather than a traditional Veneto pattern, used by both local masons and architects for farm houses in various parts of Italy. Boucher, 1994, p 76, does not accept that there was such a plan type in traditional building at all. 8

Davies, 1997, p 477. Interest in Greek authorities was spurred after 1453 by the arrival, with

9

Alvise Cornaro noted that the population of Venice doubled in the half century after 1500;

refugees, of ancient Greek manuscripts. Cosgrove, 1993, p 163. 10

Palladio’s great Venetian church Il Redentore was built after one such outbreak in September 1576; Constant, 1988, p 123.

11 12

Cosgrove, 1993, p 35. New foodstuffs were brought from the Americas, but not in Venetian ships. Imports such as beans, tomatoes and maize became central to the cucina of some Italian regions. Holberton, 1990, discusses agricultural change at length, but not gastronomy.

13

Cosgrove, 1993, p 156, argues that Venetian farms were relatively unprofitable, as they preferred expensive drainage schemes to the profitable irrigation favoured by natives of the Terrafirma.

14

Palladio, 1570, Preface, p 6; Tavernor & Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 6.

15

In the sense that Alexander et al, 1977, use the word.

16

The house was recorded as ‘incomplete and open to the sky’ in 1591; Cosgrove, 1993, p 133.

17

Puppi, 1973/89, p 244; citing Bertotti Scamozzi, 1761, p 56, and Ackerman, 1966/77, II, pp 60–1.

18

The work antedates Piranesi’s better known views by some 80 years.

19

From Tavernor, 1991, pp 106–7, with reference to Puppi, 1973/89, Constant, 1985/87, and Battilotti, 1990. The projects are all somewhat outside Palladio’s usual range: the possible reinvigorating influence of the young man’s ideas should not be overlooked.

20 21

Scamozzi, 1615, I / VI, p 18. Scamozzi, 1615, Proemio Della Prima Parte. L’idea dell architettura universale has never been translated; it is still only available in the original Italian editions, already considered ‘very rare’ by 1789 (see Smyth, Introduction to Aldrich, Dean, 1708/1789, p 71.)

22

‘almost everything relevant to the establishment of a city must be taken into account: it should be extremely healthy, it should offer every facility and every convenience to contribute to a peaceful, tranquil, and refined life’. Alberti, 1486, V / 14; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 140.

23

He does not consider this a necessity, however, noting that: ‘I would prefer to locate the house of a gentleman somewhere dignified, rather than in a particularly fertile stretch of land, where it could enjoy all the benefit and delight of breeze, sun, and view’. Alberti, 1486, V / 17; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 145.

24 25

All from Palladio, 1570, II / XII p 45; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 121. Alberti’s approach presupposes a domain of kingly proportions: ordinary citizens would be limited by whatever land was available. Other considerations include the proximity of good agricultural land. Cities, and thus by analogy villas, should be walled off from rivers south of towns. By contrast, breezes arising from rivers to the east or west of the city ‘will either disperse any harmful fumes passing through the city, or, with their arrival, do little to increase them’. Alberti, 1486, IV / 2; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 99.

26

As is indeed the case for microclimates.

27

Alberti, 1486, I / 3; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 9. Evidently he believes it to be the air itself which affects health rather than airborne organisms.

28

Alberti, 1486, X / 1; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, pp 322–3.

29

Black bile, dropsy, asthma, pleurisy, etc.

30

Alberti, 1486, I / 4; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 14.

31

‘XII. Especial care should be taken, in locating the steading, to place it… so as to be exposed to the most healthful winds that blow in the region… Precautions must also be taken in the

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neighbourhood of swamps, both for the reasons given, and because there are bred certain minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which float in the air and enter the body through the mouth and nose and there cause serious diseases’. Varro, I / XII; Page et al, (eds), p 208: 32

Swamps, he says, ‘even if they appear otherwise extremely clean and pure’, will be found very undesirable: ‘besides the pestilence inherent during the summer, the stench, mosquitoes, and other similarly foul vermin… they grow extremely cold in winter and rage with excessive heat in summer’. Alberti, 1486, IV / 2; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 100. Alberti notes Varro’s warning about ‘tiny atomlike creatures… which flit about in the atmosphere’; Alberti, 1486, I / 6; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 17.

33

Exactly the conditions that were produced in the lofty, dim, draughty sala at the heart of the villa.

34

Alberti, 1486, I / 4; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 12.

35

Alberti, 1486, I / 4; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 13.

36

Alberti, 1486, I / 3; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 10.

37

Alberti, 1486, IV / 2; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 98.

38

Promoted by both doctors and property developers.

39

Palladio presumably derives this observation from Alberti rather than Varro. He adds the reference to ‘generation’ of these creatures, evidence for the widespread belief in spontaneous generation.

40

Two Frigid, two Temperate, and one Torrid.

41

Alberti, 1486, I / 3; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 10.

42

i.e. Egypt, Greece, Alexandria, the cities of Venice and Constantinople, France from Turenne to Ligieri [Liège?], especially Blois and Amboise, and most of Italy including Rome. France is described as ‘very superior, thus for the temperateness of the Air’, and French national temperament is said to be the result of climate: ‘vivacious spirit, and quick; but in reality very unstable, whence very easily [drawn to] novelty and change of things…’. Scamozzi, 1615, II / III pp 100–3.

43

i.e. Africa, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Gothic regions of Sweden, Thule [Iceland?], Moscow, the Swiss Alps, the nations of the Goths and Ostrogoths, Huns and Vandals, Spain, Hungary, and so on. Scamozzi, 1615, II / III pp 103–8.

44

Scamozzi, 1615, II / I, p 98. Contrary to Aristotle.

45

They are apparently the first in any architectural treatise.

46

Rennie, 1996, p 30.

47

Scamozzi, 1615, II / I, p 98, II / X-XI, pp 127–32. Scamozzi identifies the Ganges as the largest river in the world, next the Indus, then the Danube, Nile and so on. Mention is also made of ‘the Thames, finishing close to London’, all evidence of a world much expanded over the preceding century and a half. ‘Great detail’ typifies Scamozzi’s approach, often to the detriment of readability: the book suffers from his desire to list everything relevant in every instance.

48

Both from Scamozzi, 1615, II / XIII, p 136.

49

Scamozzi, 1615, III / I, p 224.

50

Alberti, 1486, V / 18; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 153. This property was used in antiquity. Underground porticoes and vaults, Alberti says, ‘which receive light only from the top’, produced reservoirs of cool air for adjoining rooms: ‘Excavate the area of the dining room to a depth of twelve feet, and then cover it with boarding; if you lay a pavement with a revetment, this will make the air inside cooler than you could ever imagine.’ In other cases large volumes, carefully oriented, ‘which received shady air from covered places’, would suffice. Alberti, 1486, V / 17; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 147. Palladio describes the villa Trenti at Costozza, not one of his own, where underground ventidotti carried cool air from limestone caves to the rooms of the villa in summer. Palladio, 1570, I / XXVII p 60; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 64.

51

Serlio, VII / 8, 1619/1964, p 16.

52

Serlio, VII / 6, 1619/1964, p 240. This house he intends as a replacement for the famous sixth house with its Bramantesque exedra; evidence that for Serlio climatic considerations were significant.

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53

Serlio expands on the importance of the loggia in describing his nineteenth house. The house is small, but has a large front loggia and rear terrace, each embraced by projecting rooms. Loggias, he says, are desirable in any country house, however small: ‘Loggias, in the country, will be a great deal better good looking than [plain] facades: since virtù is thereby extended. And entering the shade through these arches, accompanied by more delight, that does not make [one] admire a completely plain facade beyond which you are not able to penetrate further. Because of [this], I wanted to demonstrate a house with little accommodation, but beautiful in appearance.’ Serlio, VII / 19, 1619/1964, p 46.

54

Serlio, VII / 1, 1619/1964, p 202. Serlio’s comments here can perhaps be taken to suggest that the loggia and terrace face north and south respectively.

55

Serlio, Book VI, Munich ms, conclusion; Codex Icon. 189, fol. 74r, lines 20–2. Trans. Rosenfeld M. R. in Serlio; Rosenfeld (ed.), 1978, p 64.

56

Serlio, Book VI, Munich ms, conclusion; Codex Icon. 189, fol. 74r, lines 22–3. Trans. Rosenfeld M. R. in Serlio; Rosenfeld (ed.), 1978, p 65.

57 58

Serlio, VII / 12, 1619/1964, p 26. i.e. circular, square, 1:v2, 3:4, 2:3, 3:5, and 1:2. Palladio, 1570, I/XXI p 52; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 57.

59

Palladio, 1570, I/XXII pp 53–54; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, pp 58–59.

60

Alberti, 1486, I / 9; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 24.

61

Alberti, 1486, I / 9; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 23.

62

Neither Alberti nor Palladio mention Vitruvius’s fundamental principles: Order, Arrangement, Eurythmy, Symmetry, Propriety and Economy. Vitruvius, I / II; Morgan, M. H. (trans.), 1914/60, p 13.

63 64

Palladio, 1570, II / I p 3; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 77. Alberti, 1486, V / 14; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 141. Unusually, Rykwert does not provide a footnote. The rule is from Varro I / XII, Page et al (trans.), 1934, p 208; and Columella I / II, I / V; Page et al (trans.), 1942, p 41, p 61.

65

That is, winter bedrooms face the winter sunrise [South-East] and winter dining rooms the sunset at equinox [West]; summer bedrooms face the midday sun [South], summer dining rooms the winter sunrise [South-East]; colonnades the midday sun [South].

66

Alberti, 1486, V / 14; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 141. In this as in other matters Alberti does not hesitate to make rules which conflict with those of Vitruvius. Rykwert perhaps overdraws the distinction between Vitruvius as recording ‘a passing epoch’ and Alberti as ‘consciously setting out on a fresh enterprise’. Vitruvius lived in a time of renewed interest in building, just as Alberti did. The real difference between the two is that Vitruvius, like Palladio, was a busy practitioner using ‘rules of thumb’ on a daily basis, whereas Alberti built only portions of a few projects Still, although he might disagree with Vitruvius, Alberti is never far from a Classical authority to justify his position. Alberti, 1486; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, Introduction, p ix.

67

Alberti, 1486, V / 18; Rykwert et al (trans.), 1988/94, p 153.

68

Both from Palladio, 1570, II / II p 4; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 78.

69

Palladio, 1570, I / XXV p 55; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997 p 60.

70

Palladio, 1570, I / XXV p 55; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 60.

71

Scamozzi, 1615, III / I, p 225.

72

Scamozzi, 1615, III / IX, p 254.

73

All from Scamozzi, 1615, III / I, p 225–6.

74

Scamozzi, 1615, III / I, p 225.

75

Scamozzi, 1615, III / I, p 226. Fynes Moryson, who went to Italy in 1591, notes that ‘In the private houses of the [noble families], the windows of the larger rooms are open to the air… but the lodging chambers have glasse windowes, whereof the Venetians brag, glasse being rare in Italy, where the windows are for the most part covered with linnen or paper.’ Quoted in Sells, 1964, p 151.

76

Pliny, II / 17; Radice (trans.), 1963/9, p 78.

77

Hersey, 1992, p 32.

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78 79

Palladio, 1570, I / XIII, p 16; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 19. Palladio, 1570, I / XXI, p 52; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 57. Certainly, balance was necessary on the soft silty soils of the Venetian lagoon. Goy, 1989, pp 35–7, p 47.

80 81

Palladio, 1570, I / XXV, p 55; Tavernor and Schofield (trans.), 1997, p 60. Hersey, 1992, p 122, compares this to an average of 25.4 projects each for seven of his contemporaries. Palladio was thus sometimes difficult to contact: Burns et al, 1975, report his client’s complaints, and Palladio’s apologetic responses. He was not well paid, not entering the lowest taxable bracket until the age of 50, (Burns et al, 1975, p 69); and frequently required advances on his stipend for the Basilica project; Boucher,1994, p 120. Burns et al, 1975, p 74, sees these advances as evidence of his standing in the community.

82

Compare for example the successive changes to set-out geometry made by itinerant masons during the construction of the apse of Chartres cathedral; reported by James, 1981.

83

In some cases reflection is obviously the starting point of the published design. Palladio’s illustrated plan of the villa Sarego appears to have been derived from a reflection of the built fragments around a central axis to produce a hypothetical plan of rigorous reflective symmetry.

84

‘così a destra, come a sinistra’; Scamozzi, 1615, III / IX, p 255. Scamozzi is here referring to the city house, but the universality of the principle is clear.

85

With compass rose and scale of piedi, with small built asymmetries, and with minor elements such as chimneys included.

86 87

Scamozzi, 1615, III / I, p 225. The matter is discussed at length by Hersey, 1976, p 161. Corresponding to Alberti’s lineaments, to which concept Scamozzi refers early in his treatise (although he does not ascribe it to Alberti). Scamozzi, 1615, I / XVI, p 52.

88

Such as that of Pliny’s Laurentian villa. Scamozzi, 1615, III / XII, pp 266–280 [sic=270].

89

Rykwert, 1983/91, p 12.

Bibliography Ackerman, James S. (1966; 2nd edition 1977) Palladio, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Alberti, Leon Battista (1486): Rykwert, Joseph, Leach, Neil and Tavernor, Robert (trans) (1988/94) On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press Aldrich, Henry, D. D., Dean of Christ Church (1708) Elementorum Architecturae: Smyth, P., Rev. (trans.) (1789, 2nd edition 1818) The Elements of Civil Architecture, Oxford: J. Parker Alexander, Christopher, et al (1977) A Pattern Language, Towns, Buildings, Construction, Oxford: Oxford University Press Battilotti, Donata; Sadleir, Richard, (trans.) (1990) The Villas of Palladio, Milano: Electa Artistic Guides Boucher, Bruce (1994) Andrea Palladio, New York: Abbeville Press Burns, Howard, Fairbairn, Linda and Boucher, Bruce (1975) Andrea Palladio 1508–1580: the portico and the farmyard (exh. cat.) Arts Council of Great Britain: London Candida, Luigi (1959) ‘La casa rurale nella pianura e nella collina veneta’, in Olschi, Leo S., (ed.), Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche: Richerche sulle dimore rurali in Italia [A 29-volume series running from 1938 to 1970] Volume 20, Firenze Cevese, Renato (2nd edition 1980) Ville della provincia di Vicenza, Milano: Rusconi Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus, Res Rustica; Page, T.E., et al (eds) (1942) London: Loeb Classical Library and Heinemann Constant, Caroline (1985; 2nd edition 1987) The Palladio Guide, London: Butterworth Cosgrove, Denis E. (1993) The Palladian Landscape, geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth century Italy, London: Leicester University Press Davies, Norman (1997) Europe, A History, London: Pimlico

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Goy, Richard J. (1989) Venetian Vernacular Architecture: traditional housing in the Venetian lagoon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Hersey, George L. (1976) Pythagorean Palaces; Magic and Architecture in the Italian Renaissance, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press Hersey, George L. (1992) Possible Palladian Villas – and some instructively impossible ones, Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press Hippocrates; Chadwick, J., and Mann, W. N. (trans) (1978/93), Hippocratic Writings, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Holberton, Paul (1990) Palladio’s Villas: Life in the Renaissance Countryside, London: John Murray James, John (1981) The Contractors of Chartres, Wyong NSW: Mandorla Kubelik, Martin (1977/85) Die Villa im Veneto, Munich: Süddeutscher Verlag Lazzaro, Claudia (1985) ‘Rustic Country House to Refined Farmhouse: The Evolution and Migration of an Architectural Form’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians XLIV, 4: 346–67 Palladio, Andrea (1570) I Quattro libri dell’architettura di Andrea Palladio, Venice, 1570; Facsimile reprint (1990) Milan: Ulrico Hoepli Palladio, Andrea; Tavernor, Robert and Schofield, Richard (trans) (1997), The Four Books on Architecture, Cambridge MA: MIT Press Pliny: Radice, Betty (trans.) (1963; 2nd revised edition 1969) The letters of the Younger Pliny, London: Penguin Books Puppi, Lionello (1973) Andrea Palladio: The Complete Works, Milan: Electa; Sanders, Pearl (trans.) (1975; 2nd edition 1989), London: Faber & Faber Rennie, Neil (1996) Far Fetched Facts, the literature of travel and the idea of the South Seas, Oxford: Clarendon Press Rykwert, Joseph (1983/91) The First Moderns, The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge MA: MIT Press Scamozzi, Ottavio Bertotti (1761) Le Fabbriche e i disegni di A. Palladio …, Vicenza Scamozzi, Vicenzo [sic] (1582) Discorsi sopra l’antichita di Roma, Venice: Francesco Ziletti Scamozzi, Vincenzo (1615) L’idea dell’architettura universale di Vincenzo Scamozzi, architetto veneto, divisa in X. libri, Venice: Giorgio Valentino Sells, Prof. A. Lytton (1964) The Paradise of Travellers, London: George Allen & Unwin Serlio, Sebastiano (1584 ) Tutte l’opere d’architettura di Sebastiano Serlio, Bolognese; dove si trattano in disegno, quelle cose, che sono più necessarie all Architetto; Et hora di nuovo aggiunto (oltre il libro delle porte) gran numero do case private nell Città, & in villa, Et un’ indice copiosissimo Raccolta per via di considerationi, da M. Gio. Domenico Scamozzi, 7 books, Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi Senese Serlio, Sebastiano, Tutte l’opere d’architettura di S. Serlio… (1964) 7 books, Venice, 1619 edition; Photographic reprint of copy once in the possession of Inigo Jones and John Webb, Ridgewood NJ: Gregg Press Serlio, Sebastiano, Book VI, (ms); Rosenfeld, Myra Nan (ed.) (1978) Sebastiano Serlio on Domestic Architecture, Different Dwellings from the Meanest Hovel to the Most Ornate Palace, Cambridge MA: The AH Foundation and MIT Press Serlio, Sebastiano; Hart, Vaughan, and Hicks, Peter (trans) (1996) Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, Volume 1, Books I-V of ‘Tutte L’Opere d’Architettura et Prospetiva’, New Haven: Yale Tavernor, Robert (1991) Palladio and Palladianism, London: Thames and Hudson Varro, Marcus Terentius, Res Rusticae; Page, T.E., Capps, E., and Rouse, W.H.D. (trans & eds) (1934) London: Loeb Classical Library and Heinemann Vitruvius: Morgan, Matthew H. (trans.) (1914) Ten Books on Architecture, Harvard University Press; facsimile edition (1960) New York: Dover Books Wright, M.R. (ed.) (1995) Empedocles, The Extant Fragments, London: Penguin Books

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Chapter 4

The role of the winds in architectural theory from Vitruvius to Scamozzi1 1

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Plain common sense suggests that we should live in clean, healthy and safe environments. Thus, all architectural treatises from the time of Vitruvius onwards discuss in greater or lesser detail where we should found our cities, and observe that the climate should be temperate, the air not too hot and not too cold, the winds fresh and that they should be in regions of abundant water supply. The disarming simplicity of these Hippocratic requirements needs no specific comment, or so it seems. Yet we should ask ourselves why Vitruvius and many architects who came after him invested so much energy in discussing these matters if they are obvious or irrelevant. A first answer is that the winds have always played a major role in people’s lives, physically as well as metaphorically: humans live and build their institutions on terra firma, but the metaphor of their troubled destinies fulfills itself completely only on the open sea, where our boat sails with and against the unpredictable capricious force of the winds. The threat of shipwreck and the hope represented by the harbor resurface periodically as images of mortal danger and salvation in western art, literature and philosophy, from Homer and Lucretius to Voltaire and Schopenhauer.2 A second reason for an abiding fascination with the winds was their ambiguous status: different theories existed about their origin; nobody knew exactly where they came from or how they moved in the sublunary world;3 70

The role of the winds in architectural theory from Vitruvius to Scamozzi

furthermore, they had and still have benign as well as harmful effects upon our existence. Their double character and irregular movement had always been a problem for those who sought to systematize the order of nature: because of their unpredictability, it was difficult to find a place for them within any accepted cosmological model, as the lack of clarity in Aristotle’s Meteorology shows.4 This is perhaps enough to explain Vitruvius’s interest in the winds. No less baffling, however, is the reception that Vitruvius’s excerpts concerning this phenomenon received in the commentaries of the Early Modern period. In spite of the fact that other passages of his treatise were often discussed in a more or less straightforward way, the intensity and thoroughness of the responses of various commentators – from Cesare Cesariano5 to Daniele Barbaro6 – on the issue of winds remains astonishing. The truth is that the debate on air and winds reflects important changes in our view of the world and, to a lesser extent, in the conceptualization of the ideal city. The variety of available sources is daunting. Although this chapter’s observations will concentrate on Vitruvius, Alberti and Scamozzi, this is neither to say that they cover all aspects of the complex relationship between the winds and the city nor that their texts can be used to illustrate a sort of “progress” or development in this story. My aim in this chapter is to analyze their very different approaches to the same issue. So far as Vitruvius is concerned, we should reconcile his focus on architectural praxis with his implicit cosmographical interests. Alberti’s discussion of the winds was instead related to an ambitious project designed to create a new urban science in the service of a community governed by an oligarchy. Scamozzi exemplifies well the interests of a new world which was better informed about the shape of the earth and the cosmos as well as about natural phenomena. His empiricism was a weapon against obsolete geographies and a shield for potentially dangerous cosmographies. The main thesis of this chapter is, therefore, the following: even if Vitruvius, Alberti and Scamozzi address the same issues and sometimes make similar points concerning the relationship between the winds and the city, their perspectives are irreconcilable. Vitruvius represents the views of a pre-Christian world, Alberti expresses the aspirations of post-medieval humanism, and Scamozzi documents the knowledge of a society which has discovered the New World and is enrolled in the debates triggered by Galileo’s Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti (1613), with all the cultural implications that such events entail. The locus classicus on the orientation of the city’s lanes in relation to the blowing winds is of course chapter six of Vitruvius’s first book, which I quote in abridged form from Ingrid Rowland’s translation: Once the walls have been raised, the division into lots of the area contained within the walls should follow, and the orientation of the streets and lanes 71

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according to the regions of the heavens. [Moenibus circundatis secuntur intra murum arearum divisiones platearumque et angiportuum ad caeli regionem (or regiones) directiones.] This process will be properly accomplished if, with foresight, the lanes are kept from facing into the path of the prevailing winds. For if the winds are cold, they injure; if hot, they corrupt; if moist, they are noxious. … Mild, dense air, which has neither drafts nor frequent circulation, on account of its motionless stability, by adding to the physique of those who are afflicted with these diseases, nourishes [instead] the patients and restores them to health. … Then it will be evident that the alignment of the streets and side streets ought to follow the angles between the regions of two different winds [emphasis mine]. By means of these principles and these divisions, the detrimental force of the winds will be shut out of dwellings and side streets, for when the broad streets are designed to face the winds head on, the force and the dense gusts coming from the open expanse of the heavens, trapped in the heads of alleyways, wander about with more violent energy. For these reasons the orientation of streets should be rotated obliquely to the regions of the winds [emphasis mine]; then, when the gusts approach the corners of apartment blocks they break apart, and, repulsed, are dissipated.7 After a long passage in which Vitruvius explains, in detail, with the help of a lost drawing like the one here reproduced as Figure 4.1, how one should construct a wind-rose – which, incidentally, is a sixteenth-century term – he ends his chapter with the following observation: when one has established the positions of the eight principal winds, one can carry out the division of the side streets by putting a square between the corners of the resulting octagon.8 We must underline three points of this well-known Vitruvian text: 1 Vitruvius implies a correspondence or at least a relationship between micro- and macrocosm when he writes that the orientation of the streets and lanes must be fixed taking into account the regions of the heavens, above all when we consider that his text is not only concerned with the sublunary world. 2 The orientation of the streets and side lanes ought to follow the angles between the regions of two different winds, that is the orientation of the streets should be rotated obliquely to the regions of the eight principal winds. 3 The reason for this rotation is related to erroneous physiological assumptions since, in opposition to Aristotle and others, Vitruvius thinks that all winds are bad for our health and that stagnant air favors good health. 72

The role of the winds in architectural theory from Vitruvius to Scamozzi

4.1 Modern reconstruction of the “scheme” of the major winds, according to Vitruvius (Book I, 6, 12): from C. Fensterbusch, Vitruvius, De architectura, Darmstadt 1964, Fig. 3

4.2 Modern reconstruction of the orientation of the city’s lanes in relation to the blowing winds, according to Vitruvius (Book I, 6, 7): from C. Fensterbusch, Vitruvius, De architectura, Darmstadt 1964, Fig. 1

Vitruvius’s commentators have discussed at length and often criticized his point of view. It is, however, important to evaluate Vitruvius’s contribution on his own terms: what at first sight seems to be the product of unpretentious and sometimes even superficial common sense, reveals itself as one of the most theoretical parts of the treatise, because the geometrical rationality of his plan has a manifestly ideal character.9 If we want to appreciate the cultural implications of the most important point made in the sixth chapter of the first book – the relationship between micro- and macrocosm implied by the geometrical rationality of the octagon – we must also take into account the crucial second paragraph of the fifth chapter. Here Vitruvius writes: “conlocanda autem oppida sunt non quadrata nec procurrentibus angulis, sed circuitionibus [emphasis mine], uti hostis ex pluribus locis conspiciatur.”10 That is, in my own translation: “Fortified towns should neither be built in the form of a square nor with protruding corners; on the contrary, they should be circular [or centrally planned], so that one can control the enemy from many different places.” The word circuitio has created many problems for Vitruvius’s commentators, but Gabriele Morolli is convinced that this term, which he associates uncompromisingly with a circular shape, can only signify a centrally planned – and not necessarily fortified – city. Moreover, he thinks that the word oppidum not only refers to a fortified town, but also, in Vitruvius’s flexible language, to an (ideal), centrally planned and possibly circular city.11 It is true that Francois-Auguste Choisy’s 1909 philological edition of the treatise had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to interpret Vitruvius’s text on this point,12 but Renaissance and post-Renaissance commentators made every 73

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possible effort to visualize the exterior form of the Vitruvian city (Figures 4.3 and 4.4): for example, Palladio’s illustration in the second edition of Daniele Barbaro’s commentary (Venice, 1567) represents a rectangular forum inside an octagonal perimeter with circular towers on the main axes, thus clarifying further or even radically changing the opinion expressed in the first edition (Venice, 1556), in which the city was based on an almost square plan surrounded by a fortified hexagon.13 The pure circular form of the Vitruvian city was first advocated in the commentary written by Quirico Viviani and Vincenzo Tuzzi in 1830– 32, but the proposals with eight sides suggested by Barbaro-Palladio, Giovanni Antonio Rusconi, and Claude Perrault, the form with sixteen sides preferred by Cesare Cesariano, Giovanni Battista Caporali and Berardo Galiani in the second edition of his treatise in 1790, and the form with thirty-two sides proposed by Joseph Francisco Ortiz y Sanz were all invariably centrally planned.14 Vitruvius’s comments on the exterior form of the city cannot be separated, however, from the orientation of the streets inside the walls. The two problems are intrinsically connected. As we have seen, the orientation of the streets of his city is determined ex negativo by the directions of the winds: since the orientation of the lanes should be rotated obliquely to the celestial regions, it follows that they must be placed at a right angle to the main north-south and east-west axes of the earth. The banality of this move, which was partly based on inaccurate physiological assumptions, must have baffled the commentators of Vitruvius’s text, so that the majority of them remain mute on this point. This apparently simple operation, however, implies a vision of an ideal city, since Vitruvius knew that his scheme of the winds was an abstraction and a simplification. To summarize what he writes in the ninth paragraph of the sixth book: those who know many names of winds will perhaps marvel at the fact that I (Vitruvius) have listed only eight of them – thus following the model of the tower of the winds built by Andronicus in Athens. The reality is that each of the eight parts of the circumference of the terrestrial globe embraces, according to the calculations made by Eratosthenes, a very large measure, and it is therefore not surprising “that in so large an expanse a single wind’s wandering, twisting, and receding should create varieties by shifting its breath.”15 Furthermore, Vitruvius knows the phenomenon of morning breezes as well as the irregular movements of some winds which blow only during certain seasons of the year, as paragraphs ten and eleven of the same book reveal (Figure 4.5). And in the same passage he describes a wind-rose with twenty-four winds.16 Vitruvius was, thus, aware of the complexity of the real world and this means that, when he discussed in his treatise the construction of the city walls and the orientation of its streets according to the regions of the heavens, he provided us with something more than pragmatic instructions about how to avoid the effects of noxious sublunary air-drafts in the planning of a real city. His elegant geometrical scheme was not only the result of (erroneous) 74

4.3 Comparison between the plans of the Vitruvian city drawn by Palladio for the first (1556) and second (1567) editions of Daniele Barbaro’s commentary on the treatise by Vitruvius: from G. Morolli, ‘Vitruvio e la città dei venti regolari’

