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Classical Greek antiquity has completely shaped our Western world in various fields like science, politics, law, art, and architecture. Renaissance humanism has its roots in Greek classicism where a man was placed at the center of cosmology “Man is the measure of all things” (Plato’s Theaetetus, 152a). We can clearly see human proportion and gender symbolism in Greek orders. The Doric order is meant to symbolize the body of a man, the ionic order is the body of a mature woman, and the Corinthian order could be a young man or a young woman. Classical Architecture speaks and has a language with meanings that can say different things with many dialects based on shapes, forms, and proportions which have useful effects and that associate with human beings. This essay will focus on architecture through the perspective of humanism and through cosmology, how philosophical conceptions of our world formed architecture. We will see how humanism was originally introduced into architecture in a historical context and how it influenced later periods of time and architecture generally.
The tendency to project the picture of ourselves and our roles into built forms is known as architectural humanism. In fact, we have unconsciously imbued the entire architecture with human movement and mood. We translate architecture into words that are personal to us.
For example, the ‘rising’ of towers, the ‘springing’ of arches, the swelling of domes, and the soaring of spires are metaphors of speech. Architecture’s beauty is a product of a complicated process that provides us with intellectual and spiritual satisfaction. This practice of projecting our own actions onto the outside world and analyzing the outside world in our own words is ancient, universal, and meaningful. The scientific method is useful in practice, but the anthropomorphic approach, which humanizes the universe compares it with our own bodies, and is the core of architecture. But, can such an explanation be carried? Can one such principle explain it? A complete answer to this question can only be found through the long process of experimentation and verification that architecture entails. How can humanism be adapted to architecture? Lines are probably the clearest example of the theory. When we focus our attention on one of these lines, we almost always ‘ follow’ it with our eyes. The mind travels by moving over points in space, and that gives us movement. But when we have movement, we have expression and movement determines our mood. Space, also, controls it. We naturally adjust to the spaces in which we stand and fill them with our motions. For example, as we reach the end of a nave and are confronted with a long sight of columns, we begin to move forward, even though we remain still, the eye is drawn down the perspective, and our mind is drawn back to the middle, and then similarly in all directions. (21-24) The humanist instinct searches for physical conditions that are similar to our own, expressions that are similar to those we enjoy, and resistances that are similar to those that can support us. It seeks particular masses, lines, and spaces, and then tries to build them and recognize their suitability after they have been created. And, by our instinctive imitation of what we see, their seeming fitness becomes our real delight. But besides these favorable physical states, the need for order is natural. Order in architecture refers to the existence of fixed relationships in the location, character, and scale of its components, it satisfies the mind’s desire and humanizes architecture. Order is linked to Symmetry and Balance, all of which bring movement and equilibrium, which are in our nature. We have an instinctive sense of right and left in our bodies. We wouldn’t be able to read or view architecture in our own words as quickly without it.
Rome retained, expanded, and transferred the values that the Greeks created. The concepts of mass, space, line, and coherence were maintained for rougher purposes, broader and more common in Roman architecture than they were in Greek architecture. It guaranteed their life, as well as their freedom from the place and time from which they emerged. Moving from Roman and Renaissance architecture to Gothic’s fantastic and complicated energies is to reject humanism in favor of mystery, it is to realize that an inhuman science’s logic has overtaken the logic of the human form. Gothic admits its deep indifference to ordered form. It is entangled in a web of thoughts in which man has stopped to be the center but it cannot be denied that Gothic Buildings are one of the greatest expressions in build form that can be seen as a model for representing philosophical conceptions of our world like man, God and structure of the universe. Abbot Suger (1081 -1151) is considered the father of Gothic Architecture that completed the ambulatory and the façade of the Basilica of Saint-Denis. His idea was to open up the space to allow access to more light in the dark. Unlike the Romanesque windows that were small and the chapels that were separated rooms with walls, Suger finds a way to disappear the walls and replace them with colored glass. The use of the pointed arch allowed for taller windows of various shapes and sizes, Ribbed vaults produced more openness to the interior and Flying buttresses freed the central nave from height restrictions. Abbot Suger’s purpose in doing these changes was to express heaven on earth and he believed that light can have these results and that God is light. the natural light that enters through the stained glass is the reflection of the divine. “The dull mind rises to the truth that which is material. And, in seeing is resurrected from his former submersion’’-Suger Abbot. The Cathedral should be seen as a microcosmos of the structure of the cosmos. The buildings enact the role of lux spiritual, the spiritual light of god, as it transformed into lumen spiritual, the light through the stained glass windows that is reflected into the physical world. All of this medieval cosmology comes from Plato and Aristotle. (Hendrix, 2011, pp. 3-5)
