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Translation and/or Representation

Joseph Rykwert

In the era of the paperless office, which the computer has introduced, the place of
drawing in the creation of buildings seems to me to require renewed and close
attention. Because drawing is not merely an expressive but also a cognitive activity.

Which puts me in mind of the English sculptor Eric Gill's quoting a child who made
some very nice drawings; when asked why they were so good, the child said: "First
I think and then I draw my think." Gill opposed that response to the art student's
approach: "First I look and then I draw my look."1

I see the opposition as factitious, since what you think would never have got into
your thinking if you had not looked first. The look and the think are tightly
interdependent.

But Gill's aphorism has its use if you wish to understand why drawing is an
essential process, one that has given its name to a large body of human activity, the
"arti del disegno," "les arts du dessein" - unfortunately called the "visual arts" in
English, thus divorcing the drawing from the intention. The French language did the
same in the nineteenth century: the noun dessin was derived from the verb
dessiner to signify a drawing and separated from dessein, defined by the dictionary
of the Academy as "intention de faire quelque chose, projet, résolution."

It is that intentionality of drawing that I wish to talk about - the intention of the
draftsman towards an end other than the drawing: a painting, a sculpture, a
building. Drawing as the statement of intention towards some artefact other than
itself is what concerns me here.

Such intention involves a transition from the capture of a thought or a sight by

drawing a line or lines "around" it, as it were, so as to transpose it onto the more
corporeal business of other techniques - essentially speaking, in a kind of
translation.

This may involve, at its simplest, the passage from the sketch or preparatory
drawing to the painting, or from the terracotta or plaster bozzetto to the fully formed
stone or bronze figure, or, more indirectly, from project sketches to models and
working drawings to the building proper. We know that each passage from one
stage to the next inevitably entails a loss of spontaneity. Yet, for a century and
more, that spontaneity, which many critics hold to be the very guarantee of
authenticity, has been valued more highly than the monumental or fully
accomplished or smoothly finished final work - the higher and grander res ipsa.

The passage of the work of art through the different stages from conception to
completion is thus analogous to the filtering that the conception incarnate in the
sounds and shapes of one language undergoes in its passage to another language.
I speak to you in English, my thoughts are made up of English words. Some of you
will receive these words directly, while others will require the services of my
translator to have them transformed into French ones, and in that transition the
English-word thought will suffer an inevitable change, since words of one language

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will never quite coincide with those of another. You need only think of the half-dozen
English versions of the very simple, innocent-seeming French sentence:
"Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure."

Although such an analogy is invoked for sculpture and painting, architecture is

rarely mentioned in this context, even though the passage from sketch project to
finished building is considerably more laborious, with all its inevitable forfeitures and
contaminations.

At the beginning of the first modern treatise on architecture, Leon Battista Alberti
finds it necessary to define the nature of the architectural operation, which - so he
wants his readers to understand - is among the highest of all human achievements.
His definition is a polemical one. He starts by refuting a commonplace view of the
architect: "It is no carpenter [tignarum fabrum] that I would have you compare to the
greatest exponents of other disciplines: the carpenter is but an instrument in the
hands of the architect."2

The commonplace that Alberti has rejected depends, in part at least, on the
ambiguous status of the medieval master mason, but also on the misleading
homology involving the Latin tectum, which means "roof" or "covering" and forms
the second part of the word architect. It therefore ignores the primary Greek sense
of architekton, "chief craftsman."3 In the fifteenth century the noun architectura was
indeed taken to mean "the roof," "roofing" - the topmost covering. The offending
commonplace had the authority of Johannes Balbi's Catholicon, which may well
have been the most popular medieval word-list or dictionary. Its author gave its date
as 1286 but the book was often copied and printed over the next 250 years.4

Intent on ennobling architecture, Alberti then proceeds to his own emphatic

definition: "Him I consider the architect who by sure, admirable reason and method
knows both how to devise in his own mind and through his own energy as well as to
realize in construction whatever can be most neatly and aptly fitted out to
accommodate the noble actions of men - by working it out in terms of the
movements of weights as well as of the joining and massing of solid bodies."

