Guarino Guarini’s Architectural Theory and Counter-Reformation Aristotelianism: Visuality and Aesthetics in Architettura civile and Placita philosophica
2020; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/710779
ISSN2037-6731
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Art and Architecture Studies
ResumoPrevious article FreeGuarino Guarini’s Architectural Theory and Counter-Reformation Aristotelianism: Visuality and Aesthetics in Architettura civile and Placita philosophicaBranko MitrovićBranko MitrovićNorges Teknisk-Naturvitenskapelige Universitet, Norway Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreGuarino Guarini (1624–83) is today mainly remembered for his architectural works, such as the chapel of Santissima Sindone, the church of San Lorenzo, Palazzo Carignano in Turin, or the church Santa Maria in Araceli in Vicenza. His encyclopedic interests and massive treatises on philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy—quite extraordinary for a Baroque architect—have received much less scholarly attention.1 At the same time, these nonarchitectural interests are not easy to separate from his architectural pursuits, especially his views on architectural theory. The theoretical positions that he endorses in his architectural treatise Architettura civile often result from his wider philosophical views, elaborated in his philosophical treatise, Placita philosophica.2 This is particularly the case when it comes to questions that pertain to visuality, aesthetics, or optical corrections. In these matters Guarini’s views on architectural theory closely follow his positions in the philosophy of perception. The link between Guarini’s architectural views and his Counter-Reformation Aristotelianism also has wider significance: while Baroque art and architecture are normally associated with the Counter-Reformation worldview, it is hard to think of another Baroque artist or architect who provided a comprehensive elaboration of this connection comparable to the one found in Guarini’s writings. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Guarini’s philosophical views (and especially Placita) have never been systematically analyzed in relation to his architectural theory, and the aim of this article is to fill this lacuna.Placita philosophicaGuarini was originally educated as a priest in Rome, and at the time he published his large-format 868-page philosophical treatise he was a professor of theology in Paris.3 A historian of philosophy will immediately recognize that the book’s structure follows that of the corpus aristotelicum: it starts with logic, followed by physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, and ends with metaphysics. The conceptual framework is Aristotelian, with the full apparatus of essences, accidents, predicables, habits, and so on, while the organization of the material is standard for scholasticism. Guarini first presents a conclusion, then proofs, followed by objections and responses to the objections and then introduces the next conclusion. (Architettura civile is written in a similar style, with a series of “observations” followed by proofs.) In other words, Placita firmly belongs to the revival of scholastic Aristotelianism that started in the second half of the sixteenth century as the Catholic philosophical response to both the Reformation and the secularized philosophy of the Renaissance.4In the seventeenth century, this Second Scholasticism (or Baroque Scholasticism, arguably a better term suggested by Daniel Novotný) provided the conceptual framework within which Catholic intellectuals understood and responded to the challenges of the scientific revolution.5 Guarini’s Placita, we will see, is a fine example of such efforts. It also belongs to a well-established genre of the era with a number of books very similar to Guarini’s philosophical work in their content, structure, format, and size. Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza, Thomas Compton Carlton, Roderigo de Arriaga, and Giovanni Morandi all survey the same series of topics in the same order as Guarini’s treatise.6 The similarity is not accidental. All these authors were Catholic priests (the first three were Jesuits, while Morandi and Guarini were Theatines), and this order of topics, identical to that of the corpus aristotelicum, was also prescribed by the Jesuit Ratio studiorum as a three-year course to be taught to future priests.7 Non-Jesuit priests (including Theatines, such as Guarini) during the era received equivalent philosophical educations.8 Morandi’s and Arriaga’s books were actually called Cursus, while Hurtado de Mendoza’s Disputationes, which established this textbook genre, had a number of editions and substantial circulation in its time.9 The term “textbook” in this case need not indicate that the book was written for students; it may have been also intended to help lecturers in the preparation of their teaching.10 Guarini’s book was thus written for a well-established market, and Susan Klaiber has suggested that this was the case with some of his other books as well.11 It is important to bear in mind this wider context of Guarini’s philosophical treatise; as Paul Richard Blum pointed out, historians of philosophy tend to concentrate on the works of those seventeenth-century philosophers who made groundbreaking contributions, whereas the philosophical culture and the philosophical education of the era were largely based on scholastic Aristotelianism.12Religious assumptions of Guarini’s philosophy become obvious if we compare his positions with those of secular Aristotelians from a century or so earlier. Renaissance Aristotelians such as Giacomo Zabarella or Pietro Pomponazzi relied on the scholastic emphasis on arguments, but the intellectual environment, the authors they discussed, and the concerns they expressed were very different. In their writings the tradition of Greek commentators such as Simplicius, Themistius, Philoponus, and Alexander of Aphrodisias played an important