The Composto Ordinato of Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenziana: Proportion or Anthropomorphy?

Starting from reactions to the Ricetto of the Biblioteca Laurenziana by contemporaries, who tried to make sense of its strange and unprecedented forms either by using the rhetorical concept of compositio or by assuming a proportional system in the vestibule, I will show how in the latter part of the 18th century proportion lost its role as the objective foundation attributed to architectural beauty. Instead, beauty became redefined as an experience of the human mind, arising from the accordance between the properties of an object, its sensuous experience and the perceptive apparatus of the human mind. But this redefinition does not mean that proportion, or to be more precise, the assumption of a proportional system, became irrelevant. In the final part of this paper I will argue that in Kant’s aesthetics, proportion, in the sense of a visible set of relations between the dimensions of the parts of a building that can be expressed in mathematical terms, became one of the key features of a building, or indeed any object, that enables the human mind to make sense of, and judge, the objects of sense perception. Continuing Kant’s line of thought I will argue that the assumption of a proportional system, together with the projection of anthropomorphy onto architecture, are the two major hermeneutic strategies by which human beings try to understand buildings