CHAPTER 7
Maarten Delbeke
The emergence of the notion of beauty in French architectural discourse in the second half of the seventeenth century invigorated a debate about a set of closely related topics, such as the place of architecture among the arts of imitation, the authority of models provided by antiquity and nature, and the legitimacy of aesthetic judgments. This essay looks at a number of related contributions to this debate and distinguishes two approaches: one that sought to identify an “idea” of beauty, governing all the arts and based on the imitation of nature, and the other that approached beauty as a matter of pleasure and taste. This essay argues that the brothers Perrault recognized problems inherent in the first view and formulated an alternative by adopting ideas that issued from the ongoing debate about literary style and ornament. In so doing, they made available for architectural theory a rich body of proto-aesthetic reflection that dealt with matters of appropriateness, of clarity of meaning, of the social embeddedness of culture, and of the legitimacy of aesthetic judgments. If this approach to architectural theory was not picked up by the budding institutions of architectural education, Giambattista Piranesi’s response to the Perraults, nearly a century later, shows how it would open up the possibility of thinking about architecture as an art form with its own peculiar beauty, distinct from the other arts yet equally rooted in nature.
The “Idea” of Beauty in Architecture, 1650–72
In 1650 the French homme de lettres Roland Fréart de Chambray published the Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne, a comparison, modeled on Plutarch’s parallel Lives, of the five architectural orders retrieved from a select sample of ancient buildings and ten modern Italian and French architectural treatises.1 The preface of the work explained how the comparison should help undo the errors and misunderstandings about the proportions and ornaments of the orders that had accrued over time and retrieve an idea of beautiful architecture from the purest sources, the three Greek orders.2
The Parallèle was meant to contribute to a French doctrine of the visual arts, an effort supported by Fréart’s translations of Andrea Palladio’s Quattro libri dell’architettura (first Italian edition 1570) published in the same year, and Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise on painting (1651).3 In 1662 Fréart would publish his Idée de la perfection de la peinture. As the preface of the Parallèle attests, the project to formulate a coherent artistic doctrine took root in Rome in the 1630–40s, when Fréart de Chambray and his brother Chantelou visited the city under the auspices of Richelieu and his superintendent Sublet de Noyers. There they frequented the circles where the notion of the “idea del bello” was developed, around Cassiano dal Pozzo, François Duquesnoy, and Nicolas Poussin.4
This doctrine would find its most influential expression in the text Idea by the Roman art critic Gianpietro Bellori, first read to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1664 and published as the preface to his Vite of 1672.5 Bellori argues that the three visual arts—painting, sculpture, and architecture—pursue beauty by means of a perfected imitation of nature, guided by the idea. The idea is not a Platonic ideal but the perfection of the models found in nature according to the sound principles of art.6 These principles restore the defects that time and contingency inflict on nature and impede the flourishing of beauty.
With regard to architecture, Bellori hews closely to Fréart. In the Parallèle the latter author mobilized the “idée” as an invective against ornamental excess in general and “Roman” license in particular, manifest in the unwarranted invention of the Tuscan and composite order, vulgar expansions of the Greek canon.7 Fréart further expanded the condemnation of improper and excessive ornament already formulated in the twentieth chapter of the first book of Palladio’s treatise. There, Palladio dismissed scrollwork and other ornaments that do not represent elements of the wood construction on which stone architecture was said to be modeled or do not refer to natural models, as when columns are not tapered and monolithic, like trees.8
Similar criticism can be found in Bellori’s Idea. In a passage directed against probably Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Martino Longhi, Bellori deplores how contemporaries neglected the only recently restored standards of architecture, using “nonsense of angles, broken elements, and distortions of lines, . . . they break up bases, capitals, and columns with fakery stuccoes, fragments, and disproportions.”9 Thus, like Fréart, Bellori puts forward the idea of architecture to weed out what he viewed as contemporary errors. And like his French counterpart, he identifies this idea with the norms and best proportions of Greek architecture.10
When they cast Greek architecture as the paradigm of architectural beauty, Bellori and Fréart had to break new ground by explaining what the idea of beauty in architecture consists of and why it is found in Greek architecture. That Greek architecture had attained a high degree of perfection was a critical commonplace already found in Italian authors such as Alberti, Raphael, and Vasari.11 Yet Bellori and Chambray now explicitly attributed to Greek architecture an ideal beauty; it was no longer a stage in a process of historical development that could allow for other architectural forms to attain perfection.12 Until the middle of the seventeenth century, the concept of beauty had played no central role in architectural theory, whereas proportion and decorum were considered key notions.13 The Renaissance treatise presenting the most developed theory of beauty, Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (published in 1486), received little attention until the end of the century.14 Each in his own way, Fréart and Bellori addressed anew the question of architectural beauty.
In the absence of a well-defined notion of architectural beauty, Fréart elaborates on architecture’s long-standing association with proportion and visual harmony, suggesting that the “true and essential beauty of architecture . . . results mainly from symmetry,” which Fréart defined as “the union and cooperation of [all parts] together, which come to form as it were a visible harmony.”15 He then simply states that the three Greek orders are of “a particular beauty,” implying that they are the paradigms of visible harmony.16
A more explicit statement on architecture’s beauty can be found in Fréart’s translation of Palladio. In his version of the chapter on “abuses,” it is stated that “this way of building, which goes entirely against what nature teaches us, and despises that pure simplicity with which we see that she produces all things, abandons entirely all that is true, good and beautiful in architecture.”17 Compared to the Italian original, Fréart introduces a number of changes that amount to restating how architecture should be modeled on nature. Palladio had written that “one cannot help but disapproving of this way of building, which, by distancing itself from that which the nature of things teaches us, and from that simplicity, that is observed in the things she creates, almost creating another nature, leaves behind the true, the good and the beautiful way of making.”18 In Fréart’s translation, “nature” replaces “the nature of things,” and the notion that “almost another nature” can be made following the principles found in nature is absent. Palladio’s “true, good, and beautiful way of making” has become “that what is true, good, and beautiful in architecture.” In other words, Palladio argues that nature shows how things are made, and that this way of making should be imitated. Doing so, the architect will adopt a true, good, and beautiful method and produce a different, second nature. Fréart’s translation suggests that truth, goodness, and beauty are qualities intrinsic to nature. Architecture should aim to incorporate these qualities by following the laws of nature in general, not by probing the nature of particular things.
