The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England

By Kimberley Skelton

This book examines how seventeenth-century English architectural theorists and designers rethought the domestic built environment in terms of mobility, as motion became a dominant mode of articulating the world across discourses encompassing philosophy, political theory, poetry, and geography. From mid-century, the house and estate that had evoked staccato rhythms became triggers for mental and physical motion – evoking travel beyond England’s shores, displaying vistas, and showcasing changeable wall surfaces. Simultaneously, philosophers and other authors argued for the first time that, paradoxically, the blur of motion immobilised an inherently restless viewer into social predictability and so stability. Alternately feared and praised early in the century for its unsettling unpredictability, motion became the most certain way of comprehending social interactions, language, time, and the buildings that filtered human experience. At the heart of this narrative is the malleable sensory viewer, tacitly assumed in early modern architectural theory and history yet whose inescapable responsiveness to surrounding stimuli guaranteed a dependable world from the seventeenth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780719098260

Kimberley Skelton

Kimberley Skelton is an Independent Scholar

Book preview

The unease of motion    1

Humility alone designs

Those short but admirable lines,

By which ungirt and unconstrained,

Things greater are in less contained.

Let others vainly strive t’immure

The circle in the quadrature!

These holy mathematics can

In every figure equal man.

Yet thus the laden house does sweat,

And scarce endures the Master great:

But where he comes the swelling hall

Stirs, and the square grows spherical.

Andrew Marvell, ‘Upon Appleton House’, ll. 40–52¹

In merely twelve lines, the English poet Andrew Marvell contemptuously dismissed the well-established basis of Classical architectural design. His English readers knew a long list of architectural theorists who had explicitly endorsed the circle and square, or ‘quadrature’, as the dependable mathematical foundation for designing a building. Circle and square appeared repeatedly in diagrams of the Classical Orders across volumes by Sebastiano Serlio, Andrea Palladio, Hans Blum, Wendel Dietterlin, and John Shute. A few authors too had illustrated the more literal origin of circle and square to which Marvell was referring: Vitruvius’s claim that all buildings are based on the human body inscribed in a square and circle.² Cesare Cesariano’s 1521 edition of Vitruvius contains a woodcut of a man whose limbs are splayed out to meet the edges of square and circle, while Vincenzo Scamozzi included a similar man balancing on one leg at the beginning of his L’idea della architettura universale (Figure 1).³ The man inside square and circle was even so well-known that Helkiah Crooke referred to this diagram near the beginning of his Mikrokosmographia, a volume devoted to human anatomy.⁴

1    Cesare Cesariano, De architectura libri dece, 1521, Vitruvian man. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Yet Marvell scoffs at these dependable mathematics. ‘Let others vainly strive’, he claims, to put circle inside square; he instead proposes a new mode of architectural design – a ‘holy mathematics [that] can / In every figure equal man’. No matter what happens, Marvell’s mathematical system will conform to the human body; every figure, regardless of its form and possibly of its regularity or irregularity, will intersect with the body. And these mathematics are so essential, so correct that they are ‘holy’, having received divine approbation. They are, however, also the opposite of the mathematics with which Marvell and his readers were so familiar.⁵ Marvell explains that his mathematics have ‘lines’, the usual edges to two-dimensional figures or three-dimensional volumes, but these lines are unusual because they are ‘ungirt’ and ‘unconstrained’. They have no boundaries, no endpoints or corners to constrain them, and so can hypothetically continue perpetually into the distance, leading eyes, mind and possibly hands further forward in a particular direction. That is, it is difficult – if not impossible – to remain at a particular point or place when looking at the figures of Marvell’s mathematics.

