THE UNIQUE CASE of the VITRUVIAN PRINCIPLE a Thesis

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ORDERING SIGNS IN ART HISTORY:

THE UNIQUE CASE OF THE VITRUVIAN PRINCIPLE

A Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of Graduate Studies

The University of Guelph

SETH GERRY

In partial fulfillment of requirements

for the degree of

Master of Arts

May, 2011

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1+1 Canada ORDERING SIGNS IN ART HISTORY: THE UNIQUE CASE OF THE VITRUVIAN PRINCIPLE

Seth Gerry Advisor: University of Guelph, 2011 Dr. Sally Hickson

Although many scholars comment on important concepts in the history of western art in reference to visual clues or textual evidence, there is little attention paid to the individual communicative nature of text and image with respect to these ideas. This thesis is an investigation of the history of the Vitruvian Principle, a concept which proclaims that the proportionality of the human form can be applied to various macrocosmic ideas. This idea is documented visually in the iconic diagram of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (1487) and introduced originally in the text of Marcus

Vitruvius Pollio's De architectura (c. 15 BC). This thesis explains that the history of this concept is dictated by its historiography as much by its historiography as it is explained by primary source documentation. Through this methodological approach, it will be shown that the scholarship that constructs this history depends on divorcing text and image for the sake of simplistic analysis, a process which betrays an apparent selective ordering of textual and visual products in different historical periods of art production. Acknowledgement

I would like to extend thanks and appreciation to all of those who assisted me with my research and completion of this thesis.

Specifically, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Sally Hickson, for her constant support and encouragement, as well as my thesis committee members, Dr. Susan Douglas and Dr. Andrew Sherwood. These three mentors have given me tremendous insight into complicated theoretical approaches in the discipline of art history, as well as the language with which to explain these approaches. Individually, they each made great contributions to the direction of my academic career, and for this I am grateful.

I would also like to extend thanks to Dr. Jakub Zdebik who, in the early stages of this project, helped direct my attention to some of the best research material used in this thesis.

Lastly, I would like to thank my kind parents, Andra and Brian Gerry, and the rest of my family for their moral support and encouragement, as well as Elisabeth Woyzbun for her diligent editing and referencing assistance.

i Table of Contents

Acknowledgement

List of Figures

Introduction 1-18

Chapter 1 19-43

Chapter 2 44-78

Conclusion 79-83

Works Cited 84 - 88

Appendix A-Images 89-90

Appendix B - The complete writings by 91 - 92 Leonardo da Vinci and Vitruvius on the Vitruvian Principle

n List of Figures

Figure 1 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man (c. 1490)

Galleria dell'Accademia (Venice Italy), Pen and in diagram on paper

Reproduced from the ARTstor Art History Survey Collection, Art Images for College Teaching. URL: http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml

Figure 2 Rene Magritte, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, (1928-1929)

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles California), Oil on canvass

Figure 3 Hildegard von Bingen, Universal Man, from the Liber divinorum operum

(c. 1165)

Biblioteca Statale (Lucca, Italy), Manuscript illumination

Reproduced from The Picture Desk Limited Collection, Hildegard von Bingen's Liber divinorum operum, Data © Gianni Dagli Orti/CORBIS. URL: http://www.corbisimages.com/Enlargement/IH164145.html

Figure 4 Villard de Honnecourt, Page from a notebook: ars de geometria, Image XXXIII, (c. 1240)

Bibliotheque nationale de France (Paris, France), Pen and Ink over lead-point diagram on paper

Reproduced from the ARTstor Slide Gallery, Data: University of California, San Diego. URL: http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml

in INTRODUCTION

My case study originates from the historical image of Leonardo da Vinci's (1452-1519)

image of the Vitruvian Man (c. 1487), a diagram from the Italian Renaissance derived from

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio's (c. 70 BC - c. 15 BC) De architectura libri decern from c. 15 BC (Fig. 1).

In modern popular culture, the Vitruvian Man (or derivations of it) can be seen in company

logos, icons for various fields of study and interest, and as a symbolic representation of

geographic locations. The government of Italy, for example, made the Vitruvian Man the

primary creative inscription on the back of its one-Euro coin (c. 1999) in order to embody the

idea of the primacy of Italian culture in the history of Europe. The Vitruvian Man is also used by

different organizations in the medical field, representing the physical excellence of the human form, a metaphorical icon of regimented health-plans, and an icon for homeopathic physical

remedies such as acupuncture.1 Most recently, in the field of visual studies, Leonardo's

Vitruvian Man has been identified in introductory textbooks as a definitive icon of scientific

inquiry. This can be seen in terms of its use in marketing materials for organizations like the

Human Genome Project, in which the Vitruvian Man is said to represent the "culmination of

modern science in its potential for control over the human body."2

Simply described, Leonardo's Vitruvian Man is the image of a nude man with his arms and legs spread-eagled, simultaneously inscribing, or being inscribed within, both the circumference of a perfect circle and the corners of a square. The drawing is accompanied by a set of notes which refer to sections of Vitruvius' De architectura on the application of the human form and the basic geometric shapes and ratios which can be derived from its proportions for

1 For a more complete list of applications of the image of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man in popular culture see "What has the Vitruvian Man Become," an online project for Professor Michael John Gorman's Course, STS 102: "Leonardo: Science, Technology, and Art" at Stanford University, (Fall 2002), http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/today.html 2 Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2n Ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 375.

1 the purpose of perfecting architectural design.3 An ink-on-paper diagram with text, the sheet

was originally a leaf in one of Leonardo's notebooks, compendia in which he habitually explored

architecture, artistic practices, hydraulics, war machines, and many other fields of artistic and

scientific studies. At the turn of the nineteenth century this page, separated from his

notebooks, was housed in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Venice. As an isolated drawing, the

Vitruvian Man has acquired considerable individual agency as an icon of Renaissance humanism

representing, through its inscription of the human form as the measure of the eternal and

unchanging geometric shapes of circle and square, the definitive expression from the traditional

Western canon of history: "Man is the measure of all things."4 This statement summarizes the

principal role of the Vitruvian Man as an icon in the history of art and the enduring power of the

human form to act as a vehicle for the communication of cultural ideals.

Not only does the Vitruvian Man appear as an icon and popular subject in the history of

art, it stands in - at times - as an icon for the entire discipline of art historical studies. This is

especially true in popular culture, in which the first clue for the scholarly protagonist in Dan

Brown's wildly popular historical novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), is a grotesque reenactment of

Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, arguably defining the field of study on which The Da Vinci Code is

based: a field of icons and symbols, the language of traditional art historical studies. Clearly, The

Da Vinci Code exemplifies a modernist and shortsighted version of the history of art, but it

clarifies the basic popular thinking about art history in the western world, a history explained by

connoisseurs of icons, symbols and clues. The general themes a trained art historian can derive

from the briefest observation of this image are the concepts of proportionality through

measured lines seen at the bottom of the diagram, marking the crucial junctures of limbs and

I B Vitruvius, De architecture/ 3,1, 1-3^. All quotes from Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914. This phrase is taken deliberately as a common turn of phrase in contemporary language out of context from Protagoras in Plato's Theatetus (152a).

2 joints on the human form, a geometric presence in the segmentation of the nude male into proportional shapes, and the inscription of the human form within a square and a circle making the body is the central element of this diagram.

The two paragraphs written by Leonardo, located at the top and bottom of the sheet bearing the Vitruvian Man, contain notes and modifications on a section of Vitruvius' seminal text, the De architectura {On Architecture or Vitruvius' Ten Books).5 This section is not copied verbatim but it does refer specifically to Vitruvius: "Vitruvius, the architect, says in his work on architecture that the measurements of the human body are distributed by Nature as follows: that is that 4 fingers make 1 palm ..."6 In brief, the conclusions that can be reached by reading this paragraph is that through the drawing and the text Leonardo was directly referring to

Vitruvius, perhaps to comprehend and visualize Vitruvian principles, and likely - according to

Martin Kemp - trying to improve on the original application of Vitruvius' derivation of measurement through the human form.7 The most popular modern reading of the image of the

Vitruvian Man is that Leonardo was somehow trying to create or discover a system of proportionality explained through the human form which would explain the world-at-large, while Vitruvius intended his first-century BC system of proportions to be applicable to practical building techniques, specifically the layout and proportional aesthetics of classical Roman temples.8

In order to substantiate the comparison of Leonardo's text to the original text of

Vitruvius, this thesis has just performed the common activity that art historians have used for

For an excerpt of each of these two texts, see Appendix B. Leonardo da Vinci, Complete Notebooks, Vol. 1 'On the Proportions and on the Movements of the Human Figure,' Entry #343 (Project Gutenberg: Complete Online Text, 2004): http://www.asksam.com/ebooks/releases.asp?file=Davinci.ask&dn=Voll%20-%20343. 7 Martin Kemp, Leonardo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 67. This is demonstrated through a comparison of Leonardo's paragraphs on the sheet to the diagram of the Vitruvian Man, folio 343 from Leonardo's Complete Notebooks Vol. 1, to Vitruvius' De architectura 3,1,1-3.

3 the sake of simplicity in modern scholarship on subjects such as this. I have intentionally

separated the visual diagram of the Vitruvian Man from its textual accompaniment so that

Leonardo's text can be compared, simply, to Vitruvius' original authorship without the

complication of the visual interpretation offered by the diagram. This phenomenon makes the

diagram of the Vitruvian Man an ideal example of an art historical image which has been

divorced from its textual element, a process of inclusion and exclusion which depends heavily on the historical paradigms within which it is studied. There is very little written on this

phenomenon and, although it will be shown that many authors theorize on the various

applications of text and images in specific times, the Vitruvian Man is a special case study

because the history of it origin covers thousands of years and major periods of art history. In this thesis I will make various observations in the chronology of the history of what I call the

'Vitruvian Principle,' the common denominator between the textual inscriptions of Vitruvius and the visual rendering of the figure by Leonardo da Vinci. The term 'principle' implies a rule founded in a mutual understanding (that the body can be used for different applications through its proportional qualities) as well as a tenet and it is a reflection of Vitruvius' original application of the proportions of the human form to the construction of Roman temples. A

principle can also be implied or communicated verbally, through a diagram, or in text. These different forms of language and visual communication do not alter its fundamental operations as an instructional tool. Thus, this term is also non-committal to textual or visual forms of documentation. In this way, the Vitruvian Principle acts as a 'stand-alone' idea which can be taken out of historical context by a writer and applied liberally to images without a need to address the implications of both visual and textual forms of documentation. Lastly, the

Vitruvian Principle implies a modern constructed notion; the mutual understanding of what this idea signifies is found in modern art historical scholarship on Vitruvius and Leonardo da Vinci's

4 individual works. Because of the substantial amount of literature available on Vitruvius and

Leonardo, it follows that the modern scholarship that will help to identify the history of the

Vitruvian Principle varies in subject matter and is relatively important in the history of art.

Despite the seemingly limitless research opportunities offered by these figures, the treatment of the Vitruvian Principle is very specific in terms of the textual or visual documentation of this

idea. There are two distinct fields of academic interest which explain this history, one which

identifies and explains the textual origin of the Vitruvian Principle and, the other, the visual nature of its rendering in a diagram.

There is very little written directly on the subject of the Vitruvian Principle, or much recognition of this concept as an idea that is independent of textual or visual documentation by virtue of its reappearance in either form during crucial periods of the history of art. Indirectly, however, the history of the Vitruvian Principle is well-documented on the fringes of several fields of study in the scholarship that forms the canon of western art history. This phenomenon is due, in part, to the constant tension between words and the images in historical scholarship. I would suggest that art historians often depend on the divorce of images from text as they work within a discipline which gives priority to all things visual; text becomes a secondary 'support,' providing evidence for mutual understandings of the meaning of a visual art object, from which one might postulate theories and develop arguments. Along these lines, I would argue that the textual accompaniment to which I am referring falls into two categories: primary source documentation (i.e. what was written about a work, during the period in which it was created) and modern authorship (i.e. what is written on a work, within the present era). As Donald

Preziosi has suggested, "the principal aim of all historical study has been to make artworks more

5 fully legible in and to the present."9 By extension, it can be suggested that authors working

within the conditions of this discipline follow this methodology. When primary source

documents, including art historical images, are read and analyzed directly, fruitful and

interesting journal articles and books are often written and the discipline of visual studies

maintains its credibility as a field of academic research. When current texts disregard or subvert

coetaneous texts or images, art historical scholarship becomes a 'self-reinforced' mode of

scholarly writing which is more dependent on modern interpretations of the meaning of primary source documents and their prescribed historical contexts than the original context and

meaning of the work.

The treatment of the Vitruvian Man for its visual agency in the history of art is a

reflection of the intensive process of selecting and determining status in order to determine what has been included or excluded from the canon of western art history. A hierarchy of

images - where one image has greater or lesser status than another - represents the systematic

methodology of modernist art history, wherein a linear narrative of progress is described through the ordering of art objects. These objects are supported by textual sources and documentation which reinforce this narrative. This is a common practice seen in the documentation of the western history, although in the larger scheme of academic scholarship I would argue that this methodology is amplified by authors in the discipline of art historical studies. Art historical authors revere visual items and give them a special and privileged position above other historical evidence; an author writing a social history of an idea like the

Vitruvian Principle might arrive at completely different conclusions because they might focus on other historical evidence and commentaries, rather than emphasize an approach almost exclusively based on visual evidence. As Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson suggest, in consideration

9 Donald Preziosi, "Art History: Making the visible legible (1998)," in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 14.

6 of the treatment of paintings as art objects, "If one is going to study social history, why privilege works of art in such a way that the findings of historiography must be bound to the mise-en- scene of painting?"10 It is admittedly difficult, however, to ignore the scholarship that explains the context in which a work is made. Over time, with repetition and sublimation in the academic narrative of history, an entire catalogue of books has been compiled to create the discipline of art historical study from this visual evidence. Through special cases like the history of the Vitruvian Principle, it is possible to arrive at remarkable conclusions about the historiography that is created from this scholarship, namely that the narrative of art history depends on the ordering of text and images at certain times and in special circumstances in order to determine a hierarchy of visual signs which reflect the cultural or historical values of the period in question.

It will be posited in this thesis that the modern scholarship that expresses the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle shows a tendency to order and re-order textual and visual materials, a process which is dictated by the time period that is being commented discussed in the scholarship itself. The theoretical framework for my approach to the Vitruvian

Principle demands explanation because it depends on common language used to refer and describe both image and text. This can easily result in the seemingly endless and spiraling discussion of the effectiveness of textual description versus visual inscription. Michel Foucault's theoretical text Ceci n'est pas une pipe (1973), a groundbreaking commentary on Rene

Magritte's image of the same name (c. 1929) (Fig. 2), is the most clear and concise explanation of the perilous theoretical grounding of authorship which attempts to discuss both the visual and textual elements of a common concept. To explain the blunders one might perform if not

10 Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, "Semiotics and Art History: A discussion of context and senders (1991)," in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 249.

7 properly prepared for this sort of discussion, Foucault proposes the scenario of a teacher referring to a chalkboard drawing of Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe in front of a classroom of students.

"This is a pipe." From painting to image, from image to text, from text to voice, a sort of imaginary pointer indicates, shows, fixes, locates, imposes a system of references, tries to stabilize a unique space. But why have we introduced the teacher's voice? Because scarcely has he stated, "This is a pipe," before he must correct himself and stutter, "This is not a pipe, but a drawing of a pipe," "This is not a pipe but a sentence saying that this is not a pipe," "The sentence 'this is not a pipe' is not a pipe" "In this sentence 'this is not a pipe,' this is not a pipe: the painting, written sentence, drawing of a pipe - all this is not a pipe."11

Foucault's writing deals with the presence of image and text on the same sheet of paper as well as the comparison of different readings and information offered by each mode of communication. The common concept of both picture and text is, in this case, the signified or the present idea of a pipe. I say the 'present' idea of a pipe because Foucault discusses a basic modern understanding of what a pipe is, what it is used for, what it looks like, and the basic function of this simply rendered object. But what if this same approach is applied to a signifier like Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, where the image itself has historical significance widely associated with one period of time (the Renaissance), and a textual element which has its own meaning and associations with another historical period of time (Roman antiquity)?

In this case, the common concept is the Vitruvian Principle, which has applications in both historical paradigms but is recognized almost exclusively in terms of is textual or visual components, factors which are dependent on the historical context in which it is placed by modern scholarship. One might suggest that the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle is therefore easier to explain that Foucault's concept of the pipe because of its documentation as a text and as an image of different periods of time in the history of art. These periods of time are

11 Michel Foucault, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, trans, and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 30.

8 treated differently in order to suit a linear narrative of art history in which the scholarship on

Roman antiquity is comfortably separated from scholarship on the Italian Renaissance. This

general pattern can be seen throughout the history of the Vitruvian Principle as it passes

through these periods. The Vitruvian Principle is relegated to the field of architectural theory

stemming from Roman antiquity because of its introduction in the text of Vitruvius, while

Leonardo's Vitruvian Man becomes a quintessential image of Renaissance humanism, the period

during which the image itself is elevated to the status of an icon of western art historical studies.

