Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory

If Carpo does not compare Book IV with earlier printed architectural books, he does seek to support his reading of it by comparing it with another work of Serlin's: Book Ill, on antiquities, which was published three years later, in 1540. According to Carpo, in the schema derived from Benjamin on which he loosely bases his interpretation, with the emergence of a new means of technical reproduction, the making of objects "designed for reproducibility" is preceded by the reproduction of objects that were not originally made to be reproduced. This is not quite how Benjamin distinguishes the technological from the auratic artwork, but it's a valid enough interpretation and permits Carpo to explain an incompatibility he perceives between the didactic functions of Books III and IV.

Certainly one comprehends the point Carpo is making: Book III's plans, sections, elevations, and details of ancient monuments that were not built with the intention of being visually replicated do not have the same easy ability to be seamlessly transferred to contemporary architectural designs as do the newly created, standardized orders, which can only exist as such in the pages of the printed treatise.

Can it truly be said, however, that this difference places the didactic role of Book III at odds with that of Book IV, or that Book III demonstrates a less advanced or less imaginative use of printing than the earlier Book IV? Carpo states, "The orders are not just another set of antique models like those in the Third Book; they are a substitute for them" (p. 51). Yet, to the contrary, it can be seen that Book IV's orders do not supplant but are coextensive with a very particular representation of antiquity that is produced in the printed images of Book III, where Serlio is hardly a guileless transcriber of antique models.

Book III on "antiquities," which also includes a number of contemporary Italian projects by Donato Bramante and others, is a powerful and necessary pedagogic partner to Book IV, It validates that the orders--those manufactured hinges between the past and the present--are authentically antique and demonstrates that if used correctly by would-be classical architects, as they were by Bramante, will result in legitimately all'antica buildings. It is not insignificant that when Serlio shows details of ancient monuments they tend overwhelmingly to be of pedestals, bases, columns, capitals, and entablatures. That is, Book III not only assures architects that they are designing in an all'antica mode, it also verifies that columns and the orders, the main subject of Book IV, are in fact the essential traits of this mode. Serlio's images in Book III direct attention to them as self-evident stigmata of antiquity--which they had not always been. In 1350, for instance, Hermann of Fritzlar looked at the Pantheon and did no t even notice them, writing, "Ah, the church is very large and there is no column in it anywhere." (5)

Although Carpo does not consider the fundamental role of Book III in helping to establish the orders as discoveries rather than inventions, he traces a very interesting post-Serlian trajectory by which their status as authentically antique was further nailed down. Considering a number of 16th- and 17th-century translations and editions of Vitruvius by northern, mostly Protestant, Europeans, he lays out a series of interconnected steps by which Serlio's system of the orders came to be "grafted onto, even attributed to, the Vitruvian text" (p. 100). Thus, Serlio became Vitruvian and Vitruvius Serlian. The ancient text--the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity--was recast as evidence that the orders had genuine antique credentials.