Please note that the primary architectural operation is the working of stable reason
and admirable orderliness of method, and that it is an operation of the mind, since it
is in the mind that the building project is first devised; only then can it be translated
through compositional skills (the joining and massing of solid bodies) and the
operations of mechanics (the movement of weights) into whatever might (I
paraphrase here) most beautifully shelter the noble actions of men.5 Obviously, any
direct translation from a mental operation to the solid fabric is impossible.

In fact, the slighted carpenter can only become the instrument in the architect's
hand after the mental construct had been formulated into a sequence of
instructions. These may be reduced to simple verbal directions when the project is
a simple one and the craftsmen are highly trained and independent. But the normal
instruction will be (as it has usually been in the past) in the form of a drawing. Like
the carpenter, so the stonemason, the bricklayer, the blacksmith, and (even more
demanding) the finicky joiner or plasterer had procedures that were routine and
which they acquired as a matter of course and as part of their craft.

For example, no precise specification or instruction - certainly no drawing - would

have been required before the middle of the nineteenth century to tell a bricklayer to
lay his bricks in a Flemish or English bond or improvise his own, or to tell a mason
how to make a scribed joint in an ashlar wall. It was only when a departure from
such typical procedures was demanded, and when explicit direction might be
needed, that some graphic indication became essential.

The passage from the mental conception to the built form therefore involves a
double translation: first, from the architect's mind to the graphic - usually his own -
presentation, and second, from the drawing to the building, through the

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collaboration of those craftsmen who, like Alberti's carpenter, would act as his
"hands." In their relation to the architect they are therefore more like singers and
instrumentalists to a composer and his musical score than like studio assistants
working from the master's sketches on the canvas.

The graphic indications need not be drawn materially to scale, but may be pegged
onto the site directly, drawn - or, to put it more accurately, stretched - with bits of
string. But from very early times, instructions were condensed through scale
reduction onto a surface that could be manipulated - some kind of drawing board.
The cliché "on the drawing board" recently acquired the sense of "practical and
sensible" - in opposition to "theoretical" - almost as if there need be no mental
operation before the drawing of the lines, almost as if the mental, the strictly
theoretical part, as it were, did not need to precede drawing-board work. And yet
when allegorical figures of architecture appeared in the sixteenth century,
sometimes as lady-like statues, sometimes as putti, they were usually shown
handling compasses, set squares, protractors, and rulers (drawing instruments),
and not chisels, trowels, and plumb-lines (the instruments of the builder). On the
frontispiece of both Palladio's or Vignola's treatises (figs. 1 and 2), for instance, the
title is flanked by two ladies, representing theory and practice, carrying drawing
instruments - for theory, a quadrant and a square, and for practice, a scale and
compasses. Clearly, design was also understood as a process that is done "on the
board" ; it was the immediate outcome of a chain of reasoning. Work on the drawing
board was considered the essential passage from thought to materiality.

Fig. 2 Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola: frontispiece,

Regola delli cinqve ordini d'architettvra (Rome,
Fig. 1 Andrea Palladio: frontispiece, I qvattro libri 1562), Call no. CAGE M NA44.V686 (W3245),
dell'architettura (Venice, 1570), Call no. CAGE Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture /
NA44.P164 (ID 88-B1843), Collection Centre Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
Canadien d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for
Architecture, Montréal

Moreover, drawing was most commonly done in some orthogonal form: plan,
section, elevation, or even projection. This has been the case at least since the time
of Gudea, the Patasi or bailiff-prince of Lagash in Southern Mesopotamia towards
the end of the third millennium BC, who is shown, in a statue now in the Louvre,
holding a drawing board on his knees.6 This board or table has a plan of a temple
building drawn on it, and lying to one side are a scaled ruler and the stylus with
which it was drawn. The sculptor of the statue seems to be alluding to an already
familiar practice rather than displaying an innovation; presumably the process of
scale representation on a drawing board was well established by Gudea's time.
Since then, such orthogonal and relatively abstract drawings have been the most
common method of representing the project back to the architect himself as well as
forward to the builders who have to act as his hands.

