Anachronism and Simulation in Renaissance Architectural Theory

Author(s): Anne-Marie Sankovitch

Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 49/50 (Spring - Autumn, 2006), pp. 188-203
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology
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 188 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

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Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

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 Anachronism and simulation in Renaissance
architectural theory

ANNE-MARIE SANKOVITCH

The Italian Renaissance is famously believed to have only by name and does not textually figure them as
achieved a true rebirth of antiquity, a phenomenon now palpable material monuments?allowed these structures
so naturalized in world thought that we rarely inquire to remain blank slates that could sustain the theoretical
into the belief system that gave it credibility. We tend to ideal of a dark age teeming with anticlassical buildings
subscribe rather blindly to the notion that the strange from which the rinascita could then emerge. Vasari
concept of rinascita was firmly sustained by a newly declares his intention to write a story of the "perfection,
invented tripartite historical narrative of antiquity's glory, and ruin, and restoration, or to put it better, rinascita" of
its destruction and abandonment (the "dark ages"), and the arts.1 He wants a sequential history of clearly
thus, finally, its rebirth. But when we look closely at compartmentalized phases in which the period of death
Renaissance discourse in architecture?more central to and ruin is structurally necessary for that of rebirth. In
Renaissance thought than is currently imagined?we the 1550 Lives, this is all successfully accomplished as
find that the historical imaginary of the Italian Vasari aligns his built examples with his metaphorical
Renaissance was, in fact, structured differently. Namely, model of death and rebirth and with his historiographie
its deep structure was not narrational, nor did it depend model predicated on a tripartite chronology and period
on the presence or the absence of antiquity (that is, on a style segregation.
pivotal diachronic figuration of the "dark ages"). In As I have elaborated in a recent article in Res,2 in the
architecture, the Renaissance historical imaginary second edition of the Lives, which appeared in 1568,
fundamentally was not aligned with a tripartite narrative. Vasari's lucid structure develops numerous cracks and
Indeed, at its core it was not even temporal in the usual flaws. The integrity of his Petrarchan narrative, and
diachronic sense. Rather, its structure was spatial, consequently of the rinascita, is severely damaged. In
dyadic, and paratactic, gathered into an uncanny the second edition, Vasari examines architecture much
transcultural, specular chiasm. more closely and adds a lengthy narrative of medieval
architecture from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries. As
The completion of the historiographie model derived a result of these changes, Vasari has trouble making the
from Petrarch's invention of the dark ages has long been buona maniera antica, which he tells us is shared by
seen as critical to the Italian Renaissance society's self both the ancients and the moderns?by only the
definition as an age that achieved a true rebirth?a ancients and the moderns?behave properly. In his new
veritable rinascita?of classical antiquity. For the visual narrative of medieval architecture, the text is fractured
arts, including architecture, which is the focus of this between those passages devoted to plot and those
study, the text that has seemed to articulate most devoted to textual figuration of buildings. An ongoing
effectively the Petrarchan dream and to function as a battle is played out between the story (its theoretical,
manifesto of an achieved and singular rinascita by critical, and historical imperatives) and its rebellious
Italian renaissance architects is Giorgio Vasari's Lives of objects. In the case of the plot, Vasari is constantly
the Artists. Indeed, the first edition of the Lives of 1550 implanting the text with statements about how clumsy,
does successfully tell a story of the death of ancient degenerate, and far removed from the ideals of antiquity
architecture in the medieval period and its rebirth in the this architecture is and how virtually no progress is
Renaissance. In this edition, medieval buildings are made between the fifth and thirteenth centuries.
primarily encountered in two nondescriptive a-narrative However, in the case of the specific buildings that
lists, two laconic inventories. This lack of individualized Vasari chooses as illustrative examples?from those of
ecphratic substance?Vasari mentions these buildings fifth- and sixth-century Ravenna, such as San Vitale, to

This essay is a lightly edited version of a lecture delivered at 1. Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de' pi? eccellenti pittori, scultori e
Berkeley on November 18, 2003; the footnotes, restricted to citations, architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini
were filled in by Marvin Trachtenberg. It distills much of the argument and Paola Barrochi, vol. 2 (Florence: Sansoni, 1966-87), p. 13:
of the manuscript for a book, provisionally titled A Credible ". . . perfezzione e rovina e restaurazione e, per dir meglio, rinascita . . ."
Renaissance, virtually completed by Sankovitch at the time of her 2. Anne-Marie Sankovitch, "The myth of the 'myth of the
death in 2005. It is anticipated that this book will be published in the medieval': Gothic architecture in Vasari's rinascita and Panofsky's
near future. Renaissance," RES 40 (2001):29-50.

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 190 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

