Early Modern Cultures of Translation

CHAPTER 1

Translating the Language of Architecture

PETER BURKE

One of the major shifts in cultural history in the last generation, as indeed in economic history, has been the inclusion of consumption alongside production. The new emphasis on consumers of culture treats them not as passive receivers but as active reemployers and as makers of meaning. Literary historians now study readers as well as writers; musicologists study listeners as well as composers and performers; historians of art and architecture study clients and viewers as well as artists; and theorists of reception offer generalizations about all these processes, shifting attention away from the individual creator and examining collective processes of transmission that often involve changes of meaning, linked to the consumers’ horizons of expectations.¹ It is therefore no surprise to see a rise of interest in the history of translation.

In the case of the Renaissance (a term used here to refer to a movement rather than a period), an academic interest in the reception of Roman law and of humanism goes back to the later nineteenth century.² As his collected works show, the central enterprise of the scholarly life of Aby Warburg was the way in which the classical tradition was received and transformed over the centuries, especially but not exclusively in the realm of visual culture.³

All the same, it is only recently that reception has become a major theme in the study of the Renaissance, especially in the case of literature, often focusing on individual writers or their books.⁴ General interpretations of the Renaissance outside Italy have also been paying more attention to the question of reception.⁵ The proliferation of studies in the history of reading is a move in the same direction. Terms such as cultural transfer and cultural exchange are coming into increasingly frequent use to refer to the past as well as the present. For example, they underpinned a recent collective project on the cultural history of early modern Europe, planned by the French historian Robert Muchembled and financed by the European Science Foundation.⁶

A related concept, which is coming to show its usefulness, is that of cultural translation. This phrase was originally used by British anthropologists such as Edward Evans-Pritchard to describe their own attempts to interpret to a public in their own society the cultures that they had studied in Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere. They tried to present the customs and beliefs of the Azande or the Trobrianders, for instance, in ways that would be intelligible to Western readers.⁷ Like anthropologists, historians may be regarded as translators, in their case from the language of the past into that of the present, facing the same basic dilemma as translators between languages—in other words, the conflict between fidelity to the culture from which they are translating and intelligibility to the audience at whom their work is aimed. More generally still, anyone who adapts ideas or artifacts to new situations and new uses, as so often happened in the course of the Renaissance, might be described a cultural translator. It should be added that translation in the literal or interlingual sense may be regarded as a kind of litmus paper that makes the process of cultural translation more visible than usual.⁸

What follows is concerned with translation in both senses, literal and metaphorical. It retells a small part of the story of the reception of the Renaissance, moving backward and forward between the translation of texts and the translation of artifacts, between the idea of transfer and the idea of translation (words derived from the same irregular Latin verb, transferre, transtuli, translatum). Indeed, some sixteenth-century translators such as Hermann Ryff, discussed in what follows, described themselves as transferring a text from one language to another.

The case study presented here concerns the language of architecture, as Sir John Summerson and other scholars have called it.⁹ The metaphor is actually an ancient one, since Doric and Ionic were the names of Greek dialects before the terms were applied to forms of columns. The shift from the Gothic style to the revived classicism of the Renaissance may be seen as a change in architectural language, both in the vocabulary of ornament and in what we might call its grammar, in other words, the rules for combining different elements.

For the transition from Gothic to Renaissance to take place, the physical transfer of artists and artisans was surely a necessity. It has been persuasively argued by some economic historians and also by some historians of science that through the ages, the main channel for the diffusion of innovation has been the migration of people, and that the transfer of really valuable knowledge from country to country or from institution to institution cannot be easily achieved by the transport of letters, journals and books [or indeed, one might add, works of art]: it necessitates the physical movement of human beings. In short, ideas move around inside people.¹⁰ The point is surely even more valid in the case of practical know-how than in that of more theoretical knowledge. A habitus, as Pierre Bourdieu (following Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas and Erwin Panofsky) called it, requires personal encounters in order to be transferred effectively.¹¹

In the case of Renaissance architecture, these encounters are quite well documented, revealing the central role played by Italian artisans, especially masons from the Lake Como region, in the construction of Italianate buildings in France, Bohemia, and Poland.¹² Conversely, the travels in Italy of foreign architects such as Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Philibert Delorme, John Shute, and Inigo Jones had important cultural consequences. What they saw and learned in Rome in particular shaped the work of these architects for the rest of their lives.

