The Insistence of Art

The emergence of the notion of beauty in French architectural discourse in the second half of the seventeenth century invigorated a debate about a set of closely related topics, such as the place of architecture among the arts of imitation, the authority of models provided by antiquity and nature, and the legitimacy of aesthetic judgments. This essay looks at a number of related contributions to this debate and distinguishes two approaches: one that sought to identify an “idea” of beauty, governing all the arts and based on the imitation of nature, and the other that approached beauty as a matter of pleasure and taste. This essay argues that the brothers Perrault recognized problems inherent in the ﬁ rst view and formulated an alternative by adopting ideas that issued from the ongoing debate about literary style and ornament. In so doing, they made available for architectural theory a rich body of proto-aesthetic reﬂ ection that dealt with matters of appropriateness, of clarity of meaning, of the social embeddedness of culture, and of the legitimacy of aesthetic judgments. If this approach to architectural theory was not picked up by the budding institutions of architectural education, Giambattista Piranesi’s response to the Perraults, nearly a century later, shows how it would open up the possibility of thinking about archi-Architecture


chapter 7
The Beauty of Architecture at the End of the Seventeenth Century in Paris, Greece, and Rome

Maarten Delbeke
The emergence of the notion of beauty in French architectural discourse in the second half of the seventeenth century invigorated a debate about a set of closely related topics, such as the place of architecture among the arts of imitation, the authority of models provided by antiquity and nature, and the legitimacy of aesthetic judgments.This essay looks at a number of related contributions to this debate and distinguishes two approaches: one that sought to identify an "idea" of beauty, governing all the arts and based on the imitation of nature, and the other that approached beauty as a matter of pleasure and taste.This essay argues that the brothers Perrault recognized problems inherent in the fi rst view and formulated an alternative by adopting ideas that issued from the ongoing debate about literary style and ornament.In so doing, they made available for architectural theory a rich body of proto-aesthetic refl ection that dealt with matters of appropriateness, of clarity of meaning, of the social embeddedness of culture, and of the legitimacy of aesthetic judgments.If this approach to architectural theory was not picked up by the budding institutions of architectural education, Giambattista Piranesi's response to the Perraults, nearly a century later, shows how it would open up the possibility of thinking about archi-tecture as an art form with its own peculiar beauty, distinct from the other arts yet equally rooted in nature.
The "Idea" of Beauty in Architecture, 1650 -72 In 1650 the French homme de lettres Roland Fréart de Chambray published the Parallèle de l'architecture antique avec la moderne, a comparison, modeled on Plutarch's parallel Lives, of the fi ve architectural orders retrieved from a select sample of ancient buildings and ten modern Italian and French architectural treatises. 1The preface of the work explained how the comparison should help undo the errors and misunderstandings about the proportions and ornaments of the orders that had accrued over time and retrieve an idea of beautiful architecture from the purest sources, the three Greek orders. 2 The Parallèle was meant to contribute to a French doctrine of the visual arts, an effort supported by Fréart's translations of Andrea Palladio's Quattro libri dell'architettura (fi rst Italian edition 1570) published in the same year, and Leonardo da Vinci's treatise on painting (1651). 3In 1662 Fréart would publish his Idée de la perfection de la peinture.As the preface of the Parallèle attests, the project to formulate a coherent artistic doctrine took root in Rome in the 1630 -40s, when Fréart de Chambray and his brother Chantelou visited the city under the auspices of Richelieu and his superintendent Sublet de Noyers.There they frequented the circles where the notion of the "idea del bello" was developed, around Cassiano dal Pozzo, François Duquesnoy, and Nicolas Poussin. 4 This doctrine would fi nd its most infl uential expression in the text Idea by the Roman art critic Gianpietro Bellori, fi rst read to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1664 and published as the preface to his Vite of 1672. 5Bellori argues that the three visual arts-painting, sculpture, and architecture-pursue beauty by means of a perfected imitation of nature, guided by the idea.The idea is not a Platonic ideal but the perfection of the models found in nature according to the sound principles of art. 6These principles restore the defects that time and contingency infl ict on nature and impede the fl ourishing of beauty.