That good art, including architecture, ought to imitate nature is a theoretical commonplace of early modern art.19 At the same time, sixteenth-century debates such as the paragone (about which was the superior art) had made it clear that architecture does not easily fit the categories that regulate the arts of imitation, such as painting and poetry.20 Sixteenth-century architects, too, were at pains to extrapolate Vitruvius’s limited indications on architecture’s mimetic relation to nature into a fully fledged theory of imitation.21 After all, architecture imitates nature at two removes: not by reproducing natural forms or objects but, for instance, by attaining the same level of organic unity as animals or plants, as Alberti would have it, or by adopting proportions found in nature and applying them to the dimension of building elements, as suggested in Vincenzo Danti’s Trattato delle perfette proporzioni, or by imitating primitive building practices or reflecting the laws of gravity, as with the tapering column in Palladio.22 Once architecture adhered to such a principle, it was implied, it would be beautiful.
Contrary to these earlier indirect definitions of architectural beauty, Fréart’s translation of Palladio suggests that the beauty of architecture is rooted in a universal principle, nature, that underlies the beauty of all works of art. Defining such a principle is the explicit aim of Bellori, who proposes a single, universal idea of beauty valid for the three visual arts. Earlier Roman theorists of the idea had focused mainly on painting.23 Expanding this idea to architecture required Bellori to resolve the difference between architecture’s relation to nature from that of painting and sculpture. His solution to this problem indicates some of the limitations of the idea as a founding principle for architecture.
Bellori’s text demonstrates that the idea is easily recognized in painting and sculpture, which imitate reality directly. Our author measures the success of a painting and a sculpture by the degree to which it appears to be lifelike. Numerous ekphrastic poems illustrate how excellent works of art produce a superior reality that forcefully strikes the beholder, especially when they achieve the lifelike depiction of the human figure in action. Architecture is a different matter. After several pages about painting and sculpture, Bellori writes, “Not to forget architecture, it too employs its most perfect Idea.” He cites the first-century philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who “says that God, like a good architect, constructed the world of the senses from the ideal and intelligible world by looking at the Idea and the example he intended.”24 Bellori’s next examples are not buildings but poetic descriptions: Diana’s cave from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Arminda’s garden from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and Ovid’s description of the Palace of Helios.
These poetic descriptions are Bellori’s only references to specific buildings. At the most basic level, they prove that God and the poet follow a design—an idea—when they devise their virtual constructions. As in all other arts the sound pursuit of the idea will engender perfection. Of Ovid’s palace of Helios Bellori writes that “the very abodes of the gods were devised by poets with the skill of architects, arrayed with arches and columns, which is how they described the royal palace of the Sun and Love, transporting architecture to heaven.”25
It is striking that Bellori illustrates the idea of architecture with descriptions of buildings rather than actual examples. If poetry proves to Bellori that some paintings and statues attain the idea, in the case of architecture it works the other way around. The poetic descriptions reveal a perfection which suggests that the idea also exists in architecture, even in the absence of natural models. In the words of Aristotle, quoted by Bellori, if a building were a natural thing, nature would execute it no differently than architecture, and would be constrained to use the same rules to give it perfection.26 Conversely, the idea of architecture can be gathered from the poetic representation of perfect yet virtual designs. In fact, the buildings in question are fictional and divinely ordained: Philo’s Temple of Jerusalem and Helios’s palace. The other examples, a cave and a garden, are not even architecture proper but pertain to nature. Poetry acts a an intermediary to uncover the architectural idea present in these models. When further on in the text Bellori advances Greek architecture as the perfect model, it this architecture assumes the same function as the poems about the buildings of God and Nature, a kind of intermediary like the second nature Palladio referred to. This intermediary is as invented as a poem about Helios’s palace; at the time of Bellori’s writing, Greek architecture was known only indirectly, by means of the remnants of its Roman emulation.
Bellori, like Palladio before him and French authors after, argues that the principle of rational creation binds architecture to nature.27 Yet Idea also shows that defining architectural beauty in terms of an idea common to the visual arts and rooted in the perfected imitation of nature requires models, principles, or intermediaries that transfer nature’s qualities onto architecture. This operation generates new questions. Which models should be derived from nature to learn and understand this creative process: craft, primitive shelter, the human body, poetry, or an ancient canon? And what determines the validity of these models: Why should Greek architecture be closer to nature than Roman, or carpentry than stone cutting? Finally, if architecture is at a certain remove from nature, to what extent do nature or the models that transfer its qualities onto architecture help shape the design of buildings? If columns imitate trees, how treelike should they look?
These questions would allow Claude Perrault to challenge the idea of architecture in his translation of Vitruvius’s De architectura (1673) and his Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes (1683). In the Ordonnance Perrault wants to understand how architectural design principles become authoritative in order to justify his own design system for the five orders. Perrault agrees with Fréart that architecture is validated by its beauty. Yet he argues that beauty is a matter of judgment, and seeks to understand what determines the aesthetic appreciation of architecture. In so doing, he questions whether beauty depends on the imitation of nature and, as a consequence, whether architecture imitates natural models.
The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment in Claude Perrault and Pierre Nicole
Like Fréart’s Parrallèle, Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes is an attempt to unclutter the five orders from two centuries of alleged misinterpretation. Contrary to Fréart, however, Perrault did not seek to promote a canon but claimed to establish rational principles for determining the proportion and ornaments of the orders. In order to legitimize his model, in the preface of the Ordonnance Perrault examined in great detail how and why buildings are deemed beautiful. It opens with the declaration that “the ancients rightly believed that the proportional rules that give buildings their beauty were based on the proportions of the human body,”28 but then proceeds to refute the idea that the beauty of buildings depends on the degree to which their dimensions adhere to an ideal system of ratios. Rather, Perrault argues, these ratios are a matter of convention. This being the case, Perrault believes that his own system of the orders is more authoritative than previous examples because it is easier to understand and more logical to apply. As such, it lays claim to the kind of primitive purity that Fréart attributed to the Greek orders.
Perrault explains why proportional systems are conventional by making the distinction between arbitrary and objective causes of beauty. The “presence in works” of “convincing” or “objective reasons” “is bound to please everyone,” regardless of time or place. Arbitrary causes, in contrast, depend on custom or “accoutûmance,” a consensus among the elite of a given time and place about what is beautiful. This consensus is also called taste.29 Rules of proportion have been shown to vary over time, Perrault points out, which suggests that they depend on momentary preferences and belong with the arbitrary causes of beauty.
