Alberti & Hugo on Architecture

Though both Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) and Victor Marie Hugo (1802-1885) looked to the past for examples for contemporary architecture, they approached the problem in a completely different spirit. Where Alberti, the Renaissance architect and theorist, wished to impose greater rationality on architecture, and on the disorder of the Medieval city, Hugo, the Romantic novelist, saw a need to remain true to the organic, homogeneous nature of the city of the Middle Ages. The two men were similar in their perception of the Medieval city as an example of uncontrolled growth. But they placed an entirely different value on this fact. Anthony Blunt's remark about Renaissance classicism sums up this difference: "in architecture the revival of Roman forms was used to create a style which answered to the demands of human reason rather than to the more mystical needs of medieval Catholicism" (1). For Alberti, human reason was the expression of the divine in humanity, and reason responded to beauty. But, for Hugo, humanity responded to the divine at an almost instinctual level, and excessive rationality interfered with the mystical experience inherent in this communication.

Alberti saw the use of the antique past as the most progressive, rational alternative for the arts in his own day. Though this return to ancient examples had been started by an earlier generation, of which the architect Filippo Brunelleschi was a prominent member, Alberti was a scholar who approached the

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rk of individuals as of a community" (113). He reiterates the unimportance of the "individual genius," and goes on to develop his metaphor of architecture as a natural process. Hugo sees the great monuments, and the cities, as developing with the passage of waves of time. Each successive group of people, leaves its "alluvium," as flowing water leaves its alluvial deposits of sediment over time (113). Again, he dismisses the individual architect, saying that, "each individual contributes his stone" (113). Hugo then expands his natural metaphor and compares this bustling mass of humanity to beavers and bees. Thus, the nature of public buildings and the form of cities is the result of a natural process. The architect has very little importance in Hugo's view. A good example of how he manages to obliterate the importance of the architect comes through in his description of Notre Dame's transitional nature. As he says, "the Saxon architect had just finished erecting the first pillars of the nave when the pointed arch, brought back by the Crusaders, arrived and planted itself victorious on the broad Roman capitals" (112). Here Hugo began with the anonymous architect, and then replaced him with the personification of the style

Category: Arts - A