With regard to architecture, Bellori hews closely to Fréart.In the Parallèle the latter author mobilized the "idée" as an invective against ornamental excess in general and "Roman" license in particular, manifest in the unwarranted invention of the Tuscan and composite order, vulgar expansions of the Greek canon. 7Fréart further expanded the condemnation of improper and excessive ornament already formulated in the twentieth chapter of the fi rst book of Palladio's treatise.There, Palladio dismissed scrollwork and other ornaments that do not represent elements of the wood construction on which stone architecture was said to be modeled or do not refer to natural models, as when columns are not tapered and monolithic, like trees. 8imilar criticism can be found in Bellori's Idea.In a passage directed against probably Gianlorenzo Bernini, Francesco Borromini, and Martino Longhi, Bellori deplores how contemporaries neglected the only recently restored standards of architecture, using "nonsense of angles, broken elements, and distortions of lines, . . .they break up bases, capitals, and columns with fakery stuccoes, fragments, and disproportions." 9Thus, like Fréart, Bellori puts forward the idea of architecture to weed out what he viewed as contemporary errors.And like his French counterpart, he identifi es this idea with the norms and best proportions of Greek architecture. 10hen they cast Greek architecture as the paradigm of architectural beauty, Bellori and Fréart had to break new ground by explaining what the idea of beauty in architecture consists of and why it is found in Greek architecture.That Greek architecture had attained a high degree of perfection was a critical commonplace already found in Italian authors such as Alberti, Raphael, and Vasari. 11Yet Bellori and Chambray now explicitly attributed to Greek architecture an ideal beauty; it was no longer a stage in a process of historical development that could allow for other architectural forms to attain perfection. 12Until the middle of the seventeenth century, the concept of beauty had played no central role in architectural theory, whereas proportion and decorum were considered key notions. 13The Renaissance treatise presenting the most developed theory of beauty, Alberti's De re aedifi catoria (published in 1486), received little attention until the end of the century. 14Each in his own way, Fréart and Bellori addressed anew the question of architectural beauty.
In the absence of a well-defi ned notion of architectural beauty, Fréart elaborates on architecture's long-standing association with proportion and visual harmony, suggesting that the "true and essential beauty of architecture . . .results mainly from symmetry," which Fréart defi ned as "the union and cooperation of [all parts] together, which come to form as it were a visible harmony." 15He then simply states that the three Greek orders are of "a particular beauty," implying that they are the paradigms of visible harmony. 16 more explicit statement on architecture's beauty can be found in Fréart's translation of Palladio.In his version of the chapter on "abuses," it is stated that "this way of building, which goes entirely against what nature teaches us, and despises that pure simplicity with which we see that she produces all things, abandons entirely all that is true, good and beautiful in architecture." 17Compared to the Italian original, Fréart introduces a number of changes that amount to restating how architecture should be modeled on nature.Palladio had written that "one cannot help but disapproving of this way of building, which, by distancing itself from that which the nature of things teaches us, and from that simplicity, that is observed in the things she creates, almost creating another nature, leaves behind the true, the good and the beautiful way of making." 18In Fréart's translation, "nature" replaces "the nature of things," and the notion that "almost another nature" can be made following the principles found in nature is absent.Palladio's "true, good, and beautiful way of making" has become "that what is true, good, and beautiful in architecture."In other words, Palladio argues that nature shows how things are made, and that this way of making should be imitated.Doing so, the architect will adopt a true, good, and beautiful method and produce a different, second nature.Fréart's translation suggests that truth, goodness, and beauty are qualities intrinsic to nature.Architecture should aim to incorporate these qualities by following the laws of nature in general, not by probing the nature of particular things.
That good art, including architecture, ought to imitate nature is a theoretical commonplace of early modern art. 19At the same time, sixteenthcentury debates such as the paragone (about which was the superior art) had made it clear that architecture does not easily fi t the categories that regulate the arts of imitation, such as painting and poetry. 20Sixteenth-century architects, too, were at pains to extrapolate Vitruvius's limited indications on architecture's mimetic relation to nature into a fully fl edged theory of imitation. 21After all, architecture imitates nature at two removes: not by reproducing natural forms or objects but, for instance, by attaining the same level of organic unity as animals or plants, as Alberti would have it, or by adopting proportions found in nature and applying them to the dimension of building elements, as suggested in Vincenzo Danti's Trattato delle perfette proporzioni, or by imitating primitive building practices or refl ecting the laws of gravity, as with the tapering column in Palladio. 22nce architecture adhered to such a principle, it was implied, it would be beautiful.
Contrary to these earlier indirect defi nitions of architectural beauty, Fréart's translation of Palladio suggests that the beauty of architecture is rooted in a universal principle, nature, that underlies the beauty of all works of art.Defi ning such a principle is the explicit aim of Bellori, who proposes a single, universal idea of beauty valid for the three visual arts.Earlier Roman theorists of the idea had focused mainly on painting. 23Expanding this idea to architecture required Bellori to resolve the difference between architecture's relation to nature from that of painting and sculpture.His solution to this problem indicates some of the limitations of the idea as a founding principle for architecture.
Bellori's text demonstrates that the idea is easily recognized in painting and sculpture, which imitate reality directly.Our author measures the success of a painting and a sculpture by the degree to which it appears to be lifelike.Numerous ekphrastic poems illustrate how excellent works of art produce a superior reality that forcefully strikes the beholder, especially when they achieve the lifelike depiction of the human fi gure in action.Architecture is a different matter.After several pages about painting and sculpture, Bellori writes, "Not to forget architecture, it too employs its most perfect Idea."He cites the fi rst-century philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who "says that God, like a good architect, constructed the world of the senses from the ideal and intelligible world by looking at the Idea and the example he intended." 24Bellori's next examples are not buildings but poetic descriptions: Diana's cave from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Arminda's garden from Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and Ovid's description of the Palace of Helios.
