Perception as a function of desire in the Renaissance

This essay focuses on the treatises of Marsilio Ficino and Leon Battista Alberti in the Florentine Renaissance, how the ideas in the treatises were applied to artistic production, and how the ideas were developed from classical philosophy. Keywords: Renaissance, perception, Plato, Euclid, Plotinus (Enneads), Marsilio Ficino (De amore), Leon Battista Alberti (De pictura, De re aedificatoria), Piero della Francesca (De prospectiva pingendi), George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, Alessandro Botticelli (Birth of Venus), Leonardo da Vinci (Last Supper), perspectival construction Keywords

Platonic architectonics: Platonic philosophies and the visual arts

Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies and the Visual Arts examines philosophical structures of Plato in their structural, spatial, and architectonic implications. It examines elements of Plato's philosophical systems in relation to other philosophical systems, including those of Anaximander, Plotinus, Proclus, Nicolas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. It also examines Plato's philosophy in relation to architectonic conceptions in the arts, including the work of Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca in the Renaissance, Paul Cezanne, and the Cubists and Deconstructivists in the twentieth century. Platonic Architectonics presents new interpretations of philosophical texts, artistic treatises, and works of art and architecture in Western culture as they are interrelated and related to Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophical structures. It demonstrates the importance of philosophy in the production of the visual arts throughout history and the importance of the relation between the work of art and the philosophical text and artistic treatise. Keywords: Plato (Timaeus, Republic, Laws, Phaedrus, Phaedo, Parmenides, Philebus), Socrates, art architecture, philosophy, cosmology, Neoplatonism, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Aristotle (De caelo, Physics, Metaphysics), Anaximander, Pythagoras, Simplicius (Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics), Hyppolytus (Refutatio), Pseudo-Plutarch (Stromata), Plotinus (Enneads), Reason Principle, Intellectual Principle, Proclus (On Euclid, Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements), Byzantine, Nicolas Cusanus (De circuli quadratura, De coniecturis, De docta ignorantia), Marsilio Ficino (De amore, Opera Omnia, Five Questions Concerning the Mind, Theologia Plastonica), Platonic Academy, Renaissance, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Oration on the Dignity of Man), Georges Bataille, Leon Battista Alberti (De re aedificatoria, De pictura, Palazzo Rucellai, Santa Maria Novella), Florence, Piero della Francesca (Legend of the True Cross, Flagellation, De prospectiva pingendi, Trattato d’abaco, Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus), Francesco di Giorgio, Paul Cézanne (The Village of Gardanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire), Cubism, Pablo Picasso (Man with a Violin, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky, Deconstructivism, Leonardo da Vinci (Vitruvian Man), Alessandro Botticelli (Birth of Venus), Luca Pacioli (De divina proportione), Giuseppe Terragni (Casa Giuliani-Frigerio), Bernard Tschumi (Parc de la Villette), Peter Eisenman (Chora L Works), Jacques Derrida (Writing and Difference), différance, chôra, apeiron, archê, Vitruvius (De architectura), Jacques Lacan (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis), Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, Totem and Taboo), Pseudo-Dionysius (Celestial Hierarchy, Mystical Theology, Divine Names), Negative Theology, Rudolf Wittkower (Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism), Erwin Panofsky (Studies in Iconology, Perspective as Symbolic Form), Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Artists), concinnitas, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica), Euclid (Elements of Geometry), Joachim Gasquet (Conversations with Cézanne), Roger Fry, Emile Bernard, Guillaume Apollinaire (Les Peintres cubists), Georges Braque, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Maurice Raynal, Léon Werth, Léonce Rosenberg, Gyorgy Kepes (Language of Vision), Le Corbusier (Villa Stein), Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics), Noam Chomsky (Syntactic Structures, Language and Mind, Cartesian Linguistics, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax), William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity), Sanford Kwinter, Catastrophe Theor

