Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is Father Carlo Lodoli, an eighteenth century Venetian philosopher, teacher, and architectural theorist. The purpose of this study is to reconstruct Lodoli's theories about architecture and locate these theories within the development of Italian Humanist thought. ;The dissertation begins with an examination of the work of Lodoli's students. They include Francesco Algarotti, Zaccaria Seriman, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Andrea Memmo. The work of Lodoli's contemporaries, philosophers and scientists, are then examined as sources of influence as well as parallel, interdisciplinary thought. They are Giambattista Vico, Antonio Conti, and Roger Boscovich. ;The second half of the dissertation locates Lodoli's thought within the conceptual framework of humanist philosophy and architectural theory. According to the first humanist treatise on the art of building by Leon Battista Alberti, architecture is an exercise in philosophical rhetoric or eloquence. Architecture as a rhetorical exercise is related to wisdom in terms of dialectics, memory, divination, and the achievement of good fortune. Topical mathematics, the mathematics of discovery and the origin of metaphor, is defined and discussed in terms of the study methods of Alberti and Vico. ;The final chapter of the dissertation is a brief examination of the development of mathematics, physics, and their application to architecture from the fifteen through eighteenth centuries in Italy. Three periods are identified and presented in brief according to the work of one humanist mathematician or natural philosopher and one paradigmatic architectural program. They are Peiro della Francesca and Donato Bramante's Tempietto, Galileo Galilei and Guarino Guarini's SS. Sidone, and the Baconian-Vichian Carlo Lodoli and Andrea Memmo's Prato della Valle