Orthogonal representation, not perspective drawing, seems therefore to be the

architect's preferred method of visualizing. Even though the rules of perspective
construction had been formulated theoretically - also by Alberti in the 1430s - it was
only towards the end of the seventeenth century that a few architects began to
design through perspective sketches. In the corpus of about a thousand surviving

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drawings by Andrea Palladio (some of them splendid and elaborate), there is not a
single perspective drawing.7 There are practically none by Michelangelo.
Leonardo's "visions" of his centrally planned churches are orthogonal projections,
even if his drawings for a new city are sometimes detailed in perspective; but these
are, of course, not "design" drawings but rather theoretical illustrations, presentation
images (figs. 3 and 4) - as are the projection drawings that illustrate the books of
Filarete and Francesco di Giorgio.8

Fig. 3 Leonardo da Vinci: sketches of centrally

planned churches (Institut de France, Paris, MS. Fig. 4 Leonardo da Vinci: plan for a town (Institut
B.N. 2037 3b), from J.P. Richter and I.A. Richter, de France, Paris, MS. B 16a), from J.P. Richter and
The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2nd ed. I.A. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da
(London, 1939), vol. II, pl. LXXXV.1-11, Call no. ID Vinci, 2nd ed. (London, 1939), vol. II, pl. LXXVII.3,
87-B4362, Collection Centre Canadien Call no. ID 87-B4362, Collection Centre Canadien
d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture, d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture,
Montréal Montréal

I have appealed to Alberti because he seems to me to have been among the most
clear-headed and perceptive individuals ever to have written about such matters: I
would even venture to say that he was the most clear-headed of all. Alberti is
particularly instructive - even psychologically so - about how the architect conceives
a project, and how the passage from the first notion to its representation modifies it,
of necessity. He confesses that he himself conceived building projects with which
he was very pleased, as long as they stayed in the mind. After he drew them, he
found errors in the very bits that had particularly pleased him while the project was
only a thought, and accurate measuring and scaling of the drawing would -
inevitably perhaps - often reveal yet other misconceptions. In the translation from
drawing to three-dimensional model, more mistakes, even regarding numbers and
dimensions, would sometimes appear.9

That three-dimensional model, he considered an essential instrument for the

designer, which is why he was so strenuously opposed to prettified or over-realistic
ones. He wanted them almost immaterial - instruments for the full working out of the
conception. Of course, the completed version, the final step, is the translation from
representation (from any form the model might take, mental-noetic or scaled and
physically present) to the thing proper, to the architectural object in its full materiality
- something that cannot be accomplished by its deviser or inventor alone, but
requires the collaboration of craftsmen with him and with each other.

One of Alberti's most erudite successors, Vincenzo Scamozzi, being a rather

dogmatic Aristotelian, had to put all the varieties of both form and material into
categories. Inevitably he asserted that forms were excellent in themselves, while
materials - which are confused and shapeless by their very nature - can only aspire
to potential excellence.

For all that, he warns the architect (whose job it is, after all, to give form to brute
matter) against doing any violence to these humbler elements - and Alberti would
not, I suspect, have found his warning ill-advised: "It is no matter for praise if an
architect designs as if he were doing violence to material; as if he were bending the
things nature made to his own command, to give them the shape he has willed."10

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Yet Alberti would have formulated this question rather differently, interested though
he was in the nature of materials and methods of construction. It was not a matter
of categorical distinction for him, but rather a problem of translating one kind of
operation into another. For Alberti the whole tangible and phenomenal part of
building did not belong to the realm of invention and beauty, but to that of
realization, of sensibilia, and therefore of ornament. It was not, for him, a matter of
imposing one category on another, but rather of giving the notional a perceptible
body, of enfleshing or incarnating - of absorbing the tangible and visible stuff into a
mental model, or of adding the quality of perceptibility to the inherent beauty of the
mental construct.

Still, even the passage from concept to graphics, from graphics to scale model,
cannot ever be literal. Like many good translations, it may, at every stage, reveal
unsuspected inconsistencies and blemishes in the original.

However, since the project has to be reformulated in the translation from two to
three dimensions, the author at that stage can correct his errors, or purge the
blemishes on his original scheme. Alfred Tennyson, it is said, would never correct a
poem on his own manuscript, but would have it set in type by a local printer at
Freshwater on the Isle of Wight - not for publication, but to be able to work on it as if
it were not his own, to provide a kind of alienation from the text that the printed
proof or later the typewriter afforded, and which the computer has now robbed us
of.

