Plan of Tree Architecture Drawing

Past Sylvia Lavin

Circumvolve of the Sangallo Family unit, On Timber, the Species of Copse, cartoon for Vitruvius, book II, affiliate nine, c.1530–1545. Pen and dark brown ink on newspaper, 150 × 264 mm. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art.

The post-obit text is the commencement of a series of iv essays on copse in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Affair would similar to thank the author and the periodical'due south editors for allowing united states to reproduce the essays on www.drawingmatter.org. To order a copy of Log 49, click hither.

In 1546, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger died of malaria while working in Umbria about 100 kilometres north of Rome. Unlike Claude Perrault, who in 1688 likewise contracted a fatal infection as function of his piece of work – the source of his malady is said to have been a camel he was dissecting in the anatomy theatre at the Paris Academy of Sciences as part of the research that eventually produced the about comprehensive early modernistic study of comparative anatomy – Sangallo died as a result of the work he was called on to perform as an architect.[one] In 1545, Pope Paul III had sent Sangallo to the region between Rieti and Terni to develop a programme for regulating the Velino River. Its frequent overflows created a wetland thought to crusade illness, repeating a cycle of flood and illness already confronted in antiquity. In 271 BCE, the Roman consul Manius Curius Dentatus synthetic a canal system that channelled water through an bogus lake and a 165-metre-high waterfall. The system fell into ruin during the Eye Ages, resulting non simply in the render of flooding and of collateral territorial and economic conflicts between Rieti and Terni simply besides the return of affliction. Sangallo travelled between the two cities over the course of a year, crisscrossing the valleys of marshland and studying the structure of the Cascata delle Marmore and the Curiano Trench.[2] Earlier he could develop a program for restoring the water management organisation, all the same, he was overwhelmed by the very environmentally induced disease he had been sent to cure.

Malaria is transmitted through the bites of female mosquitoes seeking claret to nurture their eggs laid in shallow collections of fresh h2o, but Sangallo's death was also a result of an environmental theory of architecture based on a body of knowledge that included how to slaughter an animal and inspect its liver to determine the healthfulness of a site and at what time of day and nether what constellation particular kinds of copse should be felled, as well as how to avoid 'the poisonous breath of the creatures of the marshes' that cause malaria.[three]Sangallo practiced architecture in ways that exemplified this theory vested in the relation between building and living things. His reputation was based not only on his work as a structural engineer, military architect, and hydraulics skillful just also on his capacities every bit an architectural doc who, according to Giorgio Vasari, could restore dying buildings to proficient health. Well into the eighteenth century, Quatremère de Quincy still wrote of Sangallo, 'Creating a edifice is a natural thing, but resuscitating a building takes a miracle worker.'[iv] This ability to bring things back to life, from canals to people, helps to explicate why, of all the architects working in Rome, Paul III elected to send Sangallo into the marshes. Yet Sangallo's identification with this all the same miraculous skill also limited his reputation according to a competing theory of compages rooted not in environmental knowledge but in the divine nature of individual genius: ane oft repeated account hypothesises that Sangallo did non die of malaria just rather of shame at having had Michelangelo step in to amend the design of the Palazzo Farnese.

Lacking both the training and glory of painter architects like Raphael and Bramante, coming instead from a large family of woodworker architects, Sangallo is more often than not credited with standardising the conventions of architectural representation and practice.[5] This view of Sangallo equally a proleptically mod professional builder concerned with practicalities is belied, however, because he made numerous copies of aboriginal inscriptions while in the Umbrian marshes and was also securely preoccupied with Vitruvius.[six] In fact, the unabridged Sangallo family of architects, often referred to as the 'Sangallo clan,' planned a highly unusual illustrated edition of theTen Books that would have focused less on standardising the orders than on the interaction between living beings and architectural production.[7]For case, in Book 2 of Vitruvius, chapters IX and X are devoted to trees, a topic the Sangallos considered important enough to warrant an illustration.[8] Eight different tree types are each identified by a caption above the canopy and rooted in separate earthen pedestals below, set in a shallow space close to the picture aeroplane. The labels encourage a 'reading' of the drawing from the left to the correct side of the sheet, where the one-at-a-time presentation of individual trees gives way to a duck-filled pond bordered past a pair of aqueous willows that push the picture airplane into deeper space where a pair of mountain willows abound.[9]

