Review: François Blondel: Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution by Anthony Gerbino

Abstract

Anthony Gerbino Francois Blondel: Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2010, 326 pp., 88 b/w illus. $135, ISBN 9780415491990 Anthony Gerbino’s treatment of Francois Blondel (1618–86) is at once architectural history and cultural history, for the book opens new paths of research into essential and largely ignored aspects of architectural practice that clarify the murky intersection of mathematics, geometry, theory, and design. Blondel is famous as the author of the Cours d’architecture (vol. I, 1675; II–III, 1683), founding director of the Academie Royale d’Architecture beginning in 1671, and designer of city gates in Paris, such as the Porte Saint-Denis (1672–74) and Porte Saint-Martin (1674–77), as well as the now-demolished Porte Saint-Bernard and Porte Saint-Antoine at the Bastille. A military leader and civil engineer, Blondel had traveled widely and was a learned scholar of the classics, mathematics, and a host of other fields. All his experiences coalesced in his belief that his architectural forebears—Vitruvius, Alberti, Serlio, Palladio, Vignola, and Scamozzi—had arrived at the ratios, harmonies, and measurements in architecture that guaranteed perfect beauty and that to depart from those precedents was an invitation to licentiousness and ugliness. In these regards Blondel’s position was pitted against that of Claude Perrault (1613–88), who, while respecting the collective inheritance of the classical tradition, denied the existence of absolute principles of proportion and the universal authority of the ancients and their followers. Unlike Blondel, Perrault insisted that good architecture ultimately relied on matters of taste and personal judgment rather than slavish emulation. Thus began a quarrel of the ancients versus the moderns that enlivened contemporary architectural debate and reverberated through the profession for centuries. Claude’s position was laid out in his 1673 translation of Vitruvius. It was followed by the publication of the famous Parallele des anciens et des modernes (1688–92) by Claude’s brother, Charles Perrault (1628–1703), who linked Blondel’s position with the past, in contrast to his and his brother’s embrace of “the …