| Summary: | The article examines the figure of the architect at work in
Renaissance Italy, when a major change occurred in the practice of design with the spread of
arithmetic. This deep scientific, technical, methodological, and cultural shift involved the image
of the architect and his profession, his relationship with the patron, as well as the cultural
conception of architecture. The essay, crossing disciplinary boundaries, analyses
some technical aspects of architectural design in early modern Italy only marginally investigated.
If proportional systems and architecture’s theoretical questions have been amply studied, the
practical culture, the daily professional practice and its working tools, such as the operative
arithmetic actually known to architects, have been only sporadically
analysed. During the Renaissance, especially in Italy, an important development of
mathematics occurred and arithmetic was clarified and simplified so to allow its diffusion, but at
the same time those disciplines remained essentially despised by aristocratic and intellectual
elites. What was the architects’ role in this moment of deep change? Which was the arithmetic
usually employed by them in the design process? When did Hindu-Arabic numbers and fractions became
familiar in the field of architecture? In the secular battle between geometry and arithmetic, which
system was used in what professional cases? The essay illustrates how architects
with different backgrounds responded to this change, through a comparative analysis of all the
architectural drawings containing numbers and calculations made by Michelangelo Buonarroti
(1475–1564), Baldassarre Peruzzi (1481–1536), and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger
(1484–1546).
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