To emphasize the extent to which human opinion about the beauty of architecture depends on taste, Perrault points out that people entirely disregard potential rational arguments for architectural beauty. He writes, “The reasons that ought to carry the greatest weight in regulating architectural beauty” fail to explain many architectural features that people find beautiful. The “reasons” Perrault refers to are the imitation of nature and the human body, of “the first building,” of particular plants or objects, and finally of crafts such as carpentry. If these referents guaranteed beauty, “the more exact the imitation, the greater would be the beauty [of buildings and their elements].”30 Yet history shows the exact opposite: an unending quest for new architectural forms that leaves those original models ever further behind. Conversely, buildings have been judged beautiful for reasons that have nothing to do with the alleged origins of architecture or the application of rational principles, but everything to do with custom and taste. As a consequence, the imitation of original models—whether nature, the body, or primitive constructions—does not validate the beauty of architecture.
Perrault thus distances himself from the advocates of the “idée de la beauté.” The beauty of architecture is not guaranteed by the imitation of nature, however such imitation might be achieved, but by adhering to contemporary taste. In order to be successful, the architect should acquire this taste. An arduous task, since taste is shaped by rules and principles that lack objective or rational foundations. It is purely a matter of authority: “the result of a disposition not to doubt the truth of something we do not know if it is accompanied by our knowledge and good opinion of the person who assures us of it.”31 This authority confers a semblance of objectivity to aesthetic judgments.
By building his notion of architectural beauty on these premises, Perrault connects architectural theory with a different intellectual tradition than that used by Fréart and Bellori, who, as we have seen, thought of architecture as one of the visual arts. Władysław Tatarkiewicz was the first to point out that Perrault’s distinction between positive and arbitrary beauty is indebted to Pierre Nicole’s Traité de la vraie et fausse beauté (1659).32 The Traité was originally published as the preface to a collection of epigrams and is concerned with prescribing rules for that particular literary genre. In order to found and legitimize these rules, Nicole examines the beauty of language in general and of metaphor in particular. He identifies the beauty depending on taste as a cushion between the beauty inherent in eternal truth and the fickleness of human customs. Perrault incorporates Nicole’s literary theoretical conception of beauty in his reflections on architecture. In so doing, he opens a new path to thinking about the beauty of architecture. To understand his approach, it is necessary to have a closer look at Nicole’s Traité and to identify the key issues there.
Nicole argues that beautiful eloquence is achieved when an expression corresponds with things according to the nature of the thing but also with regard to the human nature to whom it is addressed.33 This principle is rooted in the very nature of beauty, which consists of the same two elements: the beauty inherent in things and the beauty recognized by human nature:
The general rule is that beauty is that which agrees with the nature of the thing, and equally with ours. In effect, if a body, for instance, that has a part too many or too few is held to be ugly, it is because it moves away from nature, which demands the integrity of its parts and rejects what is superfluous. . . . However, it does not suffice for a thing to be beautiful to go together with its own nature, if it does not agree equally with ours. Because our nature consists of a soul and a body endowed with senses, which all have their given penchants and aversions, by which [our nature] is attracted or repelled.34
In principle, true beauty is a matter of pure reason, independent of time and place.35 Yet beauty is ultimately judged by a contingent reader or listener, a point Nicole duly emphasizes. The judgment of the contingent reader or listener depends on how expressions are perceived rather than how they are related to “things” per se or intended by their author:
Moreover, and I would like that this point, which few authors have observed to perfection, receives due attention: in order to adjust the words to things, one should not consider the things such as they are in themselves, or how they are in the spirit of he who speaks, but such as the discourse will represent them in the spirit of listeners or readers.36
As a consequence, writers should adopt the taste of the moment. Language tends to follow “l’usage,” and “l’usage” is largely determined by human opinion. Nicole states: “Because still it only depends on the fancy of men to decree that one term is used more often and is more elegant than another, yet it is natural to be hurt by unusual and improper words, and to love those [words] that are proper and in use.”37 “Opinion” is an inherently arbitrary yet authoritative mechanism that affects the human perception of language to the extent that it is natural to feel hurt by improper usage. In other words, listeners or readers wish expressions to seem natural, but what they consider to be natural changes according to opinion.
Still, language that follows opinion too closely runs the risk of becoming inaccessible to future generations. At the same time, human nature does have an innate craving for variety, which drives those same opinions. Nicole suggests that the author should avoid catering to this craving by means of excessive novelty, such as neologisms or unusual expressions. True variety depends on a judicious exploitation of the sonority of language, so that ideas are communicated in way that is clear and pleasing to the ear (Nicole refers to Cicero’s iudicium areum), and on a moderate use of metaphor, which alternatively excites and soothes the human mind.38
Nicole’s distinction of the eternal aspects of beauty from those contingent on human nature and of expressions reflecting the nature of things from those that please human expectations is reiterated in Claude Perrault’s distinction between positive and arbitrary causes of beauty. In particular, Perrault adopts Nicole’s point that fancy, opinion, and taste help determine what is perceived as naturally beautiful. In the Ordonnance Perrault stresses that the human beholder collapses the positive and arbitrary aspects of his or her judgment into one seemingly unassailable appreciation of a building.39 And in the preface to Perrault’s translation of Vitruvius’s De architectura, published ten years before the Ordonnance, Perrault argues that Vitruvius has become so authoritative because people are in desperate need of arguments that buttress their necessarily arbitrary ideas about beauty. His statement, in this preface, that “because Beauty has no other foundation than fancy, which makes that things please according to whether they are in keeping with the idea that each has of their perfection, we require rules that shape and rectify that idea” recalls a previous quote from Nicole: “Because still it only depends on the fancy of men to decree that one term is used more often and is more elegant than another.”40 If Perrault is more adamant than Nicole in declaring the “inventedness” of authority “that stands in for positive reason” in all that depends “of chance, of will, and of familiarization,” both authors share the conviction that the judgment of viewers and readers is shaped by their own, contingent circumstances yet invariably cast as based on absolute truth.
By adopting Nicole’s ideas, Perrault introduces a different approach of beauty in architecture than through the visual arts and their idea. Nicole’s Traité roots beauty in the permanent negotiation between eternal, beautiful truths and their contingent, human expression. At the same time, Nicole recognizes that it is the human desire for beauty that spurs on this negotiation. Finally, Nicole points out that people seek certainty about their judgments and tend to present them as incontrovertible and rational. Perrault takes this conception of beauty on board. In so doing, he fertilizes architectural theory with a sustained reflection on aesthetic judgment.41 Yet Nicole’s influence is not limited to this aspect of Perrault’s theory. With its notions about the nature of language and its relation to human ideas and desires, Nicole’s Traité participated in a vigorous debate on the role of figurative language in the communication of truth. This debate involved diverging ideas about how human nature is affected by beauty, how beauty should be achieved, and how ornament relates to beauty. These linguistic ideas, intimately related to Nicole’s notion of aesthetic judgment, would engender opinions about architecture too.