It is precisely this perpetual motion that characterises the new mathematics, Marvell reveals, as he continues to describe Lord Fairfax’s Appleton House in Yorkshire. The house, his reader learns, barely fits around its ‘Master great’. It is so heavily ‘laden’ by Fairfax’s presence that it ‘does sweat’ and ‘scarce endures’ his presence. Instead of spacious interiors that allow Fairfax to move easily and freely, Appleton House is more analogous to clothing that closely fits the human body and changes shape with even the smallest movements of limbs. According to Marvell, the house in fact does change shape with Fairfax’s movements: ‘where he comes the swelling hall / Stirs, and the square grows spherical’. The great hall, immediately behind the entrance, is initially a square or rectangular shape since its walls stand perpendicular to each other and extend in straight vertical planes from floor to ceiling. When Fairfax begins to stride into the hall, however, the room ‘Stirs’ out of this angular form and gradually becomes ‘spherical’, transforming into a round volume that usually is distinct from the angular square. Square and circle, in Marvell’s mathematics though, are simply phases of each other; the sphere is what the square volume becomes when it is disturbed by Fairfax’s movements. Marvell’s reader too can imagine how there may be intermediate irregular shapes as square blurs into circle. Fairfax’s right or left leg may stretch the regular sides of the square forward with a particularly long stride, or his elbow may bend a vertical wall plane. It is no longer possible to define a particular geometrical shape consistently; rather, each shape is a mere phase – a passing moment.

On the one hand, Marvell’s rejection of the usual distinction between circle and square is simply an idiosyncratic notion: he seeks a means of describing Fairfax as the ideal landowner and the mutable house provides a desirable metaphor. The ideal English landowner devoted funds from his estate to caring for his tenants, aiding wayfarers passing his gates, and reinvesting in crops and tools to enhance the productivity of his lands. His house was simply where he lived, responding more to the needs of his household than offering a display of his elite status. So, therefore, Appleton House is marked by ‘Humility’ with its ‘short but admirable lines’, dimensions that are just long enough to admit Fairfax and his household yet not so long as to soar impressively above the viewer. By necessity – because of its small dimensions, then, the house must change shape in order to accommodate Fairfax.

On the other hand, though, Marvell was not alone in urging his reader to imagine placing the built environment in motion. The Italian Vincenzo Scamozzi, whose L’idea della architettura universale was owned and read closely by architects Inigo Jones and John Webb as well as by gentleman architect Sir Roger Pratt, included an illustration depicting light rays crossing from exterior to interior and then crisscrossing rooms inside a villa (Figure 2).⁶ Readers of architectural treatises were well accustomed to black lines on the printed page that indicated unchanging boundary – the external walls that set aside the interior in the section and the grid of walls that divided one room from another in the plan. There were certainly breaks in these boundaries, the blank white spaces left for windows and doors, but they were downplayed; they were small openings dwarfed by the long black lines. In Scamozzi’s illustration, these open windows and doors that rupture boundary walls become most important as the viewer sees light rays cut through the windows and pass across rooms. There is such a plethora of lines denoting rays in the plan that the usually prominent grid of walls becomes nearly lost beneath the web of diagonal lines. And these lines suggest a perpetually changeable interior – one where sunlight shifts across the day, even potentially changing from moment to moment with blowing clouds. The illustration itself requires the reader to put the interior in motion, for all of the light rays depicted would not enter the house simultaneously; rather, they would appear at different times of day and potentially during different seasons of the year. And the lines themselves denoted different pieces of information, suggesting light rays sometimes and delimiting areas of light and shadow inside a room at other points. It was as if Scamozzi had superimposed a series of plans depicting the house at various sunlit and interpretive moments; the reader then needed to separate these moments, replacing one with another and simultaneously rethinking the interior, to comprehend Scamozzi’s image.

2    Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, 1615, house with light rays. National Library of Scotland.

