Human(ist)ical architecture. Proportion and analogy in Vitruvian theoretical discourse
The reference of architecture to the human scale seems to have been established since the beginnings of European architectural culture, if we admit to identify them in the Mediterranean basin of the 7th-5th centuries B.C. In fact, even before any modulated, possibly anthropomorphic articulation, architecture seems to have assimilated - perhaps in a diffuse and still insufficiently explained way - not one or another type of individuality, but rather a collective composition. For example, the origin of the peristyle of Greek temples has been identified in the geometry of military formations (phalanxes), with the argument of a mental setting which equated the protection thus provided with that offered by the deity to whom the temple was dedicated1.
Architecture, therefore, enters the sphere of human corporeality on a bifurcated path: as a possibility of 'incarnation' on the one hand, and as a particularization of the theme of the (human) 'organism' on the other. The first of the two directions particularly privileges mental projection or, in the case of sacred architecture, metaphorical language, while the second emphasizes the establishment of an architectural typology, articulated around a few rules: symmetry, proportionality, commensurability, etc.
Geometry and bodyscheme
Generally speaking, in classical architectural theory, the problem of proportionality is posed in terms of both mathematics and the (human) body, the area of contact being that of the human body coordinated by numerical relations. Speculations on this line start from a famous passage in Vitruvius' treatise (Lb. III, 1, 3), taken up and emphasized in the XV-XVI centuries, which depicts the inscription of the human body in two simple geometrical figures: "The center of the human body is by nature the navel; thus, if we place a man lying on his back, with his hands and feet apart, fixing the point of the compass in the navel and describing a circle, it will touch the points of his limbs"2. The relationship with geometry is, first and foremost, a confirmation of the harmony of the human frame, which thus becomes, like the geometrical figures, beautiful in itself and not through a certain relationship, as is evident from the identification in Vitruvius' text of a possible Platonist substratum: "I try to explain the beauty of the forms, not as many see it, referring to a few creatures or paintings, but I have in view the straight line - reason affirms it - the circle and, starting from this, the surfaces and bodies that appear as a result of the action of the lathe [...]. I assert that all this is beautiful, not in relation to something else, as is the case with others, but is always beautiful in itself [...]"3.
The "Vitruvian man" is thus subjected to a process of abstraction, being extracted from the zone of the sensitive and freed from the weight and opacity of corporeality4. We are in front of an almost explicit equivalence between the human body and the mental projection, geometry, the pure architectural idea. The presupposition of this identity is supported by a hypothesis: the superimposition of the two geometric figures - the circle and the square - which embrace a human body in a double hypostasis would, in fact, be an abbreviation of the method described by Vitruvius for architectural design. The man is lying in a circle, "expanding" from the umbilicus in the same way that the plane (aspectus, ichonography) develops from a central axis. At the same time, he stands in the square as in an elevation (species) that modulates according to its proportions. The image depicted by Vitruvius thus superimposes two different planes, which absorb into the fundamental data of architecture (horizontality and verticality) a geometry of man that has become (made to be) abstract.
The analogy between human composition and architectural (and urban) composition is also an abstract scheme, as formulated - especially graphically - in the 15th century by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, among others. His treatise on civil and military architecture is apparently indebted to several ancient sources (and authorities), including Plato, Aristotle and Vitruvius, in whose texts the correspondence between state/ciety and organism is recurrent. In Timaios, for example, the various functions of the soul are distributed in the body in the same way that the functional zones are established in the city: "[...] and since one part of the mortal soul is by its nature more noble than the other, the gods have built in the thoracic cavity another partition, like that between the dwelling of women and that of men [...]"5. Francesco di Giorgio Martini is even more explicit in this respect: for him, the (human) body as a proportionate whole is the model that architecture in general must take into account, not only in relation to the temple, but also to the city, the fortress or the castle. The citadel, for example, is a kind of "head" of the city, the church is the "heart", the piazza is the "abdomen", the bastions are the "arms", etc.6 [...]
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Notes:
1 John ONIANS, "Greek Temple and Greek Brain", in Body and Building. Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, Edited by G. Dodds & R. Tavernor, The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2002, pp. 49-54. In the Homeric Elada, the overlapping of the two images - the phalanx and the peristyle - is noticeable in both directions, the comparison of the hoplite with the trunk of a tree or the stone of a wall being recurrent in the Iliad.
2 VITRUVE, De l'architecture, Livre III, texte établi, traduit et commenté par Pierre Gros, Les Belles Lettres, 1990, p. 7.
3 PLATON, Philebos, 51c, Opere VII, Editura Scientifica, 1993, translated by Andrei Cornea, p. 74. See also Pierre GROS, "La géométrie platonicienne de la notice vitruvienne sur l'homme parfait (De architectura, III, 1, 2-3)", in Annalli di Architettura, 13/2001, p. 17.
4 Towards the end of the fifteenth century, the Vitruvian man appears in Francesco di Giorgio and Leonardo da Vinci, and is mainly represented in post-1500 editions of the treatise De architectura; Fra Giocondo is the author of two illustrations in the 1511 edition, and in the 1521 translation Cesare Cesariano, probably familiar with Leonardo's drawing, adds some comments betraying meditations on harmony and proportion circulated in Bramante's setting; one of the subtlest interpretations is that of Francesco Zorzi, a follower of Neo-Platonism closely interested in architecture, who in De harmonia mundi totius (Venice, 1525) moves the discussion - in the chapter Quod Homo imitatur mundum in figura circulari - into the area of mystical geometry taken from Plotinus' Enneads. The Vitruvian hypostasis is reinforced by the Christian postulate of man as God's image, in the context of the revival of Euclidean mathematics, becoming a symbol of mathematical sympathy between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Cf. Rudolf WITTKOWER, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Random House, 1962, pp. 14-16.
5 PLATON, Timaios, 69e-70a, translation by Cătălin Partenie, Opere, vol VII, Editura Științifică, Bucharest, p. 190.
6 Lawrence LOWIC, 'The Meaning and Significance of the Human Analogy in Francesco di Giorgio's Trattato', Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 42, Dec., 1983, p. 361.