those of eleventh- to thirteeth-century Tuscany, such as want to pursue other issues, related to the rebirth of
Pisa Duomo?almost all he sees and describes are ancient architecture in the collective historical and
classical spoils or newly manufactured columns, creative imagination of the Italian Renaissance. And the
capitals, bases, architraves, cornices, and arches. That is, first issue I want to address is that the contradictions that
all he can see and describe are the formal stigmata of undermine the 1568 Lives result not only from a conflict
the buona maniera antica as it had been defined in the between a theory of history and the things of history,
Cinquecento. Moreover, several of these buildings are between narrative and ecphrasis. They also emerge from
also said to resemble the ancient manner and many are a conflict between the temporal and historical structures
described as beautiful or well proportioned. This is on which the ideological program?the myth?of
particularly true for late medieval buildings, which rinascita depends and where it takes place. That is, the
follow an upward trajectory that locates them at a Petrarchan dream of a reborn antiquity in architecture
considerable distance from architecture's miserable late and architectural discourse proved to be fundamentally
antique downfall. incompatible with the realization in historical practice
Vasari tries to deny what he has seen by concluding (such as the writing of the Lives) of the Petrarchan
his medieval narrative with the statement that "little or historiographie model. In the monodirectional and
no . . . improvement can be seen to have been made tripartite historiographie model, linear time?constantly
over the course of so many years [that is, since the fifth if unevenly moving forward, rising and descending,
century] by architecture, which remained within the endowed with momentum and the capacity for
same limits and continued to go on in that [crude and change?describes historical time and plots its objects.
inept] manner."3 But this desperate and clumsy textual The structure of the space in which the Petrarchan
intervention, which comes out of the blue and tries to dream was actually consummated in architectural theory
jerk medieval architecture back onto the narrative track and practice had, however, a different relationship to
Vasari wants it to take, cannot erase the considerable time and history. The best way to come to terms with
evidence of antiquity's medieval afterlife that he has this alternate schema is to begin with a consideration of
depicted. Vasari states that the buona maniera of all the archaeological nature of the rinascita and follow the
three arts adheres to a life cycle based on a natural sequence of causes and effects, actions and reactions
biological pattern: "Like human bodies [the arts] have that it engendered.
their birth, growth, aging, and death."4 But when he tries
to write art history's first detailed narrative of medieval As is well known, the rinascita's fundamental
architecture, classical architecture rejects the biotic archaeological character was manifest in the drive to
imperatives of a healthy mortal life and instead enjoys retrieve, reconstruct, and reanimate that which had been
an unwholesome, unnatural afterlife, morbidly surfacing lost, forgotten, damaged, and obscured. As the literary
throughout the period of its supposed death. In 1568, historian Thomas Greene has put it: "There is first the
the whole of Vasari's historical theory, which includes archaeological impulse downward into the earth, into the
his model of death and rebirth and his tripartite past, the unknown and recondite, and then the upward
chronology of tightly sealed period-style compartments, impulse to bring forth a corpse whole and newly
fractures and dissolves. His Petrarchan theory of restored, re-illuminated, made harmonious and quick."5
history?which within the self-enclosed imaginative
realm of the Lives works well enough for the figurative 5. Thomas Greene, "Resurrecting Rome: The Double Task of the
arts?cannot be sustained by architecture, by the built Humanist Imagination," in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the
things whose history the theory is supposed to elucidate. Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval and
In the article where I elaborated these and related Renaissance Studies, 1983), p. 41; see also his book The Light in Troy:
Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale
points, I was primarily interested in the implications for
University Press, 1982), ch. 11. Greene's reading appears to inform or
modern art historical practice of what I had found in find parallels in, for example, Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past:
Vasari. I asked, for example, what does it mean when Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture
the art history we believe we have inherited from Vasari (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999); Alina A. Payne,
The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural
and have never really been able to shake off turns out
Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
not to be quite as we had imagined? Here, however, I University Press, 1999); and, rather similarly, in Howard Burns, "Pirro
Ligorio's Reconstruction of Ancient Rome: the Antiquae Urbis Imago of
3. Vasari (see note 1), pp. 27-28. 1561," in Pirro Ligori? Artist and Antiquarian, ed. Robert Gaston
4. Ibid., p. 31. (Milan: Silvana, 1988), pp. 19-92.

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 Sankovitch: Anachronism and simulation in Renaissance architectural theory 191

Greene proposes archaeology as a metaphor to explore

the tension between the downward movement of
imitation and the transformative upward motion of
invention in the poetic imagination of the Renaissance.
In architectural discourse, the archaeological impulse
was, however, simultaneously real and figurative,
scientific and imaginative. In Petrarch's famous letter to
his friend Giovanni Colonna, the poet wrote: "Who can
doubt that Rome would rise up again if she but began to
know herself?"6 Knowledge as identity, self-knowledge
as self-presence are anticipated as the necessary
conditions for a reborn Rome; and, beginning in the
early quattrocento, Petrarch's purely literary and
nonvisual recreation project became a physical,
scientific, and, soon, visual enterprise as humanists,
architects, and antiquarians measured, analyzed,
studied, and surveyed the ruins; collated the information
with literary and other sources, such as inscriptions and
coins; and produced detailed verbal and then graphic
reconstructions. A general trajectory of penetration and
emergence can be charted from Flavio Biondo's Roma
instaurata of 1444 where the ruins, previously perceived
as anonymous, mute, and frightening mirabilia, are
given presence and meaning though the basic act of
identification; to their ecphratic reconstruction in
Alberti's typological descriptions of 1450; and, finally, to
their being granted visible substance in drawings,
sketchbooks, architectural treatises, and maps.
As a result of these activities, the derelict, disfigured
architecture of antiquity?principally that of Rome?
seemed to be made imaginatively whole again as Figure 2. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Basilica of Constantine,
architects represented the ruined monuments as if they Trattato di architettura, ingegneria et arte militare, Cod ice
were new and the depredations wrought by the passage Saluzziano 148 (Siena, ca. 1482), f. 76. By permission of
of time had never happened. Vasari wrote about Filippo Biblioteca Reale, Turin.
Brunelleschi: "His studies were so thorough and
intelligent that in his mind's eye he could see Rome as it
had stood before it fell into ruins." While Brunelleschi's wholeness, as in Francesco di Giorgio's reconstruction of
own thoughts on the matter are unknown, Vasari's the Basilica of Constantine (figs. 1 and 2).
statement accurately represents the efforts of many other In addition to the pleasures of making the monuments
Italian architects who believed themselves able to of antiquity transparent, alive, and knowable, the drive to
retrieve the original status of the ruins as undecayed and disinter and make whole was also stoked by the desire to
inviolate objects and drew this imagined perfection as if retrieve models and rules for contemporary architectural
it were materially real. If Rome was a shambles of the practice. In 1413, Guarino Guarini wrote about Niccol?
overgrown, buried, and despoiled, as in Etienne Niccoli: "Who could help bursting with laughter when
Duperac's ?mage of the Basilica of Constantine in the this man, in order to . . . expound the laws of architecture,
pages of the sketchbook and, above all, those of the bares his arms and probes ancient buildings."7 He finds
treatise, individual monuments were re-membered and
seemed to regain their long-lost condition of organic 7. Cited in Ernst H. Gombrich, "From the Revival of Letters to the
Reform of the Arts: Niccol? Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi," (1967)
6. Cited in T. E. Mommsen, "Petrarch's Conception of the 'Dark reprinted in The Essential Gombrich: Selected Writings on Art and
Ages'," Speculum 17 (1942):232. Culture, ed. Richard Woodfield (London: Phaidon, 1996), p. 424.

