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This conviction is in line with an anti-dogmatic and in some ways historicist vision. What comes into play, then, is individual judgement and subjective discernment, since the main principle is ‘the suitability, uniformity and concordance of character, form and proportion for each part of an order’ ( Pagliara 2003: 510). 1–50 English translations of Scamozzi’s text throughout this paper follow Scamozzi 20). He even invokes and finds confirmation in Aristotle: ‘Mensura dividitur secundum mensurans et accipitur a Matematico in abstracto, a Naturale in concreto’ ( Scamozzi 1616: P. It is, thus, ‘either increased or reduced according to judgement’, and therefore at ‘the discretion of the architect’. But over and above the weight of authority and tradition, he believed the supreme arbiter was still the architect’s discretion: because ultimately the module ‘is not, as many have claimed, of a fixed, predetermined size like a palm, a foot, a braccio or other similar units of measurement, but rather a ratio or uniform standard measure’. To corroborate his argument, he turns to other illustrious authors who had dealt with the subject, from the jurists Julius Paulus to Ulpianus, with reference to aqueducts, and Pliny, on the subject of roads, as well as historians such as Suetonius or poets like Horace, without neglecting those who made use of the module in their specific roles as ‘inventors of music’ (‘Lidios Modulos Amphion, Dorios Modulos Thamirafthrax, Phrygios Marsias Phryx invenit’). He reminds us of the etymology in Vitruvius’ premise (‘this word module is Latin in Greek it is metros or embate, a term meaning “measurement”’) and logically explains its derivation from the ‘crassitudine columnarum’ (column thickness): the columns were in fact ‘the main bodies of the orders and a great ornament to them’. Scamozzi accepts these notions but debates them. Palladio, on the other hand, ‘imitating Vitruvius, who divided up the Doric order with the unit of measurement derived from the thickness of the column’, which is universally applicable and called by him a ‘module’, simply states that ‘I too will make use of such a unit for all the orders the module will be the diameter of the column at the bottom divided into sixty minutes’ ( Palladio 1997: 18 = Book I, Ch.
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2 After meticulously reviewing the evidence, he closely scrutinises the various opinions on the subject, from Vitruvius to his contemporaries, and arrives at his interpretation of the ‘truth’ through a coherent, imperturbable deductive method. Thus emerges a picture of Scamozzi as a convinced rationalist not indifferent to the echoes of Galilean scientism. Scamozzi thus devoted the whole of Book VI in the second part of his treatise to the orders, a total of 174 pages, compared to the 37 pages given over to the subject by Palladio in the first of his Quattro Libri. Indeed, he explored those disciplines on his long Roman sojourn (1578–1579) by attending the lectures of Father Christopher Clavius, who disseminated ‘many ideas essential for the development of the sciences contained in the works of the Greek mathematicians’, primarily the Alexandrians Pappus and Heron ( Basili 2003). We must bear in mind that Scamozzi argued for an architecture of an ‘anthropomorphic character’ on one hand, and was a strenuous advocate of ‘mathematics’ and ‘mechanics’ on the other. We can generally agree with this conclusion since, for example, in the types of rooms that he deems to be perfect, the height turns out to be the arithmetical mean of the width and length. He reached the conclusion that, compared to his predecessors and even more so than Palladio himself, Scamozzi ultimately simplified measurements and ratios. 1 Rudolf Wittkower in particular - who was determined, as Sir Kenneth Clark commented in the Architectural Review, ‘to dispose, once and for all, of the hedonist, or purely aesthetic, theory of Renaissance architecture’ ( Wittkower 1971: 3) - made some detailed remarks on the subject in his Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism ( 1971: 109 n.1).
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After Francesco Milizia’s broad but generic treatment during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment ( Milizia 1781, 1785), we basically have to wait until the present day and Pier Nicola Pagliara’s catalogue entries describing Scamozzi’s drawings of the orders, accompanied by some important remarks, often technical in nature (Pagliara 2004: 515–518). While many studies have addressed in various ways the issue of proportions in Palladio’s work, both in the orders and in the forms and dimensions of architecture, very little interest has been shown in Vincenzo Scamozzi’s handling of this theme.