Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque (review)

Baroque architecture of the seventeenth century, like all visual arts, music, and sciences of that extraordinary period in Western Europe, was founded on a complex faith that allowed its masters to believe in an immanent reality expressed in space. Baroque visual order, swollen by novel disciplines that expanded canonical structures of knowing, was still ruled by a comprehensive if much disputed theological system. Studies of Baroque artistic and architectural theory by Irving Lavin, Giancarlo Maiorino, and Robert Harbison have stressed this univocal intellectual order embracing an implausible plenitude of categories.

The great minds of the age, such as Francisco Suárez, Johannes Kepler, Athanasius Kircher, and Gottfried Leibniz, taught architects a protoencyclopedic approach to their discipline. Two paradigmatic Baroque architectural treatises both incorporated Gerard Desargues' new projective methods—those by the Spanish bishop, philosopher, theologian, mathematician, diplomat, and amateur architect Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz (1606-82), and by the Neapolitan Theatine cleric, architect, and polymath, Guarino Guarini (1624-83). Caramuel's Arquitectura civil recta y obliqua, published in 1678, derives all architecture from the temple of Jerusalem, but also includes a treatise on logarithms expounding Napier's Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio of 1614. A growing mathematical sophistication now underpinned the best intellectual efforts.

In Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque, George Hersey focuses on a difficult and poorly studied subject, parallels between the bewildering pathways of Baroque architecture and seventeenth-century geometric developments in music, optics, and astronomy. Unfortunately, Hersey's technical skills are limited, and he opts to address a broad audience that might be loath to follow complex arguments. Despite assistance from various people, his book suffers from a mathematical simplemindedness that Caramuel and Guarini would not have tolerated. Hersey contends that architects—who had long used rational proportions based on the square and harmonic sequences—now employed Fibonacci sequences, the five regular polyhedra, complex geometric curves, and novel scientific metaphors as well. Because he willingly accepts very loose standards for determining underlying building proportions, his book must be treated as an exploration of sources for the architectural imagination rather than as a rigorous study of the generation of architectural form.

Chapter 2, "Frozen Music," argues that Baroque architects ventured beyond sixteenth-century explorations of harmonic ratios in cubic tessellations authoritatively expounded in Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1962). In Athanasius Kircher's encyclopedia of music and acoustics, Musurgia Universalis, published in 1650, ancient theory of the music of the spheres cohabited with novel investigations of acoustics by Mersenne and extraordinary architectural inventions for capturing and amplifying sound. Suggesting a connection between these disparate sources and the oft-noted development of Protestant churches as acoustically transparent preaching boxes, Hersey concludes by constructing a musical melody from the proportions of Bernini's great baldachin in St. Peter's. This is not architecture as frozen music, as Schiller had it, but music as thawed architecture.

Chapter 3, on optics, parallels the use of monochord intervals by Robert Fludd in 1617 to explain planetary intervals and by Isaac Newton in 1704 to explain the refraction of light. A similar approach to geometry ruled many scientific disciplines. The text advances erratically through an irrelevant description of eye anatomy followed by a misrepresentation of Descartes' discussion of the eye, dragging in fractal geometry to no particular purpose. This leads to a discussion of optical instruments of the Baroque, microscopes, telescopes, and camerae obscurae. Hersey depicts these in section, alongside armillary spheres and orreries, and then compares them to the great domes of St. Peter's, St. Paul's, and Les Invalides. Even though his sophomoric seriousness in proposing these accidental and superficial analogies is embarrassing, a central insight can be salvaged: metaphors of a new science of sight governed the generation of architectural concèttos in the seventeenth century. But this is not new; Elwin Robison argued in...