The Composto Ordinato of Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenziana: Proportion or Anthropomorphy?

Caroline Van Eck

doi:10.5334/ah.br

Abstract

Starting from reactions to the Ricetto of the Biblioteca Laurenziana by contemporaries, who tried to make sense of its strange and unprecedented forms either by using the rhetorical concept of compositio or by assuming a proportional system in the vestibule, I will show how in the latter part of the 18th century proportion lost its role as the objective foundation attributed to architectural beauty. Instead, beauty became redefined as an experience of the human mind, arising from the accordance between the properties of an object, its sensuous experience and the perceptive apparatus of the human mind. But this redefinition does not mean that proportion, or to be more precise, the assumption of a proportional system, became irrelevant. In the final part of this paper I will argue that in Kant’s aesthetics, proportion, in the sense of a visible set of relations between the dimensions of the parts of a building that can be expressed in mathematical terms, became one of the key features of a building, or indeed any object, that enables the human mind to make sense of, and judge, the objects of sense perception. Continuing Kant’s line of thought I will argue that the assumption of a proportional system, together with the projection of anthropomorphy onto architecture, are the two major hermeneutic strategies by which human beings try to understand buildings.

Highlights

The argument of this essay is a philosophical one, but it has an historical dimension. It starts from a building not usually associated with proportional systems, the Ricetto or anteroom of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence (1525–1534), and a few drawings Michelangelo made in connection with his designs for the San Lorenzo complex (Figs. 1, 2). What do these images, which combine an architectural profile with a human one, tell us? Do they suggest that the human profile shares some proportional relation with the architectural outline, in the sense of a common pattern of mathematical relationships, for instance that the face can be divided into four equal parts? That the human profile is the visual manifestation of some geometrical substructure? Or that the geometrical structure of an architectural profile can best be understood in anthropomorphic terms?
Starting from reactions to the Ricetto of the Biblioteca Laurenziana by contemporaries, who tried to make sense of its strange and unprecedented forms either by using the rhetorical concept of compositio or by assuming a proportional system in the vestibule, I will show how in the latter part of the eighteenth century proportion lost its role as the objective foundation attributed to architectural beauty
Wittkower on movement in mannerist architecture One of the very first essays Wittkower wrote, his ‘Das Problem der Bewegung innerhalb der manieristischen Architektur’ of 1933, bears on the issues presented here.10. It is about movement in Mannerist architecture, and discusses among other works of architecture Giuliano da Sangallo’s Gondi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella of 1503–1506, a model for the Ricetto, as Cammy Brothers has recently argued (Fig. 3; Brothers 2008: 191)

Summary

Caroline van Eck*

Starting from reactions to the Ricetto of the Biblioteca Laurenziana by contemporaries, who tried to make sense of its strange and unprecedented forms either by using the rhetorical concept of compositio or by assuming a proportional system in the vestibule, I will show how in the latter part of the 18th century proportion lost its role as the objective foundation attributed to architectural beauty. Beauty became redefined as an experience of the human mind, arising from the accordance between the properties of an object, its sensuous experience and the perceptive apparatus of the human mind. This redefinition does not mean that proportion, or to be more precise, the assumption of a proportional system, became irrelevant. Continuing Kant’s line of thought I will argue that the assumption of a proportional system, together with the projection of anthropomorphy onto architecture, are the two major hermeneutic strategies by which human beings try to understand buildings

Introduction

Conclusion

Translated by Caroline van Eck