The Stockholm Bubble
24 See the collaborative project website I am currently part of called
1 Deleuze and Guattari explain that the hylomorphic model, which they
associate with what they call Royal science, implies a ”form that organises
matter and a matter prepared for the form.” They extend their critique
of hylomorphism further to describe a politics of the relations of power
between ”governors and the governed," suggesting that the multitude are
merely so much matter to be molded by the powerful. Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980]
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 369.
2 An argument against the concept of hylomorphism can also be found
in Gilbert Simondon’s discussion of the process of individuation. Simon-
don is, in turn, frequently cited by Gilles Deleuze. See Gilbert Simondon,
“The Genesis of the Individual,” in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and
Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 296–319. See Gilles Deleuze,
“On Gilbert Simondon,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953–1974
(Paris: Semiotext(e), 2002), 86–89.
3 See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Dur-
ham and London: Duke University Press, 2010).
4 For further discussions concerning the politics of affect, see “Spati-
alities of Feeling,” in Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect
(London: Routledge, 2008); Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” in
Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and Lon-
don: Duke University Press, 2002).
5 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23, 24.
6 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 5.
7 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 81.
8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 311.
9 Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics,’” in Essays Critical and
Clinical (London: Verso, 1998), 145.
10 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), 179.
11 Guattari uses the term Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) to describe
post-industrial capitalism. See Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (Lon-
don: Athlone, 2000), 47.
12 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 41, 45.
13 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 21.
14 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley,
Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1983), 86.
15 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 177.
16 Doina Petrescu, Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of
Space (London: Routledge, 2007), 3.
17 Thrift, “Spatialities of Feeling,” 172.
18 Ibid., 173.
19 “We need to ‘kick the habit’ of sedative discourse, particularly the ‘fix’
of television, in order to be able to apprehend the world through the inter-
changeable lenses or points of view of the three ecologies.” See Guattari,
The Three Ecologies, 40.
20 Thrift, “Spatialities of Feeling,” 187.
21 Gilles Deleuze, Les cours des Gilles Deleuze website, “Deleuze/Spinoza:
Cours Vincennes—24/01/1978,” accessed May 5, 2012, http://www.web-
deleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=Spinoza&langue=2.
22 Gilles Deleuze, “Three Kinds of Knowledge,” Pli, vol. 14 (2003), 1–20,
11.
23 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Capitalism: A Very Special Delir-
ium,” in Hatred of Capitalism, ed. Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer, (New
York: Semiotext[e], 2001), 215.
46 NORDIC JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE NO. 3. VOL. 2. 2012
Homefullness, http://homefullness.net.
25 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 7, 8.
26 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” in Negotiations
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 181.
27 Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” 181.
28 See Hans Lind, “Price Bubbles in Housing Markets: Concept Theory
and Indicators”, in IJMA (International Journal of Housing Markets and
Analysis), vol. 2, no. 1 (2009), 78–90. I want to thank Hans Lind for the
time he took to talk me through some aspects of real estate theory and
what is a housing bubble.
29 Lind, “Price Bubbles in Housing Markets,” 81.
30 Ibid., 81.
31 Ibid., 84.
32 See booli website, http://www.booli.se/ and Hemnet website, http://
www.hemnet.se/.
33 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 109.
34 Thrift, Non-Representational Theory, 55.
35 Thrift, Non-Representational Theory, 39.
Tim Anstey
THINGS THAT MOVE
DOMENICO FONTANA AND
THE VATICAN OBELISK
Tim Anstey, KTH School of Architecture
M
any of the internal and external structures of
expectation surrounding architectural prac-
tice assess the value of architectural agency
through judgements of the “built work,” its
originality and functionality. Often, the
assumption will be that in order for an architect to be taken
seriously—really seriously—substantial parts of that work need
to be constituted by new construction. A Priztker Prize–win-
ning architect will be valued for the creation of new composi-
tions of which, it can be declared, that architect is the author.
Although subject to periodic challenge, this “work-author”
connection (applied to the way building production intersects
the activities of architects) continues fundamentally to affect
how architects think about themselves, how others see them,
the way in which architects approach tasks, and the roles they
claim within project processes.1 Although the nature of archi-
tectural consultancy evidently varies worldwide, increasing
globalization means this framing narrative is becoming more
prevalent rather than less.
This essay returns to the roots of modern architectural
theory both to explore how this came to be the case, and to
challenge that model of architectural “work.” The exploration
is made through reconsidering the text De re aedificatoria, writ-
ten by Leon Battista Alberti and first circulated around 1452,
where the modern system of valuing architects according to
an assessment of the building as an artefact is adumbrated.2
The challenge is made through reviewing in some detail one
image from an architectural treatise produced around 150
years later, Della Trasportatione dell’ Obelisco Vaticano, e delle
Fabriche di Nostro Signore Papa Sisto V, by Domenico Fontana.
Sandwiched between these two accounts is a brief speculation
about a collateral effect that the architect/author/work clas-
sification had on the way in which the developing discipline
of architecture dealt with questions of representation during
the sixteenth century, evident in architectural treatises such
as those of Serlio, Palladio, or Vignola. The conclusions are Domenico Fontana, Della Trasportatione dell’ Obelisco Vaticano
intended to be useful for a developing contemporary discus- (Rome, 1590).
sion relating to how we think about roles and credit in archi-
tectural design today, particularly in relation to the question and even fame he will achieve, or conversely . . . what contempt
of alteration. and hatred he will receive, and how eloquent, how obvious, pat-
ent and lasting a testimony of his folly he will leave his fellow
Judging the architectural work men.”3 How then, according to Alberti, should this judgement
In the opening sections of De re aedificatoria Leon Battista of the virtue of an architect be made? The answer is that archi-
Alberti makes clear that the work of an architect can gain that tects will be subject to judgement via the physical compositions
person fame and credit, or conversely shame and blame: “He their agency produces.4 Much, it is made clear, depends on the
must calculate . . . the amount of praise, remuneration, thanks “arrangement of the parts” in those compositions. According
47
 Things that Move
to an idealized Albertian account of the world, the architect
will be able to define that arrangement autonomously and in
advance, having taken into account all the circumstances of
the context.5 This “art of arrangement” is both a prediction of
where the superficies that make up a projected building will
be and a guarantee of their phenomenal success (i.e., the effec-
tiveness on all levels of the object that is created following the
architect’s instructions). To this extent, the emphasis in Alberti
is very much on “placement”—the prediction of the proper posi-
tion for elements that make up compositions that are read as
buildings. At the commencement of the treatise Alberti informs
the reader that “the whole matter of building is composed of
lineaments [lineamenta] and structure [structura]…. It is the
function and duty of lineaments, then, to presecribe an appro-
priate place.”6 In this respect De re aedificatoria was critical for
the development of the modern notion that an architect can be
read as the “author” of a new work. Architects will themselves
be judged through judgements about the superficies of the built
work their agency produces.
