Sublime

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, born around 80 BC, served in the Roman army under Caesar and specialized in the design and construction of artillery machines. His duties took him to what are now Spain and France and as far away as North Africa. Vitruvius later became an architect and worked on a temple, no longer in existence, in the town of Fano in

Le travail de Vitruve plaît particulièrement à Léonard et à Francesco car il confère une dimension concrète à une analogie remontant à l’Antiquité et plus précisément à Platon, une métaphore définitoire de l’humanisme renaissant : la relation entre le microcosme que constitue l’homme et le macrocosme que constitue la terre.

Vitruvius’s fundamental tenet was that “the power of nature has acted as architect” in biology: universal laws of nature had brought about human anatomy, and so, within our body’s design, we had a map of the macrocosm. The body was literally a minor mundus, a “mini world,” and, thereby, a reflection of the universe. The implication was that the

Frank almost never started a design with a predetermined shape. He liked to begin by “playing”—a word he used far more often than “working” when he talked about how he went about designing things—with wooden blocks of different sizes, each representing a portion of a building’s functional program. He would then stack or array the blocks in what he

Un de ses prédécesseurs, Leon Battista Alberti, artiste-ingénieur, a écrit quelques années auparavant que cette matière est essentielle à l’artiste car, pour dépeindre correctement un individu ou un animal, il faut avant tout connaître ses caractéristiques internes. « Isole chaque os de l’animal, ajoute dessus ses muscles, puis recouvre le tout de