ABSTRACT
It was Emil Kaufmann,3 the historian of the architecture of the enlightenment, who has presented ‘rigorism’ as a major movement in architecture which emerged in the early 1740’s and associated it with Carlo Lòdoli, a Venetian Franciscan friar whose immensely successful public diatribes against the grandiloquent, heavy, ‘false’ architecture of his day, as passionate as they were learned, earned him the appellation of ‘the Socrates of architecture’. One reason Lòdoli was likened to Socrates was that, like the Greek philosopher, he never wrote down his theories, and left to his followers the task of publicizing them, Francesco Algarotti, Francesco Milizia, Andrea Memmo. Another, and more important one, was his attachment to the Socratic doctrine of beauty as express - ing purpose of use. Lòdoli preached that in order for architecture to renew itself and achieve ‘truth’ and ‘eternal youth’ it had, through its rigor, to cast off the excessive, plethoric forms of the past and keep only what was essential for adapting itself to contemporary technological advances.4
