In the Beginning, There was Fire 75

CHAPTER 4 In the Beginning, There was Fire: Vitruvius and the Origin of the City

Olga Medvedkova (translated by Philippe Malgouyres)

In these circumstances the reverie becomes truly fascinating and dra­ matic; it magnifies destiny; it links the small to the great, the to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of a world. The fascinated individual hears the call of the funeral pyre. For him, destruction is more than a change, it is a renewal. Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire ⸪ It is known that Vitruvius deals with the initia humanitatis in the begin­ ning of the second of his ten books on architecture, in which he reflects on the origins of the cities of men, an event that occurred in the forest and was pro­ duced by fire.1 This “natural catastrophe” led primitive men (homines veteres) to assemble, communicate (the ), and, eventually, build the first . The fire—the greatest threat to architecture—would be the source of both architecture and human society. What is the meaning of Vitruvius’s pas­ sage? What is its relevance? Where does it originate? What is its effect? What impact did this message in the “bible” of architecture—Vitruvius’s Ten Books— have on the subsequent perception of fire by architects? Since 1511, the date of the first publication of an illustrated Vitruvius, some editions of De architectura have included representations of the “primeval fire,” alongside those of the first settlements and primitive buildings. The association of these three pictures was eloquent. Strangely enough, in architectural history, the image of the has been keenly studied (especially since Joseph Ryck­ wert’s On Adam’s House in Paradise),2 but the image of fire has been ignored. And yet Erwin Panofsky, in his famous article from 1937, pointed out its impor­

1 Vitruvius II, 1–3. 2 Joseph Ryckwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300682_005 76 Medvedkova tance and produced the first comprehensive study of the subject.3 All the ques­ tions linked to the “figure” of fire in architectural history need to be reexamined: it is tempting to suppose that in the causal relationship established by Vitruvius between fire and the origin of architecture, fire is fundamentally not only con­ ceived as a destructive agent, but mainly as a purifying one, enabling a return to primeval simplicity, to natural man. In the context of urban history, this may suggest that fire can provide an opportunity to rebuild a city with greater har­ mony. Is the fire the ultimate locus for urban utopia? In a Russian play written in 1825 by Alexandre Griboedov, Woe from Wit, General Skalozub, a grotesque character, foreshortened this paradigm: speaking of Moscow, part of which was burned down during the Napoleonic occupation, he declared, “in my opinion, the fire made it more beautiful.”4 In fact, after the devastating Moscow fire of 1812, a great part of the medieval city disappeared, paving the way for the new, neoclassical Moscow, which was partly rebuilt by French architects. Ironically, the fire was even seen by Russians as an opportunity to introduce modernity. Could this paradoxical evocation of Moscow, perceived since the sixteenth cen­ tury as the “Third Rome,” represent the role given to fire at the very beginning of Roman history, as featured in Troy’s destruction? This chapter will evoke some of the questions raised by reading the introduction of Vitruvius’s second book, and by the analysis of its illustrations in various editions published in the first half of the sixteenth century. We based this provisional reading on absolute faith in the profound inner logic of the Vitruvian text.5

Res naturales

It is important to first examine the place of the special passage quoted above within the overall Vitruvian project. It follows the author’s reflections about finding propitious places and the founding of new cities in the first book6 and the story of Dinocrates and Alexander, which forms the prologue to the second

3 Erwin Panofsky, “The Early History of Man in a Cycle of Paintings by Piero di Cosimo,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1 no. 1 (July 1937): 12–30. 4 Alexandre Griboedov, Woe from Wit (1825), 2, 5. 5 Cf. Ingrid Rowland, “Vitruvius in Print and in Vernacular Translation: Fra Giocondo, Bra­ mante, Raphael and Cesare Cesariano,” in Paper Palaces. The Rise of the Renaissance Archi- tectural Treatise, eds. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 105–21; Indra McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Antoinette Novara, Auctor in bibliotheca. Essai sur les textes préfaciers de Vitruve et une philosophie latine du livre (Leuven: Peeters, 2005). 6 Vitruvius I, 4–7.