Ficino's Idea of architecture: the ‘mind's-eye view’ in Quattrocento architectural drawings

Abstract

Throughout many of Marsilio Ficino's writings of the 1460s, 70s, and 80s recurs the theme of the architect and the creation of a building's form in his mind. In the same period, Italian artists developed a new type of architectural drawing to suggest both the internal and external form of a centralized building in a single image. Wolfgang Lotz had used the phrase ‘bird's-eye view’ to refer to these drawings, found in the works of Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio, and Leonardo da Vinci. He excluded from consideration the related woodcut of the fictional Temple of Venus Physizoa in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). An analysis of the accompanying text suggests that this type of drawing relates to Ficino's concept of intuiting an architect's original design of a building – the total Idea, or ‘mind's-eye view’.