The role of the winds in architectural theory from Vitruvius to Scamozzi

4.4 Andrea Palladio, The Vitruvian city, illustration of the second edition (1567) of Daniele Barbaro’s commentary.

practical – physiological – considerations, but also an attempt to allow the harmony of the universe to dominate the chaos of everyday life. The turbulence of the winds should be kept out in order to reproduce the harmony of the higher spheres. The most recent commentators on Vitruvius’s treatise have frequently exposed the vulnerability of the architect’s implausible theory of the winds as harmful agents. As early as 1830–32 Quirico Viviani pointed out, for example, that modern science had demonstrated that not all winds are noxious,17 a point Alberti had already made.18 Viviani concluded that the most reasonable advice to the architect was that of planning straight lanes in correspondence with healthy air-drafts and winding streets where harmful winds blow. Such commentators have failed, however, to understand that Vitruvius was aware of his scheme’s abstraction. It is exactly because the phenomenological world was more complex than his theory of the eight regular winds – just as the building of real cities did not conform to his ideal plan – that the geometrical harmony of his urban model can be also interpreted as a partly utopian proposal for an ideal, centrally planned city which should reflect the harmony of the universe’s superior spheres. 75

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4.5 Modern reconstruction of a wind-rose with 24 winds, according to Vitruvius (Book I, 6, 10): from C. Fensterbusch, Vetruvius, de architectura, Darmstadt 1964, Fig. 2

Alberti, who was highly critical of Vitruvius’s inaccurate language, does not discuss in detail the final, perfect form of the city; instead, he is more concerned with its genesis. The utopian ideal cities of the Renaissance, based on rigorous geometrical schemes, were developed at a slightly later date in the treatises of Francesco di Giorgio and Filarete. Alberti’s text, in contrast, is the product of a new science, namely the rationally planned formation of physical as well as social urban spaces. The difference between Alberti and Vitruvius is reflected in the very titles of their theoretical works: Alberti’s res aedificatoria does not convey the same complex of issues implied by Vitruvius’s architectura.19 In Vitruvius, a highly practical approach to the problems of building is combined with an interest in the order of the universe. Alberti’s treatise is, instead, the result of a typically humanistic project: human reason masters the irrational furor of nature and its elements, since their taming is the premise for the well-regulated life of a civilized community.20 It is in this context that Alberti’s discussion of the role played by air and winds in the foundation of the city in the first book and in the plan of a magnificent urban structure described in the fourth book must be interpreted. In the second chapter of the fourth book Alberti writes: We … should project a [magnificent] city by way of example. … It is particularly important to determine whether to locate your city in an open plain, on the coast, or in the mountains: each has advantages and disadvantages. … Whenever a city must be sited in the mountains, … make sure that when the winds, especially Boreas, are excessive and troublesome, they do not cause too much damage;

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since it is Boreas, according to Hesiod, that leaves everyone (the old in particular) torpid and hunchbacked.21 Medicine and the effects of the climate upon human life as well as upon the weathering of architectural materials play a greater role in Alberti’s treatise than in Vitruvius’s, and this is the reason why his discussion of the winds has more to do with their effects upon health than on the orientation of the city’s lanes. Alberti writes in the third chapter of the first book: Certainly the air that we breathe, … when really pure, may have an extraordinarily beneficial effect on health.… It is quite apparent that the healthiest form of air is that which is the purest and least polluted, the most easily pierced by the sight, the most transparent and light … whereas we term as pestilential any form of air whose consistency is so cloudy and vaporous as to render it dense and fetid, so that it hangs heavy on the brow and dulls that keenness of sight. I believe that the sun and the wind, more than any other factor, are responsible for determining these two conditions.… It is no bad thing, then, to consider the quality and angle of the sun to which a locality is exposed, so that there is no excess of sunlight or shade.… Personally, I prefer gentle breezes to winds, though I would consider winds, however fierce and blustery, less irksome than a stagnant and heavy atmosphere.… The winds … cannot be all classed as healthy or unhealthy of their nature.22 Vitruvius had also discussed at length the choice of a salubrious site for his city, but his text was an organic premise associated with the construction of the walls, the orientation of the streets and the allocation of the public spaces. Alberti does not develop his argument in this direction, but rather moves on to discuss the problems of water, area, subdivision, walls, roofs and openings – regio, area, partitio, paries, tectum, apertio – before turning to the materials of architecture in the second book of his treatise. The winds, therefore, do not play a major role in the distribution of the lots inside the Albertian settlement; nor do they contribute significantly to the image of the “magnificent” city alluded to in the fourth book. In this matter only a few excerpts of his treatise seem to have been indirectly influenced by Vitruvius: in the first of these passages Alberti explains how to orient the walls of a polygonal building, so that its angles are not damaged by the violence of natural phenomena, and in the others he analyzes the best way to orient the windows of a palace or a villa according to the directions of the most important winds. The first quotation reads: The angles ought to be positioned counter to the pressure of rocks or the likely direction of violent water and winds, so as to divide and 77

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dissipate the destructive blows as they strike, by facing the trouble with the strongest part of the wall rather than the weakness of a side.23 In a sense this passage seems to imply that the streets should be placed obliquely to the directions of the winds, thus following Vitruvius’s instructions. But Alberti speaks pragmatically of one single building and not of the orientation of the city’s lanes. Furthermore, there is no trace of a connection between the universe with its cardinal points and the city of man in which the streets can be either straight or winding according to its type. As far as the passages on the placing of the openings in palaces and villas are concerned, they follow the requirements of practical common sense. The problem of the air is related to that of good illumination because they both contribute to create a healthy environment. Alberti does not offer fixed rules, as Vitruvius does, precisely because they would be abstract suggestions. In this sense, Alberti is not particularly interested in an ideal, immutable model, even if he mentions an exemplary magnificent city in the fourth book; his principal goal instead is to give down-to-earth advice for all possible situations. His “ideal” city is a real city which is designed according to the rational laws of a new urban science. In consequence, Alberti’s instructions in the matter of winds are also pragmatic and flexible. The difference between Vitruvius’s and Alberti’s approaches to this problem is finally confirmed by their different positions vis-à-vis the architect’s need for a knowledge of astronomy. Whereas Vitruvius is convinced, in accordance with his micro–macrocosm vision, that the architect should be well versed in all aspects of astronomy,24 Alberti appears to be less demanding. In the tenth chapter of the ninth book he seems to criticize Vitruvius when he writes that it is ridiculous to expect, as some say, that an architect ought to be an expert in law… Nor do I demand that he should have an exact understanding of the stars, simply because it is best to make libraries face Boreas, and baths the setting sun… It is enough that he does not build on public land, or on another person’s property; … [and] that he has a sound knowledge of the winds, their directions, and their names.25 Alberti’s lucid unpretentiousness and moderation are a far cry from Vitruvius’s ambitious aims and, at times, confused language. Their treatises belong to two different literary genres and differ on the fundamental concepts of the discipline of architecture as well as in matters of principle. Vitruvius’s architectura is the practice of building which reflects the harmony of the universe. Alberti’s res aedificatoria aims at the foundation of a new functional architecture in the service of the State, and the State manifests itself visually in the form of the 78

The role of the winds in architectural theory from Vitruvius to Scamozzi

4.6 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, Frontispiece

4.7 The globe and its hemispheres: Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, p. 96

city. For Alberti, therefore, the city is not only a stone and brick construction, but also a political and historical entity. We have already said that Alberti was not particularly concerned with the final or perfect form of one ideal city. For him it was more important that its structure reflected its social and political order.26 The city of the Florentine oligarchy could in theory be the best model, but it was only one of many possible alternatives. The essential point, however, is that his treatise invented “town-planning” as an accepted humanistic discipline;27 and in this perspective the winds were more important for their effects upon health and architectural materials than for their possible cosmological connotations. The second book of Vincenzo Scamozzi’s L’idea della architettura universale, published at the author’s expense in Venice in 1615, deals almost exclusively with geography, the climate, the choice of healthy sites, the foundation of cities, and natural phenomena like water, air and the winds (Figures 4.6, 4.7). His themes are not very different from those addressed by Vitruvius and Alberti in their introductory books and, indeed, Scamozzi does not add significantly to the conclusions arrived at by his predecessors. Yet one is overwhelmed by the encyclopedic exhaustiveness of his erudition. In 122 pages in quarto he lists and comments upon all imaginable sources; furthermore, if his detailed empirical knowledge is sometimes weighed down by his pedantic digressions, it has to be admitted that it is often more accurate than the 79

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4.8 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, p. 141

observations made by either Vitruvius or Alberti – not least because it is the product of a new age which was better informed about the world in which we live.28 I will be discussing only a few points in order to highlight Scamozzi’s original contributions to the history of the wind and the city. The, at times unclear, twelfth chapter is dedicated to the nature, quality and variety of the air. In opposition to Vitruvius and Alberti, Scamozzi is explicitly not interested in the phenomenon as one of the elements of natural

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philosophy but only in its terrestrial impact on the environment. In his analysis of the air’s quality Scamozzi demonstrates his outstanding medical learning by quoting not only Galen and Avicenna but also the School of Salerno.29 He seems to be exclusively concerned with the practical aspects of the natural phenomenon, and yet he is probably the first architectural theorist to praise the moral quality of the air. Pure air is good for the body as well as for the virtue of the soul, according to Scamozzi.30 The fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth chapters are then specifically dedicated to the winds – for a total of fifteen pages in quarto. It is in this part of his treatise that we find new information and his most original thoughts. Again Scamozzi does not want to discuss what wind is nor its origin because that is the concern of natural philosophers.31 What characterizes his approach at its best is instead his preoccupation with practical details, together with his modern critique of such ancient authorities as Vitruvius and Aristotle. To the first category belong the following observations. The study of the winds is of fundamental importance for the architect not only because it allows him to orient buildings and their parts with good judgment, as Vitruvius and Alberti had already argued, but also because the builder should know the right season for carrying out the final ornaments of the structure.32 Scamozzi is also among the first, probably following Palladio,33 to comment upon the ventidotti or air channels which, in the summer season, served to transport fresh breezes from the quarries around Vicenza to the rooms of the surrounding villas in Costozza and Brendola.34 Finally, for all that Vitruvius and Alberti had already discussed the relationship between the directions of the winds and the different functions of rooms, Scamozzi’s information is much more detailed. Alberti had written, for instance, that studies, workshops and summer dwellings should be oriented to the north, winter apartments to the south, and all those for spring and autumn to the east. Baths and supper parlors for the spring season should be erected in the west part of the building. These rather generic instructions are dealt with in greater detail by Scamozzi, who relies more on Vitruvius and partly changes Alberti’s orientation. Studies and libraries should not face the north, as Alberti had suggested, but the east, where one also finds the drawing rooms. Summer apartments, workshops, wine cellars and barns should be oriented to the north. Baths belong to the west side. The southern winds bring mostly negative effects: we should therefore avoid planting open gardens on this side, which is good only for the conservation of oils.35 Scamozzi’s discussion of this matter is lucid and simple because he is convinced that his profession can improve the quality of our life on this earth, and that the architect can make his fellow-citizens happier.36 His flexibility and lack of prejudice make him the perfect exponent of a new age. The cities indicated as models are no longer a Roman settlement or a Tuscan town. Scamozzi says instead that the air of an urban space must be temperate and that the city, 81

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therefore, must be founded in a free and open space like Amsterdam or Venice.37 The orientation of the streets remains linked to the directions of the healthy and harmful winds, but the climates of Hungary, Poland and Germany require different solutions from those adopted in Italy.38 This means that a well-planned city must take into account a given set of circumstances; a universal model therefore makes little sense. Scamozzi’s geographical perspective is, for historical reasons, wider ranging than that of his predecessors. And at the beginning of the second book of his treatise he is not afraid to say that Aristotle was wrong on many issues. In his discussion of the circular extension and circumnavigation of the earth Scamozzi writes: Even if Aristotle made fun of the opinion… that one could circumnavigate the earth… this has been done on numerous occasions by sailors who have been to the New World and have travelled in the direction of the poles: in America our ancestors discovered many notable kingdoms and provinces. [They] also [discovered that it is possible] to live comfortably south of the equator, all things that contradict the opinion of the same Aristotle.39 Scamozzi’s text is the product of new knowledge and of a new mentality. He is very proud of his independence of judgment. Scamozzi questioned the view of the natural world inherited from the antique sources and, in his description of the wind-rose, he did not refrain from rebutting the accepted wisdom by citing as his source the practice of the Dutch seamen who are more reliable and therefore more competent than Aristotle. Scamozzi writes: As far as the number of the winds is concerned, opinions differ among the ancients, even if according to Homer… only two of them were famous, namely the Ostro [i.e. Auster, the south wind] and the Tramontana [the north wind].… Vitruvius, Pliny and many others, however, gave four names to the four parts or, as people say, points of the compass.… In astronomical and cosmographical terms, this means that they are separated from each other by 90° on the entire 360° circuit of the sky and of the earth, so that each of them occupies a quarter of the circumference, of this machine we call the world. The Greeks then… developed with great artifice [a scheme] with eight winds, [as one can see] on the Tower [of the winds] in Athens. At the top of page 141 Scamozzi gives a list of the orientations and names of the eight principal winds in Greek, Latin, Italian and Spanish. The quotation continues: 82

The role of the winds in architectural theory from Vitruvius to Scamozzi

Aristotle and others who follow his opinion… developed [a scheme] with twelve winds which correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac: this number cannot be right, however, both because it is now recognized that one cannot count in the way they think one should… and because one can reasonably suppose that many other winds exist between the four principal winds and elsewhere. That they are free to occupy other spaces is confirmed by the practical experience of sailors (particularly those who bring glory to the city of Arano in Flanders), to whom credence must be given since they have traversed the oceans. And this is the reason why eight other winds have been added, and inserted between the other eight: these winds are known as middle-winds.… These sixteen winds are listed here according to the following order, beginning from where the sun rises and moving clockwise.40 At the bottom of the same page Scamozzi lists the orientations and the names of the sixteen winds in Greek, Latin, Italian and Dutch. It is this detailed knowledge of the physical world that inspires his pragmatic and empirical approach to architecture as well as the flexibility of his solutions in his chapters on the origin, foundation and appropriate dimensions of cities.41 Scamozzi’s theory, or better theorica, to use his own word, has no place for the Vitruvian preoccupation with the correspondence between microand macrocosm. And Alberti’s humanistic ideal is also alien to his interests. He does not produce an institutional treatise for the political needs of a powerful emperor, as Vitruvius had done for Augustus, nor does he intend to fulfill the ambitions of an oligarchy which perceived itself as the State and had found in Leon Battista Alberti its theorist, not to say its propagandist. Scamozzi can perhaps be described as a technocrat, instead, even if this term is probably inadequate. In any case he was convinced of the superior knowledge of his society, and his practical competence reflected a new world view. The precise mathematical calculation of parallels and meridians in his text, as well as the corresponding representation of the globe, indicate his more demanding approach to the complexity of the physical world. Yet the theory of the principal winds continued to play a major role in architectural history not only in the reception of Vitruvius’s treatise, but also in the foundation of the cities of the New World – as documented by the 1573 urban law promulgated by Philip II.42 It also found its place in utopian visions such as that expounded in Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis: in this text the ideal city has four main streets linked with four principal gates, which are oriented according to the four points of the compass.43 Thus the ideal character of the Vitruvian vision continued to coexist with Scamozzi’s Galileian approach.

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Notes 1

My sincerest thanks to Matteo Burioni for his bibliographical research and David Ekserdjian for improving my English text. Carlo Ginzburg – my warmest thanks to him as well – has added an important reference to the negative reception of Aristotle in the sixteenth century: see note 39.

2

See Blumenberg, Hans, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag 1979.

3

See Obrist, Barbara, ‘Wind Diagrams and Medieval Cosmology’, Speculum 72 (1997), pp. 33–84.

4

Aristoteles, Meteorologie. Über die Welt, ed Hans Strohm, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft [1970] 1984, Book I, Chapter 13, 349a, pp. 30–31 and Book II, Chapters 4–6, 359b–365a, pp. 52–63: for the commentary see pp. 179–183.

5

Cesariano, Cesare, De Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de Architectura libri decem traducti de Latino in Vulgare raffigurati, commentati, Como 1521, Bruschi, A., Cargo, A. and Fiore, F.P. (eds), Vitruvio. De Architectura translato commentato et affigurato da Caesare Caesariano 1521, Milano: Edizioni Il Polifilo 1981, pp. xxii verso – xxviii verso.

6

Barbaro, Daniele, I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruvio tradutti e commentati da Monsignor Barbaro, 2nd ed., Venice 1567, Book I, Chapter 6, facsimile, Rome: Bardi Editore 1993, pp. 54– 64. On Barbaro’s philosophical sources see Mitrovic, Branko, ‘Paduan Aristotelianism and Daniele Barbaro’s Commentary on Vitruvius’ De Architectura’, Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998), pp. 667–688.

7

Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Translation by Ingrid D. Rowland. Commentary and Illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe with additional commentary by Ingrid D. Rowland and Michael J. Dewar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999, pp. 29–30: Book I, Chapter 6: Orientation.

8

On this point I follow the interpretation of Gabriele Morolli and not the modern English translation: Morolli, Gabriele, ‘Vitruvio e la città dei venti regolari. Istituzioni e invenzioni della forma urbana nel De Architectura e nell’esegesi degli interpreti classicistici del trattato’, in: Cresti, C., Fara, A. and Lamberini, D. (eds), Architettura militare nell’Europa del XVI secolo (Atti del Convegno di Studi, Firenze, 25–28 Novembre 1986), Siena: Edizioni Periccioli 1988, pp. 299– 333, above all p. 309.

9

Morolli, Gabriele, ‘Vitruvio e la città dei venti regolari. Istituzioni e invenzioni della forma urbana nel De Architectura e nell’esegesi degli interpreti classicistici del trattato’, in: Cresti, C., Fara, A. and Lamberini, D. (eds), Architettura militare nell’Europa del XVI secolo (Atti del Convegno di Studi, Firenze, 25–28 Novembre 1986), Siena: Edizioni Periccioli 1988, pp. 306–7, who insists on the ideal character of Vitruvius’s city.

10

Morolli, Gabriele, ‘Vitruvio e la città dei venti regolari. Istituzioni e invenzioni della forma urbana nel De Architectura e nell’esegesi degli interpreti classicistici del trattato’, in: Cresti, C., Fara, A. and Lamberini, D. (eds), Architettura militare nell’Europa del XVI secolo (Atti del Convegno di Studi, Firenze, 25–28 Novembre 1986), Siena: Edizioni Periccioli 1988, p. 301.

11

Morolli, Gabriele, ‘Vitruvio e la città dei venti regolari. Istituzioni e invenzioni della forma urbana nel De Architectura e nell’esegesi degli interpreti classicistici del trattato’, in: Cresti, C., Fara, A. and Lamberini, D. (eds), Architettura militare nell’Europa del XVI secolo (Atti del Convegno di Studi, Firenze, 25–28 Novembre 1986), Siena: Edizioni Periccioli 1988, pp. 301–2.

12

Choisy, Francois-Auguste, Vitruv. Analyse, Paris 1909, Vol. IV, Pl. 4, Figures 1 and 2.

13

Morolli, Gabriele, ‘Vitruvio e la città dei venti regolari. Istituzioni e invenzioni della forma urbana nel De Architectura e nell’esegesi degli interpreti classicistici del trattato’, in: Cresti, C., Fara, A. and Lamberini, D. (eds), Architettura militare nell’Europa del XVI secolo (Atti del Convegno di Studi, Firenze, 25–28 Novembre 1986), Siena: Edizioni Periccioli 1988, p. 327, note 29.

14

Morolli, Gabriele, ‘Vitruvio e la città dei venti regolari. Istituzioni e invenzioni della forma urbana nel De Architectura e nell’esegesi degli interpreti classicistici del trattato’, in: Cresti, C., Fara, A. and Lamberini, D. (eds), Architettura militare nell’Europa del XVI secolo (Atti del Convegno di

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The role of the winds in architectural theory from Vitruvius to Scamozzi

Studi, Firenze, 25–28 Novembre 1986), Siena: Edizioni Periccioli 1988, pp. 303–4 and 328, note 45. 15

Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Translation by Ingrid D. Rowland. Commentary and Illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe with additional commentary by Ingrid D. Rowland and Michael J. Dewar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 30.

16

Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Translation by Ingrid D. Rowland. Commentary and Illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe with additional commentary by Ingrid D. Rowland and Michael J. Dewar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999, pp. 30–1.

17

Viviani, Quirico and Tuzzi, Vincenzo, L’Architettura di Vitruvio tradotta in italiano, illustrata con note critiche ed ampliata di aggiunte intorno ad ogni genere di architettura antica e moderna, con tavole incise, Udine 1830–2, p. 105 (Book I).

18

Alberti, Leon Battista, L’architettura, Traduzione di Giovanni Orlandi. Introduzione e note di Paolo Portoghesi, Milan: Edizioni Il Polifilo 1989, p. 212: Book V, Chapter 14.

19

A comment made by Argan, Giulio Carlo, ‘Il trattato De re aedificatoria’, in: Convegno Internazionale indetto nel V centenario di Leon Battista Alberti (Roma-Mantova-Firenze, 25–29 aprile 1972), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 1974, pp. 43–54, above all p. 44. On the terminological implications of De re aedificatoria see Choay, Francoise, ‘De re aedificatoria als Metapher einer Disziplin’, in Forster K.W. and Locher, H. (eds), Theorie der Praxis. Leon Battista Alberti als Humanist und Theoretiker der bildenden Künste, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1999, pp. 217–31.

20

Argan, Giulio Carlo, ‘Il trattato De re aedificatoria’, in: Convegno Internazionale indetto nel V centenario di Leon Battista Alberti (Roma-Mantova-Firenze, 25–29 aprile 1972), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 1974, p. 54.

21

Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press 1988, pp. 96–8: Book IV, Chapter 2.

22

Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press 1988, pp. 9–11: Book I, Chapter 3.

23

Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press 1988, p. 20: Book I, Chapter 8.

24

Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, Translation by Ingrid D. Rowland. Commentary and Illustrations by Thomas Noble Howe with additional commentary by Ingrid D. Rowland and Michael J. Dewar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999, p. 23: Book I, Chapter 1.

25

Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, Cambridge (Mass.) and London: The MIT Press 1988, p. 317: Book IX, Chapter 10.

26

For these points see Argan, Giulio Carlo, ‘Il trattato De re aedificatoria’, in: Convegno Internazionale indetto nel V centenario di Leon Battista Alberti (Roma-Mantova-Firenze, 25–29 aprile 1972), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 1974, pp. 52–3.

27

Argan, Giulio Carlo, ‘Il trattato De re aedificatoria’, in: Convegno Internazionale indetto nel V centenario di Leon Battista Alberti (Roma-Mantova-Firenze, 25–29 aprile 1972), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 1974, p. 44.

28

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, pp. 97–218. For an up-to-date bibliography on the architect and his treatise see Barbieri, F. and Beltramini, G. (eds), Vincenzo Scamozzi 1548–1616, Venice: Marsilio editori 2003.

29

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, p. 135.

30

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, p. 133.

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31

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, p. 139.

32

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, p. 139.

33

Palladio, Andrea, I quattro libri dell’architettura, Venice 1570: Dominico de’ Franceschi, Book I, Chapter 27.

34

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, p. 140.

35

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, pp. 149–51.

36

Kruft, Hanno-Walter, Geschichte der Architekturtheorie. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Munich: C.H. Beck 1985, p. 113.

37

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, p. 159.

38

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, p. 169.

39

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, p. 99: “Tutto che Aristotele tenesse per cosa ridicola … che si potesse far la circuitione del Globo della terra … [questo] si è verificato più volte da’ naviganti del Mondo nuovo, e verso i Poli: essendosi scoperto nell’America tanti, e così memorabili Regni, e Provincie a’ tempi de’ nostri Avi; & anco l’habitar comodamente sotto all’Equinottiale, tutte cose contra l’opinione del medesimo Aristotele.” As Carlo Ginzburg has pointed out to me, the critique of Aristotle’s fatuitates in this field is already to be found in a lecture given by the philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi in Padua: his source was Antonio Pigafetta, who had navigated the southern hemisphere. Pomponazzi’s words are published in Nardi, Bruno, ’I corsi manoscritti di lezioni e il ritratto di Pietro Pomponazzi’, in: Nardi, B., Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi, Florence: Leo S. Olschki 1965, pp. 3–53 and above all pp. 41–4.

40

Scamozzi, Vincenzo, Dell’idea della architettura universale, Venice 1615, reprint, Ridgewood (NJ): Gregg 1964, p. 141: “Quanto al numero dei Venti, appresso à gli Antichi fu diverso parere, e con tutto che col testimonio d’Homero […] siano due soli famosi, cioè Ostro e Tramontana. […] Con tutto ciò Vitruvio, e Plinio e molti altri ne assegnarono poi quattro alle quattro parti o, come dicono, Cardini del mondo. […] Onde parlando con termini d’Astrologia e di Cosmografia vengono distanti l’uno dall’altro 90 gradi di 360 di tutto il circuito del Cielo e della Terra, di modo che ogn’uno d’essi viene ad occupare la quarta parte della circonferenza di questa machina del Globo Mondiale. Ma i Greci […] assegnarono nella Torre d’Athene con molto artificio otto Venti. Aristotele, e altri che lo seguono, […] assegnarono dodici Venti corrispondenti a dodici segni celesti del Zodiaco, il qual numero invero si è conosciuto che non può stare sì perché non si conta nella maniera ch’essi pensano, […] sì ancora perché tra i quattro principali cadono ragionevolmente altri Venti, e in altro sito: essendo che esperienza fatta da marinari (e specialmente dassi questa gloria à quelli della Città d’Arano in Fiandra) à quali si hà da creder molto, come quelli c’hanno solcato tutti i Mari, e perciò ne furono aggiunti altri otto, e fraposti ai primi otto, i quali si dicono mezani. […] I quali sedici venti incominciando dove lieva il Sole e seguendo in giro tengono questo ordine.”

41

The same systematic thinking accompanied by the credit given to the experience of the seamen is also characteristic of Francis Bacon’s natural philosophy: see Bacon, Francis, Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis de Ventis & c., Leyden: Apud Franciscum Hackium 1648.

42

Benevolo, Leonardo, Storia della città, Rome and Bari: Editori Laterza 1976, p. 626.

43

Campanella, Tommaso, La Città del Sole, Ernst, G. (ed.), Milan: Rizzoli (BUR) 1996, p. 48.

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Chapter 5

Making visible the invisible Signs of air in architectural treatises Paul Emmons and Marco Frascari

Air’s once palpable presence in architecture has become largely invisible. Contemporary architecture is poisonously asphyxiating its inhabitants, both mentally and physically. On the one hand, approaches to physical well-being have been reduced to technological solutions. On the other hand, the art of building well has become the creation of novel photogenic images. Modern buildings neither breathe nor allow breath. Modern architecture’s emphasis on space rather than air masks the material presence of the fluid in which we dwell. While air is a positive presence, a meaningful plenum, space is pure absence, an irrelevant vacuum. Air interconnects us with things in our environment but space establishes distance from things. The morning summer breeze wafting over the rose bush planted outside a bedroom window scents the air and cools the skin as it connects interior with exterior, of both building and body. Air is a multi-tonal and polymorphic mediation between the visible and the invisible while space remains monotonal and isomorphic. Air contains a richness of life and spirit while space is limited to the shape of the container by which it is defined. Air is felt by its density or texture while space is merely perceived by the outline of a shape. The multivalent presence of air was replaced in the twentieth century by the narrowly conceived technological necessity of a mixture of gases – especially oxygen – required for breathing. The air which emerges out of a 87

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vent in an office building does not dwell in our imagination in the same way as the air we breathe on the top of a forested mountain. As water and H2O are not the same thing, air and the standard mix of N2, O2, Ar, CO2, Ne, He, Kr, H2 and Xe are not the same because water and air are both “stuff”. “Stuff” has a history and how we conceive of it changes over time, so air and the chemical description of its gas mixture fundamentally differ.1 The widespread commercial success of branding ordinary drinking water packaged in plastic bottles demonstrates its commodification as H2O under the auspices of large beverage corporations. This trend finds its aerial counterpart in the rising popularity of oxygen cafes, spas and bars. The constructed polarity between air and oxygen was developed architecturally by Le Corbusier in his distinction between impure outdoor “ordinary air” and indoor “exact air”, a proper mixture of gases and humidity that is technically purified to a precisely optimized calculation of heat and humidity for the human lung. Le Corbusier explains that “exact air”, produced through technical equipment, is “freed of dust, disinfected, ozonified, humidified exactly and brought to a constant temperature of about 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit.”2 Following the Vitruvian tradition of architects cunningly saving cities from military aggression, Le Corbusier goes on to note in 1933 that despite the threat of proliferating poison gas stocks, with his plan for producing “exact air” in purifying plants “cities can be rescued from the threat of air warfare.”3 Air, understood as an odorless and neutral mix of gases, so pure as to erase the life it supports and receives, is the achievement of modern life, a purely transient existence that does not provide any trace of inhabitation. Living air, with its odors and rustlings, is a privilege of the downtrodden, the third world and the past. The shift from air to space is seen in the changed conceptualization of the window. The root word of window, wind, clearly relates it to controlling the admission of air to the interior.4 The multi-modal destinies of windows as mediators of air, light, sound and prospect were treated as functionally separate following the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm of optimizing singular functions. Rather than an element such as a window serving many purposes reasonably well, each function was dealt with through a separate material technology for its individual performance. For example, the load-bearing masonry wall provides reasonably good thermal insulation and a slow naturally filtered ventilation, but by the early twentieth century, separate insulating material was considered preferable because it could provide the same degree of insulation with less mass, even though it didn’t provide the other benefits of the mass wall such as structure, enclosure, and water and air barriers. This evolutionary particularization came to mean that the role of the window was limited to lighting. Le Corbusier wrote: “a window is made for lighting, not for ventilation. To ventilate let us use ventilation devices; that is mechanics, physics.”5 The provision of fresh air inside a building was relegated 88

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to the domain of the mechanical system. Le Corbusier advocated the “window wall” not as a source of fresh air, but because it sealed the interior: “the glass façade will be hermetic. No opening!”6 With the widespread appearance of mechanical systems for conditioning the air, the window’s role in providing fresh air was eliminated conceptually if not actually. The functional specialization of windows reveals how air has been entirely given over to the mechanical engineer to be solved through technical expertise rather than as part of a larger architectural conception of meaningful human habitation. Current approaches to achieving “good airs” dominated by narrowly techno-scientific views consider “green” or “sustainable” architecture as a new invention devoid of any historical dimension. Yet, the broad investigation of architectural aromatics was once a central focus of architecture. Learning from the past and measuring the present, Renaissance pneumatic architecture can play a significant role in helping us to inspire richer future practices. One important lesson that we can derive from applying an understanding of Galenic pneumatic theory to architecture is its complete humanistic sensibility in achieving the art of living well that resonates within a multi-dimensional sensorial theory. Air, operating between the physical and the metaphysical, is related to physical vitality and to a spirited well-being. Since architects construct drawings rather than buildings, the question of how to integrate multiple perceptual modes into drawing arises. Architectural drawings are seen with the eyes but they are interpreted through an imagined bodily inhabitation. Architects, like Giordano Bruno’s description of magicians: “formulate images, written symbols and ceremonies, which consist of certain actions and cults, and through which they make known their wishes with certain signals.”7 Following Bruno’s indication, this chapter will examine representations of air in architectural and cosmological diagrams to examine how multi-sensorial experience and physical realities are signified in drawings. Air is conceived of as undivided matter and as the original substance. This was first suggested by the third of the Milesian monists, Anaximenes. Active around 520 BC, Anaximenes forged the understanding of air as the source of all things, the most subtle substance and related to respiration, by providing an analogical argument: “Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so also breath (pneuma) and air encompass the whole cosmos.” Anaximenes explains how all things are made from the primal substance; forming by condensation and rarefaction: rarefied air is fire; and when air is increasingly condensed, it becomes cloud, water, earth, and then stone. To the first substance, which supports the changing variety of things, is added a source of motion: wind (or breath). Air is not only physical but it is also divine – the source of the gods themselves. Anaximenes said that the apeiron (limitless) is air and it is the arche (first principle) from which arise the gods and goddesses, and all the rest arises 89

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from these. Aristotle, partly under Anaximenes’s influence, explains pneuma as a subtle body of fiery air, comparing it with the continuous frothing of bubbles in heated milk.8 Galen (c.130–c.200 AD), whose writings influenced the medical profession well into the Renaissance, had an understanding of air largely based upon Aristotle and the Hippocratic treatise, On Breaths, which conceives of air as undivided matter, and categorizes it as either good (agreeable) or bad (disagreeable). Air as a primal substance, in all its forms, touches all the organs of the senses: eye, ear, nose, tongue and skin. Pneuma-conscious architects work through representations of air addressing a multi-sensorial structure of perception.