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 192 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

ludicrous both the activity of physically measuring and

studying?rather than loftily contemplating?ancient
ruins, as well as the notion that the rules of architectural
practice could thereby be discovered. Yet, Niccol?'s
efforts, methods, and goals, shocking though they may
have seemed to Gaurino, soon became normative. The
ruins were not only structures to be virtually repaired,
but also texts whose proper decipherment could make
legible the alVantica method of building, and, even
more, make virtually present and physically vital once
again alVantica architecture itself, as at, for example,
Andrea Ralladio's Basilica in Vicenza. These were
mutually reinforcing activities, and in each case
invention was directed toward the creative problem of
piecing together the detritus of the past into seamless
and coherent, unified wholes.

Yet all the monuments thus created, ancient and

modern, on paper and as built, were, inevitably,
anachronistic. The reconstructions were always
distortions, and the new projects were never really
credible counterfeits of ancient structures. They could
not recapture some single original instant in time but
were marked by the anachronic condition of multiple
temporality. This holds true not only for those ancient
types most difficult to retrieve, such as the Etruscan
temple, the Greek temple, and the Roman house, but
even the recuperative best-case extremes are
anachronic, as represented on the one hand by ancient
monuments whose physical condition should have left
little room for interpretive doubt, and, on the other, by
Figure 3. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Basilica of Constantine,
modern buildings that seemed to most authentically
Trattato di architettura, ingegneria et arte militare, Cod ice
reclaim the form of ancient prototypes. Thus, the Saluzziano 148 (Siena, ca. 1482), f. 80. By permission of
Pantheon?that most intact and celebrated of ancient
Biblioteca Reale, Turin.
Roman buildings?was transformed, fixed, and
supplemented as Baldassarre Peruzzi, Sebastiano
Serlio, Antonio da Sangallo, Palladio, and others
submitted it to a range of alterations: entrance steps
were added, an exterior pediment removed, its displays a considerable residue of Cinquecento novelty,
pilastrini shifted or suppressed, the columns of its such as the domed tholos or the balusters that become
porch were moved and increased in number, antique anachronistic traces situating the building at the nexus
statues were placed in its niches, fine exterior of more than one chronological moment.
revetment was invented for it, or, as in a drawing by Simulations rather than duplicates of what was lost
Francesco di Giorgio Martini, its interior space was and longed for, the products of the rinascita may have
dramatically reproportioned and a three-part elevation been formally seamless, but they nevertheless reveal
became a four-part one (fig. 3). Similarly fractured by rifts in the historical project of total recall: Indeed,
temporal misalignments is the building so frequently they reveal that this could not really have been the
praised by contemporaries as incarnating the dream of goal of the project after all. In this respect it is useful
perfect recovery: Donato Bramante's Tempietto, which, to invoke ManfredoTafuri's reformulation of the
for all of its seeming alVantica purity and veracity, imitation-versus-invention dialectic as imitation versus

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 Sankovitch: Anachronism and simulation in Renaissance architectural theory 193

Simulation. "The 'rinascita,'" he notes, "could only be being rendered uncanny to oneself, of cultural
simulated."8 Tafuri did not develop this statement much innovation and good intentions, or of historical
further, but it can be taken to mean that imitation contingency and expediency.
necessarily engages invention to simulate the full and Revival describes a very different?and ultimately
spontaneous retrieval of what is in fact irretrievable. That unreal, indeed, oneiric?experience. Time hardly enters
is, what the Renaissance proposes as creative imitation into the picture at all. The condition of revival is
was basically an act of creative simulation. Various immediate: It takes place now. History seems benevolent
hypotheses came to be offered as surrogates for the and cultural demands fortuitous. The revived object is
genuinely antique. These ranged from the openly allowed to see its past self narcissistically, as if in a
imaginative where artifice is foregrounded, as in mirror. Being displaced from its original home and
Francesco di Giorgio's Pantheon, to the apparently excised from the horizon of conventions in which it first
archaeologically dutiful, where anachronism seems took shape is completely without consequence. Revival
successfully dissimulated, as in Bramante's Tempietto. denies time because it denies change in time and points
That is, in some cases the gap between the ruin and the to the pure and intact recovery of something integral,
reconstruction or between the model and the made was uncontaminated, and whole that is unmarked by the
discernable and part of the game; whereas in others it molestations, whether benign or malignant, ignorant or
was more densely screened, so as to pretend that perfect deliberate, suffered by the survivor. Rather than
identity had been achieved. Anachronism, the difference difference because of time and history, there is identity
between antiquity and its modern simulations, was not a between original and revival despite time and history. In
predetermined stable condition but could emerge other words, revival is a state that is always out of reach.
anywhere on a continuum between the poles of artifice To claim, as scholars often do, that survival and revival
and dissimulation. Yet the signs of temporal distance can be simultaneously present in any given work or
were never entirely erased, and all efforts were period is to be blind to the fact that revival is a dream
identified as virtual rather than absolute retrievals. whose waking realization can only be a survival
simulating revival and seeking, at least in humanist Italy,
This brings us closer to the heart of the matter. Italian to dissimulate this distressing condition.
architects and theorists saw the interval of difference Recently, there has been a growing interest in
between then and now, but they could not tolerate it for reexamining Aby Warburg's concept of survival or
what it actually was. They could not recognize Nachleben. The scholar who has provided the strongest
difference as a sign of distance, irrecuperability, non reading of Warburg is the French art historian Georges
identity, and change through time because these were Didi-Huberman, who writes: "The Renaissance is
the conditions not of revival?of a phoenix-like impure?survival would be the Warburgian manner of
rinascita?but of survival?of the always mutating never naming the temporal mode of this impurity."9 Survival
dead. In art historical discourse, "survival" and "revival" provides a reading of the ?mage (like Warburg, Didi
have typically been comprehended as distinguished by Huberman is primarily interested in painting, not
degrees of intent and agency, and as respectively architecture) in terms of the multiple non-aligned
describing the essential difference between unwitting temporalities that constitute it: "An image, each image,
medieval and self-aware Renaissance uses of antiquity. is the result of movements that are provisionally
This was famously codified by Erwin Panofsky in his sedimented or crystallized within it. These movements
sequence of medieval renascences and one singular traversing it through and through, each has a
Renaissance. Survival and revival are better understood, trajectory?historical, anthropological, psychological?
however, as different conditions of ontological launched from far away and continuing well beyond it.
wholeness and of being in time. Survival indicates a ... To put it in plain language. . . the time of the image
difficult journey through time during which the survivor is not the time of history in general."10 Didi-Huberman
occasionally surfaces as hurt, contaminated, alienated, thus argues that Warburg's "survival" designates that the
and altered. To survive is to be transformed via trauma,
often by a series of accreted traumas, of dislocation and
9. Georges Didi-Huberman, L'image survivante: Histoire de l'art
et temps des fant?mes selon Aby Warburg, (Paris: Les Edition de
8. Manfredo Tafuri, Ricerca del rinascimento (Turin: G. Einaudi, Minuit, 2002), p. 82.
1992), pp. 13-14. 10. Ibid., p39.

