7 - To Build Proportions in Time, or Tie Knots in Space?: A Reassessment of the Renaissance Turn in Architectural Proportions

Summary

In this paper I intended to treat the ideas on proportion of my recent book, Buildingin- Time. But in the writing I was detoured to another relevant topic for the conference that prompted this paper, Rudolf Wittkower's idea of “proportions in perspective” in Brunelleschi. I realized it needed to be part of the revisionist critique that I will offer. As a result, this will be a two-part paper. First, I will show that Wittkower did not prove his case about Brunelleschi and probably was altogether wrong, a useful point considering that Wittkower's reading is still widely accepted. Then I will discuss the proposal of my book concerning durational proportions, which are an aspect of what I term durational aesthetics, a model that incorporated time and change and allowed for the flexible shaping and reshaping of proportions through time. This system ran counter to another aspect of Wittkowerian doctrine, regarding the anti-temporal aesthetic model that was first promoted by Alberti, who sought to evacuate time from all architectural production, including the management of proportions.

Wittkower's “proportion in perspective”

In the mid-20th century, just after World War II, a nexus of ideas took shape in architecture culture regarding proportions, the hot new topic celebrated by the 1951 Milan conference that the 2011 Leiden conference on proportion revisited. Among historians, the central agent was Wittkower, plenary speaker in Milan, chosen because of his powerful book of 1949 projecting an ideal humanist world of Renaissance architectural principles. Joining him but on the architects’ side was the other star of the Milan conference, Le Corbusier, with his alluring although cumbersome Modulor. This proportional model was broached in 1943, published in 1948, and followed by Modulor 2 in 1955. It became widely diffused as a modern pseudo-humanist icon echoing Leonardo's redaction of Vitruvian man (Fig. 1).

For Le Corbusier, Wittkower and their adherents, Leonardo da Vinci's seductive drawing encapsulated a Renaissance ideology that was at once anthropocentric, -morphic, and -metric. Obviously it also was highly gendered. It concretized a fixed human scale of measure and proportions, derived at once from nature and from antiquity, which were closely associated models in the Renaissance imaginary. Leonardo's image encapsulated the authority of antiquity, the proportional doctrine of its surviving voice, Vitruvius, and the glamour of its rebirth.