Even if people come first, as suggested earlier, the migration or transfer of texts was also crucial in the reception of the Renaissance. Hence what follows will attempt to combine the history of architecture with the history of the book. As a number of scholars, notably Don McKenzie, Gérard Genette, and Roger Chartier, have pointed out, the format of a book, including so-called paratexts such as prefaces, headings, indexes, and illustrations, is almost as influential in terms of a book’s reception as the text itself.¹³ Following their example, it is possible to trace the history of a whole shelf of architectural treatises as they were written, printed, reprinted, edited, translated, studied, annotated, borrowed, or imitated.¹⁴

The only surviving classical treatise, written by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio around the year 27 BCE, was rediscovered in the age of Charlemagne, and circulated in manuscript, sometimes in incomplete form, in the Middle Ages. It was known to medieval scholars such as Hugh of St. Victor and Albertus Magnus as well as to Petrarch and Boccaccio. In 1416, the Tuscan humanist Gianfrancesco Poggio Bracciolini found a complete text in Switzerland, at the monastery of Sankt Gallen. The text was printed for the first time in the 1480s and many times thereafter.¹⁵ (See Figures 2 through 6.)

Another leading Italian humanist, Leon Battista Alberti, both criticized and imitated Vitruvius in the first Renaissance treatise on architecture, written mainly in the 1430s and presented to Pope Nicholas V around the year 1450. Like Vitruvius’s work, Alberti’s De re aedificatoria was first printed in the 1480s.¹⁶ Together, Vitruvius and Alberti inspired a new genre that laid down the rules for proper building just as Pietro Bembo and other humanists had laid down the rules for writing well. Examples of this new genre included the following:

Diego de Sagredo, Medidas del Romano, 1526

Sebastiano Serlio, Sette libri dell’architettura, 1537–

Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Livre d’architecture, 1559

Philibert Delorme, Nouvelles Inventions, 1561

Giacomo Barozzi de Vignola, Regola delli cinque ordini

d’architettura, 1562

John Shute, Grounds of Architecture, 1563

Jean Bullant, Reigle générale d’architecture, 1564

Andrea Palladio, Quattro libri dell’architettura, 1570

Hans Vredeman de Vries, Architectura, 1578

Wendel Dietterlin, Architectura, 1593–

Vincenzo Scamozzi, Idea dell’architettura universale, 1615

Henry Wotton, Elements of Architecture, 1624

Today, the most famous of these treatises is surely Palladio’s. However, Serlio’s was by far the most widely read at the time, translated into Flemish, German, French, Spanish, Latin, and finally, in 1611, into English. He probably owed his popularity to his clear, down-to-earth style, together with his interest in ornament, which—helped by the numerous illustrations—made it possible to use the treatise as a pattern book.

The treatises were usually prescriptive as well as descriptive. For this reason Serlio entitled his fourth book Regole generali, Vignola and Bullant entitled their treatises Regole delli cinque ordini and Reigle générale d’architecture, while Scamozzi’s book 6 was translated into Dutch under the title Grondregulen der Bow-Const (1640).

Figure 2. Caryatids, in Architecture, ou Art de bien bastir. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1547. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 3. Tower, in Architecture, ou Art de bien bastir. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1547. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Figure 4. Caryatids, in Vitruvius Teutsch. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1548. Universität Heidelberg.

The fact that Vitruvius was difficult to interpret needs to be emphasized. The dedications to the two Italian translations of Alberti refer to gli oscuri scritti di Vitruvio and note that the text is molto difficile e oscuro.¹⁷ The French sculptor-architect Jean Goujon noted that misunderstandings of the text had led to what he called oeuvres . . . desmesurées, et hors de toute symetrie.¹⁸ It is therefore no surprise to discover that the treatise generated an abundant literature of commentary. In the case of the Italian translation of 1521, for example, each page of the text of Vitruvius is completely surrounded by a commentary in smaller type. The French humanist Guillaume Philandrier published another commentary on Vitruvius, and so did the Venetian patrician Daniele Barbaro.¹⁹ The Italian humanist Bernardino Baldi devoted a treatise to elucidating the vocabulary of De architectura.²⁰

Figure 5. Caryatids, in De Architectura. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1582. Universidad de Sevilla.

The importance of these texts for the reception of the Renaissance was much enhanced by their illustrations. The edition of Vitruvius by the Dominican friar Giovanni Giocondo, published in 1511, was the first printed version to be illustrated (as some medieval manuscripts had been). By contrast, Alberti had to wait another forty years for illustrations, until Bartoli’s translation, published in 1550.²¹ However, later treatises were illustrated from the first edition onward.

