Guarino Guarini's Architectural Theory and Counter-Reformation Aristotelianism: Visuality and Aesthetics in Architettura civile and Placita philosophica

• Published in: I Tatti studies Vol. 23; no. 2; p. 375
• Main Author: Mitrović, Branko
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chicago University of Chicago Press 01.09.2020
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Architecture; Guarini, Guarino (1624-83); Philosophy; Protestant Reformation; Renaissance period; Theology
• ISSN: 0393-5949; 2037-6731
• DOI: 10.1086/710779

Guarino Guarini was originally educated as a priest in Rome, and at the time he published his large-format 868-page philosophical treatise he was a professor of theology in Paris.3 A historian of philosophy will immediately recognize that the book's structure follows that of the corpus aristotelicum: it starts with logic, followed by physics, astronomy, biology, psychology, and ends with metaphysics. The conceptual framework is Aristotelian, with the full apparatus of essences, accidents, predicables, habits, and so on, while the organization of the material is standard for scholasticism. Guarini first presents a conclusion, then proofs, followed by objections and responses to the objections and then introduces the next conclusion. (Architettura civile is written in a similar style, with a series of "observations" followed by proofs.) In other words, Placita firmly belongs to the revival of scholastic Aristotelianism that started in the second half of the sixteenth century as the Catholic philosophical response to both the Reformation and the secularized philosophy of the Renaissance.