The support and help of such graphic translation, on which many writers have
depended, has now been withdrawn. It has also eroded the limits over which we
need to pass from the mental image to the graphic representation, and this affects
all the further stages in correction that Alberti mentioned.

To return to architecture, however: once the craftsman begins to execute the project
from the model - usually wooden and homogeneous - and the concept has to be
worked out in masonry and carpentry and through the hands of several craftsmen
belonging to different trades and working in very different materials, the process of
translation from the representation to the ipsa res will involve another set of
corrections and pentimenti, which may sometimes be much more far-reaching than
those of a painter or sculptor.

You may follow the process in some glamorous examples: imagine Michelangelo
being commissioned by Pope Clement VII to paint the two "facades" of the Sistine
chapel (the two opposite end walls, only one of which was executed - the term
facciata is used by Condivi as well as by Vasari for the altar wall). The first
conversation about the commission probably took place near Florence in 1533, yet
both the pope and the painter would surely have stationed themselves mentally in
the Sistine Chapel - the pope presumably thinking of the wall as it then was, and
the painter stripping it mentally of the works by Perugino and Fra Angelico that were
already there (and perhaps of his own lunettes as well).

Michelangelo must have thrown a projection - a slide, as it were - from his mind
through his eye onto the rough plaster. We know a good deal about Michelangelo's
problematic return to Rome soon after, and the preparations of the real wall, and
Sebastiano del Piombo's interfering suggestion that the vast painting should be
done in oils (a kind of work, Michelangelo thought, fit only for women and loungers
like Sebastiano), and Michelangelo's return to fresco. He could then have had no
doubt - as we also know, but in retrospect - that between this image first formed in
Florence and the accomplished thing there would be many months of self-doubt,
and a working out of the composition in all its details, and that there would follow
the years on the scaffolding, during which, with his assistants, he would painfully
translate that original, primitive projection into cartoons to be brushed on the vast
and very material, empty but expectant surface.

The Sistine Last Judgment has had many enemies: prurient and overbearing ones,
like Pietro Aretino or Galileo Galilei, or marginally more theological ones, like Paul

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IV and the Fathers of the Council of Trent;11 but it was also intensely admired from
the beginning, frequently copied and engraved. And, in the opinion of many, it had
no equal in the history of Western art.

Any painter, however humble, beginning work on a plaster surface or on canvas,

will have had some such intuition as Michelangelo must have had in Florence,
without which the placing of a first line on a surface is impossible. Some will arrive
at that moment by working through many different detailed preliminaries, while
others may have the notion ready in the mind before they begin on any drawing.
Long before he undertook the Last Judgment, Michelangelo had spent several
painful years painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel; he would have known, from
that first moment of Pope Clement's commission, which of the existing paintings on
and around the wall, including some by himself, would have to be removed to make
way for his vision. He had long been meditating on the figure of the resurrected
Christ, to which there are allusions in some of the preparatory drawings done just
after the pope approached him (fig. 5). Between the first commissioning of the
fresco, by Clement VII, in 1533 and its completion, under Paul III, eight years later,
the original vision of the Resurrection had become the Last Judgment that we know
(fig. 6).12

Fig. 6 Unknown photographer: interior of the

Fig. 5 Michelangelo: study for a fresco on the altar Sistine Chapel, facing Michelangelo's Last
wall of the Sistine Chapel, ca. 1534 (British Judgement, from the album Walks In Rome, vol. II,
Museum, London), from A.E. Brinckmann, 1887, albumen silver print, 9.4 x 15.2 cm,
Michelangelo Zeichnungen (Munich, 1925), pl. 64, PH1980:1104.02:036, Collection Centre Canadien
Call no. W9429, Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture,
d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal
Montréal

But I return from that sublime achievement to my primary problem of building, and
here again I can appeal to Michelangelo: would he have had an analogous vision
when contemplating the heroic vaults of Bramante's unfinished St. Peter's, which he
was to reshape and transform so that they could carry the dome he designed (fig.
7)? The story of that remodelling and of the dome is central to the history of
Western architecture and has often been told.13

Fig. 7 Chappuis, engraver, after Baldassare Perruzzi: projection

drawing showing Bramante's project for St. Peter's, from P.M. Letarouilly,
Le Vatican et la basilique de Saint-Pierre de Rome (Paris, 1882), vol. 1,
pl. 7, Call no. M4867, Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture /
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

What interests me in this context, however, is that Michelangelo's prime move was
to reject all the projects that had been proposed or even partly built between his
being commissioned and Bramante's first scheme fifty years earlier. He decided to
return the church - which the architects in charge of the structure between himself
and Bramante had cramped into a Latin-cross shape with a long nave - to a
centralized, Greek-cross plan.

