The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness

Emanuele Lugli

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226820002, 9780226612492
• eBook ISBN: 9780226612522
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la arquitectura

An interdisciplinary history of standardized measurements.

Measurement is all around us—from the circumference of a pizza to the square footage of an apartment, from the length of a newborn baby to the number of miles between neighboring towns. Whether inches or miles, centimeters or kilometers, measures of distance stand at the very foundation of everything we do, so much so that we take them for granted. Yet, this has not always been the case.

This book reaches back to medieval Italy to speak of a time when measurements were displayed in the open, showing how such a deceptively simple innovation triggered a chain of cultural transformations whose consequences are visible today on a global scale. Drawing from literary works and frescoes, architectural surveys, and legal compilations, Emanuele Lugli offers a history of material practices widely overlooked by historians. He argues that the public display of measurements in Italy's newly formed city republics not only laid the foundation for now centuries-old practices of making, but also helped to legitimize local governments and shore up church power, buttressing fantasies of exactitude and certainty that linger to this day.

This ambitious, truly interdisciplinary book explains how measurements, rather than being mere descriptors of the real, themselves work as powerful molds of ideas, affecting our notions of what we consider similar, accurate, and truthful.

Notes

PREFACE

1 The fight of Bologna’s administration against graffiti has been recorded by the local press. See, for instance, Gian Luca Terio, “Avanti contro i graffi,” La Repubblica, Cronaca di Bologna, September 12, 2007; Elisa Anzolin, “Parte il piano contro i graffiti: Via le scritte dal ghetto e Zamboni,” La Repubblica, Cronaca di Bologna, September 19, 2007; Silvia Bignami, “Lotta ai graffiti, la Cancellieri accelera,” La Repubblica, Cronaca di Bologna, May 6, 2010; Eleonora Capelli, “La fama internazionale dei writer è iniziata sui muri di questa città,” La Repubblica, Cronaca di Bologna, May 6, 2010.

2 Paolo Segneri, “Il Confessore istruito,” in Opere, 4 vols. (Venice: Baglioni, 1712), 4:641.

3 For instance, an instance of this use is in Franco Sacchetti, Il trecentonovelle, ed. Emilio Faccioli (Turin: Einaudi, 1970), CCVII, p. 628: “per ovviare alla infamia dell’ordine.”

4 Edmund Husserl defines philosophy as the science of the most obvious truth (selbstverstaendlich). Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), 22. See also Francesca Rivetti Barbò, Essere nel tempo: Introduzione alla filosofia dell’essere, fondamento di libertà (Milan: Jaca Book, 1990), 15–16.

CHAPTER 1

1 Wenzel Gustav Kopetz, Allgemeine österreichische Gewerbs-Gesetzkunde, 2 vols. (Vienna: Friedrich Folke, 1830), 2:332.

2 Alfred Francis Pribram, Materialien zur Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Österreich (Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter, 1938), 121. Leopold’s edicts date to March 13, 1781, and July 11, 1782.

3 Emanuele Lugli, “Cesare Beccaria e la riduzione delle misure lineari a Milano (1771–1789),” Nuova informazione bibliografica 12, no. 3 (2015), 579–601.

4 For instance, the king of Sicily, Ferdinand III, introduced new standards with the law of December 31, 1809. See Codice metrico siculo (Catania: Stamperia dell’università, 1812), 57.

5 The quest of Florence’s standards of measurements is described in Leonardo Ximenes, Del vecchio e nuovo gnomone fiorentino e delle osservazioni astronomiche, fisiche ed architettoniche fatte nel verificarne la costruzione (Florence: Stamperia imperiale, 1757), 1–10. For an equivalent quest in Milan, see Cesare Beccaria, “Della riduzione delle misure di lunghezza all’uniformità per lo stato di Milano,” in Opere, 2 vols. (Milan: Società tipografica dei classici italiani, 1821–22), 2:453.

6 The renowned historian Gaetano de Sanctis is often credited with the aphorism “Metrology is not a science; it is a nightmare” (La metrologia più che una scienza è un incubo; unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own). For an example, see Vincenzo Banzola, “Le antiche misure parmigiane e l’introduzione del sistema metrico decimale negli Stati Parmensi,” Archivio storico per le province parmensi 18 (1966), 139. I do not know whether de Sanctis ever said that, but in his writings his skepticism is somewhat softer. See Gateano de Santis, Scritti minori, 6 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1966–72), 2:191. Even when de Sanctis is not cited, such a view is pervasive. See Juergen Schulz, “Le antiche misure lineari secondo Sebastiano Serlio e il problema dei loro valori,” in Lezioni di metodo: Studi in onore di Lionello Puppi, ed. Loredana Olivato and Giuseppe Barbieri (Vicenza: Terraferma, 2002), 363–71; Bruno Andreolli, “Misurare la terra: Metrologie altomedievali,” in Uomo e spazio nell’alto medioevo, 2 vols. (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo, 2003), 1:172–73. The earliest definition of measures as an “intolerable nightmare” (unleidlichen Alptraum) that I could find is in Karl Anton Henschel, Das bequemste Maas- und Gewichts-system gegründet auf den natürlichen Schritt des Menschen (Kassel: Bertram, 1855), 9. Thanks to a translation published in the same year, the book became very popular also in France.

