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Abstract
For his last architectural work, the Porta Pia, Michelangelo Buonarotti produced some extraordinary drawings, which this article proposes are the first in architecture’s history to embody the creative potentials of sketching. In them, many ideas coalesce in the same space, resulting in work that is sometimes difficult to decipher. The frequent ambiguity of the marks on the paper resulted in a new role for drawings within the design process, in which the conceptual hold of the intellect is relinquished, at least in part, to be replaced by the activity of sketching itself. The article describes the drawings closely in order to reveal the novelty of this approach within architecture, locating them within the history of architectural drawing and showing their effects on architectural composition.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank David Friedman and the late James Ackerman for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this article, Friedman in 2008 and Ackerman in 2009. The first version of this article was presented at a New England Society of Architectural Historians conference in 2008, and a later one was presented at a European Architectural History Network Conference in 2017.
Notes
1 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, vol. 9, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere (London: Medici Society, 1915), 104.
2 Michael Hirst, Paola Barocchi, Cammy Brothers, Caroline Elam, Frederik Hartt and Mauro Mussolin are the former, while Charles de Tolnay, Luitpold Düssler, James Ackerman, Elizabeth MacDougall, Paolo Porthogesi and Bruno Zevi are the latter.
3 See, for instance, James Ackerman, “The Porta Pia,” in The Architecture of Michelangelo, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 258.
4 See, for instance, Caroline Elam, “Michelangelo: His Late Roman Architecture,” AA Files 1 (Winter 1981–82): 76.
5 See Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 202. See also the catalogue entries by Caroline Elam and Mauro Mussolin in Carmen C. Bambach et al., Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017): 272, 278.
6 Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, 251.
7 A historiographical note must be made about the history of sketching. James Ackerman’s last book, Origins, Invention, Revision: Studying the History of Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), contains the essay “Origins of Sketching” (1-20). Ackerman's essay considers the beginnings of certain rapid drawings for committing ideas or observations to paper. The history provided here is intended to enrich that which Ackerman recounts, through a more detailed analysis of particular texts important to the understanding of sketching and drawing, and by including passages that Ackerman does not mention. In a meeting with the author in 2009, Ackerman strongly encouraged the writing of a more thorough account, seeing it as complementary to his own thoughts on the subject.
8 Surviving works on parchment include, among others, the Reims Palimpsest and drawings for Strasbourg Cathedral, St Stephens in Vienna, Freiburg Minster, Orvieto Cathedral and Siena Cathedral.
9 Paper was invented in the fourteenth century and was not in common use until the sixteenth. For a short discussion of the use of parchment, see James Ackerman, “Villard De Honnecourt’s Drawings of Reims Cathedral: A Study in Architectural Representation,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 35 (1997): 42.
10 There is evidence that Strasbourg Plan A1 was pricked from another drawing – it has signs of prick-marks on its surface, but they do not go all the way through the parchment.
11 For examples see, among others, the terrace of the cathedral at Clermont-Ferrand and the drawing floor at York Minster.
12 As translated in Charles de Tolnay, History and Technique of Old Master Drawings; A Handbook (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1972), 2.
13 Almost nothing is known about Villard de Honnecourt – his so-called sketchbook is the only thing that survives. It is clear that he traveled, and recorded what he saw as he did so.
14 The original date of this book is cause for speculation, but the date often given is 1437. See introduction to Ceninno Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr (New York: Dover Publications, 1960).
15 Ibid., 16.
16 Ibid., 15.
17 Ibid., 1.
18 Ibid., 2.
19 Ibid., 4.
20 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin Classics, 1991), 94 (original emphasis).
21 See David Rosand, Drawing Acts: Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 29–32. Rosand recognizes two different uses of this fully worked-out composition. He describes the use of scaled drawing and squaring to transfer to the wall Masaccio’s composition for the Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella in Florence in the 1420s and 1430s, and Paolo Uccello’s for the Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood of the mid-fifteenth century in the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. He also describes the use of full-scale cartoons and the use of pouncing or incising in Andrea del Castagno’s frescoes of the Last Supper in Sant’ Apollonia, Florence, in the 1440s. Pouncing is “a method of transferring a preparatory drawing for a painting from paper to another surface … The artist would prick holes around the outlines of the drawing, place it over the second surface, and then dust powder such as chalk or charcoal through the holes.” National Gallery, “Glossary,” https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/glossary/pouncing (accessed May 2019).
22 While Alberti is often invoked for his support of models over drawings, both for him were necessary parts of the same process. See Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), Book II, chapter 1, 33–34: “… I will always commend the time-honored custom, practiced by the best builders, of preparing not only drawings and sketches but also models of wood or any other material …”
23 Ibid., 317.
24 Ibid., 7.
25 Ibid.
26 Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. A. Philip McMahon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 51.
27 Ibid., 108–109.
28 See E. H. Gombrich, “Leonardo’s Method for Working Out Compositions,” in Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1966), 61: “The reversal of workshop standards is complete. The sketch is no longer the preparation for a particular work, but is part of a process which is constantly going on in the artist’s mind; instead of fixing the flow of imagination it keeps it in flux.”
