ERIKA NAGINSKI: This brings us to the second building
in Wittkower's sequence--
Santa Maria Novella in Florence,
which, to his mind, is offering an alternative solution
to the problem of what it means to fuse an Italian medieval structure
and a classical idiom.
Now, Santa Maria Novella was a building originally
erected under the auspices not of the Franciscan Order, as in the Tempio,
but of the Dominican Order.
It was completed around 1360,
and the commission came to Alberti a century later
from a rich Florentine textile merchant by the name of Giovanni Rucellai.
Santa Maria Novella confronted Alberti with a similar set of issues to those
he had faced at the Tempio in Rimini.
Again, he relied on the ornamental capacities
of pilasters and engaged columns, refusing the idea
that the column should have a structural function.
He also relied on the idea of a cornice projecting over half columns
on pedestals at each side of the entrance.
He inserted-- and this is different from the Tempio--
a high attic zone, which separates the lower story from the upper story.
One thing we do know is that he had to incorporate
that large, round Gothic window.
He didn't have any choice about that.
And what he did instead was reiterate it, in some sense.
It gets reiterated by the decorative motif in the triangular pediment,
as well as the gigantic scrolls to either side.
This, in other words, is actualizing something
that he had entertained at Rimini.
Now, one of the things that's striking about Santa Maria Novella
is that despite its classical forms--
we see columns, we see elaborate capitals--
it is a church that maintains Tuscan formal traditions.
You have multi-colored marble encrustations.
You have pointed arches. You have even the ornament
of the capitals and the scrolls, which all have Florentine prototypes.
Now, if you take Wittkower's interpretation of this building,
Alberti's goal was to, quote unquote, "harmonize" the medieval facade,
to find what he called a "mutual accord" between the old
and the new-- between the old structure and the new idea.
It's important here, also, to underscore that Alberti was even more
limited than he had been at the Tempio.
Not only could he not make an envelope for the entire building--
he was really only looking at the facade--
but he had to incorporate aspects of the facade that were standing:
the aforementioned window, the side entrance's under-pointed arches,
which is as far removed from the classical idiom as you can imagine,
the high blind arcades, in which the arches are simply part of the wall.
He also carried over the original color scheme of the marble encrustation--
white panels with green bands--
into his own additions.
One thing we might want to do is to pay attention
to what might be called the kind of civic, or patriotic, historicism
of the facade's stylistic aspect.
The pillars at Santa Maria Novella actually refer back
to the corners of the 11th-century Baptistery, which
had similar horizontal encrustations.
And you might also want to turn to the Romanesque church of San Miniato al
Monte, begun in the early 11th century.
Its facade is from the 12th century.
It's clear that Alberti seems to have been looking at that source
as he developed the idea of a two-story disposition
for the facade with a pedimented upper level for screening the nave.
In this sense, Alberti's design for the facade of Santa Maria Novella
is deeply traditional.
It's local, it's historiated, and it is patriotically Florentine.
This more vernacular aspect is completely uninteresting to Wittkower.
He's not interested in recovering those sources
and talking about the local and patriotic aspects of the commission--
he wants to see something else at work.
And this is what he reveals by means, of course, of his diagrams.
Now, his argument is that by focusing on the noticeably high attic separating
the lower register from the upper register,
we can see how Alberti actually, quote, "overcame"--
and this is Wittkower-- "some of the difficulties
which had remained unresolved in Rimini," end of quote.
So, somehow that strong attic zone, that strong horizontal band for Wittkower
is what detracts from the fact that, although the inner piers are
continued down below by the columns, the outer piers are not,
and this might offer the same kind of visual dead end
and confrontation between verticality and horizontally that we had at Rimini.
By inserting that attic zone, the problem, as it were, disappears.
In other words, we have alighted the discrepancy between the entrance
register and the upper story.
And what could have been a pastiche effect
becomes patently obvious to what Wittkower calls
the, quote unquote, "classical eye."
This needs explanation, and here's Wittkower to do so.
Quote, "The attic in Santa Maria Novella is
at the same time effective as a horizontal barrier
and neutralizes the vertical tendency of the projecting entablature
above the columns,
the motif which had led to such difficulties...in Rimini."
In other words, Wittkower sees Alberti as able
to offer here, at Santa Maria Novella, the colossal columns
as an ornamental vehicle without the kind of confusion
that he ran into at the Tempio.
In other words, Santa Maria Novella solves the problem of the Tempio.
After focusing on the attic, Wittkower focuses
on the complexities of the entrance, framed
by those two colossal green columns.
Now, like the Tempio in Rimini, you have two pilasters carrying up to an arch.
But there's no pediment over the door, as there was at the Tempio.
And what instead asserts itself is a much deeper space that
lets a highly decorative ornate entablature
course its way back into the recesses of the entrance depth.
This not only makes the entrance closer to an antique prototype,
in fact, the Pantheon in Rome,
but, more to the point, and this is again Wittkower's language,
it makes the composition, quote unquote, "tighter somehow, as opposed to vague
and floating and surface-oriented in Rimini."