role, as did Averroes, while Guarini hardly ever mentions these authors. (In this aspect, too, he followed the instructions of the Jesuit Ratio studiorum.)13 Rather, it is the preceding tradition of Second Scholasticism, starting with the Jesuit philosopher Francisco Suarez, that he knew extremely well and that he cites almost exclusively, with some consideration of the views of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Often, Guarini states that something is “known from faith”—an argument that would be hard to find in the works of Zabarella or Pomponazzi. Guarini regularly diverts from his presentations in order to explain the theological implications of the philosophical positions he describes. For instance, when he argues that quantity cannot be distinct from substance, he makes a digression in order to explain how the whole body of Christ can be present at the same time in a hostia and in each of its parts (250L). The ontology that he relies on consequently takes over the entire corpus of assumptions of Catholic theology, including angels, demons, disembodied spirits, and immaterial souls, and attributes to them genuine causal capacities in relation to material objects.14 The compatibility of such ontology with the authority of Aristotle would have been highly dubious to secular Renaissance philosophers.Natural philosophy receives substantially greater attention in Placita than in the other treatises mentioned above. (Counting the pages, 76 percent of Placita is dedicated to natural philosophy, compared to 51 percent in Hurtado de Mendoza’s book, 60 percent in Arriaga’s, 48 percent in Morandi’s, and 55 percent in Compton’s.) The content also indicates that Guarini attentively followed scientific developments of the era. In some cases he endorsed them—for instance, Galileo’s discovery that the matter of celestial bodies is the same as that of sublunar material bodies.15 The matter of skies, in Guarini’s view, is air, from the moon to the furthest sphere of immovable stars (297R). The sun and the immovable stars are made of fire, while moving stars (planets) are solid bodies, partly dense and partly translucent (299L). They do not move of their own volition, and they do not possess souls. This latter view Guarini defends on theological grounds, by reminding his readers that the Fifth Council of Constantinople condemned the attribution of souls to celestial bodies. He argues that celestial bodies could not have souls because only organic matter is capable of receiving souls, while no organs can be observed in the skies. The skies seem to be accidentally aggregated and lack the necessary perfection, he says (301R). At the same time, his rejection of the possibility of vacuum is an example in which he takes a position opposed to the latest scientific discoveries of his time. The arguments against vacuum that he states indicate that he was well informed about the ongoing debate, as seen from his comments about Evangelista Torricelli’s experiment with a glass tube closed at the top and filled with mercury.16 If the tube is placed vertically and the opening in the bottom of the tube is immersed in mercury, mercury will partly leave the space in the top of the tube empty, if the tube is tall enough. Guarini denies that this space is a vacuum. In his view, it is possible that mercury may contain various gaseous substances that fill out the remaining space after mercury has left (284L). He also argues that if a vacuum were indeed present in the top of the tube, then one could not see through that section of the tube, because (as Aristotle pointed out) light requires a medium for its transmission.17Arguably, the most significant breakthroughs in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century happened in mathematical astronomy—the part of astronomy that calculates the orbits and movements of celestial bodies. This was also a field of Guarini’s intense interest. Placita includes an extensive section on astronomy, and subsequently, in the eighteen years between its publication and his death in 1683, Guarini published three more astronomical treatises (Compendio, Leges, and Caelestis mathematicae). It is probably the case that in the years while he was designing San Lorenzo, Santissima Sindone, and Palazzo Carignano he dedicated as much attention to astronomy as to his architectural work. His estimation of the distance between the moon and the Earth is reasonably accurate (he states between fifty-four and sixty-three semidiameters of the Earth; modern data are between fifty-six and sixty-three), while he is wrong about the distance between the sun and the Earth (the distance he states would be equivalent to 3.6 million kilometers, while the actual distance is about fifty times more). The size of the universe that he describes—the distance between the Earth and the sphere of immovable stars, which he estimated as an equivalent of 66,435,267,898 kilometers, is almost nine times bigger than our solar system (Pluto is approximately 7.5 billion kilometers from the Earth).18 The fact that Guarini dismisses both the Copernican and Tycho Brache’s systems and endorses the Ptolemaic, geocentric view about the structure of the universe has its consequences.19 It implies that the sphere of the immovable stars has to rotate a on a daily basis around the Earth—but to achieve that, its speed would have to be sixteen times what we know today to be the speed of light (324L). Guarini indeed notes that the ultimate sphere would have to rotate around the Earth at a very great speed, but since he believes that speed can increase to infinity he assumes that this should not be a problem (324L).The endorsement of the geocentric system in Placita seems genuine, although as Edward Grant pointed out, when it comes to Catholic authors who wrote in the years when the heliocentric system was condemned by the church, it is often difficult to say what their actual view was.20 At the time Guarini was writing, Johannes Kepler had already published his laws of planetary