Modern scholarship on Vitruvius and Leonardo as historical figures, and references made to

their applications of the Vitruvian Principle, have just as much authority in dictating the popular

understanding of their work as does the primary source authorship of Vitruvius and Leonardo

themselves. These figures both made substantial contributions to the literature from their

respective periods, and both speculated on the individual virtues of visual production in relation

to textual documentation and theorizing.

The modern scholarship that I will use to explain the historiography of the Vitruvian

Principle is derived from several major scholarly fields, all of which exist under the umbrella of

the discipline of art historical studies. As I argued before, there is a substantial amount of

research dedicated to the Vitruvian Man as a visual concept and many comments made on

Vitruvius and his De architectura as a textual inciter of the Vitruvian Principle, but there is little theoretical information available on the treatment of the concept and idea that is

communicated in both cases. Each key term that is used in the literature on the Vitruvian

Principle turns up a veritable encyclopedia of research material from which to choose, and I

have attempted to draw my own historiography of the idea of the Vitruvian Principle through these sources. For example, as an initial subject of study, the relationship between ideal

proportionality and the human figure is a widespread and general idea which appears in all

9 manner of academic writing. As historical figures, Vitruvius and Leonardo are multivalent subjects thanks to their respective contributions to technological and artistic advancement in the context of their own times and into the present. Leonardo is widely documented in the visual arts but also makes his mark in the history of technological innovation12 and anatomy.13

Vitruvius is documented primarily in architectural theory, but is referred to in the study of early technical treatises from the classical era14 and cited in literary scholarship on creation myths.15 I have distilled the scholarship to explore the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle according to three major avenues of inquiry, and tried to explain how each of these three subjects are useful in describing the development of the Vitruvian Principle from its origins as a textual product of Roman antiquity to its propagation and modern understanding as an image in the

Renaissance.

The academic field of architectural theory is a logical starting point for conducting my research, because the De architecture! by Vitruvius is widely considered the founding text of architectural theory, due to its status as the earliest known surviving architectural treatise.

Hanno Walter-Kruft's A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present (1994), is a good example of a survey text which describes the relationship and influence of Vitruvius on almost all aspects of architectural theory from Roman antiquity onward. Kruft's text will be used as a benchmark text in the context of this thesis to describe the modern understanding of the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle in architectural theory. Many authors who write on

12 Ivor B. Hart's The World of Leonardo da Vinci: man of science, engineer and dreamer of flight. London: Macdonald and Company, 1961. 13 For more information see Leonardo da Vinci's On the Human Body: The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci; With Translations, Emendations, and a Biographical Intro., by Charles D. O'Malley and J.B. De CM. Saunders. New York: H. Schuman, 1952. 14 A good example would be Pamela Long's Openness, Secrecy, Authorship. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001. 15 Wiktor Stoczkowski's Explaining Human Origins: myth imagination, and conjecture, trans. Mary Tuton. London: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

10 this history also pursue the productive agenda of noting specific changes in the technique of

writing textual treatises and comment on how these changes are reflective of the cultural or

historical paradigms in which they were written. Carol Krinsky documents as many as seventy-

eight manuscript transcriptions, translations or interpretations of the De architectura,16 making

it obvious that the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle is rich with cultural changes and

influences. Hugh Plommer, writing on late Roman architectural treatises, observes that early

interpretations of Vitruvius' original writing would have offered new and important meanings

reflective of their own time periods, rather than specific and faithful transmissions of Vitruvius'

original text.17 The examination of the documentation of the De architectura, and its textual

interpretations and translations throughout the first fifteen hundred years of its existence,

makes it possible to map a historiography of the Vitruvian Principle in the scholarship of architectural theory.

The second subject that I have found useful to understand this historiography is more general than the specific opportunities offered by architectural theory because this subject of study appears in many prominent areas of art historical literature rather than in a single

recognized field. This is the idealization of the human body as an analogous model for various

popular ideas. This subject is crucial in the context of this thesis because Leonardo's Vitruvian

Man, whether faithful or not to the original intentions of Vitruvius' text, clearly privileges the nude male body as the central defining element of the Vitruvian Principle. More significant, perhaps, is the centrality of the concept of a visual human form, in that the proportions are derived from the body through visual observation. Because of this emphasis on the visual

16 Carol Herselle Krinsky, "Seventy-Eight Vitruvius Manuscripts," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30, (1967): 36-70. 17 Hugh Plommer, Vitruvius and Later Roman Building Manuals (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 3.

11 components of the human body, there are certain factors which should be taken into consideration. A modern author cannot read Vitruvius' writing on proportionality and the human form and ignore that Leonardo's image has a good deal to do with its popularity, a paradoxical phenomenon which works in favor of raising the status and awareness of both the earlier text and the later image.18 It will be seen, particularly in the historiography of the

Vitruvian Principle in the Middle Ages, that this paradox takes precedence.

My research has led me - though not exclusively - to modern authors who refer to the human form and its relationship to architectural theory. Recently, it has been argued that although the body is treated with a great deal of attention in the history of architectural theory, this relationship is poorly understood and requires further attention.19 Scholars like Alina Payne,

John Onions, and Dalibor Veseley have attempted to address the often weak relationships between nature, the human body, the cosmos, and architecture. Thanks to academics like these, there is a broad selection of theories on the treatment of the human form in the theoretical scholarship on architecture which can help to direct an investigation into the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle. A more specific relationship between architecture and the human form is the anthropomorphism of objects, buildings, and metaphorical ideas, another important and thought-provoking subject in the history of art in which Vitruvius makes regular appearances. In the context of this thesis, the subject of the human form offers so many different theories on the matter that there are a practically limitless number of points to

It seems to me that this is an example of a visual impulse in which, when a person today reads "in the human form the central point is naturally the navel," (De architectura 3,1, 3} there is an innate interest or desire to 'picture' this scenario visually (whether cognitively or in physical inscription). Because of the noted status of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man in the history of western art and modern popular culture, it follows that this image takes precedence in our minds. 19 Dalibor Veseley, "The Architectonics of Embodiment," in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, eds. George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002): 29.

12 address. The comparison of the application of the human form (say, in Vitruvius' tenet on proportionality and architecture) versus the identification of the human form within previously constructed buildings or images is one of many important studies found in this research material.

The third field of study that I will refer to in my thesis is actually a series of methodological approaches to the art historical canon which will help to explain my theoretical framework. Because of the dense and extensive amount of research that can be done on the

Vitruvian Principle in the context of the history of architectural theory or in studies of the application of the human form in the history of art, a theoretical approach will be needed to act as a filter for the case study of the Vitruvian Principle. Part of this methodology will rely on elements of the study of semiotics in order to recognize the idea of the Vitruvian Principle as the signified element of the signs created by Leonardo and Vitruvius. This is another way in which the Vitruvian Principle can be separated from its textual and visual signs so that its historiography can be accurately mapped. This approach is different than a typical iconographical study of the Vitruvian Man in relation to the De architectura because it is inherently unbiased towards a hierarchy of images over words, or vice-versa. However, I do not mean to depart from the information that is written about the Vitruvian Man as an icon or in its seminal documented form in the De architectura. As noted by Hubert Damisch:

Whereas iconography attempts essentially to state what the images represent, to 'declare their meaning' [...], semiotics, on the contrary, is intent on stripping down the mechanism of signifying, on bringing to light the mainsprings of the signifying process, of which the work of art is, at the same time, the locus and the possible outcome. In view of the almost artisanal modesty of its declared intent, could iconography, having once been the servant of the history of Art, become the servant of semiotics, providing it with part of its raw material, while

13 semiotics in return would reinforce it with its own theoretical apparatus and enable it to widen its scope, to elaborate its aims?20

The methodology used in this thesis will attempt to answer Damisch's question with a case study that is at once dependent on the language of semiotics and popularized through the traditional language of art historical studies.

In 1997, Lothar Haselberger wrote a definition of the term 'likenesses' to describe similarities between ancient architectural plans or models from classical antiquity, and the structures from classical antiquity that might have been related to these models. The purpose of Haselberger's investigation was to introduce an alternative to the prescriptive methodologies of previous authors on the subject, which implied a "projective relationship with architecture, to architectural planning."21 His definition of 'likeness' implied a theoretical association of images and ideas which, by definition, matched literal associations of visual components in architectural planning and execution:

Whether visible or theoretically postulated, likeness, through being alike, represents connection: it documents interdependency and attests to similarity beyond the visible level of the degree of an analogous behavior of the two. Hence, cause and consequence can enter a reciprocal relationship and become interchangeable. Being alike constitutes acting alike, a point of view exploited in all kinds of magic practices. If you use, and act through a likeness of someone or something, then you can influence the one through the other, reaching the original by means of what is or is meant to be similar to it, a simulacrum of it.22

In this thesis I will extend Haselberger's definition of 'likeness' even further. Not only can one identify visual similarities between art objects (like architectural models and the buildings that look like them), but one can also postulate that the words that describe an idea and the visual rendering of the same idea in a diagram can imply a similar form of the concept of 'likeness.'

Hubert Damisch, "Semiotics and Iconography (1975)," The Art of Art History, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 235. 21 Lothar Haselberger, "Architectural likenesses: models and plans of architecture in classical antiquity," The Journal of Roman Archaeology 10, (1997): 78. 22 Ibid., 77.

14 This theory of 'likeness' provides an opportunity to study an idea without committing to any

specific instance of the documentation of the idea and, by extension, can also identify likenesses

that span historical and cultural paradigms. Because of this, likeness is crucial to the study of an

idea which changes radically in term of its form of documentation during different period.

I will outline here some pitfalls that I will avoid in order to synthesize a more productive

model of historiographic analysis. The concept of "truth-seeking," as defined by the German

philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), is ideal for describing some of the possible slippery-

slope arguments of loose historiographical analysis. With a few short quotes Heidegger

describes ideologies associated with certain historical periods as "continuously withdrawing and

decaying," and asserts that the process of attempting to "rebuild" these ideologies can expose

them as elements of the past that will never be able to regain their real and true existences.23

The concept of empirical truths follows closely in this argument; Heidegger describes such truths

as existing only in a unique place and time, when a populace is thinking and talking in exactly the

same way.24 Thus, an analysis of the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle must be done with the caveat that there is little chance at actually arriving at the 'truth' of how Vitruvius was seen

in this own day, or exactly how he was viewed and interpreted in later periods. The conclusion I am striving for, through this explanation of Heidegger's theory, is that it is not what existed in the past but what existed to this day that reveals the most provocative conclusions about this case study. The analysis of the current treatment of a classical ideology can help modern scholars understand how we build histories in the first place. If one ignores this, and takes for granted a reconstructed historical environment without recognizing the implications of

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: From 'Being and Time' (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1978), 167. 24 Ibid., 174.

15 accepting work that strives for empirical truths about the past, there are few opportunities for

definitive conclusions or convincing arguments.

A unique methodology which, at first, might seem reductive in its approach to this subject will be modified in order to suit this investigation. Memetics is a modernist process of addressing an idea as it is transferred and interpreted in a culture through history; this idea is called a 'meme' in the same way that an evolutionary biologist would study a gene.25 In other words, a meme is a cultural equivalent of a gene, transmitted through writing, speech, gesture, and rituals. The treatment of a meme as an evolving cultural gene is a practice that suggests that an idea will 'survive' if the social and cultural pressures upon it will facilitate its existence.

The Vitruvian Principle can be regarded as a meme. Hypothetically, it would be easy to postulate and prove the utility and interest of the concept of the Vitruvian Principle in the

Renaissance, and argue that this cultural and historical paradigm represents an ideal environment in which this idea might thrive, but this argument would depend on definitive facts about the past without the proper recognition of the modern scholarship which informs the writer about the past in the first place. The Vitruvian Principle exists because of its documentation in primary source texts and its appropriation and dissemination in contemporary authorship, effectively avoiding the reductive process of memetics in which kernels of empirical truth from the past are meant to explain the propagation of this idea throughout two millennia.

Peter Eisenman, a modern architectural theoretician, addresses this issue with regards to the De architectura specifically in its visual terms in Leonardo's image. He argues, convincingly, that since the origin of the image of the Vitruvian Man "was thought to contain the seeds of the object's purpose and thus its destination, this belief in the existence of an ideal origin led

25 Terminology coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 189, further discussed and analyzed in Kate Distin's The Selfish Meme: a critical reassessment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

16 directly to a belief in the existence of an ideal end." In other words, the desire to create a

narrative stemming from one truthful origin and meaning, to an end that is just as certain as its

beginning, is reflective of the modernist practice of seeking out idealized and definitive

meanings for art objects. This is how the Vitruvian Man has been recognized in the past. As an

alternative to this approach, the concept of the meme, despite some notable drawbacks

introduced by its most scientific and taxonomical simplification of an otherwise complicated

idea, is directly applicable to the Vitruvian Principle with a particular modification. So long as it

is recognized that the changes undergone by a cultural meme are occasionally applied by

modern scholarship, and not just the conditions and pressures of the culture or historical period through which it passes, the Vitruvian Principle will be treated as a case study meme.

The first chapter of this thesis addresses literature that describes Vitruvius' De architectura in the context of Roman antiquity. This chapter will demonstrate that in modern scholarship there is a dependence on textual documents created during Roman antiquity, a dependence to which Vitruvius and his text are perfectly suited as source material. The second chapter in this thesis discusses literature that refers to the Vitruvian Principle as it was appropriated by artists and authors during the Italian Renaissance. The primacy of pictures and the extensive interest in visual theory derived from the visual experimentation from this period is an ideal paradigm into which modern authors insert and address the Vitruvian Principle as it is translated from text to image. The Middle Ages acts as an intermediary to these two historical paradigms, and will be addressed as a segue between Roman antiquity and the Italian

Renaissance, the two periods in which the Vitruvian Principle is most readily applied and propagated. In this historiography there appear, during the Middle Ages, a few telling attempts

26 Peter Eisenman, "The End of the Classical: the end of the beginning, the end of the end," in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), 215.

17 at documenting the Vitruvian Principle which mark a supposed continuity of this idea and demonstrate a very clear shift in the treatment of this concept from its textual origins to its transformation into a visual icon.

18 CHAPTER 1

Art historians writing on the classical period face a difficult question when addressing this early period of the history of western art. In a discipline that is so dedicated to all things visual, what does one do when faced with an era in which a rich history of cultural production has been sublimated through later and more explicit periods of visual production? I suggest that because of this problem, authors turn to textual source materials to substantiate theories in a fashion unique to the earliest stages of the art historical narrative, the classical era or - more specific to my case study - Roman antiquity. In art historical studies there is a tendency to promote and elevate visual pictures and objects to a status that is not achieved in other disciplines that have a vested interest in Vitruvius or the Vitruvian Principle, such as classical archaeology, philosophy, or architectural history. Although, in these disciplines, there is an interest in referring to both textual and visual evidence to support claims of historical facts for the purpose of scholarly writing, art history is unique in its very specific focus on visual elements and what was known about practices of seeing in whatever period is being discussed. Related to this focus is the modernist tendency in art history to presume a continual progress in the history of western art, in which all earlier artistic periods should build or have a direct influence on later periods. With this in mind, I argue that authors who describe the classical era within the visual narrative of western art history are heavily dependent on primary textual sources to substantiate theories about this historical paradigm. The overarching influence of the Italian

Renaissance period on the discipline of art historical studies must be addressed as well, in which the visual culture of the Renaissance is a culmination of the primacy of the visual art object and visual art theories, many of which are related to - or form - western ideologies that are relevant to this day. Because of the inference of a narrative in the history of art, the conclusion that can be reached by this hypothesis is that one cannot study the classical era without attention to the

19 Italian Renaissance, and vice-versa. There is sufficient confusion and doubt provided by the overlapping ideals of classical and Renaissance ideologies to facilitate multiple stances and opinions on this matter, and the Vitruvian Principle helps to explain the direction many scholars take, thanks to its unique treatment as an exclusively textual production of Roman antiquity.

As was noted, the demarcation of classical culture as a 'textual' culture needs to be done with the understanding that our perspective on this period is derived through the lens of the Renaissance in the first place. So when I suggest that Roman antiquity is a 'textual' culture, I acknowledge that it appears to be textual, from the perspective of Renaissance authors who created the foundation of art historical studies in the first place. During the Renaissance, themes of classical antiquity were played out with vigor and were particularly evident in the exaltation of 'great' master artists, a situation derived from the interest in mimicking the idealized practices of other 'great' thinkers - particularly from the classical era. This practice results in a series of revisions and interpretations of classical ideologies which begin to overlap and create new readings of the original work. A community is formed in the Renaissance, a series of authors creating an archive of anecdotal stories about master artists in order to copy the classical interest in textual tradition, expressed with self-referential conviction in the subject matter and style of paintings, sculptures, and architectural structures and decoration. For example, Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), a text whose content is definitively explained by its title is, in part, a derivation of sections from the Historia Naturalis (c. 79 AD) by Pliny the Elder (23 - 79 AD). The most important point to take from a description of this phenomenon, as outlined above and explored as the primary theme of thousands of modern texts, published world-wide, on the rebirth of classicism in the

Renaissance, is the appropriation of classical ideologies in the arts and the reinterpretations of this theme through this "community-based" practice.