Architectural forms and philosophical structures

Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures examines architectural and architectonic forms as products of philosophical and epistemological structures in selected cultures and time periods, and analyzes architecture as a text of its culture. Relations between architectural forms and philosophical structures are explored in Western civilization, beginning in Egypt and Greece and culminating in twentieth-century Europe and America. Architecture, like all forms of artistic expression, is interwoven with the beliefs and the structures of knowledge of its culture. Keywords: architecture, philosophy, cosmology, Egypt, Greece, Francesco Borromini (Oratorio di San Filippo Neri, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, San Giovanni in Laterano), Guarino Guarini (Caelestis Mathematica, Euclides adauctus, Placita philosophica, San Lorenzo), Bernardo Vittone (Istruzioni diverse, Istruzioni elementari, Cappella della Visitazione, San Bernardino, San Gaetano, San Luigi, San Michele, Santa Chiara), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Discourse on Metaphysics, Eléments de philosophie cache, Letters to Arnauld, Letters to de Volder, The Monadology), Baroque, Gianbattista Piranesi (Antichità romane, Carceri, Fall of Phaethon, Grotteschi, Opere varie, Parare su l’Architettura), unconscious, Gothic, Gothic Romance, psychophysiological space, Sigmund Freud, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Georges Bataille, Frederick Kiesler (Endless House, Inside the Endless House), Accademia di San Luca, Leon Battista Alberti (De ludi matematici, De motibus ponderis, De re aedificatoria, Sant’Andrea in Mantua), Anaximander, Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica), Aristophanes, Aristotle (De anima, Metaphysics), Daniele Barbaro (La pratica della perspettiva), Georges Bataille (Le Coupable; Eroticism, Death and Sensuality; Inner Experience), Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal), William Beckford (Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents; Vathek; The Vision), Gianlorenzo Bernini (Cappella Cornaro, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, Fountain of the Four Rivers), Ferdinando Galli Bibiena (Architettura civile), Umberto Boccioni (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space), Jacob Böhme (Theosophische Wercke), Orfeo Boselli (Osservazioni della Scultura Antica), Hermann Broch (The Sleepwalkers), Giordano Bruno (De triplici minimo, Lampas trigenta statuarum), Edmund Burke (A Philosophical Enquiry), Bernard Cache (Earth Moves), Roger Caillois (The Necessity of the Mind, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”), Coop-Himmelblau (Rooftop Remodeling Prokect), Pietro da Cortona, Counter Reformation, Nicolas Cusanus (De Beryllo, De circuli quadratura, De coniecturis, De docta ignorantia, De Staticis Experimentis, De Visione Dei, Dialogue sur la pensée), Egnazio Danti (Le Due Regole della Prospettiva Pratica), Gilles Deleuze (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque), René Descartes (La Dioptrique), Marcel Duchamp (Le Grand Verre), Albrecht