ABSTRACT
The previous chapters’ examination of the network of arguments, actors
and concepts through which the midcentury interest in proportion was
developed can now be explored in relationship to the broader issues of
humanism and architectural problems they attempted to address. Rudolf
Wittkower presented his arguments in a beguiling expositional style, as if
they were simple empirical descriptions rather than the strong theoretical
assertions that they are. Indeed, part of the text’s effect on subsequent
discourse derives from its dry style of presentation, which present specula-
tions as matters of fact. Nonetheless, while Wittkower ostensibly offered a
“history” of the theory of proportion in “Renaissance” architecture, he really
mobilized historical material in order to elaborate a theory about the rela-
tionship of form to broader cultural patterns as had been developed by Ernst
Cassirer in his multi-volume magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms. In this relationship between Cassirer’s and Wittkower’s texts, we can
begin to understand what was really at stake in the mid-century discourses
of proportion: the attempt to formulate a theory of architecture for the sub-
ject of modernity.