These poetic descriptions are Bellori's only references to specifi c buildings.At the most basic level, they prove that God and the poet follow a design-an idea-when they devise their virtual constructions.As in all other arts the sound pursuit of the idea will engender perfection.Of Ovid's palace of Helios Bellori writes that "the very abodes of the gods were devised by poets with the skill of architects, arrayed with arches and columns, which is how they described the royal palace of the Sun and Love, transporting architecture to heaven." 25 It is striking that Bellori illustrates the idea of architecture with descriptions of buildings rather than actual examples.If poetry proves to Bellori that some paintings and statues attain the idea, in the case of architecture it works the other way around.The poetic descriptions reveal a perfection which suggests that the idea also exists in architecture, even in the absence of natural models.In the words of Aristotle, quoted by Bellori, if a building were a natural thing, nature would execute it no differently than architecture, and would be constrained to use the same rules to give it perfection. 26Conversely, the idea of architecture can be gathered from the poetic representation of perfect yet virtual designs.In fact, the buildings in question are fi ctional and divinely ordained: Philo's Temple of Jerusalem and Helios's palace.The other examples, a cave and a garden, are not even architecture proper but pertain to nature.Poetry acts a an intermediary to uncover the architectural idea present in these models.When further on in the text Bellori advances Greek architecture as the perfect model, it this architecture assumes the same function as the poems about the buildings of God and Nature, a kind of intermediary like the second nature Palladio referred to.This intermediary is as invented as a poem about Helios's palace; at the time of Bellori's writing, Greek architecture was known only indirectly, by means of the remnants of its Roman emulation.
Bellori, like Palladio before him and French authors after, argues that the principle of rational creation binds architecture to nature. 27Yet Idea also shows that defi ning architectural beauty in terms of an idea common to the visual arts and rooted in the perfected imitation of nature requires models, principles, or intermediaries that transfer nature's qualities onto architecture.This operation generates new questions.Which models should be derived from nature to learn and understand this creative process: craft, primitive shelter, the human body, poetry, or an ancient canon?And what determines the validity of these models: Why should Greek architecture be closer to nature than Roman, or carpentry than stone cutting?Finally, if architecture is at a certain remove from nature, to what extent do nature or the models that transfer its qualities onto architecture help shape the design of buildings?If columns imitate trees, how treelike should they look?
These questions would allow Claude Perrault to challenge the idea of architecture in his translation of Vitruvius's De architectura (1673) and his Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes (1683).In the Ordonnance Perrault wants to understand how architectural design principles become authoritative in order to justify his own design system for the fi ve orders.Perrault agrees with Fréart that architecture is validated by its beauty.Yet he argues that beauty is a matter of judgment, and seeks to understand what determines the aesthetic appreciation of architecture.In so doing, he questions whether beauty depends on the imitation of nature and, as a consequence, whether architecture imitates natural models.

The Authority of Aesthetic Judgment in Claude Perrault and Pierre Nicole
Like Fréart's Parrallèle, Claude Perrault's Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes is an attempt to unclutter the fi ve orders from two centuries of alleged misinterpretation.Contrary to Fréart, however, Perrault did not seek to promote a canon but claimed to establish rational principles for determining the proportion and ornaments of the orders.In order to legitimize his model, in the preface of the Ordonnance Perrault examined in great detail how and why buildings are deemed beautiful.It opens with the declaration that "the ancients rightly believed that the proportional rules that give buildings their beauty were based on the proportions of the human body," 28 but then proceeds to refute the idea that the beauty of buildings depends on the degree to which their dimensions adhere to an ideal system of ratios.Rather, Perrault argues, these ratios are a matter of convention.This being the case, Perrault believes that his own system of the orders is more authoritative than previous examples because it is easier to understand and more logical to apply.As such, it lays claim to the kind of primitive purity that Fréart attributed to the Greek orders.
Perrault explains why proportional systems are conventional by making the distinction between arbitrary and objective causes of beauty.The "presence in works" of "convincing" or "objective reasons" "is bound to please everyone," regardless of time or place.Arbitrary causes, in contrast, depend on custom or "accoutûmance," a consensus among the elite of a given time and place about what is beautiful.This consensus is also called taste. 29Rules of proportion have been shown to vary over time, Perrault points out, which suggests that they depend on momentary preferences and belong with the arbitrary causes of beauty.
