What do the drawings, which combine architectural profiles with a human one, tell us? Do they suggest that the human profile shares some proportional relation with the architectural outline, in the sense of a common pattern of mathematical relationships, for instance that the face can be divided into four equal parts? That the human profile is the visual manifestation of some geometrical substructure? Or conversely, that the geometrical structure of an architectural profile can best be understood in anthropomorphic terms?

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. In the course of Western architectural theory there have been other approaches to beauty—Alberti's definition in terms of splendor and magnificence, for instance—but they lend themselves far less well to conceptualization or theorization than these two, perhaps because of their cultural contingencies.

The Composto Ordinato of the Ricetto

As is well known, viewers have long found the Biblioteca Laurenziana, and its vestibule or Ricetto in particular, very puzzling.