If lineamenta defines where things should be put, the other
side of Alberti’s definition, structura, concerns everything
that has to be put there. Alberti’s arguments, in De re aedifica-
toria and in other texts he produced that consider the effec-
tiveness of various kinds of phenomenal compositions within
the world (notably, buildings, paintings, statues, and ciphers),
suggest that an equal and slightly distinct virtue resides in the
action of placing things —that is to say, in the ability to organ-
ize the world such that its materials come to rest in a particular
position.7 Where in the architect’s case the first kind of virtue
appears bound up with notions of stasis—a kind of inevitability
that emerges when the world is arranged according to a particu-
lar vision, as if things could not be arranged in any other way
(“nothing could be altered but for the worse, as Alberti writes in
De re aedificatoria)—the second kind of virtue must be all about
striving, effort, motion, and movement: the action of placing
physical stuff, of relocating it and reforming it from one state
to another.8 Alberti relates this virtue specifically back to the
question of how architects are judged, but with a notable caveat.
Placing is also an activity that exposes the architect to judge-
ment; in this case however, the risk to reward relationship is
somewhat skewed:
Whenever you intend to move great weights, it is as well to
approach the task gradually, with caution. . . Nor will you
receive as much respect and praise for your ability if your
undertaking follows your plan and succeeds, as the disre-
spect and contempt for your temerity if it fails.9
In one sense this double emphasis in Alberti follows logically
out of the structure of Vitruvius’ De architectura, which Alberti
was adapting and clarifying for a modern audience. Vitruvius
also dwells to a great extent on methods and formulae for
guaranteeing that the “placement” of elements in experienced
compositions will be “correct”—he even adduces a rule for this,
the notion of decorum or appropriate placement.10 At the same
time, Vitruvius classifies the actions of an architect into two
fields, of which one is this facility to predict what placement
will be correct in a composition. The other set of actions that
Vitruvius describes for the architect concerns precisely the
problematics of moving material into the position in which
48 NORDIC JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE NO. 3. VOL. 2. 2012
Tim Anstey
it will be most effective. For Vitruvius this resolved itself as a
problem in physics. Thus the final sections of De architectura,
Books 8–10, consider the principles of mechanics and the con-
struction of machines that move things about.11
Alberti’s De re aedificatoria reflects De architectura, and the
overlap between these two accounts of the art of building was
to become crucial in defining the principle system of valuing
architects’ work during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
However it is very unlikely that Alberti’s distinction between
lineamenta (defined places, predetermined by the architect in
advance of construction) and structura (the material stuff that
must be moved to fill those places) emerges out of Vitruvius.12
Alberti has a general predeliction to consider the skill of art-
ists—those whose agency makes manifest compositions that
are experienced in the world—in precisely these terms. Artists
are to be valued for their ability to predict correct “placement,”
on the one hand, versus their skill in arranging the executive
actions that make this idea of placement tangible in a particular
place and time on the other. This is evident throughout Alberti’s
ouvre and emerges before the period in which the text of De re
aedificatoria was crystallized. It is present in Alberti’s defini-
tion of the art of painting as the action of placing stuff (paint)
into sets of predetermined outlines (places) to produce experi-
ential compositions to be judged (De pictura, 1435); it emerges
in his description of the art of the sculptor, who can predict the Domenico Fontana, Della Trasportatione dell’ Obelisco Vaticano (Rome, 1590). Plate 28. Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket.
position of the superficies of a body which will be occupied by
the material the sculptor has the skill to carve; it is evident also found both in producing that composition where everything is The disappearance of process
in the theorization of the system of ciphers made in De com- the “right” place, but also in an almost magical facility for plac- Notably, De re aedificatoria is unillustrated. It lays the basis for
ponendis cifris, which relies on a distinction between an under- ing those “things”—be they words, letters, stones, or timbers— a discipline of architecture that was to become obsessed with
standing of letter “places” that guarantee the meaning in a text that make up the composition to best effect.18 graphic representation, but makes its own representations in
and material letter “sounds” that fill those places and make the A number of interesting things happen out of this applica- text alone. What is very noticeable in the set of architectural
text manifest—audible to the ear or legible to the eye.13 tion of a theory for analysing one mode of human activity—the treatises that follow Alberti’s De re aedificatoria is the emer-
It seems very likely that the root for this habit of thinking production of political speeches in the extremely specific con- gence and eventual dominance of graphic over textual repre-
in Alberti, which no doubt provided the matrix that informed text of the Roman Senate—to another—the multiple processes sentation. This translation has been much studied and to good
his interpretation of Vitruvius and indirectly informed later involved in ordering and organizing the built environment for effect.19 One aspect about it, though, that still seems important
interpretations of that text, emerges out of an intellectual cul- human habitation. One is the emergence of the idea of the “pro- to emphasize is the probable relationship between the messy
ture that was rooted in the tradition of oratory. On one side ject” (in the modern sense) into architectural thought. Politi- context of building operations and the ideals of a system that
this culture was provided by Alberti’s education in the disci- cal orators have a project—an intention about how the world was based on judging architects by judging the built compo-
pline of Law, in which the methods of aural argument were should be—that goes beyond “fitting” their words to the circum- sitions that they were involved in creating. What can be seen
central. On another it was cemented by the study of the theory stances or the make-up of a specific political speech. The pres- as very useful about graphic representation is that it provides
of oratory, as codified in ancient texts by Cicero among others, ence of the idea that within architectural agency a wider ethical architects, and architecture as a discipline, with a prosthetic
which were reread by humanists in early Renaissance Italy.14 and political stance is at stake—that the architect somehow has through which judgements about architectural virtue can be
That tradition concerned the creation of the most ephemeral a responsibility and a potential beyond providing this or that made without those judgements resting entirely on the produc-
kind of sensory compositions—the positioning of words to cre- tyrant with comfortable accommodation—can be dated from tion of built work. Virtue can be judged by potential; drawings
ate effective political speeches.15 Oratory is an art of placing in Alberti’s infiltration of the methods of oratory into the ques- can show the effect of the built work that could result from the
real time. Its theory analyses the skill of how to assemble words tion of how to organize building practices. What concerns this architect’s agency, and can describe, in great and precise detail,
together effectively at the crucial moment in order to achieve essay more is how this overlap navigated the fact that political every aspect of “placement” that the architect’s agency seeks to
the aim of persuasion. It also, in its classical form, included the speeches, and speeches in general, are compositions that are produce. As virtual buildings, such projections have one great
techniques of mnemonics which enabled aural speeches to be always new and transitory, whereas the production of buildings quality—they can be controlled completely and securely such
reaassembled from memory.16 and built forms is just the opposite: turgid, slow, mortgaged to that the superficies they describe really reflect the architect’s
From Cicero’s account (which Alberti certainly read) this existing conditions, encompassed by conflicting desires, and intention and will.20
ability to decide placement, on the spot, but in advance of the very unlikely to be comprehensible in terms of a dazzling dis- In terms of Alberti’s and Vitruvius’ distinction between
audience’s reception, imbues the orator with an almost magici- play of juggling from a sole author. What happens when a sys- the ability to define decorous compositions and the skill in
cal quality. It is extremely difficult to predict what will be the tem based on valuing “placement” and “placing,” in which the mechanics that could move materials into position in those
right thing to say in advance; good orators are like conjurors, relation between these two can be fluid, inevitable, and under compositions, this development of graphic representation has
able to move people in ways that would not be thought pos- the sole control of a single mind and voice, encounters a context great significance. For the kind of architectural virtue that can
sible.17 Alberti’s understanding about how artists and artistic dominated by existing superstructures where many voices and be communicated persuasively through drawing is, or tends to
works operate seems most indebted to this schooling in ora- minds meet? be, that concerned with placement. Drawings make it possible
tory: that the creator can be judged by the sensorial effect of to experience in advance and at a distance the effect of the built
the composition produced; that the skill of the creator is to be composition—the built work. That other kind of work in which
49
 Things that Move
3 other arts—those which I have broadly termed “placing” here.
