Williams Nexus Network Journal 11,3

Architecture and Mathematics
2010
ISBN: 978-3-7643-8978-9
Verlag: Springer
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 174 Seiten, eBook

Reihe: Mathematics and Statistics (R0)

Baroque architect and mathematician Guarino Guarini is the subject of this issue of the Nexus Network Journal. A group of international scholars were invited to contribute papers that shed light on the unanswered questions in several areas: Baroque architecture in general and Guarini’s architecture in particular; philosophy; history of structural mechanics; mathematics and history of mathematics, cosmology. As always, the NNJ takes an interdisciplinary approach to the broad range of subjects that Guarini concerned himself with, thus the final results will add significantly to our understanding of how Guarini’s actual practical and technical processes were informed by knowledge of his multifaceted scientific and philosophical interests.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Williams, Kim

Inhaltsverzeichnis

From the contents: A Structural Description of the Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Torino.- Guarini et la structure de l’Univers.- Unfolding San Lorenzo.- An Analysis of Selected Sections of Guarini’s Euclides adauctus.- Guarini and Universal Mathematics: The Sources and Role of his Euclides adauctus.- The Unpublished Working Drawings for the Nineteenth-Century Restoration of the Double Structure of the Real Chiesa di San Lorenzo in Torino.- A neglected harbinger of the triple storeyed facade of Guarini's SS. Annunziata in Messina.- Guarino Guarini and his Grand Philosophy of Sapientia and Mathematics.- Reflections on the Relationship between Perspective and Geometry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.- Projective Architecture

Leseproben

"James McQuillan (S. 341-342)

Introduction

The purpose of this contribution to Guarinian studies is to establish the ulterior or ultimate meaning of this complex figure of the High Baroque, which has not been fully dealt with previously, leading to even wayward results in the literature. So this will be an exploration of the hermeneutical significance of the polymathic attributes of the Theatine architect, who was also a theologian, an area in which he did not publish, as well as an encyclopaedic writer on philosophy, mathematics and astronomy.

As Joseph Mazzeo put it, the breakdown of hermeneutics in Biblical exegesis, has been followed by a reverse movement – ‘the secularization of hermeneutica sacra and its amalgamation to hermeneutica profana open the way to two opposing tendencies in modern humanistic and literary interpretation, the sacralization of the secular and the secularization of the sacred’ [Mazzeo 1978, 24]. Three hundred years ago, such confusion was impossible, and age-old conventions were in place to secure man’s place in the world, mainly through a cosmology which was being questioned, of course, but only by an elite.

In the time of Milton, everyone was an artist in the sense of participating in thought and enquiry, so that he could call Galileo ‘the Tuscan artist’. An encyclopaedic survey of optics and perspective was entitled the ‘Great Art of Light and Shadow’ (Athanasius Kircher SJ, Ars magna lucis et umbrae in decem libros digesta, Rome, 1646). The liberal arts still reigned as the introduction to philosophy both moral and natural (the trivium) as well as mathematics (the quadrivium).

The human mind was a reflection of the cosmic order under neo-Platonic-Aristotelian norms, shared by the great artists and architects of the Baroque, especially the only one who was also a scholar and mathematician: Guarino Guarini (1624-1683). Due to the breakdown in pre-understanding necessary to consider Guarini after his death with the rise of modern science, a fresh effort must be made to restore the conditions to read this Baroque figure as he deserves to be read.

Only since 1970 has this Theatine priest, a member of the Clerks Regular who practised as a court architect in Turin where he built the astounding Chapel of the Holy Shroud, been recognised on a par with the architects Bernini and Borromini. The young Guarini studied in Rome where the others were then flourishing, and presumably the novitiate studied these masters in detail. An attempt has already been made to construct a connection between Guarini artista and Guarini scienziato: Marcello Fagiolo’s ‘La Geosofia del Guarini’ [1970] presumed to explicate Guarini’s thought more geometrica. As Guarini seems to have made no change"