Abstract

The present study examines literary and visual representations of the city from classical Greece to the ninth century A.D. It explores conceptions of the relationship between the city-as-community and the city-as architecture, between urban polity and urban space. Is the good city--the healthy, just human community--something that can be built, and if so, what architectural form must it assume in order to merit the name? Is there a necessary connection or order of priority between the organization of a polity and the organization of its space? What, if any, are the aesthetic categories operative in conceptualizing the city as a physical entity, and to what extent are urban complexes viewed as susceptible to visual representation, particularly in the form of a ground plan? ;The study addresses these and related questions by investigating ancient and early medieval sources of a philosophical, technical, and encyclopedic nature. Part I examines the Republic, Laws, and Critias of Plato and the Politics of Aristotle. Here the hierarchy and interdependence of polity and space constitute the focus of attention, moving from the radical question of whether the good city can be something material at all, to the exploration of practical ways of relating the city's physical exigencies to its political goals, to the issue of whether urban space and architecture can and should be conceptualized apart from political concerns. In Part II, the emphasis shifts with an examination of De architectura by Vitruvius and Hyginus Gromaticus' De limitibus constituendis. Here the city's status as space and architecture is assumed at the outset; the central concern is the degree to which its structures may be codified according to a set of aesthetic principles or expressed visually in a diagram or image. Finally, Part III turns to an early medieval encyclopedia in an examination of the treatment of the city in the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville. A brief concluding discussion seeks to relate Isidorian conceptions of the city to the ninth-century encyclopedia of Hrabanus Maurus and the political theology of Augustine's De civitate Dei