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Architecture as a Model for Thought and Action

ROBERT KIRKBRIDEParsons School of Design

The studioli of the ducal palaces at Urbino and Gubbio the intellectual milieu at the Urbino court, crystallizinga unique brand of humanism that spanned the mathe-offer elegant demonstrations of architecture’s capacitymatical and verbal as well as liberal and mechanical arts.to transact between the mental and physical realms of

human experience. Constructed between 1474 and 1483for the renowned military captain Federico da Monte- Owing to their comprehensive iconographic programs,feltro, duke of Urbino, and his young motherless son, the studioli are often described as encyclopedic contain-prince Guidobaldo (1472-1508), the studioli may be ers of universal knowledge: their imagery encompassesdescribed as treasuries of emblems: they contain not the seven liberal arts, the muses and virtues, thethings but images of things, rendered with remarkable heraldic imagery of the Montefeltro and Federico’sperspectival exactitude. Over the past five centuries, personal accomplishments. Yet careful review of thesethese chambers have themselves become emblems for emblems and their perspectival arrangement reveals

Figs. 1 & 2. Overviews of the Urbino (l) and Gubbio (r) studioli, drawn by author.

658 CONTRIBUTION AND CONFUSION: ARCHITECTURE AND THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER FIELDS OF INQUIRY

that the studioli might have served more as a rhetorical In the studioli, practices of visualizing knowledge wereinfluenced but not yet commanded by the corporealmedium for stimulating thought than as representa-eye. Knowing was still conceived as the cultivation oftions of a ‘‘complete’’ body of knowledge. Consideredwisdom in the mind’s eye, nourished by a well-trainedalongside recent scholarship in earlier and subsequentmemory. Icons and emblems were believed to conveypedagogical traditions — specifically that of Bolzoni,one’s thoughts directly between the inner seat ofCarruthers and Illich1 — these chambers are associativeemotional witness and the outward aspirations ofengines whose marvelous visual character assists ancommunity, with the architecture of memory facilitat-occupant to forge new constellations of meaning froming intercourse between thought and matter. In a 1451a set of carefully selected figures. As such, the studiolitreatise on meditation, Federico’s colleague Nicholas ofextend an ancient legacy of open-ended architectonicCusa asserts that ‘‘the human intellect, if it is to findmodels, conceived to activate the imagination andexpression in action, require[s] images (phantasmata),exercise the memory as an inventive agency for know-and images cannot be had without the senses, anding.senses subsist not without a body.’’4 Images alsoconducted the mind beyond the world of things and

Architecturally, the studioli are capstones to the ambi- appearances, a neoplatonist notion that held particulartious building program sponsored by the duke from the interest for the court of Urbino. Iamblichus, whose1460’s to beyond his own death. Federico enlisted two works were translated by Marsilio Ficino, writes, ‘‘thingsarchitects, first Luciano Laurana and later Francesco di more excellent than every image are expressed throughGiorgio Martini, to redesign the numerous palaces and images.’’5fortifications of his expanding dukedom. Completedduring di Giorgio’s tenure — Urbino in 1476 and Gubbioin 1483 — the studioli reflect an intense collaborationamong the many scholars and artists that the Montefel-tro gathered to their court. Although various artistshave alternately been championed as their progenitor,definitive attribution for the studioli is highly contesta-ble and somewhat beside the point. The studioli offertestament to the syncretic and convivial atmospherecultivated at Urbino, which imbued as well the works ofPiero della Francesca, Fra Luca Pacioli and BaldassareCastiglione.

In recent years, scholars have positioned the studioliand contemporary rooms of their kind at the origins of

Fig. 3.the modern museum, as spaces of inquiry and leisurenewly emerged between the private and public realms.2

Fig. 3. In the Urbino studiolo a small note, nailed to aIt is tempting to compare the visual character of theshelf like a reminder, bears the Virgilian phrase ‘‘virtuti-studioli, regarded in their time as marvelous works,bus itur ad astra’’ (with virtue one scales the stars). Inwith the ‘‘cabinets of curiosities’’ of the sixteenth andaddition to the cardinal and theological Virtues (Hope,seventeenth centuries, filled as they were with a newFaith and Charity are personified in the Urbino stu-world of things and ontological uncertainties prompteddiolo), the term virtu encompassed militaristic valour.by Columbus’ westward voyage in 1492. While notWorks of art were also considered virtu, by theirentirely inaccurate, since the effectiveness of the studio-capacity to guide contemplation heavenward. The ar-li was predicated on their capacity to induce wonder,chitect’s machina, like the lift machinery depicted in thedirect comparisons should be tempered. Columbus hadsketchbooks of di Giorgio and da Vinci, symbolically

