At the beginning of his treatise on architecture, likely completed in 1452, Leon Battista Alberti states that a building is “a form of body (corpus), which like any other consists of lineaments (lineamenta) and matter (materia), the one the product of thought, the other of nature; the one requiring the mind and the power of reason, the other dependent on preparation and selection.” He goes on to define lineaments as “those lines and angles which define and enclose the surfaces of the building and prescribe an appropriate place, exact numbers, a proper scale, and a graceful order for whole buildings.” They are also “the precise and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the learned intellect and imagination.” He adds that “lineaments have nothing to do with material…it is quite possible to project whole forms in the mind without any recourse to the material.” Lineaments for Alberti are thus the abstract formal properties or purely mental design of a building. As such, they are explicitly separate from the material world. Alberti therefore creates an architecture that is fully formed and perfected in the mind and then only later realized in (and implicitly corrupted by) physical materials. Although these issues are also part of Alberti’s larger transformation of the architect into an author and buildings into a sort of text, underlying this architectural theory is Aristotelian natural philosophy and the concept of hylomorphism. Tim Ingold has recently sought to push against this conception of architecture, which in the twentieth-century has gained great currency, but is not reflexive of pre- and early-modern architectural practice. This has been an important scholarly corrective, yet in throwing out Alberti’s concept of architecture as a purely theoretical, humanistic construct, Ingold has overlooked the pervasiveness of Aristotelian thought across a wide range of fields in fifteenth-century Italy. Taking this provocation as a point of departure, this paper seeks to demonstrate how we might understand hylomorphism within the wider world of early-Renaissance architectural thought and practice, specifically by placing the work of Alberti in dialogue with a range of other sources from contemporary descriptions of architecture to buildings contracts. Such an approach reveals that hylomorphic architectural thought stretched well beyond the writings of Alberti. In fact, a complex dialogue between form and matter clearly existed within fifteenth-century architectural culture, one which is only visible when we look beyond well-known treatises.
Michael J. Waters
Assistant Professor, Columbia University
mw3114@columbia.edu
https://arthistory.columbia.edu/content/michael-j-waters
Education:
Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Books:
Renaissance Architecture in the Making: A Material History of Fifteenth-Century Italian Building Culture (Cambridge University Press, in publication).
Variety, Archeology, and Ornament: Renaissance architectural prints from column to cornice, co-edited with Cammy Brothers (University of Virginia Art Museum, 2011).
Articles:
“Architecture: Renaissance Building Culture between Production and Place,” in A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance, ed. James Symonds; in series A Cultural History of Objects (Bloomsbury, 2020), 151–171.
“Candelabra-Columns and the Lombard Architecture of Sculptural Assemblage,” in The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy, ed. Amy Bloch and Daniel Zolli (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 344–366.
“Hieronymus Cock’s Baths of Emperor Diocletian (1558) and the Diascopic Architectural Print,” in Continuous Page: Scrolls and Scrolling from Papyrus to Hypertext, ed. Jack Hartnell (Courtauld Books Online, 2020).
“Reviving Antiquity with Granite: Spolia and the development of Roman Renaissance Architecture,” Architectural History 59 (2016): 149–179.
“Palazzo Talenti da Fiorenza, Bramante’s Canonica, and the afterlife of Bramantesque architecture in Milan,” Arte Lombarda 176/177, no. 1-2 (2016): 101–115.
“Francesco di Giorgio and the Reconstruction of Antiquity: Epigraphy, archeology, and newly discovered drawings,” Pegasus - Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike 16 (2014, published 2015): 9–102.
“A Renaissance without Order: Ornament, Single-sheet Engravings, and the Mutability of Architectural Prints,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 4 (Dec. 2012): 488–523.
This paper seeks to demonstrate how we might understand hylomorphism across a wider world of early-Renaissance architectural thought and practice, placing the work of Alberti in dialogue with a range of other sources from contemporary descriptions of architecture to buildings contracts. Such an approach reveals that hylomorphic architectural thought stretched well beyond the writings of Alberti. In fact, a complex dialogue between form and matter clearly existed within fifteenth-century architectural culture, one which is only visible when we look beyond well-known treatises.