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Human Proportions in Architecture Essay

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‘After having considered the right arrangement of the human body, the ancients proportioned all their work, particularly the temples, in accordance with it’.
To what extent does the human body influence architectural forms and writing from antiquity to 1600?
The study of the human body has spanned centuries, from the mathematicians of antiquity to the humanist scholars of the High Renaissance, and parallels between the bodily proportions and architecture have played their part in some of the most celebrated architectural feats. Writers and architects throughout this period never ceased in exploring the various ways in which the ‘arrangement of the human body’ could be applied to architecture, from associations with the Golden …show more content…

In his architectural treatise of
1537-43, Sebastiano Serlio states that “temples to male saints whose lives were less robust than delicate, or to females saints who led matronly lives should be Ionic.
Temples to the Virgin Mary, virgins, nuns, should be Corinthian”. Thus, it is apparent how the various forms of the human body can be influence not only the physical forms of the building, but also their values and associations.
Historically, it is important to note that architecture based in mathematics, meaning that to the ancients, the practice of architecture was not differentiated from that of mathematical theory. This is therefore a strong argument in favour of how bodily proportions influenced classical architecture, reiterated by Vitruvius who claimed that
“without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in design, that is, if there is no precise relation between the members, as in the case of the well-shaped man”2. Furthermore, it was the mathematician, Pythagoras (582-507 BC), who suggested that the Golden Section was based on human proportions, and therefore proving its importance in the dimensions of classical buildings. The most celebrated example of this system of proportion is the Parthenon, built on the Athenian
Acropolis, Greece in the 5th century BC. Although several elements, including the dimensions of the façade, the spacing of the columns and the interior rectangular
space

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