5-
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, Regole delli cinque ordini d’architetttura
(Rome 1562), Plate XIII
architects might be involved—political negotiation, lobbying,
organization of workforces, knowledge of mechanics such that
great weights can be lifted—can certainly be described visually,
but not, perhaps to such great effect. By nature such work is
process based, mortgaged to the specific circumstances of con-
text and site, and transient; a machination which facilitates but
does not finally condition that “correct disposition of the parts
such that nothing could be added or taken away”, and which
is invisible to a system of representation developed to record
such things.
It is possible to see in the development of the architectural
treatises that emerged in Europe, first in Italy and then rapidly
in other geographic locations between the middle of the fif-
teenth and the end of the sixteenth centuries, a steady tendency
to lift the architectural project away from the actuality of build-
ing processes.21 Although Francesco di Giorgio in the 1470s
devoted pages to the description of machines for lifting and car-
rying, in Filarete’s Libro Architettonico these had already disap-
peared. In the treatises of Serlio and onwards through Palladio
and Vignola, what is represented in greater and greater detail is
the result, the full stop, the final effect of architectural intention
in defining superficies. What is represented less and less is the
50 NORDIC JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE NO. 3. VOL. 2. 2012
action of arranging circumstances such that materials can be
moved to the positions defined in these drawings. Construction
process may enter in, but often in the form of ruins—of aban-
doned building sites, where pieces of construction lie stranded
and over-given. Building, then, becomes read as a copy of inten-
tion and the process of copying is not considered, per se as,
central to defining architectural virtue.22 This is not to say that
architects such as Palladio neglected or were unskilled in the
Far from it; Palladio was clearly established as an authority
over all aspects of building process. Yet such processes through
which this authority and virtue worked are not at the centre of
Palladio’s books of architecture. What must be communicated
there is, fundamentally, the projected surfaces of compositions
read as built or projected “works.” And we know, from a further
450 years of history, that it is through precisely those projected
“works” that architecture as a discipline has chosen to value
Palladio and claim him as one of history’s greatest architects.
In the systems of graphic representation that develop within
architectural treatises during the sixteenth century, one must
almost inevitably infer that a hierarchy is established between
these two orders of activity. In terms of valuing architectural
agency, skill in placement, which can be described through
graphical projection, is valued over that skill in mechanics and
the control of physical labour that places material. There is a
paradox is here, one to which perhaps more attention could
be given. During the sixteenth century, the architectural dis-
cipline created a virtual world in which, with more and more
sophistication, buildings could exist without being materially
constructed. One might expect that given the endless fluid-
ity that emerges in the virtual—drawings can reflect infinite
changes in intention in a way that buildings cannot—this world
might have been preoccupied by the possibility of change—of
the fluidity of intention in which a thousand possibilities can
be contemplated in a minute. Instead, in terms of its rhetoric,
architecture became more and more concerned with decorum,
with the absolute stasis that limits compositions of brick and
stone.23 Peculiarly, the more architecture could exist on paper,
the more it considered itself beholden to ideas of the hierachi-
cal value of the absolutely permanent, as if decisions could
never be reversed. Although Alberti applied to architecture a
system of valuing that saluted both skill in placement and skill
in placing, and although Vitruvius identified both control of
static composition and control of fluid process as central to
the architect’s work, within the system of valuation and credit
that developed through architecture’s encounter with the print
during the sixteenth century, process gave way to artefact and
ideas of the permanent and the transient became employed in
a specific way.
With this in mind, it is interesting to read again the archi-
tectural treatises of the mid-sixteenth century, and recent com-
mentaries on them. The multiple means of projection on which
Serlio dwells, exhaustively—ichonografia, profilo, ortografia,
sciografia, and scenografia—all concern, in one way or another,
the representation of what might be termed the permanent
architectural work—the trace, in stone, of architectural inten-
tion frozen.24 They tell us almost nothing about how that stone
arrived in its place. It is exactly these aspects of Serlio that have
been subject to much scholarly attention. Authoritative inter-
pretations of his text concern themselves almost exclusively
Tim Anstey
with nuances of Serlio’s intention around the projection of
built works as artefacts, modern and ancient.25 This statement
could be made even more confidently about the treatise of Pal-
ladio. Here, architectural compositions are drained of almost
all their material quality; the “stuffiness” of materials is dealt
with in minimal chapters of four paragraphs each (twelve for
metals); and nothing is said about the issue of moving these
things about.26 Equipped with the treatise, you could accurately
say where everything should go, but you would have no idea of
how to get it there. By the time of Vignola, the sovereignty of
this paper plane is entirely established. Graphic representa-
tion comprises a complete and developed system, which facili-
tates one kind of discussion about what architectural intention
entails. In that discussion placement rules supreme; placing
has been almost entirely relegated to a space beyond the pages
of the text.27
Challenging the model
It seems very important to acknowledge that a particular idea
about the architectural work is built into the systems of rep-
resentation through which architects were communicating
towards the end of the sixteenth century, and that this idea
was in some senses exclusive. In terms of looking for a histori-
cal locus in which a contemporary challenge to that idea of the
architectural work might be mounted, there is one text, pro-
duced at the very end of the sixteenth century, which appears
unique.