Dürer (Melancholia), Peter Eisenman (Cities of Artificial Excavation), Arthur Evans (Mycenean Tree and Pillar Cult), Marsilio Ficino (Corpus Hermeticum, De amore, De Christiana religione, Opera Omnia, Theologia Platonica), Robert Fludd (Microcosmic History), Henri Focillon (The Life of Forms in Art), Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents, The Interpretation of Dreams, On Creativity and the Unconscious, On Dreams, The Problem of Anxiety, Totem and Taboo), Galileo Galilei, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Theory of Colors), Martin Heidegger (Poetry, Language and Thought), Hermann von Helmholtz (Treatise on Physiological Optics), Hermeticism, Hesiod (Theogony), Eva Hesse (Right After), Homer (Iliad, Odyssey), Horapollo (Hieroglyphica), Victor Hugo (Les rayons et les ombres), Carl Jung (Memories, Dreams and Reflections), Johannes Kepler, Athanasius Kircher (Arithmologia, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, Musurgia Universalis, Oedipi Aegyptiaci, Pamphili Obelisci, Phonurgia Nova, Primitiae Gnomonicae Catroptique, Prodromus Coptus Sive Aegyptiacus), Rosalind Krauss (The Optical Unconscious), Jacques Lacan (Écrits, The Ethics of Psycho-Analysis, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis), Ernst Mach (The Analysis of Sensations), Man Ray (Anatomies), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception), John Milton (Paradise Lost), Robert Morris (Blind Time, Continuous Project Altered Daily, Passageway), Alfred de Musset (Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle), Neoplatonism, Frederich Wilhelm Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals), Organic Rationalism, Ovid (Metamorphoses), Erwin Panofsky (Perspective as Symbolic Form, Studies in Iconology), Francesco Patrizi (Nova de universis philosophia), Phenomenology, Alessandro Piccolomini (De la sfera del mundo), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Heptaplus, Oration on the Dignity of Man), Plato (Laws, Phaedrus, Republic, Timaeus), Plotinus (Enneads), Edgar Allan Poe (“The Fall of the House of Usher”), Pseudo-Dionysius (Celestial Hierarchy, Epistles, Mystical Theology), Marquis de Puységur, Pythagoras, Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater), Renaissance, Arthur Rimbaud (“Après le deluge,” “Le bateau ivre,” “Les Ponts”), Martin del Rio (Disquisitionum magicarum), Cesare Ripa (Iconologia), Romanticism, Colin Rowe (The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal”), Sebastiano Serlio (Architettura), Lorenzo Sirigatti (La practica di Prospettiva), Manfredo Tafuri, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Scherzi di Fantasia, Vari Capricci), Paolo Toscanelli, Bernard Tschumi (Architecture and Disjunction), Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, Piero Valeriano (Hieroglyphica), Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects), Vienna, Virgil (Aenead), Vitruvius, Horace Walpole (Anecdotes of Painting in England, The Castle of Otranto), Wilhelm Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy), Edward Young (Night Thoughts), Federico Zuccari (Origine e Progresso dell’Academia del Disegno

