BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

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French

Bernardo Baldi is one of the most remarkable figures of the end of the Italian Renaissance in that his passion for art and literature appears inseparable from his passion for science and engineering. Both were based on a profound knowledge of antique sources, from Euclid to Archimedes, from Aristotle to Vitruvius. This learned man, who according to his biographers mastered from twelve to sixteen languages, among which, besides Greek and Latin, were Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Hungarian, was a prolific polygraph who is attributed with drafts of approximately one hundred books, most of which never published, but all the same, he left a large number of studies treating the most varied subjects (theology, mathematics, geography, ancient and modern history, architecture, etc.) He also wrote educational poems on artillery, navigational compasses and nautical art. He translated the treatise on the Automates by Heron of Alexandria and prepared a commentary on the Quæstiones mechanicæ attributed to Aristotle which came out posthumously in 1621. These Exercitationes sui problemi mecanici took on, in fact, a decisive importance, because they initiated a new vain of research on applied mechanics to architecture. It has been said that they represented the anticipation of the themes which were to be taken up by Galileo (Becchi 2004).
Born June 5, 1553 in Urbino, to a noble family in the Marches area, he enrolled in the University ofPadua from 1573, but he had to return home because of an epidemic of plague. There he was taught by the famous mathematician Federico Commandino, and wrote his Vite de’ Matematici (the first of them being Commandino), which he finished in 1587, after working for twelve years on it. This work, which contains a wealth of information on the history of mathematics from the Middle Ages to the 16th century, would only be published in abbreviated form, but today we have access to a complete edition, due to Elio Nenci. At the same time, chosen as preceptor by Ferdinando Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua (1587-1626), who made of him one of the most brilliant figures of his court, Baldi was named to be head of the rich Abbey of Gustalla, where he was abbot for twenty-five years before going back to Urbino. In 1612, the same Duke Ferdinand appointed him his ambassador to Venice. Baldi died October 10, 1617, in Urbino.
But if Baldi was interested in Vitruvius, it was at the instigation of Vespasiano Gonzaga, Duke of Sabbioneta, from a younger branch of the Dukes of Mantua. This scholarly prince was fascinated by architecture and urbanism, “elegantioribus huiuscemodi studiis addictissimus”, as Baldi said in the preface of the Scamilli impares Vitruviani,his first book. Baldi stayed with him in 1584 and had him read the Latin theorist whom he consulted himself night and day and knowing about his host’s expertise in lexicography and mechanics, he asked him to explain the thinking of the old master, made obscure in many areas because of the technical terminology of the De architectura. Here is what a famous passage of Marc’Antonio’s oration at Baldi’s funeral tells us:

quivi [Baldi] più si occupo negli studi di Matematica e di Architettura, venendo anche richiesto a leggere, e spiegare I passi più difficili di Vitruvio all’Eccellentissimo Sig. Vespanio Gonzaga Duca di Sabioneta, che li diede occasione di far poi quelle bella, e util Fatica sopra Vitruvio.

And this is what Ireneo Affò confirmed in his biography of Baldi (1783, p. 45).
One will not be astonished in these conditions that Baldi was attacked at the outset on the notice reputed to be the most difficult to understand of the whole Latin treatise, in the absence of the explanatory drawing mentioned in the text but lost like almost all the others, which had already before him given rise to numerous interpretations. One which explains briefly the method of compensation of the apparent concavity of the temple stylobates in III, 4, 5 and in V, 9, 4. Under the title Scamilli impares Vitruviani, in 1612 he published a little book sounding like a challenge, dedicated to Marco Valsero of 53 pages in-4°, in which he attempts to rectify or refute, as the title clearly indicates (nova natione explicati, refutatis priorum interpretum Gugliemi Philandri, Danielis Barbari, Baptistæ Bertani) the interpretations proposed before him by Philandrier, Barbaro, Bertani, and others, and where he also evokes Palladio’s hypothesis. At first it seems to join the prevailing interpretation which saw vertical panels applied on the trunk of the column’s pedestal in the scamilli, in that way breaking the visual uniformity of the podium. But then, noting the absence of this sort of solution in the antique monuments, he expressed the idea with a promising future that the scamilli would be small seats placed between the stylobate and the base of the column. They would permit the observer at the bottom of the podium to see the plinths of the columns instead of the projection of the stylobate. In fact he had understood that this optical problem involved reflection on visual perspective and necessitated relying on geometric figures, the mastery of which he had gained in his previous training.
The same year he published his great work, known in the Vitruvian bibliography as the Lexikon under the title De verborum Vitruvianorum significatione.

Pierre Gros (Paris, Institut de France) – 2023

I. Affò, Vita di monsignore Bernardino Baldi da Urbino, Abate di Guastalla, Parma, Carmignani, 1783.

AA. VV., Séminaire d’étude sur l’Urbinate Bernardino Baldi (1553-1617), a cura di Giacomo Cerboni Baiardi, Urbino, Academia Raffaello, 2006.

A. Becchi, Leonardo, Galileo e il caso Baldi: Magonza, 26 marzo 1621, Venezia, Marsilio, 2004.

M. Biffi, “Sul lessico architettonico : Alcuni casi controversi di derivazione vitruviana”, Studi di lessicografia italiana, XVI, 1999, pp. 31-161 (regarding the scamilli, pp. 105-123).

G. Ferraro, “Le matematiche, l’architettura”, in F. P. Di Teodoro (a cura di), Saggi di letteratura architettonica da Vitruvio a Winckelmann, 1, Firenze, Olschki, 2009, pp. 207-220.

P. Gros, Vitruve. De l’architecture, livre III, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1990, pp. 139-145.

F. Lemerle, Les Annotationes de Guillaume Philandrier sur le De Architectura de Vitruve. Livres I à IV, Paris, Picard, 2000, pp. 166-167.

E. Nenci (ed.), Bernardino Baldi. Le Vite de’ Matematici, Milano, Angeli, 1998.

W. Oechslin, “Bernardino Baldi”, in W. Oechslin, T. Büchi, M. Pozsgai (ed.), Architekturtheorie im deutschsprachigen Kulturraum 1486-1648, Einsiedeln, Bibliothek Werner Oechslin, 2018, Bâle, Colmena, pp. 503-508.

A. Serrai, Bernardino Baldi. La vita, le opere. La biblioteca, Milano, Bonnard, 2001.

A. Siekiera, Anna, “L’ingéniosité et la manière de Bernardino Baldi”, in F. P. Di Teodoro (a cura di), Saggi di letteratura architettonica da Vitruvio a Winkelmann, 1, Firenze, Olschki, 2009, pp. 299-312.

L. Vagnetti (a cura di), 2000 anni di Vitruvio (Studi e documenti di architettura 8), Firenze, Edizione della Cattedra di Composizione Architettonica, 1978, pp. 89-90.

V. Zoubov, “Vitruve et ses commentateurs”, La science au XVIe siècle, Paris, Hermann, 1960, pp. 69-90.