Renaissance as proto-fascism

The sudden rise in interest in the classical style and its ideology presents today an alarming shift in discourse that is based—once again in history—on Vitruvius and his proportions as absolute harmony and aesthetic perfection in architecture.
This premise, founded on millennia-old visions, must be approached with a critical eye so as not to fall into the trap of what seems to be an emerging current of intellectual neo-fascists in architecture—thinkers who, while often well-intentioned, echo the authoritarian rigidity of the past. Their neo-fascism is not political in the literal sense, but ideological: it lies in the blind revival of universal formulas, in the conviction that beauty can be legislated and proportion moralised. It is our duty to construct a learned opinion on the subject through the experiences of those who have already lived this cycle of rediscovery and misuse.

When Vitruvius wrote his De Architectura, his text was neither celebrated nor contested by his contemporaries. As Mallgrave notes, he was more a recorder than an innovator, translating into words what Roman builders already practiced, adding his own philosophical reflections to a living craft.¹ There is little evidence that he was even widely read in his own time; his ideas left no immediate school or movement behind. What he offered was a description of existing conventions, given a veneer of order through proportion and theory. His legacy, therefore, was not born of influence but of rediscovery centuries later.

Some later interpreters tried to ascribe theological meaning to the orders Vitruvius described, linking them to divine or biblical ideals of perfection—the Temple of Jerusalem, the notion of cosmic harmony—but such readings emerged long after his time. They tell us more about the minds of Christian humanists than about Vitruvius himself. His work was not a revelation from the heavens, but an articulation of Roman culture’s self-confidence in reason and measure.²

What truly brought Vitruvius back to life were the Renaissance architects—Alberti, Palladio, and Serlio—who became, each in their own way, his disciples across time. They revived his treatise, translated it, amended it, and built upon it. Alberti, however, was not a mere follower: as Kruft reminds us, he transformed Vitruvius into philosophy, using him as a foundation to elevate architecture from manual craft to intellectual discipline.³ Palladio, on the other hand, adopted Vitruvius more literally, presenting him as a code of timeless order. Serlio completed the cycle by publishing manuals that fixed these ideas into a formal language.
While the Renaissance politically thrived on humanism and scientific curiosity, architecturally it also produced what I call intellectual proto-fascists: not political actors themselves, but thinkers whose pursuit of order, hierarchy, and universal harmony would later serve authoritarian ideals. They rationalised architecture to such an extent that its language could be used to justify purity, symmetry, and control.

This was never Vitruvius’s intention, yet his writings, once revived and systematised, became a double-edged tool. What had started as simple observations of Roman practice was later treated as universal truth. The Renaissance turned those ideas into rigid doctrine and used them to reject what did not fit—chiefly the so-called “barbaric” Gothic. This language of superiority blinded the humanists, who preached reason while refusing to question their own assumptions. Their fascination with order and perfection slowly hardened into dogma. It is from that moment that classical architecture began carrying an undercurrent of absolutism — an idea that beauty could, and should, be defined once and for all.

It was not until the seventeenth century that intellectual resistance to these pretexts emerged—most notably through Claude Perrault, who revisited Vitruvius’s measurements, tested them, and demonstrated their inconsistencies. Perrault proved that so-called “natural” proportion was, in truth, conventional. What Alberti had transformed into moral philosophy and Palladio into law, Perrault exposed as cultural preference.⁴ His work opened the door for architecture to separate itself from the illusion of absolute truth and return to the realm of experiment and doubt.

Historically, from that moment on, every revival of Vitruvian or Renaissance classicism carried an echo of political absolutism. This is not coincidence. Classicism and fascism can dialogue because they both deal in absolutes—order, purity, permanence. What for Alberti, Serlio, and Palladio had been a tool to express civic harmony and human dignity later became, under Mussolini and Hitler, an architecture of domination. The same marble, once carved for the citizen, was recast for the state. Rome itself was re-edited: its medieval layers erased to display only the classical face of authority.