Faith in the Stars and Architecture: Astrology as an Interpretation of Religious Permanence and the Birth of Modernity

Abstract

In 1912, Aby Warburg presented his interpretation of the frescoes at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara at the 10th International Congress of Art History in Rome. The decision to expound his theory in an academic setting was no coincidence: Warburg’s work, and the subsequent studies of Fritz Saxl, sought to centre the attention of art history on the complex world of astrological studies. The history of astrology demonstrated—via iconological analysis—the migration of knowledge from East to West. Warburg’s innovation was to superimpose the trauma of historical-artistic paths on this network. Through the Schifanoia frescoes, he could reflect upon how an international comparison with the surviving figurative concepts of Eastern Mediterranean civilisations had generated the stylistic transformation of the human figure in Italian art. Warburg defined astrology as ancient religion’s most tenacious form of hidden survival. He traced a path of continuity through art and its relationship to the architectural space hosting it. Astrological illustrations not only enable us to reconstruct the warp and weft of religious permanence but serve as a tool to explain the procedures of iconographic change that led to the Renaissance. After the collapse of paganism, many astrological images survived into the Middle Ages as symbols associated with the essences appropriated by Christianity as its own. A complex store of astrological iconography that migrated from classical cultures and reappeared during the Renaissance's construction of a universal language. Some foretastes emerge in medieval buildings; after a long period in which Christianity and astrology were considered incompatible, astrological language completed and provided meaning to the architecture that welcomed it. Such is the case of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua. This paper aims to retrace the most significant paths of this migration of symbols through the analysis of such examples of Renaissance architecture as Villa Farnesina in Rome and the aforementioned Palazzo Schifanoia. It will also reflect on the position and training of the architect during the Renaissance and on how astrology was considered both magical thought and a mathematical description that would lead to the discovery of infinity. It is notable that the Farnesina’s astrological contents were dictated by Baldassarre Peruzzi, the building’s architect.