Grids and Squared Paper in Renaissance Architecture

Squared and graph paper played an important role in the practice of architects, both in the analysis and measuring of the human environment and ancient monuments, and in the design process. They have been addressing not only the graphic procedures but also the architects’ way of thinking, like every tool does. In the centuries that preceded the industrial production of squared paper, which began by the late 18th century, drawing a grid onto a sheet often involved the superimposition of graphic, procedural and philosophical intentions at one time. The idea of ​​the square grid in architecture is generally linked to Greek civilization, mathematics, the Hippodamian city, and the square module of Hellenistic temples, but is also intertwined with the Roman centuriatio and the medieval ad quadratum composition. It is possible that in antiquity architects used squared panel as a design support but squared paper did not appear before the Renaissance. Even at that time, it was mainly used by artisans who worked with fabrics and tapestries. Apart from the perspective applications of the grid, the painters learnt to transfer and enlarge small sketches onto the walls by associating grids of different sizes, while Albrecht Dürer, in some famous engravings, adopted it as a graduated picture plane to illustrate how to reproduce three-dimensional elements onto a two-dimensional support in a pseudo-scientific way. The architects, who used to entrust their design process to a few ratios between integers, used the grid as a modular and operational support for their drawings. Filarete used two types of square grid – one for the proportions and one for the scale drawing – while Bramante is the author of the famous half-plan for the new church of St. Peter drawn onto a grid, whose meaning and role is quite controversial. Certainly, Bramante also has the merit of teaching his numerous collaborators, such as Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and Baldassarre Peruzzi, the benefits of such a working method, which is testified by some of their designs. After his Italian travel, Philibert De l'Orme promoted the use of the square grid, too, and, in Nouvelle Inventions (1567), superimposes a grid on the table of the architectural orders and shows how to proportion the section of a church starting from a 7x7 square grid. Promoted by the circulation of treatises and prints, other innovative uses of the squared paper can be found in the work of north-European artists and gardeners, like Hans Vredeman de Vries and other Dutch architects who applied this tool to different design fields. This article focuses on the role squared paper had in the Renaissance decades in contributing to the transition from an organic-anthropometric paradigm to a mechanical-mathematical one. The squared paper gradually became a specific design environment alternative to the Vitruvian addresses in which to size and assemble the components of architecture already disassembled and organized in the illustrated treatises. In following the operational logic of movable type printing and proto-industrial production, this design process became distinctive of the engineering schools, as already testified by the positions of Bernardo Vittone, in Istruzioni elementari and Istruzioni Diverse, contributing to their historical separation from the arts academy.