motion. Nevertheless, Kepler’s laws became widely accepted only after Newton provided their physical explanation in his Principia, four years after Guarini’s death.21 Guarini knew about Kepler’s work, and he cites him a number of times, but he seems to ignore the laws (e.g., 330L, 360R, 408L). He actually dismisses the possibility of astrological predictions because, he claims, future movements of planets cannot be calculated (371L). Guarini was writing during the era when the assumption that heavenly bodies are immaterial ceased to be credible as a result of Galileo’s discoveries but before Newton explained the movements of planets as a result of causation based on natural laws. This not only affects his astronomical views but fundamentally separates his understanding of causation and mechanics from our modern one, which bases causation on regularities (such as natural laws) that ensure that events of one kind are always followed by events of another kind.22 The assumption is that regularities underwrite our ability to predict events—and, vice versa, that no events happen that are not caused in accordance with regularities (natural laws). For Guarini, however, some events are naturally contingent and happen independently of any regularities.23 He states as an example the explosion of a bomb, whose parts may hit someone in the eye, someone else in the leg (809L). While the explosion is clearly the cause of injuries, there is no necessary and regular connection that determines the kinds of injuries that individuals suffer. The post-Newtonian view would be that the laws of mechanics determine the trajectories of the parts of the bomb and that individuals are hit if the trajectory passes through the place where they find themselves. But writing before Newton published his laws of mechanics, Guarini believed that there are naturally contingent events that no regularity can explain. Angels and blessed souls separated from their bodies can know future necessary events, he says, but future contingent events have to remain unknown to them as well (809L).Guarini’s discussion of stellar influences on life on Earth has significant implications for his architectural theory. Since Rudolf Wittkower’s 1949 book Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, it has been generally recognized that Renaissance architects and architectural theorists justified their use of proportions by reference to musical proportions—“musical” not merely in the sense of audible music but musica mundana, the harmonic ratios that define the movements of the heavenly spheres, proportions of the human body, and mathematical relationships in the created world in general.24 It is debatable whether actual design decisions of Renaissance architects were motivated by their beliefs in the musical properties of certain ratios or whether they merely explained the aesthetic qualities of architectural works by referring to musical theory.25 In any case, Renaissance architectural theorists such as Leon Battista Alberti or Daniele Barbaro repeatedly pointed out that proportions that please the ears please the eyes as well.26 At the same time, links between music and astronomy were regularly made during the Renaissance, and musical treatises of the era typically included large portions of astronomical material.27 Ptolemy made the connection between music and astronomy the main topic of the third book of his De musica, and so it was an important part of the Ptolemaic tradition.28 It is therefore important to mention that Guarini makes no connections with music in his discussions of astronomy. Architects’ decisions about proportional relationships thus had to be justified in other ways and not by reference to universal proportions that permeate the universe. His account of stellar influences on life on the Earth also imposes limits on such reasoning. Movements of celestial bodies (or consequently proportions between their angles, the basis of musica mundana in Ptolemy’s De musica) have no capacity to influence and cannot affect human actions or decisions; if they could do it, that would cancel human free will, and not even God can do that.29Architettura civileGuarini’s architectural treatise Architettura civile was published posthumously in the eighteenth century. The fact that he cites a number of books published during the 1670s suggests that he was working on it in the final years of his life. Probably a decade and a half thus separate Placita from Architettura civile, but their positions coincide at relevant points, and Guarini occasionally invokes his philosophical work in the architectural treatise.30Architettura civile is dominated by mathematical and geometrical material; the last two trattati (out of the five that it consists of) are purely mathematical. Toward the end of the final section of the book Guarini seems to realize that he has gone too far and admits that “this chapter will be of no use for an architect.”31 The impression that Giulio Carlo Argan was right when he described Guarini’s designs as “puro calcolo” is hard to avoid.32 This is part of a wider phenomenon insofar as mathematics increasingly came to play an important role in the architectural theory of the era.33 Similar examples during the period are not hard to find. Gioseffe Viola Zanini’s Della architettura and Carlo Cesare Osio’s Architettura civile open with extensive sections defining and explaining elementary mathematical concepts—something one does not find in Renaissance architectural treatises—and Osio’s discussion throughout the rest of his treatise is intensely mathematical as well.34 In Guarini’s case, the core justification for the emphasis on mathematics pertains to the aesthetic implications of the mathematically (i.e., geometrically) describable properties of architectural works.Guarini opens Architettura civile by stating that architecture’s primary purpose is to be useful, that it should not oppose the customs of countries and peoples, and that the architect should not expose clients to