Introduction: Two Kinds of Proportion

Abstract

The subject of architectural proportional systems in the history of architecture, the topic of this special collection of essays in 'Architectural Histories', has long been characterized by a fundamental ambiguity: the word and concept of proportion simultaneously signify two unrelated and in some ways opposite meanings. Proportion can refer to ratios, or it can refer to architectural beauty. In this introduction to the papers that follow, Matthew A. Cohen proposes a simple clarification of this ambiguity as a framework for continued discussion of this subject: that whenever scholars use the word proportion, they specify whether they intend ‘proportion-as-ratio’ or ‘proportion-as-beauty’. The frequent blending of these meanings today, Cohen argues, is a survival of attitudes toward proportional systems in architecture that were prevalent as long ago as the early Renaissance. Cohen proposes an alternative to Rudolf Wittkower's paradigmatic ‘break-away’ theory of the history of proportional systems, according to which virtually everyone accepted proportional systems as sources of universal beauty in architecture until the mid-eighteenth century, and after that time virtually everyone believed that beauty and proportional systems were matters of individual preference. Rather than a long period respectful of tradition followed by a long period skeptical of it, Cohen argues, based in part on a new interpretation of Claude Perrault’s 1683 codification of the notion of positive beauty, that architects and others have always had access to two parallel strands of thought pertaining to proportional systems: a skeptical-pragmatic strand and a respectful-metaphysical strand. This new historical and historiographical interpretation of the problem of architectural proportional systems, and the new vocabulary with which to discuss it critically presented herein, helps to separate aesthetic from historical considerations.