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 194 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

temporal condition of images is anachronistic and not corporeal analogies, the reading of modern buildings
chronological as historians from Vasari to Panofsky would through ancient texts, and so on?all of these offered
have it. This interpretation can certainly be extended to ways of conceiving or of making architectural form in
architecture, where it allows us to appreciate that, for such a way that the anachronistic disfigurements of
example, the anachronism of Bramante's Tempietto survival were masked. Yet these dissimulative efforts
cannot be plotted only in terms of a simple ancient were successful only because they took place in an
versus modern opposition, or categorized only in imaginative space that effectively omitted rather than
formal, morphological, or stylistic terms. camouflaged history and the medieval. Conversely, this
What Warburg and Didi-Huberman do not allow, space was itself brought into being by these various
however, is an understanding of how Italian Renaissance dissimulative efforts whose drives, desires, and products
architects and theorists were able to persuade articulated its ideal configuration.
themselves that formally, morphologically, and Critical to comprehending the contours of this space
stylistically they had achieved an authentic rinascita? is the twofold nature of the archeological project of
truly a revival, beyond any survival?and that the rinascita. It is important to recognize that the restoration
specific classicism they created did in fact wholly of antiquity (fig. 4) and the creation of new buildings in
recreate the timeless and true classicism of the ancients. the ancient manner (fig. 5), while closely intertwined, in
Furthermore, Didi-Huberman sees the structure of fact, represented two separate recovery efforts: two
survival as a dialectical one, involving both survival and rebirths. They did so because they were responding to
revival. He declines to recognize that fundamentally two separate though related deaths: the death of ancient
there are only different states of survival, and it is buildings and the death of the knowledge of how to
precisely these different states that are embodied in any build. In the 1460s, Filarete poignantly mourns the
given work. That is, as much as a reappraisal of former, as he lists now-lost buildings that are known to
Warburg's "survival" is congruent with an understanding him only through their descriptions in ancient texts. At
of architecture that I would agree with, it does not take the same time, he relates the latter as a progressive
into account the mechanisms of dissimulation that are disaster, beginning with the barbarian wars that brought
critical to understanding the Italian Renaissance desolation and poverty (which, in turn, led to the
architectural imagination. For much of what was most collapse of the will and the financial means to build
creative about this imagination can be directly traced well) and ending in the complete extinction of
to the ceaseless inventiveness of its bravura architectural knowledge. A century later, Vasari again
experimentations?built and textual, graphic and stressed the dual nature of the loss, specifically
rhetorical?with epistemic camouflage: the efforts to identifying its two victims. He tells us not only how the
simulate a revival of antiquity and dissimulate the invading barbarian tribes destroyed the city of Rome,
condition of survival. laying it to waste and razing its architecture to the
ground, but also that the wars had killed all the
To sustain the illusion of an achieved rinascita, Italian architects: The knowledge of the art of good building
architects and theorists variously dissimulated the nature died with them. The ruination of the buildings was a loss
of the anachronistic interval that left its traces on all to the "miserable city of Rome," which had thereby lost
their creations. Instead of acknowledging the gap for its majesty and its essence. The loss of knowledge?a
what it was?a sign of irretrievability and non-identity, loss Vasari tells us was "of far greater consequence"?
of instrumentalized and maimed survival, rather than was a loss to all future generations of architects (and all
pure and wholesome revival?the nature of the people generally), including those of the recent past and
difference was concealed and cast as something else. present who felt it most keenly. The two losses (or
Difference was often accepted and even flaunted as deaths) were thus vanquished by two rebirths, as two
invention, license, originality, but its true origins and architectural cultures were restored to life and became
character were imaginatively dissembled. Dissimulative the two inseparable parts of the rinascita.
methods were devised, all of which dealt with the In this twofold project of rinascita, both the moderns
problems posed by anachronism and survival in formal and the ancients were imagined as active participants.
terms. The new and public discourse on the rules of That is, agency and motivation, the desire to save and to
architecture, the preoccupation with identifying and be saved, was conferred upon antiquity by Italian
classifying architectural errors even within antiquity Renaissance architects, as though they were in direct
itself, the conception of buildings in terms of Vitruvius's unmediated communication with each other. Often, the