The cartoon, post-obit Vitruvius, brings together copse useful to building as timber in various ways, from dowels and beams to pilings, merely it also reveals the emergence of a schism within epistemic space opened past sixteenth-century architectural procedures. On the left, the copse, extracted from their native habitats, are drawn as a wall of arboreal specimens in quasi-orthographic project, while on the right, they are presented as natural inhabitants of a landscape perspective. A path formed by the topographic delineation negotiates between these two kinds of view, minimising the advent of contradictory representations of space. A similar spatioperceptual difference was inscribed within the practices of sixteenth-century natural sciences equally scholars began simultaneously to establish botanical gardens in order to bring specimens close to the observer and to move into the field in order to written report the lives of plantsal vivo. This double vantage signal structures sixteenth-century herbaria, in which individual specimens are drawn in big scale and placed in the foreground while the plant's native growth setting is placed in a distant background.[10]But unlike drawings that superimpose the space of scientific taxonomy and the space of organic life but exit them separated by an impassable gulf, the Sangallo cartoon moves the viewer from one space to another, from trees in the procedure of condign timber, and hence of condign architecture, to trees in the process of living. The drawing thus entangles orthography and perspective, rather than standardises their differences, and constructs an anachronistic temporal reversal in order to account for them: the very 'beginning' tree, a trimmed fir, is presented as a quasi-technical object, indicated by the pot that has replaced its crown, and initiates a stroll down the cartoon'southward pathway that leads back in time to copse earlier such man intervention.[11]

Circle of the Sangallo Family, amphiprostyle temple plan, analogy to Vitruvius Volume III, Chapter 2, c.1530–1545. Pen and night brownish ink on laid paper, 150 × 250 mm. DMC 2939 r.

While using foreground and background to plant a timeline for the origins of architecture was common in Renaissance editions of Vitruvius, these 'stories' were more often than not told within a unmarried perspectival scene and a unidirectional timeline from the afar past to the near present. The Sangallos' simultaneous use of both unsaid orthography and perspective suggests a more circuitous timeline, and the complication of their history of the origins of architecture in the interaction of humans and trees is fabricated explicit in what has been identified as a cartoon for Book III, chapter II in which Vitruvius classifies temples.[12] Dissimilar about editions of Vitruvius, in which the temple types are diagrammatically drawn in plan without a setting in order to emphasize the comparative number and configuration of columns, the Sangallos embedded a unmarried amphiprostyle temple within both a setting and a narrative. Two soldiers, having arrived by sea and traversed a terrain topped by fortified medieval colina towns, are shown a plan of a temple past a magus, a Renaissance effigy with the attributes of the scientist, sorcerer, and priest, and associated with multiple forms of knowledge, similar the builder.[13] A hilly woodland has been cleared and flattened to make space for an predictable architectural drama, and trees, sized to serve as edifice material and connected to the site by a waterway, institute the wings of the scene.[fourteen] A program, drawn at calibration and directly on the ground, has been planted, and the activity is about to begin.

The drawing constructs a theatre, dramatizing the office of architecture in the interactions between fourth dimension and life that were visibly reshaping the surroundings during the sixteenth century.[fifteen] Already in the fifteenth century, writers similar Alberti were making ample use of analogies betwixt plant life and architecture to propose this dynamic, only the wordprogram accrued a especially potent double meaning when the Latinplanta (a sprout, shoot, or twig) becamepianta, the architectural program.[xvi] New buildings and living organisms, similar young trees and seedlings, were implanted in the earth because that was where they were understood to grow, and drawing was a means of this propagation. When Vitruvius gave instructions for laying out a new metropolis, he not only recalled the ancestral habit of creature cede as a means of gauging a site'southward existing health, he likewise provided a method for ensuring healthy air in the futurity that involved casting primal shadow lines directly on the world. Sangallo's drawing is a representational brainchild and architectural ritualization of these md-environmental activities and brings together old forms of knowledge with new forms of projection. On the i hand, there is the violent but noesis-producing cutting: only as a botanist would cut a found to expose its internal organs to the flick plane of representation, Sangallo shows the program as a horizontal cut through a building.[17] That Sangallo conceived of this as an abstruse plane is made evident by the fact that the surface of the world is rendered in virtually every part of the sheet except around and under the plan, which floats over nothing. On the other hand, Sangallo cutting the temple infinitely close to the ground, at a level continuous with the magus'due south pes that steps frontward directly on the earth. He also drew it at full-scale, as did the Colchians in Pontus, who, co-ordinate to Vitruvius, used trees non equally columns but as lines placed on the ground to found the plans of their houses.[xviii] Nigh extraordinarily, Sangallo drew the programme in perspective, equally if a thing seenal vivo, the protagonist of an architectural drama unfolding in an environment, similar the Umbrian marshes, the very natural history of which was being redesigned. This drawing is simultaneously a projection toward a time to come city, a futurity built on a thousand cuts, of the land, of trees, and of plans, merely besides a recollection of the time when architecture lived among the trees planted in the globe.