Della Trasportatione dell’ Obelisco Vaticano, e delle Fabriche
di Nostro Signore Papa Sisto V, written by Domenico Fontana
and published in Rome in 1590, combines a re-evaluation of Domenico Fontana, Della Trasportatione dell’ Obelisco Vaticano (Rome,
architectural agency with a lucid description of the experiential 1590). Frontispiece.
impact of construction process.28 The text is written in part to
advertise, precisely, the judgment of Fontana as an architect. Della Trasportatione dell’ Obelisco Vaticano defines the archi-
It appears to conform to the conventions, implicit in the texts tectural work in terms of processes as much as objects. The
of Serlio, Palladio, and Vignola, that such publication required: subtext of the frontispiece, like the text of the title, is very
Fontana stands as the author; the book combines text, costly explicit about this. The medal Fontana holds out is the mate-
production, and fabulous illustrations; and it describes what, rial token of a decision made by Sixtus V, and through Sixtus by
since the framing of architecture as an artistic and intellectual the Roman people, precisely to honour Fontana’s judgement as
discipline at the start of the modern era, must be considered as an architect.30 This reward was given not for any normal defi-
architectural “works.”29 nition, on Fontana’s part, of “lines and angles” in a projected
At first glance the frontispiece to the book emphasizes its artefact, nor for a conventional demonstration of his predictive
alignment with this tradition. Here Fontana is represented, knowledge of the correct place for all the parts in a composi-
like Serlio, like Vignola, beard bristling in three-quarter view. tion such that “nothing could be added or taken away but for
He stands at a table bearing the tools essential to his calling, the worse.” Indeed it was not given for defining the lineaments
clutching an architectural body, that of an obelisk, to his breast. of any object at all. Rather, it was awarded for his prowess in
The suggestion one almost inevitably derives from this is one designing, organizing, and predicting the results of a process. Of
of ownership between a built work presented via a projective the several projects in Fontana’s treatise, the most spectacular,
drawing (the obelisk, represented in perspective) and the archi- which gives its name to the book and which informs the frontis-
tect pictured: the obelisk stands on Fontana’s table among his piece, concerns the removal of the Egyptian obelisk that, since
other possessions. But on closer examination disturbances are antiquity, had stood to the south of what became the basilica of
to be found in this reading. There is something strange both St. Peter in Rome. In 1585 Fontana obtained the commission to
about the placing of the obelisk on Fontana’s table (balanced translate the obelisk to a new location axially before the facade
on the rear edge) and about the positioning of Fontana’s hands. of the church, then in the process of reconstruction, in what is
The right appears to have got caught up in the chain and medal- now known as Piazza San Pietro. The work took exactly one
lion hanging around his neck—why, one wonders, must Fontana year, from 25 September 1585 to 26 September 1586. It con-
run chains through his fingers in order to hold the obelisk? And sisted of moving a single piece of stone, weighing around 400
the fingers of the left hand appear to be in motion, as if holding tonnes, a distance of 250 metres.31
the obelisk required constant effort, as if it were a snake, or a What is created here, and what must be described to illus-
fish, hard to grasp, apt to escape. What, kind of work, then, is trate Fontana’s judgement, is not, then, a projected artefact,
Fontana describing to articulate his virtue? but an event—a staging, a happening. Fontana adds very little
51
artistic creativity in relation to the physiognomy of the obelisk;
indeed, the reverse is rather the case—his goal is to translate it
without material change, alteration, or damage. What is cre-
ated through Fontana’s “work” is the extraordinary process that
moving the obelisk entailed. Yet in the reading and writing of
architectural history, to value an architectural work in this way
is unusual. It is perhaps this condition that resonates with the
hand gestures in Fontana’s frontispiece. Moving the obelisk
was obviously a very difficult task technically.32 But I would
suggest that for an architect in 1590 it was also already a chal-
lenge theoretically to dignify the action of moving the obelisk
as a bona fide architectural work.33 Thus the richness in Fon-
tana’s architectural treatise is its celebration and vindication
of this other kind of work, experienced by a crowd of thousands,
of lifting, rotating, and dragging a gargantuan object with the
means available, and of directing, organizing, bullying, and
negotiating the context in which this could happen. Much of
the intriguing quality of the treatise emerges out of this ambi-
tion to celebrate one kind of idea of the exemplary architectural
work (concerned, exclusively, with “placing") via the conven-
tions evolved to communicate another (the system of graphic
representation developed in architectural treatises since Serlio
to describe “placement” in architectural compositions, or the
definition of superficies in the stationary, if virtual, object).
Fontana accomplishes this task through ten carefully
composed plates and through an accompanying text.34 These
plates follow almost completely conventions of architectural
draftsmanship developed to represent architectural works as
artefacts: plan, section, and elevation; perspective; and an iso-
lation from and a filtering of contextual information to com-
municate content. All these are theorized by Serlio and all are
used through Palladio and Vignola to underline the centrality
of defining placement to the architect’s task. Yet what is clearly
articulated in Fontana’s depictions is not the final, static, mon-
umental capacity of the obelisk itself, but the moment before
this capacity is realized—the drama of “placing”—or “displac-
ing”—what, for the extended duration of the moment in the
book (it took three years to complete), must be considered
a temporary, movable, and ephemeral object. The drawings
deserve to be studied as a series, but the ways in which Fon-
tana adjusts convention in order to achieve his aims, and much
of the alternative idea of the architectural work implicit in the
treatise, can be exemplified by looking carefully at one image.
The second plate in Fontana’s series is based on a plan rep-
resentation of the urban space that surrounded the obelisk in
its “original” position south of the cathedral, that is to say, the
place it occupied before Fontana’s work. This consisted of a
rough piazza containing the obelisk and a circular fourth-cen-
tury sacristy (shown central and free standing on plan), edged
by the construction of the church to the east (on the right) and
by dwellings to the south and west (whose walls show as frag-
ments in conventionally hatched plan). Within this space, in
Fontana’s representation, a series of patterns are marked. At
the centre is a cross of small squares marking the assembly of
temporary piles that made up an enormous scaffold, the “cas-
tello” built around the obelisk, in which Fontana would first
pivot and then lower it. Filling the remaining space of the paper
and the experiential urban space contained by the “permanent”
structures already mentioned, a further set of revolutions are
marked. A series of forty crosses—each circumscribed by two
52 NORDIC JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE NO. 3. VOL. 2. 2012
concentric rings, each with a kind of piglet’s tail and mouse’s
nose—are connected by lines to small circles that cluster in
their turn in and around the squares marking the central cross.
Transient artefact and permanent process
In this drawing Fontana makes visible that which is usually
excluded from architectural representation—the temporary
supports, tools, workers, and scaffolding that allow material
construction to come into being. Indeed, Fontana’s whole work
revolves around such objects, challenging that hierarchy that
usually privileges the representation of the built over that of
building. But because such an hierarchical order was already
inscribed into the systems of representation Fontana was
using, he has to twist the rules of those systems to make his
description.