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 Sankovitch: Anachronism and simulation in Renaissance architectural theory 195

ruins themselves are personified and seen as coextensive

with their makers. They reveal and show, they bear
witness. For Alberti, the ruins are professors who teach
him, and, similarly, Manetti in his biography of
Brunelleschi writes that in studying the ruins
Brunelleschi was studying the ancient masters
themselves. The antiquities seemed to effortlessly yield
their past perfection to the searching eye of the learned
architect. Palladio, for example, writes of the Basilica of
Constantine, as he does of many monuments, that "its
remains, ruined though they are, suggest such
magnificence that one can imagine all too well what it
was like when it was complete."11 That Palladio's desire
to know was equalled by the desire and capacity of
antiquity to disclose seemed self-evident. The ruins also
share the traits that the Renaissance believed were
possessed by the ancients. Again, I can cite Palladio,
who wrote, "the fragments of many ancient buildings
. . . provide, even as stupendous ruins, clear and
powerful proof of the virt? and greatness of the
Romans."12 And the ancients themselves are often
imagined as seeing and judging the works of the
present. In his praise of Giulio Romano, Pietro Aretino
claimed that Vitruvius and Appelles would have greatly
admired his works.
The active and direct engagement of the ancients in
the project of rinascita is most explicitly spelled out,
however, in Filarete's architectural treatise, which is a
Figure 4. Sebastiano Serlio, Theatre of Marcel lus, Tutte Vopere
fictional account of the construction of the Utopian city d'archittetura, et prospetiva, Terzo Libro (Venice, 1619), 71 r.
of Sforzinda. Filarete recounts that one day, while the By permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library,
foundations of a new building for Sforzinda are being Columbia University in the City of New York.
excavated, a large stone box is discovered, and in this
box is found a golden book, written centuries ago by a
certain King Zogalia, who had once reigned over a
disappeared city of Plusiapolis. In the Golden Book,
Zogalia writes that he is composing his text for the for which Zogalia provides detailed measurements and
future. He has foreseen the disasters that will befall his images is the Temple of Plusiapolis of which he writes:
country, which will be invaded by barbarians, fall into "Because of its beauty I have engraved it in this our
ruin, and disappear. Thus, the Golden Book contains a golden book, which we have left because ... it will be
series of detailed descriptions and engravings of the a memorial to us."14 The temple of Plusiapolis becomes
buildings of Plusiapolis, so that "posterity. . . can have the model for the cathedral of Sforzinda, and, in
some knowledge of us," and, as becomes clear, can general, the buildings described by Zogalia (buildings
itself benefit from this knowledge.13 Among the buildings whose architect's name is a specular anagram for
Filarete's real name, Antonio Averlino) are used as
models for the architecture of Sforzinda. Thus, at
11. Andrea Palladio: The Four Books on Architecture, vol. 4, ed. Sforzinda, the lost ancient architecture of Plusiapolis is
and trans. R. Tavenor and R. Schofield (Cambridge and London: reborn through the joint efforts of Zogalia with his
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 11. architect and the lord of Sforzinda with his architect.
12. Ibid., vol. 1,p. 3.
13. Filarete, Treatise on architecture, being the treatise by Antonio
di Piero Averlino, known as Filarete, vol. 1, trans. J. R. Spencer (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 183/105r. 14. Ibid., p.188/107v.

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 196 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

Figure 5. Sebastiano Serlio, Doric Fa?ade, Tutte Vopere d'archittetura, et

prospetiva, Quarto Libro (Venice, 1619), 151r. By permission of Avery
Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of
New York.

Filarete's story of the Golden Book can be read as an Renaissance architectural imagination in general, as it
allegory of the desires and anxieties of Italian sought to effect a rinascita.
Renaissance architects. The Golden Book makes This brings me back to the issue of the nature of the
antiquity transparent, lucid, and completely knowable. space where the dream of rinascita was realized: That
Antiquity speaks directly and immediately to the present is, the space where revival was simulated, by which I
in the present, leaving no room for interpretive doubt or mean the space where anachronism and survival are
distortions. The vast span of historical time that stands produced, while simultaneously being dissimulated. I
between antiquity and the present disappears. Zogalia would argue that comprehended as a temporal
fully anticipates the needs and desires of the future phenomenon, the archeological project of rinascita in its
builders of Sforzinda and also recognizes that his own two rebirths and with its two sets of actors was imagined
desire to have his architectural culture be made perfectly as two separate but simultaneous and intersecting
whole and knowable again can and will be satisfied in gestures across time: from the present back to the past,
the future. Filarete's allegory directly lays bare what is as the degraded architecture of antiquity was rescued
muted in the more scientific and dispassionate treatises and restored (for example, in Palladio's reconstruction of
of such authors as Alberti, Serlio, and Palladio. Much of the Basilica of Constantine from his Quattro Libri [fig.
what Filarete describes, in particular the participation of 6]); and also from the past to the present, as the
a desiring antiquity in its own rebirth, informs and architecture of antiquity became a model for
vibrates throughout these treatises and the Italian contemporary architecture, which could thereby be

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 Sankovitch: Anachronism and simulation in Renaissance architectural theory 197

Figure 6. Andrea Palladio, Basilica of Constantine, / quattro

libri dell'architettura, Quarto Libro (Venice, 1570), p. 13. By
permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library,
Columbia University in the City of New York. Figure 7. Andrea Palladio, Villa Rotonda, / quattro libri
dell'architettura, Quarto Libro (Venice, 1570), p. 19. By
permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library,
Columbia University in the City of New York.

