The body in brief

Abstract

This chapter continues to develop a picture of Vitruvian expertise by interrogating the implications of Vitruvius’s repeated characterization of his text as a complete body marked by brevitas. The corpus hominis bene figurati in book 3 (so-called Vitruvian man) is reconsidered for its relevance to the corpus of De architectura as a text. The body and its parts remain powerful metaphors for composition: a body is complete and well ordered, and provides a “lifelike” mimesis of what it represents. Despite ancient and some modern claims to the contrary, textual bodies never embrace the comprehensive wholes with which they are associated and, in the Roman period, are rarely politically disinterested. Textual bodies are often emphatically reductive and, as such, mediate various wholes and universals through synopsis and other forms of “definition.” Such a bodily metaphor is especially appropriate for Vitruvius’s “expert” text. Examples from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero’s letters, and the so-called universal historians show that the textual “body” (also often described as “brief”) involved specific, ideological value before Vitruvius. His claims to have ordered the synoptic body of architecture properly suggest an analogous ideological function. Physical bodies are “compositions” of nature, so the author’s claims to have put a textual body in good order mimic nature’s sense of what is appropriate. This is another quality particular to experts. Such expertise has implications well beyond the proprietary fields on which they lay claim. By cordoning off the true totality of architecture from the reader, the guiding corpus metaphor of De architectura is basically restrictive.