Reading into Fontana’s picture, one starts naturally out-
side the plan with the scene at the base, which provides both
a foreground introduction and implicitly a foundation for the
meaning of everything else. This scene represents only things
that move and whose manifestation is temporary—animate ste-
vedores, horses, whips in hand, circumambulate an inanimate
windlass. As one moves from the perspective scene into the
plan drawing it is clear that each of the circles in the swarm fill-
ing the plan’s space represents such an assembly. In this trans-
lation from perspective to plan, however, the most “temporary”
objects are lost to the conventions of representation (the peo-
ple and animals disappear) and what remains marked on the
paper is the outline of the slightly more permanent and inani-
mate objects on which they exert force—windlasses, ropes and
the rotational track of the moving figures. So the first stepping
point highlighted in this combinatory drawing is that between
animated objects (that move freely and diurnally) and inani-
mate ones—winches and ropes.
The next step that one can impute is one between vary-
ing orders of permanency in temporary objects concerning
whether their job is to move—rotationally or linearly—or to
guide movement—to resist force and orientate translation.
The articulation of this spatio-temporal step between classes
of transience and permanence is also built into the represen-
tational convention of the picture. The slippery nature of the
windlasses is indicated by their contrasting degrees of rotation
in plan relative to the axis of the picture; the nature of the cas-
tello orientates its cross orthogonally on the paper. The cas-
tello, which anchors the picture, might be seen as a kind of pin
connecting the worlds of “building” (as an action) and build-
ings (as artefacts)—or perhaps one could say as one side of a
central link in the chain of connection the drawing suggests,
between the class of the temporary and the class of the per-
manent. Like the windlasses the castello is a temporary mani-
festation—it existed during one year in two different locations,
and its internal material connections were designed such that
all the elements in its assembly could be reused and disappear
into other constructions. But its classification as “temporary”
becomes highly complex, for what is most important about the
castello, in fact, is its absolute permanency in relation to the
enduring moment in which the obelisk must be lowered from
vertical to horizontal. Thus the castello derives an aura of per-
manence through its task of resisting and modulating forces
that are absolute and permanent. And so the whole of Fontana’s
drawing, as this section of the whole event, becomes orientated Domenico Fontana, Della Trasportatione dell’ Obelisco Vaticano (Rome, 1590).
53
 Things that Move
around the orthogonal propriety of this object. The castello can
be seen as the stationary element around which all the other
urban structures revolve, and in its representation only fixed
items concerned in the movement of the obelisk are shown.
There is therefore a very subtle change of drawing convention
between the windlasses and the castello; in drawing the latter,
the lines representing the mobile rope disappear and only the
beams that will support the obelisk and the pulleys that will
channel the motive forces in the cables are shown.35
The permanence and fixed nature of the castello is spelt
out clearly in the detailed plan superimposed, at larger scale,
midway up the picture. The main part of this plan shows the
blocks (doubled pulleys are shown with a doubled ellipse) and
beams that were to channel forces in a reflected ceiling plan
view (i.e., a view imagined as looking up from the underside).
But this plan too includes a representational flip. At the centre,
the obelisk is shown, viewed from directly above as opposed to
beneath, the lines of its pyramidal top crossing at the centre.
As one crosses from describing a temporary-but-permanent
object to a permanent-but-transient object, one must literally
invert one’s mental view of the picture. One can take this ana-
lysis further to embrace the framing images of the obelisk in
profile that surround the plan. In the four elevational views
that frame Fontana’s drawing one is never permitted to view
the obelisk directly. Each view is protected by a sheathing layer,
lying between the obelisk and the castello, the obelisk and the
viewer’s eye, and between the obelisk and harm. Following
elevation convention, the representation here is nearly lifelike
again, showing the blocks and tackles that will move the object;
the detail of iron connecting rods and bindings; shadow relief
on the bundled timbers. Together this assembly of straps and
pulleys and timbers creates the device that allows a translation
between two contrasting notions of the absolute—the one tem-
porary and permanent (an obelisk that will last until the end of
the world but that will soon move); the other the constructional
and platonic (a network of forces that act on this object and
condition its placing, manifest in the castello that will last a
year but in which movement is untenable).
From the clothed obelisk it is possible to descend into the
plan drawing of the picture again to follow a further set of steps.
Where the drawing up to now has communicated the absolute,
and in platonic terms “permanent,” nature of the seemingly
transient (windlasses, castello), it now relates the temporari-
ness of apparently permanent structures. Lineamenta, those
lines and angles that define the superficies of buildings as arte-
facts and which can so easily be represented by drawing, may be
absolute in space. But Fontana’s twisting of convention makes
clear that they are provisional in time. A transience conditions
architecture-as-artefact that effects every single “permanent”
structure represented in Fontana’s picture.36 Any hierarchical
order assumed between the significance of determining place-
ment in permanent structures and organizing the placing of
their “transient” construction is challenged in this drawing.
The permanent condition it alludes to concerns not only the
absolute nature of the context of forces that produces change
in buildings—that moves materials and re-places objects—but
the also the constant translation, removal, and transience of
what we usually think of as solid built works that these forces
act upon.
54 NORDIC JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE NO. 3. VOL. 2. 2012
Architectural work
It should be emphasized that Fontana’s treatise is not a pro-
jective set of instructions about how to move the obelisk. It
is, rather, a reflective account a posteriori (and three years in
the making) about having moved it. In terms of its historical
context, this account is significant in that it curates and makes
visible an aspect of the architectural work that goes beyond
the definition and recording of projected artefacts. Indeed,
the significance of the architectural “work” articulated in the
drawings only really emerges as one reads Fontana’s descrip-
tion of the logistic context of legislative, economic, and ecologi-
cal agency that was necessary to support the project. Working
outwards from the obelisk, Fontana lists the following: the cal-
culations in building statics made to estimate its weight; the
design of the timber castello that should bear and rotate this
mass; the sourcing and geographical transport of the timber;
the papal bulls required to secure the commodities involved
and assistance at the right price; the estimate of the number
of horses (and therefore the amount of horsepower) required
as motive force; the breaking strain of hemp cable; the supply
of the hemp; cable manufacture; the stabling of the horses; the
removal of men; the provision of foodstuffs; et cetera.37 As one
reads one understands Fontana’s awareness that this “preg-
nant” moment of moving the obelisk, like a piece of military
strategy hanging in the balance, is at the centre of a national
network of supply, transit, climate, and administration that is
and must be ongoing.