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Early on in his involvement, two models of the dome were made. He seems to have
made the first one, of terracotta, himself, though it has long since disappeared.
Following that, he had carpenters make a larger one, 15 feet high - a composite
limewood model that survives, though it was modified after Michelangelo's death,
first by his successor as the architect to the fabric, Giacomo della Porta, and again,
nearly two hundred years later, in the 1740s, by Luigi Vanvitelli, who was then
responsible for repairs to the cracking structure (figs. 8 and 9).14

Michelangelo's own initial notion thus went through a double plastic transformation:
from the kneaded and hand-shaped one to the built-up version. He had dismissed
the project of his immediate predecessor, Antonio da Sangallo, with undisguised
contempt.

Fig. 8 Michelangelo Buonarroti: exterior, model of Fig. 9 Michelangelo Buonarroti: interior, model of
half the drum and dome of St. Peter's, 1558-1561 half the drum and dome of St. Peter's, 1558-1561
with later modifications (Vatican, Fabbrica di S. with later modifications (Vatican, Fabbrica di S.
Pietro), from L. Beltrami, La Cupola Vaticana Pietro), from L. Beltrami, La Cupola Vaticana
(Vatican, 1929), pl. 8, Call no. NA5620.S9 B37 (ID (Vatican, 1929), pl. 11, Call no. NA5620.S9 B37 (ID
85-B7952), Collection Centre Canadien 85-B7952), Collection Centre Canadien
d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture, d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for Architecture,
Montréal Montréal

A huge model had been made of it, about 25 feet long and 15 feet high, with the
intention that it serve as the definitive statement, the perfect contractual working
document of the project; Vasari considered it Sangallo's masterpiece (figs. 10 and
11).15 But Michelangelo took his rejection so far that he actually mutilated the
Sangallan model, adapting parts of the interior to try out his own proposals. This
kind of working back, manipulating the representation in the interest of another,
different conception, is no longer a form of translation, since it involves distorting
the translation to correct the faults of the original text. That is where my analogy
between the linguistic translation and the built one may no longer be helpful.

Fig. 11 Huguet ainé, engraver: elevation and

Fig. 10 Chappuis, engraver: main elevation of section of the dome of Antonio da Sangallo's model
Antonio da Sangallo's model for St. Peter's, from for St. Peter's, from P.M. Letarouilly, Le Vatican et la
P.M. Letarouilly, Le Vatican et la basilique de Saint- basilique de Saint-Pierre de Rome (Paris, 1882), vol.
Pierre de Rome (Paris, 1882), vol. 1, pl. 18, Call no. 1, pl. 20, Call no. M4867, Collection Centre
M4867, Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture / Canadien d'Architecture / Canadian Centre for
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal Architecture, Montréal

Analogies have limited use, in any case, and should not be forced. I have already
suggested one limit when I mentioned Alberti's notion that the conceptual project is

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in a different sphere from the materiality of construction, which belongs with other
sensibilia such as the climate or the quality of the soil and water and where the
building stands, or even the name of the site. Yet until that last category shift, the
analogy of translation has been as useful in considering Alberti's description of the
design process as it had been for the work of the architects in earlier times, and as
it would also be for many of his successors, who may not have been as clear-
headed as he.

However, in the course of the last century and a half something more radical
happened to the process, as first the building site and later the techniques of
drawing and representation were increasingly industrialized and mechanized; here
again translation provides a close and useful analogy.

Perhaps the easiest way to disentangle this particular strand from the many
developments with which it is enmeshed may be in a discussion of the
professionalizing of design. It is not so much the teaching of it or "qualifications"
that concerns me, but the role of the model and the drawing.