not yet set sail. Although the perspectival compositionfacilitated contemplation (such as the medieval practice

of the studioli reflects a new organizational status of sancta memoria) due to its pivotal role in theaccorded the eye, foreshadowing the empirical interde- construction of cathedrals and monasteries, and to thependence of witnessing and believing, it was not yet overarching notion that God the Architect would havethe world of Vesalius’ anatomical theatre, or of Giulio used such a mechanism while fabricating the universe.6Camillo, who in a mid-sixteenth century treatise on In Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville extracts the wordmemory exclaimed, ‘‘Let’s turn scholars into specta- maciones (mason) from the Latin machina, citing thetors.’’3 tradition of the architect-inventor who, like Daedalus,

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designs the walls of buildings and the machines that thought emerging precisely from within its discontinui-ties. Alberti’s recommendation that painters imitatefacilitate their fabrication.7 For Gregory the Great thedirectly from nature also urges them to ‘‘leave more formachina symbolized the act of contemplation, ener-the mind to discover than is actually apparent to thegized by love, which builds the fabric of the mind. As aeye.’’11 The influence of artistic works and mechanicalmechanism of self-edification, contemplation facilitatedprocesses on habits of late quattrocento thought —the discovery or fabrication of a universe within thefrom the jigsaw puzzle assembly of intarsia panels tomemory, empowering one to emulate in small compassthe comprehensive planning of palaces and cities — isthe labors of God the Architect. (Photo by author)complex and subtle. Even those instruments that magi-cally reflected or amplified the appearance of theThe studioli nonetheless represent a significant turningworld, including such technical marvels as the mirrorspoint in the role of sight in verifying experience. Inand lenses found in each studiolo, expanded upon well-particular, the chambers manifest a transformation inestablished metaphors for prudence and memory.practices of envisioning knowledge, from an inwardWhen considering these items, we must recognize thathabit of mnemonic composition toward a more extro-they were used to different (or further) ends than mightverted mediation of the world as a theatre for thebe expected from hindsight. Along with emblems,corporeal eye and its prosthetic instruments. By theirpaintings, poems and architectural ornament, theyvisual arrangement, the studioli demonstrate the emer-provided the materials of thought. The gravitatinggence of a quantitative methodology for representingconcern in the studioli, it is argued here, was not opticalreality, centered on the belief that humans mightrealism but ethical preparation.12participate directly in the workings of the universe.

‘‘Heavenly things are present in the hidden life of theworld,’’ writes Ficino, ‘‘and in the mind, the queen ofthe world, where they are its vital and intellectualproperty, its excellence.’’8 With increasing breadth, theprinciples of perspective offered a proportional harnessfor the field of experience, promising consonance — orconcinnitas — between the music of the spheres and therealm of human affairs.9

In the studioli this transformation in visuality may becharacterized as a polithetic overlap rather than anabrupt departure. Mechanical practices such as perspec-tive recalibrated rather than replaced earlier rhetoricaltraditions. Drawing extensively from Cicero, Pliny, Quin-tilian and Virgil, Alberti’s treatise on the subject is notcircumscribed by Euclid or Ptolemy. In De pictura,Alberti is as concerned with what should be depicted ina work, its subject or historia, as with its instrumentalexecution. Alberti’s treatise, in fact, served his contem-poraries more as a discursive explanation of perspectivethan as a practical manual. Most quattrocento perspec-tives, including such architectonic, in-the-round compo-sitions as Andrea Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi atMantova, the Sala dei Mesi at Ferrara and the Montefel-tro studioli, did not follow Alberti’s prescriptions literal-ly but were assembled according to methods conceivedin the artisan’s workshop.10

From a post-daguerreotype point of view, one mightpresume that the appearances of the studioli unders-core a desire for ‘‘realistic’’ imitation in representation.Compositional discontinuities would be dismissed, un-der such a premise, as small bumps in the road toward Fig. 4.seamless verisimilitude. For the quattrocento mind,however, space was heterogeneously conceived, with