Architecture as cosmology: Lincoln Cathedral and English gothic architecture

An examination and explanation of the unprecedented and influential architecture of Lincoln Cathedral. Considers precedents at Durham and Canterbury, interpretations of the architecture by historians, and the influence of the architecture throughout the development of English Gothic architecture. Focuses in particular on the writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235-53. The geometries of the architecture can be seen in relation to the geometries of Grosseteste's cosmologies. Keywords: architecture, cosmology, Lincoln Cathedral, Lincoln Academy, English Gothic Architecture, Robert Grosseteste (Commentary on the Physics, Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, Computus Correctorius, Computus Minor, De Artibus Liberalibus, De Calore Solis, De Colore, De Generatione Sonorum, De Generatione Stellarum, De Impressionibus Elementorum, De Iride, De Libero Arbitrio, De Lineis, De Luce, De Motu Corporali at Luce, De Motu Supercaelestium, De Natura Locorum, De Sphaera, Ecclesia Sancta, Epistolae, Hexaemeron), medieval, University of Lincoln, Early English, Decorated, Curvilinear, Perpendicular, Catholic, Durham Cathedral, Canterbury Cathedral, Anselm of Canterbury, Gervase of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, Becket’s Crown, Trinity Chapel, Scholasticism, William of Sens, William the Englishman, Geoffrey de Noyers, Saint Hugh of Avalon, Saint Hugh’s Choir, Bishop’s Eye, Dean’s Eye, Nikolaus Pevsner (Buildings of England, Cathedrals of England, Leaves of Southwell, An Outline of European Architecture), Paul Frankl (Gothic Architecture), Oxford University, Franciscan School, Plato (Republic, Timaeus), Aristotle (De anima, De Caelo, Metaphysics, Physics, Posterior Analytics), Plotinus (Enneads), Wells Cathedral, Ely Cathedral, Hereford Cathedral, Lichfield Cathedral, Winchester Cathedral, Beverley Minster, Chester Cathedral, York Minster, Worcester Cathedral, Salisbury Cathedral, Southwell Minster, Gloucester Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Elias of Dereham, Nicholas of Ely, Reginald Ely, St. Mary Redcliffe, Norwich Cathedral, Bristol Cathedral, Exeter Cathedral, Tewkesbury Abbey, Ottery St. Mary, lierne, tierceron, William Joy, Thomas Witney, John Ramsey, William Ramsey, Alan of Walsingham, William Hurley, Thomas of Cambridge, Thomas of Canterbury, fan vault, pendant vault, Henry Yevele, Robert Hulle, William Orchard, Oxford Divinity School, Oxford Christ Church, Windsor Castle (St. George’s Chapel), Cambridge King’s College Chapel, Peterborough Cathedral, Bath Abbey, William Vertue, Robert Vertue, Adam Vertue, William the Conqueror, Remigius, St. Mary Undercroft, St. Stephen’s Chapel, Abbot Suger, Abbey Church of St. Denis, Leon Battista Alberti (De re aedificatoria), Albertus Magnus, Alexander of Aphrodisias (De anima), Alexander the Mason, Abu Nasr Alfarabi (De intellectu), Alhazen (Opticae), Alkindi (De aspectibus), Amiens Cathedral, Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica), Saint Augustine (De Civitate Dei, De Musica, De Trinitate), Averroes (Long Commentary on the De anima), Avicebron (Fons Vitae), Avicenna (De anima, De Caelo, Liber Naturalis, Metaphysica), Roger Bacon, Bartholomew the Englishman, Benedictine, Boethius (Arithmetic, De Consolatione Philosophiae), Byzantine, Cambridge University, Alistair Cameron Crombie, Nicolas Cusanus (De circuli quadratura, De coniecturis, De docta ignorantia), Duns Scotus, Euclid (Catoptrics, Elements of Geometry), Marsilio Ficino (De amore), Franciscan, John Harvey (English Medieval Architects, The Medieval Architect, The Perpendicular Style), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics), Henry of Avranches (Metrical Life of Saint Hugh), Hugh of Wells, Humanism, Robert Hulle, James of Venice, Robert Janyns, Henry Janyns, Liber de Causis, London, Michael of Canterbury, Neoplatonism, Folke Nordström, Norman, Norman Conquest, Notre Dame, Noyon Cathedral, Old St. Paul’s, Erwin Panofsky (Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism), Paris, Matthew Paris, John Peckham (Perspectiva Communis), Plantagenet, Proclus (Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, Elements of Theology), Pseudo-Dionysius (Celestial Hierarchy, Divine Names, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Mystical Theology), Pythagoras, Reims Cathedral, Renaissance, Thomas Rickman (Attempt to Discriminate the Style of Architecture in England), Robert of Beverley, Romanesque, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (The Philosophy of Art), Sir George Gilbert Scott, Gottfried Semper (The Four Elements of Architecture, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts), Edmund Sharpe (Seven Periods of English Architecture), Sir Robert Smirke, William Smyth, Richard William Southern, John Sponlee, George Edmund Street, Themistius (Paraphrase of the De anima), Theology of Aristotle, Edmund Venables, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Entretiens sur l’architecture), Vitruvius (De architectura), John Wastell, John Welbourne, Westminster Palace, William of Wykeham, Erasmus Witelo (Perspectiva), Christopher Wren, William Wynfor