To emphasize the extent to which human opinion about the beauty of architecture depends on taste, Perrault points out that people entirely disregard potential rational arguments for architectural beauty.He writes, "The reasons that ought to carry the greatest weight in regulating architectural beauty" fail to explain many architectural features that people fi nd beautiful.The "reasons" Perrault refers to are the imitation of nature and the human body, of "the fi rst building," of particular plants or objects, and fi nally of crafts such as carpentry.If these referents guaranteed beauty, "the more exact the imitation, the greater would be the beauty [of buildings and their elements]." 30Yet history shows the exact opposite: an unending quest for new architectural forms that leaves those original models ever further behind.Conversely, buildings have been judged beautiful for reasons that have nothing to do with the alleged origins of architecture or the application of rational principles, but everything to do with custom and taste.As a consequence, the imitation of original models-whether nature, the body, or primitive constructions-does not validate the beauty of architecture.
Perrault thus distances himself from the advocates of the "idée de la beauté."The beauty of architecture is not guaranteed by the imitation of nature, however such imitation might be achieved, but by adhering to contemporary taste.In order to be successful, the architect should acquire this taste.An arduous task, since taste is shaped by rules and principles that lack objective or rational foundations.It is purely a matter of authority: "the result of a disposition not to doubt the truth of something we do not know if it is accompanied by our knowledge and good opinion of the person who assures us of it." 31This authority confers a semblance of objectivity to aesthetic judgments.
By building his notion of architectural beauty on these premises, Perrault connects architectural theory with a different intellectual tradition than that used by Fréart and Bellori, who, as we have seen, thought of architecture as one of the visual arts.W ładysław Tatarkiewicz was the fi rst to point out that Perrault's distinction between positive and arbitrary beauty is indebted to Pierre Nicole's Traité de la vraie et fausse beauté (1659). 32The Traité was originally published as the preface to a collection of epigrams and is concerned with prescribing rules for that particular literary genre.In order to found and legitimize these rules, Nicole examines the beauty of language in general and of metaphor in particular.He identifi es the beauty depending on taste as a cushion between the beauty inherent in eternal truth and the fi ckleness of human customs.Perrault incorporates Nicole's literary theoretical conception of beauty in his refl ections on architecture.In so doing, he opens a new path to thinking about the beauty of architecture.To understand his approach, it is necessary to have a closer look at Nicole's Traité and to identify the key issues there.
Nicole argues that beautiful eloquence is achieved when an expression corresponds with things according to the nature of the thing but also with regard to the human nature to whom it is addressed. 33This principle is rooted in the very nature of beauty, which consists of the same two elements: the beauty inherent in things and the beauty recognized by human nature: The general rule is that beauty is that which agrees with the nature of the thing, and equally with ours.In effect, if a body, for instance, that has a part too many or too few is held to be ugly, it is because it moves away from nature, which demands the integrity of its parts and rejects what is superfl uous. . . .However, it does not suffi ce for a thing to be beautiful to go together with its own nature, if it does not agree equally with ours.Because our nature consists of a soul and a body endowed with senses, which all have their given penchants and aversions, by which [our nature] is attracted or repelled. 34 principle, true beauty is a matter of pure reason, independent of time and place. 35Yet beauty is ultimately judged by a contingent reader or listener, a point Nicole duly emphasizes.The judgment of the contingent reader or listener depends on how expressions are perceived rather than how they are related to "things" per se or intended by their author: Moreover, and I would like that this point, which few authors have observed to perfection, receives due attention: in order to adjust the words to things, one should not consider the things such as they are in themselves, or how they are in the spirit of he who speaks, but such as the discourse will represent them in the spirit of listeners or readers. 36 a consequence, writers should adopt the taste of the moment.Language tends to follow "l'usage," and "l'usage" is largely determined by human opinion.Nicole states: "Because still it only depends on the fancy of men to decree that one term is used more often and is more elegant than another, yet it is natural to be hurt by unusual and improper words, and to love those [words] that are proper and in use." 37 "Opinion" is an inherently arbitrary yet authoritative mechanism that affects the human perception of language to the extent that it is natural to feel hurt by improper usage.In other words, listeners or readers wish expressions to seem natural, but what they consider to be natural changes according to opinion.
Still, language that follows opinion too closely runs the risk of becoming inaccessible to future generations.At the same time, human nature does have an innate craving for variety, which drives those same opinions.Nicole suggests that the author should avoid catering to this craving by means of excessive novelty, such as neologisms or unusual expressions.True variety depends on a judicious exploitation of the sonority of language, so that ideas are communicated in way that is clear and pleasing to the ear (Nicole refers to Cicero's iudicium areum), and on a moderate use of metaphor, which alternatively excites and soothes the human mind. 38icole's distinction of the eternal aspects of beauty from those contingent on human nature and of expressions refl ecting the nature of things from those that please human expectations is reiterated in Claude Perrault's distinction between positive and arbitrary causes of beauty.In particular, Perrault adopts Nicole's point that fancy, opinion, and taste help determine what is perceived as naturally beautiful.In the Ordonnance Perrault stresses that the human beholder collapses the positive and arbitrary aspects of his or her judgment into one seemingly unassailable appreciation of a building. 39And in the preface to Perrault's translation of Vitruvius's De architectura, published ten years before the Ordonnance, Perrault argues that Vitruvius has become so authoritative because people are in desperate need of arguments that buttress their necessarily arbitrary ideas about beauty.His statement, in this preface, that "because Beauty has no other foundation than fancy, which makes that things please according to whether they are in keeping with the idea that each has of their perfection, we require rules that shape and rectify that idea" recalls a previous quote from Nicole: "Because still it only depends on the fancy of men to decree that one term is used more often and is more elegant than another." 40If Perrault is more adamant than Nicole in declaring the "inventedness" of authority "that stands in for positive reason" in all that depends "of chance, of will, and of familiarization," both authors share the conviction that the judgment of viewers and readers is shaped by their own, contingent circumstances yet invariably cast as based on absolute truth.
