Prehistories of Common Space: Conflict and Abstraction in Renaissance Architecture

Traditionally, Renaissance architecture has been seen either as a totalitarian apparatus to “make slaves its workmen and plagiarists its architects,” or as the embodiment of a universal system of true harmonic proportions. In the first case, the lower classes are reduced to a mere passive role; in the second, the historicity of the class confrontations that characterized the period are completely removed, and architecture is reduced to an abstraction of the worst kind. In the dedicatory letter of The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli employs the tool of linear perspective: to know himself, the prince has to look at himself from the point of view of the common man. But this method is not only a heuristic device for the knowledge of power, but also the key for its conquest and management. The Prince has to ally with the multitude, because the multitude, not yet tamed as a well-ordered people, preserves the right to enforce the common good of the state through violence. Architecture is always a product of the ruling classes, and its emergence as an autonomous, abstract knowledge parallels the necessity to order the rise of the modern state, to give form to what will become its public space. But in the Renaissance this space is far to be realized, and architecture is caught between an unresolved tension between a power in constant redefinition and the tumultuous multitude in the process of organizing itself as a political force. The emergence of Brunelleschi's, Alberti's and Palladio's architectural systems will be seen as informed by this confrontation, in the necessity to strengthen an alliance with the innovative forces of the common, but also as an attempt to tame its revolutionary impulses.