delivered from the degraded condition it endured for so

long (as was apparently achieved in Palladio's Villa
Rotonda, seen also in an image from the Quattro Libri simulated revivals are equally present. In this space at
[fig. 7]). The rinascita only attains presence and the center of the chiasm, where the revived architecture
authority because the two simulated revivals function of the ancients and the new architecture of the
synchronically at the intermediate conceptual place Renaissance are brought face to face, temporal distance
where the two sets of regenerative vectors, projected evanesces. Here the condition of anachronistic non
through time, meet. identity, which characterizes each simulated revival
The space and the mechanism of rinascita is thus individually, disappears to be replaced not by identity
chiasmic, generated by the dynamic crossing of the two but specular analogy. Each is defined as authentic by
recuperative drives that together produce and articulate the degree of similarity it bears to the other. The
a virtual, superhistorical space outside of linear, dissimilarities between them are not negative traits, for
monodirectional historical time: A space where the two they are seen to result not from temporal distance but

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 198 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

from spatial distance within the same imaginative field. Raphael says about himself. Even the builders of the
Consequently anachronism, which is predicated on fictional city of Sforzinda declare their intention to
duration and chronology, becomes a term without exceed the architecture of Plusiapolis. Such claims are
meaning and a condition that no longer obtains. The not merely sustained by an insecure rhetoric that seeks
center of the chiasmic rinascita, it should also be to mask an anxious reality, but rather attain credibility in
stressed, is not occupied by the medieval, but at best by the virtual reality of the chiasmic rinascita whose
its transformation into an indefinable ahistoricized fog creations are, in Pietro Aretino's words, "anciently
exterior to the chiasm, existing outside the creative modern and modernly ancient."17 In this simple turn of
forcefield of the architectural imagination of rinascita. phrase, Aretino not only articulates the conditions of
Thus the objects created there are amnesiac, ignorant of non-identity and difference, but also the specular
history, and free of the distortions of survival. analogy, resemblance, and proximity that define the
Serlio wrote about Bramante that he had "brought products of the rinascita as a twinned, detemporal ?zed,
back to life ... the fine architecture which, from the superhistorical phenomenon that unfolds in a space
ancients to that time, had lain buried."15 Palladio where the slippery term alVantica gains semantic
concurred, "Bramante was the first to bring to light that traction.
good and beautiful architecture which had been hidden If the Petrarchan historiographie model is sequential,
from the time of the ancients till now."16 At first glance, linear, tripartite, and mono-directional and places its
these statements present us with an apparent ambiguity: events in a motivated narrative chronology, the structure
Did Bramante excavate and physically repair the long of the detemporalized space where the architectural
buried architecture of antiquity? Or did he build new rinascita could gain self-evident authority is, to the
monuments based on the study of antiquity, which had contrary, paratactic, chiasmic, bipartite, and specular. Its
revealed its forms and knowledge to him? Because we events and objects are not coordinated on a motivated
are familiar with Bramante's activities, we are inclined temporal chain where each is assigned a fixed position,
to answer that only the latter is meant. But understood but emerge dyadically as independent entities in a
as an imaginative exercise, so is the former. The shared creative and discursive field where the
statements are ambiguous only to the extent that we fail relationship between them is elastic. The rinascita, it
to recognize the twofold, simultaneous, and virtually might thus be said, has the uncanny structure and the
specular nature of events within the chiasmic field. mobile logic of a dream. This is not to say that it is
These statements also indicate an extreme proximity inauthentic or false. The rinascita was real to the extent
between restoration and imitation, which is not always that we understand it to possess the genuine reality of a
the case. Because the distance between the two revivals simulacrum. There exists no prior or exterior reality of
in the chiasm is spatial rather than temporal, the any substance and presence that it veils or distorts. It is
measure of this distance is not fixed but fluid and thus is an authentic cultural phenomenon.
able to expand or contract. In the eyes of Serlio and
Palladio, Bramante's Tempietto seemed to greatly narrow What the rinascita is not, however, is a phenomenon
this spatial distance to the point of near obliteration. Yet that can be narrated. It is a mistake to impose on
because formal difference within the chiasmic rinascita Renaissance theoretical discourse about the production
is not a sign of irrecuperability and loss, the interval of alVantica architecture the narrative structure that was
could be safely opened up (as in the Villa Rotunda). developed in the quattrocento from Petrarch's invention
Also, far greater disparities between the two revivals of the dark ages. The medieval was essential to the
could be absorbed into discourse as evidence of formation of the chiasmic rinascita, but only as an entity
exceptional individual achievement within a common to be immediately evacuated. Its emergence as a defined
field (hence the frequency of the trope that the ancients span of historical time generated its own obliteration in
have been rivaled and surpassed). This is what Alberti the imaginative and symbolic domains. The rebirth of
says about Brunelleschi's cupola, what Vasari says about antiquity could only occur not after antiquity's death,
virtually everything created by Michelangelo, and what but after the death of its death, the definitive consigning
of the dark ages to darkness, which takes place in the

15. Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture, trans. Vaughan Hart and

Peter Hicks (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), vol. 17. Pietro Aretino, Lettere sull'arte, ed. E. Camesca (Milan:
1, p. 127. Edizioni del Milione, 1957), letter 142 ("anticamente moderni et
16. Ibid., p. 276. modernamente antichi").

