CODIFYING GOOD TASTE

Louis XIV’s minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert sought to assemble accurate documentation on the architecture of antiquity and to adapt that documentation to French architectural practice. He commissioned the medical doctor and scientist Claude Perrault to translate a new version of Vitruvius’s treatise on architecture (De Architectura, c. 20–30 BCE), more accurate than Jean Martin’s 1547 translation. Versed in the humanities, Perrault published in 1673 the first edition of the Dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve with illustrations by Sébastien Le Clerc. In his footnotes, Perrault did not limit himself to philological and historical explanations of Vitruvius’s most difficult passages; he also questioned the Roman author’s belief in the natural origin of architectural forms and their proportions.

Perrault developed his critique in an abridged edition of his translation published the following year and, more forcefully, in his Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes (Treatise of the Five Orders of Columns) of 1683 (fig. 60.21). He posited two kinds of beauty in architecture. The first, which he called ‘positive’, rested on self-evident qualities, such as a building’s size, the quality of its materials, the neatness of its construction and its symmetry. The second he called ‘arbitrary’: Perrault believed that prejudice based on custom determined a particular culture’s appreciation for certain forms. For him, modern Europeans had adopted the Classical orders on account of their association with the grandeur of Ancient Rome, not because of their supposed intrinsic beauty.

François Blondel and his contemporaries vehemently rejected Perrault’s aesthetic theory. In his Cours d’architecture (Architecture Course, 1675–83), Blondel maintained the tenets of ‘Vitruvianism’, the architectural doctrine based on the Roman architect’s writings. He reiterated the dogma that beauty in architecture rested on mathematical harmonies found in nature. Even the architect Antoine Desgodets, whom Colbert sent to Rome in 1674 to survey the city’s key monuments, adhered to the natural theory of proportion in spite of the blatant inconsistencies he had identified between fact and theory.

Claude Perrault never sought to eliminate Classical forms. On the contrary: because he had proclaimed that architectural beauty rested in part on custom, he decided to rationalize architectural conventions. He created simple proportional rules for the orders, in an attempt to supersede the complex ratios that Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola had propagated in his influential Regola Delli Cinque Ordini D’Architettura (Canon of the Five Orders of Architecture, 1562). While the theory of arbitrary beauty may have helped Perrault elaborate a rational system of architectural proportions, it prepared the ground for the demise of Classicism during the nineteenth century and the rise of Eclecticism and Historicism.