Making the invisible visible The paradox of considering the representation of air in architectural drawings is its presumed invisibility. Unlike anything else, air is most often indicated in drawings by the complete absence of marks, the pure white drawing surface. For air to be known visually, it must therefore be perceived indirectly through signs. The interpretation and exploitation of air signs parallels the modus operandi of the medical semiotic: an outward reading of signs of people’s inner health. Renaissance architectural treatises describe air on building sites becoming visible through interpreting signs in things such as: existing buildings, animals, vegetation, and inhabitants’ complexions.9 Vaporous exhalations of the earth provided subtly visible indications of the quality of the air. Drawings of these vapors vary between treatises, indicating differing ideas of their nature. Alberti, following Vitruvius, recommends finding underground water by an early morning search for its sign as a vapor, “forming mists in the air like a man’s breath in the cold of winter”.10 This was illustrated in Cosimo Bartoli’s translation of Alberti as curving lines like smoke (Figure 5.1).11 Cesare Cesariano’s cabbage-like representation of the same passage in his translation reveals a very different visual conception of vapor, which was thought to make air too moist.12 Similarly, although many of Cesariano’s images were copied for Walther Hermann Ryff’s architectural treatise into German, the representation of smoky air was substantially altered, suggesting a regional visualization of its appearance (Figures 5.2, 5.3).13 Good air is neither too moist nor too stagnant, so it is clear, more invisible than vapor, and, as Anaximenes points out, it has movement. Andrea Palladio in the Four Books on Architecture shows invisible air through his use of wind vanes in a number of elevation drawings, representing the effect for the cause (Figure 5.4).14 Palladio’s curving wind vanes are themselves signs of billowing flags since, in Italian, banderuola (weathervane) derives directly from bandiera (flag). The wind vanes, made in metal to resemble cloth, with curving 90

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5.1 Vapors to find water, Cosimo Bartoli

outlines to represent the undulating movement of good air, indicate the direction of the wind as indexical signs.15 In Palladio’s elevation of Villa Thiene two flags are blowing in opposite directions (Figure 5.5). This could be interpreted as a clumsy attempt at symmetry but more likely it suggests that the four corner towers of the Villa are each balancing and orienting the winds from the four corners of the earth. Palladio also shows wind vanes in his reconstruction of the ancient house, projecting back in time an originary idea of good air as a cause in the devising of architecture. Palladio’s wind vane flags indicate the tactile presence of wind blowing upon one’s skin through exclusively visual signs. Renaissance paintings commonly show wind billowing through a figure’s hair and clothing – something that Aby Warburg has interpreted as a mobilization of air

5.2 Chimney with smoke, Cesare Cesariano

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5.3 Chimney with smoke, Walther Hermann Ryff

showing the presence of a transformative force that manifests the vital spirit of the world.16 Similar representations were achieved in architecture. A Galenic good air devotee, French architect Philibert de l’Orme made invisible air visible in his treatise through the use of clouds (Figure 5.6). Probably the first person to show clouds in an architectural elevation, de l’Orme makes it clear that he is representing good air in billowing clouds through contrasting this with his image of the bad architect. A violent rain cloud

5.4 Elevation of Villa Sarego with wind vanes, Palladio

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5.5 Wind vanes facing opposite directions on Villa Thiene, Palladio

overcasts the bad architect while the prudent architect enjoys airy clouds in a sunny sky. In his illustration of the prudent architect shown avoiding tribulation – the tribola are three-pointed passive weapons sitting on the ground – and moving quickly (celere) from a cave to a palm tree, the overhead clouds and lines show speed and direction. Chimneys prominently projecting into the sky can also represent air. This is reinforced by de l’Orme’s use of a wind vane above a kitchen chimney, a place where air plays within a realm of multi-sensorial conditions and perceptions from ice to fire and from good odors to good-tasting and good-looking food (Figure 5.7).17 There are deeper implications of the representation making invisible things visible. For de i’Orme, wind and wine – the two words in French, vent and vin, being homophonic – are symbols of imagination, hence of spirited thought. The neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino explained that the spirits in wine are close in nature to the human spirit.18 The elm tree (in French orme) shown standing beside the prudent architect is supporting a grapevine with mature grapes to be picked for wine making. Invisible air is made palpable through deeply resonating signs in the presence of clouds and chimneys.

5.6 Front view of the Château de S Maur, Philibert de l’Orme

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5.7 Kitchen chimney section, Philibert de l’Orme

Diagrammatic air Air has a visible presence in cosmological diagrams. Too often presumed to be merely conventional symbols, diagrammatic marks iconographically embody the nature of thought about a subject. Although Aristotle’s theory of a fifth element – aether – defining a decisive split between the celestial and the mundane realms is abandoned during the Renaissance for a more continuous pneumatic view, Aristotle’s approach remained in use to describe the four elements. Cosmographies represent the elements sorted into four concentric rings by their nature as heavy or light (Figure 5.8).19 Earth, absolutely heavy, falls to the center, and fire, absolutely light rises upward. Air and water, relatively light and heavy, respectively, are represented in the two central rings, but are highly volatile and cause the many variations experienced in the mundane world (Figure 5.9). Pliny described wind as the spirit or breath that “generates the universe by fluctuating to and fro as in a womb.”20 A snaking lemniscatic line cosmographically represents air as a moving vital force. Undulating lines signifying air are conceived in analogy to water following the Anaximenian theory of air. For example, Palladio’s 94

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5.8 Diagram of the geocentric universe, Peter Apian, Cosmographicus liber

5.9 Diagram of the elements, Isidore of Seville, Liber de responsione mundi & astrorum ardinatione

reconstruction of the Temple of Jupiter Thunderer shows a double retaining wall with an air space between to vent damp air and represents it like flowing water.21 Similarly, de l’Orme represents air as undulating lines in a chimney section. The undulating line of multiple folds representing air as clouds provides a transductal joint between the mundane and celestial realms. This cloudy line cleaves the physical and the metaphysical in representations of theophanic events.22 The Annunciation and Ascension were represented as presencing the divine in the profane realm and were divided by the undulating line. The hand of God reaching out to earth appears through the same diagrammatic line (Figure 5.10). The airy ring of clouds in cosmological diagrams was a ductal insulation making possible the close proximity between earth and heaven. Performances of holy representations (sacra rappresentazione) of the Annunciation and the Ascension were staged in cathedrals utilizing complex machinery such as Brunelleschi’s hoisting device to lift actors from the floor to the ceiling.23 Descriptions from the time explain that they rose up on a structure with “white cotton batting on the beams to simulate clouds.”24 An anonymous woodcut of an Annunciation mystery play shows an undulating line of clouds around the base of the structure (Figure 5.11). Ribbons of cotton batting attached to a frame in a series of curves provides the material image of air in the diagrams. Art historians have shown that many Renaissance paintings about the Bible did not illustrate the sacred text, but rather reproduced the images of familiar spectacles.25 Thus, the twisting ribbon of cotton batting probably produced air’s diagrammatic image. The waving line, continuously suggesting but lacking an interior or exterior, is more a texture line than an outline, just as 95

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clouds are composed of formless airy material. Leonardo explained that a cloud is a “body without a surface” and Brunelleschi treated clouds as outside his system of perspective.26 The garland of a twisting ribbon concretizes the material imagination of moving air. The semantic field of cloud, air, and wind is paralleled by a visual field of representations that are neither determined nor arbitrary, but consistent in their associations.

Warm air in Renaissance heart and hearth Of the three forms of pneuma that Galen identified, he locates the seat of the vital spirit (pneuma zoticon) in the heart. He writes that combustion occurs in the left ventricle of the heart and transforms environmental air from the lungs into pneuma in the heart through the transfer of the quality of heat. Pneuma, as fiery air, is conceptualized through analogy with the fireplace. Aristotle’s description of pneuma builds on the analogy between hearth and heart. The son of an architect, Galen explains the operation of the heart in generating the pneumatic heat of life through detailed comparison with the hearth of a house. Galen compares the left ventricle of the heart to a furnace because it is round, it has openings to regulate the entrance of blood and air, 96

5.10 Divine hand from cloud holding an armillary sphere, Sacrobosco, De Sphaera

5.11 Anonymous Italian woodcut of a sacred representation of the Annunciation c. 1450

Making visible the invisible

and it has valves. Like a fireplace, the heart’s walls do not take part in combustion. Galen explains that the arteries that conduct the heated blood to all the parts of the body resemble the hypocaust heating system of a Roman house that has underfloor vaults through which heat travels. As Galen’s vermis regulates the flow of cerebral pneuma by covering the passage like a cupola or vaultlike structure, so does Daniele Barbaro’s illustration of Vitruvius’s description of regulating warm air in a hot bath.27 With the numerous physical and operational similarities that Galen notes, the fundamental comparison is made because both organs, the heart and the hearth, create the vital spirit for the body’s wellbeing; one internally and one environmentally. This may explain the practice of placing animal hearts inside chimneys by the inhabitants of a house.28 The analogy between hearth and heart is an operative principle of health and well-being that defines both medicine and architecture. Man the microcosmos, with the heart at the center, is proportional to the cosmos with the sun as the central planet. Between micro and macro, the house’s hearth is constructed to provide well-being. Sebastiano Serlio discusses fireplaces in his fourth of seven planned books on architecture, following the location of the sun in the Ptolemaic system of the seven planets. Alberti anthropomorphically describes the brick area above the fireplace opening that retains heat and warms the room as the breast – the place of the heart. Alberti further recommends placing a metal vent within the breast of the fireplace that can be closed to stop drafts when a fire is not burning; paralleling Galen’s description of the door that lets air into the heart from the lungs. Renaissance architectural treatises describe fireplaces as openings in walls. Palladio first discusses windows and doors as horizontal openings and then considers stairs and chimneys as the wall’s vertical openings in the same section that he also describes the cave-cooled ventiducts of Villa Eolia. Palladio often mentions vertical shafts or vents to the roof for purging bad airs, whether for earthly exhalations from below the foundations, for toilets, or for smoke from chimneys.29 Yet, despite their importance, chimneys are entirely absent in the woodcuts of Palladio’s Four Books (Figure 5.13). Why are chimneys not delineated in his drawings when they not only exist but are celebrated on his buildings (Figure 5.12)? Since the fireplace is an important pneumatic technological device warranting a distinct chapter in his treatise, Palladio did not omit chimneys out of neglect. Other authors of architectural treatises such as Serlio, de l’Orme and Scamozzi all include representations of chimneys.30 Palladio chose not to include chimneys in his treatise because he represented not the physical building but an ideal design. In the pneumatic dreamland of Palladio’s treatise, unlike actual building, the air is always perfect so there is no need for chimneys to expel bad air. Daniele Barbaro, friend and patron of Palladio, confirms this in writing on fireplaces in his translation and commentary on Vitruvius – which 97

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5.13 Elevation of Villa Malcontenta without chimneys, Palladio

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Palladio illustrated – praising the Roman hypocaust heating system because it radiates heat through the floor so that no smoke can enter the room. Barbaro ends the section by expounding that: “only smoke or a bad woman can drive a man out of his house.”31 Immediately following this, he writes that his Palladio will present this superior hypocaust heating system in a book on private residences and, indeed, Palladio’s buildings in the Four Books are entirely smoke free. Serlio’s tragic stage in the second book of his treatise is also smoke free, presenting an ideal view of a classical city completely void of chimneys, whereas in the comic stage Serlio portrays a medieval city’s gothic buildings bristling with chimneys.32 The preference for designs represented in perfect air continues today with architectural renderings invariably showing proposed buildings on ideal sunny summer days.

Aromaticity of air

5.12 Photo of Villa Malcontenta showing its chimneys

Odors are the most meaningful expression of air. Ranging from sweet to noxious, the emotional potency of odor-evoked memories is a powerful demonstration of odor’s significance. Galen used cross-sensorial descriptions borrowed from taste to describe odors, such as sharp, penetrating, strong, and harsh. Following Aristotle, Galen explained that an odor-emitting substance combines its quality with air. Abnormal humors in people give off offending odors and are important to the diagnosis of disease.33 Alberti writes that we can detect the conditions of a body, be it animal or building, by its odors: “foul from a diseased body, sweet from a clear one”.34 Since noxious air was deemed the basis of disease, substantial efforts were made to avoid and correct it. Bad air could be ameliorated with good fragrances. Medicinal perfumes were used to protect from or to cure disease. People protected themselves from plague, thought to be a disease of the air, by adding sweet scents into the air. Plague-afflicted houses were treated with a thorough perfuming by heating a complex amalgam of scent agents such as the much valued “Venice treacle” – the recipe of which varied with thirty to sixty ingredients, but always included snakeskin. Marsilio Ficino, writing that he followed both Galen’s and Hippocrates’ views that air is affected by the qualities of things both sublunary and celestial, held that since odors are vaporous like the spirit, smells most directly affect the spirit.35 To cure illness, Ficino recommended that preparations of odorous substances be externally applied over the heart. Galen explained that although the heart’s vital pneuma was transformed into cerebral pneuma at the base of the brain, odors in the air were directly perceived by flowing into the brain.

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5.14 Wind vane on cupola from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 5.15 Fireplace section with Aeolian sphere, de L’Orme

Multi-sensorial architecture A multi-modal celebration of the value of sweet odorous air is in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an early illustrated book about love and architecture. In the episode when Poliphilo encounters five nymphs that allegorically represent the senses, they take him to a “miraculous octagonal bath-building” – probably based on the tower of the winds – where all his senses are inspired. A substance emanating from the nearby earth is ignited on perfumed woods to produce “an indescribable fumigation,” the most subtle and delicate of odors. Appealing to vision, translucent crystals in the doors give “a wonderful and multi-coloured light”. Fulfilling Palladio’s dream of a heated villa without chimneys or smoke, the water in this bath is “warmed without hypocaust or furnace, and pure beyond belief.” The cupola of the octagonal thermal bathhouse is topped with a putto-shaped wind vane that provides a cross-modal sensory perception of air, operating both acoustically and visually (Figure 5.14). A wing swings with the wind, and the golden putto has a hollow in the back of his head funneling the air to make the trumpet he holds to his lips play an aria varying with the intensity of the wind. Seeing the wind-wing and hearing the trumpet blast are sensorial signs of moving air. In this wonderful setting animating all of Poliphilo’s senses, the five beautiful maidens seduce him, as Poliphilo confesses: “I certainly could not prevent the ardent fires from leaping up to assault me in my furnace of a heart.” The Hypnerotomachia, well known for its cross-modal imagery of text and woodcut, continues to resonate for practices imagining and revealing a multi-sensorial architecture. De l’Orme proposed installing Aeolian spheres in fireplaces – brass balls full of water which, when heated, boil and cause air to rush out of a small hole in the sphere. He claimed this would exhaust noxious fumes, humidify the 100

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dry air, and produce a whistling sound of rushing air, thereby creating the spirit of the heart of the fireplace. All of this is illustrated by de l’Orme with the simplest diagrammatic marks distinguishing between fiery, windy and watery air (Figure 5.15). De l’Orme’s description of the prudent architect fully utilizing all his senses, and explaining that the sense-less architect has “little nose” because he does not have the intuition of good things, is evidence that the pneumatic architectural imagination is multi-sensorial.36 Long before the current narrow green-architecture ecological movement, Renaissance notions of pneuma revealed a concern for the connectedness of person and place where architecture can refine the qualities of air to, as Alberti wrote, “let in the refreshing breath of the heavens”. Air, though invisible, becomes palpably present in architectural drawings, even the most diagrammatic, as signs of the material imagination. Renaissance pneumatic theory clears the air that architectural happiness results in a well-spirited imagination fed by multi-sensorial experiences.

Notes 1

This argument is developed from Ivan Illich, H20 and the waters of forgetfulness: Reflections on the historicity of “stuff”, Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1985.

2

Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, New York: Orion, 1967 [1933] p. 402.

3

Ibid, pp. 60–61.

4

In Latin languages the word fenêtre and finestra have their root in the Indoeuropean phen, or wind.

5

Le Corbusier, Precisions on the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, with an American Prologue, a Brazilian Corollary, followed by the Temperature of Paris and the Atmosphere of Moscow, translated by Edith Schreiber Aujame, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991 p. 54.

6 7

Ibid, p. 44. Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity and Essays on Magic, translated by Robert de Lucca, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bruno’s De Magia, written c. 1590, remained unpublished until Tocco’s 1891 edition and deals explicitly with magic.

8

Gad Freudenthal, Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance, Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul, Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. M. Fattori and M. L. Bianchi, editors, Spiritus: Ivo Colloquio Internazionale del Lessico intelletuale Europeo, Rome: Aeneo, 1984.

9

See, for example: Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.

10

Ibid, X. 4, p. 329.

11

Cosimo Bartoli, translator, L’architettura di Leon battista Alberti, Firenze: Torrentino, 1550.

12

Cesare Cesariano, Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione de Architectura, Como, 1521, VIII. CXXV.

13

Walther Hermann Ryff, translator and editor, Vitruvius Teutsch, Nuremberg, 1548.

14

The villas shown with wind-vanes are: Pisani, Saraceno, Repeta, Thiene and Sarego.

15

This discussion of signs is based upon the semiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce.

16

Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the Renaissance, edited by Kurt Forster, translated by David Britt, Los Angeles: Getty Institute, 1999. Georges Didi-Huberman, “The imaginary breeze: remarks on the air of the Quattrocento” Journal of Visual Culture 2.3 (2003) 275–289.

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17 18

Philibert de l’Orme, Le premier tome de l’architecture, Paris, 1567 p. 276. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, translated and notes by Carol Kaske and John Clark, Tempe, Arizona: Renaissance Society of American, 2002.

19

Whether air was conceived as one of four elements or as the arche of the sub-lunar and celestial realms varied. Friedrich Solmsen, Aristotle’s System of the Physical World. A Comparison with his Predecessors, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960. Aristotle, On the Heavens. Aristotle, Meterologica. Peter Apian, Cosmographicus liber, ed. Gemma Frisius, Antwerp, 1533, 6v.

20

Pliny, Natural History, translated by H. Rackham, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938, I. 116. Barbara Obrist, “Wind Diagrams and Medieval Cosmology” Speculum 72. 1 (January 1997) 33–84. Vitruvius, like Pliny, explained “wind (ventus) is a flowing wave of air with an excess of irregular movements.” Vitruvius, 1. 6. 2. Isidore of Seville, Liber de responsione mundi & astrorum ordinatione, Augsburg, 1472.

21

Andrea Palladio, I Quattro libri dell’architettura, Venice, 1570, IV. xix.

22

Sergio Bertelli, The King’s Body: Sacred Rituals of Power in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

23

Arthur Blumenthal, “A newly-identified drawing of Brunelleschi’s Stage Machinery” Marsyas 13 (1966–67) 20–31.

24

Nerida Newbigin, “The Word Made Flesh: The Rappresentazioni of Mysteries and Miracles in Fifteenth-Century Florence” in Christianity and the Renaissance. Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, edited by Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, Syracuse University Press p. 361–375.

25

Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/ Toward a History of Painting translated by Janet Lloyd, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 [1972].

26

Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, translated by John Goodman, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

27

Rudolph Siegel, Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine: An analysis of his doctrines and observations on blood flow, respiration, humors and internal diseases Basel: Karger, 1968 p. 161.

28

Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, translated by James Freake, edited by Donald Tyson, St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn, 1993, II. XLIX, p. 400.

29

This is sometimes combined with stairs.

30

Serlio notes that neither Vitruvius nor surviving ancient buildings describe chimneys and he suggests that acroteria may have been chimneys, and recommends their use as such. “The acroteria above the cornice were made as ornament, and also for utility because when chimneys are to be built they could serve for that requirement.” Sebastiano Serlio, On Architecture, Volume One, Books I-V of Tutte L’Opere D’Architettura Et Prospetiva, translated by Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, New Haven: Yale Universitiy Press, 1996 p. 356.

31

Daniele Barbaro, translation and commentary, I dieci libri dell’architettura di Vitruvio, Milano: Il Polifilo, 1997.

32

Serlio’s comic scene includes chimneys and while he allows for them in the tragic scene, he does not show them. Serlio, op. cit., 88.

33

Rudolph Siegel, Galen on Sense Perception: His doctrines, observations and experiments on vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch and pain, and their historical sources. Basel: Karger, 1970 p. 155–157.

34 35

Alberti, 10. 1, p. 322. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, translated by Carol Kaske and John Clark, Tempe, Arizona: Renaissance Society of America, 2002. D. P. Walker, “The Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958) 119–133.

36

Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Philibert de l’Orme’s Traités d’architecture, Paris: Laget, 1988, 28v. Jean-Pierre Chupin, “Hermes’ Laugh: Philibert de l’Orme’s Imagery as a Case of Analogical Edification” Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, 2 (1996) 37–68.

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Chapter 6

Poetry and “spirited” ancient sculpture in Renaissance Rome Pomponio Leto’s Academy to the sixteenth-century sculpture garden Kathleen Wren Christian

A fundamental prerequisite for the consideration of spirited architecture is the Renaissance theory of animate painting and sculpture, propelled by the paragone between poetry and the visual arts. From the early Quattrocento, it is hardly possible to find any poetic description of a visual work that does not highlight its “life-like” qualities: epigrams on portraits which seem to speak or ekphrases about statues filled with life bridged the gap between words and images, putting them into direct competition. In these contexts, the revelation of anima (soul) and spirit is the common aspiration of the poet and the visual artist. To the credit of the artists, life-sized figural sculpture, in particular, seemed to be a remarkably “animate” man-made work. Recently the concept of “spirited” and animate sculpture has been discussed in relation to bodily pneuma, the substance mixed with the blood that was thought to give the body its breath of life. Animation has also been recognized as the sculptor’s power to give life to stone as a quasi-divine creator or magus invoking angels or demons.1 This new research into the life of sculpture has helped amend long-standing, awkward paradigms about “realism” and naturalism as the products of stylistic evolution in Renaissance art.2 Here I want to continue on this path by considering how the competition between sculpture’s animate force – granted through the ingenium of the

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artist who had made it life-like – with the poet’s own ingenium – the poet’s powers of invention – fostered the idea that sculpture could itself be both inspirited and inspirational. I want to consider the paragone between poetry and sculpture as it centered on the divinely “inspired” state of the creative agent and propose that this debate helped give birth to early collections of ancient sculpture. In particular, I will argue that Pomponio Leto’s Roman Academy played a fundamental role in this process. Verses recited in the presence of sculpture, written in the “voice” of ancient sculptures and physically attached to these works drew out the inspirited quality that antique sculpture was thought to share with poetry. Too often the Pasquino or other so-called “speaking sculptures” have been singled out as the only ancient works with breath and voice in Renaissance Rome. Yet the vivacity of antique sculpture – a dynamic quality only heightened, as Leonard Barkan has stressed, by its state of fragmentation and its unfamiliar subject matter – encouraged poets and artists alike to personify them ubiquitously, transforming them into the agents and actors of their own creations.3 The assignment of voice and persona to antiquities relies upon the age-old belief that ancient statues possessed special powers, sometimes demonic and sometimes protective. The idea pervades medieval descriptions of ancient Mirabilia in which antique sculptures are not only “life-like,” but also able to influence the outside world and act within it. Gradually, the perception of magical power shifted to the observation of artistic prowess, or ingenium. As the Trecento defense of poetry brought the concept of ingenium to the forefront of a wider discourse about poetic and visual arts, viewers began to attribute ingenium universally to the ancient works surviving in their own day, envisioning all of them as the masterpieces of famous ancient artists. Petrarch had already seen in the twin Quirinal Horsetamers the qualities of “arts” (skill) and “ingenium” (genius) as the basis for an imagined “contest” between their presumed authors, Phidias and Praxiteles (Figure 6.1).4 By the end of the fourteenth century the observation of ingenium and ars in antique sculpture had become almost conventional, judging by Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio statement that ancient sculptors “were by nature more powerful in genius [ex natura ingenio potiores] and more learned in the mastery of their art [than those of today].”5 The combination of learned skill and innate ingenium seemed to be the special quality that had allowed these artistic creations to endure for so many centuries. Though viewers gradually became more cautious about attributing all antiquities to master sculptors, the idea of the “living” image remained the predominant mode of describing the vast corpus of antique works either unearthed or resuscitated in the fifteenth century. According to Manuel Chrysoloras, writing in the second decade of the Quattrocento, the seemingly miraculous animation of ancient sculpture was also what made them collectable. As Chrysoloras wrote, many in his day would 104

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6.1 The Quirinal Horsetamers, from the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae

willingly trade many whole and healthy, living horses for even one broken fragment carved out of stone by Phidias or Praxiteles. We admire not so much the beauties of the bodies in statues and paintings as the beauty of the mind of their maker… The artist disposes the outward form of the stone, stubborn and hard though this may be… so that through portrayal and skill the passions of the soul can be seen in them.6 Animation, as Chrysoloras’s quote suggests, was a process by which the sculptor conferred part of his inner self to stone. But sculpture “lived” only thanks to a deeply-felt sympathy between a knowledgeable viewer/possessor and a creator who revealed his soul in his works.7 Those who displayed antique sculpture in their homes brought this relationship into action, allowing Rome’s “other population in stone” to take on vitality and voice in the realm of private collections. To take a case in point, in the courtyard of the Sassi family as Maarten van Heemskerck captured it in a drawing around 1535, ancient sculptures turn to face the entering guest as if they were inhabitants of the house (Figure 6.2). Above the courtyard, a protective bust of Jupiter stands watch over the entire cortile, while the positioning of two paired, life-sized statues at either side of the threshold maintains the sense that these ancient sculptures functioned apotropaically as bodies; these particular methods of display can also be

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found in other domestic collections of the time.8 Heemskerck, for his part, dramatized the works displayed in this courtyard and in Rome’s dozens of other collections in his own artistic inventions. In the background of his St. Luke Painting the Virgin in Rennes (Figure 6.3), the Sassi sculptures adorn an artist’s workshop where a sculptor’s chisel gradually brings a block of stone to life; Heemskerck portrays the head and the upper body in the colors of living flesh and the rest of the figure as white marble, making the artist’s role as a conduit of animation clear. In the competition between artists and poets that gradually promoted ancient sculpture to the status of “spirited,” potent images, Pomponio Leto’s Roman Academy played a particularly important role. Today, Leto is most often remembered for the accusations of heresy and anti-papal conspiracy leveled against him by Paul II in 1468, leading to his imprisonment in Castel Sant’Angelo and the persecution of his sodales. But Leto seems to have been less a political radical than a new breed of intellectual, one whose adherence to ancient practices in all forms of life approached what the Curia considered to be heresy.9