By adopting Nicole's ideas, Perrault introduces a different approach of beauty in architecture than through the visual arts and their idea.Nicole's Traité roots beauty in the permanent negotiation between eternal, beautiful truths and their contingent, human expression.At the same time, Nicole recognizes that it is the human desire for beauty that spurs on this negotiation.Finally, Nicole points out that people seek certainty about their judgments and tend to present them as incontrovertible and rational.Perrault takes this conception of beauty on board.In so doing, he fertilizes architectural theory with a sustained refl ection on aesthetic judgment. 41Yet Nicole's infl uence is not limited to this aspect of Perrault's theory.With its notions about the nature of language and its relation to human ideas and desires, Nicole's Traité participated in a vigorous debate on the role of fi gurative language in the communication of truth.This debate involved diverging ideas about how human nature is affected by beauty, how beauty should be achieved, and how ornament relates to beauty.These linguistic ideas, intimately related to Nicole's notion of aesthetic judgment, would engender opinions about architecture too.

Metaphor, Beauty, and Truth
Nicole's Traité adheres to the principles of the Logique of Port-Royal, where fi gurative language is considered one of many unfortunate consequences of humankind's fall from grace.Because humanity has forfeited utterly transparent and universal forms of expression, it requires language to mediate between inner ideas and the outside world. 42As we have seen, Nicole intends to determine the extent to which language in general, and fi gurative language in particular, should play to human desire in order to communicate eternal and universal truths in a changing world.In doing so, he proposes the perceived beauty of an expression as the measure of its success.Annie Becq has argued that this turns the Traité into an early example of the increasingly commonplace identifi cation of beauty and truth in the French proto-aesthetic discourse that developed in the late seventeenth century. 43In particular, the Traité contributed to the lively French debate about the relation of fi gurative language to reason.Some time after the fi rst edition of the Traité, the Jesuit Dominique Bouhours, an opponent of Port-Royal, would write in his Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène (1671) how "beautiful" French language follows human thought "step by step": "Beautiful language resembles a pure and clear water that has no taste; that runs from the source; that goes where the natural slope carries it; not those artifi cial waters that are brought with violence into the gardens of the greats; and make a thousand different fi gures there." 44Bouhours did not share Nicole's distrust of fi gurative language in expressing truth-he deemed it sheer necessity.But he did adhere to the ideals of clarity and indeed naturalness, such that fi gures should emerge from ideas as if guided by nature alone and not by artifi ce.Like Nicole, Bouhours believed that clear and intelligible expressions are beautiful. 45ith the Entretiens, and his later work La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d'esprit, fi rst published in 1687, Bouhours participated in the budding Querelle des anciens et modernes and the related long-standing debate with Italian authors about the legitimate use of literary ornament. 46ne of his interlocutors was the Roman Jesuit Sforza Pallavicino, whose Trattato dello stile (fi rst published in 1646, princeps main edition in 1662) examined in detail the role of fi gurative language in scientifi c discourse.Pallavicino's ideas on style are partly based on a similar premise as Nicole's: It is humankind's innate craving for variety that necessitates fi gures of speech.Like Nicole, Pallavicino defends a style in which excitement alternates with periods of rest. 47But unlike the Jansenist, Pallavicino does not consider literary style the price to pay for human weakness.Even the most valuable truth requires sugarcoating to be appreciated, the Jesuit writes; after all, given the choice, everyone would prefer a golden drinking cup over a simple wooden one. 48As a consequence of such human desire, Pallavicino recognizes, like Nicole, that language is historically contingent: Desire calls for novelty, and the quest for novelty gently transforms language over time. 49ith the Trattato dello stile Pallavicino attempted to harness fi gurative language (and its inherent historicity) in the service of the communication of truth.This endeavor was prompted by the enthusiastic embrace of metaphorical language across a wide range of genres in contemporary Italian literature.Recognizing its attractions, Pallavicino attempted to give metaphor and its pleasures an instrumental role in communication. 