BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE

Consult in image mode

Transcribed version of the text

French

      Antoine Desgodets never published his Traité des ordres d’architecture. Nine more or less complete manuscripts are in existence today, dated between 1719 and 1779. The one kept at the Institut de France was presented to Louis XV on August 2, 1719 “when his Majesty honored the Academy of Architecture with his presence” according to the note written by Desgodets, it would seem, at the end of the dedicatory epistle. It has the appearance of a book ready to be printed with the title (Traité des ordres d’architecture), the frontispiece, the illustrations, the dedication to the king, the headings and the cartouches and the table of contents at the end. It was finished in 1711, and in 1712 the author had obtained a privilege to publish the book (Paris, Archives nationales, o1 1087, f. 64), which leads us to believe that it had originally been dedicated to Louis XIV and that the dedication was consequently modified since Desgodets had not found a publisher (Hermann 1958). The manuscript was in Desgodets’ possession, and it was only acquired by the Academy in 1779, according to the hand-written note on the leaf preceding the frontispiece (“M. Sedaine, secretary, has presented to the assembled academy, a manuscript written by M. Desgodets […] by the respect that the academy has for the memory of one of its former professors, […] it authorizes M. Sedaine to purchase it to be placed in its library”).
      The manuscript at the Institute is the oldest. It is less complete than seven of the eight other known ones. It consists of only 17 chapters instead of 22, numbered consecutively, with the text on the left page with the illustration on the page facing it and is illustrated with 54 plates instead of 62 thereafter. Desgodets, appointed a professor at the Royal Academy of Architecture in 1719, a few weeks before presenting the manuscript to Louis XV, had all the time he needed to improve his text during the period he taught his courses, since the treatise was to “acquaint young amateurs of this art and the pupils of this Academy with the principles and the first elements of architecture through these lessons” (Dedication). The treatise begins with the dedication to the king and the author’s preface. The first eight chapters deal with the orders (profiles of moldings and columns, the presentation of the five orders, superimposition). Chapter 9 deals with arches, chapters 10 and 11 with the positioning of pilasters and columns, chapters 12 to 15 with the proportions of pediments, doors and windows as well as niches. Chapter 16 is devoted to the attic order and the last to balustrades. The presentation of each order unquestionably reminds one of that in Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura (a colonnade, an arcade with or without a pedestal and base, a capital and entablature). The manuscript’s illustrations are accessible online on the Desgodets site.
      The book falls within the tradition of François Blondel, who, as the first director of and professor at the Royal Academy of Architecture, had published his Cours in three volumes in the years 1675-1683 (his successor La Hire who kept his Cours in manuscript form) and of his disciple d’Aviler who had brought his Cours out in 1691, completed by a dictionary, even if to his great regret he never taught at the institution. At the same time, Desgodet’s project, by its very title, aimed at actually competing with all those who had written on the subject. In fact the theory of the five orders developed by Serlio (1537), refined by Philandrier (1544) and Vignola (1562), spread by their followers Palladio (1570) and Scamozzi (1615) among the most important, is at the heart of architectural creation. In the 17th century Fréart de Chambray devoted his famous Parallèle (1650) to it, Abraham Bosse devoted two books to it (Traité des manieres de dessiner les ordres, 1664; Des ordres de colonnes, 1664) as well as a collection of doors (1659) and the champion of modernity Claude Perrault his Ordonnance des cinq especes de colonnes (1683) in which he intended to close the issue according to the principle of the “médiocrité moyenne”. Desgodets proposes orders which claim expressly to be an ambitious synthesis among antique Gallo-Roman edifices and Roman ones, a few contemporary realizations and the writings of previous theoreticians exposed to the teaching he benefitted from during lectures at the Royal Academy of Architecture. “After which”, as he writes in the preface, “I decided to make drawings of them and put them in book order in order to use them and know what to expect when the opportunity to execute them appears”.
      Desgodets rarely mentions his sources. It is astonishing that the treatise with a pedagogical aim is based so little on history. Few theoreticians are quoted: Vitruvius, the founding father, is mentioned only seven times, concerning the reduction and the bulge of columns (p. 6), the Tuscan order (p. 12) (Desgodets says he has seen no vestige of it), the origin of columns (p. 10), the Doric base which antique architecture does not describe (p. 28), and his rule for intercolumnation (p. 50). Vignola is the only contemporary theoretician mentioned, but only once, for his method allowing the decrease of the column (p. 6). However he joins up with him concerning the Doric base without citing his name (“I will follow the opinion of those who have made a special base for the Doric order by adding an astragal above the torus of the Tuscan base”, p. 28). Neither Fréart de Chambray, nor Bosse, nor Perrault, or even Blondel or d’Aviler is mentioned. Reference to Roman antiquities is quasi nonexistant, which is surprising to say the least for the author of the Édifices antiques de Rome (1682). He does not write one word about Louis XIV’s great constructions or about prestigious sites (Collège des Quatre-Nations, Val-de-Grâce...) or more contemporary ones. No civil or religious building is given as a reference, even as a counterexample. 
