Model as Paradigm​

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Michael Ytterberg

MY Architecture, USA

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It is universally known that in the fourth century B.C., Aristotle defined the essence of all  the arts, including architecture, as the “imitation of nature.” Less often mentioned is his assertion  that imitation, or mimesis, is only half the story, that “harmony and rhythm” are needed as well. 

 

One of the outstanding Greek buildings constructed during Aristotle’s lifetime was the  round temple, or tholos, at Epidauros. It provides an excellent opportunity to clarify Aristotle’s  theoretical statements through the analysis of contemporary artistic practice. The centerpiece of  the sanctuary of Asclepios, the mortal turned god who healed the sick and, in some cases, raised  the dead, the tholos is known for the beauty and richness of its carving, particularly of its  feminine Corinthian capitals on the interior of what is on the exterior a masculine Doric building.  Though leveled to the foundations, which take the startling form of a labyrinth, plentiful  surviving fragments allow a solid reconstruction. Miraculously preserved by careful, perhaps  ritualistic, burial at the site is a Corinthian capital which could well have been the very model  which the sculptor/architect himself carved, a model of unusually fecund power which  established the archetypical forms of the Corinthian capital for the rest of time.  

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The beauty of these capitals and of the unusual building of which they formed an intrinsic  part was renowned already in antiquity. Pausanias, writing in the second century A.D., cites both  the tholos and the theater at Epidauros as exemplary constructions and attributes them both to the  sculptor Polykleitos. Polykleitos was internationally famous, primarily for the Canon, his treatise  on sculpture and the perfect proportions of the human figure, and its three dimensional demonstration, the Doryphoros. Thus Polykleitos’s theory and practice would seem to embody exactly the kind of artistic process Aristotle had in mind when postulating the dual instinct of  men for morphological imitation and harmonious proportions. However, the architect responsible  for this building would have to be a Polykleitos the Younger, a descendant in charge of the  family workshop, since the famous Polykleitos was by now deceased.  

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The use of the Corinthian capital was ubiquitous in Roman architecture; the Doryphoros  was the most frequently copied statue found in Roman lands. The intertwined theoretical  tradition of sculpture and architecture which Vitruvius invokes based the forms of each art on a  shared proportional system which had found its most definitive treatment in the Canon of  Polykleitos. The Epidaurian capital and the Doryphoros both, preferred models for hundreds of  years of production, based on nature’s models according to the theory of Aristotle, constituted  the paradigms in their respective fields. Based on a Canon, themselves forming canons, both  were the productions of a family whose famous founder meets almost mythical demands for his  formative power.

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Vitruvius tells us that the Corinthian capital was inspired by the sight of rejuvenating  acanthus plants growing around a basket at a young girl’s tomb. Asclepius promised cures from  sickness, rejuvenation, even rebirth, by sleeping amongst snakes. The writhing motion of snakes  recalls the twisting turns of the labyrinth, with its promise of rejuvenation. The model capital  was buried. The body, in its form and proportions, is divinely given. Themes of the death of the  body and its rejuvenation abound, but is Polykeitos’s theory of proportion found in the tholos?  This paper shows that it is.