The Tsar's Last Philosopher on the Method of Architectural History: Orthodox Theology versus Geistesgeschichte

A photograph dating from the years of the Russian Civil War shows Vasiliy Pavlovich Zubov in the uniform of the Red Army: an unlikely conscript to it, given his poor eyesight (as betrayed by his thick glasses), but in fact one who served as a scribe in an artillery unit located near Moscow (Fig. 1). Another photograph, taken not long before his death in 1963, shows him in the greyish suit of the Khrushchev years: a survivor who, by becoming Russia's greatest intellectual historian, managed to avoid playing any active part in political history (Fig. 2).

Zubov is the towering figure of Russian architectural history in the twentieth century. The most pertinent way to introduce him here is as the Russian translator of Leon Battista Alberti'sDe re aedificatoria(Fig. 3) and as one of the two co-translators of Daniele Barbara's commentary on Vitruvius. The former treatise is notorious for the complexities of its text, and it took a team of three scholars to produce the most recent English translation. Understanding of the latter work demands such an extensive knowledge of both Renaissance and Roman intellectual history that it is considered virtually untranslatable, and the translation on which Zubov collaborated is the only one ever published in any living language. He was also the author of an extensive commentary on Alberti's architectural treatise (Fig. 4), much praised by those Renaissance scholars who can read Russian, while those few of his articles on Leon Battista Alberti that were published in French or Italian during his lifetime are still widely cited today.