50In so doing, he entered in a silent polemic with an author well known to Bouhours and whose ideas were antithetical to Nicole's: Emanuele Tesauro, whose Cannocchiale aristotelico (princeps, main edition, in 1670, fi rst edition in 1654, and written from the 1620s onward) provided an exhaustive classifi cation and discussion of metaphorical language. 51The Cannocchiale aimed to explain the working and making of argutezza, to be translated (imperfectly) both as wit and witticism, the quintessential quality of lively fi gures of speech. 52t the outset of the Cannocchiale aristotelico Tesauro distinguishes verbal and symbolical argutezza.Rather than limiting the purview of his treatise, this distinction suggests that argutezze are not constrained to spoken or written language but pervade literally every product of natural, human and divine creativity: everything can be construed as a form of fi gurative, witty expression.Tesauro's "symbolical" argutezze are material objects, including paintings, statues or inscriptions.Argutezze constitute a particularand superior-category of fi gures of speech, "fi gure," and these, too, issue from a general principle that is not confi ned to the word.When Tesauro defi nes what a "fi gura" is, he roots the use of fi gures in humankind's innate craving for pleasurable variety, and therefore "all that, which to alleviate the boredom of the listener, differentiates the words, or the sentences, or the enthymemes, from the naked, clear, and everyday style: it is called rhetorical SCHEMA, and FIGURE." 53As we have seen, Nicole attributes this same craving with stirring humankind's invention of ever-new words and turns of phrase.Tesauro fi nds proof of this desire in the fact that not a single human artifact is merely functional.He fi rst enlists the decoration of boats, where oars are gilded and prows sculpted as lions when the simplest of wooden contraptions would suffi ce.The second example is architecture: A house requires nothing more than solid walls and a closed roof, yet an inn "which not goes out of itself with ornaments" will be disdained.Likewise, drinking cups tend to be made of crystal and gold rather than wood-the example Pallavicino also used in his Trattato. 54Tesauro adduces marble fl oors and fashionable clothing as still further proof of the human desire for "fi gure," which extends to language and engenders fi gures of speech.
At fi rst Tesauro does not seem to condone this human tendency.He attributes the penchant for an inn with a "crest, with decorated frontispieces" rather than a humble roof to "superbia," or pride.A similar point is made in the Logique of Port-Royal, where sumptuous house decoration is credited to the despicable urge of owners to keep up appearances and to bask in the splendor of the surroundings. 55But despite his misgivings about the morality of fi gures and ornaments Tesauro recognizes that they are inevitable and eventually embraces them, because they are inherent in human sociability and graceful communication. 56s already suggested by the curt dismissal of what amounts to the primitive hut (the simple construction with solid walls and a watertight roof ), architecture contributes signifi cantly to the production of argutezza.Tesauro celebrates it as the human endeavor that produces perhaps the most lasting form of argutezza: "[Wit] appears in so many ornaments that elegantly jest on the facades of sumptuous buildings: leafed capitals, arabesques of friezes, triglyphs, metopes, masks, caryatids, terms, modillions: all stone metaphors and mute symbols, that add beauty [vaghezza] to the work, and mystery to the beauty." 57When enumerating the means to make witticisms, too, Tesauro extols "the jests of friezes, capitals, metopes, modillions, because buildings that are not less beautiful than solid not only protect their guests, but send them into ecstasy [rapiscano]," again pointing out that the pleasurable effect of fi gures greatly surpasses the benefi ts of usefulness. 58esauro's relish in the blatant artifi ciality of fi gurative expressions is what distinguishes him from the three other authors discussed here.Yet they all share the view that literary style is rooted in human nature and its unquenchable thirst for variety.This thirst accounts for the historical contingency as well as the sheer necessity of fi gures of speech in language.Nicole, Bouhours, Pallavicino, and Tesauro are all concerned with how an expression will affect a subject, and this concern shapes their view of how language works.What distinguishes our authors is how they defi ne and value the effect of successful fi gures.Tesauro's is a poetics of marvel, meraviglia, where viewers or listeners are "sent into ecstasy," thanks to the power of the artifi ce of argutezza. 59Pallavicino believes that marvel assists in bringing across important truths, and calls for a moderate, subservient use of ornament.In his poetics, as in Tesauro's, beauty plays a secondary role, as a side effect of or conduit to marvel.In Nicole, and later Bouhours, beauty takes center stage, as the quality an expression should aspire to.
