The book by Eugenio Battisti explores the guidelines of the work of Filippo Brunelleschi. Thanks to the Florentine architect, the imitation of antiquity shifted from symbolism and ideology toward a complex of practical rules.
The book by Eugenio Battisti explores the guidelines of the work of Filippo Brunelleschi. The use of features from antiquity, which could be encoded and repeated – perspective and proportions – reflects aspects that might be defined as “conceptual” today, leading to the perhaps excessive characterization of the work of Brunelleschi as something lucidly, eternally complete in itself. His research represented a genuine revolution that spread gradually and persistently from Florence to Italy to all of Europe, and then to the colonial world and regions under occidental influence. The imitation of antiquity was no longer symbolic or ideological, but became typological, a question of grammar, as demonstrated by the subsequent theory of the orders, which is a survey of recurring proportions, based on certain fundamental characteristics (solemnity, elegance, etc.). Perspective, previously suggested and approximate, became exact, with precise, easily learnt rules, permitting construction of functional spaces measured exactly to the scale of both the observer and, in the case of the painting, of the architecture and figures observed, so that logic, proportion and order could extend in continuity between the real world and that of fantasy.