Figure 6. Tower, in De Architectura. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1582. Universidad de Sevilla.

We might think of illustrations to a text as themselves a form of translation, from one medium of communication to another. In the case of Serlio in particular, the pictures—the nine fireplaces illustrated in book 4, for instance—are perhaps more important than the text. As has already been suggested, these images allowed patrons to use a theoretical treatise as a collection of samples. In similar fashion, Castiglione’s Cortegiano, in which different characters had debated the principles of courtly behavior, came to be presented to readers by some of its editors and publishers as a simple and practical guide to good manners.²²

To exemplify some of these points we may turn to the fortune in translation of three of the leading treatises on architecture, by Vitruvius, Alberti, and Serlio, over a long sixteenth century that runs from the 1480s to the 1620s. In the course of this period three barriers restricting the reception of these texts were breached: the barriers of geography, language, and price.

In the first place, books were commodities relatively heavy and expensive to transport, so publishing these treatises in Paris, Nuremberg, or Madrid brought them to the attention of many more people than had been reached by Italian editions alone. In the second place, Latin was an obstacle to readers who had not studied in grammar schools, so that translations of Vitruvius and Alberti into different vernaculars widened the potential audience for these books. Four Italian translations of Vitruvius were published in the sixteenth century. Alberti’s treatise circulated in an Italian version in manuscript before appearing in two published translations in the middle of the sixteenth century, whereas Serlio himself wrote in Italian. Translations of the treatises into French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and English widened the readership still further.

In the third place, the format of the treatises changed. Heavy and expensive folios were joined by cheaper quarto and even octavo editions. Abridgments or partial translations were also produced, among them Hans Blum’s summary of Serlio’s account of the five orders, published in Latin in 1550 and then in German, French, and English. The shift from the roman type of the Latin and Spanish editions and the italic type of the Italian and French ones to the Gothic type used in Germany, the Netherlands, and England symbolized the cultural translation that these texts required outside the Romance-speaking world. It may be useful to look a little more closely at the process of vernacularizing architectural ideas, in which the order in which different texts were translated affected their reception, the later ones being understood in terms of expectations that the earlier ones helped create.

For example, the first architectural treatise to appear in print in French, in 1537, was not one of the three considered here but a translation of the Medidas del Romano by the Spanish architect Diego Sagredo, an imitation or simplification of Vitruvius.²³ Serlio’s fourth book, the one about rules, appeared in French in 1542. Vitruvius himself, translated in 1547, came third, and Alberti, translated in 1553, came fourth.

In Dutch, the tradition of architectural translation began with Serlio’s fourth book, in 1539, suggesting once again that there was a significant demand for rules of architecture at this time. In German, the story was much the same, the fourth book being translated in 1542, not from the original but from the Dutch (translation of this kind at second hand was not uncommon in the Renaissance). Vitruvius followed in 1548.

In the Iberian peninsula, an early sixteenth-century Portuguese translation of Vitruvius circulated in manuscript, like the Spanish translation by Lázaro de Velasco made in the 1550s. The first published translation of an architectural treatise, a Spanish version of Serlio, appeared in print in 1552, followed by Vitruvius in 1582.²⁴ Alberti was published in Spanish in the early 1580s, and Vignola in 1593. As for England, it was on the margin of this process of dissemination. It was only in 1611 that Serlio was published in translation for the first time, while the English had to wait until the eighteenth century to read Vitruvius, Alberti, and Palladio in their own tongue.

The illustrations of these treatises have a story of their own, a complicated story in which the threads have not yet been disentangled. It was of course possible in principle to use the same illustrations in different translations of the same text. In practice, though, the pictures were generally copied—recut by a new engraver—as minor differences reveal. In other cases, artists or printers preferred to do things in their own way, and new illustrations were made, sometimes by well-known artists such as Jean Goujon or Andrea Palladio.²⁵ Complicating the story, later treatises or editions sometimes copied—or perhaps we should say stole—illustrations from earlier ones.²⁶

The editing, translation, and publication of these treatises were a major collective enterprise involving some well-known individuals as well as others more obscure. Architect-translators included the Sangallo brothers, who worked on a version of Vitruvius but did not publish it; Cesare Cesariano of Milan, a follower of Bramante; and in Spain, Francesco de Villalpando, Lázaro de Velasco, and Miguel de Urrea.²⁷

Among nonarchitects who translated or commented, Pieter Coecke was a painter, printer, and entrepreneur, while Guillaume Philandrier and Jehan Martin were both secretaries to French ambassadors in Rome. A major figure in this collective enterprise who does not seem to have attracted the scholarly attention that he deserves is Walter Hermann Ryff. Ryff, also known as Rivius, described himself as a physician and mathematician, but also wrote on perspective, fortresses, weighing, anatomy, cookery, obstetrics, pharmacy, surgery, and the art of memory.