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Fig. 4. In the Gubbio studiolo, the term Ingenioq is How did Federico and his colleagues fabricate theirthoughts? Freshly infused with Greek and Persianlocated directly above a cabinet ‘‘containing’’ an archi-notions of micro- and macrocosm, a quattrocento mindtect’s set square/level, a compositional detail that re-was preoccupied with harmoniai — modes of fasteningflects deeper significances. Defined as natural talent orthat supplied architectural, musical and humoural con-‘‘prerational’’ genius, ingenium was held in contrast tonotations. For Homer and Hippocrates, both of whomthe wisdom gained from practice and experience, andare portrayed in the Urbino studiolo, a properly builtconsidered a divined stamp on the soul delivered at theboat and a virtuous human were considered to beinstant of one’s birth. Innate talent was as mysterious to‘‘well-balanced’’ in construction.16 Healthful symmetrythe quattrocento as it was for Vitruvius, who describes itwas the objective for politics as well. Themes ofas ‘‘hidden in the breast.’’ A teacher’s methods werereconciliation and universal harmony, such as Alberti’stuned to reveal and cultivate the unique characterconcinnitas and Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia opposi-hidden within each student, while impressing thosetorum, were counterposed to a litany of crises in faith,habits of uprightness that would guide his or herpolitics and scholarship. The decay of Byzantiumingenium to the common good. Instruments of thebrought to Italy an influx of Greek scholars whose directarchitect assisted in this process, supplying symbols offamiliarity with Plato, Plotinus, Euclid, Ptolemy and thejustice and moral rectitude. Castiglione, a central figureCorpus hermeticum introduced a fresh set of consider-in Duke Guidobaldo’s court, writes: ‘‘the prince oughtations for western thought. The meeting of orientalnot only to be good, but also to make others good, likeand occidental wisdom problematized (and impregnat-that square used by architects, which not only is straighted) the mind with new possibilities, from meditationand true itself, but also makes straight and true alland health to accounting, the architecture of time andthings to which it is applied.’’13 (Photo by author)the cosmos.

Federico and his colleagues embraced the mathematical According to the ancient tradition of humoural medi-arts with a passion imbued with a deep appreciation of cine, extending back through Avicenna and Galen, athe spoken and written word. If Alberti’s veil of balanced character could be maintained by carefullyintersected lines supplied the artisan and observer with tempering the body’s internal humours. With the ab-a new proportional harness for visualizing experience, sorption of Greek and Arab scholarship during Federi-the architectonics of memory sustained accord between co’s life, this tradition found new purchase in thethe senses and intellect through mathematical, literary writings of Bartolomeo Platina and his student Ficino.17and visual figures. Quintessentially, the studioli are Humours were not hermetically contained within the‘‘visual panegyrics,’’ akin to and yet distinctly removed body but were subject, it was believed, to the shiftingfrom such historical precedents and antecedents as the influences of terrestrial climate and celestial bodies.Roman cubiculum and medieval reliquary.14 The spatial Consequently, the salubrity of one’s physical environ-arrangements and ornament of the Montefeltro studio- ment was a fundamental concern to Vitruvius andli prepared a quattrocento mind with visual tropes that Alberti, who supported the ‘‘traditional’’ practice ofliterally fed the imagination with materials for cogita- haruspices to determine the healthfulness of a sitetion. The studioli embody an amalgam of classical and before constructing a private residence or city. In themedieval attitudes toward cognitive architecture, in Art of Building, Alberti attends to those aspects ofwhich practice(s) of cogitation called for physical set- climate that are explicit and obscured, referring totings that could move an observer, physically and Hippocrates and the need to accumulate historic ac-emotionally. counts (symptoms) of ‘‘hidden properties’’ bestowed by

nature to a given locale. ‘‘When selecting the locality, itUntil well into the Renaissance, the memory was is not enough to consider only those indications whichfashioned as a storage place (an ark) for experience and are obvious and plain to see, but the less evident shouldas an engine for its interpretation and reconstitution. also be noted, and every factor taken into account.’’18

‘‘You were trained to furnish the rooms of the mind,’’ At Urbino, Alberti notes, ‘‘water is found as soon as youCarruthers observes, ‘‘because you cannot think if you dig,’’ providing an architect-hydraulic engineer such asdo not have something to think with.’’15 Demonstration Francesco di Giorgio with ample opportunity to conveyof a well-furnished memory, on the battlefield or in his ingegno to such humourous inventions as thermalmatters of diplomacy, conveyed one’s capacity for baths and Heroic fountains, conceived to benefit thecrafting thought. Subsequently, the perception that we health of Duke Federico and life in the palace inmake our own thoughts, from any and all available general.materials, has gradually given way to the more passivenotion that thoughts are things we simply absorb and Such a thermal bath is found in the Urbino palace at thehave. base of a vertical sequence of chambers joined by a