Such swift mental shifts were, in fact, becoming a predominant mode of understanding one’s world across discourses. Scientists revealed how, in a mere blink of an eye and turn of the head, the basic scale of one’s world might change. As one looked into the recently invented telescope, once small stars and moon became suddenly up close – even a world that one could imagine inhabited; Thomas Hariot documented the moon’s topography in his detailed maps, while other authors, including John Wilkins and Francis Godwin, envisioned the moon’s topography and populations for their readers.⁷ Quickly shifting mental frameworks also became a means of rethinking the usual diagram introducing an almanac. Readers were accustomed to a nude body with astrological signs linked to particular body parts to reveal how various limbs and organs were under the control of the moon. At the beginning of The Ravens Almanacke, however, Thomas Dekker shows his readers this familiar diagram but playfully offers them variant interpretations (Figure 3). He asks, ‘do not those Roundels … shew like so many pardons, tyed to the partes of his body with Labels?’⁸ As he was carried through the streets, a criminal would have a placard attached to him identifying the nature of his crime.⁹ Likewise, the lines in Dekker’s diagram attach astrological signs to the nude male body to identify – to make manifest astral connections. Or, Dekker then speculates, the body could be that of ‘a theefe begd for an Anatomy in Surgeons Hall’ where the anatomist then performs a ‘slashing and slycing, and quartering & cutting’.¹⁰ The anatomist uses sharp tools to cut open the human body, to peel back the skin and reveal bones, veins, and organs. So too the diagonal lines in Dekker’s illustration are poised at the layer of the man’s skin, immediately above the inner anatomy. And they appear sharp lines with their striking black contrasting to the white page that evokes the white skin they may be about to puncture. The human body was as malleable as the world surrounding it; Dekker moved his diagram quickly – with a mere few sentences – from astrology to the legal system to anatomical study, changing its context as swiftly and fluidly as Nun Appleton House moved from square to circle.

3    Thomas Dekker, The Ravens Almanacke, 1609, astrological diagram of the human body. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Literal physical motion too became a new focus of describing the human body in scientific discourse. It was well known that circulation of nutrients and air through the body was essential to human survival. One breathed in some air and released other air; one also ingested food, then various organs filtered out the essential nutrients, and finally one excreted the unnecessary parts of the food.¹¹ But this circulation was often considered within the more general context of static human anatomy.¹² In his Mikrokosmographia, for instance, Crooke illustrated the veins by which blood passed nutrients through the body, yet he depicted the motionless veins and arteries rather than the blood that moved and his maps of veins and arteries occupied merely a few pages within his lengthy volume.¹³ In 1628, however, William Harvey produced an entire volume devoted to explaining circulation and announced his focus on motion from his very title, De motu cordis (‘On the Motion of the Heart’). In his text, he then focused on the movement of blood – how it travels from one area to another and how the speeds at which it travels can vary. And, in 1649, he published another volume that explained and justified these movements further: De circulatione sanguinis (‘On the Circulation of Blood’).¹⁴ The body was necessarily in motion in order to survive, the physical world – whether natural or built environment – changed perpetually around it, and the individual who constructed, experienced, and interpreted that world needed continuously to readjust in order to comprehend. Motion, that is, was becoming the de facto physical and mental mode of negotiating and navigating through one’s world.

The problem and power of motion

This book explores how across the seventeenth century, theorists, designers, and patrons rethought motion from the external threat of movement to the inherent quality of mobility. Movement was external to object or individual, an action that could or could not be performed, while mobility was an inescapable property – derived etymologically from the Latin ‘mobilis’, meaning ‘capable of being moved’ or ‘changeable’.¹⁵ Mobility, the potential for motion of an object or individual, was simply a given and also suggested a passivity and vulnerability in the object or individual that had this quality, for object or individual was as likely to move as to be moved – that is, to act on its environment as to be acted upon by that environment. It is precisely this shift from external action to internal quality and from active agent to agent or recipient that seventeenth-century Englishmen and -women both articulated and experienced. Early in the century, architect, patron, philosopher, poet, and etiquette-manual author had described and constructed secure boundaries to restrain motion: objects and ideas linked into the pairings of analogy and contradiction, reason’s bridle that restrained the violent passions, and walls that held individuals in place within the domestic interior. In the shelter of this relative security, individuals seemed to retain a degree of agency; they could exercise their reason, for instance, to choose whether to perform one action or another. From mid-century, however, these same theorists and designers speculated about a new viewer and a new type of environment; continuous motion characterised humans, the words that they spoke, and the built interiors in which they interacted, and they were newly responsive, newly malleable to these motions as they reacted to the sensory stimuli around them. Ideas coursed perpetually through the human mind, words could change meaning from one moment to another, and vistas cut through interior and exterior walls to reveal unprecedented spatial continua.