Notes

1. The basic literature on Sangallo includes Gustavo Giovannoni,Antonio da Sangallo, il Giovane; a cura del Centro Studi di Storia dell'Architettura e della Facoltà di Architettura dell'Università di Roma(Rome: Tipografia Regionale, 1959) and Christoph Luitpold Frommel and Nicholas Adams,The Architectural Drawings of Antonio Da Sangallo the Younger and His Circle (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1994). For his work on fortifications and in the countryside, see Giulio Zavatta,1526, Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane in Romagna: Rilievi di fortificazioni e monumenti antichi romagnoli di Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane e della sua cerchia al Gabinetto disegni e stampe degli Uffizi (Bologna: Angelini, 2008). For his papal commissions, run into Maria Beltramini and Cristina Conti,Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane: Architettura east decorazione da Leone Ten a Paolo 3 (Milan: Officina Libraria, 2018).
   See Perrault's compendium, Claude Perrault, ed.,Mémoires cascade servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1671). On Perrault's biography, see Antoine Picon,Claude Perrault ou la curiosité d'un classique (Paris: Picard, 1988). On his written report of animals, run across Anita Guerrini, 'Perrault, Buffon and the natural history of animals,Notes and Records of the Majestic Society of London 66, no. 4 (2012): 393–409.
2. On the architectural and environmental history of this region from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, see Emanuela Guidoboni, 'Human Factors, Extreme Events and Floods in the Lower Po Plain in the sixteenth Century,'Environment and History four (1998): 279–308, Saverio Ricci, 'United nations paesaggio 'testimonianza di civiltà': la cascata delle Marmore nella cultura europea di età moderna,'Opus:Quaderno di storia architettura restauro disegno, no. 2 (2018), and Miro Virili, 'Il Canale Pio e l'opera di Andrea Vici a Terni,'Memoria Storica, no. 39 (2012).
3. The phrase is from Vitruvius, Book I, chapter IV, 'The Site of a Metropolis,' inVitruvius: The Ten Books on Compages, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), 17. For more on Sangallo'due south involvement in Vitruvius, see below.
4. For Vasari'southward remarks, run across Giorgio Vasari,Lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors and architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, vol. 6 (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1913), 131. For Quatremère's, come across Quatremère de Quincy,Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages des plus célèbres architectes du XIe siècle jusqu'à la fin du XVIIIe: Accompagnée de la vue du plus remarquable édifice de chacun d'eux (Paris: J. Renouard, 1830), 1:185. The complete passage reads, 'Nous dirons donc ici avec Vasari que restaurer ainsi, c'est créer, et même faire quelque chose de plus difficule. En effet, ajoute-t-il, crére un edifice est chose naturelle, mais le ressusciter, cela tient du miracle.'
5. See, for case, James S. Ackerman, 'Architectural Practice in the Italian Renaissance,'Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 13, no. three (October 1954): 3–11. On the importance of orthography to Sangallo and the emergence of representational conventions, see Wolfgang Lotz, 'The Rendering of the Interior in Architectural Drawings of the Renaissance,' inStudies in Italian Renaissance Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press,1965), 1–41.
6. On these inscriptions and on Paul III's involvement in the engineering antiquities of the regions, encounter Frommel and Adams,The Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and His Circle, two:262–65 and 470–72, and Ludwig Pastor,The History of the Popes from the Close of the Eye Ages (Wilmington, North.C.: Consortium Books, 1977), 12:590–93. I am indebted to Jack Freiberg for these references and for his insight into Sangallo and 16th-century Italian creative practice.
7. On the Sangallos' involvement in Vitruvius, run across North. Pagliara, 'La attività edilizia di Antonio da Sangallo il Giovane: Il confronto tra gli studi sull'antico e la letteratura vitruviana,'Controspazio 4 (1972): 23–47, Ingrid D. Rowland's introduction to the facsimile edition of Vitruvius Pollio, Giovanni Battista da Sangallo,Vitruvius, 10 Books On Architecture: The Corsini Incunabulum (Rome: Edizione dell'Elefante, 2003), also as Hanno-Walter Kruft,A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present (London: Zwemmer, 1994), 69.
   On the other members of the Sangallo family in this context, see Adriano Ghisetti Giavarina,Aristotile da Sangallo: Architettura, scenografia eastward pittura tra Roma e Firenze nella prima metà del Cinquecento: Ipotesi di attribuzione dei disegni raccolti agli Uffizi (Rome: Multigrafica, 1990) and Sabine Frommel,Giuliano da Sangallo(Florence: Edifir, 2014).See also H. Günther,Das Studium der antiken Architektur in den Zeichnungen der Hochrenaissance (Tübingen: East. Wasmuth Verlag, 1988).
   Renaissance specialists and experts in the history of works on paper agree that the drawings discussed here are likely to have been made as illustrations to this edition, just they disagree on the attribution. Some claim they were drawn by Aristotile and others, Antonio da Sangallo. The authorship of the drawings, across originating within the orbit of the Sangallos and of Vitruviuan-based practice during the sixteenth century, is not fundamental to the concerns of this essay. Henceforth, I refer to their producer as Sangallo in this generic sense.