20 Instead of reiterating our understanding of the appropriation of classical ideologies to

Renaissance neoclassicism, however, I would like to evaluate the modes by which certain ideas are transmitted and interpreted, in text or in imagery, from Roman antiquity to the Italian

Renaissance period. It will be shown that in the historical paradigm of Roman antiquity, as a construction evident in the modern authorship on this period, many Roman writers might have favored text over image. In part, this idea is derived from the fact that there are no images that survive from in the treatises which originated in the classical era, such as Vitruvius' De architectura, and a considerable amount of doubt associated with whether there ever were images drawn to accompany treatises such as this. This lack of 'illustration' could be attributed to the fact that, at this time, technologies of reproduction available at this time were not sufficiently advanced to permit the large-scale visual propagation of images, a limiting element in the widespread publication or survival of ancient texts. Also, the social and political atmosphere, as described in the literature on Roman antiquity and the textual sources that do survive from this period, expresses tendencies which would promote the use of text over image; a phenomenon which is reflected, in fact, in Vitruvius' own authorship. To facilitate a later discussion on the visual imagery of the Renaissance in my second chapter, I will also introduce differences and similarities between the intent of creating visual products in Roman antiquity in relation to the practices of visual cultural production during the Italian Renaissance. The field of scholarship which best describes the transition between the textual culture of Roman antiquity and the visual culture of the Renaissance is architectural theory, in which a general transition, rather than an immediate shift, can be seen from textual to visual interests.

Text takes precedence in the early period of the Vitruvian Principle for two reasons. The first is the reproducibility of the formal sign, the visual quality of text. Simply put, it was easier

21 to reproduce text during Roman antiquity than it was to reproduce images. It is evident,

particularly in the earliest years of the history of architectural theory, that images were not the

ideal medium through which to communicate rules of construction, the orders of columns, or

theories on idealized architectural proportions. This is a subtle argument, however, because

architects during classical antiquity had, it has been noted, other forms of visual documentation

and instruction:

In three-dimensional form, they extend from miniature building to the full-scale prototype of architectural elements; in two-dimensions, from large construction plans to small-scale drawings. Thematically they include representations of temples, houses, granaries, stage-buildings, fountain houses, and baths, as well as those single elements like columns, capitals, entablatures, arches or pediments. They comprise of the fraction-of-the-inch designs for architectural subtleties and the ground-plan display of an entire metropolis.27

In conjunction with Haselberger's investigation of these models, it must be pointed out that

although there is a growing body of architectural models from this period, there are very few

models which can be linked definitively to descriptions of actual buildings, or actual structures that survive to the present day.28 Thus, there is little evidence of the actual reproduction of these visual elements in Roman antiquity, even //the models still exist. Because of this, I would argue that it becomes more difficult for modern scholars to address the issue of reproducibility

in any way beyond pure hypotheses. Because of the instructional and descriptive nature of

Vitruvius' De architecture!, the question becomes "why would Vitruvius, in his elaborate compilation of Roman architectural ideals, have excluded images from his text?" Arguably, this is in part due to the limited technologies that were available to architects or authors working in this period. Compared to architects and authors in the Renaissance, who advocated strongly for the reproduction of images through the technologies of woodcuts, engravings, etchings, and the printing press, images from the antique were generally "one-offs," or simple stone diagrams,

Haselberger, 79. 28 Ibid., 80-81.

22 designed only for those who knew how to read them; such simple mnemonic devices were used by builders well into the Middle Ages.29 In fact, the most available means of reproduction would have been through the oral transmission of ideas, in which information would be dictated to scribes writing on papyrus or vellum. Despite the crudeness of textual reproduction via dictation, as was common in the scriptoria of the second century, "the differences between the calligraphic techniques of each scribe should not have compromised the recognizability of the alphabetic text. Images cannot be dictated in the same fashion."30 Given the consistency of this idea throughout the literature on early architectural theory it can be suggested that

Vitruvius, as an author working within these specific technological limitations, might have recognized this technological limitation and would therefore have favored text and words over images. Pliny the Elder was another author working within these limitations and, in recognizing the drawbacks of the technology, suggested that authors should always use text instead of images to describe their work, in order to be explicit in meaning. The famous example used to illustrate this is Pliny's anecdotal passage in which he says that a description of plants in a botanical treatise should be limited to text explaining the formal aspect of a plant's qualities, rather than the addition of an image of the plant which could be corrupted over time in the process of reproduction by hand, a significant risk when the document is meant to help the reader to identify non-poisonous plants.31 The general theme here is that authors in Roman antiquity who produced technical treatises in science would have avoided using images not only because of logistical problems presented by technological limitations, but also because of the significant risk of confusion that might result from these limitations.

Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, writing, typography, and printed images in the history of architectural theory, trans. Sarah Benson (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001), 33. 30 Ibid., 20. 31 Pliny the Elder, NH, XXV, 4-5.

23 The second factor which allows text to take precedence in the early period of the

Vitruvian Principle is the actual content of textual documents produced during Roman antiquity, the ideas and theories that were expressed in primary source documents from this period.

Authors in Roman antiquity would have had a very specific agenda for writing in the first place, and this agenda is markedly different from what one would expect later in the history of western art. The treatment of Vitruvius' De architectura in modern scholarship is largely as the seminal text on architectural theory, and it has been suggested that Vitruvius' writing style represents a particular fashion of writing, reflective of the literary interests of other authors from Roman antiquity, which helps to explain the content and intention of his treatise. Some authors have developed some unorthodox explanations for why this might be so. Indra McEwan notes, "Vitruvius wrote in the Roman style of auctoritas [...] originally a legal term related to vouchsafing and guaranteeing, authority was the security offered by an auctor who underwrote an action undertaken by someone else."32 The Emperor Augustus too, to whom the De architectura was dedicated, loved writing and books, particularly in this style.33 It can be suggested that Vitruvius wrote in this style in order to guarantee and bind his agenda and theories to Augustus' authority and power.34 It follows that in order to raise one's social status, writing in the style of auctoritas would have been a more effective communicative tool than rendering visual pictures of buildings or the drafting of architectural designs. In his dedication of the De architectura to Augustus, Vitruvius himself notes the importance of writing as a means of documenting great achievements by the emperor:

But when I saw that you were giving your attention not only to the welfare of society in general and to the establishment of public order, but also to the providing of public buildings intended for utilitarian purposes, [...], I thought

32 Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003), 33-34. 33 Ibid., 34. Ibid.

24 that I ought to take the first opportunity to lay before you my writings on this theme.35

The overall authority of writing, aligned with the Emperor's own interest in this form of

documentation, could have promoted text as a primary choice for explaining classical ideologies.

This differs from authorship in the Renaissance where, though writing was a key instance of

becoming famous through the practice of self-fashioning, one would also be recognized by focusing heavily on interdisciplinary studies, such as visual art production or monumental accomplishments in architectural design.36 Regardless of the validity of this argument, the fact that modern day authors include observations like this, in reference to Vitruvius' own words, helps to create a historical narrative for the development of the De architectura as it exists in its textual form.

Another thought-provoking text-based concern in the content of classical writings is the treatment of mathematical notations as having similar semiotic qualities as text. It would seem convenient to address mathematics and geometry, and their development as a recognizable study in the classical age, as an even 'purer' textual and numerically-based form of empirical communication, just as easily-reproducible as text. This is easily arguable when viewing our contemporary considerations of mathematics as a true universal language, but - as Vasely argues - the underpinning element of math and geometry in Roman antiquity was language in the first place.37 This lends even more agency to the power of words and the oral tradition in our overall understanding of Roman antiquity as a textual culture. Lastly, poetry, the backbone to the seminal introduction of humanism into the canon of art history, was an important

35 Vitruvius, De architectura 1, pref., 2. 36 These conclusions about the Renaissance can be garnered easily through observation of the compendium of scholarship on master painters and thinkers from this time, identifying figures like Vasari as author and artist, Brunelleschi as artist, architect and mathematician, etc. 37 Vesely, 37.

25 product of the revival of classicism during the Renaissance. This textual art form was easily

appropriated, reproduced and interpreted throughout the centuries, becoming a substantial

text-based influence in classical music, classical literature studies, and - to a substantial degree

- a later understanding of classical architecture.38

The selection of text, as an ideal form of documentation, is apparent when one

considers the particular power it had to preserve classical ideologies and to be re-appropriated

and propagated in the Renaissance. These three examples begin to show that text produced

during Roman antiquity garners a special agency as a mode of communication. Thus, Vitruvius

wrote within this historical paradigm that actively promoted an interest in developing a treatise

heavy in textual content, rather than imagery. Although there continues to be a constant

debate between contemporary architectural historians as to whether or not Vitruvius drew

images to accompany his text, this debate is not as interesting or productive as the simple fact

that no images survive from Vitruvius' original treatise, drawn by his hand or under his

supervision.39 This phenomenon might be linked to the aforementioned limitations of

technological reproduction, but it is important to note that modern scholarship exploits this fact

liberally.

One-such argument, formed on the bases of this presumption, is supported theoretically

by the primary source writing of Vitruvius himself. Vitruvius, it has been suggested, simply would have left images out because of his own interests:

He addressed himself to an erudite audience, one, furthermore, to which his text would be transmitted across both space and time. Vitruvius hoped that this text would be reproduced, and not surprisingly he refrained from the use of

38 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Classical Architecture: the poetics of order (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986), 4. 39 It should also be noted that his original text does not survive either. This is often ignored by the scholarship on Vitruvius; the textual element of the Vitruvian Principle is often taken for granted as a truthful representation of Vitruvius' authorship even though there is little to prove this point.

26 images that would not have been reproducible. Like many other ancient authors of scientific and technical treatises, Vitruvius would not have risked burdening his text with complex images because, as all of his contemporaries knew perfectly well, no such image could be faithfully copied or reproduced alongside the manuscript text.40

This is one theory on the issue which suggests, effectively, that Vitruvius may have been inclined to leave images out of his treatise. It is not difficult to relate this tendency directly to Vitruvius' own words, they are reproduced in our modern translations of his De architecture/.41 These show a personal interest in an explanation of the necessary knowledge and skills that one must acquire to become a great architect or author on architecture. The opening passages from Book

One, on the education of the architect, introduce what would become the accepted expectations for architects and theorists in future years and fortify the above argument:

1. The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by his judgment that all work done by the other arts is put to test. This knowledge is the child of practice and theory... [...] 2. It follows, therefore, that architects who aimed at acquiring manual skills without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains, while those who relied only upon theories and scholarship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance. But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, have sooner attained their object and carried authority with them. n

Essentially, Vitruvius suggests that "he who does not build (and therefore produce visual items or visual experiences) writes", and vice-versa. Those who have both of these skills would become the most successful, a fact which elevates the importance of writing to (or beyond) the level of producing visual and physical art objects.

The symbiotic relationship between practice and theory is another factor of considerable importance when considering the value of text in Roman antiquity. The position of the Vitruvian Principle in the paradigm of Roman antiquity is exemplary of the fact that images

Carpo, 19. 41 The most popular English edition being Morris Hicky Morgan's translation (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1914). Vitruvius, De architectura 1, 1,1-2.

27 are often relegated to practice and application while books and words are often communicators for theories and postulations. Pierre Gros, a modern scholar on ancient Roman architecture, has tied Vitruvius' writing closely to the developing liberal arts program of Roman antiquity, and has

explained how the practice of writing text can be seen as a fundamental element of this development: "There is no doubt that for Vitruvius the transition from drafting to writing was the principal means for raising architecture to the status of a liberal arts: that is, a practice grounded in a branch of learning [...] and governed by a set of rules that could be formulated with the same rigor, as, for example, those of the art of rhetoric."43 In other words, architecture, through Vitruvius' own words and in his enacting of the writing process in the first

place, could be that much more than just utilitarian building practices. Vitruvius does note that the ability to draw is an important asset for an architect, but this skill is only one of several other important skills one should acquire to be a competent, progressive and recognized architect. An overall comprehensive education in music, astronomy, philosophy and history join drawing as the subjects that one must master in order to be the archetypical and idealized architect in

Vitruvius' text.44 These skills were secondary to the ability to express and write the theory of architecture. In its existence as a textual document from Roman antiquity Vitruvius' De architecture/ exemplifies this, in its sections on the theory of writing and its importance in architecture, sections which are commented on in a selective manner by authors of modern scholars on this subject.

The previous section of this chapter demonstrated that Vitruvius' De architectura acts as an excellent example of a text-based communicator of Roman ideologies. Modern scholarship has formed a popular understanding of the Vitruvian Principle in the context of its original

43 Pierre Gros, "Notesurles illustrations du De Architectura," 58, quoted in Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing, 19. 44 Vitruvius, De architectura 1,1, 4-17.

28 textual component and has constructed a naturalizing history in which it would seem logical that

the Vitruvian Principle would adhere so readily to the form of textual documentation. The

context in which we place the Vitruvian Principle is, therefore, not the 'context of Roman

antiquity,' and not the 'context of the Renaissance' but, rather, is the context of the literature on

these periods of time. Thus, we can identify Vitruvius' De architectura, in the historical and

cultural paradigm from which it was created, as an exemplar of a text-based culture. It should

be noted that the historical paradigm of Roman antiquity and the paradigm of the Italian

Renaissance are not binary to one another in the sense that the historiography of the Vitruvian

Principle changes abruptly to suit either time period. Vitruvius' text and ideas do not simply

disappear in the historiography at the end of the Roman period (around the third and fourth

centuries) and reappear instantaneously in the later period of the Renaissance. Instead, it can

be reported that the De architectura appears in a couple of important late Roman building

manuals without the potent association with the centrality of the human form or the sections that - hypothetical^ - made the Vitruvian Principle so easily rendered in visual form during the

Renaissance.

There is, however, no evidence that the Vitruvian Principle 'survived' from Roman antiquity through the Middle Ages in a linear and direct fashion. This may be due to the fact that Vitruvius had no known influence on specific buildings, images, or texts for a long period of time between the fourth century and the fifteenth century. The point of the following sections is to demonstrate that the Vitruvian Principle does appear in the Late Roman period and the

Middle Ages on a few key occasions, but it is always addressed as a reference in one of two ways. On occasion the Vitruvian Principle appears to be propagated in a few key texts which survive from Roman antiquity, a direct and clear recognition of Vitruvius' writing during the Late

Roman Period. The Vitruvian Principle is also cited as a textual precursor to supposed visual

29 interpretations of the concept of using the body as a source of macrocosmic ideals through its

proportional qualities. The two categories of visual and textual consideration of the Vitruvian

Principle, during this period, are mutually exclusive of one another, and it will be shown that

there is no precise relationship between them.

Firstly, the Vitruvian Principle in the Middle Ages is not the focus of subsequent

treatment of Vitruvius' text by Late Roman authors. In the centuries immediately following

Vitruvius' time, his ten books surface in textual sources but there is no direct propagation of the

Vitruvian Principle at all, either in the sources themselves or in the scholarship written about them. What can be gleaned from Late Roman interpreters of Vitruvius is the expression of the

beliefs and practices of their contemporaries rather than any direct quotation of Vitruvius.43 For

example, Marcus Cetius Faventinus, writing around the third century, specifically finds Vitruvius

most convenient as a manual for architects of domestic residences and their clients,46 while

Rutilius Taurus Aemilianus Palladius (c. fourth century) follows by interpreting Faventinus' text

in order to complete his book of fourteen treatises on farming (the Opus Agriculturae), designed to assist the owners or architects of private estate-manors on arable land.47 Neither of these

manuscripts includes illustrations and they do not survive with visual renderings of the Vitruvian

Principle. It can be concluded from these two examples that there were productive applications of Vitruvius, but in the case of these Late Roman interpretations of the De architectura, his theory of proportionality is only discussed in relation to practical building methods, such as the design of hot bathrooms and oblong rooms.48 Here, the human form has Iittle-to-no importance as a model of proportions and the proportions of bathrooms or oblong spaces are given for

Plommer, 3. 46 Ibid., 33. 47 Ibid., 3. 48 Ibid., 32.

30 utilitarian reasons; no mention is made of the concept of using the human form as a method of deriving these proportions, as is explicit in the formulation of the Vitruvian Principle in the canon of western art. The Vitruvius Codex in Selestat, France (from around the ninth or tenth centuries) actually contains illustrations of the Doric and Ionic orders to support or visualize

Vitruvius' order of columns,49 and contains the entire paragraph from the De architecture describing the Vitruvian Man but, again, has no visual representation or unique textual treatment of this specific concept.50 I would therefore suggest that there was an interest in

Vitruvius' De architecture] which existed throughout the Middle Ages that can be bound to a textual evolution of other treatises designed for architectural applications and that the Vitruvian

Principle was neither documented as a unique element of Vitruvius' writing either in pictures or in text.

Modem scholarship includes, however, a remarkable series of connections between certain drawings from the Middle Ages and the concept of the Vitruvian Principle. The Vitruvian

Principle makes appearances in the scholarship on the Middle Ages, in a fashion that is dissociated from the De architectura altogether. These connections are not related to Vitruvius via a narrative describing the continuity of his textual legacy but, in seeking out evidence of

'Vitruvianism,' a term coined by Kruft to describe the establishment of Vitruvius as the vehicle of architectural theory through commentaries, translations and editions, I will argue that contemporary scholars go to great lengths to define meager connections between Vitruvius' original ideas and subsequent images created by other figures. This argument will be expanded by suggesting that, at times, purely visual components of images sometimes eclipse the relationship of the image to the common idea itself, making the comparison of one image from

49 Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor, Elsie Callander and Antony Wood (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 611. 50 Ibid., 31.