7 Ugo Tucci, “Pesi e misure nella storia della società,” in I documenti, vol. 5.1 of Storia d’Italia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi, 1973), 581–612. An exception is Witold Kula, Les mesures et les hommes (Paris: Editions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, 1984).

8 The best book on the history of the metric system is Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World (New York and London: Free Press, 2002). Also useful are the slim exhibition catalogue L’aventure du mètre (Paris: Musée national des techniques, 1989) and Louis Marquet, L’Epopée du mètre: Histoire du système métrique décimal (Paris: Délégation à l’information et à la communication, 1989).

9 Maurice Crosland, “The Congress on Definitive Metric Standards, 1789–9: The First International Scientific Conference?” Isis 60, no. 2 (1969), 226–31.

10 Alder, The Measure of All Things, 301–8.

11 Emanuele Lugli, Unità di misura: Breve storia del metro in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2014), 37–52.

12 See Kathryn M. Olesko, “The Meaning of Precision: The Exact Sensibility in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in The Values of Precision, ed. Matthew Norton Wise (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 103–34.

13 [Arthur-Jules] Morin, “Notice historique sur le système métrique, sur ses développements et sur sa propagation,” Annales du Conservatoire Impérial des Arts et Métiers 9 (1870), 611–13.

14 Héctor Vera, A peso el kilo: Historia del sistema métrico decimal en México (Santa Úrsula Xitla: Libros del escarabajo, 2007), 15–39; Tamano Mitsuo, “Japan’s Transition to the Metric System,” Commercial Weights and Measures, no. 3 of US Metric Study Interim Report (July 1971), 97–102.

15 Maurice Crosland, “Nature and Measurement in Eighteenth-Century France,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 87 (1972), 277–309.

16 Helen E. Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 97–123.

CHAPTER 2

1 “Nôtre corps n’est pas une régle absoluê, sur laquelle nous devions mesurer les autres.” Nicolas Malebranche, De la recherche de la verité, ed. Jules Simon (Paris: Charpentier, 1842), 36.

2 “Pour comparer les choses entre elles, ou plutôt pour mesurer exactement les rapports d’inégalité, il faut une mesure exacte, il faut une idée simple et parfaitement intelligible, une mesure universelle et qui puisse s’accommoder à toute sorte de sujets.” Malebranche, 487–88.

3 “Non v’ha matematico, che di questo non faccia il maggior uso.” Girolamo Francesco Cristiani, Delle misure d’ogni genere antiche, e moderne (Brescia: Bossini, 1760), 10. The Académie des sciences had sent French measurements to numerous European institutions, as recalled in Mathématiques, ed. Jean-Baptiste le Rond D’Alembert, vol. 13 of Encyclopédie méthodique (Paris: Panckoucke, 1789), 130–31.

4 The Royal Society of London asked Christiaan Huygens for a sample of the Rhenish standard in 1664. See Joella G. Yoder, Unrolling Time: Christiaan Huygens and the Mathematization of Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 154. Twenty years later, the Florentine scientist Vincenzo Viviani sent the Florentine standards to Pietro Paolo Caravaggio, a math professor in Milan. See Vincenzo Viviani to Pietro Paolo Caravaggio, 31 October 1684, in Florence: Biblioteca Nazionale, Fondo Galileano 256.

5 Antonio Favaro, Il metro proposto come unità di misura nel 1675 (Mâcon: Protat, 1901), 17–19 and 108–10; Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World (New York and London: Free Press, 2002), 97.

6 Klaus A. Vogel, “Cosmography” in Early Modern Science, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 493; Paolo Casini, Newton e la coscienza europea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983), 60.

7 Gabriel Mouton, “Nova mensurarum geometricarum idea,” in Observationes diametrorum solis et lunae apparentium (Lyon: Mathieu Liberal, 1670), 427–48.

8 Bruce T. Moran, “Courts and Academies,” in Early Modern Science, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (New York: Cambridge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Written in Stone
• I. SAFES
• II. SQUARES
• III. CITIES
• IV. FIELDS
• Conclusion: The Metamorphoses of Measurements
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index