The architecture of humanism; a study in the history of taste

194

THE

ARCHITECTURE

OF HUMANISM

to recall the

libertinismof the

seventeenth cen1:ury

backtotheacademic

yokeofPalladio.

But

othercauses,stillmore

powerful,wereatwork.

Threeinfluences,

incombination,

turnedRenaissance

architecture to

an academic art.

They were the

revivalofscholarship, the

inventionofprinting,the

discovery

ofVitruvius. Scholarship

setuptheideal

ofanexact

andtextualsubserviencetothe

antique

;

Vitruviusprovidedthe

code: printingdisseminated

it. Itisdifficulttodo

justicetotheforcewhichthis

implied.

Theeffectiveinfluenceof

literaturedepends

onits

prestigeanditsaccessibiUty.

Thesparse

and

jealously

guarded manuscripts of earlierdays gave

literatureanalmostmagicalprestige,but

affordedno

accessibility; the cheap diffusion of the

printing

press

has made it accessible, butstripped it ofits

prestige. The interval between

these

two

periods

wasliterature'sunprecedentedandunrepeatedoppor-

tunity.

In

thisintervalVitruvius

came

to

light,and

bythisopportunityhe,moreperhapsthananyother

writer, has been the gainer. His treatise was dis-

coveredin theearlier partof

the fifteenth

century,

at St.

Gall

;

the

first presses in Italy were estab-

lished in

1464

; and within a few

years

(the first

editionisundated)thetextof

Vitruviuswasprinted

inRome. Twelveseparate

editionsofit werepub-

lished within a century: seven

translations

into

Italian,

andothers

into

FrenchandGerman, Alberti