Page 98 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

role than architects in revealing the inherent side, shall be a house of the comune [the local
8
order of nature as created by God. The means government] with a loggia.... And on the other
through which painters were to effect this reve- side... shall be built the church of the parish
lation was the acquisition of rational under- of St. Peter Inside the town shall be nine
standing and systematic skills. Alberti con- streets.... [There follows an account of the
sidered these attributes essential if their widths of the streets and dimensions of the
possessors were to have any hope of resisting properties, according to a carefully graded
the vagaries of fortune in human affairs. The mathematical order, diminishing in size from
kind of enlightenment that Alberti sought was the central axis. ] The main street shall run the
disinterested, in that the philosopher-creator length of the town and another street, similar
was to be detached from corrupting entangle- to it, shall be made across it in the middle of
ments in the hurly-burly of politics and com- the town/' 10
merce, but it was not completely separate from One of the best surviving examples of the
society, since it could be applied to the creation new towns is San Giovanni Valdarno, the birth-
of actual structures for the benefit of human place of Masaccio, a town where axial streets of
life. The vision of order formulated by Alberti, calculated widths flow into and out of a fine
founded on the neo-Stoic doctrines of the double square. At the center stands the Palazzo
Roman authors he admired, above all Cicero and Pretorio, the seat and symbol of civic rule, sur-
Seneca, was very much that of the new urban rounded by places of worship and of business
intellectual class, for whom monastic with- and domestic life, arranged according to a care-
drawal from society seemed as undesirable as fully ordered hierarchy of functions. The visual
unreserved commitment to the unprincipled elements are controlled in a rigorous manner
outer world where human beings struggled for through a series of calculated alignments and
supremacy. vistas that make manifest the rationality of form
The new visions of space that appeared in the and function in the new urban settings for the
late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, above all theater of life.
in Italy and most especially in Florence, arose Such regular planning, which required skill in
within urban societies and were expressed practical mathematics, including surveying, lay
through new conceptions of the human envi- in the hands of sophisticated architect-masons,
ronment—not only the environment that was who were drawn largely from the workshop of
actually constructed for the conduct of human the cathedral in Florence. In the city of Florence fig. 2. Piero della Zucca, Plan of San Giovanni
affairs, but also the imagined worlds depicted itself, the scope for the establishment of sys- Val d'Arno. 1553, pen and ink.
by practitioners of the figurative arts. Perhaps tematic town spaces and proportional design Archivio di Stato, Florence
in no other period were developments in con-
structed and depicted space more profoundly
united. If it is true to say in the final analysis
that the fourteenth-century developments in
the rendering of human space in painting, as in
Ambrogio Lorenzetti's superb depiction of the
well-governed city, were dependent upon actual
spaces in cities and the manner of their use, it
is nonetheless apparent that the depiction of
imagined space, especially after the invention
of linear perspective in or before 1413, played
an active role in transforming the fifteenth-
century vision of urban space.
This development appeared first in the
construction of actual urban spaces. The late
Middle Ages witnessed the building of planned
new towns in a number of European centers,
but those initiated in Tuscany from 1299
onwards by the government of Florence were of
special significance in the development of urban
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geometry. The commission that reported in
1350 on the proposed new town of Giglio
Fiorentino made the following recommenda-
tions: "In the middle of the town shall be a
piazza ninety braccia [about 50 m] long and
seventy braccia [about 39m] wide. In the piazza fig. 3. Church of San Giovanni viewed along the south arcade of the Palazzo Pretorio, San Giovanni Val
shall be a well. And flanking this piazza, on one d'Arno. 1299 onwards

EUROPE AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD 97