8. Vitruvius's chapter on timber emphasizes the interconnectedness of things: he classifies trees according to their proportional containment of the 4 elements that compose all matter. He discusses when to fell copse (non in spring when they are pregnant, because then, like women, they are weakened by the needs of their fetuses) and links the characteristics of different species of tree to their architectural uses. This interconnected concatenation, which includes everything from fire to poisonous breath to time, pervades all aspects of his discussion of architectural sites. For example, his word of animal sacrifice is couched both as a reference to an outmoded ritual and as a reminder of the complex of visible and invisible factors that together determine the salubriety of a site: a good for you liver in a grazing animal attested non only to its health, or even the wellness of its herd, but to the quality of nutrient, air, and temperature that also determined the health of humans.
9. The copse include fir, beech, linden, willow, and, possibly, maple.
10. Amid the best-known botanical drawings structured in this way are those by Gherardo Cibo. On the history of Italian botany, see Paula Findlen,Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Civilization in Early Modern Italian republic (Berkeley: Academy of California Printing, 1996),167–70 , ;Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, 'Gherardo Cibo: Visions of mural and the botanical sciences in a sixteenth-century creative person,'The Journal of Garden History 9, no. 4 (1989): 199; and 'New World Plants in the Italian Imagination,' in E. Horodowich and L. Markey, eds.,The New Globe in Early Modern Italia, 1492–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Academy Printing, 2017), 167–222. On early on modern botany more by and large, see Sachiko Kusukawa,Picturing the Book of Nature: Prototype, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human being Beefcake and Medical Phytology (Chicago: Academy of Chicago Press, 2012) and Wolfgang Lefèvre, Jürgen Renn, and Urs Schoepflin, eds.,The Power of Images in Early Mod Science (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2012).
11. The tree is designated equallyAbeto dolate, ortrimmed fir. On the human relationship of orthography to the territorial survey, come across Anthony Gerbino, 'Mastering the Landscape: Geometric Survey in Sixteenth-Century France,'The Fine art Message 100, no. 4 (2018): 7–33. On anachronism, see Alexander Nagel and Christopher South. Wood,Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
12. Run into the attribution provided past Drawing Matter, 'Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484–1546), Analogy to Vitruvius Book III, Chapter 2, c. 1530–1545.'
13. On the magus every bit a 'typology,' come across F. Borchardt, 'The Magus as Renaissance Man,'The Sixteenth Century Periodical 21, no. 1 (1990): 57–76.
14. Ane of Vitruvius's recommendations is to select building sites on the basis of whether or not they are near waterways that can facilitate the transport of architectural materials.
15. I am suggesting that the temple plan serves the purpose of the checkerboard design oft used in Renaissance images both to establish the perspective lines of a scene and to link that representational device to the weather condition of scenography and hence to theatre architecture.
16. Run into, for case, these phrases in which Alberti links plants and compages: 'Now that nosotros accept set down the roots and foundation of our discussion' and, more than pointedly, in the context of discussing columns, 'So to begin from the very roots, as it were, let information technology first be said that every cavalcade has a foundation.' Leon Battista Alberti,On the Art of Building In Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert with Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge: MIT Printing, 1988), 9, 25. An early Italian edition of Alberti's De re aedificatoria uses the discussionpianta several times, particularly when the discussion concerns dimensions. See Leon Battista Alberti and Pietro Lauro,I Dieci Libri De L'architettvra Di Leon Battista De Gli Alberti… : Nouamente De La Latina Ne La Volgar Lingua Con Molta Diligenza Tradotti(Vinegia: Appresso Vincenzo Vavgris, 1546), 148 and 151. Of course, following Vitruvius, Alberti also devotes a department of his treatise to trees. Run across Book II, chapters IV–VII. While using the termplant to refer to an entire building goes back to at least the thirteenth century, it is only during the fifteenth century that the unified and three-dimensional construction of the architectural constitute is separated into the plan(t) every bit an abstract aeroplane, which is further separated from the planes of sections and elevations. On the early history of these conventions, see Howard Saalman, 'Early Renaissance Architectural Theory and Practice in Antonio Filarete'southwardTrattato Di Architettura,'The Fine art Bulletin 41, no. 1 (1959): 89–107.
17. While the parallel between the cutting of human bodies in order to study their internal organization and the cutting of buildings to produce sections, plans, and elevations is frequently noted, the parallels betwixt the procedures of botanical investigation and architectural projection is less discussed, despite the nearly directly relation between at what distance to the ground a tree is felled and at what altitude to the ground a edifice is cutting to produce a plan.
18. Meet Vitruvius, Book 2, chapter I, 39.

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Source: https://drawingmatter.org/trees-make-a-plan/

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