6.2 Maarten van Heemskerck, Courtyard of the Cassi Sassi, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

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6.3 Maarten van Heemskerck, St Luke Painting the Virgin, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes

Leto was an extremist about antiquity. He exchanged his baptismal name for a classical one, observed the ancient festival of the Palilie on the birthday of Rome, and even, it was said, wore a toga when he walked around the city. The equally passionate followers he gathered around him in the 1460s, men such as Platina, Pietro Marsi, and Filippo Buonaccorsi, revived the scholars’ symposium as Plato and Macrobius had described it, composing Latin poetry for recitation at garden banquets. Because they did not leave behind a published treatise or guidebook, only topographical notes jotted down on Leto’s 107

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archaeological tours, they are given less credit than Alberti or Biondo for bringing ruins and fragments into dialogue with the philological reconstruction of antiquity. But as they rambled through Rome, inscribing their names on the walls of the catacombs and mournfully comparing Rome’s state of degradation to her past glory, they collected antique inscriptions that they saw as the counterparts to their own epigrams. Writing their poetic compositions, they reunited two strands of ancient culture which had since become unraveled: the poetic language of inspiration and its visual counterpart in ancient mythological sculpture.10 Although Paul II disbanded the Academy in 1467, Leto and Platina resuscitated it under the more humanist-friendly reign of Sixtus IV, re-establishing it on the model of a religious confraternity. From accounts of the second Academy, we learn that the group assembled on Rome’s birthday at S. Maria in Aracoeli, attended mass before the altar of their patron saints Victor, Genesio, and Fortunata, and then adjourned to Leto’s house. Here they met for a banquet and a poetic contest, crowning their victorious poet with laurel clipped from Leto’s garden. This garden was a small plot nestled among the grandiose ruins of the Baths of Constantine (Figure 6.4), in sight of the colossal Quirinal Horsetamers and complete with a “little atrium [courtyard] built out of erudite epitaphs, ancient marbles, and inscriptions.” Notes jotted down by visitors to Leto’s house in the 1480s and 1490s reveal that his epigraphical collection was one of the most extensive in Rome.11 There is no record of any ancient sculpture in Leto’s garden. Yet I would argue that the prominent display of ancient inscriptions, and the exclusion

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6.4 Antonio Tempesta, Map of Rome, detail showing the ruins of the Baths of Constantine at center, where Leto’s house and garden were located

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of statuary, ideally suited the function of the site as a poets’ academy. Like the poems written by the Academicians about antique sculpture, the display of antique inscriptions in the house itself asserted the value and endurance of Latin epigrammata. In stark contrast to our own era, when the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum has relegated ancient inscriptions to the status of catalogued, dry source material for archaeological “science,” Renaissance poets regarded ancient inscriptions as the stuff of poetry and invention. Inscriptions, though very rarely written in meter, were mostly referred to as “epigrammata,” epigrams, and presented in the poets’ Academy they offered themselves as parallels and models for the brief Latin epigrams composed by members of Leto’s group. As antique survivals displayed in Leto’s garden, they could have reminded the poets of the endurance of their own artistic products, which would survive the centuries as better carriers of ingenium than antique sculpture ever would. Indeed, the most prominent inscription on display in the garden explicitly referenced the competition between poetry and statuary in the preservation of memory and artistic prowess. This inscription, set into a fountain in Leto’s garden, announced the dedication of a statue in the Forum of Trajan in honor of the fourth-century poet Claudianus. The inscription honored Claudianus with the words “Although his poems are enough to guarantee the eternal memory [of Claudianus], nevertheless the serene and most learned Emperors Arcadius and Honorius, in accordance with the Senate, have ordered his statue set up in the Forum of Trajan.”12 The inscription, and the poems of Claudianus, had survived to be studied and imitated by Leto and his followers; the statue of Claudianus, on the other hand, had disappeared without a trace. Arguably, such a prominent position given to this inscription – and the conspicuous absence of the ancient statue which had not survived the ravages of time – stood as a stark reminder of the durability of poetry and its superiority to any statue. Leto’s Academy was a prime venue for the competition between ancient sculpture and poetry in fifteenth-century Rome, as the surviving poems of the Academicians attest. The most famous example is an epigram about a Nymph slumbering beside a fountain. The verse will be well known to those who have read Elisabeth MacDougall or David Coffin’s work on Roman gardens, or Phyllis Bober’s reflections on Leto’s role in the Sleeping Nymph cult.13 It seems that the Academician Giovannantonio Campano composed the verse, and it appears first in manuscripts of the 1460s connected to Leto’s Academy.14 The epigram could only have been inspired by one of the ancient sculptures of Sleeping Nymphs visible in Rome, possibly the same figure which appeared later in the collection of Cardinal Domenico della Rovere after he had become protector of Leto’s Roman Academy in the 1480s.15 It is possible that the Academicians may even have invented the epigram to be carved on stone and set next to a Nymph in a Roman sculpture garden, since its lapidary quality associates it with authentic and invented inscriptions commonly displayed in these settings. It reads: 109

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I sleep as I listen to the murmur of the soothing water. Be careful, whoever approaches this marble cave, Not to disturb my slumber: drink or bathe in silence.16 Written as if it were authored by the Nymph herself and set up as a warning to visitors, the conceit of the epigram hinges on the idea of a living statue. Standing in the statue’s presence, the viewer might think that the soporific trickle of water is the only cause of the Nymph’s “sleep” and that she slumbers so soundly that she only looks as if she were made of stone. It should not be forgotten, however, that it is the poet who has brought the statue to life. The poem thus transfers the idea of animate sculpture to a display of the poet’s own ingenium, as he dwells on the subject of poetic inspiration itself. A demigoddess of a Dionysian world, the inspirational spring, and the grotto whose presence recalled the distant realms of Mount Parnassus or Mount Helicon, the sculpture of the Nymph acted as a bridge between reason and irrationality, or a talisman that might aid the poet’s communication with the divine in dreams. The ancient sculpture incites the poet’s ingenium as she brings him closer to the state of “afflatus,” filled with breath, an idea embedded in the word “inspired.” As the concept had been inherited through the reception of Plato’s Phaedrus, the poet’s ingenium was a “divine power in the soul” that sparked creative frenzy in the few who possessed it. In Plato’s words, the poet brought “sweets culled from honey dropping founts in the gardens and glades of the Muses,” until he was “inspired, put out of his senses, and out of his mind”; Ficino, famously, would characterize this state as furor poeticus, a mental fervor that stirs up the poet’s verses and transforms him into a prophet speaking out the words of the divine.17 The idea that antique sculpture could be linked to the forces of furor and ingenium built upon the already well-established concept that antiquities affected and ennobled their surroundings. When Poggio Bracciolini followed Cicero’s descriptions of his “Tusculan Academy” to decorate the villa he called his “Valdarnian Academy” with classical marbles, he hoped that ancient sculpture would incite inspired imitation. Poggio, who knew ancient dialogues set in gardens such as Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, recreated an appropriately Ciceronian backdrop for his own philosophical discussions with friends, believing that classical sculpture could, as he explained, “inspire” men’s actions and push them towards nobler thoughts and deeds. As he wrote: It is known that the ancients, learned men, devoted much attention and enthusiasm to procuring statues and paintings. Cicero, Varro, Aristotle, and others both Greek and Latin, outstanding in all fields of learning, spurred themselves on to study through images of virtue, and so adorned their own libraries and gardens with these 110

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[portraits], in order to ennoble the very places in which they were set up, [since] they wanted that same amount of praise and industry. For they believed that the images of those who excelled in the study of glory and wisdom, when placed in front of the eyes, greatly inspired and ennobled the spirit.18 For the humanists who gathered together collections of coins and portrait busts, images of great men offered corporeally-present exempla of correct behavior that incited imitation of their virtuous thoughts and deeds. But when Leto’s group picked up on this motivating quality of ancient sculpture, it was not the portrait bust or other tokens of Roman virtus they invoked, but mythological images that put them in direct contact with the revelatory power of ancient poetry. This power of classical imagery could thus parallel the theological wisdom of ancient verse extolled so vividly by the Trecento defenders of poetry (especially Boccaccio), who had argued that pagan poetry contained within it the hidden prophecy of Christian Truth. The fascination with the spiritual and theological power concealed within pagan mythological verse encouraged the poets in Leto’s garden to revive ancient poetry about spirited statues. In this task they had at their disposal poems about speaking sculpture in the Carmina Priapea – then attributed to Virgil – and in Ausonius. Many of them also seem to have known the Planudean manuscript of the Greek Anthology, a compilation of hundreds of Greek epigrams preserved by Byzantine scholars, brought to Rome in the fifteenth century by Cardinal Bessarion and studied in Bessarion’s Academy – the direct precursor of Leto’s.19 In the erotic verses of the Carmina Priapea and in the lively epigrams of the Greek Anthology statues take on voices. Within them Leto’s Academicians rediscovered the Hellenistic cult of animate Nature, as – in the Priapea – lewd herms heckle passersby, and as – in the Anthology – fountains shout out to strangers to stop and drink, or ships describe all their past journeys.20 The impact of these antique models is seen especially in the poems of the Academician Filippo Buonaccorsi, who took the pseudonym “Callimachus” in reference to one of the poets represented in the Greek Anthology. Callimachus is remembered today as the most subversive member of Leto’s group and the figure Leto and Platina accused of being the true radical of the first Academy.21 Yet he should also be considered as a founding figure in the revival of Hellenistic verse, thanks to the poems he wrote before 1468, when Paul II’s persecutions forced him to flee Italy forever. For example, Callimachus composed three works in honor of a bronze cow sculpted by Myron, which directly echo the thirty-odd short epigrams in the Planudean Anthology praising Myron’s bronze heifer. Like the Greek verses, Callimachus’s epigrams are variations on the theme of the sculpted heifer’s animation. The bronze cow is so life-like that it deceives all viewers, animal or human: 111

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On a Bronze Calf Sculpted by Myron Myron, seeing the calf he had made of bronze by his art, Believed it to be alive. He stopped And he said, “I remember I sculpted a calf similar to this one, But this one has more to it, it bellows, while mine was mute.”22 On the Same A calf, about to be sacrificed, had taken flight to the sanctuary. The attendant saw me [the statue], and exclaimed, “Take it.” He put chains around my neck, and in error he tied me and dragged me, trembling and moaning. But when he realized that I would not yield to his efforts, Wearily, he said: “Our brilliant Myron deceives us.”23 On the Same: The bull is mad with love and the calf hastens to my udders. If he sees me, the herdsman will drive me to the herd.24 In choosing the topic of Myron’s bronze heifer, Callimachus was probably aware of a passage in Pliny’s Natural History which attributed greater fame and ingenium to the poet who had memorialized Myron’s sculpture in verse than to the sculptor himself: “Myron… was made particularly famous by his statue of a heifer,” Pliny wrote, “which was praised in some well-known verses, as happens when a man owes his reputation to the someone else’s ingenium which is greater than his own.”25 Callimachus extended the scope of this competition between poetry and sculpture by adopting the manner of the Greek Anthology freely in compositions about other sculptural topics. In two verses about the colossal Quirinal Horsetamers (Figure 6.1), which stood just around the corner from Leto’s garden, the works speak in their own voices: On the Marble Horse of Praxiteles I was endowed with spirit by the sculptor Praxiteles and The wind moved my mane across my neck. I let out a neigh, and my hoof struck the earth, Its blow inciting fierce men to battle. Voracious Time stole away my spirit and left me frozen, And I am now marble, my head without a mind. On the Marble Horse by Phidias What! Do you, deceived by this image, intend to bridle a work in stone? This is the work of Phidias, and all spirit is absent. 112

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Art tricks the eyes, but Nature will be apparent to the hands: I seem to be a horse, but to the touch I will be marble.26 Callimachus’s lines “win out” over the ancient statues by inspiriting them and allowing them to speak, while simultaneously denying the artist the ability to give permanent life to stone. Although Phidias and Praxiteles initially brought these figures to life, Time has since turned them back into mere marble, and now only the poet’s verse that can give them voice. The effects of such experiments within pagan genres were far-reaching for the history of collecting and crafting sculpture in Renaissance Rome. The famous Pasquino “spoke” to the man on the street in the voice of the people. All around him passersby pinned political satires, often cutting jibes at the papacy voiced by Pasquino himself (Figure 6.5). However, the anonymity and freedom of the Pasquinades, made possible by the public display of the statue, was exceptional. Verses celebrating the animation of ancient sculpture had arisen in a context of the poetic sodality as an assertion of the durability and revelatory powers of the poetic genre itself, yet in the increasingly closed context of the private antiquities collection, poetry about antique sculpture came to rest in the panegyric of the collector. In the exclusive realm of the collection, poems and animate ancient sculpture brought together in gardens “heightened” the patron’s palace, transforming it into a supernatural realm of the divine. For example, in a monologue by Giuliano della Rovere’s Apollo Belvedere, speaking in a poem composed by one of Pomponio’s Academicians in the 1490s, the Apollo praised Giuliano as another Julius Caesar, his house a new Delos or a new Rhodes.27 After della Rovere became Pope Julius II, the compositions of Leto’s pupil Evangelista “Fausto” Maddaleni de’Capodiferro called upon his Dying Cleopatra (the Sleeping Ariadne in the Vatican collections) to offer a similarly-flattering discursus on a new Golden Age.28 Such verses have often been used to define an iconographic “program” that supposedly governed the collector’s initial choice of antique sculptures. Yet programs emerged after the fact, as an outgrowth of the patron and poet’s common desire to present the collection as an inspirational realm. By depicting the collection as a place of genius, a gift of an enlightened and benevolent patron to the artists and poets of the city, poets vaunted their own ingenium while also helping to ensure the continuation of the patronage cycle itself. In the early Cinquecento Raphael’s School of Athens, with its gallery of ancient sculptures headed by figures of Apollo and Minerva, had already canonized the idea of the sculpture collection as a privileged locus of intuition and inspiration. In the Roman Academy of Leto’s successor Angelo Colocci, the Sleeping Nymph reappears as a Muse and the genius loci of the Academy’s archaeological garden, while Johannes Goritz of Luxembourg also invoked the cult of the Sleeping Nymph in his antiquities collection near the Forum of 113

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Trajan.29 Goritz’s poetic sodality celebrated their own modern counterpart to an inspired ancient goddess – a living sculpture of St. Anne, the Virgin, and Child carved for Goritz’s tomb in S. Agostino by Andrea Sansovino (Figure 6.6) – in hundreds of Latin verses recited and then pinned to the trees or the classical sculptures in the garden. Almost all the verses centered on Sansovino’s capacity to give sculpture life, just as the ancient masters had.30 The reception of Sansovino’s sculpture reminds us how profoundly the concept of animate ancient sculptures affected contemporary artistic practice in the Quattrocento and Cinquecento. Sculpture drew upon Hellenistic imagery associated with spirit such as the classical putto or “spiritello,” for example, in Verrocchio’s fountain ordered by Lorenzo de’ Medici for his villa at

6.5 The Statue of the Pasquino near Palazzo Orsini d’Agone from the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae

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6.6 Andrea Sansovino, St Anne, the Virgin and Child, S. Agostino, Rome

Careggi as a fountain spirit (Figure 6.7) and a reminder of the inspiration which flowed freely in this setting.31 At the same time, the garden of ancient sculpture had become the ideal training ground for Renaissance sculptors who sought their own inspiration from ancient works of art. Given the associations already in place between ancient sculpture and poetic ingenium, by the early sixteenth century the act of drawing upon the example of ancient sculpture and recasting ancient models in one’s own work implicitly drew parallels between the creations of sculptors and poets. 115

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6.7 Andrea del Verrocchio, Putto with a Dolphin, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

Of all sculptors in Rome in the early sixteenth century, it was Michelangelo above all who equated the craft of the sculptor with that of the poet. If, in his day, artists were still praised most often for their mimetic ability to make images seem alive and sensate, or to cull lessons from Nature, during Michelangelo’s career and thanks to his influence the ideal shifted towards that of the artist as inspired Creator. Like the poet, the sculptor presented himself as a conduit of the divine, a potency made visible by his ability to give the spark of life to stone.32 Such a self-conscious conception of the artist’s role seems to inform Michelangelo’s statue of a Bacchus, displayed by the banker Jacopo Galli within a garden collection of ancient worksand later exhibited as if it were a fragmented antiquity missing its left hand (Figure 6.8).33 The adaptation of ancient sculpture by Renaissance artists has often been considered as a formal, stylistic process of imitation. What makes Michelangelo’s sculpture not only “pass for” but also exceed the antique, however, is also its ability to tap into the creative furor of the poet.34 Arguably, such a work would have been inconceivable without Academic poetry, which had staged a competition between antique and modern in terms of the ability to impart life. Even in the context of Christian sculpture, Renaissance artists active in these debates wished to model their works on the most “spirited” ancient prototypes available. Ancient sculptures of Minerva or Venus with inherent divinity, animus, and numen became ideal models for sculptures of the Virgin made in Rome, and when Claude Bellièvre, a French visitor to Rome around 116

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6.8 Maarten van Heemskerck, The Garden of Jacopo Galli, Staaliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

1514, saw a collection of ancient sculpture owned by Gabriele de’ Rossi in Rome, he remarked: In the de’ Rossi house there is an [ancient] statue of Minerva whose face, by its feminine sweetness and beauty, is so worthy of veneration that she seems to be an animate spirit and an oracle. Hence on occasion de’ Rossi, a noble man and judged by many to be a virtuous person, used to inveigh against modern sculptors who depict the Blessed Virgin with a too Venus-like countenance.35 Patrons, then, instructed artists to draw upon the numen present in ancient models which seemed capable of revelation, making ancient sculpture a guide for Christian cult imagery. Bellièvre’s quote reveals that even statues of Venus were being used as models for statues of the Virgin. Appreciation for the numen in all varieties of pagan sculpture is concretely visible in many images of Mary: Lorenzetti’s Madonna and Child sculpted for the tomb of Raphael and modeled on an ancient Venus and Cupid in the Vatican, Jacopo Sansovino’s Madonna and Child (Figure 6.9) which follows an ancient figure in the Sassi collection – thought to be a figure of Roma or Vesta – and Maarten van Heemskerck’s image of the Virgin painted with the same Sassi figure in mind (Figure 6.3). The head of Andrea Sansovino’s own figure of Mary in the statue he made for Goritz, as well, must follow an antique prototype (Figure 6.6).

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6.9 Jacopo Sansovino, The Madonna and Child, S. Agostino, Rome

In all of these examples, it is significant that the transferal of spirit from ancient sculpture into cult statue focused on the figure of the Virgin – that is, the vessel of the Holy Spirit. The extraordinary conclusion one might draw is that the animate liveliness of antique sculpture could, in early sixteenth-century Rome, not only be associated with poetic ingenium but even evoke the mystery of the Incarnation. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue was regarded as a prophecy of the

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birth of Christ, and Virgil was a poet whose inspiration by the divine granted him the power of prophecy and a means of articulating Christian truth, hidden and veiled within poetic verse.36 It seems that particular works of ancient statuary were also seen to have the same powers of prophecy. Poets had long exploited the allegorical interpretation of pagan poetry to justify the strict imitation of pagan verse in their own compositions. But until the early Cinquecento, in works like Andrea Sansovino’s, the visual equation between works of Christian devotion and ancient statuary had never been so direct. Leto’s Roman Academy had early on recognized the potential of antiquities to act as sources of inspiration in Christian culture, but the concept came full circle when poets devoted to a Sleeping Nymph and sculptors imitating antique goddesses found common ground in inspirited cult statues of Mary.

Notes I am very grateful to Caroline Elam and Frank Fehrenbach for their comments and suggestions. 1

Dempsey 2001; Pfisterer 2002, esp. 111–83; Cole 2002; Fehrenbach 2005.

2

Gross 1992; Jacobs 2005.

3

Barkan has observed how the use of prosopopoeia – the assignment of a speaking voice to speechless objects – accommodated a more sophisticated viewer’s desire to “complete” fragmented antique sculpture in new narratives: Barkan 1993; Barkan 1999.

4

“Hoc Praxitelis Phidieque extans in lapide tot iam seculis de ingenio et arte certamen,” Fam VI.2; “Non tu artis eges, nec ingenii, si quid insuetum novitas feret, animi illud forcipe rapies, et in usum trahes, tua incude repercussum, tuis iniectum recoctumque fornacibus, tuum fiet, idque non solum tale, sed melius. An ignoras ut ex eadem massa Phydias aliam excudebat imaginem, aliam Praxiteles, aliam Lisyppus, aliam Polycletus, incipe ne diffidas, et veteribus et nova permisce si id rite feceris, suum pretium invenient. Frivolum est soli senio fidere et qui haec invenerunt homines erant.” Seniles II, 3. Cf. Pfisterer 1999: 61–97.

5

“De artificiis ingeniorum veterum quamquam pauca supersint, si qua tamen manent alicubi, ab his qui ea in re sentiunt cupide queruntur et videntur magnique penduntur et si illis hodierna contuleris, non latebit auctores eorum fuisse ex natura ingenio potiores et artis magisterio doctiores. Edificia dico vetera et statuas sculpturasque cum aliis modi huius, quorum quedam cum diligenter observant huius temporis artifices obstupescunt.” cit. Baxandall 1971: 52; trans. Gilbert 1977: 344–5. Poggio Bracciolini later admired the ingenium and art of the ancients, since they “render a mute and lifeless thing as if it breathed and spoke; often indeed they represent the emotions of the soul” ”Delector enim admodum sculpturis ac celaturis in memoriam priscorum excellentium virorum, quorum ingenia atque artem admirari cogor, cum rem mutam atque inanem veluti spirantem ac loquentem reddunt; in quibus persepe etiam passiones animi ita representant, ut quod neque letari dolere potest, similem ridenti ac tristanti conspicias,” letter to Suffreto da Rodi, 26 May 1431, in Harth (ed.) 1984: 2: 139; see also Lorenzo Valla’s consideration of the diversity of ingenium in Phidias and Praxiteles, in his De voluptate 2.36 (Valla 1540: 953), cit. Kemp 1977: 390.

6

Letter to Demetrius Chrysoloras, translation and discussion in Baxandall 1971: 81–3; for Chrysoloras’s artistic criticism, see Smith 1992: 150–70. As Baxandall notes, the locus classicus for Chrysoloras’s analysis is Aristotle’s Poetics 1448(b), which asks poets to “feel for” their characters in order to let their own emotions show in their works.

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7

On Petrarch’s reception of Seneca, and its import for a later discussion of the revelation of the soul in the creative arts, see Summers 1980:192–4 and Summers 1989.

8

For example, Heemskerck’s well-known representation of the palace of Cardinal Andrea della Valle shows paired, human-scaled statues of Marysas and Neptune turning towards each other across the threshold. At an earlier della Valle palace nearby, a large bust of Jupiter surveyed the street from above the principal doorway.

9

Fundamental studies of Leto’s Academy include: De Rossi 1890; Della Torre 1903; Zabughin 1909–1912; Garin 1966; Dunston 1973; Palermino 1980; Medioli Masotti 1982.

10

As Ferno wrote in his eulogy of Leto, “errabat erebo solus per veterum monumenta, vetustatis diligentissimus rimator. Nihil in urbe tam abstrusum tamque abditum, ad quod ille non penetrarit,” Fabricius (ed.) 1734–46: 3: 630. A codex related to Leto’s practice of teaching in the ruins is the “Excerpta a Pomponio dum inter ambulandum cuidam domino ultramontano reliuias ac ruinas urbis ostenderet” (Venice, Marc. lat. X, 195); see also De Rossi 1882.

11

Cardinal Federico Borromeo, in the seventeenth century, described the garden: “Erat in ea domo atriolum constructum ex lapidibus eruditis, vetustaque marmora et inscriptiones ibi passim cernebantur cum frequenti lauru,” in Muratori (ed.) 1732–7: 1: x, cit. Della Torre 1903: 250. For Leto’s inscriptions, see Magister 1998 and Magister 2003. For Leto’s house and garden, see Zabughin 1909–1912: 199–203; Borsi 1975: 45–66; Magister 1998: 167–96; Magister 2003: 51–121.

12

CIL 6: 1710 = CIG 6246; Fulvio Orsini wrote that Leto kept it in a fountain: “Pomponius Laetus, ut erat omnis antiquitatis conservator diligens in Quirinali monte, ubi habitabat, aedium suarum in impluvio collocavit,” Orsini 1570: 48.

13 14

MacDougall 1975; Coffin 1991; Bober 1977. MacDougall first attributed the poem to Campano, citing its description in an epigraphic sylloge (“Romae nuper inventum. Campani est;” MacDougall 1975, citing Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana cod. 907, fol. 172). The poem is attributed to Campano in other MSS: Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana cod. 152, fol. 167r; Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ashburham 1174, fol. 61r; BAV, Vat. lat. 5225, IV, fol. 985v, cit. Cecchini 1982: 76. It also surfaces in a manuscript of the Academician Domitius Palladius Soranus (Martini 1969: 253). Yet the epigram still does not appear in Campano’s Opera omnia (Campano 1495).

15

For Domenico della Rovere’s statue and garden, see Bober 1977: 223–39; Aurigemma and Cavallaio 1999.

16

“Dormio, dum blandae sentio murmur aquae. / Parce meum, quisquis tangis cava marmora, somnum / Rumpere: sive bibas sive lavere, tace.”

17

Plato, Ion 534a (trans. W.R.M. Lamb), Cf. Osgood 1930: introduction; Tigerstedt 1969; Baxandall 1971: 15; Kemp 1977: 385; Bober 2000.

18

The quote is from a dialogue invented by Bracciolini between himself, Niccolò Niccoli, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, in which “Lorenzo” speaks the lines: “Nam constat priscos etiam doctissimos viros in signis et tabulis comparandis plurimum operae studiique posuisse. Cicero ipse, Varro, Aristoteles, caeterique tum Graeci, tum Latini insignes omnium doctrinarum genere viri, qui virtutum specie ad studia se contulerunt, eiusmodi rebus suas quoque bibliothecas et hortos excolebant, ad loca ipsa in quibus constituta erant nobilitanda, idque laudis et industriae esse volebant. Multum enim ad nobilitandum excitandumque animum conferre existimaverunt imagines eorum qui gloriae et sapientiae studiis floruissent ante oculos positas,” Poggio Bracciolini, De nobilitate, cit. Müntz 1888: 9; Della Torre 1902: 540; Franzoni 1984: 316–8.

19

The Priapea had been included in an edition of Virgil partially emended by Leto (cf. Venier 2001: 52–64). For the Greek Anthology see Hutton 1935. Cardinal Bessarion carried to Rome the celebrated autograph volume compiled by Maximus Planudes and now in the Marciana. Here it should be remembered that Leto’s circle grew directly out of Bessarion’s earlier Academy, and that Leto, Platina, Buonaccorsi, and Campano all had close ties with Bessarion or his secretary

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Niccolò Perotti: see Bianca 1994: 119–27 and also the poem “In hortum Bissarionis” by Filippo Buonaccorsi, published in Kumaniecki 1963: 43. 20

Although the poems about statuary in book 16 do not appear in the Planudean Anthology and therefore may not have been known in fifteenth-century Rome, most of the works about animate objects in book nine were included in Planudes’s manuscript; cf. AG 9:37, 38, 106, 107, 109, 257, 258, 589, 590, 754, 756.

21

Uzielli 1898; Uzielli 1899; Paparelli 1971; Garfagnini (ed.) 1987.

22

“In vaccam aeneam a Myrone caelatam: Arte sua cernens fabricatam ex aere iuvencam, / constitit et genitam credidit esse Myron. / Ac ait: ‘Huic similem vitulam caelasse recordor, / plus habet, haec mugit, nam mea muta fuit.’” Buonaccorsi’s poems are in BAV, Urb. Lat. 368 and National Library, Warsaw, Cim. 128, and published in Kumaniecki (ed.) 1963 and Sica (ed.) 1981.

23

“In eandem: Fugerat in sacris subito mactanda iuvenca. / Me videt et clamat: ‘ferte’ – minister – ‘opem’ / inque meum pavidus disponens vincula collum / me ligat et frustra saepe rudente trahit. / Viribus at postquam sensit concedere nullis, / fessus ait, ‘Fallit lumina nostra Myron.’

24

“In eandem: Taurus amore furit properatque sub ubera pullus / inque gregem, videat me modo, pastor agit.” cf. AG 9.730, by Demetrius of Bithynia.

25

“Myronem Eleutheris natum, Hageladae et ipsum dicipulum, bucula maxime nobilitavit celebratis versibus laudata, quando alieno perique ingenio magis quam suo commendantur,” Pliny, NH 34.57.

26

“In marmoreum equum Praxitelis: Praxitelis fueram caelis animatus et aura / testis erat motis per mea colla iubis. Os dabat hinnitus, feriebat et ungula terras, / ad pugnam fortes aere ciente viros. / Tempus edax animam rapuit gelidumque reliquit / et sum marmoreum nunc sine mente caput.” “In marmoreum equum Fidie: Quid frenare paras deceptus imagine saxum? Phidiacum hoc opus est, spiritus omnis abest. Ars oculos fallit, manibus natura patebit: Visus equus, marmor postmodo tactus ero,” Sica (ed.) 1981: 203–4.

