Talk about translation will sometimes turn to the passage from the sketch, from a preparatory drawing to a painting—or even from the terra-cotta or plaster bozzetto to the fully formed stone or bronze figure.


Notoriously, any passage from one stage to another almost inevitably involves a loss of spontaneity—even of authenticity. Spontaneity has been valued more highly by recent critics than the monumental scale or full accomplishment and smooth finish of the final work, the higher and grander res ipsa. In that way, the passage of the work of art through the various stages from conception to completion is analogous to the filtering that a concept incarnate in the sounds and shapes of one language undergoes in its passage to the forms and feel of another one. Although this analogy is recognized for sculpture and painting, architecture is rarely mentioned in this context.


Yet it represents an even more elaborate passage or translation from one “language” to another—with all its inevitable forfeitures and contaminations. At the beginning of the first treatise on architecture of modern times, Leon Battista Alberti found it necessary to define the nature of the architectural operation, which, he wanted his readers to understand, is among the highest of all human achievements: and his definition was polemical. He starts by refuting a commonplace view of the architect: “It is no carpenter (tignarum fabrum) that I would have you compare to the greatest exponents of other disciplines: the carpenter is but an instrument in the hands of the architect.”


The rejected commonplace depends, at least in part, on the ambiguous status of the medieval master mason, but also on the misleading homology between the Latin tectum, which means “roof” or “covering” and forms the second part of the word architect, though this ignores the primary Greek sense of architekton, or chief craftsman.


Architectura was indeed taken to mean the roof or roofing, the uppermost covering of a structure, in the fifteenth century. The offending commonplace had the authority of Johannes Balbi’s Catholicon, probably the most popular medieval lexicon, dated by its author 1286, a book that was often copied and printed over the next 250 years.


Intent on ennobling architecture, Alberti then proceeds with his own emphatic definition: “Architectum ego hunc […] constituam,” he says, and I translate, “him I consider the architect, who by sure and admirable reason and method knows both how to devise in his own mind and through his...