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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 antique somewhat more systematically than earlier enthusiasts. Alberti surpassed Brunelleschi in his knowledge of the past, and in his work on architecture, De re aedificatoria, he imitated the classical writer Vitruvius in laying down his theories of architecture. In the book, and in the few works he designed, Alberti "demonstrated how to apply the vocabulary of antique architecture to contemporary needs" (Greenhalgh 129).

One of the principal demands his...

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Alberti & Hugo on Architecture. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 05:19, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692180.html