27

“Simulacrum Apollinis marmoreum nuper inventum: Postquam Cesarei fato cecidere penates / Et Capitolinae tecta superba domus / Ruderibus latui immensis dum Iulius alter / Haec strueret magnis atria digna deis / Tu dilecta mihi Delosque Rhodosque valete / Haec mihi sit Delos: haec mihi silva Rhodos.” Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, Ms. Lat. X 195 (3433), fol. 20; Zabughin 1909– 1912: 2: 187; Magister 2002: 579.

28

For Capodiferro’s epigrams on ancient sculpture, preserved in BAV, Vat. lat. 3351 and Vat. lat. 10377 see Janitschek 1880; Tommassini 1892.

29

Fanelli 1979: 111–25; De Caprio 1982; Gaisser 1995.

30

Alhaique Pettinelli 1986, Ijsewijn (ed.) 1997.

31

See Dempsey’s discussion of “natural spirits” embodied in Verrocchio’s spiritello (Dempsey 2001: 54).

32

See discussion in Kris and Kurz 1979.

33

Frommel 1999, with previous literature.

34

Bober 2000.

35

Claude Bellièvre, Noctes Romanae, Paris, BN, MS. lat. 13,123, fol. 191: “In domo Roscia est statua Minerve cuius facies cum dulcedine et pulchritudine feminea est adeo veneranda ut animatum numen et oraculum videatur. Hinc sumpta occassione Roscius nobilis vir multorum iudicio bonus, invehebat contra modernos celatores qui beatam virginem facie nimis venerea sculpunt;” Christian 2002: 192.

36

Maierù 1999: 145–6.

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Bibliography Alhaique Pettinelli, R. (1986) “Punti di vista sull’arte nei poeti dei Coryciana,” La Rassegna della letteratura italiana 90: 41–54. Aurigemma, M. G. and Cavallaro, A. (1999) Il palazzo di Domenico della Rovere in Borgo, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato. Barkan, L. (1993) “The Beholder’s Tale: Ancient Sculpture, Renaissance Narratives.” Representations 44: 133–66. —— (1999) Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Baxandall, M. (1971) Giotto and the Orators. Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bianca, C. (1994) “Roma e l’accademia bessarionea,” in G. Ficcadori (ed.) Bessarione e L’Umanesimo: catalogo della mostra, Naples: Vivarium. Bober, P. P. (1977) “The Coryciana and the Nymph Corycia,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 40: 223–39. —— (2000) “Appropriation Contexts. Decor, Furor Bacchicus, Convivium,” in A. Kuttner, A. Payne, and R. Smick (eds) Antiquity and Its Interpreters, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Borsi, F. (1975) “La consulta nella storia urbana,” in F. Bonifacio (ed.) Il palazzo della Consulta, Rome: Editalia. Campano, G. A. (1495) Opera omnia, Rome: Eucharius Silber. Cecchini, P. (1982) “Per un’edizione critica dei carmina di Giannantonio Campano,” Res publica litterarum. Studies in the Classical Tradition 5.1: 53–76. Christian, K. W. (2002) “The de’ Rossi Collection of Ancient Sculptures, Leo X, and Raphael,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 65: 132–200. Coffin, D. (1991) Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cole, M. (2002) “The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium,” Art Bulletin 84: 621–40. De Caprio, V. (1982) “I cenacoli umanistici,” in La letteratura italiana 1. Il letterato e le istituzioni, Turin: Einaudi. De Rossi, G. B. (1882) “Note di topografia romana raccolte dalla bocca di Pomponio Leto, e testo pomponiano della Notitia regionum urbis Romae,” Studi e documenti di storia e diritto: 49–87. —— (1890) “L’accademia di Pomponio Leto e le sue memorie scritte sulle pareti delle catacombe romane,” Bullettino di Archeologia Cristiana di Roma ser. 5, 1: 81–94. Della Torre, A. (1902) Storia dell’Accademia platonica di Firenze, Florence: Carnesecchi. —— (1903) Paolo Marsi da Pescina. Contributo alla storia dell’Accademia Pomponiana Rocca S. Casciano: L. Cappelli. Dempsey, C. (2001) Inventing the Renaissance Putto, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dunston, A. J. (1973) “Pope Paul II and the Humanists,” Journal of Religious History 7: 287–306. Fabricius, J. A. (ed.) (1734–46) Bibliotheca latina mediae et infimae aetatis Florence: T. Baracchi. Fanelli, V. (1979) Ricerche su Angelo Colocci e sulla Roma cinquecentesca. Studi e testi 283, Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Fehrenbach, F. (2005) “Bernini’s Light,” Art History 28: 1–42. Franzoni, C. (1984) “Remembranze d’infinite cose. Le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità,” in S. Settis (ed.) Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana I, Turin: Einaudi. Frommel, C. L. (1999) “Raffaele Riario, la Cancelleria, il teatro e il Bacco di Michelangelo,” in K. WeilGarris Brandt, C. Acidini Luchinat, J. D. Draper, and N. Penny (eds) La Giovinezza di Michelangelo, Florence: Skira. Gaisser, J. H. (1995) “The Rise and Fall of Goritz’s Feasts,” Renaissance Quarterly 48: 41–57. Garfagnini, G. C. (ed.) (1987) Callimaco esperiente, poeta e politico del ‘400, Florence: Olschki.

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Garin, E. (1966) “L’Accademia romana, Pomponio Leto e la congiura,” in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 3, Milan: Garzanti. Gilbert, N. W. (1977) “A Letter of Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio to Fra’ Guglielmo Centueri: A Fourteenth-Century Episode in the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns,” Viator 8: 299–346. Gross, K. (1992) The Dream of the Moving Statue, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harth, H. (ed.) (1984) Poggio Bracciolini. Lettere, Florence: Olschki. Hutton, J. (1935) The Greek Anthology in Italy to the Year 1800, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ijsewijn, J. (ed.) (1997) Coryciana, Rome: Herder. Jacobs, F. (2005) The Living Image in Renaissance Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janitschek, H. (1880) “Ein Hofpoet Leo’s X. über Künstler und Kunstwerke,” Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 3: 52–60. Kemp, M. (1977) “From mimesis to fantasia: the Quattrocento Vocabulary of Creation, Inspiration, and Genius in the Visual Arts,” Viator 8: 347–98. Kris E. and Kurz, O. (1979) Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist, trans. A. Laing and L. M. Newman, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kumaniecki, K. (ed.) (1963) Philippi Callimachi epigrammatum libri duo, Wratislaviae: Zaklad Narodowy im. Ossolinskich. MacDougall, E. B. (1975) “The Sleeping Nymph. Origins of a Humanist Fountain Type,” Art Bulletin 57: 357–65. Magister, S. (1988) “Pomponio Leto collezionista di antichità. Note sulla tradizione manoscritta di una raccolta epigrafica nella Roma del tardo Quattrocento,” Xenia antiqua 7: 167–96. —— (2002) “Arte e politica: La collezione di antichità del Cardinale Giuliano della Rovere nei palazzi ai Santi Apostoli,” Atti della Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche. Mermorie 9th series, 14: 385–631. —— (2003) “Pomponio Leto collezionista di antichità: Addenda,” in Antiquaria a Roma. Intorno a Pomponio Leto e Paolo II, Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento. Maierù, A. (1999) “Littera e Allegoria,” in Storiografia e poesia nella cultura medioevale, Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medioevo. Martini, M. (1969) Domitius Palladius Soranus poeta (Contributo alla storia dell Umanesimo), Frosinone: Casamari. Medioli Masotti, P. (1982) “L’accademia romana e la congiura del 1468 (con un’appendice di Augusto Campana),” Italia Medioevale e Umanistica 25: 189–204. Müntz, E. (1888) Les collections des Médicis au XVe siècle, Paris and London: Librairie de l’art. Muratori, L. A. (ed.) (1732–7) Caroli Sigonii mutinensis Opera omnia: edita et inedita, cum notis variorum illustrium virorum et eiusdem vita, Milan: In aedibus Palatinis. Orsini, F. (1570). Imagines et elogia virorum illustrium et eruditor ex antiquis lapidibus et nomismatib[us] expressa cum annotationib[us] ex bibliotheca Fulvi Ursini, Rome: Antonio Lafreri. Osgood, C. G. (1930) Boccaccio on Poetry, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Palermino, R. J. (1980) “The Roman Academy, the Catacombs, and the Conspiracy of 1468,” Archivum Historiae Pontificae 18: 117–55. Paparelli, G. (1971) Callimaco Esperiente (Filippo Buonaccorsi), Salerno: Beta. Pfisterer, U. (1999) “Phidias und Polyklet von Dante bis Vasari. Zu Nachruhm und künstlerischer Rezeption antiker Bildhauer in der Renaissance,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27: 61–97. —— (2002) Donatello und die Entdeckung der Stile 1430–1445, Munich: Hirmer. Sica, F. (ed.) (1981) Callimachi Experientis (Philippi Bonaccorsi) Carmina, Naples: Fratelli Conte. Smith, C. (1992) Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Summers, D. (1980) Michelangelo and the Language of Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press. —— (1989) “Aria II: The Union of Image and Artist as an Aesthetic Ideal in Renaissance Art,” Artibus et historiae 20: 15–31.

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Tigerstedt, E. N. (1969) “Plato’s Idea of Poetical Inspiration,” Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum. Societas Scientiarum Fennica 44.2: 1–76. Tommassini, O. (1892) “Evangelista Maddaleni de’ Capodiferro accademico … e storico,” Atti della Reale Accademia dei Lincei. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche. Memorie, ser. 4, 10: 1–20. Uzielli, G. (1898) “Filippo Bonaccorsi ‘Callimaco Esperiente’ di S. Gimignano,” Miscellanea storica della Valdelsa 6: 114–58. —— (1899) “Filippo Bonaccorsi ‘Callimaco Esperiente’ di S. Gimignano,” Miscellanea storica della Valdelsa 7: 84–112. Valla, L. (1540) Opera omnia, Basel: Henricus Petri. Venier, M. (2001) Per una storia del testo di Virgilio: nella prima età del libro a stampa (1469–1519), Udine: Forum. Zabughin, V. (1909–12) Giulio Pomponio Leto. Saggio critico, Rome: La vita letteraria.

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Chapter 7

The winds in the corners Giulio Romano, the elements, and the Palazzo Te’s Fall of the Giants David Mayernik

7.1 The Winds from the north-east and north-west corners of the Sala dei Giganti

Giulio Romano’s frescoes in the Sala dei Giganti of the Palazzo Te have received much attention from visitors and scholars at least since Charles V’s tours of the building in 1530 – before they were begun, when he might have seen the cartoons – and 1532 – while they were in progress, with essentially just the ceiling complete – and Giorgio Vasari’s visit in 1541 – approximately five years after their completion. Vasari, who had the privilege of visiting the room with the artist – five years before Giulio’s death – provides invaluable information about the pains Giulio took within the room to sustain their remarkable illusionism. Certain assumptions about the way in which artists and architects are presumed to collaborate have tended to structure the ways in which frescoes 125

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are generally interpreted in the context of their architectural framework; but Vasari’s information from the artist/architect himself about the precautions taken here to prepare the room for the paintings challenge the normal assumptions about the integration of the arts. Giulio, at the Te, had the rare chance to design the architecture, paint the frescoes, and compose the stuccoes for a building unique for its scale and rapidity of completion, and he was not one to compartmentalize those disparate arts, nor was he prepared to simply see the paintings as being in the service of the architecture. This chapter will explore a reading of the frescoes and their relationship to their architectural context that recovers a fuller sense of their significance and intended effect, recovering for Giulio thereby a role as steward – rather than saboteur – of the classical humanist tradition. I will examine the impact of the paintings of this room in particular – and those of the Palazzo generally – on the architecture, while interpreting the iconographic role of the elements in this room as destructive rather than beneficent forces – the way they are more commonly portrayed in other sixteenth-century villas – tying the images not only to their armature but to its wider landscape. While references to air, water, earth, and fire are common topoi in sixteenth-century villas, the Palazzo Te is unique in the ways in which Nature’s dual aspects — bounty and vengeance — are explicitly juxtaposed in both painting and architecture. By making a virtue of the natural faults of the site while inextricably stitching together the various arts for narrative purposes, Giulio Romano wove a sophisticated and fertile conceptual tapestry at the Palazzo Te, taming the elements in reality as he fictively invoked their destructive power. The resulting dynamic narrative furnished much of the raw material for what Gianlorenzo Bernini a century later would call the bel composto, or beautiful whole, and enriched the repertoire of the Renaissance’s representations of Nature.

The interpretive background Giulio’s frescoed rooms in the Te are generally described episodically – or at best sequentially – partly reflecting a certain prejudice about his inventive process (presumably ad hoc) and partly a disdain for the purposes of this evident pleasure palace. This has tended also to prejudice readings of the iconographic coherence of the ensemble. If we could instead put Giulio Romano back into the context of Raphael’s atelier and see him as Vasari did, as Raphael’s most able – not most idiosyncratic – pupil, then his work done after Rome might instead recover a status as the fulfillment of Raphael’s classical project rather than its Mannerist overturning; indeed, what maniera Giulio exhibited might better be understood as a novel compliement to his master’s own maniera and grazia rather than its bizarre inversion. 126

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Let us for the moment give his student the benefit of the doubt which Raphael has been granted in the Stanze frescoes1 or the Capella Sistina tapestries2: as a quasi-humanist rhetorician, with full command of the disposizione of his characters and themes internally – within each fresco or tapestry – dynamically across the room, and from one room to another, a command the master exploited more inventively, poetically, and systematically than perhaps anyone before him. Our first task, before we explore Giulio Romano’s intent, is to begin to disassemble much of the interpretive scaffolding that has grown up around the building and its frescoes over the past few centuries. The most pervasive frameworks are disposed to see him as subversive, or at best willful and witty; Manfredo Tafuri sees a mind given to deliberately alternating between seriousness and jest, delighting in the “poetics of contrast”.3 To see the Te this way is to privilege its formal aspects over the allegorical, and can be dangerously circular as an argument, coloring every operation of Giulio’s with this light. Regarding the question of the artist’s classical “subversiveness”, few architects of the middle of the sixteenth century achieve anything close to Giulio’s sure command of an all’ antica style – indeed, one wonders what his motivation for subverting that tradition might have been; if Giulio Romano the architect is subversive in his deployment of rustication and the orders, then so too could be his follower Andrea Palladio. Not willful, but on the contrary supremely rational, Giulio’s architecture will be shown to emerge from a rigorous formal and allegorical integration of the arts realized in response to an overarching poetic concetto. More to the point of these frescoes’ allegorical meaning, the politicized reading of the Fall of the Giants as referring to the rebellious communes and papal allies crushed under the Emperor Charles V’s overwhelming Olympian forces is questionable: the Giants were, above all, uncouth upstarts, aberrations of nature void of Olympian dignity, and are hard to identify with the papal forces or ancient cities, like Florence, who futilely opposed Charles. The Giants in Giulio’s frescoes, moreover, have a decidedly northern, transalpine aspect — one more in keeping with the mythical barbaric tribe from north of the Peloponnese that they are described as in the ancient textual sources (the Fall event itself took place in Thrace, a geographic point to which we will return later). One could say that Giulio’s Giants look perhaps more like Charles’ troops than their Italic opponents. Indeed, the Giants might instead seem “gothic” to the Mediterranean Olympians, hardly in tune with the nationalities of the supposed sixteenth-century political antagonists. It also seems unlikely that this frescoed room alone would play to the emperor’s ego, since he had access on his visits to the work in progress throughout the whole Palazzo, and he would have been just as struck by the festivities in the Sala di Psiche, whose theme would be hard to politicize – although not impossible. In fact, when Charles visited Mantua for the second time 127

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in 1532, the Giants room was still two years from completion, and what he would have seen completed was the Olympian ceiling, not the Giants themselves – although temporary paintings in the lower register would have given him a sense of the final effect. Instead, it would be more fruitful to search for the iconographic program for these rooms and the Palazzo as a whole in the context of the mainstream humanist tradition. It was Giulio’s inventive formal and narrative contributions to that tradition that will be the subject of this chapter.

Giulio Pippi’s Roman background Among the many, indeed innumerable, disciples of Raphael of Urbino, of whom the greater part proved themselves very able, there was no one who imitated him more in style, invention, design, and colouring than Giulio Romano, nor anyone among them who was better grounded, bolder, sounder, more fanciful, varied, prolific, and versatile than him.4 Raphael was the source of the young Giulio Pippi’s education not only in disegno and coloring, but also in a particular approach to narrative and allegory. At the same time, however, we should note that the instinct to want to thematically link up painted themes with architectural ones was not just something brought to Mantua from Rome by Giulio — his patrons the Gonzagas had themselves already shown a penchant for such conceits decades earlier. Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, writing as he was restoring his Diaconia of Sta Agata dei Goti on the Quirinal hill in Rome between 1475 and 1481, described his intention for the decoration of its garden’s maze this way: Put the story of Theseus on the facade where the labyrinth is, but paint on the wall only his entrance into the labyrinth to the point at which he was given the thread; from there on the natural labyrinth itself should be considered sufficient to conjure up the death of the Minotaur that took place there.5 More than simply an early instance of a prelate using classical mythological themes to embellish a semi-private garden, what is of special relevance to a discussion of the integration of the arts at the Palazzo Te is the idea that part of the actual garden could function as an integral part of the fictive narrative painted on the walls, essentially completing it — a conceptual bridge between the painted and real worlds that Giulio would eventually exploit. But the influence of the Gonzagas apart, it was in Rome and Raphael’s studio that Giulio Pippi was introduced to the theoretical problems of 128

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integrating painting, sculpture, and architecture. Fresco especially, a demanding medium that demanded thoughtful preparation, posed special problems and opportunities in the realm of illusion. Plastering and painting the wall surface each giornata meant that the wall itself was literally being transformed by the paint in ways unique to the medium – unlike, for example, oil on canvas. While fifteenth-century Florence saw some of the earliest experiments in the illusionistic continuity of real and fictive space – beginning with Masaccio’s Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella – the Rome in which Giulio Pippi grew up had no shortage of fruitful models to emulate. At the Capella Bufalini in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Pinturicchio had tackled the chapel’s walls with a knowing grasp of the difficulties of relating the painted world to the world of the worshipper, but he was reluctant to make a stab at dramatic continuity between them; rather, he self-consciously acknowledged both the fact of the painted wall plane and the illusionism of the fictive frame.6 Filippino Lippi is within the same tradition at the Capella Carafa in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva; his similar work in Florence would have been known to Raphael as well. At the Palazzo Venezia, in the room known as the Sala del Mappamondo, an early sixteenth-century artist – Bramante himself, or someone under his direction? – frescoed illusionistic pilasters that enliven the wall plane in a way that has more to do with architectural composition than painting; what is especially of note is the suggestion of ruin in the architectonic system, with architraves and pilasters eroded by time or the elements. In the absence of evidence of the artist’s intent, a reasonable interpretation might be that it is precisely the chipped, cracked, and fragmented nature of fictive architecture that contributes, paradoxically, to its sense of three-dimensional reality. (How many later paintings, of the seventeenth century especially, with architectural armatures show imperfections to heighten the sense of corporeality, or rather mitigate the abstract, graphic quality of the architectural rendering?7) Adding an iconographic layer to this depiction of fictive ruin, in Botticelli’s fresco The Punishment of Korah in the Sistine Chapel the contrast between his ruined (or incomplete?) triumphal arch and the whole ones in Perugino’s fresco of the Delivery of the Keys opposite serves a precise thematic purpose, made explicit by the frescoes’ spatial juxtaposition.8 Raphael himself would provide the most compelling models for Giulio Romano’s thought process at the Te. The Stanza della Segnatura, painted roughly six years before Giulio Pippi entered the master’s bottega, has recovered again the dynamic allegorical logic underlying its disposizione thanks to Timothy Verdon’s reading of the School of Athens as continuous with the Disputà, making the philosophers in the former not only engaged among themselves but with the saints of the latter on the wall opposite — Verdon sees Plato and Aristotle literally walking toward the revelation of the Christian theme. Verdon repositions Raphael as not only a genius of classical form, but of 129

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Aristotelian dramatic logic – with its unity of time and place. Since both the School of Athens and the Disputà assemble personages from across history, they have no unity of time internally — it is in the space of the room itself that they can be unified. The visitor to what was then Pope Julius II’s library entered through a door on the School of Athens wall, thereby animating and extending the frozen action painted on the walls above.9 Christiane Joost-Gaugier’s analysis of the same room uncovers its geographic logic – each wall’s cardinal orientation referring to an historic/mythical locus that corresponds to its painted theme –and the role of an erudite humanist iconography, again restoring to Raphael a spatial sophistication unique at this period.10 Around the time Giulio entered his atelier, Raphael was at work on his first fresco for the Villa Chigi – now the Villa Farnesina; apart from the elegance of the Galatea fresco’s figures, the talented novice would have been exposed to the problems of disposizione and integration between selfcontained painted works, since the Polyphemus that completes the Galatea theme was painted in a separate bay adjacent to Raphael’s fresco – and by a different artist, Sebastiano del Piombo. Giulio would also have come in contact on site with the architect of the villa, Baldassare Peruzzi, a painter himself who gave the most impressive display of coherent illusionism yet attempted in the so-called Sala delle Prospettive in the upstairs salon: there all the walls of the room are dissolved as loggias with views to a more or less topographicallyaccurate landscape beyond. Apart from the command of perspectival illusionism that Peruzzi displays, and the desire to expand not only one wall but the very room itself, Giulio would have been seduced by the felicitous “allusionism” at work on the fireplace hood, where the Forge of Vulcan was painted — the fresco thereby metaphorically transforming the real fire below into Hephaestus’ mythical flames. That same transformative allusionism was put to work in the great ground floor loggia, which Raphael – near the early end of his life – would conceptually transform into a fictive arbor hung with tapestries, a master-stroke that allowed him to both extend the real space of the Loggia and respect the internal logic of his two most important painted scenes – which as tapestries become quadri riportati seen from below, hung from the arbor’s soaring armature. At the Villa Madama, where Raphael was both architect and painter for the first time at a significant scale, Giulio may have had greater responsibilities for the invenzione of frescoes and stuccoes, and while illusionism and allusions of the Chigi sort were not attempted, another kind of allusion — the overt, conscious evocation of admired antique precedents, like the Domus Aurea — transformed the villa in a more intellectual way. When the Villa Turini (now Lante) design was tackled within the atelier after Raphael’s death, references to the history of the site on the Janiculum hill – allusions to Janus abound; and the fresco of the Discovery of the Tomb of Numa Pompilius and the Sibylline Books anachronistically 130

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contains an image of the villa itself11 – informed not only some of the frescoes but perhaps the architecture itself. The building was therefore archaeologically referential both as a concetto and in its parts. This sort of frozen archaeology was perhaps most congenially practiced in Rome, but could be exploited almost anywhere on the Italian peninsula with an antique pedigree – such as Virgil’s Mantua, which claimed a lineage even older than Rome’s. The problems – and opportunities – of mural painting demanded a rigorous “pictorial intelligence” on the same level of sophistication as the rhetorical strategies of a curial humanist. At least as importantly as the familiarity with humanist texts, one might argue that this pictorial intelligence defined the painters who excelled in it as humanists in their own right.

The sequence of works at the Palazzo Te And because the place has no living rock, and no convenient quarries that could provide stone for hewing and carving, as used in building by those who can obtain them, he made use of bricks and tiles, to which he then added stucco; and with these materials he made columns, bases, capitals, cornices, doors, windows and other structures with most beautiful proportions, and in a new and fantastic style the decorations of the vaults, with very lovely compartments and with richly adorned alcoves.12 Arriving in Mantua in 1524, Giulio Romano entered into the most prolific phase of his career, in the service of patrons who would entrust virtually the entire city to him. Outside the urban walls to the south of the city, between two small lakes and on a man-made piece of ground which had housed the Gonzagas’ prized horses, Giulio was called first to embellish the existing stable buildings – by building on their old foundations. That project having come out so well, the Marchese Federico Gonzaga resolved to embark on the more ambitious design we know today. At that point a detailed model was prepared – showing both the exterior and the interior cortile, we may assume – and construction began almost immediately thereafter. Situated between two lakes to the west and east, the Te island was in essence a dike, controlling the west–east flow of the Mincio’s slow currents around the city.13 To the north, a channel separated the Te from the city of Mantua and its Porta Pusterla; immediately to the south, marshland ran almost continuously from west to east. These two watery boundaries to the north and south would be regularized with retaining walls by the time of the 1628 map of the city (Figure 7.2). The Gonzagas had been perhaps excessively prudent – for both structural and military reasons – in not having previously built anything more substantial than a stable complex on the island, but the challenges of building on 131

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7.2 Detail of Figure 7.7, after the map of Mantua of 1628 (north is toward the right in the image)

such marshy terrain were no doubt real – not dissimilar to construction in Venice. The stagnant waters around the Te island would have also implied malevolent airs to anyone versed in Hippocratic theories – not to mention popular superstition. For Giulio as an architect, the treatises of the Roman architect Vitruvius – available by this time in Italian translations – and Alberti would have been the likely source of transmission of ancient ideas about unhealthful airs and waters. It is significant that these apprehensions about the Te island would not hinder the Gonzagas or their architect from building a palazzo there of notable size and refinement, although their interest in the project seems to have happened in stages. It was only as their aspirations grew with Federico’s increasingly close ties with the emperor, and with the family’s involvement with architectural projects along the north–south route that connected the center of Mantua with one of its southern gates – the now destroyed Porta Pusterla; the channel has since been filled in – that the idea of developing the dike/island seemed actually desirable and almost inevitable. The designs for the Te palazzo fall easily into two distinct phases: the refurbishing and expansion of the existing structure on the site, and the large project which superseded it for the Palazzo as it now stands.14 Both campaigns involved the same construction and ornamental system – stucco over brick – determined as Vasari relates by the site’s lack of “living rock,” and frescoes. Both also, it has been shown, involved building on the pre-existing foundations of the stable complex and its villa – which was also organized around a square court.15 While the frescoes are usually considered apart from their architectural context, that second phase was indeed conceived synthetically – as was the first – in architecture, construction, painting, and sculpture. The meaning of the Te’s frescoes cannot, therefore, be detached from their armature and the site. In fact, the unique challenges of the site afforded not a small part of the poetic conceit behind the project from its inception.

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We can know that the design for the Palazzo must have, almost by definition, incorporated a holistic architectonic and iconographic program for one simple reason: at least in one spot its foundations and walls were shaped to accommodate the eventual frescoes. Vasari claims that the Fall of the Giants room had “double foundations” sunk because it was over a particularly unstable part of the site – he calls it “marshy” – and the corners of the room rounded at the begining of the ceiling to allow continuity of the frescoes from wall to wall and wall to ceiling. The frescoes were painted roughly six years after construction of the foundations began. Thus structure, plan, and frescoes must, of necessity, have been conceived before construction began, and therefore we might profitably look for deeper relationships between the architectonic concept and the fresco program. The unstable, and perhaps insalubrious, aspects of the site challenged Giulio Romano’s virtuosity as an architect. Since antiquity, overcoming such challenges had been a mark of heroic achievement. Overcoming it, however, meant effectively completely transforming the extant terrain, leaving little evidence of the Herculean effort expended — and thus less opportunity for fame. Giulio and Federico would, however, have been desirous of recording somehow what they had accomplished in the face of nature’s obstacles. It can be shown that the building itself and the Giants fresco do just that. It is the cortile, with its Doric entablature’s slipped triglyphs and its unruly rustication, that has provided most fodder for the label of “subversive” attached to Giulio Romano (Figure 7.3). Concealed within the private realm of the Palazzo, unlike the dignified (and “correct”) rusticated Doric facade presented to the outside world, the cortile’s architectonic system seems a witty joke, a playful inversion of classical decorum. Witty or not, the cortile’s stucco decorative system demanded serious brickwork support that anticipated it, suggesting careful planning – and detailed designs. Work on the cortile was interrupted so that Giulio could fresco the Giants and Psyche cycles, which means that the cortile either conceptually predated them or was projected coincident with them. The work progress around the Palazzo actually suggests a complete conceptual framework was in place from the start, allowing Giulio and his team to switch fairly effortlessly from one task to another, and back again, as necessity (like an Imperial visit) demanded. The first significant room completed in fresco formed part of the first project: the so-called sala dei Cavalli, after the frescoed horses (Federico’s favorites) perched high up above the tall fictive dado that wraps the room. Transforming a stable into an elegant salone had been done at least once before in the sixteenth century, and famously: Agostino Chigi had Raphael design stables for his villa along the via della Lungara in Rome, and at a grand dinner there for Pope Leo X the building was hung with Belgian silk hangings embroidered in gold. After the meal, Chigi had the hangings drawn away, 133

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revealing to the Pope’s (feigned?) astonishment and delight the stalls for the horses behind.16 At the Te, Federico Gonzaga instead permanently transformed the stables into a grand reception hall, with the horses present only fictively. Along with the horses, Giulio had frescoed six adventures of Hercules: a combination of the Labors with deeds involving other creatures,17 the scenes perhaps deliberately omit the two Labors associated with horses, The Mares of Diomedes and The Stables of Augias, since they were represented metaphorically by the Gonzagas’ stately frescoed mares themselves – and the former function of the room. This very strategy, of the real space completing the frescoed narrative, was employed throughout the Palazzo.

