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ARCHITECTONICS OF HUMANISM: ESSAYS ON NUMBER IN ARCHITECTURE
By Lionel March. London: Academy Editions. 1998. £24.95

ARCHITECTURAL PRINCIPLES IN THE AGE OF HUMANISM
By Rudolf Wittkower. London: Academy Editions. 1998. £24.95

The big question about systems of proportion is: what are they for? Fifty years ago Wittkower’s Architectural Principles overturned the prevailing view that Renaissance architecture was essentially worldly, and its proportions intended chiefly to please the human eye. Its ultimate goal, he argued, was not hedonistic but sacred. It mattered little to Alberti and his contemporaries if their mathematical relations were imperceptible to the passing viewer. The man-created harmony was an echo of the celestial: the ratios were meant for the eyes of God not of man.

Architectonics of Humanism is a celebration and a critique of Wittkower’s book, re-issued to mark the half-centenary of the original publication. March not only argues compellingly against Wittkower’s assumption that Renaissance artists used exclusively harmonic ratios like 2:3 or 4:5, but provides entirely new explanations of the purpose of proportion in architecture. Without denying the sacred significance of Renaissance proportion, he emphasizes its ludic aspects: magic squares, gematria, occultism, and so on. A key chapter describes the medieval and Renaissance fascination with the ludus philosophorum or rithomachia (number-battle), a board game fought between armies of numbers. Like that game, systems of proportion need no extrinsic justification, either aesthetic or cosmological; the disinterested intellectual enjoyment they offer is enough. Whereas Wittkower supposed that post-Renaissance science and philosophical scepticism had fatally undermined the metaphysical foundation of such systems, March concludes that ‘The visual arts, and architecture in particular, now have an opportunity to assert their intellectual grounding as reflective, scholarly disciplines’. RICHARD PADOVAN