The Critical Agency of Full-Size Models, from Michelangelo and Bernini to the Picturesque Garden

Abstract

This article maps and investigates the practice of 1:1 modeling between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries to demonstrate its critical agency in emphasizing vision over proportional and mathematical tools of composition, in promoting innovative and interdisciplinary approaches, and in encouraging a general circulation of ideas, techniques, and forms between architecture, sculpture, and garden design. Generally applied to solve exceptional cruxes, full-size models were mostly developed by artists like Michelangelo Buonarroti and Giovan Lorenzo Bernini, who were both sculptors and architects and who helped create a specific operative tradition later also adopted in parallel fields, such as the picturesque garden design endorsed by the marquis de Girardin. While clients and public require denotative detailed mock-ups, rough full-size models can provide their creators with both visual control of the design development on-site, sometimes promoting a “direct forming” approach to architectural design, and heuristic explorations that may lead them to unpredictable solutions.