29 We have seen Cennino describe drawing as the basis of painting. In Filarete’s Libro architettonico, of which the sections on drawing were most likely written in 1464, drawing is given as the foundation of all the arts: “…[A]s soon as you have understood drawing, it will be much easier for you to understand everything else, whether engraving cornelians, or painting, or anything else done with the hand.” See Filarete, Treatise on Architecture; Being the Treatise By Antonio Di Piero Averlino, Known as Filarete, trans. John R. Spencer, vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 317.
30 Giorgio Vasari, Vasari on Technique: Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Louisa Maclehose (London: J. M. Dent and Company, 1907), 205. Maclehose’s translation uses the word “design,” which is not inaccurate, but in modern usage fails to capture what is at stake in disegno.
31 It should be remembered that disegno was a concept not only historically but also geographically and culturally determined, even in Italy. While the Florentines mainly espoused disegno, the Venetians worked with a much different system: colorito. The Venetians, for the most part, supported the method of building up a composition directly on the final surface using paint, rather than, as Vasari and those who espoused disegno as the foundation of the arts would have it, preparing a design in contour and line first, and then transferring it to the working surface. (The familiar process of transferring a cartoon’s lines to the final surface through pricking and pouncing is not possible in the Venetian system). It is because the architect, unlike the painter, does not work directly on the final object of his or her creation – because architects create drawings for buildings, not buildings themselves – that disegno offers much to the discussion of the architectural design process.
32 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori, e archittetori, vol. 1 (Florence: G. Milanesi, 1906), 169–70, quoted in Frederika H. Jacobs, “An Assessment of Contour Line: Vasari, Cellini and the ‘Paragone,’” Artibus et Historiae 9, no. 18 (1988): 142.
33 Vasari, Vasari on Technique, 212.
34 The project to establish the exact authorship and date of each of these drawings is that undertaken by Meg Licht, “‘I Ragionamenti’ – Visualizing St. Peter’s,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44, no. 2 (May 1985): 111–128.
35 Charles de Tolnay, Corpus Dei Disegni Di Michelangelo (Novara: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 1975) provides the best color reproductions of the drawings discussed here, in the largest format available.
36 There is some debate about whether this drawing is actually for the Porta Pia. See, for instance, Elizabeth B. MacDougall, “Michelangelo and the Porta Pia,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 19, no. 3 (October 1960): 102. The method described here originated with Michelangelo’s initial copies of the Codex Coner, a sourcebook of ancient Roman architectural motifs from the early fifteenth century; he abstracted elements from their historical relations, allowing them to be juxtaposed at will. This process was key to Michelangelo’s extraordinary architectural designs, and was employed in his proposals for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican and the Laurentian Library in Florence. For an insightful and detailed discussion of this method, see Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing.
37 He used a similar technique in his even later project for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (1559), first laying out the geometry of the drawing and then modifying his designs as he proceeded. See, especially, Casa Buonarroti 124 A recto and the changes rendered in the position of the altar. Casa Buonarroti 121 A is another interesting case. Here, Michelangelo lays out four distinct possibilities in the same drawing for the number of columns, their spacing and their relation to the entryway to the corner chapels. The series of drawings for San Giovanni dei Fiorentini also serves to best illustrate Michelangelo’s use of construction lines to set out the geometry of the drawing.
38 This is my own practical explanation for the slightly hesitant quality of the drawings, something that has not been suggested elsewhere. A drawing at the Ashmolean that has been linked to aspects of the Palazzo dei Conservatori similarly exhibits an attempt to reconcile these two geometries, although the method does not appear to have affected any of Michelangelo’s designs prior to the Porta Pia – see Design for a Window, Reused for the Design of a Door and a Niche, The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Presented by a Body of Subscribers, 1846 (1846.78; KP II 332).
39 Michael Hirst, Michelangelo Draftsman (Milan: Olivetti, 1988), 89–90.
40 It is most typical for Casa Buonarroti 102 A recto and 106 A recto to stand as the primary drawings for this project. They are chosen, it would seem, because of the similarities of their materials – the use of white lead and bistre wash to render forms. But if we use instead line quality to assess these drawings, Casa Buonarroti 106 A and 84 A prove to be closer in kind. Their qualities of line give rise to the same qualities of form, those of indistinctness.
41 Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, 254.
42 The strange uniqueness of this composition is summed up well by Christof Thoenes: “Within the cityscape of Rome, the Porta Pia remained a foreign body, impossible to assimilate and indeed not even assimilated by Michelangelo’s Baroque admirers. Only Bernini would permit himself to cite a detail from the gate, just once, on the interior of the Porta de Popolo.” Christof Thoenes, “The Architect of Rome, 1534–1546,” in Michelangelo, 1475–1564: Complete Works, eds. Frank Zöllner, Christof Thoenes, and Thomas Pöpper (Köln, London: Taschen, 2007), 338. It should be noted, however, that the publication of this design in Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura would spread knowledge of the work’s final composition and assert influence in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands. See Krista De Jonge and Konrad Ottenheym, eds., Unity and Discontinuity: Architectural Relations between the Southern and Northern Low Countries, 1530–1700 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 122–27.
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Jordan Kauffman
Jordan Kauffman is an architectural historian whose work focuses on architectural drawings and their dissemination from the Renaissance to the late twentieth century. He is research fellow in the history, theory and criticism of architecture at Monash University. His book Drawing on Architecture, The Object of Lines, 1970–1990 was recently published by MIT Press, and his writing has appeared in journals such as the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Architectural Education, Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture and Log.