31 a period to another image from a different period, without textual support, somehow acceptable in the field of art historical authorship. The extrapolation of the Vitruvian Principle from its initial appearance in Roman antiquity into the Middle-Ages is done through two specific examples. Despite the tenuous connections that these examples have to Vitruvius, an investigation of figures like Hildegard von Bingen (twelfth century, Germany) and Villard de

Honnecourt (thirteenth century, Northern France) will prove fruitful in the context of this thesis.

These examples mark the narrative historiography of the Vitruvian Principle by the scholarship which creates this historiography and demonstrates that this narrative discourse is, in fact, constructed and can be seen as pseudo-fictitious.

Hildegard von Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess who was active in the twelfth century. She practiced as a writer, musical composer, and - most importantly in this case - religious visionary. These visions were documented by von Bingen in three books explaining her twenty-six recorded visions; these books contained graphic illustrations to accompany her manuscripts, comprising of a "comprehensive theological cosmology, a summa theologica, that touch on the entire range of salvation history from beginning to end."51 Included in the grand narrative of salvation expounded by von Bingen is a single image of a man rendered frontally with his arms outstretched mimicking, in formal visual shapes, the qualities and composition of

Leonardo da Vinci's later Vitruvian Man. This is Hildegard von Bingen's Universal Man drawn around 1165 (Fig. 3). The illumination depicts von Bingen kneeling in prayer before the apparition of the highly idealized and naked figure of a beardless man, inscribed in a perfect aureole of glowing light. The presence above this apparition of the bearded face of God clearly identifies this as an idealized figure of Christ, but the drawing is often cited in the history of

Rosemary Ruether, Visionary Women: three medieval mystics (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002), 8.

32 Vitruvianism as the 'Universal Man.' Any direct connection between von Bingen and Vitruvius is negligible at best. Their intentions, social and political interests, professions, biographies, geographical and temporal paradigms, were wholly different. There is no evidence that von

Bingen read Vitruvius, or was influenced in any way by his authorship. As Kruft tells us in his comprehensive history of architectural theory, the link between Vitruvius and von Bingen is, at best, extremely tenuous.53 But Hildegard von Bingen is connected, in many ways, to the propagation of Vitruvianism. The inclusion of this figure as a comparative to Vitruvius demonstrates something more interesting than just a simple (and apparently unrelated) duplication of images or ideas throughout history. The point is that if the image of Leonardo's the Vitruvian Man looks like another image - in this case say, von Bingen's Universal Man - an equation is made through the similarities between the formal visual elements of these images by authors like Kruft. There is a reversal here of the modernist meta-narrative of art history, in which modern common-sense thinking might dictate that a series of influences and improvements in earlier periods will drive history forward, in a linear fashion, through a series of definitive links. This example is an anomaly of this process. The historiography of the Vitruvian

Principle that we have studied thus far has shown us that Vitruvius may have intended to dictate a series of architectural treatises based on the argument that the proportions of the human body should be the model of architectural design. This idea is evident to us in his text, but is not at all related to Hildegard von Bingen's intention in her drawing, which is described as being part of a depiction of the relationship between the human body and the cosmos, closely related to

I would like to thank Dr. Dominic Marner for his insights into the twelfth-century depictions of the Adam-Christ to which this illumination clearly belongs. 53 Kruft, 611.

33 divine intervention and Christian mythology. Hildegard von Bingen is included in Kruft's

History of Architectural Theory for the same reason she is included in other texts on Vitruvius; her image of the Universal Man is visually synonymous with Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, but not at all with the original text of Vitruvius. This is a reversal of the linear chronology of history that demonstrates, as a side effect of the inclusion of these figures in the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle, an increased interest in revering images as sources of historical elements worthy of a survey text on architectural history.

The practice of relating similar-looking visual imagery in order to construct a general history of the Vitruvian Principle is also extended regularly to another important figure named

Villard de Honnecourt, who was an artist, architect and builder active in the northern regions of

France in the thirteenth century. In this case we see the same tradition of visual selection as we saw with von Bingen and, again, the primary materials in this case are the images de

Honnecourt produced in his two-hundred and fifty drawings on thirty-three pieces of parchment, known as the Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt (c. 1240) (Fig. 4). The relationship between de Honnecourt and Vitruvius is, arguably, much stronger than what can be seen with Hildegard von Bingen since there is a much more theoretical grounding to the work of

Villard de Honnecourt which suits the same theoretical interests of Vitruvius. This common groundwork, while still based on the assumption that, in this case, a simple comparison of visual interpretations of the Vitruvian Principle can be made, represents an argument which leads to the question of why Villard de Honnecourt's images would lead a modern scholar to an association of his drawing with the Vitruvian Principle and what the differences were in the intention of the works of Vitruvius and de Honnecourt?

54 For further arguments on the intent of Hildegard von Bingen's imagery, see Mathew Fox's Illuminations of Hildegard von Bingen (Santa Fe: Bear and Company, 1985). It should be noted that none of these supposed intentions have anything to do with architectural theory or the construction of buildings.

34 Looking again to Leonardo's Vitruvian Man as the exemplar, visual interpretations of the

Vitruvian Principle show a human form outspread, marking with his extremities the shape of a

perfect square and circle. Villard de Honnecourt's manuscript, while filled with drawings of

buildings and animals, also contains drawings of human forms being inscribed onto (or defining the edges and points of juncture of) several ideal geometric shapes, namely triangles and

rectangles. The link between these two figures, in terms of the relationship between the visual qualities of de Honnecourt's sketches with a modern understanding of the visual appearance of the Vitruvian Principle, is the relationship of the image of the body and formal geometric shapes. The fundamental comparison between de Honnecourt and Vitruvius, the consideration of a possible visual interpretation aside for a moment, is that they both write (or draw) rules about architectural production; Vitruvius in a literary treatise on architectural theory, de

Honnecourt with a series of drawings and a textual preamble describing the function of geometry and the reproduction of images for architectural applications. From here, a comparison of their authorship - whether in text or in images - can be established first in the content of the writings that they both produced and then in the actual processes of writing and drawing of these two figures.

There are problems with this simple comparison, which can be seen in a comparison of the described intention of rendering visual images. More specifically, the principles stated by

Vitruvius in his De architectura are different from those advanced by Villard de Honnecourt with regard to the application of geometry to the human form. Where Vitruvius suggested that geometry is always derived from the representation of the human form,55 de Honnecourt describes in his textual preamble that the human form (and other various forms such as animals,

Vitruvius, De Architectura 3,1, 5.

35 pillars in buildings, arches, etc.) are always derived from geometry. In other words, for

Vitruvius the human form prescribed geometric proportions, but for de Honnecourt geometry was the foundation for drawing the human form in the first place. This is an important and practical comparison to make, particularly for any scholar interested in the development of architectural theory and the changes that may have taken place in the thoughts and writings of architects during the Middle Ages.

The second important comparison to draw between these figures has to do with their individual practices of writing and drawing, and what these activities meant in their cultures and historical periods. The first simple question to ask is 'who are these two figures writing fori' In the case of Vitruvius, we have already outlined that his writing was dedicated to the Emperor

Augustus57 and that he was, hypothetically, writing openly for a future audience, depending heavily on the communicative authority of text throughout history. It is much more difficult to identify an audience for de Honnecourt. Because of the lack of text in his manuscript, the theories or intentions of Villard de Honnecourt must be derived from his images. This process, as explained by Carpo, does not always end in solid conclusions. But this ambiguity, too, can shed light on an underlying interest in the treatment of the Vitruvian Principle during this historical period.

Sometimes manifestly incomplete or cryptic ("in this diagram place the bottom at the top," etc.), the technical drawings of Villard are often intriguingly reticent and seem to lack both comprehensibility and practical value. It is difficult to say for whom or what they would have been useful. These schemata have little to teach the uninitiated, and their significance was probably clear only to those who already knew the solutions to the problems posed by Villard. [...], these diagrams must have served primarily as mnemonic devices, a visual aid to the memory of those who had previously mastered the subjects. Indeed, the

Villard de Honnecourt, The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, ed. Theodore Bowie (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), 82. 57 Vitruvius, De Architectura 1, pref.

36 training of medieval builders must have gone otherwise, and as far as we know without the help of illustrated books.58

The ambiguous purpose of Villard de Honnecourt's drawings is, to Carpo, more telling to the architectural processes of the time than the actual content of these drawings. This represents a considerable shift from traditional art historical methodologies, which would look to textual support to establish the meaning of an image. In a well-directed alternative mode of thought, the suggested conclusion is that images were not used by architects during the Middle Ages, a conclusion derived from the images that exist in a manuscript such as this.

Lastly, the technologies available to de Honnecourt in his time period are of considerable importance to this discussion. I made the argument earlier that Vitruvius' use of images might have been limited by the technologies of reproduction available in his time, and this factor may be an ongoing factor in the distinctive historiography of the Vitruvian Principle as it appears in the Middle Ages. In Villard de Honnecourt's case, the rendering of figures based on standard geometric shapes lends credence to the idea of reproducibility; a mason or an architect versed in the didactic visual language created in de Honnecourt's diagrams could easily reproduce forms based on these models.59 The geometric system of proportions offered by de

Honnecourt's simple shapes creates the form of the human body, an easy standard of reference for those who might need to reproduce forms like this. Without textual explanation beyond what was offered above, it would be difficult to extrapolate much more meaning from de

Honnecourt's images. By this token, it can be presumed that de Honnecourt's intent was not to use the geometric proportions of the human body to explain or capture any idea larger than instruction and the standardization of construction practices. Thus, it can be surmised that the

Carpo, 33. Ibid., 31.

37 intentions of Vitruvius and de Honnecourt are not parallel, despite the fact that these intentions are the supposed impetus to visual interpretations which appear, at face-value, to be similar.

Because of the strange appropriation of their works as almost exclusively visual comparatives to the Vitruvian Principle, Hildegard von Bingen and Villard de Honnecourt act as alternative examples to the typical western practice of art historical narrative. Here, investigations are conducted and conclusions drawn in modern scholarship that are exclusively dependent on images rather than text. This mode of research and authorship is, arguably, an alternative method to traditional forms of art historical scholarship, a method which falls under the umbrella term 'visual studies.' There is a re-ordering of the status of text and image in which the visual component of the Vitruvian Principle takes precedence over its textual component. This new hierarchy of communicative modes is not immediate, however. One cannot fully commit the concept of the Vitruvian Principle to visual studies in exclusively visual terms because of its initial introduction in the form of text. If one were to begin looking through every item of visual imagery from the Middle Ages and compare them to the concept of the

Vitruvian Principle, a researcher would be faced with a huge number of images and would have to negotiate the important paradox introduced by the critic and theoretician James Elkins, who explains that a decision must be reached by any researcher in the field of visual studies in order to focus attention on a specific subject. The sheer number of visual comparatives that can be made throughout our visual history can be compiled and studied, but this list of images would be either "hopelessly miscellaneous or happily inclusive, depending on your point of view."60

Under these circumstances, the Vitruvian Principle may be open to all-manner of images of men inscribed in geometric shapes. The purpose here is not to make a ruling on the respective value of either outcome, but to elaborate on the construction that is apparent in the comparison of de

60 James Elkins, Visual Studies: a skeptical introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003), 37.

38 Honnecourt and von Bingen to Vitruvius in the first place. I maintain that the Vitruvian Principle

must be addressed as an idea, a signified concept with no dependence on signs either in words

or in pictures, in order to bridge this complicated period of time in which text and image begin

to intermingle in terms of their respective treatments in the historiography of the Vitruvian

Principle. As this historiography progresses chronologically into the Renaissance, it will be see

that textual and visual histories of the Vitruvian Principle begin to reinforce each other in

cultural and historical paradigm which fosters an interested in investigating and theorizing about

classical ideologies. The immediate appropriation of Vitruvius' text as a key example of classical

idealism in the early years of the Italian Renaissance is commonly associated, in a few crucial

subheadings in the field of Renaissance art history, with a developing interest in discussing and

promoting the world of the visual.

There is a general interest in the literature of architectural theory during the Middle

Ages and into the Renaissance in exploring the idea of the 'body model,' a theme outlined by

Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis in their The Emergence of Modern Architecture (2004). This

theme is ultimately introduced almost exclusively through Vitruvius, whose introduction of the

Vitruvian Principle is cited as a parallel concept to the anthropomorphism of construction plans

and building layouts. One of the best examples of this is expounded textually in Adelhard's

(1055-1082) Account of the Abbey of Saint-Trond of 1057. The church, near Liege in Belgium, is

thought to be the first example of creating an allegorical interpretation for an ecclesiastical

structure by using the body as an analogous form. The overarching theme of the 'body

model,' in its application to architectural theory, is aptly described by the author:

At this time the fabric of this church was so much enlarged that one might say of it, [...], that it was formed after the image of the human body. For it had, as can still be seen, a chancel which, with the sanctuary, is like the head and neck; the

61 Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern Architecture: a documentary history from 1000 to 1810 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 30.

39 choir with its stalls the breast; the transept projecting as two sleeves or wings on either side of the choir, the arms and hands; the crossing of the bell tower the uterus; and the lower arm of the cross, displaying symmetrically two aisles to the north and south, the thighs and shins.62

It is easy to imagine, here, a simplified human form - interestingly, a female form - as the analogous shape used to define the design of the Abbey of Saint-Trond. From this point on, the tradition of modeling religious buildings on the proportions or physical attributes of the human form can be considered a common practice. The most basic example of this, particularly in

Catholic cathedral design, is the nave and transept layout of structures designed to mimic the proportions of the Latin cross, a traditional design which exists in modern church construction and is cited as an analogue to the body, head, and outstretched arms of a human figure. This phenomenon represents another appearance of the Vitruvian Principle in the history of architectural theory, given the introduction of the 'body model' through Vitruvius. In the case of

Roman Catholic churches, the Latin cross shape definitively means something as an important symbol in western history and, therefore, the simplicity of visual comparisons can only lead a researcher to a limited set of conclusions. If we extend our investigation of the Vitruvian

Principle from a simple visual rendering of this idea into the concept of a 'system of proportions,' it becomes apparent that there is much more information to study, and - as is apparent through the figures of Villard de Honnecourt or Hildegard von Bingen - the simple comparison of images can sometimes be a productive starting point.

The extrapolation that occurs from Vitruvius' initial intention of using the human form as a system of proportions for the design of a Roman temple occurs during the Middle Ages, when the human body is understood as a system of proportions for architectural designs, and also as a macrocosmic design of the cosmos. The writing produced to reflect this system of proportions, for example by the Abbot Suger of Saint Denis in France during the eleventh

62 Adelhard's Account o/ the Abbey of Saint-Trond [1057), quoted in Lefaivre and Tzonis, Emergence, 30.

40 century, demonstrates a new interest in visuality, the science of sight, and the effects of an

individual's body and mind as central to the source of these new studies. All of this becomes

integrated into the anthropomorphism of architectural structures. Abbot Suger, in his Latin

description of his own contributions to the structural improvements to Saint-Denis in France

(1148-1149), describes this concept by copying the inscription in copper-gilt lettering located

above the entrance to the church:

Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work Should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, To the True Light were Christ is the true door.

The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material And, in seeing this light, is resurrected from

its former submersion.63

Here, we see a marked shift from the understanding of the body as a physical shape with limitations dictated by the visual contours of the human form. Abbot Suger describes an experience which effectively separates the mind from the body, making the physical body a limiting shell, something to be overcome and to escape from. The practice of looking, in this case inside a Gothic cathedral, allows for a new understanding of the body during the Middle

Ages, a mode of inquiry and experimentation which foreshadows interests that were prevalent in the Italian Renaissance. 'Man is the measure of the world' becomes just that, 'man is the measure of the world,' not 'the body is the measure of the world.'64 There is an important

Abbot Suger, On What was Done under his Administration (1148-1149), quoted in Barbara H. Rosenwein, Reading the Middle Ages: sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2006), 403. 64 Ironically, after evaluating the first millennia of the history of the Vitruvian Principle in its historiographical context, the relation of this idea to the statement "Man as the measure of all things" finally begins to adhere to the original concept forwarded by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras (c. 490 BC - 420 BC). Rather than referring to the simple contours of the body or the

41 distinction here in which individuality through the body and the mind becomes much more

important than just the shape of the outline of the human form. It is apparent that from the

Late Roman period though to the Middle Ages there were a considerable number of different

ways in which the human form was used. These multiple uses have demonstrated that the

Vitruvian Principle survived the Middle Ages, but there is little to suggest exactly how this

happened. In the context of this thesis, the purpose of introducing these early applications of the human form is to acknowledge that, as the narrative history of the Vitruvian Principle approaches the Early Renaissance Period, the human form was already being subjected to

multiple applications, exploitations and extrapolations within the canon. I would argue that the

attachment of the Vitruvian Principle to these various treatments of the human form results in

its appearance in the Renaissance as a universally applicable idea, which might help to explain

its applications in a variety of disciplines and practices described in the modern scholarship on the Italian Renaissance.