Reading the Fall of the Giants in context [A]nd whoever enters that room and sees all the windows, doors and so forth all distorted and apparently hurtling down, and the mountains and buildings falling, cannot but fear that everything will crash down upon him.18 While perhaps obvious, it still bears saying that the Sala dei Giganti can only be properly understood in light of its context: the adjacent frescoed rooms, the

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7.3 East facade of the cortile

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Palazzo Te itself, its architecture and its site, and the humanist allegorical reading of the event. The latter, dependent upon a literate approach and access to textual sources, implies either the role of an iconographer or a learned artist, or both.19 It seems beyond doubt that, despite a lack of a formal humanist education, Giulio can be inferred from the subject matter of his fresco oeuvre and his interests in ancient coins to have been at least as learned as Raphael. Whether he had help with the iconography of the Te is an open question. Of course, it is also impossible to understand Giulio’s approach to the project without recourse to his precedents and the culture of virtuosity that demanded he exceed them; indeed, Mantua had attracted important artists and architects at least since Alberti’s activity in the city half a century earlier. The artist who had impacted Mantua most significantly before Giulio’s arrival was certainly Mantegna. Mantegna’s significance extended beyond Mantua and he had been innovative at the highest level, whether for his penetrating interest in antiquity, for his exploitation of the construction of perspective, or for the logical extension of perspective to illusion when he was presented the opportunity to fresco an entire room. The Camera degli Sposi at the Palazzo Ducale would have offered the lately arrived Roman artist an inspiring departure point for his work at the Te, both in terms of narrative continuity around the walls and in fictively opening up the ceiling to vertiginous di sotto in su effects. Not only did Giulio seize upon the Mantegnan challenge and exceed it, he also literally drew on his predecessor’s cast of characters and props when necessary — as when he transformed the oculus of the Sposi into the circular Ionic temple of Olympus in the Giants fresco (an inversion whereby void becomes solid, fictive stucco populated sky). This implicit challenge to Giulio’s virtuosity was no doubt formative in his desire to find an opportunity to exceed the challenge, and the subject of his response would require a theme invested with dramatic interest and allegorical relevance to the rest of the Te. The Fall of the Giants echoed a broad theme which other artists had embraced before — the impudent challenge to the gods by lesser beings, like Marsyas competing with Apollo — which had elicited several elegant solutions – recall Raphael’s Flaying of Marsyas on the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura – but The Fall offered greater numbers of figures and thundering action. Indeed, the Palazzo Te’s version, enveloping the spectator both laterally and vertically, literally overwhelmed any competing version of the theme.20 The event, in Giulio’s reading of it, has all the elements of a tempestuous cataclysm: Jupiter’s lightning and presumed thunder, winds blowing from the four corners, water carrying away some of the Giants, the earth itself swallowing up the rest and their prideful Corinthian temple/tower. Storms, tidal waves, and earthquakes conspire to defeat Gaia’s misshapen sons. These are the elements — earth, air, fire, and water — that other Renaissance villas would celebrate as healthful aspects of their site and the life it 135

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afforded. Here Nature is tumultuous, destructive, and vengeful; the gods wield nature’s power to destroy Nature’s (Gaia’s) aberrations. The frescoes, rather than a celebration, are a talisman against Nature, warding off the harmful effects of earth, air, fire, and water. The Sala dei Giganti is found in the south-east corner of the Palazzo Te, paired about the central east–west axis with the Sala di Psiche in the northeast corner; it is also adjacent to Federico’s ball court. The ball court would have provided an appropriately resonant racket to stand for Jupiter’s thunder, while the Giganti’s geographic position might have sustained the frescoes’ illusion for a knowing visitor. The Fall itself took place in Thrace, a setting more or less southeast of Mantua, in the region that was home to Constantinople – whose connection with Mantua extended from Pius II’s ill-fated Congress to win support for a new crusade, held in Mantua in 1459, to Federico Gonzaga’s on–off interest in marrying a member of the Paleologa family, whose surname evoked the Byzantine Emperor who attended the ineffective Council of Florence in 1439. The fact that the room flanked the Sala di Psiche about the Loggia di Davide suggests a parallel of meaning, and a clue to the linked reading can be found in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili – a book from which Giulio profited throughout the Palazzo.21 There Poliphilo, having emerged from “that odious, dark and frightful cave” is welcomed by Queen Eleuterylida (whose name means “free will”); richly attired, around her neck she wears an oval, etched diamond, “scintillating and of monstrous size,”22 whose iconography is explained to Poliphilo later on in the text: Logistica, understanding my honest request, immediately replied, saying ‘Know, Poliphilo, that this gem is engraved with the image of almighty Jupiter, sitting crowned on his throne, while under his majestic and holy footstool are the vanquished giants who wanted to reach his high threshold, to seize his sceptre and to be equal with him; and he struck them with lightning. In his left hand he holds a flame of fire, in his right he has a cornucopia filled with good things, and he holds his arms apart. This is all that is contained on that precious jewel.’ Then I said, ‘What is the significance of these two such different things that he holds in his divine hands?’ Thelemia replied knowingly, ‘Through his infinite goodness, immortal Jupiter indicates to earthlings that they can freely choose from his hands whichever gift they wish.’23 The fact that Poliphilo was enlightened by Logic to this recondite meaning contained in an ancient gem would have appealed particularly to Giulio Romano, an expert in numismatics with a not insubstantial personal collection of coins and gems (Figure 7.4). Coins provided him sources for 136

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7.4 Queen Eleuterylida wearing the Jupiter and the Giants pendant, based on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili text and illustrations

arcane imagery as they would for Pirro Ligorio and later for Poussin; that this one implied a kind of Herculean choice between Virtue and Vice would have accorded well with an emergent tradition of garden iconography24 that read choice of direction as a moral choice: in a symmetrical palace-villa, like a symmetrical garden, the choice of left and right could take on allegorical significance that would influence the imagery in sculpture and fresco which accompanied it. Here at the Te the Banquets of the Psyche room would stand for Jupiter’s right hand and its cornucopia, while his left and its flame of fire naturally suggests the Fall. Jupiter as a type of Moral Nature provides humanity with a choice of gifts or punishments based on their desires. At the Loggia di Davide, in the middle of the east wing, a visitor to the Palazzo, aware of the frescoed rooms, would have been presented with a similar choice; of course, King David himself wrestled with those alternative paths, and at times was a model king while at others he succumbed to a baser nature – witness his affair with Bathsheba and his sending of her husband Uriah to his death. David therefore stood for humanity at large, and rulers in particular, who balanced tendencies toward virtue with vice. The fruits of such a choice are made evident in the actions of Nature: abundance, fulfillment after arduous effort, and joy in the Psyche frescoes (Figure 7.5), punishment, desperation, and anguish in the Fall of the Giants (Figure 7.6). In the former the Winds, Earth, Water, and Fire bring all good things, while in the latter they are the agents of destruction. In the Loggia di Davide the Israelite king is shown in the lunette above the door on the Psyche side in the violent act of decapitating Goliath,

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7.5 The goat Amalthea nursing two infant satyrs, from the scene of the Rustic Banquet in the Sala di Psiche

7.6 The right half of the west wall, Sala dei Giganti

while above the door on the Giants side he gracefully plays his lyre while triumphantly perched above Goliath’s head; within the scope of one heroic act he is first warrior then poet. It is also relevant that the impudence of the Giants is represented by their buildings: after all, they attempted to scale to Mount Olympus by means of architecture. Giulio seems to chastise the arrogance of their Corinthian construction with Jupiter’s dignified Ionic temple in the sky,25 but the Te itself was soberly Doric inside the cortile and on the outside, suggesting that its imposing presence 138

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7.7 Analytical study of the Sala dei Giganti and its context

is offset by its decorative restraint and relatively low elevation – it is in essence a one storey building with an attic, unlike the Giants’ tower. The low elevation would have been largely conditioned by building on the foundations of the previous structures, which were themselves conditioned by the marshy site; and the use of stucco instead of stone might have elicited musings on permanence versus impermanence. The real building, therefore, was juxtaposed at every level — plan, vertical scale, material — with the Giants’ impudent construction (Figure 7.7). Evidently, the Winds, Water, Fire, and Earth shown destroying the Giants won’t harm the Gonzagas – although, as we will see, they do feel their effects. 139

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{A}nd in this spot, among all the crashing buildings, was positioned the fireplace of the room which, when there is a fire lit, makes it seem as if the giants are burning, for Pluto is painted there, fleeing towards the centre, with his chariot drawn by lean horses and accompanied by the Furies of Hell.26 The east wall of the room, until the eighteenth century, incorporated the room’s fireplace between two windows overlooking the gardens and fishponds (Figure 7.8). Recalling Peruzzi’s frescoed fireplace with its Forge of Vulcan in the Sala delle Prospettive at the Villa Chigi, Giulio Romano transformed the practical fire of the hearth into the flames of a metaphorical furnace, here consuming the Giants on the walls as they battle Jupiter’s elemental agents in paint. Above the fireplace the Giant Typhoeus belches his last flames as he is crushed under boulders; as the mythical source of Mount Ætna’s eruptions, he suggests the fireplace below is not just Vulcan’s forge but the great volcano of Sicily itself. Both the fireplace and the frescoes are enriched by this exchange: the former sheds it mundane, practical role, while the latter are invested with greater evident reality. Less dramatically, the original floor of the room – replaced in the eighteenth century – was made of rocks meant to extend the character of the painted rocks on the walls under the very feet of a visitor. Illusionism was not confined to the efforts of brush and pigment; instead it simultaneously extended the narrative into the phenomenal world and enveloped the spectator in the realm of the narrative. Similarly, Giulio was noted for his inventive reinterpretations of the Gonzaga’s heraldic imagery. Often, that invention took the form of an activating of the emblematic devices, setting them into quasi-narrative contexts.27 Giulio’s inventive direction was almost exclusively toward heightened dramatic action and realism. Like the Giants’, Psyche’s troubles with the gods began when she sought equality with them, in her case amorously; Phaeton, on the contrary, had legitimate claims to divine status but was unprepared to wield it, and in the nearby Sala delle Aquile he tumbles out of the sky after losing control of Apollo’s chariot of the sun. Unlike the Giants or Phaeton, however, Psyche was not impudent or rash, but naïve, and overcame her inadvertent transgression by undergoing a series of ritual trials — which restored her eventually to her lover, and future husband, Cupid. The result of this reconciliation with Olympus was a great banquet, or in the case of the Palazzo Te frescoes, two banquets. Psyche was afforded the fruits at her marriage not only of Nature, but of divinity. It was Jupiter who heard Cupid’s pleas for his human lover, rewarding Psyche for her dedication to her trials by reuniting her, via Mercury’s transport, with Cupid. The product of her union with Cupid was their child Pleasure. It is not hard to see this story as the antithesis to that of the Giants, and indeed to see them both as perfect illustrations of Poliphilo’s gem. But if Psyche’s reward is evident in the fictive banquets no doubt complemented by the real banquets that took place 140

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7.8 Conjectural reconstruction of the fireplace on the east wall, Sala dei Giganti

in the same room — and more generally in the happy life of the villa and its gardens — is there evidence outside their room of the Giants’ calamitous tale? It is the sometime Wind-god Mercury who brings Psyche to Cupid, and a relaxed Zephyrus serenades the lovers in the noble banquet. While Jupiter and Aeolus unleash the Winds in the corners of the Giants room to hasten the destruction, the Winds in the Camera dei Venti (adjacent to the Sala di Psiche) allude to the winds of fortune, with which the Gonzagas developed a deliberate iconographic association. This association was linked to another, that with the gods of Olympus: 141

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According to an interpretation of the Mons Olympus incorporated into the description of the visit of Henry III to Mantua in 1576, the impresa signifies that, unlike the rest of the world, the summit of the mountain is by no means subject to winds, tempests, or storms.28 So if Federico Gonzaga as Jupiter is protected from the elements in his metaphorical Olympus, all earthly beings on the contrary must weather those storms as a matter of course, and Jupiter can unleash them with special force against his rivals. If Vasari may have indeed been repeating something he had heard from Giulio himself, the idea that the Palazzo Te was designed “more for gods than men” suggests that it was designed to be Olympian in its isolation from Aeolus’ captive winds and other destructive elements. It is significant that the rounded corners of the room are the places where the howling winds enter: in masonry architecture it is precisely at the corners that the structure needs to be and is represented as most robust, and here Giulio has simultaneously suppressed the folds of the corners of the ceiling while opening the space to the air, allowing the howling winds to fracture the Giants’ brick and stone arch. The healthful effects of Nature with which most sixteenth-century villas are concerned are explicitly balanced in the mind of the Te’s artist–architect with her harmful effects. The winds, fire, and water that are depicted battering the frescoed Giants also batter real buildings, and Leon Battista Alberti dedicated the last chapter of his treatise on architecture to the repair of buildings damaged by, among other things, the elements: Then there are the frequent accidents by fire, lightning, earthquakes, battering of waves and floods, and so many irregular, improbable, and incredible things that the prodigious force of Nature can produce, which will mar and upset even the most carefully conceived plan of an architect.29 Alberti also spends no little time in On the Art of Building discussing the importance of a healthy, stable, and propitious site for a building or a city. Water and winds figure heavily in his criteria for an appropriate or inappropriate setting. Given the Te’s somewhat imperfect site, Alberti would have wanted those flaws compensated for if not transformed. At the same time, he knew that: “If you seek to drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she will find a way back in.”30 Since an architect is not always able to choose his patron’s site, dealing with its flaws is a substantial portion of what a designer does. At the Palazzo Te, Giulio Romano triumphed over the imperfect site with humble materials, prudent foundations, and modest height; he lets us know that Nature offers both bounty and calamity in the building’s frescoes, and one suspects something of that unstable ground has left its mark also on the cortile, where the 142

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ornament seems not so much incorrect as ruined (see Figure 7.3). It does, perhaps, recall the effect of the Roman remains that Giulio would have known in Rome and as they were documented in the drawings of his contemporaries like Sangallo, Serlio, and Palladio. But it is a calamitous event, rather than slow ruin, that seems to have shaken the cortile’s triglyphs loose and forced upwards its keystones. For the Renaissance, time was often an agent of destruction,31 aided by the forces of nature, mankind’s ravages of war or private aggression, and general human indifference. What remained of ancient Rome bore the marks of all of these, not to mention the ongoing pilfering of raw materials for modern construction. If the effects of nature and time on buildings were generally negative, then an architecture that aspired to last must of necessity accommodate and yet continuously battle with the elements. The cortile of the Te seems to suggest the evidence of these forces, but rather than slow decay we instead see the effects of more dramatic, earth-shattering forces. At the same time, the ornament of the Te is often just emerging from its raw natural state, not yet fully formed – like the inchoate shafts of the columns in the west entry loggia – suggesting instead the elemental power of Nature in the act of becoming; like Michelangelo’s non finito it was another kind of struggle between man and material that bore the marks of battle. Indeed, for all of its similarities to Renaissance drawings of decaying Rome, the Te cortile’s ornament seems to have been subjected to either an emerging, heroic creative act or a destructive event, rather than a slow decline. Until the building and frescoing of the Palazzo Te, the contemporary depiction of this ruinous reality was mostly reserved for paintings – like those in the Palazzo Venezia mentioned earlier. Nature’s destructive forces were too awesome to be acknowledged in three-dimensional form without a violation of classical decorum, while painting provided a safe, detached forum for representing the “sublime.” But an architect like Giulio Romano, who was prepared to shape a room precisely to facilitate its frescoing, might also be tempted conversely to see the architecture itself as illustrative, an active participant in a larger painted narrative. There are numerous ways in which the fictive world engages the real experience of the Palazzo: within the cortile the illusionistic landscapes painted in the Loggia delle Muse on the north side are paralleled with a view of real nature to the south through a similarly-framed arch. Like Cardinal Gonzaga’s fifteenth-century garden in Rome, the cortile of the Te may have had a maze that was a corollary to a frescoed scene – in the Mantovan case the scene in the Sala di Psiche was Pasiphaë Entering the Cow, a story whose “consummation” was the Minotaur, inhabitant of the maze of King Minos.32 The frescoed banquets of Cupid and Psyche have been interpreted as taking place on the Island of Cythera as described in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, and to make that reading explicit Federico intended a statue of Venus to occupy the room’s center – of course, the Te itself was an island, and the watery context was available immediately to the east of the Palazzo in two large 143

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fish ponds.33 In the Psyche room, the Cyclops Polyphemus is perched atop the fireplace, looking in the direction of the Fall of the Giants, an obvious prelude in the room of banquets to the devastation in the opposing room. Armed with this approach to Giulio’s work, it is remarkable that the cortile has mostly been seen as an autonomous exercise in architectural humor and not instead as directly impacted by the serious, thunderous drama of the Fall (Figure 7.9). If Giulio blurred the boundaries between the walls and ceiling – and therefore between the zones of the frescoes – in that room by rounding the corners as Vasari describes, and linked the real fire in the fireplace with the painted flames above while relating the flood sweeping away the Giants to the water visible through the room’s eastern windows, it surely is not beyond his imagination to involve the whole Palazzo in the experience, to see its architecture as an extension of the painted illusion as much as the painted illusion extends the architecture. Indeed Giulio Romano, highly competent craftsman that he was, used the fictive architecture in stucco of the cortile to represent the potential structural dangers of the site which he did everything in his power to overcome in the real structure – rather than a violation of classical decorum, Giulio’s slipped triglyphs in stucco over solid masonry are instead a poetic idea overlaid on a highly stable, durable, traditional, and eminently “correct” masonry framework. Vasari links the architect’s practical preparations against instability to the room where instability is the painted theme: So having had double foundations sunk deeply at that corner, which was in a marshy spot, he had constructed over that angle a large,

7.9 North-east corner of the cortile

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round room, with very thick walls, so that the four external angles of the masonry should be strong enough to be able to support a double vault, round like an oven.34 The event in the Sala dei Giganti has been acknowledged since its unveiling to be truly enveloping and overwhelming, which is just what Giulio Romano intended. Given the Herculean effort expended to make that experience come alive, it seems only natural that the whole Palazzo would feel its effects, and would shudder at the Giants’ fate. Shaken but not stirred, the cortile displays the effects of the cataclysm on the walls that correspond to the primary axis of experience for most visitors – from west to east. Like the flow of the Mincio around Mantua, the west–east axis of the Palazzo develops the theme of the relentless, destructive power of winds, water, earth, and fire, and Giulio’s violation of classical decorum on the cortile’s east and west facades is, like the brutal or repugnant images allowed by the mnemonic treatises, an aid to remembering the iconographic themes about which the Palazzo is organized. The cortile and the Sala dei Giganti become like a combined talisman against an aggressive Nature, warding off destruction by depicting its effects. It remains to clarify why only the east and west walls of the cortile participate in the drama with their slipping triglyphs, while the north and south walls, articulated with fewer engaged columns, more generally respect classical decorum. In the cortile one can always see at least any two adjacent walls, and so the architectonic system is discontinuous within most fields of vision. The explanation for the dichotomy may lie in the two orientations of the Palazzo, with

7.10 Exterior west facade of Palazzo Te

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two distinct entrances; indeed, Vasari describes the “square” Palazzo as being organized about its two cross-axes.35 On the north side the original villa was directed toward the city of Mantua, and there is no reason to doubt that this would have continued to be the most convenient entrance for Federico and his guests coming from the city; yet Giulio seems to have directed attention to the west entry as the principal one (Figure 7.10), and the logic would likely have had to do with the approach of visitors from the south, who could have used the Palazzo as part of the “ceremony of entry” to the city not unlike the role of the villas Madama and Giulia in Rome. The road to the Porta Pusterla passed just in front of the west façade. Each kind of visitor, therefore, would have been presented with a unique experiential sequence: urbane, “correct” and artful for the intimates of the Gonzaga court; rugged, unstable, and “natural” in the case of foreign guests coming from the countryside. Each sequence, of course, could be reoriented 90 degrees with a concomitant change in emphasis; like the disposition on either side of the Loggia di Davide, the aspect of choice conditioned the reading of the architectural allegory. The Loggia delle Muse therefore, on the north side of the Palazzo, invests the urbane approach with artful grace, while the rustic western portal lacks finish and refinement – artfulness eventually gained, one supposes, by passing through the Muses’ loggia on the way out again toward the city. So only two walls, those on the rustic axis, respond to the Giants’ fall, while the other two walls would parallel the banquets attended by Cupid and Psyche. Like Jupiter’s choice of Nature’s effects, two choices are presented to the visitor within the cortile: between making and destroying, between art and chaos, between the waters of the Muses’ Hippocrene spring – represented over the doors leading into the Palazzo from the Loggia delle Muse – and the Thracian tempest. Not split about one axis like the iconography of the Palazzo’s eastern suites of rooms, the cortile is divided between its cardo and decumanus. As a “small city,” in Alberti’s famous expression for a house, or better a small castrum for the military-minded Gonzagas, the Palazzo could best be understood not as a circular “doughnut” plan but rather as disposed about cardinal axes emanating from its umbilicus. This would explain Vasari’s emphasis on the axial disposition, which positions the Palazzo in the tradition of the Roman agrimensor’s civic foundations. Since the Te has always been known not as a “villa” but as a Palazzo, these axes of organization thread the Te and Alberti’s house/city analogy together with Vitruvius’ description of the Roman surveyor’s practice – interestingly, Vasari describes Giulio’s first response to the site as”‘surveying”.36 They therefore structure the experience of the Palazzo not as a loop but as a choice between two perpendicular paths. If the maze indicated on an early plan of the Palazzo did in fact exist, these aspects of choice of direction would have taken on even greater 146

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significance. Of course, entering from the western portal one would first glimpse only the eastern wall of the cortile, and this first impression was crucial toward establishing its narrative plot as the primary one for most foreign visitors. It is therefore the experience of the effects of the Giants’ fall that early dominates a visitor’s approach to the Palazzo’s interior, even before the frescoes themselves are experienced. An understanding of the cortile is only completed upon a second visit, after having seen the Fall of the Giants: it is their tumultuous crash that has shaken the Palazzo’s walls. Visiting the cortile a second time, after having witnessed the frescoes, we should feel the earth rumble under our feet. And yet for all of the apparent damage to its tectonic system the Palazzo Te still stands, even after Jupiter’s monumental tempest of wind, rain, and lightning have been unleashed, and after more than four and half centuries of time.

Conclusion This chapter’s thesis has been that Giulio Romano, a humanist painter/architect who could not help but see architecture and the figurative arts as collaborating visual narrators of a single poetic plot, evolved the whole conceptual framework for the arts at the Palazzo Te simultaneously in formal, structural, and allegorical terms – as he would for the parts of an individual fresco. His most innovative achievement, therefore, was not the Sala dei Giganti itself, but the relationship between that room’s dramatic action and the cortile outside its western wall: architecture shaped by painting, rather than the more common painting shaped by architecture, was the Te’s important contribution to later artistic developments. While Giulio pushed the expressive power of the classical language of architecture, he also required ornamental sculpture and frescoes to convey deeper, metaphorical messages. His ornamental inventions are grounded in their poetic conceits, and are inconceivable without them. As powerful mnemonic images they are meant to reinforce a memorable narrative. The way the actors both inhabited and transformed their stage allowed the spectator to participate in and experience the realm of myth in a way earlier artists had only dreamed of doing, and later artists would try to emulate and exceed. As inventive as he was in engaging the viewer, Giulio Romano was also critically engaged with the common topoi of Renaissance villas, in particular the celebration of nature as a beneficent force. His explicit juxtaposition of the destructive and the bountiful had roots in humanist culture, but was rare in artistic representation. If we can sense the four winds that blow through the rounded corners of the Sala dei Giganti also shaking the foundations of the Palazzo Te itself, we will have recovered both a more complex understanding of the Renaissance’s relationship to nature and the elements, and a subtler appreciation for Giulio Romano’s novel integration of the arts. 147

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Notes 1

Joost-Gaugier, C.L. (2002) Raphael’s Stanza dell Segnatura: Meaning and Invention, Cambridge, pp.158–63.

2

Shearman, J. (1992) Only Connect …: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 202–7.

3

Tafuri, M. “Giulio Romano: linguaggio, mentalità, committenti,” in Belluzzi, A. and Forster K.W.

4

Vasari, G., trans. George Bull (1987) “Life of Giulio Romano,” Lives of the Artists Volume II, New

(eds.) (1989) Giulio Romano, Milan: Electa, p. 20. York: Penguin Books, p. 208. 5

translated in Coffin, D. (1979) The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, p. 183.

6

Sandström, S. (1963), Levels of Unreality, Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells, pp. 41–7.

7

examples are numerous from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in French and Italian painting, but from Giulio’s time the work of Domenico Beccafumi particularly evokes a melancholic response to the landscape of ruins, albeit less heroically than Giulio’s robust romanità

8

Stinger, C.L. (1985) The Renaissance in Rome, Indiana University Press, pp.206–7.

9

Verdon, T. “Pagans in the Church,” in M. Hall (ed.) (1997) Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 114–30.

10

Joost-Gaugier, pp. 59ff.

11

Coffin, pp. 262–65.

12

Vasari, “Life…,” p. 218.

13

Gabriele Bertazzolo’s view of Mantua from 1628 (Urbis Mantuae descriptio, Biblio. Communale) shows the Te island more or less centered on the Palazzo and with the island regularly defined at its edges, suggesting it is more or less manmade: more than an island, therefore, it might be better characterized as a dike, connected by a land bridge to the south and a raised arcaded bridge to the north toward the city gate; see Belluzzi, A. and Forster K.W. (eds.) (1989) Giulio Romano, Milan: Electa, ill. p. 319.

14

it is my contention that the hiatus in the work on the Te around 1530 is simply an interruption in the project, and does not demand that the recommencement developed according to a substantially revised program or project; but see Verheyen, E. (1997) The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, pp. 7ff.

15

Belluzzi and Forster, p. 317.

16

Coffin, p. 108.

17

the six scenes, represented as grisaille reliefs above each of the frescoed Gonzaga horses, consist of Hercules and: Nessus and Deianira, Anteus, the Nemean Lion, Cerberus, the Lernæan Hydra, and Achelous in the form of a bull, this last has links to numerous rivers, and to the Muses — Achelous fathered the Sirens by the Muse Melpomene; appropriate for a retreat dedicated to otium, Achelous’ horn is sometimes represented as the cornucopia.

18

Vasari, p. 224.

19

Verheyen, p. 40; he offers either Baldassare Castiglione, Pietro Aretino, or the court humanist Mario Equicola as possibilities.

20

Perino del Vaga’s representation of the Fall, on the ceiling of the temporary throne room in the Palazzo Doria in Genoa — datable to around 1533 — did not show the Giants buried under rock, brick, and marble as Giulio did, nor was there any blurring of the boundaries between heaven and earth: on the contrary, it is remarkable for the clear distinction between the two. It’s quadro riportato aspect precludes any form of illusionism. See Freedberg, S.J. (1983) Painting in Italy 1500–1600, New York: Penguin Books, p. 255.

21

John Onians suggests that the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili presented, in written form, the Renaissance’s first holistically conceived integration of the arts and architecture; Onians, J. (1988) Bearers of Meaning, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 215. It could be argued that Giulio Romano achieved at the Te its first full realization in three dimensions.

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22

Colonna, F., trans. J. Godwin (1999) Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, London: Thames & Hudson, p. 99.

23

Ibid, pp. 131–2.

24

Coffin, pp. 327ff.

25

Onians, pp. 318–19.

26

Vasari, pp. 223–4.

27

Cox-Rearick, J. (1999) Giulio Romano: Master Designer, New York: Hunter College, pp. 54–57.

28

Verheyen, p. 27 and p. 63, n.75.

29

Alberti, L.B., trans. J. Rykwert and R. Tavernor (1989) On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Cambridge: MIT Press, Book Ten: I, p. 320.

30

Horace, Epistles, (1955) trans. in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, New York: Oxford, p. 257.

31

Panofsky, E. (1967) Studies in Iconology, New York: Harper & Row (Icon Editions), pp. 69–93.

32

Verheyen, p. 26 and p. 117. The Pasiphaë story and the Minotaur suggest an analogy with the Giants, since the child of Pasiphaë and the Bull could also be seen as an aberration of Nature like the sons of Gaia; along that vein, a project of 1785 by Paolo Pozzo for paving the sala dei Giganti in form of maze may recall the earlier arrangement of the cortile; see Belluzzi, Giulio, ill. p. 331.

33

Verheyen, pp. 25–6; the fish ponds were probably required as retention ponds to compensate for the marshland and subsoil displacement caused by the Palazzo’s construction.

34

Vasari, pp. 223–4; my italics.

35

Ibid, p. 218.

36

Perhaps Giulio was making a pun on the Te’s name in these t-shaped or crossed axes.

