"Los aposentos de la cabeza": Architecture and Madness in the Quijote

Following the fifteenth-century rediscovery of Vitruvius’ De architectura (1st century C.E.) at the Monastery of St. Gall, European theorists sought to redefine architecture as a fundamentally rational, mathematical endeavor. Leon Battista Alberti’s influential 1450 treatise made a distinction between the manual labor of the carpenter and the intellectual labor of the architect, emphasizing the “sure and wonderful reason and method” and the “knowledge of all the highest and most noble disciplines” by which the architect “knows both how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, whatever can be most beautifully fitted out for the noble needs of man” (5). Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Pietro Cataneo similarly noted the “good judgment” (giudizio), “ingenuity” (ingegno, Cataneo 185), “subtle imagination” (sottile immaginazione), and “reason” (raciocinazio, Martini 36-7) required to create “a single, harmonious work” (Alberti 23).1 The well-ordered building, according to early modern formulations of architecture, was one in which the highest speculative abilities had been exercised, assuring “the most handsome and effective position, order, and number” (313) of each component of the design and the rigorous observation of the principles of proportion, decorum, and symmetry.