unreasonable expenses, and he emphasizes the importance of structural stability (1–14). But these issues are rarely mentioned throughout the rest of the treatise. Once Guarini has listed these basic concerns, he continues by saying that beauty is one of the main purposes of architecture and that architecture needs to please the senses (14, 17), while “the beauty of buildings consists in the proportioned convenienza of parts.”35 From this point on, mathematics dominates the book. As we will see, aesthetic concerns for Guarini are primarily visual and dependent on the geometry of light and the geometrical relationships, convenienza, between the visible parts of buildings.The way that Guarini uses the term convenienza throughout Architettura civile, as well as his use of the term convenientia in Placita, suggests that he is talking about the way things or their parts agree and fit together and with each other. Harold Alan Meek has translated convenienza as “harmony,” and standard dictionaries state this translation as one possibility.36 Obviously, this would be “harmony” in the sense that things fit and agree with each other—not in the sense of harmonia mundi of Renaissance theorists of music. The arts, Guarini says in Placita, join things according to their natural convenientia (213L). As an example, he states that a painter combines colors that are convenientes between themselves (213L). In Architettura civile he says: “Proportion is nothing but convenienza of parts measured [misurata] in such a way that no part exceeds or lacks something in comparison with the other and that it does not look too big or too small.”37The identification of beauty with proportion consequently justifies the profusion of mathematical analyses in the architecture treatise. In principle, “proportion” (the way he uses this word) sometimes directly means “the right proportion” (as in the section cited above). Alternatively, in some cases Guarini emphasizes that he is talking about vere proporzioni in order to avoid the impression that he is talking about relationships between sizes in general.38 At the same time, simmetria, a term that since Vitruvius has been understood to refer to commensurable relationships between sizes (i.e., to preclude relationships such as the one between a side and a diagonal of a square) in Guarini means any relationship between sizes, rational or irrational (“ineffabile” as he puts it).39It is, however, one thing to relate beauty to proportions and quite another to explain how this relationship works. Guarini admits that it is difficult to investigate how symmetry and correspondence between parts of a well-designed facade delight the eye and what is the root of this delight.40 In the same way, he says, it is hard to determine the origin of delight in beautiful clothes or to establish the origin of discordance in music or of the variety of colors in painting.41 In Architettura civile he is content to explain that the eye measures things in relation to those nearby and is offended by extremes (134). From this explanation follows the demand, cited above, that parts should appear neither too big nor too small in relation to each other. Guarini comes closer to providing an explanation in Placita, where he argues that every cognitive capacity delights in performing operations about its object (143R–144L). Since cognitive operations are mainly exercised in relation to predication, predicamental relation causes greatest delight in cognitive capacities. (Predicamental relations are relations such as fatherhood, equality, and similarity, in which a subject is constituted as related to another.)42 The senses and the intellect harvest much more pleasure when things correspond to each other than when they are disparate aggregates that are not ordered according to some mutual equality or similarity. The reason is that disparate things do not relate to each other and generate no pleasure. However, when things are ordered with a certain similarity and correspondence, they generate the greatest delight (144L).This explanation is certainly very general. It leaves unclear which proportional relationships are to be preferred and why. (At this point a Renaissance theorist such as Alberti or Barbaro would have introduced harmonic ratios and claimed that pleasure in architecture comes from the same ratios as in music.) Guarini’s position potentially implies relativism, since it is not clear that the same relationships between parts will have convenienza for everyone. This interpretation seems strengthened by his observations that fashions change, that things that were once admired as beautiful subsequently came to be abhorred as deformed, and that what pleases one nation does not please another.43 He presents a convincing litany of reasons why we cannot expect all people to agree in their judgments: it is impossible to please everyone’s eye, some people are too arrogant to appreciate the artistic ability of others, some are critical or envious and can only criticize, some are ignorant, some are more taken by the unexpected than by beauty, some are influenced by the spirit of their country and abhor everything they are not used to, and some are led by their own inclinations so that a serious person dislikes excessive ornaments while those who like gentle things are displeased by simple and rough things (127). Nevertheless, Guarini is not a relativist when it comes to beauty. He mitigates the relativist implications of his statements by differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate attitudes. The difficulties that he lists merely serve to point out that the eye that delights in proportions “needs to be judicious and without inclination.”44 Similarly, he points out that the visual gratification that a facade provides is not intended for everyone but only for those who, free of every passion and sufficiently able to engage with art, can be competent judges (129). The majority, he nevertheless expects, will share the same sentiment (129). In other words, there