Leon Battista Alberti and the Concept of Lineament

A core idea in the architectural theory of Leon Battista Alberti, as expressed in the De re aedificatoria, is the distinction between “lineament,” the line in the mind of the architect, and “matter,” the material presence of the building. This distinction plays a key role in architectural design throughout the history of Western architecture. As Le Corbusier would say in the twentieth century, “architecture is a product of the mind.” The distinction between mind and matter can be found in Vitruvius, in the distinction between “that which signifies and that which is signified”; at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, between disegno interno and disegno esterno; or in Peter Eisenman’s distinction between deep aspect and surface aspect in architecture, to name just three examples. There are passages in the De amore of Marsilio Ficino where it seems clear that he is referring to his mentor’s concept of lineament. Lines cannot be called bodies, for example, and beauty can only be a property of matter through arrangement, proportion, and aspect (shape and color), which are products of thought, in the Neoplatonic tradition, as in the idea of beauty described by Plotinus, which can be found in Alberti’s concept of beauty or concinnitas. Plotinus distinguished the shape of the matter of a statue from the shape of the statue in the mind of the artist. I would like to suggest that Alberti knew the Enneads of Plotinus, perhaps as a result of a meeting with Gemistos Plethon and Nicholas of Cusa at the Academy of Palestrina, and through the translation of the Enneads by Marius Victorinus. Alberti’s concept of lineament is a Neoplatonic concept, and it plays an important role in architectural theory. Neoplatonism can also be found in Alberti’s proportioning systems in his architecture, as Ficino called Alberti a “Platonic mathematician.” These propositions have never been advanced, that I know of, and they are fundamental to an understanding of architectural theory

Plotinus and the Artistic Imagination

In the thought of Plotinus, the imagination is responsible for the apprehension of the activity of Intellect. If creativity in the arts involves an exercise of the imagination, the image-making power that links sense perception to noetic thought and the nous poietikos, the poetic or creative intellect, then the arts exercise the apprehension of intellectual activity. According to John Dillon in “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination,” Plotinus’ conception of the imagination led to the formulation of the imagination as a basis of artistic creativity. In Plotinus, imagination operates on several different levels: it produces images in sense perception, it synthesizes images in dianoetic thought, and it produces images in correspondence with the articulation through logos of noetic thought. The imagination is what connects the intelligible in intellect and the form in sense perception. Plotinus imagines an art which is a product of noetic thought as made possible by the imagination. The primary principle of beauty is Intellect, from which all images should be taken, as facilitated by imagination. Forms of art, like the forms of nature, are the product of Intellect. The production of a work of art is an intellectual or spiritual exercise of the imagination that allows apprehension of Intellect and noesis in nous poietikos. All art is metaphysical, and is an expression of intelligible form in imagination, an expression of an intellectual idea that can be differentiated from sensible form in intellectual apprehension. There are many ways in which the tenets of the thought of Plotinus become currents of art and aesthetic theory as it develops to the present day

Architecture and psychoanalysis: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan

Architecture and Psychoanalysis is an analysis of the relation between psychoanalytic theory and compositional strategies in architecture. In psychoanalysis it focuses on the writing of Jacques Lacan as well as theories of the structure of the psyche, linguistics, and perception. In architecture it focuses on the writings and projects of Peter Eisenman. There are extended discussions on the thought of figures such as Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Jacques Derrida, and of the architecture of figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco Borromini, Giuseppe Terragni, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Keywords: architecture, psychoanalysis, Peter Eisenman (Barenholtz Pavilion, Frank House, Falk House, Wexner Center, Columbus Convention Center, Aronoff Center), Jacques Lacan (Écrits, A Selection; The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis), psyche, linguistics, perception, Plato (Timaeus, Republic, Parmenides, Phaedrus), Proclus (Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements), Plotinus (Enneads), Nicolas Cusanus (De circuli quadratura, De coniecturis), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit, Reason in History, Philosophy of Mind), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (The Philosophy of Art, System of Transcendental Idealism), Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, On Dreams, Civilization and Its Discontents, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Ego and the Id), Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics), Structural Linguistics, Noam Chomsky (Language and Mind, Cartesian Linguistics), Jacques Derrida (Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Margins of Philosophy), Deconstruction, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity), Leon Battista Alberti (Sant’Andrea in Mantua, De pictura), Giulio Romano (Palazzo del Tè), Andrea Palladio, Francesco Borrmomini (San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane), Le Corbusier (Villa Shodhan), Giuseppe Terragni (Casa Giuliani Frigerio, Casa del Fascio), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson (Glass House), Colin Rowe, Bernard Tschumi (Parc de la Villette), mirror stage, the Other, Imaginary Ego, Symbolic Ego, dreams, subconscious, manifest content, latent content, Vorstellun