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To prepare an occupant to enter communal memory asa star among the heavens, the architecture of thestudioli was tailored to filter vices from the soul and tomediate beneficial and harmful stellar rays. In a chapterdedicated to making a figure of the universe, Ficinorecommends that his readers set up, deep inside theirhouses, a little room decorated with figures and colorsthat evoke the generative and protective influences ofthe heavens. Green, he writes, represents Venus and theMoon, whose moist natures are ‘‘appropriate to thingsof birth,’’ such as thoughts. The Apollonian sun isrepresented by gold, and the jovial influence of Jupi-ter — vital, Ficino emphasizes, to counteract Saturn’smelancholy — is captured by sapphire, the color of lapislazuli and ultramarine. Also effective against Saturn’sblack bile are coral (red) and chalcedony (milky grey).Elsewhere in the Book of Life, Ficino associates purplewith a safer, diluted form of Saturn’s humour that, likethe influence of Mars, may be used as a homeopathicpharmakon. To assist contemplation and judgement,Ficino recommends that these colors be worn as cloth-ing and applied in architectural ornament.19 Each ofthese colors — gold, green, blue, red, purple and grey —is found in the ceiling of the Gubbio studiolo, whoseinterlocking geometries evoked for its quattrocentooccupants a well-tempered distribution of divine influ-ences. While filtering the deleterious aspects of theheavens and one’s own character, the Gubbio studioloembodied a garden of earthly experience and anastrobiomechanism for contemplation.

Virtuous images and maxims inlaid in the studioli offertracks for the observer’s gaze, supplying innumerable

Fig. 5. Western façade of Urbino’s ducal palace. (Photo by routes for contemplation, lifting the mind’s eye throughauthor) the sensual world toward the heavens by select exam-

ples of heroes, edifying phrases and icons. At Urbino,spiral stairtower: directly above the bath, the seriesthe arrangement of these tracks guides the viewer tocontinues through twin chapels (dedicated to God andthe central image of the east wall — a distant hilltownthe muses) to the studiolo and a rooftop observatory.viewed through the arcade of a piazza. Is the distantThe program of this spine reveals that the duke and hiscity Urbino? Why is the piazza empty?architects conceived the palace as an oversized model of

the human body and a small-scale model of theWhile the studiolo as a whole provided a quarry foruniverse, expressing an ancient yet unprecedentedthought, the piazza offered the Montefeltro dukes aapproach to physiological and spiritual science. In thiscivic theatre in small compass in which to envisionworld-view, shared by Cusa and Ficino, architecture and

its ornament served as a conduit for an unceasing flow consequences of policy and rehearse rhetorical delibera-of influences between the heavens and the human soul, tions.20 The emptiness of this setting also reflects thelocated by Leonardo’s anatomical drawings in the heart impossibility of realizing the ideal in the tangle ofof the mind. By correspondence, the Urbino studiolo human affairs. Even if the city viewed in the distanceserved as a theatre of memory in the palace-brain, as a were intended to evoke Urbino, the similitude presentsrecombinatorium for thought with which to govern Urbino as an allusion to the New Jerusalem and not aswisely. This remarkable arrangement represents a nest- the ideal city in and of itself. This is a critical distinction.ed relationship of mind and world — one within the While the notion of an ideal state has fascinatedother — enlacing Christian, Jewish and Muslim teach- philosophers and politicians for over two millennia, itings while foreshadowing the memory theatre of Giulio remained for the quattrocento a dream as inaccessibleCamillo in the following century. in this world as Plato’s Republic or Augustine’s City of

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Consequently, the architecture of the studioli did notrepresent an imposition of reason onto nature, butrather a belief in an underlying order that might rectifyhuman nature and sustain a productive balance inhuman affairs. It was the prerogative of the idealprince, Castiglione emphasizes, to establish just laws;the role of the ideal courtier was to uphold these laws.Mechanisms such as those designed by Brunelleschi, diGiorgio and da Vinci were believed to operate accord-ing to universal laws, and by long tradition metaphori-cally facilitated the fabrication of thoughts. As expres-sions of this tradition, the studioli offered armatures forintegrated thought and action, enabling the Montefel-tro dukes to compose themselves and their thoughts forgovernance.

NOTES

1 Lina Bolzoni, The Gallery of Memory; Mary Carruthers, The Book ofMemory and The Craft of Thought; Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of theText.

2 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature (Los Angeles: University of Califor-nia Press, 1994), 112-13; Dora Thornton, The Scholar in His Study(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 120-23.

3 Camillo, Opere, Vol. 1 (Venice, 1560), 66-67. For a discussion of thevirtual witnessing practiced by Sir Francis Bacon and the RoyalSociety see William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 338-39.

4 Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God, trans. Emma Gurney Salter (NewYork: J. M. Dent, 1978), 43.

5 As cited by Emerson in ‘‘The Poet.’’ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays(Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1892), 15. Iamblichus was a followerof Porphyry, a student of Plotinus.