Metaphor, Beauty, and Truth
Nicole’s Traité adheres to the principles of the Logique of Port-Royal, where figurative language is considered one of many unfortunate consequences of humankind’s fall from grace. Because humanity has forfeited utterly transparent and universal forms of expression, it requires language to mediate between inner ideas and the outside world.42 As we have seen, Nicole intends to determine the extent to which language in general, and figurative language in particular, should play to human desire in order to communicate eternal and universal truths in a changing world. In doing so, he proposes the perceived beauty of an expression as the measure of its success. Annie Becq has argued that this turns the Traité into an early example of the increasingly commonplace identification of beauty and truth in the French proto-aesthetic discourse that developed in the late seventeenth century.43 In particular, the Traité contributed to the lively French debate about the relation of figurative language to reason. Some time after the first edition of the Traité, the Jesuit Dominique Bouhours, an opponent of Port-Royal, would write in his Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671) how “beautiful” French language follows human thought “step by step”: “Beautiful language resembles a pure and clear water that has no taste; that runs from the source; that goes where the natural slope carries it; not those artificial waters that are brought with violence into the gardens of the greats; and make a thousand different figures there.”44 Bouhours did not share Nicole’s distrust of figurative language in expressing truth—he deemed it sheer necessity. But he did adhere to the ideals of clarity and indeed naturalness, such that figures should emerge from ideas as if guided by nature alone and not by artifice. Like Nicole, Bouhours believed that clear and intelligible expressions are beautiful.45
With the Entretiens, and his later work La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit, first published in 1687, Bouhours participated in the budding Querelle des anciens et modernes and the related long-standing debate with Italian authors about the legitimate use of literary ornament.46 One of his interlocutors was the Roman Jesuit Sforza Pallavicino, whose Trattato dello stile (first published in 1646, princeps main edition in 1662) examined in detail the role of figurative language in scientific discourse. Pallavicino’s ideas on style are partly based on a similar premise as Nicole’s: It is humankind’s innate craving for variety that necessitates figures of speech. Like Nicole, Pallavicino defends a style in which excitement alternates with periods of rest.47 But unlike the Jansenist, Pallavicino does not consider literary style the price to pay for human weakness. Even the most valuable truth requires sugarcoating to be appreciated, the Jesuit writes; after all, given the choice, everyone would prefer a golden drinking cup over a simple wooden one.48 As a consequence of such human desire, Pallavicino recognizes, like Nicole, that language is historically contingent: Desire calls for novelty, and the quest for novelty gently transforms language over time.49
With the Trattato dello stile Pallavicino attempted to harness figurative language (and its inherent historicity) in the service of the communication of truth. This endeavor was prompted by the enthusiastic embrace of metaphorical language across a wide range of genres in contemporary Italian literature. Recognizing its attractions, Pallavicino attempted to give metaphor and its pleasures an instrumental role in communication.50 In so doing, he entered in a silent polemic with an author well known to Bouhours and whose ideas were antithetical to Nicole’s: Emanuele Tesauro, whose Cannocchiale aristotelico (princeps, main edition, in 1670, first edition in 1654, and written from the 1620s onward) provided an exhaustive classification and discussion of metaphorical language.51 The Cannocchiale aimed to explain the working and making of argutezza, to be translated (imperfectly) both as wit and witticism, the quintessential quality of lively figures of speech.52
At the outset of the Cannocchiale aristotelico Tesauro distinguishes verbal and symbolical argutezza. Rather than limiting the purview of his treatise, this distinction suggests that argutezze are not constrained to spoken or written language but pervade literally every product of natural, human and divine creativity: everything can be construed as a form of figurative, witty expression. Tesauro’s “symbolical” argutezze are material objects, including paintings, statues or inscriptions. Argutezze constitute a particular—and superior—category of figures of speech, “figure,” and these, too, issue from a general principle that is not confined to the word. When Tesauro defines what a “figura” is, he roots the use of figures in humankind’s innate craving for pleasurable variety, and therefore “all that, which to alleviate the boredom of the listener, differentiates the words, or the sentences, or the enthymemes, from the naked, clear, and everyday style: it is called rhetorical SCHEMA, and FIGURE.”53 As we have seen, Nicole attributes this same craving with stirring humankind’s invention of ever-new words and turns of phrase. Tesauro finds proof of this desire in the fact that not a single human artifact is merely functional. He first enlists the decoration of boats, where oars are gilded and prows sculpted as lions when the simplest of wooden contraptions would suffice. The second example is architecture: A house requires nothing more than solid walls and a closed roof, yet an inn “which not goes out of itself with ornaments” will be disdained. Likewise, drinking cups tend to be made of crystal and gold rather than wood—the example Pallavicino also used in his Trattato.54 Tesauro adduces marble floors and fashionable clothing as still further proof of the human desire for “figure,” which extends to language and engenders figures of speech.
At first Tesauro does not seem to condone this human tendency. He attributes the penchant for an inn with a “crest, with decorated frontispieces” rather than a humble roof to “superbia,” or pride. A similar point is made in the Logique of Port-Royal, where sumptuous house decoration is credited to the despicable urge of owners to keep up appearances and to bask in the splendor of the surroundings.55 But despite his misgivings about the morality of figures and ornaments Tesauro recognizes that they are inevitable and eventually embraces them, because they are inherent in human sociability and graceful communication.56
As already suggested by the curt dismissal of what amounts to the primitive hut (the simple construction with solid walls and a watertight roof), architecture contributes significantly to the production of argutezza. Tesauro celebrates it as the human endeavor that produces perhaps the most lasting form of argutezza: “[Wit] appears in so many ornaments that elegantly jest on the facades of sumptuous buildings: leafed capitals, arabesques of friezes, triglyphs, metopes, masks, caryatids, terms, modillions: all stone metaphors and mute symbols, that add beauty [vaghezza] to the work, and mystery to the beauty.”57 When enumerating the means to make witticisms, too, Tesauro extols “the jests of friezes, capitals, metopes, modillions, because buildings that are not less beautiful than solid not only protect their guests, but send them into ecstasy [rapiscano],” again pointing out that the pleasurable effect of figures greatly surpasses the benefits of usefulness.58
Tesauro’s relish in the blatant artificiality of figurative expressions is what distinguishes him from the three other authors discussed here. Yet they all share the view that literary style is rooted in human nature and its unquenchable thirst for variety. This thirst accounts for the historical contingency as well as the sheer necessity of figures of speech in language. Nicole, Bouhours, Pallavicino, and Tesauro are all concerned with how an expression will affect a subject, and this concern shapes their view of how language works. What distinguishes our authors is how they define and value the effect of successful figures. Tesauro’s is a poetics of marvel, meraviglia, where viewers or listeners are “sent into ecstasy,” thanks to the power of the artifice of argutezza.59 Pallavicino believes that marvel assists in bringing across important truths, and calls for a moderate, subservient use of ornament. In his poetics, as in Tesauro’s, beauty plays a secondary role, as a side effect of or conduit to marvel. In Nicole, and later Bouhours, beauty takes center stage, as the quality an expression should aspire to.
