Architecture and the Urban as a Metaphor of Governance: Paolo Paruta and the Spatiality of Venice in the Late Sixteenth Century

Abstract

Vitruvius’ text, De architectura, described the practice of architecture and urban strategies for the late Roman Republic. Later use of the text and its messages, emerging with the growing impact of printing on specific changes in power relations associated with governance of cities, provided the opportunity for a politicized agenda to be incorporated to appease these differing contexts. It was during the Renaissance that Vitruvius and other antique authorities were employed in discourses on citizenry where architecture’s attributes were used to reinforce ideals of good governance in the emerging urbanity of city-states. This paper investigates Paolo Paruta’s Della perfettione della vita politica, a work of sixteenth-century political theory on the Venetian Republic, to examine how politically inspired uses of Vitruvius’ concepts supported the survival of Venice’s model of a republic. Paolo Paruta was to become Procuratore of San Marco in 1597. Fundamental to his validation of Venetian governance was Vitruvius’ representation of the body-of-state being reflected in the architectural make-up of the city. Paolo Paruta’s Della perfettione is a dialogue in which the relationship between the body politic of Venice and its embodied presence in the organization and representation of the city, are debated. In the first instance this paper establishes how Renaissance dialogue form could use the authority of Vitruvius to validate Venice’s patriarchal form of republic and its mirrored urbanity. In the second the paper evaluates Paruta’s text to show how Vitruvius’ ideas were made relevant to the Renaissance Venetian context. Finally, within the context of Venice’s architecture it explores how this new political agenda, which uses Vitruvius as its authority, was rationalized.