6 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Pine-Coffin (New York: Viking Pen-guin, 1961), 11.5. See Chapter 1 of Carruthers, Craft of Thought.

7 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, 19.8.1-2. Etymologically, then, theFig. 6. Central panel of the east wall, Urbino studiolo. (Photo by master-mason was not only the chief stonecutter, but also theauthor) ‘‘master of machines.’’

8 Marsilio Ficino, Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer (Woodstock, Conn.:Spring Publications, 1980), 3.15.135.God. Federico and his cohorts considered an ideal state

9 For a discussion of concinnitas see Alberti, Art of Building (9.5.305),oxymoronic to the human condition, a vision to beas well as Rykwert’s gloss (421-22), trans. Rykwert, Leach & Tavernorcontemplated and aspired to, yet never ‘‘actualized.’’21(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). For the transition from perspecti-

The ideal city offered a destination attained after the va naturalis (medieval optics) toward perspectiva artificialis, seeend of time by living according to virtuous principles in Perez-Gomez and Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the

Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 16-29.earthly life. The future state remained tantalizingly10 James Elkins, Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,beyond (or just to the side of) the vanishing point of the

1994), 84-89.human horizon. As a rebus for contemplation, the ideal 11 Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (New York: Penguin Books,city represented an image of concord drawn through 1972), 2.42.77.the macro- and micro-architecture of the cosmos, align- 12 David Hockney recently argued that artists used optical devices such

as mirrors to achieve optical correctness in representation (Secreting the music of the spheres with the city, one’s home,Knowledge, New York: Viking Studio, 2001). His error lies not inprivate study and the ark of memory preserved in thehow they were used, but in why they were used. Dora Thornton has

heart of the mind. Amid this sequence of nested vessels, more thoroughly analyzed the practical uses for mirrors and lensesin the Renaissance study (Scholar in His Study, 141-42, 167-74), andan occupant of the Urbino studiolo is simultaneouslywith Luciano Cheles and others, has pointed out their iconographiccontained within and a container of divine wisdom,correlation to prudence as a virtue of self-reflection. There are

embodying the erotic tension of created and creator further associations. The Gubbio studiolo offered prince Guidobaldodescribed by Plato in Timaeus.22 a three-dimensional manual for conditioning his memory for ethical

judgement, producing a new ‘‘wrinkle’’ in pedagogical traditions.

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See Kirkbride, ‘‘The Renaissance Studioli of Federico da Montefeltro 17 Bartolomeo Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health, trans. Maryand the Architecture of Memory,’’ in Chora 4: Intervals in the Ella Milham (Asheville, N.C.: Pegasus Press, 1999), 1.10.13; MarsilioPhilosophy of Architecture, ed. S. Parcell and A. Perez-Gomez Ficino, Book of Life.(Montreal: McGill-Queens’ Press, 2003), 127-76. 18 Alberti, Art of Building, 1.5.15. On divination, see Vitruvius, De

architectura, 1.4.9, as well as Ruth Padel, In and Out of Mind; Ivan13 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. LeonardIllich, H2O or the Waters of Forgetfulness; Joseph Rykwert, Idea of aEckstein Opdycke. (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 261.Town.

14 In a fall 2000 lecture at New York University, Lina Bolzoni used this 19 Ficino’s comments on colors reflect interests shared with the Urbinophrase in discussing the tradition of ut pictura poesis. The historical court and suggest his familiarity with the studioli. They are culledinterdependence of linguistic and visual figures, articulated in from 1.6.10, 3.12.123 and 3.19.153 of the Book of Life.Horace’s Art of Poetry, thrives in Alberti’s definition of istoria in De 20 This setting is akin to the tradition of the ‘‘mirror of princes.’’ In thepictura and in Castiglione’s self-deprecating description of the Book

following century, through the writings of Serlio and fabrications ofof the Courtier as a ‘‘picture’’ by a ‘‘humble painter.’’ For more onPalladio and Scamozzi, the ideal city would be literalized as a civicthis subject, see Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis.setting for theatrical performance.

15 Mary Carruthers, ‘‘The City in Our Minds: Memory Makes Poetry at 21 Perez-Gomez, ‘‘Villalpando’s Divine Model,’’ Chora 3: Intervals in thethe Met,’’ Poetry Calendar 23, no. 1 (1999), 11. Philosophy of Architecture, ed. S. Parcell and A. Perez-Gomez

(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1999), 125-56.16 Maria Karvouni, ‘‘Demas: The Human Body as a Tectonic Construct,’’Chora 3: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, ed. S. Parcell 22 Plato, Timaeus, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Books,and A. Perez-Gomez (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1999), 116. 1977), 42.