Page 100 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

city fathers intended the physical organization scapes, that now in Urbino, as in the appearance
of the city to convey: "This palace (the Palazzo of the most coherent piece of actual fifteenth-
Vecchio) is so immense that it must house the century town planning from the middle of the
men who are appointed to govern the state. century, the main square of Pope Pius n's
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Indeed it was so magnificently conceived that Pienza. The various buildings around the
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it dominates all the buildings nearby/' This square—the cathedral, the pope's family palace,
nodal building is set in progressively broader the residence of the archbishop, the seat of the
perspectives as Bruni, in his description, moves local government, and other, more modest
away from the center of the city, until he sees structures, including a beautifully designed
Florence, its surrounding walls, its corona of well —are arranged in a highly coherent visual
villas, and its encircling hills and orbital towns and social ensemble.
as a manifestation of a supreme spatial order. The theorists, of course, could be even more
In the middle of the century Alberti, in his uncompromising in adopting geometrical plans
treatise De re aedificatoria (On the Art of than the builders of actual projects, who had to
Building), laid down the ideal order as a set of confront the range of practical problems con-
theoretical principles. The same combination of nected with each individual site. When laying
social and aesthetic factors governed his axioms, out his imaginary city of Sforzinda for the duke fig. 7. Intarsia Decorations in the Studiolo in the
according to the premise that "the range of dif- of Milan, Filarete uncompromisingly drops his Palazzo Ducale, Urbino
ferent works depends principally on the varia- geometrical scheme for the city into a virgin
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tions within human nature/' Thus, appropriate landscape — one free of preexisting structures
provision—appropriate both functionally and and conflicting property rights. Such overarch- in Renaissance theory was so compelling that
visually—must be made for the various govern- ing geometrical designs drew their justification Pacioli prefaced his treatise with a verse hymn
mental, public, private, and religious activities not only from the cultivation of order for beau- in praise of their ubiquitous significance in the
within the city. For example, different kinds of ty's sake (or even for the sake of function), but construction of the world. For Leonardo, as for
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rulers needed different kinds of buildings: also from their symbolic associations. The Luca Pacioli, the cerebral abstractions of geome-
"Whereas a royal dwelling might be sited next regular geometrical forms, particularly the so- try corresponded to elements that were
to a show-park, a temple or the houses of noble- called Platonic solids, were thought to corre- embedded in reality rather than separate from
men, that of a tyrant should be well set back on spond to the building blocks of the cosmos. 21 it. The conceptual spaces in the human mind
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all sides from any buildings/' Similar differen- These archetypal forms governed the design and the realized spaces in which Renaissance
tiations were to be made between types of reli- of man, the microcosm, as much as they man pursued his social and intellectual life
gious buildings: "There are two main types of determined the scheme of the heavens, the existed in a continuity. This continuity is per-
temple: major temples where a great prelate macrocosm. In the Renaissance, this view of haps best symbolized by the decoration of aris-
solemnly conducts established ceremonies and man as the microcosm came to be associated tocratic scholars' studies (studioli), particularly
sacraments, then those presided over by a lesser particularly with the so-called Vitruvian man, those designed for Federigo da Montefeltro in
priest, such as chapels in built-up areas — Per- based on a set of ideal proportions laid down by his palaces at Urbino and Gubbio. The designs
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haps the most suitable site for the main temple the Roman architect Vitruvius and expressed in of inlaid woodwork in the studioli and in other
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would be the centre of a town." The paintings the image of a human figure, arms outstretched, items of domestic and church furniture (cat.
of ideal townscapes from later in the century, inscribed in a square and a circle. Both Fran- 145) use the new science of perspective to evoke
particularly those now in Urbino and Baltimore cesco di Giorgio and Leonardo (see cat. 175) the orderly disciplines of the liberal arts
(cats. 147,148), can be analyzed in terms of made drawings of this subject. 22 through details such as books, mathematical
such functional and visual hierarchies. All the The later fifteenth century saw the flowering solids, and scientific instruments, and not infre-
diverse elements in a city should be held of an appreciation of the regular geometrical quently include images of well-ordered town-
together in a rational order: "The principal bodies in terms that can justifiably be called scapes akin to those on the painted panels. The
ornament to any city lies in the siting, layout, aesthetic. The leading figures in this movement intellectual base underlying this vision of har-
composition and arrangement of its roads, were the painter Piero della Francesca and the mony was, in theory at least, formed by con-
squares and individual works; each must be mathematician Luca Pacioli (cat. 143), the latter templative philosophers of the kind imagined
properly planned and distributed according to of whom published an important work, De by Botticelli in his Saint Augustine (cat. 144),
use, importance and convenience. For without divina proportione (On Divine Proportion), in depicted as a Renaissance scholar who sits in a
order there can be nothing commodious, grace- 1509. The brilliant perspectival illustrations of study equipped with a treatise on geometry, a
ful and noble." 17 the regular geometrical bodies in their solid and modern clock, and an armillary sphere that rep-
The kind of order envisaged by Alberti's skeletal forms in the original manuscript were resents the design of the celestial orbits. 25
immediate successors as architect-theorists, designed by Leonardo da Vinci, Pacioli's col- In creating the images through which this
Filarete and Francesco di Giorgio, was far more league at the court of Milan in the late 14905 vision of geometrical order in space was dissem-
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complex and all-embracing than even that of the (see cat. 142). The ubiquitous "divine propor- inated, the artistic technique of perspective was
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fourteenth-century town planners. Everything tion" upon which the beauty of the bodies was crucial. The close association between Brunel-
from the design of a capital at the top of a dependent was the harmonic division of a line leschi's invention of perspective and the "squar-
column to the overall plan of the city was to be according to the ratio of the so-called golden ing up" of Florence's public spaces has already
governed by a rigorously proportional geome- section (such that the ratio of the smaller part been noted. Indeed the techniques through
try. The visual effect of such calculation is as to the larger equals the ratio of the larger part which the town planners achieved their ends,
apparent in the finest of the painted ideal town- to the whole). The attraction of these forms involving precise techniques of mensuration,

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