About models, Alberti had taught an austere doctrine, as I suggested earlier: they
are not for showing to the client as a dinky baby-building all tarted up with colours
and model trees - that would be mere display of what Alberti termed ornament. On
the contrary, they are to be the architect's own way of working through his project,
his method of translating the mental notion or even the two-dimensional graphic
account of it into the solidity proper to building.16

With the industrializing of the building site, a new factor - and another stage -
appears in the process of translation: the working drawing is no longer the
architect's instruction to the builder, but becomes a binding, legal document in a
three-way contract between patron and contractor, contractor and architect.

This is not to say, of course, that patrons and builders were not litigious in the past:
Hammurabi's code, compiled in Babylon some three centuries after the time of
Gudea of Lagash (whose statue I mentioned earlier), imposed very heavy penalties
for building failure - including the death penalty for a builder if his patron was killed
when a house collapsed.17 The Greeks exhibited building contracts and
specifications, engraved on stone tablets, beside the buildings to which they
referred; Vitruvius counted the law as one of the essential disciplines of the
architect.

In my generation the building process has been locked in a tight mesh of contract
and regulation that is a product of an investment economy controlled by corporate
patronage, of different production and assembly methods, and of a much more
highly organized - because much more capital intensive - building technology.

This has thrown more weight on the drawing: the three-dimensional model is now a
relatively insignificant aspect of the process of representation. It would seem that
the mechanization of the drawing process in the computer, which is very recent -
just over twenty years old - will become another factor in smoothing that process.

What is increasingly obvious, however, is that the passage from the graphic
representation to the three-dimensional scale model can now be made by a
relatively simple mechanical operation on the screen;18 and a wood, or plastic, or
even stone model can be plotted or cut directly from computer software.19 And
because of the very ease with which computer representations, both two- and
three-dimensional, can be altered in this way, they will no longer be regarded as
reliable "documents."

This problem has already arisen acutely in the financial world, where online
registration or transmittal of information are not considered binding. Of course,
"hard" copy may still be required for documentation, and the contractual importance
of drawings and models will - perhaps, paradoxically enough, because of the very

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ease of computer operation - give increasing weight to the graphic quality of the
drawings and the communicative power and precision of tangible and three-
dimensional models.

I surmise that the quality and value of a translation from one language to another
depends much more on the translator's mastery of the language into which he is
translating, on his judgment and skill, and less on his knowledge of the language of
the original text. That is why the mirage of a literary computer-aided translation has
receded out of reach. It will be no different, if my analogy holds, for building. The
idea of a project entirely computer-generated from a set of specifications seems an
even more tenuous mirage to me; and the idea of conceptless designing seems
logically excluded, in view of what I said earlier.

There is no escape from the translative cycle of concept-representation-realization.

At each stage of that cycle, choice and judgment, as well as mechanical skill, have
to be exercised. Therefore, if my paradox holds, it almost seems as if the
mechanization and now the digitization of the means has focused attention on
elaboration and precision, the very quality of representations.

[Notes]

1. Eric Gill, Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940), 162.

2. "Non enim tignarum adducam fabrum, quem tu summis caeterum disciplinarum

viris compares: fabri enim manus architecto pro instrumento est. Architectum ego
hunc fore constituam, qui certa admirabilique ratione et via tum mente animoque
diffinire tum et opere absolvere didicerit, quaecunque ex ponderum motu
corporumque compactione et coagmentatione dignissimis hominum usibus
belissime commondentur." Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, "Prologus,"
with Italian translation in L'architettura, ed. P. Portoghesi and G. Orlandi (Milan: Il
Polifilo, 1966), vol. 1, 7ff.; English translation in On the Art of Building in Ten Books,
tr. J. Rykwert, N. Leach, and R. Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 7
(slightly modified). This echoes Cicero's De Claris Oratoribus, 73, "Ego me Phidiam
esse mallem, quam vel optimum fabrum tignarum."

3. The Latin tectum is related to the Greek *steg, which relates to covering. Hence
the architector is one who concerns himself with "top covering" - as Du Cange has
it, faber qui facit tecta. The modern use of the term is a transliteration of architekton,
the chief craftsman or maker, the master builder; tekton is from the Greek tekein,
the Indo-European root being *tek, making, begetting.

4. See Joseph Rykwert, "On the Oral Transmission of Architectural Theory," RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics 5 (1983), 25ff. Tignarum fabrum literally means joist-
maker, but is a common term for building-carpenter.