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 Sankovitch: Anachronism and simulation in Renaissance architectural theory 199

a-narrative space of the chiasm. It is here and not in the the virtually restored architecture of antiquity and
historiographie model, articulated by quattrocento images of contemporary architecture could be brought
humanists and transferred to art history by Vasari, that together as part of the same project, thereby affirming
Petrarch's dream of a revitalized antiquity was most each other's authenticity and, moreover, because of the
successfully realized, at least for architecture. The nature of the printed image could do so with great
second edition of the Lives is thus compromised not epistemic credibility. To a certain extent, two illustrations
only by the tensions between history and historical from Palladio's Quattro Libri of 1570 make the point
buildings, but more fundamentally by Vasari's (figs. 6 and 7). That both the reconstructed ancient
overarching intent to narrate a comprehensive and basilica and Palladio's own villa are anachronistic
sequential history of architecture, to construct a survivors, incapable of making authentically present
narrative link between antiquity and the present, to flesh antiquity's irretrievable condition of self-present
out what in the previous edition had only been a plenitude, is rendered irrelevant, as they dyadically
theoretical abstraction and to thereby bring the dark embody the state of specular analogy of the rinascita.
ages into light, make it visible: All of which gave This printed graphic project of rinascita was first
presence to a historical space that should not have any. realized and its protocol of representational tactics first
The assumptions and imperatives of the tripartite coalesced, however, in Serlio's treatise, the third book
motivated narrative were thus brought into inevitable of which appeared in 1540 and was entitled On
conflict with those of the bipartite paratactic chiasm. Antiquities. Prior to the appearance of Serlio's Book III,
This was the intractable flaw embedded in the very no ancient building had ever been published. Now
structure of Vasari's ambitious project. Serlio printed not one but a whole group of ancient
But if the trans-historical narrative could not serve as monuments in a single volume. The actual physical
an effective and necessary manifesto of the rinascita, condition of the buildings represented by Serlio varied
another genre could: the architectural treatise, in considerably and ranged from the relatively undamaged
particular the printed illustrated treatises of the Pantheon to a Greek building of unspecified function of
Cinquecento. It is for this reason that so much of the which Serlio had only a vague textual knowledge. In
material I have used to explain and illustrate the chiasm between these two extremes were such monuments as
has been drawn from treatises. I now want to turn to a the arch of Septimius Severus, which (as in Heemskerk's
more direct consideration of the Italian Renaissance and other views of the forum) was half-buried in the
treatise and the chiasmic rinascita. The many treatises sixteenth century, yet was graphically disinterred and
that appeared in the quattrocento and Cinquecento are cleaned up by Serlio. Even more, buildings in a near
typically seen as engaged only in contemporary debates total state of ruin, such as the mausolea on the Via
about the rules of architectural practice and as offering Appia, which Serlio calls tempiettos, were seamlessly
pedagogical models, both contemporary and ancient, pieced back together (fig. 8).
that illustrate these rules. Because they are treatises and Serlio's woodcuts did more than simply erase the
not histories and thus are not concerned with duration, varying effects of time and history that had rendered
narrative, and descriptions of the temporal trajectories of antiquity more or less accessible. They also effaced all
the classical, they have not been understood as offering traces of the buildings' diverse historical origins. The
a theory of the Renaissance historical imagination. And antiquities that he illustrates ranged from ancient
they certainly are not understood as being the classical Greece to Republican and late Imperial and
fundamental?in fact the only?place where the Constantian Rome and thus varied greatly in their formal
chiasmic rinascita in all its dimensions could be reified. and morphological traits as well as in their scale,
Yet this is precisely what they did and what they were. material, and relative lavishness. Yet the graphic
The dynamics of the chiasm and the relationship conventions by which they were represented reduced
between its objects are identical to those found in the them all to a common plane of stylized abstraction that
Italian Renaissance architectural treatise. This holds true annulled these differences. For example, the early
already for the manuscript treatises of the quattrocento, second-century Hadrianic Pantheon and the mid-fourth
even for Alberti's De re aedificatoria of 1450 that does century Santa Costanza (which Serlio calls the Temple of
not have illustrations. But it was the illustrated and Bacchus), two buildings that were basically intact, are
printed Cinquecento treatise, whose images took priority represented as versions of the same architectural mode
over text, that provided the ideal space to display and (figs. 9 and 10). That the Pantheon was far more lavish,
theorize the chiasmic rinascita. It is only in its pages that encrusted with multicolored rare marbles, and that its

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200 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

is usually interpreted as evidence of the cinquecento's

pride in its own accomplishments. Yet as true as this
may be, it is important to recognize that here for the first
time the two aspects of restored antiquity, its two
simulated revivals, were brought face to face in a
printed book and were, moreover, graphically figured in
such a way that both were seen as participating in an
identical architectural project that they dyadically reify.
Whatever their actual condition in the world outside the
book, whether intact, ruined, or unbuilt, known
materially or textually, within the self-enclosed
autonomous realm of the treatise they are all equally
real and whole. The treatise is not coextensive with nor
does it substitute for the experience of physical
structures out there in the world. Instead the treatise is a
self-focusing, self-reflecting, self-constituting world that
creates an alternate and authentic reality. Thereby the
imaginative space at the center of the chiasmic rinascita
was rendered visibly real and genuine in Book III,
whose pages created a superhistorical space outside of
linear time where the restored?graphically reborn?
architecture of the ancients and the newly imagined
buildings of the moderns are each equally present.
Furthermore, if the space of rinascita is created by the
fusion of two historical moments into a single common
superhistorical terrain, as already indicated, its two
groups of objects never similarly fuse or collapse into
each other. They never formally merge into an inert
synthetic monolith. The creative vitality of the rinascita
Figure 8. Sebastiano Serlio, Tempietto, Tutte Vopere resided in the differences between its two products, in
d'archittetura, et prospetiva, Terzo Libro (Venice, 1619), 68r. their condition of non-identical specular analogy. Had
By permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library,
he wanted, Serlio could have presented one of his
Columbia University in the City of New York.
reconstructions of a particularly badly damaged and
barely standing antiquity as a near duplicate of a
modern project. Yet he never did so. Instead, a series of
formal motifs appear in his woodcuts as devices in
individual forms are of far greater complexity and which ancient and modern projects are graphically
refinement than those of the Temple of Bacchus, is not emphasized as similar but non-identical participants in
signalled in Serlio's woodcuts. Thus the graphic the same architectural discourse. One such motif, which
conventions of his woodcuts dehistoricized antiquity derives from triumphal arches, is that of paired columns
and represented it as an idealized timeless whole where framing a niche and an inset plaque. This can be found
its diverse moments were collapsed into a single flanking either side of Bramante's Cortile del Belevedere
synchronie space. staircase, as in fact occurred in reality. But Serlio also
Despite the fact that Serlio's Book III was entitled adds the motif to many other structures, such as the
On Antiquities, he included in the dehistoricized, temple at Tivoli (fig. 11) about which Serlio writes: "The
detemporal ?zed synchronie space of the treatise a temple shown ... is very ruined. ... At the front there
number of contemporary projects and buildings, such as are no traces of. . . niches . . . but I have shown it in
Peruzzi's unrealized plan for Saint Peter's, Raphael's Villa this way . . . since it could certainly have been like
Madama, Bramante's unrealized project for the dome of this."18 He also incorporates it in his wholly imaginative
Saint Peter's, and, of course, his Tempietto. The presence
of these and other sixteenth-century projects in Book III 18. Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture (see note 15), p. 126.