The printers of these treatises (in an age in which the modern distinction between printer and publisher had not yet emerged) are also worth noting, like the places of publication, helping us to reconstruct the routes along which the ideas and ideals of Renaissance architecture traveled Europe. Most of the early editions of architectural treatises appeared in Rome, Venice, and Florence, but the circle gradually widened to include publications in Paris, Lyon, Paris, Nuremberg, Zurich, and Basel.

A few printers were personally involved with the movement to revive antiquity, among them the Giunta brothers in Florence; Jacques Kerver of Paris, who published the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili and Horapollo’s Hieroglyphics (texts of great interest to humanists) as well as Alberti; and Johan Petreius of Nuremberg, best known for his edition of Copernicus but also the publisher of Ryff’s Vitruvius. Ancient architecture and new astronomy appear to have appealed to the same printers, and perhaps to the same readers as well.

Perhaps the most important conclusion to emerge from a study of this collective enterprise is that understanding the more technical parts of Vitruvius was the kind of problem that required both the practical knowledge of craftsmen and the philological knowledge of humanists, thus illustrating Erwin Panofsky’s well-known description of the Renaissance as a period of decompartmentalization, breaking down the barriers between the liberal and mechanical arts and bridging the gap which had separated the scholar and thinker from the practitioner.²⁸

For example, the most important editor of the text, the philologist Fra Giocondo, collaborated with Raphael on the construction of St. Peter’s after the death of Bramante. Again, it was at Raphael’s request and in his house that the scholar Fabio Calvo translated Vitruvius into Italian, since the artist did not know Latin.²⁹ The humanist Philandrier studied with Serlio, was a friend of the Sangallos and Vignola, and probably worked as an architect himself on the cathedral of Rodez, where he was a canon. Jehan Martin, best known as a translator, also helped design the temporary architecture for King Henri II’s state entry into Paris. Andrea Palladio illustrated Barbaro’s edition of Vitruvius. Inigo Jones was dissatisfied with the way in which editors and commentators had interpreted the obscure Vitruvian phrase scamilli impares, and used his practical knowledge to advance a hypothesis of his own.³⁰

It is time to turn, as historians of the book so often do these days, to the readers, including the readers of manuscript as well as printed versions of the books that concern us here. Some of these readers were important people. Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, owned a manuscript copy of Vitruvius. Lorenzo de’ Medici read Alberti on architecture before the book was printed.³¹ Prince Philip, later Philip II, read Vitruvius and Serlio and developed firm tastes as a patron of architecture.³² The poet Angelo Poliziano owned an autograph manuscript of Alberti. The English ambassador Sir Henry Wotton, the author of one of the first English treatises on architecture, also owned a manuscript of Alberti, in his case one with corrections by the author. Inigo Jones annotated his copies of Alberti, Palladio, and Scamozzi, while an anonymous Catalan architect covered with comments and sketches a copy of the Bartoli translation of Alberti.³³

Attention should not be given to individuals alone. It may be argued that too much emphasis—in this case as in other studies of creativity—has traditionally been placed on the achievements of individuals, solitary geniuses. On the other hand, too little attention has been given to small groups or networks and the dialogue, debate, and other forms of give-and-take that occur within them.³⁴ This point is especially true in the case of architecture, a collaborative art par excellence. It is time to go a little further in the same direction and to extend the concern with groups from production to reception, focusing on networks of readers, their horizons of expectations, and the ways in which these networks transmitted, discussed, and criticized new ideas. The traditional term to describe these groups is circle, but network may be preferable because it does not imply either centers or closure.

One French network in the middle of the sixteenth century centered on the princess Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of King François I. Serlio, who had emigrated from Italy to France, dedicated his fifth book to her. Rabelais too dedicated a book to her, his Tiers Livre, while his references to Vitruvius and Alberti reveal his interest in architecture. Rabelais was also a close friend of the architect Philibert Delorme.³⁵ One of his French pupils was Guillaume Philandrier, whose edition of Vitruvius has already been mentioned. Philandrier was secretary to Georges d’Armagnac, who was French ambassador to Venice and Rome as well as bishop of Rodez, where Philandrier was a canon. It was in Armagnac’s entourage that another architect and writer, Androuet du Cerceau, lived when he was in Rome.

