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Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2003 by Anne-Marie Sankovitch
MARIO CARPO
Trans. Sarah Benson Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. 246 pp.; 27 b/w ills. $34.95
In 1985 Christof Thoenes and Hubertus Gunther published a groundbreaking essay whose answer to its provocative title--"The Architectural Orders: Rebirth or Invention?--came down squarely on the side of invention. (1) The authors demonstrated that the classical orders as we know them today were not, as had long been assumed, a formal code originally devised in antiquity that had been abandoned and forgotten by medieval builders only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. Rather, the concept of an order and the canon of the five orders (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite), first presented to Europe by Sebastiano Serho, were modern inventions abstracted from and imposed upon the vast chaotic complexity of ancient buildings and texts in a fraught archaeological and exegetical process that engaged numerous architects, theorists, and humanists.
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In part 1 of the joint publication, Thoenes showed that in the quattrocento and early cinquecento the number, names, and sequence of the orders, what properly constitutes an order, and even what to call the phenomenon--the word order (ordine) appeared as but one choice among many, not to mention that it also could signify quite different things--were anything but stable. That so much was up in the air and had to be created from scratch was largely because neither the concept nor the word order appeared in the Roman text that supposedly gave us both: Vitruvius's On Architecture.
If the idea and terminology of the orders emerged only as the result of much collective effort, equally complex was the related process by which the morphology and formal attributes of individual orders came to be established and the different types visibly distinguished one from the other. This was astutely laid out in the second part of the essay, where Gunther examined the detailed studies and various proposals offered for the formadon of the orders--notably, the most recalcitrant Tuscan and Doric--in numerous drawings and sketches, illustrated editions of Vitruvius, and manuscript and printed treatises prior to Serlio's. (2) Gunther stressed that in this process imagination and invention, of necessity, often overtook archaeological fidelity and reliance on Vitruvius's descriptions of temple types. Indeed, according to him, the turn away from the authority of murky antique sources that was taken by Serlio, who synthesized and regularized earlier efforts, goes far to explain why Book IV "on the five manners of building" (1537) became such a sensational success. The orders were a modem invention created for modem needs. Serlio recognized that they would function most effectively if they were freed from the antiquarian agonies that had trammeled his predecessors.
One thing that Thoenes and Gunther did not much comment on was the format in which Serlio finally codified the canon and system of the five orders. Other scholars, however, above all Myra Rosenfeld, have explored the significance of Serlio's Book IV (which, despite its number, was in fact the first of the projected seven volumes of the treatise to be published) as the earliest printed illustrated architectural book devoted to the orders in which images took priority over text. Situating Serlio within a newly developing culture where science, pedagogy, and printing converged, Rosenfeld argued that, like his contemporary Vesalius, Serlio was well aware of the didactic and dissemination possibilities of the printed image in books that could widely circulate. (3) She also demonstrated that in planning each subsequent volume he became increasingly sophisticated in the use of the medium of printing as he refined the relation between text and image and systematized his graphic presentation.
Mario Carpo's hook (first published in Italian in 2998) proposes something a bit new. He sees the invention of the system of the orders and the invention of printing as related not sequentially or coincidentally, but intimately and dialectically. In this scenario Serlio becomes more than a canny synthesizer, packager, and disseminator of contemporary critical debates about the orders. Instead of naturalizing Book IV as the next step in a chain that happened to have been taken by Serlio but that could have been taken by many, Carpo portrays Serlio as making a major and singular imaginative leap in response to the new technology of printing by recognizing that its reproducibility could be extended to architecture through exploiting this specific dimension of the new technology. Serlio's orders--what would become the orders--were, in a phrase Carpo borrows from Walter Benjamin, "designed for reproducibility." It is not so much that the printed book could be widely disseminated that Carpo stresses as its capacity to permit standardization and repeatability of images and architectural form.
Carpo writes, "The Serlian orders are architectural microdesigns, ready for use but with some assembly required. The user must se lect, combine, and construct the parts.... [T]here should be no difference between an image printed in the treatise, its copy in an architectural design, and the three-dimensional form of the resulting structure" (p. 49). This surprising statement, which goes far beyond any previous claims made about Serlio's intentions, is partly qualified in a note that acknowledges the well-known fact that Book IV's "stereotypes" were rarely used as such, and that Serlio allowed for, even encouraged, much creative flexibility on the part of architects. But if the note qualifies, it also clarifies: "what matters here is not individual use, but the general status of the model-its theoretically unlimited reproducibility and visual recognizability" (p. 158 n. 14). It is this ideal, theoretical, and visual isomorphism between image, design, and building that Carpo identifies as the Serlian project-ev en as the Serlian revolution--a project that he sees as eventually assimilated on just these terms throughout Renaissance Europe and beyond.