In this chapter I have attempted to show how the Vitruvian Principle has been treated in the literature in its earliest period and through the years leading up to the Renaissance. The

modern scholarship that helps to describe this period suggests that Vitruvius' De architectura is a product of a period which might have promoted the use of text over images. By tracking the

Vitruvian Principle as an idea in the history of architectural theory, I have outlined several instances of comparison in the Middle Ages which are founded less on the textual authorship of

Vitruvius himself, while depending more consistently on visual imagery in order to describe the continuity of the history of this particular case. The moments when connections are made

attributes of its physical proportions it is clear that Protagoras was more concerned with the debate of the mind and the body as a fundamental tenet of his philosophy. For more information refer to William Keith Chambers Guthrie, The Sophists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

42 between the Vitruvian Principle and other the work of other figures from the Middle Ages

(either in their writings or visual images), are documented in the literature that constructs the

canon of art historical authorship. Throughout the Middle Ages the historiography of the

Vitruvian Principle begins to act as a precursor to the interest in visuality in the Renaissance and

demonstrates a particular penchant for images rather than text. It can therefore be concluded that the Vitruvian Principle appears, in modern scholarship, to "survive" this period through a

combination of two specific strategies. The first is the textual preservation of the De architectura in a small number of manuscripts, like the Selestat Codex or encyclopedias from the

High Middle Ages such as Vincent de Beauvais' (c. 1190-1264) Speculum majus, in which

Vitruvius is quoted verbatim.65 These texts, supposed vehicles of classical ideologies, were appropriated by Renaissance artists, architects, and scholars in their extensive program of classical revival. The history of the Vitruvian Principle is also described in visual comparisons of a few key 'interpretations' like the images by Villard de Honnecourt or Hildegard von Bingen.

These images are announced in the history of the Vitruvian Principle because of their formal visual similarities to later images of the Vitruvian Principle; they could be cited as individual anomalies, but they are not. Instead, they act as visual references to a supposed continuing interest in the Vitruvian Principle throughout the Middle Ages.

Kruft, 36.

43 CHAPTER 2

At the end of my first chapter I suggested that the visual products of figures like

Hildegard von Bingen and Villard de Honnecourt are often referenced as evidence of the

continuity of the Vitruvian Principle throughout the Middle Ages. I proposed that this was a sort

of 'visual substitute' that historians identify during a period in which there was a waning of the

Vitruvian text and that this subsitution is made because the formal visual elements in von

Bingen's illuminations and de Honnecourt's sketches match the visual components of

Leonardo's later Vitruvian Man in a way that is more distinct and clear than any association with

Vitruvius' original text. These examples demonstrate that the advent of a visual culture in the

Renaissance was certainly not represented by an abrupt shift to visual imagery in the history (or the historiography) of the canon of western art history. Not only were images and text both

present and important during the Middle Ages, but modern scholars writing on this period are clearly not limited to textual fact when describing visual comparatives that represent a reversal of the normal expectation of a linear chronology from the past to the present. In other words, there is an indication here that scholars are not finished elaborating on the visuality of the

Middle Ages as it leads into the Renaissance, and are also willing to cite examples that are independent of textual support in order to address visual signs in comparatively similar images from different periods. I would argue that this tendency is derived from the notion of the growing primacy of visual art objects that is apparent in the history of the Italian Renaissance.

The idea of a 'developed' visual culture comes to primacy in the Renaissance where, in the literature and recorded canon of art history, our understanding of this period is that painters, architects, sculptors, and authors alike were concerned with making visual things and documenting theories on the concept of the visual and cognitive processes of sight. This is reflected in both the visual and textual materials that exist from the Italian Renaissance and

44 modern-day literature that forms our understanding of this period of time. This chapter

explains how the visual was - and still is - emphasized in the culture of the Italian Renaissance, creating the perfect environment for the appropriation of exclusively textual documents from the past into the realm of visual studies. The De architectura would have been appropriated and interpreted visually in order to satiate the visual interests of the Renaissance period.

The De architectura, is a text-based communicator and a reflection - first and foremost

- of cultural interests from Roman antiquity. It was argued in my first chapter that modern scholarship on Roman antiquity describes an interest in textual documentation, a paradigm in which Vitruvius' De architectura can be seen as a textual cultural product. A modern understanding of the value of text during this period becomes integral to a reinforcing system of scholarly writing which encourages an acceptance of this period as a paradigm whose cultural product, the De architectura, was described in words. In this chapter I will argue that the De architectura is distilled down, in many ways over many decades, to the concept of the Vitruvian

Principle which, when it is rendered visually in a diagram by Leonardo da Vinci, became a reflection of the cultural interests of the Italian Renaissance, Instead of being bound closely to scholarship on text and architectural treatises during Roman antiquity, the Vitruvian Principle is launched into a world of visual culture, thanks to a primary concern with visual items seen in both the visual cultural products of the Renaissance, but also in the primary source texts which exist from this period. This new and expansive interest in visuality is reflected in modern scholarship on the subject, just as the authority of text as an ideal communicator of the classical ideologies of Vitruvius is reflected in the scholarship on Roman antiquity. It is also closely associated with interests and agendas formed during the Renaissance, like the documentation of the history of architectural theory, aesthetic theory, naturalism in painting, anatomy, print culture, physics, mathematics, and many other burgeoning investigations and experimentations

45 that arise during this period. These new practices of scientific, social, political, and artistic cultural experimentation resulted in something that can be described as a complete and comprehensive visual culture in which many new scholarly pursuits produced a textual history as well as a well-preserved visual history. This chapter is meant to explore the idea that the appropriation and propagation of the Vitruvian Principle in the Renaissance exemplifies these new visual practices, and that modern scholarship demonstrates a particular tendency to treat the Renaissance period in this fashion as well. It will be shown that the Vitruvian Principle became an integral part of the Renaissance program of classical revival and that Vitruvius' writing from Roman antiquity became a governing voice of reason amongst the chaos of new theories on visual studies. Because of this, his authorship - particularly the passages which formed the initial idea of the Vitruvian Principle - became intrinsic to the building blocks of modern visual studies in the western world.

The Italian Renaissance was also a period during which there was an interest in documenting contemporary artists and their works, recovering ideas and art objects from the past, and theorizing on the position and practice of art historical studies. Modern art history is still, to a degree, based on the tenets of the earliest texts on the Renaissance history of art, such as Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Prominent Painters, Sculptors and Architects from 1550, in which the author assumes a privileged position from which to select and privilege certain artists and works by formally documenting their biographies and achievements. Vasari's text documents, interprets and (occasionally) invents anecdotal stories about figures like Giotto,

Pisano, Brunelleschi, Pontormo, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Titian (to name just a few), structured in a step-by-step linear chronology covering about three-hundred years of the

46 history of Renaissance art. A fundamental strategy undertaken by many traditional critics and

art historians is to write and reference facts in a manner congruent with Renaissance authors

like Vasari. This practice suits the modernist tendency to support linear chronologies and the

narrative development of artistic periods,67 as I described in my introduction. In this vein, the tradition of documenting artists' greatness in terms of specific criteria harks back to the seminal

authorship of Renaissance writers like Vasari, who is criticized, at times, for this ultimately

reductive form of academic scholarship. One of the overarching themes in contemporary

criticisms on Vasari's authorship is the way in which his character and career tended to impose themselves on his discussion of other artists, either contemporary artists or those from Vasari's distant past,68 a criticism which introduces problems of subjectivity in the supposedly objective

process of historical documentation. The question of objectivity in historical documentation is a reoccurring subject in many fields of historical studies, and it can be concluded that some of the issues associated with the seminal authorship of figures like Vasari have not been addressed.

Hierarchies of artistic production, for example the elevation of painting above sculpture and architecture, also developed in tandem with a reverence for particular artists at particular times. The point of this chapter is to recognize that the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle, particularly at its point of translation from being a classical text in Vitruvius' De architecture! to being a Renaissance image in Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, exposes a different type of

See Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Artists, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 67 A brief example would be the authorship of Modernist art critic Clement Greenberg, who elevated a figure like Jackson Pollock to the status of 'great genius artist' by describing how his personal biography and artistic practices were directly linked to his position as a great artist of the abstract expressionist movement in post-World War II New York City. 68 Robert Williams, "Vasari Revisited: a review of Patricia Rubin's Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (1995)," Oxford Art Journal 20, no. 2 (1995): 84.

47 ordering of cultural signs which has not been given attention in past scholarship. This order changes in the selective practice of art historical writing, where there is a noticeable shift in

interests from the scholarly treatment of cultural products from Roman antiquity to the scholarly treatment of cultural products from the Italian Renaissance. The Vitruvian Principle exemplifies this phenomenon by existing predominantly in textual terms, followed by an important translation into the visual terms of Leonardo's diagram.

The research material used to substantiate this argument must be as comprehensive as was the discussion of the culture of Roman antiquity seen in thefirstchapter of this thesis. The fundamental shift between text and image in the Renaissance appears specifically in the history of architectural theory in two separate ways, both of which aptly describe the general trend towards visuality in the Renaissance. First, architectural theorists attempt to consider the social political, and artistic orientation of Renaissance interpreters of classical treatises, such as

Leonardo da Vinci. The concepts which best explains the continuity of the Vitruvian Principle are the combination of religious visual imagery with important religious texts, the practice of architectural design and city planning, a new-found interest in the science of the human body, and the pursuit of naturalism in Renaissance art. Second, in the history of architectural theory there is an interest in comparing illustrated architectural treatises to those which were not illustrated. In this case study there is a community of architectural theorists who address the seminal text of Vitruvius and pay careful attention to its historical translation in text and in illustration during its reappearance in the Renaissance. The notion of the architectural diagram, and the integration of these images with textual documentation, is seen as an important factor in the history of the Italian Renaissance. These theories are derived from a more general consideration of the differences between treatises from the classical era compared to those written or reinterpreted in the Renaissance. As architecture becomes a more elevated form of

48 artistic practice during this period, it follows that these investigations are very productive in describing how and why our understanding of the Renaissance is very 'image-based.'

The human body is a crucial part of Renaissance artistic practices, and is seen predominantly in high realist painting, in applicable sciences like anatomy, and as a matter of religious concern which is best exemplified through the Christian saying that "Man was made in the image of God." All of these factors highlight the fact that, during the Renaissance, the form of man was the measure of all things. The treatment of the human body in the Renaissance is manifold, a multifaceted consideration of the implications of the body in the world-at-large.

Because the Vitruvian Principle is cited in a many different fields of academic thought and these fields are extended regularly to Vitruvius' De architecture), one must recognize that any of the factors inherent in a discussion of the human form in the Renaissance can be applied to the

Vitruvian Principle. The links used to facilitate these interpretations are made through a mutual interest in the agency of the human form in visual representation.

Leonardo da Vinci, the man and his notebooks, are at the crux of this thesis. His visual interpretation of one short paragraph from Vitruvius' text becomes, in popular modern culture, a quintessential symbol of Renaissance humanism and an iconic representation of the history of

Western Art. Through the popularization of the Vitruvian Man in the modern day this image becomes a visual diagram of the term "man is the measure of all things" and the Vitruvian text, on which is it based and which is noted by Leonardo in conjunction with the image on the same sheet of paper, is often treated as an afterthought to the diagram itself. The fact that this image is based on the original - or earliest - surviving example of the application of the proportions of the human body in architectural theory is of paramount importance, but it is the visual nature of the diagram itself that makes it an icon in the modern popular understanding of the Vitruvian

49 Principle. In other words, if Leonardo had not drawn this image, the Vitruvian Principle would not have the same notoriety within art historical studies that it has today. However, this section on Leonardo da Vinci is not meant as a comprehensive study of this image or meant to arrive at a specific source for Leonardo's inspiration to sketch the Vitruvian Man. Instead, I would like to look at how our understanding of the multiple meanings expressed in Leonardo's diagram are constructed in accordance with the values of each paradigm through which they pass, namely those of Roman antiquity and of the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci, as the artist and seminal

'Renaissance Man,' will be the subject of study here, as it is his diagram of the Vitruvian Man which launches the Vitruvian Principle into the world of visual culture. In the context of this paper I will address Leonardo from two points of view. The first is what I will call the 'personal interests' of Leonardo da Vinci; his biography and the anecdotal evidence which can be used to explain his proclivity towards an appropriation of Vitruvian ideology, as well as the socio political and historical atmosphere around him which would have caused him to investigate the world along the same lines as Vitruvius. Second, I will address a much more concrete source of information; Leonardo's own handwritten (and hand-drawn) notebooks and the pages that exist from these notebooks.

The discussion of the relative primacy of text and image in the canon of Western art history is at a crossroads in this chapter, as the Vitruvian Principle shifts, in its essence, from text to image. The comparison between Vitruvius' and Leonardo's cultural products is not as simple as one might imagine, mired in fifteen-hundred years of history, spanning the Middle Ages which is made difficult by the relative absence of the Vitruvian Principle during this period, save a few key examples. However, one of the most fundamental reasons for the relative lack of historical evidence of the Vitruvian Principle in the Middle Ages may be well-documented and

50 basic to the general presumptions of where and why cultural art objects are produced. It has been suggested that during the Middle Ages there was a lack of art production due to a dispersion of European populations from cities to rural areas. This displacement also shifted artistic production from the urban city to a largely rural environment. A systemized approach to building, which was demanded by major urban centers, would have been a natural inciter of

Vitruvian ideologies in architecture as this was the initial environment in which the De architectura was intended to be used. It follows, perhaps, that a general migration to rural areas would have resulted in a relative silence in the chronology of the appearance of the

Vitruvian Principle. Lefaivre and Tzonis, in their comprehensive survey of the development of modern architecture, have described this phenomenon in brief but effective terms:

During this dark stretch of time, the institutional and cultural constructs set up by the Hellenistic kingdoms, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire continued - in the words of Edward Gibbon - to 'decline and fall' in Western Europe. [...] Lands that were previously productive were turned into marshes and wasteland. Slave resources were deleted, reducing productivity, stocks of coins drained away and gold exchange was abandoned, starving commercial exchanges. The schism between a Hellenised East and a Latinised West, [...] was widened by the Mohammedan incursion. [...] The whole terrain of Western Europe was fragmented into self-sufficient homesteads, castles, abbeys, villas and manors.69

Although this passage represents a conflation of a thousand years of history into the general idea that European civilizations were in no position to create as many monumental or 'luxurious' cultural products in the Middle Ages as were created during earlier or later periods, it still demonstrates a practical reason for which there may have been a silent millennium in the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle. The practical applications of the Vitruvian Principle; whether in Roman antiquity, the Late Roman period or, as will be shown, in the Renaissance; depended on urban centers and the progressive creation of art as a cultural product. It is precisely in this context that we can place Faventinus' and Palladius' later Roman translations of

69 Lefaivre and Tzonis, The Emergence of Classical Architecture, 4.

51 Vitruvius' De architectura since, in both cases, rural utilitarian applications of the De architectura

overshadowed the Vitruvian Principle.

I would like to propose that the modern scholarship on this period reflects and

reinforces this phenomenon, due to the fact that the methodology of selecting art historical

objects was, after all, defined by documented artistic production and discussions which

occurred during the Renaissance, afterthe gap of the Middle Ages. Roman antiquity and the

Middle Ages must be addressed with the caveat that much of the way modern scholars write

about classical art is dictated by methodologies explored in the writing of Renaissance artists

and scholars. It is important to make this argument, again, as the chronological history of the

Vitruvian Principle approaches the visual culture of the Renaissance because the documented

art producers and scholars during the Renaissance were not immune to this gap either, and this

might help to explain the circumstances in which the Vitruvian Principle was popularized in the

Renaissance. It can be suggested that in the history of art there is a 'dropping off' of classical

ideologies at the end of Roman antiquity, and then a 'picking up' of idealized parts of classicism

in the Renaissance thanks to a specific interest in creating a classical revival. The treatment of

the period in between is of critical importance to this phenomenon. Indeed, the conception of the 'Dark Ages' was embraced by many Renaissance scholars, who read and supported writings

by figures like Petrarch (1304-1372): "Antiquity, so long considered as the 'Dark Age,' now

became the time of 'light' which had to be 'restored'; the era following Antiquity, on the other

hand, was submerged in obscurity." 70 This disregard for the Middle Ages paralleled the practice of appropriating classical ideals into later artistic practices where, in general, it can be suggested that classicism suited the Renaissance: "the attachment to classical architecture, far from being

70 Theodore E. Mommsen, "Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark Ages'," Speculum 17, no. 2 (April, 1942): 228.

52 an instinctual response, is an acquired taste, a matter of adopting or rejecting conventions and

cultural values established at a certain moment in history and in a given social context."71

It follows that the relationship between the Renaissance period and the classical era was

more-or-less symbiotic in the sense that Renaissance authors borrowed classical ideologies from

the past, but then created an individual body of literature and art which fostered new

interpretations of these ideologies. These interpretations were not always faithful to the

original program of classical thought, taking on new meanings that are indicative of the period in

which the interpretation took place rather than the period in which the ideology originated. The

scholarship that marks the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle demonstrates this

phenomenon through its seeming disappearance and then re-emergence in the Renaissance

under a new guise, incorporating the new visuality of the Renaissance period. In part, the

freedom to stray from the original classical ideologies was permitted by this type of translation.