Yet this shift from external threat to internal quality was no easy dissolving of boundaries into fluid motion, for, by its very nature, motion paradoxically reinforced and threatened the stability of the built environment and the human body. Vitruvius and subsequent architectural authors explained how winds could be directed through cities and interior spaces to create healthy air circulation, while these same writers asserted that building design rested on unmoving lines.¹⁶ The man immobilised in square and circle was the basis of all building, according to Vitruvius, while fifteenth- through seventeenth-century authors articulated the Orders with geometrical diagrams. Even when there was a playful suggestion of potential movement, that illusion was carefully limited. In The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, John Shute illustrated Hercules as an example of the warrior from whom the Doric Order was derived and suggested that this man was about to break free from the vertical columnar space in which he stood (Figure 4).¹⁷ Hercules turns toward the reader in a three-quarter position, his elbow projects behind him to nudge the numbers of the adjacent mathematical diagram, and his right knee is bent as if he is about to stride forward off the pedestal. If he were to move out of his space, the diagram illustrating the Doric Order would collapse into nonsense; Hercules would leave the entablature that had rested on his head simply hanging in mid-air when he stepped off the pedestal, for instance. Yet Shute implicitly reassures his reader that Hercules will move no farther, for he encases Hercules in clear boundaries: the right edge of the page within which Hercules’s hand barely fits and the uninterrupted black line of the column shaft in the diagram to the left. Motion was essential to building, the source of a healthy environment, yet also threatened fundamental design principles.

4    John Shute, The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, 1563, Doric Order. Courtesy of Country Life.

Philosophers likewise argued that the human body simultaneously benefitted from and was vulnerable to motion. Human existence depended on the circulation of nutrients, air, and blood through the body, yet one perpetually worried that one of the humours on which human health depended would migrate to a new area of the body and cause disease or infection.¹⁸ The human mind had to move in order to remember, for rhetorical theorists urged readers to store their ideas in mental landscapes through which they could then walk to recall those thoughts.¹⁹ But the mind could also be unsettled by the violent passions that tore through the body, driven unpredictably in one direction or another instead of following reason’s deliberative analysis.²⁰ To remain healthy physically and mentally, humans had to move but also had to ensure a measured pace rather than succumbing to continuous flow.

From mid-century, however, humans and environment alike were in perpetual motion; the boundaries that had guaranteed secure stability suddenly created the risk of incomprehensibility. Englishmen and -women were experiencing a wide range of motions that permeated both tangible and intangible experience: physical motions that encompassed journeys between city and country, imagined motions of looking along and travelling beyond the spatial continua of interior vistas, and the mental motions of adjusting to change in a concept or the meaning of a word. If one stood still physically, one risked losing touch with one’s social circles that had moved to a new location, and if one stood still mentally, one risked losing one’s understanding of a world that kept on moving. Stability, that is, depended on keeping pace rather than standing still. Yet the difficulty of maintaining this synchrony of motion was also well-known. The court masque dances that offered a tangible example of synchronous movement, as noble and gentle courtiers moved together to retain a geometrical formation, were possible only after weeks of training.²¹ It was only too easy to fall out of step – for instance, to move too slowly to understand the quick changes in meaning of a word. Seventeenth-century Englishmen and -women thus needed to find a means of continuously evoking the strict choreography of the masque dance. I argue that architect and patron responded to this problem by designing domestic environments in which movement and the suggested potential of movement held immobile a malleable sensory viewer with a perpetual suggestion of novelty. Philosophers described a continuously restless mind that responded involuntarily to sensory stimuli, but as long as an individual’s physical environment offered potential novelties to engage the senses, the human mind would stay focused and in place. Owners offered guests this possibly endless sequence of novelties through façades that invited travel beyond England to the Continent, through unending vistas opening into little-defined greensward or blue sky, and through illusionistically changeable interior walls that evoked ongoing sequences of events.