To record this and to give it virtue (which is what Fontana
achieves in his treatise) is to do a number of interesting things,
then. Fontana is obviously interested in architecture as an
action, as the “placing of material,” in Alberti’s terms. There is
also a strong resonance between Fontana’s textual description
and Vitruvius’ observations in Books 8–10 of De architectura
(i.e., those sections not concerned with decorum or the appro-
priate placing of elements within built compositions, but with
the process of placing and the knowledge and facility necessary
to control such processes).38
But it seems important also to reiterate the extent to which
this treatise appears bound to Alberti’s notion that architects
will be judged according to the experienced composition their
agency produces. Technical and mathematical details; bureau-
cratic machinery; spectacle, including the identity of the audi-
ence; and religious rites—all are bound together into an idea
that must still be interrogated in terms of architects, authors,
and works. Fontana’s drawing signals the experiential presence
of the “discovered” permanencies that are implied by the invis-
ible path of the obelisk or the rotations of the temporary wind-
lasses. Like a political speech or a piece of music, this transient
“work” would have created powerful responses; the agency that
controlled it could certainly be judged through this effect.
In looking at architecture we are still conditioned to a great
extent by representational systems that facilitate the judge-
ment of architectural agency via the description of projected
artefacts. At their most extreme, Fontana’s illustrations appear
to develop a system of representation that directly confronts
this tradition, as radical as any drawing from Cedric Price or
Superstudio. It might be suggested that the transient events
Fontana’s text describes hold a secondary status—that they
cannot be viewed as part of the syntax that makes the built envi-
ronment meaningful, or that is central in judging the designers
of that environment. However, although the experience Fon-
tana conveys is partly emotive—horses strain, windlasses creak,
hemp cable groans—behind this lies a choreographic scheme;
fixed relationships of contract and risk; links that, although not
manifest permanently in any one location, have their own kind
of permanence through repetition. The phenomena amounts
to another urban pattern replete with its own tightly con-
trolled formal structure. Fontana’s distortion of renaissance
modes of architectural representation—and celebration of
the architectural significance of process—appears valuable in
theorizing architectural agency today. The move to redefine the
architectural work as something process based is of particular
relevance at several levels. The materials we use to build, what
we have to do to them in order to make them serviceable, where
they come from, and the ways in which we join them together,
are all matters suddenly fraught with potential in a sustain-
able society. Fontana’s description of the logistic background
to moving the obelisk has the same panoscopic fascination
that emerges in life-cycle cost analysis today. In re-evaluating
architectural agency, our acknowledgement of the management
of such webs will become increasingly central. To include, as
Fontana’s treatise does, this “theatre of construction” within
the definition of the architectural is to make visible, in a very
specific way, the technological, carbon-significant processes on
which habitation depends.
For architectural works are defined, precisely, by their
spectacular quality—to define something as a work is to make
it visible—to criticism and to aesthetic judgement. Defining ele-
ments of process as integral to the notion of the architectural
work is to raise the stakes in regard to such processes and to
position them as matters of central import to the self-definition
of architecture as a discipline. To shift one’s emphasis from
understanding architectural intention as the organizational
composition of built artefacts to valuing a microscopic under-
standing of process is to shift how one values a Le Corbusier
or a Cedric Price, or more latterly a SHoP architects in New
York or a Lacaton & Vassal in Paris. There is nothing particu-
larly moralizing in this proposal—the aim is not to produce a
humbler or somehow more worthy discipline, one in which
the actors eschew their designer clothes and take on sack cloth
and ashes; rather, the aim would be to make integral a notion of
material construction into the central vanity that must accom-
pany actions within a discipline that, from its roots, is defined
as artistic and creative. And it perhaps allows a new kind of
definition of what architecture is and what we value in terms
of the actions that create it. It would be productive to think of
architecture as the art of getting things moved about from one
place to another, at a rather slow speed, with the intention that
they will stay for a while and create value. An art of placing, or
displacing material. An important enquiry within such a defi-
nition is to understand which elements are critical in creating
such actions within a framework that also includes an idea of
ethical responsibility.
Nils-Ole
Tim Anstey
Lund
1 See Tim Anstey, Katja Grillner, and Rolf Hughes, Architecture and
Authorship (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007); Jeremy Till, Architec-
ture Depends (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010).
2 Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, On the Art of Building in
Ten Books, trans. J. Rykwert, R. Tavernor, N. Leach (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1988), hereafter abbrieviated as De re aed. See also Giovanni
Orlandi, L. B. Alberti, L’archittetura, ed. G. Orlandi and P. Portoghesi, 2
vols (Milan: Ed. E. Polifio, 1966)), and the facsimile of the 1485 edition
prepared by Hans-Karl Lücke, Alberti Index: Leon Battista Alberti, De re
Aedificatoria, 4 vols [Florence, 1485] (Munich: Prestel, 1975).
3 De re aed., IX, 10, 315.
4 On the various backgrounds to Alberti’s identification of the possibility
of judging architects through the built work, see Mario Carpo, The Alpha-
bet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011) and my own
“Authorship and Authority in L. B. Alberti’s De re aedificatoria,” Nordic
Journal of Architectural Research, 4 (2003), 19–25.
5 Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, 20–26.
6 De re aed., I, 1, 7.
7 Alberti’s position vis-à-vis the architect’s involvement in the action
of “placing” might be debated. On one side, in De re aedificatoria Alberti
makes clear that the architect need not control actions on the building
site, but can leave such matters to a “zealous, circumspect and strict clerk
of works” (De re aed. IX, 11, 318). This might suggest a determined disin-
terest in the action of placing material as an area of concern for architects.
At the same time, in the introduction to the Italian edition of his treatise
on painting, Della Pittura, Alberti praises Brunelleschi’s virtue in con-
structing the dome of S. Maria del Fiore, which “if I am not mistaken . . .
people did not believe possible in these days and was probably unknown
and unimaginable to the ancients” (Della Pittura, Introduction, 34–35.)
This expressed concern can be linked to the structures of De pictura, De
statua and De componendis cifris. The classical examination of the rela-
tionships between these works is contained in Joan Gadol, Leon Battista
Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago Uni-
versity Press, 1969).
8 The location within De re aedificatoria of Alberti’s discussion on the
movement of large weights occurs at the centre of his treatise within the
crucial Book 6 on Ornament (that is to say, it is divorced from the discus-
sions of materials that occupy Books 2, Materials and 3, Construction,
which deal largely with the function of materials in place. See De re aed.,
VIII, 6–8, 164–175.