Other French readers may be discovered through inventories of their libraries, often preserved in notarial archives. The poet Remy Belleau, for example, owned an edition of Serlio. Montaigne owned a copy of Delorme. The architectural interests of secretaries at this time are worth noting. Besides Philander and Martin, mentioned earlier, the royal secretary Jacques Perdrier owned copies of Alberti, Delorme, Serlio, and Vignola. Another royal secretary, Evrard de Vabres, owned Alberti, Serlio, and Vignola.³⁶

The interest of French noblewomen in both architectural theory and practice is worth noting. Marguerite de Navarre has already been mentioned. Louise de Clermont, wife of François du Bellay, owned a copy of Serlio’s treatise and may have commissioned the author to build for her. Queen Catherine de’ Medici was a patron of architecture, and Delorme dedicated a treatise to her, while Catherine’s rival Diane de Poitiers, King Henri II’s mistress, employed Delorme at her famous chateau at Anet.³⁷

In the German-speaking world, owners of Alberti’s treatise included Thomas Wolf, a humanist from Strasbourg. Maria of Hungary (sister of the emperor Charles V and an important patron of the arts, often in the emperor’s name) owned copies of Serlio in both French and Latin. The Elector Palatine Ottheinrich owned Serlio and Vitruvius. In England, Sir Thomas Tresham, a Catholic gentleman, owned Alberti, Serlio, Vignola, and Androuet.³⁸ Sir Francis Willoughby, a rich man thanks to his ownership of coal mines, and a great builder, owned copies of Alberti, Serlio, Androuet, Delorme, Palladio, Shute, and Vignola.³⁹ It is worth noting that at this time, the English were still polyglot. The lack of translations of architectural treatises into English did not matter too much because a number of patrons could read Latin, Italian, and French.

The translation of the treatises into different languages involved cultural translation, as a case study will show: the translations of a single section in book 6 of Vitruvius, concerned with the housing appropriate for different social groups.⁴⁰ This section was in particular need of adaptation, since the ancient Roman social structure was very different from that of Renaissance Europe. The most obvious contrast comes in the rendering of the descriptions of two Roman groups: the moneylenders and tax farmers, feneratores et publicani, and the nobles (nobiles), who possess honors and offices (honores magistratusque).

The problems were least serious for translators into Italian not only because Italian is close to Latin but also because Italy, like ancient Rome, was dominated by an urban patriciate. Hence the Cesariano translation was able to refer to fenatori, publicani, nobili, honori, and magistrati. However, a later translation by Daniele Barbaro preferred contemporary terms such as banchieri, cambiatori (money changers), avvocati, and huomini di palazzo.

The French translation of this section was also a free one. The phrase Nobles constituez en dignitez honorables keeps close to the Latin, but the feneratores et publicani are brought up to date and also expanded into two different groups, Banquiers, Usuriers, Publiquains, Changeurs, et autres qui present argent a interest et sur gage on one side, and Conseilliers, Advocatz, Procureurs et gens de Practique on the other. The German solution is similar enough to make one wonder whether Ryff had been looking at Martin’s version, since he too distinguishes den grossernhendlern, Gewerbsleuthe, Publicanen from Juristen, Advocaten, Procuratores. In similar fashion the Spanish translation distinguishes los usuarios y cambiadores from los abogados y procuradores and from los nobles, y que goviernan.

As for the translation of architectural terms, this would have been impossible without a massive creation of neologisms. In the Romance languages, these neologisms generally followed Greek and Latin models, while in German and Dutch there was an attempt to invent terms based on compounds of native elements (architectura becoming Baukunst, for example), a point to be discussed further subsequently.

Historians of the book are much concerned with the question of reception. These consequences are clearer than usual in the case of treatises on architecture, since it is possible to compare them with what was actually built. The translation of theory into practice was often free, a process sometimes described at the time as accommodation. For example, Vredeman de Vries declared that the rules of Vitruvius could be broken in order to accommodate art to local conditions (accommoder l’art à la situation et necessité du pais).⁴¹ Accommodatio was originally a rhetorical term, used by Cicero and others to describe the way in which orators might adapt their discourse to different audiences. It was also the word that Jesuit missionaries such as the sixteenth-century Italian Matteo Ricci used when they described their adaptation of Christianity to Chinese culture.⁴² Today, translation theorists prefer the term