5. See note 2.

6. That particular diorite statue of Gudea of Lagash is headless, but there are
several other statues of him in the Louvre with the head intact.

7. For example, see Palladio's sheet with drawings of the Temple of Romulus and
the Temple of Vesta (Royal Institute of British Architects, London, inv. SC213/VIII/1
recto), published in H. Burns with L. Fairbairn and B. Boucher, Andrea Palladio
1508-1580: The Portico and the Farmyard (London: Arts Council of Britain, 1975),
103, no. 194, and his elevation for the Palazzo Ducale project (Chatsworth,
Devonshire), published in Andrea Palladio e Venezia, ed. L. Puppi (Florence:
Sansoni, 1982), cover and pl. 31.

8. One of the fascinating exceptions is the rather elaborate drawing of Donato

Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio (a central-perspective drawing of
the circular building), which has had various attributions, including inevitably one to
Bramante himself. It is now ascribed to the late sixteenth-century painter Federico

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Barocci. Among Michelangelo's drawings, the study for the Laurentian Library
staircase (Casa Buonarotti, Florence, 92a) has some central vanishing-point
sketches of the arrangements of the ramps. But clearly, such drawings are quite
exceptional and contrast with the vast mass of orthogonal drawings and of details,
some of them elaborately drawn and shaded.

9. Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, IX.10, in Portoghesi and Orlandi, xx, and in Rykwert,

Leach, and Tavernor, 317.

10. "Non é molto lodevol cosa che l'architetto tenti di far come violenza alla materia:
in modo che egli pensi di ridur sempre a voler suo le cose create dalla Natura . . ."
Vincenzo Scamozzi, L'idea della architettura universale, vol. 2 (Venice, 1615),
173ff. Like Palladio and Vignola, Scamozzi has two ladies flanking his frontispiece,
whom he called Theorica and Experientia, but he also includes a number of other
figures.

11. See Romeo De Maio, Michelangelo e la Controriforma (Rome and Bari: Laterza,
1978), 17ff., 31ff., 253ff.; D. Redig de Campos, Il giudizio universale di
Michelangelo (Fermo: Andrea Livi, 1964), 64ff.

12. A number of early drawings exist, such as Casa Buonarotti, Florence, 65ff.
Slightly later ones are in the Museum at Bayonne and in Windsor (12776).
Michelangelo, however much he valued the instant concetto, had no respect for
overly rapid execution, as is clear from his remarks recounted by Francisco de
Hollanda. But see David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 64ff.

13. For bibliography see Christoph Luitpold Frommel, "St. Peter's: The Early
History," in The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The
Representation of Architecture, ed. Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnago
Lampugnani (Milan: Bompiani, 1994), 399ff.; Henry A. Millon and Craig Hugh
Smythe, Michelangelo Architect: The Facade of San Lorenzo and the Drum and
Dome of St. Peter's (Milan: Olivetti, 1988), 93ff.; and James S. Ackerman, The
Architecture of Michelangelo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 193ff.,
317ff.

14. See Millon and Lampugnani, The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to

Michelangelo, 44-45, 663-665, no. 396.

15. For photographs of Sangallo's model, see Millon and Lampugnani, The
Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo, 35, 41, 632, no. 346.

16. Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, bk. 2, sec. 1; Portoghesi and Orlandi, vol. 1, 97ff.,
and in Rykwert, Leach, and Tavernor, 33ff. Of course, such a model will also allow
him to judge of many ornamental matters, such as quantities of materials and even
costs.

17. J. Bottéro, Mésopotamie: L'écriture, la raison et les dieux (Paris: Gallimard,

1987), 191; G.R. Driver and John C. Miles, eds., The Babylonian Laws (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1952), vol. 1, 425ff.

18. A good survey of contemporary drawing techniques is provided by Jean-Paul

Saint-Aubin in Le relevé et la représentation de l'architecture (Paris: L'Inventaire,
1992).

19. On the process of cutting such models directly from software see Felice
Ragazzo, "I modelli lignei delle opere di Leon Battista Alberti alla mostra di Palazzo
Te," in Leon Battista Alberti, ed. Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel (Milan: Electa,
1994).

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