Review: The Art of Building in the Classical World: Vision, Craftsmanship, and Linear Perspective in Greek and Roman Architecture, by John R. Senseney

Abstract

John R. Senseney The Art of Building in the Classical World: Vision, Craftsmanship, and Linear Perspective in Greek and Roman Architecture Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, xv + 245 pp., 95 b/w illus. $94.00, ISBN 9781107002357 This intriguingly titled volume is a rare attempt to address some of the more theoretical and philosophical aspects of classical architecture. The “art of building” of the title is primarily the craft of architectural drawing, through which the architect’s vision is translated into a finished structure, here primarily the temple. It takes as its starting point Vitruvius’s three types of projection ( dispositio ): ground plan ( ichnographia ), elevation ( orthographia ), and perspective ( scaenographia ) ( De architectura I.ii.2). Although the title highlights linear perspective, the book focuses far more on the ground plan, and particularly on reduced-scale drawing as an essential and transforming element of architectural design, because it is the only aspect of a structure that is not normally perceptible in the finished form. This is an important observation: understanding a plan as the distillation of a building implies accepting an abstract pattern as a reasonable representation of three-dimensional reality—the building as experienced—something relatively uncommon even today. The search for the origins and impact of scale drawing necessarily emphasizes the Greek and Hellenistic periods, despite the reference to Roman architecture in the title; while Vitruvius is the starting point, actual Roman architecture appears only fleetingly between the introduction and the last ten pages of the final chapter. The book is at its most challenging when it takes us, via Vitruvius’s mention of the Greek term ideai , beyond a purely architectural idea of vision to Plato’s Ideal Forms. Architectural drawing is then read as a contributor to wholesale changes in Greek concepts of vision in relation to nature and the cosmos. The stated aim of the first chapter is to examine how temples “were created during the Archaic and Classical periods” (26). Senseney points out that evidence from a limited number of examples indicates that reduced-scale drawing was probably not used before the fourth …