Disegnare per conoscere: anatomia, meccanica e architettura nei disegni di Viollet-le-Duc/ Knowing by Drawing: Anatomy, Mechanics and Architecture in Viollet-le-Duc’s Drawings

The present study investigates the relations between technical-scientific illustration and architectural drawings in the context of European Historicism. In the thriving publishing activity that characterised the first decades of the 19th centur y and aimed at promoting knowledge dissemination, such illustrations take on growing importance in all fields. In such a context, the case of the renowned architect and restorer Viollet-le-Duc is significant due to the quality and consistency of his theoretical elaboration and graphic work, as well as to his undisputed critical and editorial popularity. The tireless French scholar and draughtsman theorised drawing as a fundamental means of knowing the deep structures of reality in ever y field.The analysis of texts and images sheds light on a transfer of ways of thinking from the natural sciences to architecture that tran-slates into a sort of “biological” depiction of buildings based on unshakeable rationalism founded on life sciences. In accordance with his surrounding epistemological context, Viollet-le-Duc carries out an inquir y into architecture, and medieval architecture in particular, that was based on the study of the existing relations among the parts and the relationship between conformations and functions, and was borrowed from studies in anatomy and integrated with a reading of the rational efficiency of the architectural organism in mechanical terms. Thus, did organic and mechanical metaphors attain a synthesis that is significantly mirrored in the ways of drawing.