This is very noticeable in Wittkower's language, this kind of seeking out
of compactness, of legibility, of coherence, in this second example,
as opposed to Rimini.
It's a way to describe in language the kind of developmental terms
of Alberti's quest to apply a classical idiom to the facade
and seek out tightness and unity in the end result.
The other advantage of turning to Santa Maria Novella after Rimini
is that it imposes an immaculate chronology.
It says that, somehow, the Tempio in Rimini--
you'll remember that the commission dates from about 1450 to 1454--
is followed, then, by Santa Maria Novella,
which unfolded as a commission between 1456 and about 1470.
Wittkower is allowed to conclude along these lines.
Quote, "The entrance to [the Tempio], is only the first step
leading to the fully developed classical composition displayed
in that of Santa Maria Novella."
So given the allegiance to Tuscan precedences, to Tuscan motifs,
to 12th-century sources like San Miniato,
like the Baptistery in Florence, one might
be led to ask what manner of classicism is this
beyond entablatures and columns?
In other words, is there really a system here?
This is where Wittkower's diagram steps in, of course,
and where he unveils his explanation of classical harmony.
"Harmony, the essence of beauty, consists... in the relation of the parts
to each other and to the whole,
and, in fact, a single system of proportion permeates the facade,
and the pace and size of every single part and detail
is fixed and defined by it.
Proportions recommended by Alberti are the simple relations of one to one, one to two, one to three,
two to three, three to four," and so on.
"...which Alberti had found in classical buildings.
The diameter of the Pantheon, for instance,
corresponds exactly to its height,
half its diameter corresponds to the height of the substructure,
as well as to that of the dome," and so on and so forth.
In view of this kind of explanation, in view of this scheme of things,
simple ratios--
the idea of simple ratios, emerge as the principle dictating
the configuration of the facade.
So for example, in that diagram, Wittkower
inscribes the entire facade in a square.
That rectangle cuts the large square in half,
explains the relation of the two stories to each other.
The lower story encompasses two of the squares,
while the upper centralizes one of them.
What this means is a ratio of 1:2.
In figure four, another diagram,
the same ratio is shown in the sub-units of each of the stories.
The central bay of the upper story is a perfect square
whose sides correspond precisely to half the width of the whole story.
The whole story can be summed divided into four equal squares: two
corresponding to the pediment and to the entablature,
and then two to the pilastered wall below.
The subdividing continues on and on, with the smaller four squares
defined in dashes in Wittkower's diagram
becoming the fundamental module for the attic and the entrance door.
And then there are the 1:3 ratios.
The height of the entrance bay is exactly 1 and 1/2 time its width.
Furthermore, the small square encrustations of the attic
are 1/3 of the attic's height, and are related in a ratio of 2:1
to the actual diameter of the columns, and so on, and so forth.
The story of ratios of modules unfolds.
And the whole point of this diagrammatic demonstration of Santa Maria Novella's
ostensive geometrical harmony is to introduce the conceptual basis
of an otherwise stylistically retrograde and confusing, or eclectic, facade
with Tuscan and medieval roots.
Here's Wittkower again--
"The whole facade is geometrically built up of a progressive duplication,
or, alternatively, a progressive halving of ratios.
It is clear that Alberti's theoretical precept
that the same proportion be kept throughout the building
has here been fulfilled.
It is the strict application of an unbroken series
of ratios that marks the unmedieval character of this... facade
and makes it the first great Renaissance example of eurythmia."
What is "eurythmia" in this context?
In Greek, eurythmy designates graceful movement or the graceful movement
of a well-proportioned object.
And we can even turn to the Hellenistic architectural theorist and engineer
Vitruvius, for an explanation of this architectural concept.
For Vitruvius, architecture consists actually,
in six fundamental principles.
The first is order, the second is arrangement or disposition,
the third is eurythmy, the fourth is symmetry, the fifth is decor,
and the sixth is distribution.
For Vitruvius, eurythmia quote, "depends on the beautiful shape of the building,
and on the proper appearance achieved by the arrangement
of its individual parts.
It is achieved when the elements of the work are proportionate in height
to width, length to breadth, and every element corresponds in its dimensions
to the total symmetries of the whole."
Eurythmia, put another way, speaks to the beautiful relation
of parts as an architectural principle, as a geometric necessity.
So eurythmy is associated with the appearance of visual beauty,
as opposed to symmetry, which belongs to something more abstract.
It is defined as a kind of illusion of grace,
or the quality of being well-shaped.
It signifies an aesthetic sense of wholeness,
of an overall coherence of the work.
Eurythmy is crucially based on the aesthetic apprehension of a composition
in proportional terms.
Because of this eurythmy, because of this appearance
of the beauty of the ratios in Santa Maria Novella,
we come to this conclusion.
The Tempio poses the problem of aesthetic apprehension,
and Santa Maria Novella solves it.