are correct proportions and competent judges whose eyes can delight properly.Guarini’s discussion of Gothic architecture finely illustrates this point.45 He attributes its invention to the Goths; in the countries where they settled, as well as in Italy one can see churches built in their way, with much expense and not without great art (207). Guarini actually talks about the Gothic order and establishes three types of its columns (207–10). Such architecture must have pleased people of those days, but it is little appreciated in his own time, he says; its buildings are marked by artifice, and although they are not accurate in symmetry, they are capable of inspiring marvel, and deserve much praise (19). The Goths originally disliked Roman architecture in the same way Guarini’s contemporaries dislike Gothic architecture (127), but beyond mere difference in taste there still remains the complaint about the proportions of their architecture. (Hence, the judgment of proportions is not context relative.) Since people of those days liked things slender and angular, they made their churches very high in relation to their width and made extremely slender columns; when the weight forced them to make columns thicker, they combined multiple columns into a single one in order to preserve slenderness. They pursued aims different from the Romans. Their buildings do not gratify the eye, but they shock the intellect and terrify observers (208). In other words, what people like may change from culture to culture, but Guarini implies that the judgment of the eye is a transcultural constant.Light and VisionThe relationship between the theories of vision and light presented in Placita and Guarini’s views about aesthetics and optical corrections elaborated in Architettura civile constitutes the most important theoretical link between the two treatises. The remainder of this article will therefore seek to reconstruct this relationship by presenting a comparative analysis of Guarini’s positions in both treatises. The important starting point of our discussion is Guarini’s departure from the mainstream scholastic tradition in his discussion of light and vision in Placita. The scholastics’ views on light and visuality were based on Aristotle’s stance that light does not travel, and therefore has no speed, but that it is the actuality of a transparent medium as transparent.46 (For instance, without light a medium such as air is only potentially transparent. This potentiality is actualized when the presence of light makes this transparency actual, allowing us to see.) Less than a century before Guarini, Zabarella summarized Aristotle’s view by differentiating between lux that belongs to a bright body and lumen that is produced by lux in a medium, such as air.47Lumen, Zabarella says, is immediately present in all parts of the perspicuous medium and immediately generated when a body that possesses lux is introduced; it does not move from one part of the medium to another.48 In his account of perception, Aristotle asserts that a sense organ receives forms without matter (that it is δεκτικόν εἰδῶν ἄνευ τῆς ὕλης).49 However, he says little about the nature of this process and especially about the generation, nature, and transmission of visible forms. The account even leaves it unclear whether these forms might reach the eye following a curvilinear path, in which case we should be able to see more than one side of one and the same object from the same place—which is obviously not the case.50 Theories of vision in the writings of the authors of Second Scholasticism mainly elaborated on the Aristotelian account. The assumption is that perception does not depend on the reflection of light from objects but rather that objects continuously emit light-independent species that enable perception.51 (The term species was standardly used as the equivalent of Aristotle’s forms without matter, the εἴδεα ἄνευ τῆς ὕλης that senses receive.)52 For our discussion here, it is important to pay attention to the distinction between two different ways in which species can be conceived: as formal or virtual. In the former case species are assumed to resemble the objects that emit them (the way a sculpture of Caesar resembles Caesar). In the latter they merely have the capacity to produce representations, the way that semen can be said to represent the father because it produces the son who resembles the father.53 This latter understanding of species as virtual was widely endorsed by the authors of Second Scholasticism.54Guarini’s thinking about light and vision, however, follows a path different from the mainstream of Second Scholasticism. In Placita he says that light is a quality that (unlike other accidents) depends on a luminous object and does not inhere in an object (400L–401L). He rejects the Aristotelian view that light spreads instantaneously and states that the speed of light is dependent on the density of the medium.55 On the basis of the phenomenon of diffraction, he argues that light is always emitted from a luminous body in a circle and not in straight lines (413R). The diffraction of light plays an important role in his theory of vision, since he compares the eye to a dark room into which light penetrates through a small opening and projects images of external things on the opposite wall (414L, 703R, 719R). Guarini presents a comprehensive although not fully accurate account of the anatomy of the eye, since he places the lens in the middle of the eye (711L–714L). In his account, light is projected onto the retina, but vision occurs in the uvea, the choroid layer between the retina and the sclera. He also rejects the understanding of species as virtual (703R–710R). The image that light projects onto the wall of a dark room is real and not virtual, he points out (704L). In other words, species must resemble the object it represents. One of his arguments important for our discussion later in this article is that if species were virtual we would be seeing objects in their
Referência(s)