Nicole’s Traité thus participates in a theoretical reflection on how usage determines the effect of figures of style (ornaments) on the beholder and listener. Perrault adopts this aspect of Nicole’s thought, which has further implications for architectural theory. Tesauro’s inclusive approach to “figure,” which extends to architecture, makes it particularly clear that the uneasy relation of architecture with other arts under the tutelage of the idea of beauty can be replaced by a parentage based on a shared purpose and effect: so that the beholder marvels at the an unexpected play of ornaments. Tesauro recognizes that this parentage goes hand in hand with propagating an inventiveness and artificiality that far exceeds the primitive fulfillment of human needs. Although they recognize that linguistic primitivism is unproductive and even impossible, Pallavicino, Nicole, and Bouhours censure Tesauro’s view as excessive. They defend an aesthetic ideal in which the judicious handling of ornament marries clarity with beauty in order to appear natural. This view of the function of ornament dovetails with Claude Perrault’s conception of architectural beauty, as is demonstrated in Charles Perrault’s Parallèle des anciens et modernes.
The Parallèle consists of dialogues among the President (champion of the ancients), the Abbot (partisan of the moderns) and the Knight, which vaunt the superior merits of the moderns over the ancients. The second dialogue, published in 1688, treats architecture, sculpture, and painting. It is set in Versailles and after the Président guides an extended visit to the premises, he initiates a debate about the merits of those who invented architecture and ornament.
The interlocutors agree that buildings require ornament; it is inconceivable that a building would have “no columns, or pilasters, or architraves, or cornices, and that it is all uniform.”60 The requirement of ornament in architecture is likened to the necessity of figures of speech in rhetoric.61 The President believes that this sheer necessity bestows the ultimate honors on the ancients, who invented and codified ornament.62 The Abbot, however, sees no particular merit in the invention of ornaments, except in their appropriate use. Use is a matter of custom. The constructions of primitive people, too, are ornate, he argues, although according to their own taste and capacities, and their ornaments changed when usage so demanded.63 To underscore his point, the Abbot reiterates Claude Perrault’s ideas about positive and arbitrary beauty in architecture.64 The distinction is tested against the rules of proportion in architecture. Proportion is a habit of human perception, so the Abbot states, not an inscrutable secret of nature accessible only to architects.65 In order to understand which principles should govern proportion and ornament, in the absence of a natural standard, the Chevalier ventures an analogy between architecture and poetry: “So it is just like in poetry, where rhyme and the measure of verse should be kept, as if the meaning and the argument do not restrict anything, and where the things one says should be as sensible and natural as if they had no rhyme or measure to observe.” The Abbot concurs: “It is the same.”66 Here, the Parallèle explicitly joins the debates on architectural and poetic beauty that we have traced so far, now as part of a distinctly “modern” artistic program: Because it is conventional and custom-based, ornament engenders the beauty that stems from clarity and is seemingly natural. Primitivism and archaism are flawed and therefore ineffective, as would be the imitation of a putatively unchanging nature.
The Peculiar Beauty of Architecture
Elsewhere in the Parallèle Charles Perrault has the Abbot defend the “idée de la beauté” in painting and sculpture, thus separating architecture, where this idée does not apply, from its sister arts.67 In this respect, Perrault ran counter to budding contemporary academic architectural theory. Under the force of the attack on ideal proportions in the Vitruvius translation and the Ordonnance, the Cours d’architecture (1675–83) of François Blondel, the official account of the teachings at the Académie d’Architecture founded by Colbert in 1672 with a curriculum based on Fréart’s Parallèle, incorporated an extensive discussion of beauty. Blondel, too, testifies to the importance of contemporary literary criticism in shaping the conceptual framework of architectural theory, for instance when Alberti’s concinnitas (the principle of harmonious and organic composition that engenders beauty) is compared with the je-ne-sais-quoi.68 But contrary to the Perraults, Blondel sought to explain how the imitation of nature is at the root of architectural beauty. In so doing, he pursued the path laid out by Fréart and Bellori, and his approach would dominate architectural discourse from the early eighteenth century onward, until architecture would be considered fully one of the fine arts.69
Yet the discussion that played out in the pages of Perrault’s Parallèle was picked up later, most notably by an Italian architect at odds with French classicism. In 1762 Giambattista Piranesi published Della magnificenza ed architettura de’Romani. The Magnificenza examines the historical development of ornament to account for the hellenization of Roman architecture. According to Piranesi, the capricious and effeminate ornaments of the Greeks infected the majestic and masculine Tuscan buildings of the Romans.70 To argue his point, Piranesi traces the origins of architecture. Architecture, he writes, evolved from the primitive buildings of first people.71 This first architecture very soon reached the point where it accommodated most of humankind’s needs. But the inborn desire for novelty and variety inspired builders of all regions and ages to decorate their buildings.72 Piranesi denotes this endless process with the word dirozzamento, “disuglification” or “disprimitivation.”73 In other words, if architecture certainly originated from the first human dwellings—“architecture has been instituted in such form that it shows that architecture imitates the first manner of building of humankind”—the long historical development of architecture has removed architectural design inevitably from these primitive roots: “But with that I do not intend to signify that since then nothing else has been invented, or that nothing else has been added to these first inventions.”74 The primitive hut is a valid explanation of the historical origins of architecture but not a design model. Piranesi argues that contemporary architectural design in general (or, for that matter, Roman and Greek design) and ornament in particular cannot be regulated by referring to an original, primitive building. After all, this building was definitely rozzo, ugly.