As Ivor Hart explains, in a recent review of Leonardo's interests and practices:

Unlike literature there was no classical tradition to entice the [visual] artist from reflecting the originality of his own day. Little of ancient art had come to light during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Such classical stimulus was needed as a spur and an example could, therefore, only reach the fifteenth- century painters, sculptors and architects through literature. In art itself, imitation therefore had less scope, and originality had more free play.72

As an example of classical stimulus, the De architectura was subjected to this mode of 'free play'

in which original thought could take precedence over many of Vitruvius' original ideas.

The documentation of the Vitruvian Principle in the historical paradigms of the Roman

antique and the Italian Renaissance is also reflective of a common theme in the case of early

humanist architectural theory. In Alberti's interpretation of Vitruvius' ten books, the de Re

Aedificatoria (1443-1452), the concept of 'shifting antiquity' is introduced, where Greek and

71 Ibid., 37. Hart, The World of Leonardo da Vinci, 65.

53 Roman periods were often conflated and exploited for certain images and ideals, a concept

which is "perfectly serviceable if, [...] Ancient and Modern are thought of as different segments

of a continuous culture."73 In other words, much of Alberti's appropriation of classical ideology from the classical era (or, in this case, the 'Ancients') depended on the temporary subtraction of the Middle Ages in order to promote continuity between the Greeks and the Romans, and the

populace of his own time (the Moderns).

Although, as we have seen, these periods were by no means clearly defined, the Humanists still managed to discuss the relative merits of the Ancients and the Moderns. Such discussions centered on linguistic and literary problems: the so- called quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, the use of the vernacular, and the permissibility of neologisms. [...] Indeed, Alberti's writings make clear that general premises about his culture made in reference to literature hold true also for architecture. It is this correspondence that permits him to use architectural metaphors for literary and, in general, cultural problems.74

This passage marks Alberti as another important figure in the development of architectural theory in terms of its role in cultural production and, furthermore, it announces a separation between practitioners and theorists. This distinction is reflective of Vitruvius' own idealization of the roles of the architect who is also a literary scholar, a theory introduced in the first of his ten books.75 Through a combination of textual interpretation, linguistic and interpretive translation, and metaphors in the discipline's vernacular, it became common for Renaissance scholars like Alberti to discuss art and architecture in relation to his contemporary cultural paradigm, a reflection of Vitruvius' own expectations of a good architect.

Because of the rich interest in the Renaissance in referring back to classical ideologies and the lack of concrete evidence used to substantiate the theory that Vitruvius survived the

Middle Ages definitively through visual means, it may be surmised that the De architectura was

Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics and Eloquence 1400- 1470 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 68. 74 Ibid., 69. 75 Vitruvius, De architectura 1,1,1-17.

54 likely appropriated in the Renaissance through means of text-based language, and that the

Vitruvian Principle did the same because of its documentation in this form. In particular, the

paragraph describing what would be known as the "Vitruvian Man" was preserved from Roman

antiquity and remerged in the Renaissance as an ideal candidate for idealistic interpretation and

extrapolation. In this sense, Vitruvius joins a compendium of authors from the classical era, ripe

for the picking in the Renaissance.

Vitruvius and Cicero, Horace and Varro, Aristotle and Quintilian, Euclid and Plato were in equal and urgent need of recovery; moreover, they went through this process at virtually the same time. This meant not only that their translations dovetailed into each other but that they carried the imprint of the same linguistic moment. On the architect's bookshelf they became contemporary texts. The language of these translations, complete with the nebulas of latent meanings and textual associations surrounding individual words, thus produced the "Renaissance classics" and through their mediation the language of all subsequent discourse. De architecture! was perhaps one of the most extreme examples of this phenomenon, for not only did it enter the world of word-driven intertextual relationships, but as the only text on architecture, its language - translated, mediated, polysemous - circumscribed all architectural thought and thus controlled it.76

The literary library of the Renaissance architect had, in a sense, standard texts in which, as the

previous passage has shown, Vitruvius took considerable precedence. 'Vitruvianists,' as Alina

Payne has described, existed as a community of scholars from all over Italy who, being

dedicated to the archaeological enterprise of recovering and translating Vitruvius, would have

added to the prestige that Vitruvius' writing found during this time. The development of this

school depended on "a relatively small group of protagonists who appeared and reappeared in various associations with each other in different centers throughout Italy [who] contributed

much to its dissemination and, ultimately, to its unitary character [...]. Indeed, one may speak of

Vitruviuanism as a form of peninsular 'internationalism.'"77 Payne goes on to describe four

Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: architectural invention, ornament, and literary culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 53. 77 Ibid., 31.

55 provocative reasons why this community would have been formed to appropriate Vitruvius in

the first place, causing an explosion of Vitruvian ideology throughout academic and artistic

cultural production during the Renaissance.

[Firstly], the need to define modern practice involved understanding the Ancients, for only then could freely (license) [...] acquire meaning. [...] Indeed, invention and the search for rules were two sides of the same coin; neither did experimentation cease nor did architecture turn to dogma in this period [...]. Second, [...] Reassembling ruins, whether literally or on paper, dramatized the issue of the architectural ensemble as a composition. Practical questions had to be addressed in an equally practical way and the question of how actual pieces of stone fit on top of each other had to be faced. Third, this archaeological, norm-seeking milieu was tied to literary/humanist circles. [...], varied and very specialized expertise was called into service by architects in their effort to understand and assimilate the past. Finally, [...], it unfailingly included a textual and theoretical component. Vitruvius was the one stable reference point in a visual world of fragments, and his was inevitably the voice of the referee: even if his forms were not always heeded, his theoretical precepts always ruled.78

This passage explains the four general categories or themes by which Vitruvius might have been appropriated by authors and architects in the Renaissance. Here, the most important point is that Vitruvian ideologies and authorship suited the Renaissance in such a general sense that there could be strong links between his writing and many different aspects of Renaissance activities.

The appropriation and dissemination of Vitruvius' text represents a degree of fame in the history of art that Vitruvius himself never would have known in his own time. The particular fate of Vitruvius' treatise has been aptly described as follows: "In the history of art there is probably no other example of a systematic textbook aiming at contemporary influence, missing its target, and yet achieving such overwhelming success centuries after its appearance."79 I would add, in order to explain the development of Vitruvian ideologies in the image of

78 Ibid., 31-33. 79 H. Koch, Vom Nachleben des Vitruvs (Baden-Baden, 1951), 10. Translated and quoted in Hanno-Walter Kruft, The History of Architectural Theory, 30.

56 Leonardo's Vitruvian Man into a popular icon of art historical studies, a fifth general category to

Payne's list: a new interest in inventing a visual culture in the Renaissance and the propagation of this theme throughout the scholarship explains this period of time. The popularity of

Vitruvius in the Renaissance, as it is explored in the scholarship which reinforces Payne's four original themes, is directly linked to a new interest in producing and discussing visual art products. This fifth theme is what accelerates the popularity and propagation of Vitruvius beyond the historical period of the Renaissance and into contemporary popular culture. The particular elements that build this interest in the Vitruvian Principle are 1} the practices of seeing fostered by the rich new scientific, artistic, and humanitarian nature of the Italian

Renaissance, 2) the newfound importance of diagrams in the continuing development of architectural theory, and 3) the integration of the human form into both of these fields of study.

The following sections of this chapter look at each of these three facets, bound by the common theme of placing the Vitruvian Principle in the specific context of a new visual culture.

The visual experience was of considerable interest in the Renaissance, and plays a key role in our understanding of this period as the first real visual culture in the history of art. The body, it will be shown, takes precedence in this discussion but it is important to first establish how the cultural artifacts from the Renaissance - the writing and visual art products - expressed an overall interest in all things visual. This interest is reflected in the modern scholarship on the

Renaissance partly because the early scientific understanding of vision, and the body's role in experiencing things visually, was developed during this time.80 Fundamentally, painters and other art practitioners during the Renaissance were interested in how to imitate nature in order to reproduce visual experiences. The experimental nature of this practice was documented in

80 This is particularly evident in the introduction of texts such as Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in fifteenth century Italy: a primer in the social history of pictorial style. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

57 Renaissance treatises on painting processes and in the actions of contemporary artists, such as

in Alberti's De Pictura of 1435 and, later, Vasari's Lives. These examples mark specific moments when the visual culture of the Renaissance can be identified both in visual cultural products and in the content of text. Technologies that were discussed throughout the Renaissance; such as the concept of single-point perspective, the grid technique in painting used to create the impression of perfect perspective, and Brunelleschi's technique of creating false natural perspective with a mirror-mechanism; are all documented as various practical approaches the question of the visual experience. These technologies eventually formed specific 'styles' of artistic production, reflected in contemporary authorship, where a visual technology like the imitation of three-dimensions on a two dimensional surface can be treated like a symptomatic identifier for a particular style of art production.81 As Renaissance art historian Samuel Edgerton aptly suggests, these techniques ought to be noted not only for their value as indicators of a particular artistic movement but also as important points of study in the historiography of the

Renaissance, which can lead to conclusions about how modern art historians arrive at an understanding of historical periods. Take, for example, the scheme of geometric perspective:

... The geometric perspective scheme employed for the first time ever [in the Renaissance] utterly changed how artists of Western civilization represented "reality" for the next four hundred years and more. Even when artists consciously violated perspective rules, they were acknowledging its cultural importance. And even more astounding is the fact that the geometric-optical perspective method Brunelleschi first introduced here has managed also to change the very way people, especially those in Westernized societies, visually verify the phenomenal world in their acculturated mind's eye. In other words, Brunelleschi's perspective not only altered how we represent what we see but how we actually see a priori.82

The technologies producing visual art was just one of many factors which created the visual culture of the Renaissance. At the other end of the spectrum of visual technologies developed

Erwin Panofsky, Perspective of Symbolic Form (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1993). 82 Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Mirror, the Window and the Telescope (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 6.

58 during the Renaissance were the mechanisms through which images were reproduced in print.

The combination of images and text, printed clearly on the same pages and bound in the same texts, introduced a new paradigm in the understanding of these communicative modes. The physical evidence of visual experimentation through new technologies, an activity performed by

Renaissance artists and treatise-writers, were numerous cartoons, diagrams, practice images, and under-drawings; representative products of processes linked to visual experimentation.

These 'secondary' cultural products represent, to an art historian, possible supporting documentation for the intention or meaning of the acclaimed great works of art which hold status in the canon. I would suggest that there is not as much focus on textual documentation in the Renaissance because of this primary source visual-'documentation.' Interestingly, art historians in the latest centuries have become seemingly obsessed with continuing to recover a never-ending list of visual products throughout the history of art, using special technologies to extrapolate information from them. Continuous investigations of historical paintings through the use of X-rays, ultraviolet light, high definition images, and various other non-invasive technologies are providing a continuous stream of information on images that never would have been seen when the original works were first created. It can therefore be posited, in an indirect way, that the visual culture of the Renaissance has not stopped growing in terms of the visual products that are being created or 'discovered.'83

The integration of text and image, particularly in the context of a newfound interest in the printing and publication of these elements through new technologies, was also crucial to the development of architectural treatises during the Renaissance. Architectural treatises from this

83 For a contemporary example: Parisian historian Pascal Cotte claims to have identified in 2007 three unknown elements within Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, including an underdrawing of the position of the subject's fingers, a renegotiation of the width of the subject's mouth, and the remnants of a rendered blanket that the subject might have held, thanks to high-resolution imagery, infrared and ultraviolet light. See "Inventor says ultra-detailed scans reveal Mona Lisa's secrets," CBC News (October 22, 2007): http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/artdesign/story/2007/10/22/monalisa-scans.html

59 period are, in fact, exemplars of the function of text and image working side-by-side thanks to the frequent use of diagrams, pages which often combine text and imagery in a technical and applicable nature. The common presumption of the function of a diagram is to distill complicated images to basic shapes but also - through these simple shapes - explain complicated ideas. Diagrams are commonly bare-bone images or outlines with a focus on communicating a theory rather than imitating photographic realism. More importantly, diagrams are commonly used as preparatory drawings which take the place of physical objects or are used as convenient substitutes for time-consuming endeavors like rendering complicated shapes, shading, and perspective. It is easier to draw a building and rearrange its parts on a few pieces of manuscript than it is to construct the building and move its physical components, and it is easier to prepare a painting with several sketches to judge composition before applying oil to canvas. As a second important feature of diagrams, these images are particularly useful in the field of architecture because they conform nicely to the idea of the technical arts, rather than 'emotive arts.' It has been suggested that because Renaissance painters were largely concerned with allegorical representations through naturalism, they could not help but to integrate drama into their pictures.84 Thus, in architectural practice, the diagram intentionally subtracts this factor in favor of technical objectivity. It is important to note this because, in the spirit of simplifying an otherwise complicated definition, the lines between diagram and photo realism are undeniably blurry at times. Take, for a brief example, a comparison of preparatory cartoons versus architectural diagrams, both common practices from the Renaissance. These images were created for different purposes but, on the surface, look the same in terms of their formal visual characteristics and media. In the case of this paper I would like to consider diagrams in their most basic form: simple two-dimensional images, as simple as letters or words

84 Walter J. Ong, "From Allegory to Diagram in the Renaissance Mind: a study in the significance of the allegorical tableau," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17, no. 4 (June, 1959): 429.

60 on a page, in the sense that most of the formal features that are commented on in the canon of art (texture, color, shape, size, etc.) become secondary to the simplification of a complicated image, building, or idea. The reason that diagrams are important in the case of the Vitruvian

Principle is not simply because Leonardo's Vitruvian Man is often cited as a diagram or sketch, but because diagrams also constitute an integral part of the study of architectural theory which harks back, again, to the De architectura.

When Lefaivre and Tzonis discuss the philosophical elements of architectural theory, they state that diagrams "operate in an intermediate plane between verbal abstraction and concrete object. For this reason they are most valuable instruments of formal analysis."85 This passage confirms the importance of the diagram as a juncture in the processes of artistic (or architectural) creation, where the act of rendering architectural structures on paper can be just as fruitful a source for a theoretical approach to architectural theory as the actual physical structures themselves. In the case of Sebastiano Serlio's (1475-1554) diagrams of the Pantheon in Rome, for instance, it has been suggested that no amount of verbal description could convey an accurate image to those unable to visit important buildings or monuments such as this.86 Not only were diagrams crucial to architectural construction, they became a means of communicating structure and composition to those who might not have the opportunity to see certain buildings with their own eyes.87 Diagrams, therefore, acted with a good degree of agency in conveying information about solid structures and important architectural ideals efficiently, in a documentary way that could be consulted and understood with a good measure

Lefaivre and Tzonis, Classical Architecture: the poetics of order, 5. 86 Fil Hearn, Ideas that Shaped Buildings (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 56. Arguably, although images of buildings, sculptures or paintings can never express the true sense of the experience of being in the presence of a work like this, the passage by Lefaivre and Tzonis suggests that images are better more efficient, in a way, than are words. This sort of passage might indicate to a reader to begin viewing images with a higher regard for their potential to communicate an ideology.

61 of clarity regardless of geographic or historical limitations. Renaissance architects and treatise-

writers like Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1502), in his Trattato di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare (written around the year 1482), would have embraced the practice of reproducing

passages from Vitruvius' De Architettura by depicting them in diagrams. Not only would

interpreting Vitruvius, as the referee of classical architecture, align a Renaissance architect's

practice with that of the Ancients thanks to the re-inscription and commentary on textual content, but Vitruvius' ideas would be rendered with visual clarity for wide distribution. It has also been suggested that, as another contribution to this impulse, Vitruvius' unspecific style of writing and the loose canonical element of Roman building practices would have resulted in a text perfect for the creative nature of visual rendering which was so prevalent during the

Renaissance.

This is a subtle argument, but in fact scholarly attempts to discover a single consistent system in Vitruvius are usually frustrated by his inconsistencies. Indeed, he may have intended no such thing as a single canonical system. First of all, Vitruvius's notorious prescriptions are not that prescriptive. If one actually attempts to draw [the orders of columns, as described in the De architectura], there is not a single one that is fully sufficient to allow the complete rendition of an object, whether a catapult or a capital. In order to finish a "Vitruvian" order in the Renaissance manner, one always has to assert some personal creativity, or assume common craftsmanly knowledge, or both. [...] Awkward though it may be, in this way Vitruvius is asserting the simultaneous necessity of mastery of underlying flexible rules and exercise of personal invention in specific circumstances.89

Di Giorgio's diagrams of Vitruvius' three orders of classical columns, therefore, can be seen as creative interpretations based on the textual content of Vitruvius' De architectura, which would have been an ideal subject, ripe for interpretation by the mind of a creative Renaissance scholar.

It has been argued that Di Giorgio's diagrams were rendered in his Trattato because diagrams

Thomas N. Howe, "Vitruvian Critical Eclecticism and Roman Innovation," Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 50, (2005): 43.

62 represented a "clearer and crisper" transmission of the contents of Vitruvius. 'Clearer' and

'crisper,' however, are not necessarily synonyms for faithfulness to Vitruvius' original theories.

