Were Early Modern Architects Neoplatonists? The Case of François Blondel. Issue 1 (20th June 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gerbino, Anthony
• Is Part Of: Architectural histories. Volume 2:Issue 1(2014)
• Publication Date: 2014-06-20
• Subjects: Architecture -- History -- Periodicals; Architecture -- Historiography -- Periodicals; Architecture -- Research -- Periodicals; 720.9
• DOI: 10.5334/ah.bm
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2050-5833

Abstract

Abstract : What was the status of Neoplatonism among early modern architects? What relationship did they see between their designs and the 'design' of nature? What, if anything, guaranteed the aesthetic claims for specific numerical ratios or geometrical forms? Did early modern architects even require such a guarantee? We have little direct evidence to answer these questions. It has generally been assumed, since the publication of Wittkower's Architectural Principles, that practitioners held to stronger or weaker versions of Renaissance Platonism. Music, bodies, and buildings, according to this notion, shared a structural affinity with the order of the heavens, because they depended on the same basic numerical ratios. It is worth pointing out, however, that Wittkower himself adduces only circumstantial evidence for such beliefs. Alberti and Palladio, while suggestive, are both very terse on this point, obliging Wittkower to supplement his case with further evidence drawn from philosophers and mathematicians, in particular Luca Pacioli, Francesco Giorgi, and Nicolas of Cusa. It is this set of circumstances that makes François Blondel's extensive response to Claude Perrault, in their famous debate over the efficacy of proportion, so important. The twenty chapters that Blondel devoted to this issue in the final volume of the Cours d'architecture (1675–1683 ) represent a rare historical testimony: an explicit, self-conscious, and theoretically elaborate justification of proportion by a Renaissance practitioner. Blondel's interpretation of this tradition, too, is noteworthy. What these pages show is not an orthodox expression of Platonic doctrine, but rather an attempt to adapt the age-old principle of cosmic symmetria to a new, modern context.