From Quantitative to Qualitative Architecture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A New Musical Perspective

Abstract

In Rudolf Wittkower’s influential view, Renaissance musical theory, based on Pythagorean and Platonic proportions, is a paradigm of harmony, order, and spatial organisation in architecture from Alberti to Palladio. However, sources from Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) and other sixteenth-century French treatises, through Rene Ouvrard’s Architecture Harmonique (1679) seem to show another, undiscovered story. The keys to interpretation include a different philological reading of Vitruvian theory of proportion, as Fra’ Giocondo’s French lessons show. This is a starting point for a particular sixteenth-century passage between two differents conceptions of architecture – from anthropomorphic to rhetoric, from volumetric to linear, and from quantitative to qualitative – which will find a definitive arrangement in the seventeenth century.