Although Vitruvius' theories were considered the authority on many subjects,91 it must be

concluded that Vitruvius' voice in the Renaissance is not the same as it was in Roman antiquity.

These 'creative interpretations,' whether in illustration or in textual translation, resulted

in some startling discrepancies between Vitruvius' original writings and the authorship and

interest of Renaissance scholars. In Alberti's De Re Aedificatoria, for example, there is a substantial "lack of correspondence between Vitruvius' standard and what [Alberti] had observed in Roman architecture. He was either unconcerned or unaware that most of the structures he had observed were designed and erected in the four centuries after Vitruvius' death. To resolve this discrepancy he sought justification for his own standard by citing specific instances from other ancient authors and from his own measurements among the ruins."92 It is plain to see here that authors like Alberti supplemented evidence from their own time in order to introduce their own interpretation of classical ideals.

Regardless of the faithfulness of the visual rendering of ancient architectural theories, however, the general theme that can be derived from this discussion is that the diagram offered a new forum for architectural study in the Renaissance. Buildings could be described as spaces on a page rather than geographic locations,93 and the space of the page was also occupied, in many cases, by text. The interrelationship between text and image, forged by print culture, and particularly the mass reproduction of images and text in architectural treatises, is significant for the dissemination of the Vitruvian Principle in the Renaissance. These technologies and

90 Ibid., 101. 91 McEwen, 2. 92 Hearn, 53. Carpo, 46.

63 interests were not present during the classical era, an important absence to recognize in order to understand the translation of the Vitruvian Principle from textual to visual interpretations.

Modern scholars writing on Vitruvius in the context of Roman antiquity do not have to contend with the later images created by Renaissance figures simply because these images do not exist from this time. Instead, these images came later and are therefore relatively inconsequential to these authors. I would argue that, because of this, the question of the meaning of diagrammatical interpretations of Vitruvius' writing makes the question of visuality in the history of the Vitruvian Principle exclusive to the Renaissance period. In order to draw a proper comparison between these periods, in which the treatment of the Vitruvian Principle is so markedly different in the scholarship that describes them, I will employ the use of a theme common to both cases - the central figure of the human form, prevalent in both textual and visual documentations of the Vitruvian Principle.

Vitruvius' main intention for the use of the human form as a system of proportional measurement, it should be clear by now, is only a small part of an otherwise complicated set of functions given the shifting nature of its application in the Renaissance. The meaning of the

Vitruvian Principle became increasingly multifaceted during this period and the application of the Vitruvian Principle evolved into something grossly different than anything Vitruvius could have imagined. This change is best exemplified in di Giorgio's treatise Trattato di architettura, which - Alina Payne has suggested - is of special interest in this discussion. Although Payne writes on the similarities of intention between di Giorgio and Vitruvius, in that di Giorgio simply applied the Vitruvian Principle to the world-at-large instead of simple temple designs, the differences between these two applications are obvious in their implications.

It is evident that Francesco's departures from Vitruvius are part of a systematic strategy and that this systematic quality arises from his single-minded concentration on the human analogy for the derivation of all architectural

64 forms. In fact, the strength and visibility of the human analogy is probably his principal and most powerful contribution to the Renaissance reading of Vitruvius. And it is especially powerful because it is almost unnoticeable: it does not seem his own - which in large measure it is - but very much the voice of Vitruvius himself.34

In other words the human form, and its use as a systematic model of proportionality used to describe architectural forms, is central to the modern understanding of the main contributions of Vitruvius in the Renaissance. This idea was so suited to this period that instances like di

Giorgio's extrapolation of the Vitruvian Principle from simple temples to all architectural forms became natural occurrences that moved away from Vitruvius' original application of his ideas of a universal system of proportions. This new application of the proportions of the human body can be seen as a tradition that continued to develop during the Renaissance, and is evident in examples such as the anthropomorphism of city plans, especially through the writing and drawing of di Giorgio.95 I would suggest that this experimentation led to some of the more elementary applications of the human form, where the contours of the human body - its appendages and extremities - were inscribed rather simply onto maps, building layouts, and city plans, rather than the complicated (and sometime metaphorical) implications of the use of the body's proportions and ratios.

This phenomenon is just one facet of the application of the human form in the

Renaissance because, at the same time, the human body began to undergo a long period of experimentation in the fields of anatomy and medicine which actively enforced the fact that this was a living, breathing and bleeding organism, not the simple visual form that might have once been imagined. The expansion of the function and actions of the human form, and the life cycle implied by the condition of a 'living' human body, is propagated throughout the Renaissance and - in the case of the Vitruvian Principle - is echoed in the authorship of Antonio Averlini,

94 Payne, Architectural Treatise, 107. 95 Kruft, 84.

65 better known as Filarete. In his own Libro architettonico (1451-1464), Filarete dedicated a

section to the construction of cathedrals that describes the dramatic treatment of the human

form which was reflective of a newer, modified anthropomorphism of buildings.

You could say perhaps that 'you have told me that the building is similar a man. If this is so, then it needs to be conceived and born.' As with man himself, so with a building. (Book II) [...] The building should also be well proportioned and have members suitable to its size. As the body of man is arranged with voids, entrances and hollow places for its maintenance, so the building needs them too. As you know a person is recognized by the appearance of the face, breasts and all the other parts; the church too should be most beautiful and pleasant in its forward parts. As the major part of the beauty of a man is in his face, so it should be with the building. The entrance to the body of man is the mouth and he sees through the eyes. The building needs them, that is, a door and windows through which one sees the light. (Book VII)9S

In conjunction with the new interest in studying the concept of visuality in the Renaissance and the new agency of the diagram as a communicative tool in architectural practice, the human

body took precedence in all manner of creative artistic production. Although bound, in the case of Leonardo da Vinci's later Vitruvian Man, to an idea originally documented in text, it is important to note that the Vitruvian Principle began to extend beyond the boundaries of the discipline of architecture, and became an important example of different forms of rendering and treating the human form in the Renaissance.

Through this period, renderings of the human form in works of art were often the key signs of the message that the artist meant to convey. Modern writings on this subject often depend on traditional art historical systems of research like iconography and symbolism in order to explain (or decipher) the intended meaning and reception of each human form. The resulting literature on the subject is a large number of sources which demonstrate a fundamentally new interest, at this juncture in the history of art, in the treatment of the human form as it is related

Antonio Averlino (Filarete), Treatise on Architecture (1451-1464), Books II and VII, quoted in Lefaivre and Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern Architecture, 68-70.

66 to the mind of the Renaissance artist, and the practices of visual art creation which result from this. During this period, for example, there was a new interest in cognitive systems and how the model of the mind of man could be used as an analog of larger theories. In the simple understanding of Vitruvius that I outlined above, the building (like Vitruvius' original classical temple) becomes a microcosm of larger ideas in the Renaissance such as the cosmos, the universe, or the world-at-large. This is dependent on the proportions of the human body, the tool that Vitruvius originally pioneered as a most utilitarian form of measurement in the construction of buildings. In this case, as has been noted, the human body is only the physical component of this system of measurement; scholars from the Renaissance not only expand their knowledge in the inner workings of the body in anatomy, but also begin to speculate on the distinction between bodily physical functions and cognitive functions as well. In the

Renaissance, as John Hendrix speculates, the intermediary between the building and the universe is human thought (not the body), the structure of which is represented in buildings and is analogous to that of the universe through 'cognitive anthropomorphism.' The application of the human form to the proportions of buildings in Roman antiquity exists to modern scholars through the writing of Vitruvius, but as cognitive processes were recorded during the

Renaissance, they became intermediaries in facilitating a larger application of the proportions of the human body.97 Even in the philosophical phrasing of Hendrix, the Vitruvian Principle is elevated in its central importance in describing how Renaissance authors and artists explained the cosmos and the world-at-large through the centrality of the human form in the Vitruvian

Man. The human form and the practices of thinking and seeing could all be linked, albeit indirectly in some instances, through the Vitruvian Principle.

John Hendrix. Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2003), 115.

67 There are other instances of visual elements of the Renaissance which reflect this notion

and indentify the human form as the central icon to visual production, another factor which -

though not directly related to the Vitruvian Principle - might help to explain why the Vitruvian

Man takes such precedence in the canon of art history. According to Leonard Barkan, painting

gave impetus to the 'Renaissance Esthetician,' who studied the principles of the human form

and its relationship to new practices like the development of perspective systems and the

imitation of nature.

We saw in the Middle Ages that the analogy [of the human form] was derived as part of a great chain of imitation. This is no less true of the Renaissance, but the nature and methods of that imitation become the subject of exhaustive study. The estheticians of the Italian Renaissance derived the analogy through the scientific study of measurement and proportion by which works of architecture could be simulacra of the body.98

The theme which plays out here, and is reinforced through the treatment of an image like

Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, is the idea that buildings can be built based upon the proportions of the human form and that - as analogues with the world at-large - architecture reinforces and elevates the agency of the human form to express much more than this. In addition to the artistic practices of Renaissance artists and authors, there was a specific interest in

interdisciplinary studies during this period. Therefore, the visual culture of the Renaissance was not specifically a product of artistic experimentation; one must recognize that science and art were not mutually exclusive and that the agency of the human figure in Leonardo da Vinci's

Vitruvian Man cannot be placed in an exclusively artistic context. Indeed, the discussion of the importance and uses of diagrams in architectural theory should make this point clear because of the scientific implications of mechanics and physics in architectural design.

Leonard Barkan, Nature's Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 136.

68 The primacy of the Vitruvian Man at the crux of this discussion is its position as an icon

which represents the ultimate success of the program of Renaissance humanism. With the goal

of creating a system through which to command the human form in this interdisciplinary

paradigm, the Vitruvian Man acts as both a visual indicator of this exercise and also as a

representation of a text which would have been beneficial to those Renaissance scholars

participating in this program in the first place. Figures like Alberti and Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-

1455), for example, both elaborated on the specific need to master the rendering of the human

form to populate perspectively correct spaces or to reproduce realistic scenes," and the

technique offered by Vitruvius to draw space in relation to the human form would have likely

been a beneficial technique to study. I would posit that the actual intention of the Vitruvian

Principle mattered little, that the original iconographical meaning of the Vitruvian Man is

secondary to the fact that the model of the Vitruvian Principal clearly resounded in the mind of

Leonardo - a figure interested in documenting and experimenting with the effect of visual

production - and it was therefore drawn in his notebooks. Martin Kemp suggests that the body was a substitute for the voice of a narrative in many instances of Renaissance art, a reflection of

Leonardo's often-repeated trope from his notebooks: "painting is mute poetry."100 The action of painting result in the formal visual elements of art commonly discussion, such as shapes, colors, and lines for the purpose the visual representation of physical things, while poetry is

historically dedicated to the documentation of words. Without wading too deeply into the endless debate of poetry versus painting, this quote is provocative in the context of Leonardo's own authorship because it demonstrates a special awareness of the effect of words in direct comparison to the effect of pictures. In the broader scheme of the historiography of the

Vitruvian Principle this demonstrates, in a succinct fashion, an equality of sorts between text

99 Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, 14. 100 Ibid., 16.

69 and image. This equality is a leveling of the order of text and image in the sense that scholars cannot 'read' the icon of the Vitruvian Man and ignore its textual accompaniment, nor can they read Vitruvius' original paragraphs describing the Vitruvian Principle without identifying the importance of its visual translation by Leonardo.

The actual transmission of Vitruvius's ideas to Leonardo is indirect, a factor which lends credibility to the idea of a creative interpretation rather than the direct translation of the

Vitruvian Principle into visual imagery. Leonardo is known to have been an avid reader of

Alberti,101 and therefore may have read Vitruvius' De architectura through this source.

However, Leonardo also read and commented on other influential Renaissance thinkers; like di

Giorgio, Roberto Valturio, and Mariano di Jacopo, better known as il Taccola; documented mainly in his Manuscript F (Paris), in which his main subjects of research are the movement of water and the functions of optics, geology and astronomy.102 Leonardo is documented as the apex of a community of other Renaissance artists and authors, or classical thinkers; Vitruvius was just one of many figures whom Leonardo acknowledged in his notebooks and it would not be prudent to discuss the Vitruvian Man, or the propagation of the Vitruvian Principle through

Leonardo, without recognizing that he was not the only possible influence on Leonardo, even with respect to this one single page of his notebooks. As mentioned, the direct connection between Leonardo and Vitruvius is sketchy at best, but the most tenuous theories are perhaps the most telling. In the most elementary terms, they are both authors of important historical texts, multidisciplinary thinkers from two important periods of time, and -above all else in the context of my arguments - exemplars of Roman architectural theory and Renaissance humanism, respectively. The De architectura and Leonardo's notebook manuscripts are documented, preserved, and compared in these terms. Because of this, a link is drawn between

101 Hart, Leonardo da Vinci, 28-29. 102 Ibid., 81-82.

70 these two historical figures. Their perceived interests, however, do not rest solely in a mutual

interest in the applications of the Vitruvian Principle. Both Vitruvius and Leonardo also wrote on the representation and analysis of time in terms of the speed and distance of travelling ocean going vessels.103 Leonardo also made improvements on Vitruvius' single-wheeled hodometer,104 an early version of the modern-day odometer. Yet, except for these direct connections between

Vitruvius and Leonardo the actual comparisons of their interests and intentions are speculative

- another factor which influences the separation of Vitruvius from his own time in order to be appropriated by Leonardo in such an effective manner in the Renaissance.

In terms of the Vitruvian Principle, it has been argued regularly and convincingly that

Leonardo saw room for improvement on Vitruvius' famous system of proportions from Roman antiquity. These arguments are derived primarily from Leonardo's own writing on classical antiquity. "Leonardo felt that the blind acceptance of classical authority that had become characteristic of his day and age in Florence and elsewhere, [...] was wrong. 'Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses not his understanding but his memory,' Leonardo writes in the Codex Atlanticus."105 It follows that a desire to revisit and reinterpret classical ideologies might have been common practice for Leonardo. Kemp furthers this notion by suggesting that

Leonardo would have been dissatisfied with Vitruvius' proportional system and would have wanted to explore other applications of human proportionality that would go beyond the limits of architectural construction and design.106 This argument demonstrates the extrapolation of

Vitruvius' original intent for the Vitruvian Principle from Roman antiquity. Kemp goes on to say that, in Leonardo's mind, "architectural principle is not the end of the matter, however, it only

"Vitruvius, De Architecture! 10, 3, 3; Leonardo MS. G., fol. 54r. 104 Vitruvius, De Architecture! 10, 9, 1-7; Leonardo Codex Atlanticus fol. I r, a. Hart, The World of Leonardo da Vinci, 29. Kemp, Leonardo, 67.

71 represents the beginning of a concept which has a literally universal application."107 Leonardo's

interest in the applications of the proportions of the human form is seen in other images of his as well; his studies of the proportional elements of the interior of the skull, for instance, can be found in his notebooks alongside proportional cutaway sketches of column bases and capitals.108

It can therefore be suggested that one of the important themes in Leonardo's notebooks, culminating in the image of the Vitruvian Man, was an appropriation and improvement of classical theories and, in terms of the Vitruvian Principle, a shift from practical application to universal understanding.

The equality between the written word and the rendered image can also be seen as an impetus toward the development of new technologies of mechanical reproduction available to artists and authors during the Renaissance. Generally speaking, woodcut printing and other advances in print technology would have presented authors and artists with the ability to copy text and images. The concept of documentation and reproduction through print would have forced Renaissance thinkers to negotiate the implications of the copying and distribution of their work, as well as the comparative communicative modes of words and images. This new paradigm of thinking would undoubtedly have challenged the abilities and interests of figures like Leonardo da Vinci. Although, as will be seen, the creation of images and text together in the set of notebooks by Leonardo was not necessarily intended to be bound for publication, his practice of sketching and writing simultaneously established him at the forefront of this practice. "No one," Kemp tells us, "had used paper as a locus for sustained graphic experiment in the same way as what Leonardo was to do."109 Although this sentence elevates Leonardo to a unique position, an exception to the rule of typical Renaissance thinking, I would argue that -

Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci, 97. 103 Ibid., 96. 109 Kemp, Leonardo, 112. 72 through the scholarship on Leonardo and the popular contemporary reception of him as 'the

Renaissance Man' - he is marked, in fact, as an exemplar of this process.