Piranesi’s argument is indebted to the Ordonnance and the Parallèle in its dismissal of the relevance of primitive models for contemporary artistic practice.75 Like the Perraults, Piranesi argues that ornament indicates the distance traveled from these primitive models, since humanity thrives on the beautification of its artifacts; the beauty of architecture results from humankind’s craving for novelty. Piranesi even shares their misgivings about this process, since it easily leads to decay, as when Greek design affected Roman architecture.
But Piranesi pushes the ideas of his predecessors to new conclusions, in a way that at once repositions nature as the model of architecture and vindicates the peculiarity of the architecture’s beauty. As we have seen, Tesauro treated architectural ornaments as signifiers, on a par with literary metaphors. He expanded the classicist myths of origin about architectural structure and ornament that we encountered in Palladio to cast architecture as a witty game of ever-new figures that enliven buildings. The Perraults, too, saw close parallels in the way literary and architectural ornament appealed to a beholder. Although deeply sympathetic to these stances, Piranesi attacked the equation of poetry and architecture on which they were founded, on the ground that hearing a poem is something altogether different from experiencing a building.
His statement on the matter was prompted by Pierre-Jean Mariette’s criticism of the Magnificenza. Mariette, an art critic and connoisseur, furthered the cause that Fréart had advanced a century earlier by arguing that the Roman taste for excess and luxury was a perversion of the original elegance and simplicity of Greek architecture. Piranesi responded to Mariette with the Parere su l’architettura (1765), a dialogue on ornament in architecture between the characters Protopiro, cast as a critic of Piranesi, and Didascalo.76
In the dialogue, Piranesi examines the analogy between architecture and poetry to dislodge rigorist criticism of excessive ornament. At the outset of the dialogue Protopiro attempts to distinguish the “clutter . . . found around doors, windows, arches, and other openings and walls,” such as “festoons, fillets, masks, paterae, heads of stags and oxen . . . , the labyrinth frets, the arabesques, the hippogriffs, the sphinxes” from the elements of architecture proper, in order to send the clutter back to “the realm of poetry.”77 In so doing, he argues along the lines of Palladio, Fréart, and Bellori, who considered only artifacts and forms rooted in nature and the original act of building as legitimate sources for architectural design. Protopiro’s remark also recalls and dismisses Tesauro, who praised architecture for its capacity to load buildings with all kinds of poetic inventions.78
Didascalo attacks his adversary by assuming the same antiprimitivist stance as Tesauro or the Perraults. Following Claude Perrault’s line of reasoning, Didascalo argues that few elements of architecture have identifiable origins in a primitive model.79 In fact, any attempt to identify such primitive models would annihilate architecture: “Take note: buildings with no walls, no columns, no pilasters, no friezes, no cornices, no vaults, no roofs. A clean sweep.” Moreover, Didascalo points out, it is unclear how the imitation of primitive models could lead to rich and sophisticated forms of architecture. In Didascalo’s words, “How can a simple prototype remain entire and unified at the very moment of being halved, varied, and rearranged in a thousand ways, in short, when the simple becomes composite, and one becomes as many as you like?”80
These remarks appear to be indebted directly to Charles Perrault’s Parallèle, where it is stated that architecture is unthinkable with “no columns, or pilasters, or architraves, or cornices, and that it is all uniform.”81 Both Perrault and Piranesi use the enumeration to make the same point: Architecture without ornament is unthinkable, because ornament appeals to the innate aesthetic sensibilities of humanity. In the Parere, along the lines of the Magnificenza and the Parallèle, Didascalo also argues that the whole history of architecture illustrates how humanity craves for ever more appealing and ornate architecture. The Scythians and the Goths waged war on the Romans so that they could exchange their primitive huts for sumptuous buildings.82 This process should not be explained as a long history of ever more refined (and eventually perverted) imitation of primitive forms, but as an enduring quest for pleasing architectural compositions.
When it comes to identifying the source of architecture’s aesthetic success, however, Didascalo distances himself from his seventeenth-century predecessors by challenging the validity of the analogy between architecture and poetry. He emphasizes repeatedly that buildings are perceived entirely differently from poems. A building presents itself to the eye as a whole, whereas a poem generates a sequence of mental images; a building benefits from visual complexity, whereas a profusion of literary ornament confuses reader or listener.83 As a consequence, nature stands in another relationship to architecture than to the other arts: It does not proffer models to imitate, but displays the laws of successful visual composition. In this capacity, as the paradigm of a pleasing, variegated visual appearance, it guides the development and application of architectural ornament. Conversely, architecture is distinguished from the other arts by its ability to emulate the visual composition of nature. This capacity bestows architecture with its own particular beauty.
NOTES
1. Frédérique Lemerle, “Fréart de Chambray ou les enjeux du Parallèle,” XVIIe siècle 49, 196 (1997): 419–53; idem, “Une querelle des Anciens et des Modernes en architecture,” in Architectes et architecture dans la littérature française, Colloque international, 23–25 octobre 1997, ed M. Bertaud, Travaux de littérature 12 (1999): 37–47.
2. Roland Fréart de Chambray, Parallèle de l’architecture antique avec la moderne suivi de Idée de la perfection de la peinture, ed. Frédérique Lemerle and Milovan Stanic (Paris: ENSBA, 2005), 55.
3. On the agenda of the Palladio translation see, besides Lemerle, Claude Mignot, “Palladio et l’architecture française au XVIIe siècle: Une admiration critique,” Annali di architettura 12 (2000): 107–15, esp. 109–10. On Fréart’s treatises on painting, see Oskar Bätschmann, “Fréart de Chambray et les règles de l’art,” in La naissance de la théorie de l’art en France 1640–1720: Revue d’esthétique, ed. Christian Michel and Maryvonne Saison, 31/32 (1997): 61–69.
4. Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey, Nicolas Poussin. Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 23–63; Olivier Bonfait, ed., L’idéal classique: Les échanges artistiques entre Rome et Paris au temps de Bellori (1640–1700) (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art. Collection d’histoire de l’art de l’Académie de France à Rome 1, 2002); Daniela Del Pesco, “Paul de Chantelou, Paul Fréart et Charles Errard: Successi e insuccessi dal Italia,” in Rome-Paris 1640: Transferts culturels et renaissance d’un centre artistique, ed. Marc Bayard (Paris: Somogy éditions d’art. Collection d’histoire de l’art de l’Académie de France à Rome 11, 2010), 141–74; Sabine Frommel and Flaminia Bardati, eds., La réception des modèles “cinquecenteschi” dans la théorie de l’art français du XVIIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2010).