Nicole's Traité thus participates in a theoretical refl ection on how usage determines the effect of fi gures of style (ornaments) on the beholder and listener.Perrault adopts this aspect of Nicole's thought, which has further implications for architectural theory.Tesauro's inclusive approach to "fi gure," which extends to architecture, makes it particularly clear that the uneasy relation of architecture with other arts under the tutelage of the idea of beauty can be replaced by a parentage based on a shared purpose and effect: so that the beholder marvels at the an unexpected play of ornaments.Tesauro recognizes that this parentage goes hand in hand with propagating an inventiveness and artifi ciality that far exceeds the primitive fulfi llment of human needs.Although they recognize that linguistic primitivism is unproductive and even impossible, Pallavicino, Nicole, and Bouhours censure Tesauro's view as excessive.They defend an aesthetic ideal in which the judicious handling of ornament marries clarity with beauty in order to appear natural.This view of the function of ornament dovetails with Claude Perrault's conception of architectural beauty, as is demonstrated in Charles Perrault's Parallèle des anciens et modernes.
The Parallèle consists of dialogues among the President (champion of the ancients), the Abbot (partisan of the moderns) and the Knight, which vaunt the superior merits of the moderns over the ancients.The second dialogue, published in 1688, treats architecture, sculpture, and painting.It is set in Versailles and after the Président guides an extended visit to the premises, he initiates a debate about the merits of those who invented architecture and ornament.
The interlocutors agree that buildings require ornament; it is inconceivable that a building would have "no columns, or pilasters, or architraves, or cornices, and that it is all uniform." 60The requirement of ornament in architecture is likened to the necessity of fi gures of speech in rhetoric. 61he President believes that this sheer necessity bestows the ultimate honors on the ancients, who invented and codifi ed ornament. 62The Abbot, however, sees no particular merit in the invention of ornaments, except in their appropriate use.Use is a matter of custom.The constructions of primitive people, too, are ornate, he argues, although according to their own taste and capacities, and their ornaments changed when usage so demanded. 63To underscore his point, the Abbot reiterates Claude Perrault's ideas about positive and arbitrary beauty in architecture. 64The distinction is tested against the rules of proportion in architecture.Proportion is a habit of human perception, so the Abbot states, not an inscrutable secret of nature accessible only to architects. 65In order to understand which principles should govern proportion and ornament, in the absence of a natural standard, the Chevalier ventures an analogy between architecture and poetry: "So it is just like in poetry, where rhyme and the measure of verse should be kept, as if the meaning and the argument do not restrict anything, and where the things one says should be as sensible and natural as if they had no rhyme or measure to observe."The Abbot concurs: "It is the same." 66Here, the Parallèle explicitly joins the debates on architectural and poetic beauty that we have traced so far, now as part of a distinctly "modern" artistic program: Because it is conventional and custom-based, ornament engenders the beauty that stems from clarity and is seemingly natural.Primitivism and archaism are fl awed and therefore ineffective, as would be the imitation of a putatively unchanging nature.

The Peculiar Beauty of Architecture
Elsewhere in the Parallèle Charles Perrault has the Abbot defend the "idée de la beauté" in painting and sculpture, thus separating architecture, where this idée does not apply, from its sister arts. 67In this respect, Perrault ran counter to budding contemporary academic architectural theory.Under the force of the attack on ideal proportions in the Vitruvius translation and the Ordonnance, the Cours d'architecture (1675-83) of François Blondel, the offi cial account of the teachings at the Académie d'Architecture founded by Colbert in 1672 with a curriculum based on Fréart's Parallèle, incorporated an extensive discussion of beauty.Blondel, too, testifi es to the importance of contemporary literary criticism in shaping the conceptual framework of architectural theory, for instance when Alberti's concinnitas (the principle of harmonious and organic composition that engenders beauty) is compared with the je-ne-sais-quoi. 68But contrary to the Perraults, Blondel sought to explain how the imitation of nature is at the root of architectural beauty.In so doing, he pursued the path laid out by Fréart and Bellori, and his approach would dominate architectural discourse from the early eighteenth century onward, until architecture would be considered fully one of the fi ne arts. 69et the discussion that played out in the pages of Perrault's Parallèle was picked up later, most notably by an Italian architect at odds with French classicism.In 1762 Giambattista Piranesi published Della magnifi cenza ed architettura de'Romani.The Magnifi cenza examines the historical development of ornament to account for the hellenization of Roman architecture.According to Piranesi, the capricious and effeminate ornaments of the Greeks infected the majestic and masculine Tuscan buildings of the Romans. 70To argue his point, Piranesi traces the origins of architecture.Architecture, he writes, evolved from the primitive buildings of fi rst people. 71This fi rst architecture very soon reached the point where it accommodated most of humankind's needs.But the inborn desire for novelty and variety inspired builders of all regions and ages to decorate their buildings. 72Piranesi denotes this endless process with the word dirozzamento, "disuglifi cation" or "disprimitivation." 73In other words, if architecture certainly originated from the fi rst human dwellings-"architecture has been instituted in such form that it shows that architecture imitates the fi rst manner of building of humankind"-the long historical development of architecture has removed architectural design inevitably from these primitive roots: "But with that I do not intend to signify that since then nothing else has been invented, or that nothing else has been added to these fi rst inventions." 74The primitive hut is a valid explanation of the historical origins of architecture but not a design model.Piranesi argues that contemporary architectural design in general (or, for that matter, Roman and Greek design) and ornament in particular cannot be regulated by referring to an original, primitive building.After all, this building was defi nitely rozzo, ugly.