The momentum of the Church began to shrink in the 14th century as a result of the development of humanism. In the Renaissance, the center was recovered and humanism became once more a conscious principle of thought. Renaissance man breaks free of the Middle Ages mysticism and starts to care more about himself, reality, and the present. Renaissance humanism placed a greater emphasis on liberty than on order. This contrast can be seen in its architecture. Order is used as a method of Renaissance architecture, but it is created to serve the variety of life. It has mastered the speech of architecture from Greece and Rome, but the Renaissance will now decide what the speech will mean. It was realized that the human body in some way entered into the soul of architecture and that it had to appear organic like the body, so it can communicate the vital values of the spirit. Renaissance Humanism was a cultural movement in thought, literature, and art, that began to gain power in Italy and later spread through Europe and England that influenced Western society and architecture. In great Italian cities, such as Rome and Florence, architects, who were also humanists, such as Brunelleschi, Alberti, Michelangelo, and Palladio, reconstructed the architectural elements of ancient Greek and Roman tradition, such as columns, chapiters, and entablatures. This architecture was used on temples, churches, and private homes, dividing itself from the Gothic tradition by focusing on Vitruvius’s authority. In particular, Renaissance architects were often inspired by the human body, or, more specifically, they tried to understand how the human body entered into the current traditions of design. Many of their drawings include ratios of the male body that are inserted into the proportions of an architectural drawing and designed to fit with the parts. What is equally seen must be perceived equally. The mind and the eye must travel together. The architect now focuses on mathematical ratios which define harmony. For instance, the Vitruvian Man that was created by Leonardo da Vinci shows a male figure in two positions with his arms and legs apart and in a circle and square. As shown in the drawing human proportion was the base of measure ‘’A palm is 4 fingers, a foot is 4 palms, a cubit is 6 palms, 4 cubits make a man, a pace is 4 cubits, a man is 24 palms” (The Open Book, 2019) This principle of humanism gives us the links that we require. It serves as a connection between the various phases of the Renaissance style. It explains its strange attitude toward antiquity’s architecture. It describes how Renaissance architecture is related to the whole mindset of thought, such as the humanist approach toward literature and life.
Humanist principles were resurrected in Britain during the 18th century through different new styles of architecture, such as Baroque and Palladian. Around the 15th and 16th centuries, the Italian Baroque found its way into Britain. It was however postponed due to the geographical distance from England to Renaissance Italy and the Catholic Rome Schism in England. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a German mathematician and astronomer who described the planet’s elliptical orbits and related the geometry that formed the universe to God. This new way of looking at the world inspired architects and we can see that Italian buildings were based on this right conception of the cosmos in the Baroque era. The Most Noticeable example that explains this concept is the dome of St. Carlos alle Quattro Fontane in Rome by Francesco Borromini. You can clearly see the outline of an ellipse full of light symbolizing God with the holy trinity in the center as you pick your head up in the church. Furthermore, light access from the windows in the lower dome and on the side of the lantern. The dome’s coffering of octagons, crosses, and hexagons is thrown into sharp and deep relief, and light overlays progressively down to the darker lower cathedral. The interior is white stucco, there is the absence of color and it can be identified in 3 sections that are the lower order of the ground floor, the transition area of the pendentives that separates the lower area from the heavenly top above, and the oval coffering dome with is an oval lantern. St. Carlos alle Quattro Fontane is clearly extraordinary and complex and it was the first building since those of Palladio and Michelangelo where everything was newly designed. With many inventions, Borromini created a new language of architecture, the Baroque, which established architecture in Rome and then spread it across Italy and eventually to Europe. (Kostof, 2010, pp.514-515). However, it was mainly a superficial decorative introduction to Renaissance forms until the beginning of the 17th century that we really got the first classical buildings that came from Palladianism in Britain
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