Architecture and Mathematics in Early Modern Religious Orders

Abstract

For most of us, a familiar image from Raphael’s School of Athens serves to illustrate our intuitive notions about the links between early modern architecture and mathematics. The artist’s portrait of the great Renaissance architect Bramante as the geometer Euclid recalls the medieval traditions of Gothic architects and master masons using geometry. Moreover, the inclusion of Zoroaster and Ptolemy—identified by celestial and terrestrial globes—in the group huddled around Euclid/Bramante further seems to associate geometry and architecture with astronomy, vaguely echoing the medieval quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. In short, the architect as mathematician (or mathematician as architect) operating within a larger group of quantifiable crafts and sciences seems obvious, and not particular to the early modern world. Yet a closer look at a well-defined culture which produced such individuals illuminates much about the period’s understanding of both architecture and mathematics. The religious orders traditionally associated with the Counter Reformation, such as the Jesuits, Theatines, and Barnabites, provide rich material for investigating the relationship between architecture and mathematics, and they nurtured a specific type of priest-architect.