9 De re aed., VI, 8, 175.
10 M. Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura. Translated as Vitruvius, The Ten
Books on Architecture, trans. by Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover
Publications, 1960). For a description of Vitruvius’ use of decorum see
John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1988), 36–39. On the subsequent history of this term, see Vaughan Hart
and Peter Hicks, Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Treatise (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
11 Vitruvius considers, first, the behaviour of materials in their place, i.e.,
the problem of knowing that materials will do appropriate things once
they are included in the new composition; second, the characteristics that
guarantee a fit between use and organistation; and third, the appropriate-
ness of appearance, such that the building signals the correct fit between
its occupants and their social or racial or hierarchical status. All these
aspects of the treatise are dedicated to guaranteeing the stasis of the built
55
 Things that Move
composition (Books 1 to 7). Books 8 to 10 consider, in order, the problems
that condition the actual movement of materials to a new site of occupa-
tion, and deal, in principle, with “machines.” On the compositional struc-
ture of Vitruvius see, among others, Ingrid Roland, “Vitruvius in Print and
in Vernacular Translation: Fra Giocondo, Bramante, Raphael and Cesare
Cesariano,” in Paper Palaces: the Rise of the Renaissance Architectural
Treatise, ed. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), 105–121. For a recent and acute analysis, see Bernard Cache,
“Vitruvius Machinator Terminator,” in Projectiles (London: Architectural
Association, 2011), 119–139.
12 For recent studies of the intellectual background to Alberti’s text on
architecture, see Caroline Van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Visual Arts
in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Alina A.Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance:
Architectural Invention, Ornament and Literary Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999); and now Caspar Pearson, Human-
ism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).
13 For a comparison of these texts, see Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti. On
Descriptio urbis Romæ, see additionally M. Carpo, “Descriptio urbis Romæ:
Ekfrasis geografica e cultura visuale all’ alba della rivoluzione tipografica,”
Albertiana 1 (1998), 121–143. For translations of Alberti’s mathemati-
cal works, including De componendis cifris see Kim Williams, Stephen
R. Wassell, Lionel March, eds. The Mathematical works of Leon Battista
Alberti (Basel: Birkhauser, 2010). De pictura and De statua were trans-
lated with an introduction in The Latin Texts of De pictura and De statua,
trans. and ed. C. Grayson, London, 1972. Joan Gadol’s analysis of Alberti’s
thinking successfully demonstrated the structural similarities that exist
between De componendis cifris, De pictura, De statua and Descriptio
urbis Romæ. This structure also describes the work of the sculptor, who,
in Alberti’s terms, positions sensible substances—timber, stone, clay—
using the measurements of porre di termini, regulated by the ideals of
misura. Likewise, Descriptio urbis Romæ analysed the city of Rome by
providing a table of “places,” each defined by a unique distance and orien-
tation from a single origin, and a list of the material objects to be found in
Rome which belonged in these places. As Gadol observes, the mechanisms
Alberti proposed to define placement in these texts were related. Thus the
concentric wheels of De componendis cyfris are echoed in the calibrated
disc and measuring plumb line of De statua and the orrizonte of Descriptio
urbis Romæ. Alberti’s aim in proposing such mechanisms relates to the
tradition of mnemonics both overtly and via the informational structure
of oratory, of which mnemonics formed a part, and in which Alberti was
schooled. As Mario Carpo has observed, both De statua and Descriptio
urbis Romæ provide a means to encode and re-member—in the one case
statues, in the other images of cities—over periods of time.
14 The classic examination of the importance of oratory for fifteenth-
century analysis of the visual remains Michael Baxandall’s Giotto and the
Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pic-
torial Composition, 1350–1450 [1971] (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991). In relation to architecture, see Carol William Westfall, In this Most
Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban
Planning in Rome, 1447–55 (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer-
sity Press, 1974) and Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early
Humanism: Ethics, Aesthetics and Eloquence (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992).
15 Oratory included the codification of mnemonics, the technique by
which orators were able to store and recall their compositions. And
beyond mnemonics the organisational structures of oratory were con-
ditioned by the notion of an architecture of places, which provided
organization, decorum, orientation (the “points” addressed; the moral
56 NORDIC JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE NO. 3. VOL. 2. 2012
imperative of what must be said) and a cornucopia of explosive, sensible
content, that gave speeches their emotive quality but which had to be kept
in check, located, by the frame.The contrast between these registers, as
well as much of the structure and tradition that the humanists attempted
to recover from antique oratory is evident in Cicero, On the Ideal Orator
(De oratore), trans. James M. May and Jakob Wisse (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2001).
16 De re aedificatoria’s distinction between lineaments and structure
also resonates strongly with the mnemonic classification of compositions
as being made up of ordered loci and effective imagines which fill these
places. On the wider implications of mnemonic theory for Alberti’s writ-
ing, see Tim Anstey, “The Dangers of Decorum,” in Architecture Research
Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2 (2006), 131–139.
17 “Who is it who sends shivers down your spine? At whom do people
stare in stunned amazement when he speaks?” (De oratore, trans. May
and Wisse, 3.53, 238, 239). It was extremely difficult to give rules for how
this should happen, qua Cicero: “As in life so in rhetoric, nothing is more
difficult than to judge what is appropriate [quod deceat]” (Cicero, Orator,
is a short profile that models the ideal orator on his own technique; see
Cicero, Brutus. Orator, trans. G. L. Hendrickson and H. M. Hubbell, Loeb
Classical Library (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1939), 70); and “It is,
of course, obvious that no single style is fitting for every case or every audi-
ence or every person involved or every occasion . . . So it seems that there
is really no rule I could give you at this point” (De oratore, trans. May and
Wisse, 3.210, 290). One side of this difficulty concerns the composition
experienced, on which the orator is judged; one side concerns the skill of
the oratory which lies precisely in this action of placing.
18 This celebration of the magical attributes of an architect in the pro-
cess of placing is evident in Alberti’s dedication of the Italian version of
On Painting to Fillipo Brunellsechi. Della Pittura [1435] in Leon Battista
Alberti. Opere volgari, ed. Cecil Grayson, vol. 3 (Bari: G. Laterza, 1973),
5–107. For an analysis of Alberti’s formulation of the potential of archi-
tects, and of buildings, to affect their viewers, and a comparison of this
with the potential attributed to speeches and orators by Cicero, see Tim
Anstey, “Architecture and Rhetoric: Persuasion, Context, Action.”
19 See particularly Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, and Carpo,
“The Emergence of the Typographical Architect,” in Paper Palaces.
20 See Tim Anstey, “The Ambiguities of Disegno,” in The Journal of Archi-
tecture, vol. 10, no. 3 (2005), 295–306.
21 For a thorough treatment of the development of the architectural trea-
tise, see Payne, The Architectural Treatise.
22 This argument is rehearsed also by Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algo-
rithm.
23 On the development of Vitruvianism and its relationship to decorum,
see Paper Palaces.
24 Vaughan Hart, “Serlio and the Representation of Architecture,” in
Paper Palaces.
25 See Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, “On Sebastiano Serio: Decorum
and the Art of Architectural Invention” and Carpo, “The Making of the
Typographical Architect,” both in Paper Palaces.
26 Andrea Palladio, I Quattro Libri di Architettura (Venice: Domenico de’
Franceschi,1570), 1: I–VI.