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 Sankovitch: Anachronism and simulation in Renaissance architectural theory 201

Figure 9. Sebastiano Serlio, Interior of Pantheon, Turre Vopere

d'archittetura, et prospetiva, Terzo Libro (Venice, 1619), 52r. By
permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia
University in the City of New York.

Figure 10. Sebastiano Serlio, Temple of Bacchus, Tutte Vopere

d'archittetura, et prospetiva, Terzo Libro (Venice, 1619), 57v. By
permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia
University in the City of New York.

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202 RES 49/50 SPRING/AUTUMN 2006

orders, as Christof Thoenes and Hubertus G?nther have

clearly and extensively demonstrated, was a modern
invention. The very concept of an order, what properly
constitutes it, the hierarchy and canon of the five orders
from Tuscan to Composite, were all anachronistic and
dehistoricizing inventions both abstracted from and
imposed upon the vast chaotic complexity of ancient
buildings and texts. The first place where the orders
were codified and graphically presented as a
comprehensive canon of standardized forms was in the
?mage from Serlio's On the Five Manners of Building
(fig. 12), Book IV of his series, which had appeared in
1537, three years before he published the book on
antiquities. That Serlio published his system of the orders
before his book on antiquities has never really been
adequately explained. I would argue that the self
evident credibility of the theory embodied in the
?mages of Book III, the self-evident veracity of the
superhistorical dyadic rinascita depended upon
establishing the presence and credibility of
superhistorical formal links between antiquity and
modernity. Disembodied formal ideals detached from
actual physical structures, Serlio's orders were validated
in Book IV as the self-evident stigmata of classical
architecture, which they had not previously been.
Furthermore, Books III and IV were soon published as
one volume, and all its images, such as the
reconstruction of the Theater of Marcellus from Book III

Figure 11. Sebastiano Serlio, Temple at Tivoli, Tuffe l'op?re (fig. 4) and Serlio's project for a palace fa?ade from
d'archittetura, et prospetiva, Terzo Libro (Venice, 1619), 64r. Book IV (fig. 5), were now joined, thereby extending
By permission of Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, and amplifying the space and the project of rinascita.
Columbia University in the City of New York. Serlio's treatise, like those which followed, is a highly
effective manifesto of the cinquecento's pseudo
Petrarchan project. The Italian-printed, illustrated
architectural treatise is, however, not merely the
manifesto of the rinascita, declaring the parameters,
reconstruction of a Greek building. In addition to these nature, and intent of its program. It also is highly
ruined or completely lost ancient buildings, he even credible evidence?proof?that the rinascita had in fact
appends the motif to perfectly intact contemporary been achieved. The dream of architectural rebirth is
monuments, such as Raphael's Villa Madama. Serlio effortlessly made real in the images of the treatise
admits: "The niches at the sides ... do not exist."19 He which, moreover, could only have the epistemic
nevertheless refigures the fa?ade to include them and authority it does because it is a printed book. The
thereby graphically indicates that the Villa Madama, the advantage of the treatise over Vasari's Lives is not only
Greek building, and the Roman temple all emerge in the that its statements are primarily conveyed in images
same creative space, where the formal links between rather than words, but also that these images are
them are paratactic rather than sequential. printed. The sketchbooks and codexes of drawings that
The forms that most clearly establish the presence of were created by Renaissance architects always betray
a common terrain of architectural invention were, of the interpretive nature of their facture. The images in a
course, the classical orders. The system of the five printed book, however, seem severed from the messy
and contingent creative process of making and
19. Ibid., 238. consequently suggest that their information is self

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 Sankovitch: Anachronism and simulation in Renaissance architectural theory 203

printed image is launched into the world cleanly

detached from its origins in a specific interpretive
context. The printed image in the sixteenth century had
the kind of evidentiary status that the photograph did in
the modern era. It was Serlio's great insight to be the first
to recognize that the technology of printing and the
printed, illustrated book could be used to authenticate
and to incarnate the Italian Renaissance architectural
project of rinascita in a way that a narrativized,
chronological art history never could. At the same time,
the tremendous success of Serlio's project, which had
rendered the rinascita so real and credible, was the very
event that led Vasari, a diligent student of Serlio's
treatise, to believe that the rinascita's reality could be
written into history.

Figure 12. Sebastiano Serlio, Composite image of the orders,

Tutte l'op?re d'archittetura, et prospetiva, Quarto Libro
(Venice, 1619), 127r. By permission of Avery Architectural and
Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

contained and self-evident. Mario Carpo has recently

suggested that the technology of the printed image
"guaranteed] . . . that no middlemen will tamper with or
disrupt the chain of transmission?from the maker to the
user?of the image itself."20 But I see it differently.
Printing does not protect but rather suppresses the
presence of a maker as it breaks the connection
between an intending person and the image. The

20. Mario Carpo, "How do you imitate a building that you have
never seen? Printed image, ancient models, and handmade drawings
in Renaissance architectural theory," Zeitschrift f?r Kunstgeschichte 64
(2001):230ff.

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