5. Fernando Bollino, Teoria e sistema delle belle arti: Charles Batteux et gli “esthéticiens” del secolo XVIII, Studi di estetica 3 (Bologna: Sezione di Estetica dell’Istituto di Filosofia dell’Università di Bologna, 1976.), 125–38.
6. On Bellori’s “idea,” see, for instance, Elizabeth Cropper, “L’idea di Bellori.” In L’idea del Bello. Viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori (Rome: De Luca, 2000) vol. 1, 81–86, with literature; Elisabetta di Stefano, Bello e idea nell’estetica del Seicento (Palermo: Centro internazionale di studi d’estetica, 2007. Aesthetica Preprint 97), esp. 27–44.
7. As Lemerle and Mignot have shown, Fréart was equally concerned with the French uptake of the architecture all’antica as with the perceived imperfections of the Italian treatises.
8. Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice: Bartolomeo Carampello, 1581), book 1, 51–52.
9. Gian Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors, and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition, trans. A. Sedgwick Wohl, intro. T. Montanari, notes by H. Wohl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 62a–b.
10. Ibid., 61b.
11. See Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. J. Rykwert, N. Leach, and R. Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), VI.3, 197–98; Francesco P. Di Teodoro, Raffaello, Baldassar Castiglione e la Lettera a Leone X (Bologna: Minerva, 2003), 73 and related comments.
12. See Alina Payne, “Vasari, Architecture, and the Origins of Historicizing Architecture,” Res 40 (2001): 51–76.
13. Milovan Stanic, “Les tribulations du beau idéal en France aux temps de Bellori,” in L’idéal classique, ed. Bonfait, 22. Interestingly, Władysław Tatarkiewicz, as a historian of aesthetics, identifies the theory of architecture, and in particular the writings of Claude Perrault and François Blondel, as the first to engage with aesthetics in the seventeenth century; see “Objectivity and Subjectivity in the History of Aesthetics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 24 (1963): 167; also “L’esthétique associationniste au XVIIe siècle,” Revue d’esthétique 13, no. 3 (1960): 287–92.
14. Françoise Choay, La règle et le modèle: Sur la théorie de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 225–42; Werner Szambien, Symétrie, Goût, Caractère: Théorie et terminologie de l’architecture à l’âge classique 1550–1800 (Paris: Picard, 1986), 62.
15. Fréart de Chambray, Parallèle, 54. On the association of beauty and proportion, see Thomas Leinkauf, “Der Begriff des Schönen im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert: Seine philosophische Bedeutung und Hinweise auf sein Verhältnis zur Theorie von Poesie und Kunst,” in Renaissance-Poetik: Renaissance Poetics, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 53–74.
16. Fréart de Chambray, Parallèle, 55.
17. Andrea Palladio, Les quatres livres de l’architecture: Mis en françois (Paris: E. Martin, 1650), 49.
18. Palladio, Quattro libri, 51.
19. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, “L’esthétique du grand siècle,” XVIIe siècle 78 (1968): 21–39.
20. Alina Payne, “Alberti and the Origins of the Paragone between Architecture and the Figural Arts,” in Alberti teorico delli arti, ed. Arturo Calzona, Francesco Paolo Fiore, Alberto Tenenti, and Cesare Vasoli (Florence: Olschki, 2006), 347–68.
21. See Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 77–88 (Alberti), 154–69 (Spini), 224–35 (Scamozzi).
22. See Alberti, On the Art of Building, IX.5, 301–2; Vincenzo Danti, Il primo libro del Trattato delle perfette proporzioni (1567), in Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, vol. 1, ed. Paola Barocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1960), 238–39.
23. Di Stefano, Bello e idea.
24. Bellori, Lives, 60b–61a.
25. Ibid., 60b.
26. Ibid., 61a.
27. See the examples cited in Henri Coulet, “La métaphore de l’architecture dans la critique littéraire au XVIIe siècle,” in Critique et création littéraire en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1977), 300–303.
28. Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, trans. I. Kagis-McEwen, intro. A. Perez-Gomez, Texts and Documents (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1993), 47.
29. Ibid., 50–51.
30. Ibid., 51–52.
31. Ibid., 51. Here it should be noted that, as Di Stefano has argued, the doctrine of the “idea del bello” emerged in support of the claims of the connoisseur to be equally apt at judging art as the artist.
32. Tatarkiewicz, “L’esthétique,” 32–33. Later authors who have explored Perrault’s debt to Nicole include Wolfgang Hermann, La théorie de Claude Perrault (Liège: Mardaga, 1980), 36; Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 43–47; Alain Guiheux and Dominique Rouillard, “Échanges entre les mots et l’architecture dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle à travers les traités de l’art de parler,” Les Cahiers de Recherche architecturale 18 (1985): 25; Antoine Picon, Claude Perrault ou la curiosité d’un moderne (Paris, Picard: 1988); Maria Luisa Scalvini and Sergio Villari, “Presentazione,” in Claude Perrault: L’ordine dell’Architettura. Aesthetica Preprint 31 (Palermo: Centro internazionale di studi d’estetica, 1991), 9.
33. Pierre Nicole, La vraie beauté et son fantôme et autres textes d’esthétique, ed. Béatrice Guion (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1996), 57: “Truly beautiful eloquence is that which agrees with the nature of the things themselves as well as with the inclinations of our senses and our soul”; see also ibid., 65, 71. On Nicole, see Annie Becq, Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne 1680–1814 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 51–54, 101–2; and Béatrice Guion’s introduction to her translation and critical edition.
34. Nicole, La vraie beauté, 55.
35. Becq, Genèse, 52.
36. Nicole, La vraie beauté, 65–67, my emphasis.
37. Ibid., 71.
38. Ibid., 73–75.
39. Perrault, Ordonnance, 51, 53.
40. Claude Perrault, Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve, corrigez & traduits nouvellement en François, avec des notes & des figures (Paris: J.-B. Coignard, 1673), preface, n.p. Also cited in Rykwert, First Moderns, 42.
41. This is also suggested by Guiheux and Rouillard, “Échanges,” 25, but they conclude that there is no direct influence on architectural theory from literary theory. It should be noted that theories of music similarly discussed the question of custom on taste and aesthetic judgment, and that the analogy between music and architecture played an important role in the debate about proportions.
42. See Fernand Hallyn, “Port-Royal vs. Tesauro: figure, signe, sujet,” Baroque 9–10 (1974, 1976, 1978): 76–86.
43. Becq, Genèse, 45–94.
44. Dominique Bouhours, Les entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671), ed. Bernard Beugnot and Gilles Declercq (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), 116. See also Nicholas Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, Va.: Rockwood Press, 2003), 53.