27 Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura
(Rome: No publ., 1562. Although this concern with the decorum (or licen-
tiousness) of projected architectural compositions, which is the subject of
the paper architecture of the sixteenth century, is often attributed to the
increasing significance of Vitruvius, such a supposition cannot provide
a complete explanation. This is because Vitruvius, to a far greater extent
than Alberti, spells out how machination can be seen as a central part
of the architect’s activity, and how the ability to organize materials and
processes—to move weights, to organize men—can be as crucial as any
other facility in gaining an architect praise or vilification. Rather, it seems
proper to say that sixteenth-century architects sampled, and very spe-
cifically, from Vitruvius’ text exactly those aspects that could be of use in
guaranteeing a new system for valuing their activities. In that system, two
components were central—the development of graphic systems of repre-
sentation that could communicate projected buildings without building
them, and the emphasis that the central and staple virtue of the architect
is the ability to make such projections.
28 Domenico Fontana, Della trasportatione dell’ obelisco Vaticano, e della
fabriche di Sisto V is published in facsimile with an introduction by Paolo
Portoghesi in Domenico Fontana, Della trasportatione dell’ obelisco Vati-
cano 1590, ed. Adriano Carugo (Milan: Edizione Polifilo, 1978) and is avail-
able in facsimile with an English translation and introduction by Ingrid D.
Roland in the CD-ROM series of the Rare Books and Special Collections
Division, Library of Congress, as Domenico Fontana, Della trasportatione
dell’ obelisco Vaticano, Rome 1590 (Oakland, CA: Octavo, 2002).
29 On the history of the Fontana’s project for moving the obelisk, see
Brian Curran et al., Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, Mass.: Burndy Library,
2009), 103–140; Giovanni Cipriani, Gli Obelischi Egizi, Politica e Cultura
nella Roma Barocca (Florence: Leo S. Oschki, 1993); Marcello Pagiolo, and
Maria Luisa Madonna, eds, Sisto V, vol. I, Roma e il Lazio (Rome: Istituto
Oligrafico e Zecca Dello Stato, 1992); and Erik Iversen, Obelisks in Exile,
vol. 1, The Obelisks of Rome (Copenhagen: Gad, 1968).
30 Curran et al., Obelisk, 134.
31 The conversion of weights and distances from Roman into metric
measures are my own. The height and weight of the obelisk were calcu-
lated by and are recorded in the text, Della trasportatione, 9r-10v. On the
history of the process, Curran, Obelisk, 103–140.
32 It was difficult in terms of what actually had to be done. The strong-
est motive power unit at the time was a horse or ox, capable of exerting
a continuous force of around 125 lbs (50 kg) in an unsteady horizontal
direction; the strongest cable able to transmit this force could take some-
thing over 20,000 lbs of tension (8 tonnes, 40 times what the horse could
move). However, the obelisk was a single piece of stone, 114 palms high
by Fontana’s calculation (around 25 meters), weighing 963,537 35/88 lbs
(Fontana calculates the weight to this precision), about 8,000 times as
much as a horse could lift through direct traction.
33 Intriguingly, Fontana has never been treated particularly kindly by
those texts that develop a history of architecture through the descriptions
of architects and works. His removal of the obelisk was celebrated in Gio-
vanni Baglione’s undiscriminating Le Vite de Pittori, Scultori, Architetti
e Intagliatori [Naples, 1642], and he was the only architect included in
Giovan Pietro Bellori’s Vite [Rome, 1671], on account of the same action.
Yet Bellori’s selection itself was rapidly criticized as outdated on stylis-
tic grounds (Bellori supported traditionalists like Maderno against, say,
Borromini). For a review of the place of such selection in seventeenth-
century art history, see Giovan Pietro Bellori, The Lives of the Modern
Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. and ed. Alice Sedgwick Wohl et
al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In later history Fon-
tana’s projects for new compositions (which include the Lateran palace
and additions to the Quirinale palace) were criticized for their monotony
and lack of imagination. This image stuck, particularly among the writers
who forged architectural history as a discipline in the twentieth century.
For Sigfried Giedion, Fontana belonged to “that artistically mediocre gen-
eration of architects between Michelangelo and the rise of the Roman
Baroque. His taste was as flavourless as that of his client.” Sigfried Gie-
dion, Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1941), 89.
34 The plates were made by the engraver Natale Beneficio da Sebenico
Tim Anstey
from Fontana’s own drawings, see Fontana, Della trasportatione dell’
obelisco Vaticano, Rome 1590, CD-ROM, “Introduction,” 10.
35 There is a very specific change in terms of representation between
Fontana’s preparatory drawing for this plate and the final engraving,
which suggests that this omission was very carefully considered. In Fon-
tana’s drawing the lines indicating ropes are carried into the representa-
tion of the castello; in the engraving these lines are omitted.
36 Directly above the castello at the centre of the plan, and heavily
hatched, stand the walls of the circular fourth-century sacristy, gashed
top and bottom by the invisible and partial path of the obelisk as it is
lowered to horizontal. Away to the bottom left of the plan, walls and tow-
ers of houses close the space at the bottom of the paper, but others have
been demolished, Fontana explains in the legend, to make space for the
operation. At the head of the picture (the composition is closed by a timber
paling) fencing must be removed to allow access to the “sledge” that will
later transport the obelisk to its destination. Finally, to the right of the
drawing stands the church around which all this activity will take place,
shown as two separate and disconnected things. In the upper section of
the plan is the new construction around the dome of S. Peters not yet built;
in the lower section, the wall of the Constantinian basilica, in the process
of demolition.
37 Della trasportatione, 5v, 6r–8v (contents of papal bull empowering
Fontana to expedite process and collect materials), 9r–10r (calculation
of weights), 10r (cables and windlasses), 10v–13r (scaffold and timbers),
13v– (process of movement).
38 In this respect Fontana may be indebted to a development in later
interpretations of Vitruvius that celebrated the architect’s role as a
governor of process, which was to inform later commentaries on the De
architectura. This strand started early in northern texts based on Vitru-
vius, for example, John Shute, First and Chief Grovndes of Architecture.
(London: Thomas Marsh, 1563), emphasizes the scientific aspects of
the architect’s role, and this understanding was strong in the Vitruvian
thought developed by John Dee and evident all the way through English
attributions of architectural virtue to Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren.
In relation to this, see John Dee, A Preface to Euclid, in John Dee, ed. Ger-
ald Suster (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2003). See also Frances
A. Yates, Theatre of the World (N. p.: Law Book Co of Australasia, 1969)
and Vaughan Hart, “Inigo Jones’ Site Organization at St. Paul’s Cathe-
dral: ‘Pondrous Masses Beheld Hangin in the Air,’” Journal of the Society
of Architectural Historians, vol. 53, no. 4 (December 1994), 414–427.
57