In conjunction with the arguments made concerning the audience of Vitruvius in my first

chapter, Leonardo's own potential readership has a significant bearing on the history of the

Vitruvian Principle. The universal system of proportionality that the Vitruvian Man implies was either derived exclusively for Leonardo da Vinci and his own private means, or it was destined for more public dissemination among other Renaissance minds. This subject is open for debate,

but it is important to address these arguments in order to explain the complex environment in which the Vitruvian Principle was rendered visually in Leonardo's Vitruvian Man. The debate at

hand, ongoing in the modern literature on the subject, addresses Leonardo's notebooks in two separate ways; one suggests that his notebooks were destined for print (or at least addressed to a reader that was - presumably - not just Leonardo), and the other suggests that Leonardo never intended his notebooks to be read by anyone except himself. The first proposition implies an element of instruction in Leonardo's notebooks, a factor which aligns him with other architectural theoreticians or technical and artistic treatise writers, while the other implies that

Leonardo was the typical introverted Renaissance man, alone in his studies and selfish in his intentionality. This debate is evident in the following cases. In a comparison of Leonardo da

Vinci's notebook writings to Sebastiano Serlio's / sette libri dell'architettura (1537-1551), Mario

Carpo suggests that Leonardo lacked the proper literary interest in being published for public consumption.110 Ivor Hart suggests the opposite by saying that, because Leonardo always referred to a reader in direct narrative, he might have hoped to one day coordinate his notes for publication.111 These conflicting viewpoints are both productive hypotheses, but there are some

110 Carpo, 49. 111 Hart, Leonardo, 19.

73 other conclusions that might be made about Leonardo's notebooks that do not necessitate a

commitment to either proposition. Regardless of whether Leonardo meant for his books to be

read - either by a broad audience or by a select few - he still lived at a time when the founding technologies of direct textual and visual reproduction were first invented and used.

Furthermore, the implications of printing and the propagation of images and text intermingled on the same sheets of paper could not have gone unnoticed by Leonardo, whose own use of diagrams, oil painting, textual notations and treatise writing have been championed as markers of the Italian Renaissance. In other words, the equation of text and images throughout the

Renaissance was not an idea exclusive to Leonardo but was a common practice and, therefore, his intentionality as the author is secondary to the cultural paradigm which provides context for the history of the Vitruvian Principle in this period of time. With Leonardo's intention and practice inscribed within a commonly understood framework of what it means to be an important artistic figure during the Renaissance (being dynamic in interests, ambitious in elevating social status, and individualistic112), it is possible to understand why his work was elevated to such a high status among many other practicing artists and authors. This elevation is performed after-the-fact, in the modern scholarship on Leonardo. As yet ignored in the scholarship on Leonardo is the hypothesis that his popularity in the field of art history is directly linked to his ability to recognize and work with both images and words in such a way that these elements create a self-reinforcing system which can be studied almost indefinitely in practical and theoretical authorship. It is therefore partly because of the documentation of the Vitruvian

Principle in text and image that it remains iconic, and the status given to Leonardo is extended to the Vitruvian Man by virtue of its authorship.

Agnes Heller, Renaissance Man (Norfolk: Lowe & Brydone Printers Ltd, 1984), 9.

74 This exercise of referring text to image, and vice-versa, is a practice that is rampant throughout Leonardo's own notebooks which were representational of experimental practices with the communicative modes (or the capacity) of text and image. This conclusion is drawn from a few important sources in the modern library on Leonardo da Vinci. Kemp, for instance, suggests that Leonardo could describe things in lines just as well (if not better) than as in words,113 a concept which reinforces the idea of a rising equality between the treatment of text and images. Maria Rzepinska suggests that Leonardo, who tended to use mathematics to define complex visual phenomenon, would find a parallel in direct artistic realization, and use diagrams instead of text and numbers to communicate his meaning.114 The exercises of understanding the balance between text and image, outlined above in the theory on how Leonardo's notebooks are documented in the literature on the subject, is also a broader concept in the context of the aforementioned multidisciplinary nature of the Renaissance. Walter J. Ong suggests that central to this exercise is the semiotic device of the allegorical tableau in

Renaissance art-making, and that this device is closely linked to print culture and the equation of text and image.

The peculiar dependence of visual symbol on verbalization which marks the great age of the allegorical tableau is testimony to the fact that it was a marginal age - an age when a verbal culture was being transmuted into a visual culture. Could we perhaps modestly define a central meaning of the Renaissance in terms of this traffic between a verbal world of meaning and its spatialized successor, in terms of an aural-to-visual shift? For Renaissance man, space, while still populated by the old forms, was taking on new and mysterious meanings of its own, whether this was the space on the printed page or the space of the new Copemican and Newtonian cosmos, so vulnerable to mathematical assault, or the space on the surface of the globe which Renaissance man was so feverish to explore.

Kemp, Leonardo, 168. 114 Maria Rzepinska, "Light and Shadow in the Late Writings of Leonardo da Vinci," in Leonardo's Science and Technology: Essential Readings for the Non-Scientist, ed. Claire Farago (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), 41. 115 Walter J. Ong, "From Allegory to Diagram in the Renaissance Mind: A Study in the Significance of the Allegorical Tableau," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17, no. 4 (Jun., 1959), 439.

75 If Leonardo's Vitruvian Man is subjected to this sort of theory, where it becomes an allegorical tableau of Renaissance humanism (an architectural theory, the Vitruvian Principle, or the phrase

'man is the measure of all things'), Ong's definition suggests some interesting ideas as to why this sheet from Leonardo's notebooks has such a special status in the history of the Western art canon. Unlike many paintings, sculptures and architectural elements which become the markers of great art production during the Renaissance, allegorical tableaus lack narrative and action. Ong states: "All real or dramatic actions take place in time, real or imagined respectively.

A characteristic of the allegorical tableau is that there is no human time element at work in it as a whole. Although it may involve figures pictured in action, or even a certain season of the year, it remains basically a diagram felt as committed to space in such a way as to be free of time, like a geometrical triangle or square."116 It is this sort of commentary that defines the concept of equality between text and image, in the special circumstance of the simple diagram. It follows that if Leonardo's Vitruvian Man is treated in the same way as an allegorical tableau, this sheet from his notebooks could be readily divorced both literally and figuratively from the documentation of its history. Aside from being separated from its original context and passing to the Accademia in Venice in the late nineteenth century, a distancing of the Vitruvian Man from the notebooks from which it came, this icon is comparable to the concept of the allegorical tableau which - when treated in its objective state as a geometric shape - can be divorced from time itself. This unique property gives the Vitruvian Man a large degree of its agency in terms of flexibility and appropriation throughout the canon of Western art history and modern popular culture.

Ibid., 430.

76 The appearance of the Vitruvian Principle during the Middle Ages was fleeting and frequently viewed in terms of exclusively visual comparisons. Part-and-parcel to the

appropriation and applications of the De architecture/ in the Renaissance is the translation of the

original text into visual pictures. A commonplace practice in the Renaissance, the translation of ancient texts into visual imagery became a popular exercise in architectural theory, print culture, and authorship on humanist interests. With the advent of the Renaissance, its rules and

regulations of art production, the Vitruvian Principle was embraced with excitement which rest mainly on its dual role as an iconic sign of a textual tenet. This process resulted in multiple readings and inscriptions of the Vitruvian Principle by important Renaissance figures like Alberti and di Giorgio who created a palimpsest of ideas and ideals that can be applied to or interpreted from this sign. The original meaning and intention of the De architecture!, it can be concluded, is all but sublimated by other ideas and meanings given by a multifaceted historiography of the

Vitruvian Principle. From this point forward, the Vitruvian Principle became an idea which embodied an enormous capacity for communicating other ideas, represented largely by

Leonardo's iconic Vitruvian Man.

The source material used to explain the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle in the

Renaissance, it should be noted, comes from some different areas of research in the field of art history than did my explanation of the Vitruvian Principle during Roman antiquity. This is mainly due to the extensive focus on visual studies promoted by Italian Renaissance scholars, a field which not only documents the practices of creating visual items, but also addresses the writings about these visual items and those that created them. Certain discoveries or inventions of perspectival systems and anatomy, along with technological advancements in the field of printing, more modern philosophical ideas, and the proliferation of Christianity, were first seen in the Renaissance and therefore not factors during Roman antiquity. Consequently, interest in

77 the functions and application of the proportions of the human body would have changed greatly from the Greek and Roman periods to the Renaissance. Therefore, if the Vitruvian Principle existed in its most provocative form in text during Roman antiquity, and subsequently as an image during the Italian Renaissance, the content of the modern publications on this common thread will reflect this change. If a subject of research is well-documented throughout two millennia, like the Vitruvian Principle, it follows that the research and writing published on this subject might change in a more marked way than a principle of lesser status in the history of art.

The unique quality of the Vitruvian Principle, though, is that its two modes of communication, text and imagery, are ordered specifically over time to suit and explain the context of the

Vitruvian Principle at its most 'active' times in its history. Thus, Roman antiquity is hypothesized to be textual in nature, a time during which the De architecture! contained a textual signifier of the signified Vitruvian Principle, with its own applications and suitability to the interests of the period. The Renaissance offered a newer visual signifier of the same idea, but with the added implications of Renaissance interests and agendas.

78 Conclusion

This thesis has not attempted to place the Vitruvian Principle back into the context of

Roman antiquity, nor has its purpose been to understand this idea within the historical

paradigm of the Italian Renaissance. Instead, the Vitruvian Principle has been treated here as a modified meme, a principle or idea that has been transmitted for two millennia from Roman antiquity to the present day through an extensive array of documentation in both textual and visual forms. The historiography of this meme is made of a combination of primary source texts from the historical periods through which the Vitruvian Principle passes, but - by definition - this historiography is also fundamentally constructed by the modern scholarship from which it is formed. Through this study it is possible to conclude that modern scholarship in the field of art history occasionally betrays a penchant for textual or visual forms of documentation, depending on the time period that is being discussed. In the case of the Vitruvian Principle, this phenomenon can be seen in the creation of a fluid hierarchy of image and text which relies upon a) the appearance of this modified meme in either text or image in, arguably, the two most popularly-cited periods in the history of western art, and b) the historical paradigms which are described in these periods, derived from the primary source documents from the period and the propagation of this information through modern scholarship.

This idea is a remarkable example in the history of art. The Vitruvian Principle demonstrates information about two of prolific figures in the visual narrative of art history, it is sourced from two very important manuscripts which are used to explain the historic context of the times in which they were created, and these documents are examples of the communicative nature of the two historic paradigms in which they appear. This case study can be seen as a unique situation, a quality which, unhappily, signals a specific drawback to my arguments,

79 because there are so few other images or icons that possess the same status, can be measured by the same criteria, or suggest the same circumstances as the Vitruvian Principle. However, this thesis was intentionally dedicated to the concept of the Vitruvian Principle because of its position as a popular idea in the western art canon. Because of this, one can obtain information on its textual and visual components, by virtue of its given status and special circumstances. As stated in my introduction, the historiography of the Vitruvian Principle is an original idea, built by evidence offered in the fringes of modern scholarship that cover many of the different academic fields in which Vitruvius and Leonardo are mentioned. By this token, the Vitruvian

Principle is at once exemplary in terms of its historiography. The Vitruvian Principle makes appearances in academic sources from fields as varied as the history of architectural theory, the representation of the body in the Italian Renaissance, the historical practices of technical treatise-writing, and studies of visual practices during Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Italian Renaissance. It is this compendium of scholarship that makes this case study such an ideal example of 'common practices' in the field of art historical studies because it is so widely propagated. It is, therefore, the far-reaching nature of the scholarship used to explain the history of the Vitruvian Principle that marks this subject as an example of the general tendencies of modern art historical scholarship.

The Vitruvian Principle has been treated naively in past scholarship because Vitruvius' original text had been taken out of the context of its original time and applied liberally throughout the visual narrative of art history, and earlier visual works from the Middle Ages have been compared with the later Vitruvian Man by Leonardo. This has been performed with the seemingly inherent understanding that Vitruvius' text and Leonardo's image are one and the same. Due to its dual existence in text and in image, there are considerable difficulties inherent in discussing this topic. Though it is easy to criticize this approach due to its suggestion of a

80 rather extreme reversal of the linear chronology of the visual narrative of art, alternative treatments to this subject are not easy to find. With its firm definitions of 'sign' and what it means to recognize the 'signified,' the language of semiotics is beneficial to this study even though there are only a few succinct theoretical approaches to historical concepts that are communicated through different modes of communication, passing through different periods of time. This, combined with the traditional practice of reading famous images like Leonardo's

Vitruvian Man through the strict terms of iconography, makes this case study fraught with difficulties seen in past assumptions of truth and meaning which were somehow seen as inherent in images themselves. This is mainly problematic because iconography depends on textual explanation in order to facilitate its existence. In the traditional 'dual' process of

'reading' the iconography of the Vitruvian Man in both its earlier textual documentation and late visual rendering, a viewer is enacting one of the fundamental assumptions of art historical studies.

We must admit that any iconographic reading of the image is, as it were, appended to the verbal chain (text or discourse) which 'declares' its figures. But it is precisely this complicity between the method as such and the logocentric model - an inborn, although never explicit, never theorized, complicity - which explain why iconography can nowadays try to some extent to appear not only as part of a semiotics of art (still to be formally established), but also as a 'blue print' for it ...117

Thus, it can be concluded that the modes of communication of the Vitruvian Principle ought to be subtracted, to the best of one's ability, in order to view the bare-bones nature of the

Vitruvian Principle itself; the goal of this practice has been to expose the 'blue-print' of the history of the Vitruvian Principle and its fundamental historiography as it is described in modern scholarship in art historical studies.

Damisch, 239.

81 Haselberger's concept of 'likeness,' modified slightly in my introduction, has been central to this methodology. Objects, texts, and ideas can be seen as referencing an original idea by means of what is meant to be similar to it or a simulacrum of it. The cause and consequence of the existence of these elements is recognized as reciprocal over time. Thus, the

Vitruvian Principle can be seen as a fluid and changing idea, one that has an enormous capacity to communicate various ideals and interests. It is possible to track the historiography of the

Vitruvian Principle in a much more succinct fashion with a good degree of focus, thanks to this definition. It can be concluded through this process that the Vitruvian Principle was segmented from Vitruvius' De architecture! because it suited a particular period of art history, and that this process of selection had been so consistently repeated in modern scholarship that Leonardo's

Vitruvian Man became a substantial icon of an improved, and certainly more universally applicable Vitruvian Principle, divorced from its textual counterpart for the sake of simplicity.

This progression of the narrative of the Vitruvian Principle is due, in part, to the interplay of text and image in its documented history. There is an apparent ordering of textual and visual communicative modes where, historically, textual information is sometimes made servant to visual evidence, or visual imagery is sometimes used to substantiate primary source texts.

Although it is possible to devolve into the 'chicken and the egg' discussion of 'what came first, the text or the image?' I have attempted in this thesis to avoid the awkward situation of

Foucault's classroom teacher in his 'This is not a Pipe' model. Instead, it can be surmised that it is possible to utilize the concept of likeness in the context of a historiography to avoid the looping arguments which can sometimes arise from works that contain both text and image thanks to the historical distance between the two periods of time in this case study. Heidegger's warning against 'truth-seeking' in historical authorship has been avoided in this sense; it is possible to strike a balance between the iconographical, modernist, and traditional forms of art

82 historical authorship with more philosophical, modern, and critical approaches to the discipline so long as the weaknesses and strengths of each field of study are recognized and capitalized.

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88 Appendix A

Images:

Figure 1 - Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, (approx 1487)

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Figure 2 - Rene Magritte, Ceci n'est pas une pipe, (1928-1929)

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89 Figure 3 -Hildegard von Bingen, Universal Man, (approx. 1165)

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Figure 4 - Villard de Honnecourt, Notebook, Image XXXIII, (1220 - 1240)

90 Appendix B

The complete textual writings of Leonardo da Vinci and Vitruvius on the Vitruvian Principle:

Leonardo da Vinci:

From: Notebook VII, 343. Galleria dell'Accademia Venice, On the Proportions and on the Movements of the Human Figure, (c. 1487)

Vitruvius, the architect, says in his work on architecture that the measurements of the human body are distributed by Nature as follows: that is that 4 fingers make 1 palm, and 4 palms make 1 foot, 6 palms make 1 cubit; 4 cubits make a man's height. And 4 cubits make one pace and 24 palms make a man; and these measures he used in his buildings. If you open your legs so much as to decrease your height 1/14 and spread and raise your arms till your middle fingers touch the level of the top of your head you must know that the centre of the outspread limbs will be in the navel and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle.

The length of a man's outspread arms is equal to his height.

From the roots of the hair to the bottom of the chin is the tenth of a man's height; from the bottom of the chin to the top of his head is one eighth of his height; from the top of the breast to the top of his head will be one sixth of a man. From the top of the breast to the roots of the hair will be the seventh part of the whole man. From the nipples to the top of the head will be the fourth part of a man. The greatest width of the shoulders contains in itself the fourth part of the man. From the elbow to the tip of the hand will be the fifth part of a man; and from the elbow to the angle of the armpit will be the eighth part of the man. The whole hand will be the tenth part of the man; the beginning of the genitals marks the middle of the man. The foot is the seventh part of the man. From the sole of the foot to below the knee will be the fourth part of the man. From below the knee to the beginning of the genitals will be the fourth part of the man. The distance from the bottom of the chin to the nose and from the roots of the hair to the eyebrows is, in each case the same, and like the ear, a third of the face.

Vitruvius:

From: De architectura 3,1,1-2. (c. 15 BC), Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, The Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1914.

1. The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect. They are due to proportion, in Greek ava\oyia. Proportion is a correspondence among the measures of the members of an entire work, and of the whole to a certain part selected as standard. From this result the principles of symmetry. Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members, as in the case of those of a well shaped man.

2. For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the underside of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the under side of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair

91 is also a third, comprising the forehead. The length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it was by employing them that the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity attained to great and endless renown.

(Continues on 3,1, 3-4.)