Vasco Zara Research Université de Bourgogne From Quantitative to Qualitative Département de Musicologie 36, rue Chabot-Charny Architecture in the Sixteenth and 21000 Dijon FRANCE Seventeenth Centuries: A New Musical
[email protected] Perspective Keywords: René Ouvrard, Rudolf Wittkower, Architecture Presented at Nexus 2010: Relationships Between Architecture Harmonique, Hypnerotomachia and Mathematics, Porto, 13-15 June 2010. Poliphili, seventeenth-century French architecture, musical Abstract. In Rudolf Wittkower’s influential view, Renaissance proportions, architectural orders, musical theory, based on Pythagorean and Platonic rhetorical paradigm proportions, is a paradigm of harmony, order, and spatial organisation in architecture from Alberti to Palladio. However, sources from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and other sixteenth-century French treatises, through René Ouvrard’s Architecture Harmonique (1679) seem to show another, undiscovered story. The keys to interpretation include a different philological reading of Vitruvian theory of proportion, as Fra’ Giocondo’s French lessons show. This is a starting point for a particular sixteenth-century passage between two differents conceptions of architecture – from anthropomorphic to rhetoric, from volumetric to linear, and from quantitative to qualitative – which will find a definitive arrangement in the seventeenth century. 1 Introduction The relationship between music and architecture can be considered from different disciplinary perspectives, for example from those of acoustics, aesthetics, or history. Here I would like to engage with a simpler and yet more controversial approach: the analogical and the proportional. Let me first make it clear that I am not an historian of architecture, but of music. Furthermore, my discussion is somewhat at variance from that presented in the standard text, Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism [Wittkower 1949].