Music, Architecture, Proportion and the Renaissance Way of Thinking

Abstract

During the Renaissance, the language of proportion became a unified theory capable of encompassing the understanding of the world within a coherent theological, philosophical and artistic framework. Music, with its harmonic paradigm, plays a key role in this construction. From the fifteenth century through to the end of the sixteenth century, architects and architectural theorists made reference, both in new treatises and commentaries to Vitruvius, to musical matters, transforming architecture into the summa of knowledge. The affinity to music was grounded on both a common mathematical and rhetoric gnosiology. Formerly conceived of as ideal, numbers became eloquent, reinforcing the quantitative paradigm of proportion with its qualitative one. The language of proportion as a compositional tool reveals the shift between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: while the Medieval tèchne based on modular thinking provides beauty and universal truth using the technique of repetition, the Humanist paradigm of variety produces pleasure and individual truth – a condition typical of the premodern.

Acoustic analysis of a well-preserved Renaissance music space: the Odeo Cornaro in Padua

“…Central-plan buildings assumed a predominant role in the High Renaissance philosophical and artistic framework. The most leading architects, such as Bramante, Leonardo, Brunelleschi, Alberti, used to glimpse the idea of the divine perfection behind symmetrical shapes, also according to Aristotle and Plato's views and the De Architectura by Vitruvius [1,2]. Indeed, the geometrical features of centrally planned halls significantly affect the acoustics of the environments [3,4].…”