Bibliography Alberti, L. B., trans. J. Rykwert and R. Tavernor (1989) On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Cambridge: MIT Press Belluzzi, A. and Forster K. W. (eds.) (1989) Giulio Romano, Milan: Electa Coffin, D. (1979) The Villa in the Life of Renaissance Rome, Princeton: Princeton University Press Colonna, F., trans. J. Godwin (1999) Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, London: Thames & Hudson Cox-Rearick, J. (1999) Giulio Romano: Master Designer, New York: Hunter College Freedberg, S. J. (1983) Painting in Italy 1500–1600, New York: Penguin Books Joost-Gaugier, C. L. (2002) Raphael’s Stanza dell Segnatura: Meaning and Invention, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Horace, Epistles, (1955) trans. in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, New York: Oxford University Press Mayernik, D. (2003) Timeless Cities: An Architect’s Reflections on Renaissance Italy, Boulder, CO: Westview Press (Icon Edition) Onians, J. (1988) Bearers of Meaning, Princeton: Princeton University Press Panofsky, E. (1967) Studies in Iconology, New York: Harper & Row (Icon Editions) Sandström, S. (1963), Levels of Unreality, Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells Shearman, J. (1992) Only Connect …: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press Stinger, C. L. (1985) The Renaissance in Rome, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Tafuri, M. “Giulio Romano: linguaggio, mentalità, committenti,” in Belluzzi, A. and Forster K. W. (eds.) (1989) Giulio Romano, Milan: Electa Vasari, G., trans. George Bull (1987) “Life of Giulio Romano,” Lives of the Artists Volume II, New York: Penguin Books Verdon, T. “Pagans in the Church,” in M. Hall (ed.) (1997) Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Verheyen, E. (1997) The Palazzo del Te in Mantua: Images of Love and Politics, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 149

Chapter 8

The breath of cities Rebecca Williamson

Matter, Ivan Illich reminds us, has its own history. The understandings of form, of space, and of “stuff” have not been constant over history (Illich 1986: 4). Air, water, and earth are intimately linked in the symbolic landscape, and intervention, or neglect in one domain has inevitable effects in another. Air, unlike water and earth, lacks an evident, intuitive presence as “stuff” and even more readily accepts invisible properties, associations, and symbolic values. Barbara Kenda has demonstrated the importance of “pneuma – breath, wind, spirit, soul [as] the primary prerequisite for establishing harmony in the triangular relationship of the human body, a building, and the universe” (Kenda 1998: 108). The two primary examples of Renaissance pneumatic architecture cited by Kenda, Francesco Trento’s Costozza villas and Alvise Cornaro’s exploitation of an underground ventiduct in the city of Padua, were the result of efforts of individuals to promote their own well-being and that of those close to them through access to air that was somehow better than the air they would otherwise breathe. This chapter will consider the application of ideas about pneuma to a broader population. It will examine the urban implications of pneuma: how the understanding of the breath figures in Renaissance ideas about the city, and how this reflects on ideas about the harmony – or lack thereof – between the body, the city, and the universe. The change of the middle term of the triangular relationship with body and universe from “a building” to “the city” draws attention to the relationship 150

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between the individual body and the collection of bodies that is the city. Many bodies dwell close to one another in a city, where an individual body is in a constant state of exchange with other bodies. This exchange entails benefits – transfer of ideas, goods and services – and risks – transfer of diseases or fears. The relationship between the individual and the collective is, for better or worse, the essence of the urban condition at every scale. At the same time, the city itself is a complex assemblage that almost defies our ability to comprehend it. An enduring way to make sense of this complexity has been to describe the city as a kind of body, to personify it, to animate it with bodily functions like our own. These two bodies, in the city and of the city, lead to a set of reflections about the well-being of the human/city body. How do we characterize and assure the health of bodies in the city and the health of the body of the city itself? To answer this question, Renaissance architects went to the classical sources for answers. There they found contradictory advice, as Alberti indicates in his introduction to his discussion of cities in Book IV: Everyone relies on the city and all the public services that it contains. If we have concluded rightly, from what the philosophers say, that cities owe their origins and their existence to their enabling their inhabitants to enjoy a peaceful life, as free from any inconvenience or harm as possible, then surely the most thorough consideration should be given to the city’s layout, site, and outline. Yet opinions vary on these matters. (Alberti 1486/1988: 99) The passage underlines both the collective nature of the city – everyone relies on it – and the degree to which the city is a willed construction – based upon a choice of layout, site, and outline. The aim of this collective construction is the well-being of the individuals who inhabit it or who rely upon it, even if they themselves do not inhabit the city, for “everyone” implies that even inhabitants of distant, rural areas rely upon the city and its public services. The city, like the individual building, exists in Alberti’s triadic organization as a physical construction of roads and walls, a social construction of politics and public services, and an “ornamental” construction: an expression of the beauty that is “a reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body.” The parallel roles of the city as a collection of buildings and outdoor spaces and as a hub of intense interaction among people cannot be separated from the most basic matters of urban life. By Alberti’s time, one of the most pressing of these was how to manage the concentration of waste that such a dense settlement produces to ensure that inhabitants would not choke, stumble, or drown in their own refuse. Renaissance attempts to address this issue met with limited success, yet they played a central role in the invention of the modern city as a social, technical, and administrative entity. 151

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Siting the city Alberti introduces his discussion of the city by summarizing the recommendations of various Roman authors regarding the placement of cities. He then establishes a set of recommendations intended to ensure that a particular location will protect a city against environmental and military threats. Among the central environmental considerations in choosing a site is the quality of the air; it should be neither too cold nor too hot, not the coarse and heavy sea breeze, nor on the plain where the sea air becomes thick and mucus-like upon meeting moist air, nor below crags from which the vapors raised up by the sun will pour down, nor in infernal valleys overflowing with acrid air. Ideally the city should be placed on a ridge above the dense vapors of the sea, but not on a mountaintop with a heavy build-up of mist. Whether the city should face Boreas to the east or Aquilo to the west is a subject upon which the ancient authorities disagree. When a city is located on a plain and a river passes through or near the walls then the direction of the flow of the river will affect the quality of the air. Rivers flowing eastward or westward are preferable to those running toward the north or south. Rivers with steep banks and deep, shady stone beds and swamps are to be avoided for the unhealthy air that they produce (Alberti 1486/1988: 98–100). With ancient recommendations on the ideal orientation with respect to the winds inconclusive, Alberti warns that “whatever wind prevails, it is better kept at bay than allowed to penetrate the city or to blow directly against its walls.” The outline of the town and the distribution of the parts will vary according to the location. At this point, Alberti outlines military considerations for the shape of the city without citing the ancient literature regarding the preferred orientation of streets in relation to the prevailing winds: out of alignment, to break the force of the winds or in alignment, to increase air movement in the city (Rykwert 1976). The discussion of walls, roads, and bridges that follows is dominated by military concerns until Alberti arrives at the topic of drains, which he identifies as a part of road construction, almost as if to excuse the shift in topic. The drains to which he is referring are sewers, which he defines in structural terms as a kind of bridge. He evokes the great Roman sewers and then proceeds with a listing of ancient and contemporary cities suffering from inadequate sanitation. In a passage that could have inspired one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (Calvino 1974), he describes the beautifully designed ancient city of Smyrna which was rendered repulsive by a lack of a means to eliminate waste, and similar problems in Siena at the time of his writing. Then, touching on a theme later developed by Alain Corbin (Corbin 1986) in his discussion of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hygienic debates in France, he identifies two types of waste removal system, one that diffuses the waste into a body of water, the other that allows it to sink into the soil in a subsidence pit or cesspit. Questions of air quality arise again in Book 10 in Alberti’s discussion of restoration (Alberti 1486/1988: 322). To summarize his earlier discussions, 152

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he enumerates “the factors that make a climate hard to bear… either the sun is excessive, the shade harsh, or the wind strong, or harmful vapors emanate from the ground, or the very climate is responsible for some evil.” He argues that it is thought to be impossible for humans to improve a climate unless perhaps by placating the gods. Nevertheless, although no remedy can be found for an entire region, “there should be some way to protect those who live within an individual town or villa.” Here he puts forth a notion of a limited protection against airborne ills that will be important in the discussion of Renaissance approaches to pneuma. Alberti’s discussion of environmental aspects of the city thus focuses on two principal areas: the planning of the city in relation to the air quality of the location, and the management of the waste and runoff generated in the city by the concentration of inhabitants there. Renaissance architects after Alberti were frequently called upon to devise hydraulic interventions as part of their architectural practice. While projects involving air movement were less common, several “pneumatic” architectural schemes, such as those of Francesco Trento and Alvise Cornaro, reflect a program of maintaining well-being through respiration. Such projects were attempts by individuals and groups to escape the problems engendered by the growing pains of European cities: the simultaneously stimulating and uncomfortable effects of close proximity among different kinds of people and the environmental effects of density (Sennett 1994). In Renaissance Italy, ancient Greek and Roman medical and environmental theories formed the basis of urban and architectural theory. Cornaro’s Discorsi della vita sobria (1558/1903) joined the classical texts and was an influential reference for four centuries. During those centuries medical and environmental science underwent substantial changes, in large part due to new tools for measurement and observation, alongside mutations in the relationship between scholarship and the church. At the same time, problems perceived as related to urban air quality provoked sporadic and largely ineffectual efforts at modifying urban structures – physical, legal, and economic. When changes were finally implemented on a large scale, it was because the paradigm of pneumatic well-being was finally applied to broad populations rather than to small clusters of the elite. Alain Corbin shows how much of French eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury thinking about the city was dominated by new perceptions of airborne odors (Corbin 1986). While Corbin argues that a particular sensitivity toward odor that arose during this time led to specific, local interventions, his account opens the possibility of extending the history of urban air to other times and places. With air as the witness of the past, the “aesthetic” character of the city appears differently. The visual dominance of sight lines and monuments recedes, and largely hidden aspects emerge: infrastructure, legislation, ritual signification, and power struggles. 153

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8.1 Protective costume of the plague doctor. The mask, with lenses covering the eyes, and the robes of waxed and perfumed cloth were intended to shield the wearer from noxious vapors. (From Bartholin 1661. For further description see Cipolla 1981; Sennett 1994)

Ill winds and dirty cities Although “bad air” was an ancient preoccupation, and plagues had ravaged cities such as Athens, the growth of European cities after 1300 created new conditions that intensified real and perceived airborne threats. From the fourteenth century until well into the eighteenth, plague and other epidemics ravaged Venice, Paris, and other European cities. Up to a third of the urban population of Europe is thought to have died in the black plague, and other diseases such as smallpox and malaria also took their toll. This scourge was paired with, and in part due to, the explosive growth of cities. Venice was one of five European cities – all but Paris in Italy – of over 100,000 inhabitants in the medieval period. Between 1500 and 1700 eleven other cities were added to the list. The modern city was coming into existence, but the frameworks for understanding and managing such a dense concentration developed in fits and starts. The streets of European cities were piled with refuse. Smoke from heating and industrial fires rendered the air thick and acrid. John Evelyn describes the corruption of the air of seventeenth-century London in dramatic terms, stating that the city’s 154

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[I]nhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the Lungs, and disordering the entire habit of their Bodies; so that Catharrs, Phthisicks, Coughs and Consumptions, rage more in this one City, than the whole Earth besides. (Evelyn 1961) The byproducts of everyday life in an urban milieu could no longer be simply absorbed back into the land as in more rural situations. Sporadic attempts at legislating urban cleanliness in France and Italy during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries largely came to nothing. When the black plague struck Paris in 1348, the teachings of Toxares, who had delivered Athens from the plague by removing waste and washing the streets with wine, served as the model for legislation requiring residents to sweep in front of their houses so that the refuse could be taken away. The rules were not obeyed. In 1395 the crime of dumping in the Seine carried severe punishment, but the practice continued (Laporte 1978). The true causes of the epidemics would not be understood until the nineteenth century. In the absence of predictable causes and effective remedies, afflicted cities responded with a variety of tactics. Some, including prayer, morality campaigns, expulsions, confinement, and even murder of the population groups considered to be the cause, were based in the notion that the plagues were a form of divine punishment.

Seeking a perfect equilibrium Cornaro and Trento’s efforts to establish a pneumatic architecture formed part of an attempt at achieving a state of “perfect equilibrium, the guarantee of a life that could defy death, and surpass the threshold of immortality.” This equilibrium was meant to reflect an order that reproduced the harmony of the heavens: the accord between macro- and microcosm. Giuseppe Barbieri reveals how, in a 1542 text, Sperone Speroni described this as an “impossible order” because it was smisurato – without correct parameters of measure and judgment. Speroni sharply condemns Trento’s imprudence in recommending the dangerous venture of reproducing heavenly order on earth. A fundamental aspect of this critique is political. Speroni warns that if the recommendations of Cornaro and Trento were to be adopted by the masses, the existing social order would be thrown into tumult (Barbieri 2004). Cornaro’s theories and actions were conservative, directed primarily toward the preservation of himself, his property, and the Venetian state with which 155

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he closely identified. In his hydrological writing he argues for the defense and conservation of Venice: protecting the “virgin” body of Venice (Cornaro 1903). Thus his theory is one of preservation: of the body, of individual buildings, of the city. His method involves limiting consumption, both amounts and types of things. When he is not discussing protecting “his” city, his architectural focus is domestic, with a particular interest in his own lodgings: houses and apartments. He emphasizes the pleasure that he takes in his home and gardens, and the degree to which they protect his own body from extremes of temperature. Additionally, he describes time he spends in the Euganean Hills, the pleasure he takes in his villa in the plain, and the transformation of the landscape through bonifica measures: [I]t is, indeed, a very different place than what it was formerly, having once been marshy and of unwholesome atmosphere — a home fit rather for snakes than for human beings. But, after I had drained off the waters, the air became healthful and people flocked thither from every direction; the number of the inhabitants began to multiply exceedingly; and the country was brought to the perfect condition in which it is today. (Cornaro 1558/1903:68)

Viscera terra/Viscera microcosmi From the fifteenth century until well into the eighteenth, the Veneto region was the site of experimentation and discovery concerning the management of the landscape and of the body, which scientists there understood to be analogous. The University of Padua was a center for the emerging science of hydrodynamics, beginning with the experiments of Galileo and his circle. Arab discoveries in medical science, specifically those connected with the movement of fluids within the body, first entered Europe by way of the same university (Illich 1986). Often the same men studied the movement of the blood and air in the body and the related movements of water and air in the landscape. Galileo, Santorio Santorio, Benedetto Castelli, and Fabricio di Aquapendente were all active in Padua around the time that William Harvey studied there in 1603 (Figures 8.2 and 8.3). Hydrodynamic studies permitted interventions that extended human control over the waters: the bonifica programs of swamp drainage, river redirection, and similar interventions, such as those cited by Cornaro as having “improved” his land. Paolo Ulvioni has shown a rather different side of the bonifica measures (Ulvioni 1989). Many of the operations benefited large landholders at the expense of cities and small communities. 156

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8.2 Front view of the trachea attached to the larynx and bronchial tubes (Andrea Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica,

Venetian hydrologists looked to regulate and equilibrate the relationships among the waters (saline, fresh, etc.), particularly in the lagoon. Debates raged – and continue – about the good or harm done by human intervention into the existing system, which has been subject to tinkering for so long that the relationship between “natural” and “artificial” has been blurred. In parallel studies, often by the same men considering lagoon and river hydrology, there is a sense that the fluids within the body — bile, saliva, etc. — should be identified, separated, and maintained in equilibrium. William Harvey’s dissemination of theories of circulation of the blood provided a model for understanding other physiological systems, and by analogy, systems external to the body. The title of Georgio Baglivi’s 1705 Analogismo circulationis maris per viscera terra ad circulationem sanguinis per viscera microcosmi renders explicit what appears to have been a prevalent assumption: that there were analogical relationships between movements in the body of the earth and in the human body. Study of the movements of the heart and blood entailed observing the movements of the lungs and air within the body. A key contributor in this area was Santorio Santorio (Figure 8.4). While Santorio would not begin teaching in Padua until 1611, he was already a member of Galileo’s circle in 1599. His De Statica Medicina recalls the title — De statica experimenus — of the 1450 text by Nicolas of Cusa that symbolizes the entry of measurement, experiment, and quantification in the life sciences in the fifteenth century and in which the relationship between mens and mensura is articulated. In diligent experiments, Santorio measured 157

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8.3 Della Misura

everything visible that went into and out of his body. The difference between the weight of what he consumed and that of his visible excretions confirmed for him the surprising amount of weight lost to “insensible exhalations” of the body. Pneuma, now understood as breath and perspiration, acquired weight, became quantifiable, and gained a firmer grounding in the realm of “stuff.”

Corruption of the air Beginning in the latter half of the seventeenth century, experiments with air involved placing flames and animals in containers voided of air by pneumatic pumps. Yet despite the increasing interest in measurement, the air inside and outside the body continued to be viewed in contradictory ways. As a result, efforts at managing the air of cities were sporadic and largely ineffectual. Paolo Ulvioni argues that the reaction to plague in Italy during the seventeenth century was uneven (Ulvioni 1989). Measures taken to isolate and prevent spread caused their own damage. Whole families died in isolation. Like Ulvioni’s, Carlo Cipolla’s analysis of responses to plague demonstrates that the problems of urban air were a central concern in seventeenthcentury Italy. He shows how an awareness of environmental odors in the early seventeenth century provoked responses such as the formation of Uffici di sanità, with broad powers of control of hygienic conditions, including housing of the poor. Cipolla described Northern Italy as a site of “feverish and intense activity” in the prevention and fight against the plague between 1348 and 1700.

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8.4 Santorio Santorio measures his body’s insensible exhalations

We now know that fleas and rats spread plague, and that without these carriers the plague cannot exist. However, as Cipolla notes, the science of the time attributed plague to venomous atoms whose presence caused a “corruption and infection of the air that degenerated into poisonous, sticky miasma that could kill through contact or inhalation.” The causes of corruption and infection of the air were thought to include “bad alignments of the stars, exhalations of swampy water, eruptions of volcanoes, dirty and rotten conditions, and the exhalations from corrupt and putrid bodies.” Theories of miasma attributed the prevalence of plague in the summer to the strong odors that arose with the increase in heat, rather than to insects. According to those theories this smelly, noxious air was made up of particles that would cling to woolly or shaggy surfaces, thus explaining the greater incidence of plague among people who worked with wool and fur.

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Influenced by these theories, sanitary officials burned furnishings and clothing considered contagious and quarantined ships, merchandise, and people. These efforts, while not consciously directed toward the insects that were the real culprits in the spread of disease, would nevertheless have a limiting effect on their proliferation. In Cipolla’s view, medicine in Europe between the classical period and the beginning of the contemporary era was based on a “fundamentally wrong theoretical paradigm.” He wonders at how the paradigm – humors and miasma – endured despite the attention given to the problems of health, and argues that this resulted from the tendency to adapt observed facts to the dominant paradigm rather than give up the paradigm for a new interpretation of facts. Only in the nineteenth century, and still following miasmic theory, did urban programs of waste removal, improvement of the sewage system, and street cleaning become widely implemented. These same interventions had preoccupied the Italian Uffici di sanità from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and had also been the subject of a series of failed attempts at legislation in Paris. 160

8.5 Section of a street showing plumbing and paving aimed at increasing urban hygiene

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Urban air examined While writers such as John Evelyn had sought to expose the dangers of urban air, Ludovico Testi’s 1696 Disinganni, ovvero Ragioni fisiche che provano l’aria di Venezia intieramente salubre defends the quality of the air of the city of Venice. He supported his arguments with letters from the famous scientist Antonio Vallisneri senior. In this slim volume Testi argues that the air in Venice is not noxious, as some had previously suggested, but rather good for health, especially for people of sanguine temperament, as were pure-bred Venetians (Testi 1696). According to his account, Venice avoided the problems that plague the terra firma during rainy periods – all seasons except the summer – where the soil becomes inzuppata (literally “soupy”). Testi’s theory is based on the notion that both toxic and beneficial substances can reach the blood from water via the air. Through an analysis of the salts in Venetian air, which he states is often mistakenly considered unhealthy due to its odor, he puts forth an argument that would gain widespread currency only later: that odor and toxicity were not necessarily connected, or as the French would later say: tout ce qui pue ne tue pas, tout ce qui tue ne pue pas. Another Italian writing on urban air not long after Testi was Bernardino Ramazzini, who is now considered to be the founder of the field of occupational medicine. While indebted to Hippocratic tradition, he broke new ground in thinking about the relationship between health and the environment. Ramazzini’s La salute dei principi (1710) is modeled on Cornaro’s Vita sobria. (The two texts were bound together in some editions.) Ramazzini criticizes Cornaro’s austerity, arguing for a giusta misura. The notion that what is missing in Cornaro’s theories is measure echoes Speroni’s indictment of those same theories cited in Barbieri’s article and discussed earlier. Air quality plays a central role in Ramazzini’s study. Of his own time he says: No epoch has been able to better understand the characteristics of the air and its influence on living things than our own. We must now, on the basis of this knowledge, establish and put into practice certain rules to defend health. (Ramazzini 1700/1841) He recommends the purest air to promote the circulation and fermentation of the blood and the generation of “animal spirits.” Some according to their temperament need more dense air, he maintains. Just as some creatures do better in summer or winter, likewise men do better or worse in air that is more or 161

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less dense. For this reason, princes have palaces in different places according to their needs and the seasons of the year, a practice conducive to improving health. Examples are the Quirinale (summer) and Vatican (winter). Like Cornaro’s Discorsi della vita sobria, Ramazzini’s Salute dei principi aims to protect the health of the elite by protecting their bodies from ill winds and other negative environmental conditions. His (1700–13) De morbis artificum diatriba, on the other hand, applies the model of environmental wellbeing to whole populations. Citing Ovid, Hippocrates, and Galen, Ramazzini catalogues the maladies associated with various trades, including miners, perfumers, cesspool cleaners, and soap makers. In each case he correlates the illnesses prevalent in a group with their working conditions, specifically the air that they breathe, the substances they touch, and the positions of their bodies. In applying the principles of healthy living formerly reserved for the elite to a broader population, Ramazzini provided the link between Renaissance pneumatic theories and modern urban infrastructure, as we now call it. In part due to Ramazzini’s influence, the Renaissance search for harmonious relationship between people and the air that they breathe began to achieve widespread urban applications toward the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Ramazzini’s theories find their echo in European texts on architecture, such as those by Pierre Patte and Francesco Milizia. Although it would be decades before the interventions proposed in these texts were fully implemented, they are at the foundation of the “invention” of the modern city. This city would become a network of systems built upon an infrastructure whose principal purpose was to regulate the flows of the city, principal among them the flows of beneficial and harmful substances in the air. Inverting the Albertian model, in which the defects of buildings appear at the end of the treatise, Pierre Patte begins his Mémoires sur l’architecture with defects and their remedies. His attention goes first to the street, in particular its paving and drainage (Figure 8.5). Urban infrastructure also occupies an important place in Milizia’s writing on architecture. Milizia begins his Delle belle arti... by upholding Roman Cloaca Maxima as an architectural high point – contrasted with the low point of Roman Baroque formal inventions of the generations preceding his own. He explains that Romans deified things in the public domain, naming a goddess Cloachina and a god Stercorus. The beauty of the cloache is that they respond to necessity and are not “sullied” by ornament (Figures 6 and 7). In his Dell’architettura, Milizia devotes a similarly prominent place — his conclusion — to a discussion of laws governing architecture (Milizia 1826– 28). He first establishes the laws related to architecture deriving from the dritto di servitù. This concerns the rights and obligations of the individual property owner. The laws of servitù include such issues as the distance that part of a 162

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8.6 and 8.7 Cloaca Maxima, Tab. I and Tab. II

building can protrude into a courtyard, how light and views are shared, management of water flows (from roofs, in canals, etc.), and the handling of refuse. Milizia cites the law of dritto sterquilini immittendi, or the right to place a cesspool near a neighbor’s wall. He goes into specific detail about the placement and cleaning of cloache, cysterns, and fosse before ending his text with a brief maxim that echoes the guiding principles of Trento and Cornaro:Vi dev’essere equilibrio (There must be equilibrium).

How air became stuff in the modern city The second half of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of programs to promote the movement and cleanliness of urban air and water. Modern sewers, fountains, street paving and cleaning, and lighting – to prevent night dumping – were among the solutions implemented. Hospitals and cemeteries were sited to reduce their perceived capacity to render the air insalubrious (Etlin 1977). 163

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Innovations in indoor plumbing, first promoted in Britain, made their way across Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Perrault had raised the question of the meaning of the cellas familiaricas cited by Vitruvius (Laporte 1978). Illustrations of privies appear as nearly hidden insertions in the treatises of Milizia and Danieletti (Figures 8.8 and 8.9). At the same time, Danieletti’s teacher Domenico Cerato was promoting a design of fireplace chimneys attributed to Benjamin Franklin, whose efficiency would improve indoor and outdoor “air quality.” The theorist Carlo Lodoli, whose architectural teachings influenced Milizia, Danieletti, Cerato, and others in their circle, had cited the equivalence of function and representation in his teachings. In their interest in plumbing, sewers, chimneys, and related “infra-structural” aspects of architecture, Lodoli’s followers demonstrated that an architectural function can be understood in the sense of bodily function – 164

8.8 and 8.9 Details showing architectural moldings and an early indoor toilet

The breath of cities

such as digestion or motion – as well as a function of the body politic (Rykwert 1980:324). The symbolic value of pneuma as spirit diminished and was replaced with a hygienic value at the same time that education in hygiene began to supplant religious education. The weakening of the church’s hold on urban life corresponded to increased effectiveness of urban cleansing. The change reflected both the rise of secular state power and an attention to corporeal rather than spiritual matters.

Conclusion Italo Calvino described many imaginary cities in which the structures of what we unpoetically call “waste management” are as essential to the city as any other attribute. Calvino renders these structures, be they legislative or architectural, as having symbolic values as powerful in their own way as pneuma was in Trento’s time. Calvino’s stories of invisible cities are complemented his story La poubelle agréée, by a seemingly mundane description of the most banal of urban acts in the real city: setting the garbage out for collection. The story hinges on the notion of “agreement.” This delicate link between individual and collective determines how we manage “stuff” in the contemporary city (Calvino 1995). Cornaro and Trento sought to achieve a harmonious equilibrium modeled on the order of the heavens for themselves in their well-ventilated villas. Their sense of the importance of air movement for bodies and places would become a preoccupation in the formation of the modern city. The successors of Cornaro and Trento, who considered the relationship between architecture and health on a more collective scale, such as Milizia and Patte, sought a complex equilibrium based in the invention of invisible or hidden structures of infrastructure, legislation, and social agreement.

Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista (1486): Translated by Rykwert, Joseph, Leach, Neil and Tavernor, Robert (1988/ 94) On the Art of Building in Ten Books, Cambridge MA and London: MIT Press. Barbieri, Giuseppe (2004) La Medicina miglior. Francesco Trento tra controllo degli elementi e nuovo ordine social. Unpublished conference paper presented at the Academia Aeolia Revisited International Symposium, Costozza, Italy, 28–29 May 2004. Bartholin, Thomas (1661) Historiarum anatomicarum & medicarum rariorum centuria. Copenhagen. Calvino, Italo (1974) Invisible Cities. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt. (Translation of (1972) Le città invisibili, Milan: Giulio Einaudi.) —— (1995) “La poubelle agréée” in La Strada di San Giovanni, Mondadori, Milan, pp. 69–93. Castelli, Benedetto (Dom) (1628) Della Misura dell’ acque correnti. Rome: Stamp. camerale.

165

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Cipolla, Carlo M. (1981) Fighting the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Italy. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. —— (1986) Contro un nemico invisibile: epidemie e strutture sanitarie nell’ Italia del Rinascimento. Bologna: il Mulino. Corbin, Alain (1986) The Foul and the Fragrant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Translation of Corbin, Alain (1986) Le Miasme et la Jonquille: L’odorat et l’imaginaire social XVIIIe – XIXe siècles. Paris: Flammarion.) Cornaro, Luigi (Alvise) (1558) Discorsi della vita sobria. Padua: translated by Gregory, John Goadby (1903) The Art of Living Long. Milwaukee: William F. Butler. Danieletti, Daniele (1791) Elemeni di’architecttura civile. Padua. Etlin, Richard (1977) “L’air dans l’urbanisme des lumières,” in Dix-huitième siècle. Paris: Garnier, 123– 134. Evelyn, John (1961) Fumifugium: or, The inconvenience of the aer and smoake of London dissipated. London, National Society for Clean Air. (reprint of 1661 text) Illich, Ivan (1986) H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness. London and New York: Boyars. Kenda, Barbara (1998) “On the Renaissance Art of Well-Being: Pneuma in Villa Eolia” in Res 34 Autumn 1998, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Laporte, Dominique (1978) Histoire de la merde. Paris: Christian Bourgeois. Milizia, Francesco (1826–28) Opere complete di Francesco Milizia, risguardanti le belle arti. Bologna: stamp. Cardinali e Frulli. Opuscoli diversi; II-III. Dizionario delle belle arti del disegno; IV-V. Memorie degli architetti antichi e moderni; VI-VIII. Principii di architettura civile. Patte, Pierre (1973) Mémoires sur les objets les plus importants de l’architecture. Geneva: Minkoff. Piranesi, Giovanni Battista and Piranesi, Francesco (1761) Della magnificenza ed architettura de’ Romani, Vol. 7, 5a, Rome. Ramazzini, Bernardino (1700) De morbis artificum diatriba. First edition Modena: Antonii Capponi, revised edition 1713. Translated by M. De Fourcroy (1777) Essai sur les maladies des artisans. , Paris: Moutard; later edition published: 1841, Paris: Béthune et Plon. —— (1710) La salute dei principi: ovvero Come difendersi dalle malattie e dai medici. Italian translation from Latin by Francesco Carnevale, Maria Mendini e Goffredo Traquandi, Florence: Tosca. Rykwert, Joseph (1976) The Idea of a Town: the Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World. London: Faber and Faber. —— (1980) The First Moderns: the Architects of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT press. Santorio, Santorio (1634 ) Ars … de statuca neducuba et de responsione ad staticomasticem. Aphorismorum sectionibus septem comprehensa. Venice. Translated by Marc’antonio Brogiollo (1722) La Médecine statique … de l’Art de se conserver la santé par la transpiration, Paris. Sennet, Richard (1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York and London: Norton. Testi, Ludovico (1696) Disinganni, ovvero Ragioni fisiche che provano l’aria di Venezia intieramente salubre. Venice. Ulvioni, Paolo (1989) Il gran castigo di dio: Carestia ed epidemie a Venezia e nella Terraferma 1628– 1632. Milan: Franco Angeli.