      Obviously Desgodets copied the profiles from Vignola’s Regola of the Tuscan order (with the exception of the pedestal) and the two Doric models, one with a denticle, the second with mutules. He also took from him the composite (“composée”) base with a single baguette separating the two scotias. But he borrowed Palladio’s idea of placing steps under the colonnades and especially the composite architrave with two fascias and its cornice with double quadrangular modillions (Vignola presents a cornice with dental molding) although without repeating the convex frieze of the Palladian model. The horned Ionic capital which he uses for that matter to decorate the colonnade and the arcade comes from Scamozzi. The base of the Corinthian column is the one recommended by Serlio who was the first to associate it with the column of that order and to name it “Corinthian”. (Vitruvius does not mention it and in Alberti’s description it is called “Ionic”). But the forms do not suffice. Desgodets recognizes that he has used two different systems for the proportions of the columns, the first system “by dividing the whole height of each order into a certain number of equal parts in order to have the heights of pedestals, columns and entablatures, next dividing again each one of its heights into another quantity, and then going from subdivision to subdivision until I have reached the measure of each small part”, and the second system by dividing “the diameter of the base of the columns into two modules and each module into thirty parts which makes sixty parts for the entire diameter”, these parts allowing one to measure all the parts of each order marked in figures on the drawings, which it is necessary to “tally” as exactly as possible with the divisions of the first system, all of which obliges him to use fractions. Desgodets recognizes that the second system is more practical but that the first shows the proportions of the various members among themselves better (Preface). In fact he adopts the Vignolesque method for the Tuscan and the Doric, in dividing the height into nineteen parts out of which he gives four to the pedestal, twelve to the column and three to the entablature (p. 10). He modifies the ratios for the Ionic, the Corinthian and the composite (p. 10), which he combines with the Vitruvian modular system having as its reference and module the diameter of the column, whereas for Vignola the module is the radius. Fréart de Chambray had cleared the way by unifying the presentation of antique and modern orders through making the choice of the half-diameter of the column, divided into thirty parts. Bosse had gone further; he had repeated Vignola’s concept of the order as an architectural entity determined by a constant ratio among its three basic parts but by changing the ratios. Once the height of the column was determined, he divided it in 14 parts parts for the Tuscan, 16 for the Doric, 18 for the Ionic and 20 for the composite and the Corinthian, each one of these parts being subdivided itself into 30 parts. This is what was used as the module or “fundamental foot” (Lemerle 2009).
      Desgodets’ originality seems relative (Ionic architrave with two fascias and not three, a composite base less decorated than the Corinthian base, the presence of orders on the frontispiece only, and a new way to draw the Ionic volute). The position of the composite between the Ionic and the Corinthian was taken from Scamozzi; the opinion to refrain from placing the Corinthian above the composite or the opposite comes from Fréart de Chambray who considered that it was necessary to use the “Roman” order alone, as the Ancients did. Blondel took up again and dealt in depth with the reflections on superimposing the columns which had already been studied by Serlio and Philandrier. The French humanist was the first to have dealt with the problem of the joint use of pilasters and columns and pondered its consequences when it came to the capital and the entablature, the problem to which Bosse and Blondel responded. The reflection on the joint use of pilasters and columns already existed in Blondel’s work but Desgodets went further. The main innovation was the fact that it systematically represents the capitals of the pilasters following the capitals of the columns. Moreover the author rarely features his own observations or feelings. He condemns the cornice placed directly on the architrave, omitting the frieze (p. 8), like the one at the Palazzo Farnese that Mansart reproduced at Maisons after Philibert De l’Orme’s plate. He is resistant to superimposing more than two orders (p. 78).
      The manuscript at the Institut is interesting in that it reveals the academic concept of a certain architectural taste and theoretical debates in the institution during the 1700s. The fact remains that the Traité des ordres is disappointing. Without the cohesiveness of the sum of Blondel’s encyclopedic knowledge, without the imaginativeness or the modernity of d’Aviler’s Cours, it was really no longer topical. Its detailed presentation appeared laborious. One must wonder if Desgodets himself was not aware of this, for he postponed sine die its publication, whose privilege had already been obtained and which, however, he would constantly amend. Practicians could not accept the models he presented as absolute references. We know that theoretical debates in the Academy on determining the models to follow had only few responses in the 17th century among French architects, who practiced eclecticism with a certain preference for the Vignolesque Doric, the Scamozzian Ionic, the Palladian, indeed Scamozzian Corinthian and composite. “La belle architecture” personified by Ange-Jacques Gabriel (1698-1782), after the uncontested reign of Jules Hardouin-Mansart (who died in 1708) falls less within the province of the orders of a great formal purity than of an elegant and refined concept of architectural undertakings.

Frédérique Lemerle
(Centre national de la recherche scientifique, CESR, Tours) – 2015

Critical bibliography

J. Duportal, “Le cours d’architecture de Desgodets. Recueil inédit du Cabinet des Estampes”, La revue de l’art ancien et moderne, 36, 1914, pp. 153-157.

W. Herrmann, “Antoine Desgodets and the Académie Royale d’Architecture”, The Art Bulletin, 40, 1958, pp. 23-53.

F. Lemerle, “Ordres et proportions dans la tradition vitruvienne (XVe-XVIIe siècles)”, S. Rommevaux, P. Vendrix & V. Zara (eds.), Proportions. Science–Musique–Peinture & Architecture, Turnhout, Brepols, 2012, pp. 409-423.

F. Lemerle, “L’enseignement de l’architecture au XVIIe siècle: les voix de l’Académie”, to be published.

H. Lemonnier, Procès-verbaux de l’Académie royale d’architecture 1671-1793, Tome 4, 1712-1726, Paris, Champion, 1915, p. 352.

C. Nocentini, “Il ‘trattato degli ordini’ di Antoine Desgodets: un manuale inedito”, Quaderni di storia dell’architettura e restauro, 2, 1989, pp. 13-18.