This synchrony of motion between viewer and environment, on the one hand, reflected particular English historical circumstances yet, on the other hand, was also symptomatic of a broader pan-European seventeenth-century turn to motion as a mode of perception. Only in England was traditional government overturned to create literal unpredictability in daily life; new political terms developed, for instance, to describe those who opposed and those who supported the monarch, while government buildings contained surprisingly a military instead of a hereditary leader. These political events, however, were simply an additional strand of changeability alongside widespread theoretical and architectural rearticulation of the relationship between viewer and environment in terms of mobility. Philosophers probed how data coursed perpetually through body and mind; the French René Descartes, for instance, speculated about how nerves transmitted sensory data to the brain, and music theorists re-grounded composition in the human process of hearing rather than static mathematical proportions.²² Architects across northern Europe opened the vistas that appeared in English houses through their interiors.²³ Such vistas had proliferated on the warmer Italian peninsula at least since the late fifteenth-century Poggio a Caiano, yet not until the seventeenth century did the desirability of a spatial continuum outweigh well-established concerns about drafts in cold climates. Seventeenth-century England, then, was a particularly intense moment of an international turn toward mobility and a malleable sensory viewer.

Mobility in historical perspective

By examining the seventeenth-century turn to mobility, this book sets in its cultural context a strand of historical analysis stretching back to the nineteenthcentury Heinrich Wölfflin.²⁴ ‘Baroque’, the word traditionally used to describe seventeenth-century art and architecture, contains within its very etymology the suggestion of potential motion. Derived from the Portuguese barroco and the Spanish barrueco, meaning ‘rough or imperfect pearl’, a Baroque object must be examined across a sequence of moments and physical movements.²⁵ A perfectly shaped spherical pearl can be comprehended at a single glance since it does not vary, but an irregularly shaped pearl has uneven contours perceived by turning the pearl and examining with eye and hand its idiosyncratic sides. The pearl itself can seem changeable, and so mobile; since it does not fill the spherical outline of the perfect pearl, one can imagine how the pearl might be extended to become a sphere. As Wölfflin distinguished between Renaissance and Baroque styles, he asserted that precisely this potential for motion in object or building and response of the viewer distinguished the Baroque.²⁶ Baroque architecture, he asserted, ‘did not aim at the perfection of an architectural body … but rather at an event, the expression of a directed movement in that body’.²⁷ A Baroque building would never reach the stasis of perfection, when no more could be added or changed, because it was an ‘event’, inherently containing a cause-and-effect sequence, and because it had ‘directed movement’, a forceful thrust along one axis that would push away from a motionless centre. Correspondingly, the viewer who experienced this building was restless rather than calmly stationary, experiencing ‘a feeling of anticipation, of something yet to come, of dissatisfaction and restlessness rather than fulfilment’.²⁸ The viewer anxiously or eagerly awaits an event that is about to happen; he or she is held poised between the present and the unknown future, malleable in response to sensory stimuli suggestive of motion.

A century later, Gilles Deleuze extended Wölfflin’s mobility to one’s entire environment and perception of that environment; quite simply, the definition of the Baroque is being in process. Everything in a Baroque world, according to Deleuze, was a sequence of events – from an object to the human mind; objects are composed not of individual points, whether atoms or dots, but rather folds that offer a continuous surface and so no opportunity to pause in a staccato rhythm of jumping from point to point. And these folds are perpetually changeable, constantly inviting the possibility of being folded and unfolded.²⁹ The human mind itself is composed of folds and perceives the world through the process of their vibrations; each fold is an area of innate human knowledge and comes to one’s consciousness