Piranesi's argument is indebted to the Ordonnance and the Parallèle in its dismissal of the relevance of primitive models for contemporary artistic practice. 75Like the Perraults, Piranesi argues that ornament indicates the distance traveled from these primitive models, since humanity thrives on the beautifi cation of its artifacts; the beauty of architecture results from humankind's craving for novelty.Piranesi even shares their misgivings about this process, since it easily leads to decay, as when Greek design affected Roman architecture.
But Piranesi pushes the ideas of his predecessors to new conclusions, in a way that at once repositions nature as the model of architecture and vindicates the peculiarity of the architecture's beauty.As we have seen, Tesauro treated architectural ornaments as signifi ers, on a par with literary metaphors.He expanded the classicist myths of origin about architectural structure and ornament that we encountered in Palladio to cast architecture as a witty game of ever-new fi gures that enliven buildings.The Perraults, too, saw close parallels in the way literary and architectural ornament appealed to a beholder.Although deeply sympathetic to these stances, Piranesi attacked the equation of poetry and architecture on which they were founded, on the ground that hearing a poem is something altogether different from experiencing a building.
His statement on the matter was prompted by Pierre-Jean Mariette's criticism of the Magnifi cenza.Mariette, an art critic and connoisseur, furthered the cause that Fréart had advanced a century earlier by arguing that the Roman taste for excess and luxury was a perversion of the original elegance and simplicity of Greek architecture.Piranesi responded to Mariette with the Parere su l'architettura (1765), a dialogue on ornament in architecture between the characters Protopiro, cast as a critic of Piranesi, and Didascalo. 76n the dialogue, Piranesi examines the analogy between architecture and poetry to dislodge rigorist criticism of excessive ornament.At the outset of the dialogue Protopiro attempts to distinguish the "clutter . . .found around doors, windows, arches, and other openings and walls," such as "festoons, fi llets, masks, paterae, heads of stags and oxen . . ., the labyrinth frets, the arabesques, the hippogriffs, the sphinxes" from the elements of architecture proper, in order to send the clutter back to "the realm of poetry." 77n so doing, he argues along the lines of Palladio, Fréart, and Bellori, who considered only artifacts and forms rooted in nature and the original act of building as legitimate sources for architectural design.Protopiro's remark also recalls and dismisses Tesauro, who praised architecture for its capacity to load buildings with all kinds of poetic inventions. 78idascalo attacks his adversary by assuming the same antiprimitivist stance as Tesauro or the Perraults.Following Claude Perrault's line of reasoning, Didascalo argues that few elements of architecture have identifiable origins in a primitive model. 79In fact, any attempt to identify such primitive models would annihilate architecture: "Take note: buildings with no walls, no columns, no pilasters, no friezes, no cornices, no vaults, no roofs.A clean sweep."Moreover, Didascalo points out, it is unclear how the imitation of primitive models could lead to rich and sophisticated forms of architecture.In Didascalo's words, "How can a simple prototype remain entire and unifi ed at the very moment of being halved, varied, and rearranged in a thousand ways, in short, when the simple becomes composite, and one becomes as many as you like?" 80 These remarks appear to be indebted directly to Charles Perrault's Parallèle, where it is stated that architecture is unthinkable with "no columns, or pilasters, or architraves, or cornices, and that it is all uniform." 81Both Perrault and Piranesi use the enumeration to make the same point: Architecture without ornament is unthinkable, because ornament appeals to the innate aesthetic sensibilities of humanity.In the Parere, along the lines of the Magnifi cenza and the Parallèle, Didascalo also argues that the whole history of architecture illustrates how humanity craves for ever more appealing and ornate architecture.The Scythians and the Goths waged war on the Romans so that they could exchange their primitive huts for sumptuous buildings. 82This process should not be explained as a long history of ever more refi ned (and eventually perverted) imitation of primitive forms, but as an enduring quest for pleasing architectural compositions.
When it comes to identifying the source of architecture's aesthetic success, however, Didascalo distances himself from his seventeenth-century predecessors by challenging the validity of the analogy between architecture and poetry.He emphasizes repeatedly that buildings are perceived entirely differently from poems.A building presents itself to the eye as a whole, whereas a poem generates a sequence of mental images; a building benefi ts from visual complexity, whereas a profusion of literary ornament confuses reader or listener. 83As a consequence, nature stands in another relationship to architecture than to the other arts: It does not proffer models to imitate, but displays the laws of successful visual composition.In this capacity, as the paradigm of a pleasing, variegated visual appearance, it guides the development and application of architectural ornament.Conversely, architecture is distinguished from the other arts by its ability to emulate the visual composition of nature.This capacity bestows architecture with its own particular beauty. notes