45. On Bouhours, see also Sophie Hache, La langue du ciel: Le sublime en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), 275–83.
46. Corrado Viola, Tradizioni letterarie a confronto: Italia e Francia nella polemica Orsi-Bouhours (Verona: Fiorini, 2001), 61–76.
47. Compare Nicole’s position with that of Sforza Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile e del dialogo del padre Sforza Pallavicino (1662), Reggio Emilia, 1824, photographic reprint (Modena: Mucchi, 1994), chap. 5, 35. Both authors probably rely on Cicero, yet the similarities are striking.
48. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, chap. 4, 26. See Eraldo Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria e scrittura filosofica in Sforza Pallavicino,” in Il vero e il falso dei poeti: Tasso, Tesauro, Pallavicino, Muratori, by Carlo Scarpati and Eraldo Bellini (Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1990), 99–102.
49. Maarten Delbeke, The Art of Religion: Sforza Pallavicino and Art Theory in Bernini’s Rome (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2012), 188–92.
50. See Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria,” and Giovanni Baffetti, Retorica e scienza: Cultura gesuitica e Seicento italiano (Bologna: CLUEB, 1997).
51. On Pallavicino’s disagreement with Tesauro, see Bellini, “Scrittura letteraria,” 160–66. On Nicole and Tesauro, see Hallyn, “Port-Royal vs. Tesauro.”
52. On the Cannocchiale aristotelico, see Pierantonio Frare, “Per istraforo di perspettiva”: Il “Cannocchiale aristotelico” e la poesia del Seicento (Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2000); Carlo Scarpati, “La metafora al di là del vero e del falso in Emanuele Tesauro,” in Il vero e il falso dei poeti, by Scarpati and Bellini, 35–71; Jon Snyder, L’estetica del barocco (Bologna: il Mulino, 2005), 99–139.
53. Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (Turin: Bartolomeo Zauatta, 1670. Ristampa anastatica, Savigliano: Artistica Piemontese, 2000), 122–23.
54. Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile, chap. 4, 26.
55. La logique ou l’art de penser: Neuvième édition (Amsterdam: Veuve de Paul Maret, 1718), 112, mentioned by Hallyn, “Port-Royal vs. Tesauro,” 81, yet as entirely antithetical to Tesauro.
56. In fact, Baldassare Castiglione makes a similar point in Il Cortegiano, when he writes that even if men initially made slated roofs on their buildings to keep out the rain, they immediately recognized that a house “senza il colmo [non] aver potesse dignità o bellezza alcuna.” Quoted in Di Teodoro, Raffaello, 221. See also the quote at note 73 below.
57. Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale, 86–87.
58. Ibid., 33.
59. See the use of the verb “rapire” in the quote at note 58.
60. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et modernes en ce qui regardes les arts et les sciences: Nouvelle édition augmentée avec quelques dialogues (Paris: Jean Baptiste Coignard, 1693), 87.
61. Ibid., 88.
62. Ibid., 92.
63. Ibid., 88–90. See also the discussion of this passage in Caroline van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 190–91.
64. Charles Perrault, Parallèle, 94.
65. Ibid., 100–109.
66. Ibid., 110.
67. See Max Imdahl, “Kunstgeschichtliche Exkurse zu Perraults Parallèle des Anciens et Modernes,” in Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et modernes, intro. Hans Robert Jauss. Theorie und Geschichte der Literatur und der Schöne Kunste: Texte und Abhandlungen, vol. 2 (Munich: Eidos Verlag, 1964), 79.
68. François Blondel, Cours d’architecture enseigné dans l’Académie royale d’architecture (Paris: Lombard Roulland, 1675), bk. 5, chap. 3, 731.
69. For an excellent discussion of the institutional and intellectual stakes in the debate between Perrault and Blondel, see Anthony Gerbino, François Blondel: Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Routledge, 2010). For the position of architecture among the fine arts, see Kevin Harrington, Changing Ideas on Architecture in the “Encyclopédie” (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI, 1985).
70. Lola Kantor-Kazovsky, Piranesi as Interpreter of Roman Architecture and the Origins of His Intellectual World (Florence: Olschki, 2006), 193–222.
71. Giambattista Piranesi, Della Magnificenza de’Romani, in John Wilton-Ely, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Le opere polemiche: Roma 1757, 1561, 1765, 1769 (London: Gregg International, 1972), xciii–xcvii §lviii–lix; also clv §lxxxviii.
72. Ibid., lxix §xlv; cliii §lxxxviii.
73. Ibid., xcvii §lx: “From this process of civilisation [dirozzamento] of architecture two things emerge: that which necessity requires, and that which luxury has introduced.”
74. Ibid., xciii–xcv.
75. For Piranesi’s debt to the Perraults, see Kantor-Kazovsky, Piranesi, 144, 232–35, 242–45.
76. John Wilton-Ely, introduction to Giambattista Piranesi, Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette with Opinions on Architecture, and a Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times, trans. C. Beamish and D. Britt, intro. J. Wilton-Ely, Texts & Documents (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2002.) 40–1; Kantor-Kazovsky, Piranesi, 227–29; also Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. P. d’Acierno and R. Connolly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 43–45.
77. Piranesi, Opinions on Architecture, 103.
78. Tesauro is not mentioned by name, and whether Piranesi knew Tesauro’s Cannocchiale is unclear. It is possible that, in his comments on architecture, Tesauro had recourse to the same architectural literature that shaped the debate Piranesi engaged in. It should be noted that Inigo Jones’s Roman sketchbook from 1615 contains a passage in which he recommends completing the design of a building by “cloath[ing]” it and “consequently [making] a hoole Story wth all ye ornamentes,” which are then enumerated in great detail; see Caroline van Eck, ed., British Architectural Theory, 1450–1750: An Anthology of Texts (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2003), 24.
79. Piranesi, Opinions on Architecture, 103.
80. Ibid., 106.
81. See supra note 60.
82. Piranesi, Opinions on Architecture, 106.
83. Ibid., 111–13. This point is made to contradict Julien-David Leroy and deeply indebted to the conceptualization of the notion taste that condensed in Montesquieu’s essay on that topic; see Maarten Delbeke, “L’ornement et la beauté chez Piranèse et ses interlocuteurs,” in Questions d’ornements XVe–XVIIIe siècle, ed. R. Dekoninck, C. Heering, and M. Lefftz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 59–69.