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

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

Trans. Sarah Benson. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2001. viii + 246 pp. $34.95. ISBN: 0-262-03288-0.

The concept of imitation has been central to the creation of architecture and art. In antiquity and the Middle Ages imitation was not a visual act, but was governed either by a literary or oral source. Many years ago Richard Krautheimer in a notable article on the iconography of medieval architecture demonstrated conclusively how medieval imitation was so ambiguous to our visually oriented minds and was determined by the similarity of numbers or figures rather than visual similarity (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, V, 1942, 1-33). Before the invention of printing the communication of these imitations was limited to the experience of one man and to hand copying with its danger of errors.

Mario Carpo has now focused on the influence of visual imitation in architectural theory, commencing in the Italian Quattrocento. This architectural revolution of the Renaissance is linked to the technical innovation of printing. As Carpo notes: "Printing from movable types is probably the means of communication that most profoundly influenced the civilization to which we still belong" (13). During the Quattrocento the architectural theorists struggled with this new problem. The most eminent theorist, Leon Battista Alberti, consciously chose not to have illustrations in his treatise, De re aedificatoria, as, according to Carpo, did Alberti's guide Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architect. When Alberti wrote, there was not yet available a means of accurate transcription of images. The first book with printed illustrations was published in Germany in 1457 and in Italy in 1467. Alberti wished, therefore, to avoid the difficulty of copying errors in images. His contemporaries, Filarete and Francesco di Giorgio, did include images in their manuscript treatises. In fact, Francesco di Giorgio insisted that verbal communication could not convey some concepts or facts that visual communication could, so he was apparently willing to accept visual errors of transcription.

It will be the woodcut illustrations of the first printed books that permit standardization in imitation and, according to Carpo, transformed the discipline of architecture as well as other disciplines. Sebastiano Serlio's treatise, Tutte l'opere d'architettura (1537-51), marks the development of a new image-based architectural method and the first appearance of the canon of five classical orders (1537). The images enlarge the architects' acquaintance with their heritage aver and above their own experience. As Carpo asserts, "every architect... could now compose in an all'antica architectural style without having to specialize in antiquarian study, without ever even having seen an ancient monument" (51). With these models and the grammar of Serlio's canon of orders, any mediocre architect or builder could design examples of the new Renaissance style. Later in 1584 the Milanese artist Giovanni Lomazzo in his treatise, Trattato dell'arte della pittura, complained that "Sebastiano Serlio has made more dog-catche rs into architects than he has hairs to his beard" (117).

A great master, the Vicenzan architect Andrea Palladio in 1570 published I quattro libri dell'architettura, a simplified but sophisticated version of Serlio's book, relying on woodcut illustrations with sparse text, which spread the classical style of architecture throughout Northern Europe. The Palladian version of classicism dominated much of Europe through at least the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century in North America.

The Carpo text is accompanied by an extraordinary body of references, comprising more than a third of the book, in which he amplifies and often clarifies the text, thus offering an extensive, learned commentary on the text. At times the footnotes offer a welcome reprise from the rather dense philosophical text.