166

Index Illustrations are indicated in bold. abaton, restricted passage 38, 39

ancient statuary and prophecy 119

acanthus plant, Corinthian order, healing

animate Nature, speaking 111

properties 31

animate painting and sculpture 103

Acquapendente, Girolamo Fabrizio, physician 14

animation 103, 105

adyton, reconstruction 27, 28, 29

Annunciation (sacra rappresentazione) 95, 96

Aeolus; captive winds 142; god of winds 3;

antique inscriptions in Leto’s house 109

statue of 17; unleashing Winds 141

antique sculpture in homes 105

Aeschylus, Eumenides 27

antique statues, demonic powers 104

Aesculapius see Asklepios

antiquities, as inspiration for Christian culture

agriculture 50–1 air 2, 26, 40; in architecture 87–102; bad and good fragrances 99; breath and 89; circulation through floor rosetta 13; as clouds 95; corruption of 160–1; diagrammatic images of 9; invisibility of

119; ennobling of surroundings 110 Apian, Peter, diagram of geocentric universe 95 Apollo 113; chariot of the Sun 140; oracular cult of 22, 24, 25, 26; sanctuary at Delphi, model 22, 23; temple 27; worship of 31

90; malign or stagnant 53, 54; moving,

Apollo Belvedere, Giuliano della Rovere 113

vital force 94, 95; unhealthy, and medical

Apollo and Daphne (Bernini) 30

effects 54–5; vapor and 90; warm and

Apulian bell crater 28

cold 30, 96–9; winds and 71, 76–7

aqueduct at Delphi 25

airborne ills 19, 155

Arab discoveries in medical science158

air-conditioning system 8

architectural composition in painting 129

air quality in cities 154

architectural drawings 89

air warfare 88

architectural moldings 164

Alberti, Leon Battista, On the Art of Building

architectural theory 70–83

142; on brick fireplace as breast 97; on

architecture, laws governing 162; multi-

city layout and placement 151; on climate

sensorial 100–01; of Palazzo Te, extension

54, 77; on hidden rooms 55; on house as

of painted illusion 144; pneumatic 1, 2, 3;

small city 146; on human reason versus

of the Renaissance 63; “spirited” 103–21;

nature 76; on integration of rooms 57; on

of Vitruvius and of Alberti 78

military consideration for city 153; on

Aristotelian dramatic logic 130

odors 99; on post-medieval humanism 71;

Aristotelian fitness for purpose 57–8

on rational planning of urban spaces 76;

Aristotle 99; Meteorology 71; on circum-

on real city 78; on the sun 54; treatise 19,

navigation of the earth 82

50, 52; on unhealthful airs and waters

armillary sphere 96

132; on waste management 153–4

artist as conduit of divine 116

allegorical frescos 127

artists and poets, competition 106

allusionism 130

Ascension (sacra rappresentazione) 95

altar, round and serpent-entwined 33

Asklepiadae clan 40

altars, circular 31, 33

Asklepian healing 34, 43

Anaximenes, on air 89–90

Asklepieion, marble relief, Pireaus 38, 40

ancient sculpture, into cult statue 118; and

Asklepios (Aesculapius) 22–43; and Delphi 37;

poet’s ingenium 110

and powers of life and death 36; in form

Index

of snake 39; healing god 31; sanctuaries of 40; as Savior god on red-figure dish 43;

Capella Sistina see Sistine Chapel tapestries 127

sculptural relief with snake 37; with

Cardano, Girolamo, spiritus vitalis theory 11–12

serpent-entwined staff 34–5, 36; son of

Carmina Priapea (Virgil attrib.) 111

Apollo 35

Cartesian enquiry, and climate 54

astronomy, architect’s knowledge of 78

Cassotis and Castalia springs, Delphi 27

Athena 36

Castel Sant’Angelo, imprisonment in 106

Auster – air – blood 40

catharsis, psychological 41 Cave of Ida 2

Bacchus (Michelangelo) 116

Cave of the Winds 7

banquet for Cupid and Psyche 140, 141

caverns, subterranean 13

Barbaro, Daniele, on Vitruvius 97

Cesariano, Cesare, chimney with smoke 91

Bartholin, drawing of plague doctor 154

Chasma gês 22–43

Bassae, temple at 31

Chateau de S Maur (de l’Orme) 93

Baths of Constantine, Leto’s garden 108

Cheirion, centaur 35

bay leaves, wreath, on Asklepios 43

Chigi, Agostino and Raphael’s stables for his

Beccafumi, Domenico 148 Bernini, Gianlorenzo 126; Apollo and Daphne 29

villa 133 chimneys 97; in medieval city 99; prominent 93; with smoke 91, 92

Bessarion, Cardinal 111

Christ identified with Asklepios 41

Bible, Renaissance paintings 95

Christian cult imagery 117

black bile 40

Christian theme 129

Black Death 50

Christian truth 119

blood 40; and air in body 159

Christians 27; snake a symbol of harm for

bodies in a city 150–1 body; of city 149–51; of earth, human body 159

Christians 41 Chrysoloras, Manuel, on animation of ancient sculpture 104–5

Boreas (wind) 40

Cicero 110

Botticelli, The Punishment of Korah fresco 129

Cipolla, Carlo, on medicine 158

Bracciolini, Poggio 110

city; circular 73, 74; ideal 83; layout and health

breath 3, 7; of cities 150–65 breezeway, central in Venetian houses 49 Brunelleschi, Filippo; on clouds 96; hoisting device 95

151–2; physical and social construction 152 classical form 129 classical imagery and ancient verse 111

Bruno, Giordano 89

classical mythology 128

Buonaccorsi, Filippo see Callimachus 111

Claudianus, 4th century poet, inscription 109

Burton, Robert (Anatomy of Melancholy) xiii

climate 63, 70; and city planning 19; and

Byzantine Emperor, Paleologa 136 Byzantine iconography and infant Asklepios 42 Byzantine scholars 111

healthy locality 53–5; and Renaissance plan form 55–7; windy, dry and cold 54 Cloaca Massima 162, 163 clouds; cotton simulation 95; formless 96

caduceus as emblem of medicine 34

coastal sites 54

Calvino, Italo, on ‘waste management’ 165

coin collections 111

Callimachus (Buonaccorsi, Filippo) 111–12;

coin of Pergamon showing Asklepios 38

poems give permanent life to statues 113

coins and imagery 137

Camera degli Sposi, Palazzo Ducale 135

coolness and dryness 49

Camera dei Venti, Palazzo Te 141

Corbin, Alain, on airborne odors 155

Campanella, Tommaso (Civitas Solis) 83

Corinthian order 31, 32

Capella Bufalini, Santa Maria in Aracoeli 129

Cornaro, Alvise 12; Discorsi della Vita Sobria

Capella Carafi, Santa Maria sopra Minerva 129

168

153, 163; on harmony in villas 165; and

Index

pneumatic architecture 155–6; ventiduct

Earth, goddess 34

in Padua 150

Eastern Orthodox Church and Asklepios 41–2

corners rounded in Palazzo Te 144 cortile of Palazzo Te 133

elements; battling with 144; destructive power of 145; portrayed in Palazzo Te 135

cosmological diagrams 95

Empedokles, philosophy 40, 48

Cosmosgraphicus liber (Apian) 95

entrances 57

Costozza; caves of 2; villas 1, 13, 17

environment and human body 4

Cupid 140, 141; and Psyche banquets on

Eolia 13; movement of air in 14

Cythera 143 cupola with wind vane, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 100

Epicurius, and disease 31 epigram of Sleeping Nymph 109–10 epigraph collection in Leto’s house 108

curative effects of elements 43

Erynnies (Furies) 27

Cyclops Polyphemus, Palazzo Te 144

Evelyn, John, on London’s bad air 154–5, 161

David and Bathsheba, moral choice 137

Fall of the Giants 127, 128, 135; anguish 137;

David and Goliath 137–8

cortile of Palazzo Te 144; first experience

de L’Orme, Philibert; Aeolian spheres in

for visitors 146; fresco, Palazzo Te 133,

fireplaces 100; architectural treatise 97;

134–47

Chateau de S Maur 93; kitchen chimney

Favonius (water) 40

section 94

feminine principle of earth 43

death and rebirth 34

fertility 34, 53

deities, chthonic 33

Ficino, Marsilio; Furor poeticus 110; cosmic

Delphi; Cassotis and Castalia springs 27; sanctuary of Apollo, model 22, 23

spiritus theory 11; on odors 99; on wine 93

Delphic cult of Apollo 18

figural sculpture, life-sized 103

Delphic pneuma 22–43; and air and water

fire (heat) 7, 26, 30, 31, 40; real, below

29–30 Delphic sanctuary of Apollo, model 22 Delphic Sibyl, “wife of Apollo” 27; Sistine Chapel ceiling 24, 25 Delphic Temple of Apollo; adyton 27; plan 25, 25

painting of it 130 fireplace; as opening 97; Sala dei Giganti, Palazzo Te 141 flame frescoes over fire in hearth, Palazzo Te 140 fleas and rats, causing disease 161

demographic statistics 165

floor-gratings 7

di sotto in su effects 135

Florentine oligarchy, Alberti 79

Diaconia of Sta Agata dei Goti 128

Forge of Vulcan, Villa Chigi 130, 140

Dionysos; festival 40; tomb 27

Forum of Trajan 109, 113–14

disease, of city centres 50; diagnosis, odors as

frescoes 125–6; a demanding medium 129;

99; engendered in water 48; transmission by air 48, 49, 64 Disputà (Raphael) 129, 130

and stuccoes 130; and tapestries 127 funeral monument from Rhodes 35 furnace and heart 96

Dodonna, oracular sanctuary of Zeus 27 domestic architecture 49

Ga, earth goddess, Asklepios served 26, 38

Domus Aurea 130

Gabriele de’ Rossi (Minerva) 117

Doric entablature of Te 133

Gaia 135–6

dream oracles in ancient Greece 40

Galatea theme 130

dreams, curative effects 43

Galen, physician 40; on breath and air 90;

Dryden, John xi

descriptions of taste 99; humoral pathology 4, 43; on odors 99; on pneuma

earth (chthon) 34 Earth (dryness) 26, 30, 40 earth and heaven 95

96–7 Galilei, Galileo 14, 71; on blood and air 159; and hydrodynamics 158

169

Index

garden iconography, choice of direction 137

Hippocratic villas of the Renaissance 50–1

gardens of ancient sculpture 115

Homer (Iliad) 31

Garzadori, Alberto 13

house, detached 63–4

geography and climate, Scamozzi 79

human body 1, 2, 3; and edifice 4

Giuliano della Rovere (Apollo Belvedere) 113

human condition 50

globe and hemisphere (Scamozzi) drawing 79

humanism 3, 26

Goat Amalthea nursing satyrs 138

humanists 13, 111; allegorical reading, Te 135;

goddess-worship 16 Goliath 137–8

circle in Costozza 17; texts 131; tradition 128

Gonzaga, Cardinal Francesco 128

humidification 101

Gonzaga, Federico 131, 132; heraldic imagery

humors, and elements 40; four 4, 40

140; as Jupiter 142; stable at Palazzo Te

hydrodynamics 158, 159

134

Hygieia (health) 39

Gonzagas; at Mantua 131, 132; patrons 128

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 136, 137, 143, 148

Greek Anthology, Planudean manuscript 111,

hypocaust heating system, Roman 99;

112

compare human heart 97

Greek tragedy as catharsis 41 Grotto of Marinali 16

Iaso (healer) 39

growth of cities 155

iconography and iconology; of Garzadori-da

hall, large central 55

iconostatis, Christ, Virgin and Asklepian

Schio 13–14; of the Palazzo Te 128, 135 hallucinogens 29

ex-votos 42

harmony 1, 2; of the universe 75

Ictinos, architect of Parthenon 31

Harvey, William, on circulation of the blood

illusionism 130, 140; in Palazzo Te 143; of Sala

159; in Padua 159

dei Giganti 125

healing arts 35

Il Redentore, Venetian church (Palladio) 64

healing dreams 39

immortality 34

healing rites 41

incubation 39

healing the sick 39

ingenium 109; and ars (artistic prowess) 104

health 48, 49; of bodies in city 151; and

inscriptions, survival of 109

isolation 63; and stagnant air 72

inspiration from the antique 110–11

hearth, and heart 96, 97; sacred 31

insulation 88

heat, and humidity 49, 64; and poison 54; and

Isidore of Seville, diagram of the elements 95

sun 53 heavenly order on earth 157

Janiculum hill 130

Heemskerck, Martin van, Courtyard of the Cassi

Janus 130

Sassi 106; Garden of Jacopo Galli 117;

Julius Caesar 113

Sassi family 105, 106; St Luke painting

Jupiter 140, 141, 142; bust in courtyard of

the Virgin 107; image of the Virgin 117 Hellenistic verse revival 111

house 105; and Nature 137, 146 Jupiter and the Giants pendant 137

Hephaestus’ mythical flames 130 heresy and anti-papal conspiracy 106

kitchen chimney section (de l’Orme) 94

Hermes 34 Hestia, goddess 31

La Rocca Pisana, Lonigo, Padua (Scamozzi) 13

Hippocrates of Cos 40, 48–68; Airs, Waters,

Labors of Hercules at Palazzo Te 134

Places 3, 4; on odors 99

labyrinth 128

Hippocratic idea of disease 18

landscape, topographically accurate 130

Hippocratic medicine 43

Latin poetry 107

Hippocratic Oath 40

latitude of Rome 54

Hippocratic theories on malevolent air 132

laurel species and prussic acid 45

Hippocratic tradition 4, 161

laurel tree 27, 29

170

Index

Le Corbusier, on air and gas 88; on windows walls 88, 89 Leonardo da Vinci, on clouds 96; geometrical studies 11; sensus communis 11 Leto, Pomponio 106; extremist about antiquity 107

mother goddess 26 Mount Olympus 141–2 Mount Parnassus, geological faults 29 mural painting problems and opportunities 131 Myron, bronze cow sculpture, poem to 111–12 mythological sculpture 108

Leto’s Academy 108; competition between sculpture and poetry 109

narrative and allegory 128

light, need for 58

naturalism in Renaissance art 103

limestone from Mount Parnassus 29

nature as destructive (Fall of the Gods) 136,

Lippi, Filippino 129

143

living space on one level 63

noxious fumes 100

load-bearing wall 88

numismatics, coins and gems (Romano) 136

Loggia delle Muse and garden in Palazzo Te 143 Loggia di Davide, Palazzo Te 136, 137 loggias 57 Lorenzetti, Madonna and Child 117

octagon (winds) 4, 73 oculus; of dome 13; of Camera degli Sposi 135 odors in air 99 Olympian ceiling 127, 128

Macrobius 107

omphalos (navel stone) 24, 25, 27

Madonna and Child (Lorenzetti) 117

oracular cult of Apollo 39, 43

Maganza, Giambattista, poet and painter 14

oracular healing shrines, of Dionysos 40–1

magical power of ancient statues 104

orientation, of buildings and rooms 58, 59, 63,

malaria 48 Mannerism 126 Mantegna, Andrea 136

81; and painted theme, relation of 130; of streets and lanes 72, 74 oxygen cafes 88

Mantua 131, 135, 136; map of, detail 132 Marinali, Orazio 13

Padua University and hydrodynamics 158

marshes 49

pagan; mythological verse 111; poetry and

marshy site of Palazzo Te 131, 132, 139

Christian truth 111

Marsyas competing with Apollo 135

Palazzo Porto Breganze 52

Mary, cult statues of 119

Palazzo Te (Romano) 19, 125–49; The Mares

Masaccio Trinity, Santa Maria Novella 129

of Diomedes Te 134; The Stables of

measurement of air 159

Augias Te 134; architectonic and

medical pneuma 3

iconographic program 133; architecture

medical theories and urban architecture 154

shaped by painting 147; classical

Medici family villa 50

decorum, east and west, violation of 145;

Medici, Lorenzo de 114

corner of cortile 144; design 132, 133;

medicine, and architecture 97; symbol of 34

elemental power of Nature 143; façade of

Mercury Wind-god 140, 141

cortile 134; four entrances designed for

miasma theory 160

foreign guests 146; frescoes 126, 127,

Michelangelo 116; Sistine chapel ceiling 24,

132; Muses’ Hippocrene spring 146;

25 Milizia, Dell’architettura 164–5 miners’ maladies 164

nature as beneficent 147; north faces Mantua 146; triglyphs, slipping 145; west façade 145; see also Te

Minerva 113; statues of, and the Virgin 116

Palazzo Thiene Bonin 52

Minotaur, Palazzo Te 143; death of 128; story

Palazzo Venezia 129

148 moral awareness 41

Palladian villa 50 Palladio, Andrea (I Quattro libri) 13, 51, 61,

mosquito-borne disease 49

127; il Redentore, Venice) 64; Villa

Mother Earth or Ga 42; vital forces 34

Badoera at Fratta Polesine 60, 61; Villa

171

Index

Malcontenta, elevation 98; Villa Pisani at

Polyphemus 130

Montagnana 60; Villa Poiana Maggiore

Pomponio Leto’s Roman Academy 103–21

52; Villa Saraceno 51; Villa Sarego,

Pope Julius II 113; library 130

elevation 92; Villa Thiene 91; abstract

Pope Leo X 133

theory 57; buildings smoke free 99;

Porta Pusterla 132

elevation of; importance of symmetry 60;

portrait busts 111

on openings 97; on plan proportions 57;

Poseidon 27, 30

plans of Vitruvian city 75; rectangular

Praxiteles 104, 105, 112

forum 74; villas 49; woodcuts 97

premonition 34

Panaceia (all-curing) 39

professions and illness 163

Pasquino, and political satires 113; “speaking

Prometheus 4, 6–7

sculptures” 104; statue of, near Palazzo Orsini d’Agone 114

Psyche room, frescoes, Palazzo Te 137, 140, 141

Patte, Pierre, Mémoires sur l’architecture 164

Ptolemaic system of planets 97

Paul II, Pope 106, 108, 111

purification of air in Eolia 14

perfumes as medicines 99

Putto with a Dolphin (Verrocchio) 116

Pergamon coin showing Asklepios and snake

Pythagoras 2

36, 38

Pythia, goddess 22, 24, 26, 29, 31; ravings 44

perspective 136

Python; Apollo slaying 26; on coin of Pergamon

Perugino Delivery of the Keys 129

38; at Delphi 34; guardian of goddess

Peruzzi, Baldassare, architect of Villa Chigi 130

Earth 34; servant of Ga 36, 39

Petrarch 2; on Phidias and Praxiteles 104 Phaeton, Sala delle Aquile, Palazzo Te 140

Queen Eleuterylida (free will) 136, 137

Phidias 104, 105, 112–13

Quirinal hill, Rome 128

phlegm, blood and bile 40

Quirinal Horsetamers 104, 105, 108, 112

Phoebus 31 Pinturicchio and fresco painting 129 Pippi, Giulio, Roman background 128–31 Pius II, Congress in Mantua 136 placement of cities 152 plague 50; in European cities 155; in Italy 159; in Paris 154; protection 99

Ramazzini, Bernardino; recommends pure air 160; on siting of buildings for health 160 Raphael of Urbino 126, 128; Disputà 129; Flaying of Marsyas 135; School of Athens 113; Stanze frescoes 127 realism in Renaissance art 103

plague doctor, protective costume for 154

refuse and smoke 155

Plato 107

regeneration, snake shedding skin 34

Pliny; on spirit or breath 94; villa,

relief panel of Asklepian healing 39

reconstructions 63 plumbing in a street 160

religious confraternity 108 Renaissance, architects and architecture 1–15;

pneuma (breath) 3, 150, 160; as fiery breath 7

and destruction of the age 143;

pneumatic architecture 13

pneumatic theory 18, 101; Rome 103–21;

pneumatology 1, 2; in Renaissance architecture

sculptors and antique inspiration 115; villa

18 poems; and antique sculpture 113; attached to sculptural works 104; and statuary 109 poetry 103–21; language of inspiration 108; and sculpture 104, 112

48–68 Romano, Giulio 125–49; and Palazzo Te 19, 129 140, 142–5, 147; work for Gonzagas 131 Rome, antique 107, 108

Poets’ academy 109

roof, hipped 63

Poggio a Caiano, near Florence 55, 63

rooms, cool and central 49, 63; for different

Poggio Reale, Naples 63 Poliphilo (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) 100, 136, 137 political satires of Pasquino 113

172

directions 81 rustication 127; Palazzo Te 133 Ryff, Walther Hermann, chimney smoke 92

Index

S. Agostino 114

serpent, incarnation of dead hero 33–4

St Anne, the Virgin, and Child (Sansovino)

serpents, in Greek iconography 33; sacred 33;

114, 115

see also snake

St Luke painting the Virgin (Heemskerck) 106

sewers 153

S. Maria in Aracoeli, Rome 108, 129

Sibyls, on Sistine Chapel ceiling 25

Sacrobosco, De Sphaere 96

Sicily’s volcano, Aetna 140

Sala dei Giganti (Romano) Palazzo Te 125,

Sistine Chapel 129; ceiling 24, 25; tapestries 127

134, 135, 138; analytical study of 139; as

site, choice of, for city 53

cataclysmic 145; reconstruction of

Sixtus IV, Pope 25; reinstated Leto’s Academy

fireplace 141; see also Fall of the Giants

108

Sala della Prospettiva 130

skill and ingenium 104

Sala del Mappamondo 129

Sleeping Nymph, a Muse 113; cult of 109

Sala di Cavalli, Palazzo Te 133

snake; as life force 34–5; a symbol of evil to

Sala di Psiche 127, 135; goat Amalthea 138

Christians 41; see also serpent

Samozzi, Vincenzo 19

social and political order of city, Alberti 79

Sangallo, Giuliano da 50; Villa Ambra at Poggio

solar orientation 59

a Caiano 62; Villa Medici at Poggio a

space and air 62–3, 87

Caiano 55

Spenser, Edmund xi

sanitation in cities 154

spirit 150

Sansovino, Andrea, St Anne, the Virgin, and

stable complex on Te island 131, 132

Child 114, 115

Stanze della Segnature (Raphael) 129, 135

Sansovino, Jacopo The Virgin and Child 118

storms and earthquakes 135

Santa Maria Novella, Florence 129

streets, cleaning 161; as straight lanes 75; in

Santa Maria sopra Minerva 129 Santorio Santorio, De Statica Medicina 156; body’s exhalations 159

the wind 72, 74 stucco over brick, Palazzo Te 132 Styx, river 27

Sassi sculptures 106

Subsolanus (fire) 40

Scamozzi, Vincenzo 13, 50; L’idea della

swamp drainage 158

architettura universale (Scamozzi) 79, 80; abstract theory 57; air channels 81;

symmetry; reflective 60, 61; and ventilation 60–3

architectural treatise 97; climates are important 82; geographical perspective

Tasso, Torquato 14

82; on healthy locality 55; and

Te; axial positioning of 146; island or dike 143,

mathematical calculation 83; medical

148

learning of 81; natural phenomena 79; on

Teatro Olimpico 52

New World 71; study of winds important

Tempesta, Antonio, Map of Rome 108

for architect 70–83; on the sun 54; on

Temple of Apollo at Delphi 18, 26;

symmetry 62

reconstruction, cella 28, 29

scholars’ symposium 107

Temple of Asklepios at Epidaurus 38

School of Athens, Raphael 129, 130

Temple of Jupiter Thunderer 95

sculpture; ancient 103–21; collection for

terraces 56

inspiration 113

Testi, Ludovico, on good air in Venice 163

sea and shipwreck 70

theater; in Greece 40; in sanctuaries 41

seasonal weather, rooms for 81

therapeutic effects of elements 26

Sebastiano del Piombo 130

thermal insulation 88

Seneca 7

Theseus, story of 128

Serlio, Sebastiano 49, 50, 52; abstract theory

Tholos, Sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, Delphi 32;

57; architectural treatise; on chimneys 99;

at Delphi 31, 32, 33; at Epidaurus 32, 33

on fireplaces 97; on height of rooms 57;

toilet, early indoor, drawing 164

on importance of climate 55; on terraces

Tower of the Winds, Athens 4, 100

and loggias 56

town building 50

173

Index

town-planning (Alberti) 79 towns, fortified, and circular 73

Villa Malcontenta (Palladio); elevation 98; showing chimneys 99

toxicity and odor 163

Villa Medici (Sangallo) 55

trachea and bronchial tubes 159

Villa Odeon, Padua 12

Trajan’s Forum 109

Villa Pisani at Montagnana (Palladio) 60

transcendance, snakes a symbol of 34

Villa Poiana Maggiore (Palladio) 52

treatises, published, on architecture 63

Villa Rotonda 13; central hall 12;

Trento, Francesco 4, 13, 10–11, 13, 14; academy 18; Costozza villas 150; on

cryptoporticus 11; floor grating 12 Villa Saraceno (Palladio) 51

harmony in villas 165; and humanism 7,

Villa Sarego with wind vanes (Palladio) 92

17; and pneumatic architecture 153

Villa Thiene, wind vanes (Palladio) 93

triumphal arch 129 Tusculan Academy (Cicero) 110

Villa Trento-Carli 8; floor grating 9; hall with wind tunnel 10 Villa Turini 130

underground porticos and vaults 66 unity of time and place 130 urban air, cleanliness 163–5; densities 50; problems in 17th century Italy 161

Virgil, Aeneid 2; Fourth Eclogue, prophecy 118–19 Virgin and Child (Sansovino) 118 Virgin Hodegetria on iconostatis 42 Virgin modelled on antique statues 116

Valdarnian Academy 110

Virtue and Vice, left or right 137

vapors to find water, Bartoli 91

vital spirit, seat in heart 96

Vasari, Giorgio 125, 126, 132, 142; on

Vitruvian city, plans 75

architectural instability in Palazzo Te 144;

Vitruvius 57, 64; De Architectura 4; and pre-

on Fall of the Giants room at Palazzo Te

Christian world 71; modern reconstruction

133

of city and wind ‘scheme’ 73; treaties on

Venetian houses 63

architecture 132; on wind-rose and winds

Venetian hydrologists 159

1, 19, 70–83, 166

Veneto region, landscape management 158 Venice 50, 51; conservation of 158; houses 49; as a trading centre 50

wall, double retaining 95 walls of the city 71

“Venice treacle” scent agent 99

waste and refuse, in city 151

ventiducts; of villas 43, 97

water 26, 30, 40; Alberti on 77; and earth 27;

ventilation 1, 13, 19, 88 Venus and Cupid 117

injurious properties of 53; and purification rites 37; stagnant 49

Venus statues, and the Virgin 116, 117

water-borne disease 49

Verrocchio, Andrea del; fountain at Medici villa

waters 48–50

114; Putto with a Dolphin 116

weathervanes 90

Vesalius, Andrea, De Humani Corporis 157

well-being 1

Vicentine Berici Hills 2

west wind 18

views from houses 59

wind channels 7, 10

villa, an antique form 50; detached building 63

windows, as glass walls, Le Corbusier 89;

Villa Almerico Capra ‘la Rotonda’ 52 Villa Ambra at Poggio a Caiano, (Sangallo) 62

proportion of 58–9; and shutters 60; and wind 88

Villa Badoera at Fratte Polesine (Palladio) 60, 61

wind rose, modern reconstruction 76

Villa Chigi (later Villa Farnesina), Raphael 130

winds 1, 2, 3, 150; alignment of streets for

Villa Eolia xii, 1–2, 4; cryptoporticus 5, 7; floor

154; in architectural treatises 19; in

grating 6; frescoes 6; model of

corners 125–49; and dirty cities 154–5;

Renaissance pneumatic architecture 10

effects upon health, Alberti 77; eight

Villa Farnesina (former Villa Chigi) 130

principal 72, 74, 83; of fortune and the

Villa Garzadori-da Schio 14, 15, 16

Gonzagas 141; names of local 4; in

Villa Madama Raphael 130

Palazzo Te, corners 142; role of 70–83;

174

Index

and street orientation (Vitruvius) 72, 73,

yellow bile 40

74; violent 4; warm and cold 48–68 Winds, Earth, Water, Fire, good and bad 137, 139 wind vanes 90, 91, 92; on cupola (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) 100 wisdom of Ga 39

Zephirus; fresco on natural rock 18; west wind 13 Zeus 27 Zodiac, twelve signs of the 83

womb of Mother Earth, or Ga 39 woodcut of the Annunciation 96

175