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2. Castas, Monstrous Bodies, and Soft Buildings
- University of Texas Press
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68 It is no secret that traditional discourses of classical architecture are founded on analogies to the human body. In the third volume of The Ten Books of Architecture, the Roman architect Vitruvius established what would become a permanent union between the proportions of the (male) body and classical architecture. Vitruvius asserted that the ancient Greeks designed their buildings using measuring units that corresponded to bodily proportions. “It was from the members of the body that they derived the fundamental ideas of the measures which are obviously necessary in all works, as the finger, palm, foot, and cubit”; hence symmetry in buildings was equivalent to symmetry in the human body: Similarly, in the members of a temple there ought to be the greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to the general magnitude of the whole. Then again, in the human body the central part is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses centred at his navel, the fingers and toes and his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms and the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.1 According to Vitruvius, perfect proportion for the Greeks expressed divine order and harmony; consequently architecture was infused with mystical qualities. Vitruvius’s vision of the man with arms and legs spread within a circle and a square would not be imaged until the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci made his famous drawing of Vitruvian man, fundamental for later publications , around 1490 (Fig. 2.1). Fra Giovani Giocondo’s illustrations to De Architectura (1511) followed Cesare Cesariano’s Italian translation of the same text with new illustrations in 1521 and an edition by Francesco Giorgi (1525), among others. Most of these men portrayed Vitruvian man as a solidly built, muscular, Caucasian male in his prime.2 Castas, Monstrous Bodies, and Soft Buildings F A 2 69 ■ Castas, Monstrous Bodies, and Soft Buildings During the Renaissance, visions of the ideal body linked architecture and painting. While architecture materialized ideal bodily proportions, representations of ideal bodies populated frescoes and canvases. Vitruvius’s image of perfect human proportion acquired moral overtones as it became conflated with the figure of Christ as the model of physical perfection.3 Bodily fitness manifested in clearly defined musculature and perfect moral character also were associated with kings as representatives of God on earth.4 Because morality is expressed in attitudes and actions, the association of the body with moral qualities required the discourse of the perfect body to expand from its focus on visual representation to include comportment. Notions of the ideal body then entailed a complex of ideas, images, and physical and behavioral manifestations intricately bound with notions of masculine power. FIGURE 2.1. Vitruvian Man. From M.VitrvvivsperIocvndvmsolito castigatiorfactvscvmfigvrisettabvlavtiamlegietintelligipositby M.VitruviusPollio. Venice: Ioannis de Tridino alias Tacuino, anno Domini. M.D.XI. die .XXII. maii . . . [1511]. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. [54.242.22.247] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:15 GMT) 70 ■ Cosmopolitanism in Mexican Visual Culture Artists and architects assumed the ideal body to be universal. Implicitly, raced bodies in their particularity were distant from this ideal.5 The tension between the universal and the particular in discourses of the body replicated the dynamics of the cosmopolitan and the local. Ideal bodies were cosmopolitan by virtue of their presumed universal aesthetic value; raced bodies, like notions of the local, were specific and had limited appeal. Despite this artificial opposition, the power of each construct depended on the other. Specific bodies were evaluated in respect to the ideal body; conversely, the ideal body could not serve as a model without specific bodies with which to compare and contrast it. In other words, the ascription of universality to the ideal, muscular, clearly articulated white male body carried with it the potential to marginalize all other bodies. The aesthetic principles of classical and Renaissance architecture and painting based on the ideal body were fundamental to the development of the international language of...