Emulation: II.2

The. Classical. Tradition.

The Libreria Marciana, a radical classical
intervention on the Piazzetta S. Marco

In my forthcoming book The Challenge of Emulation in Art & Architecture (Ashgate, UK), I make a case that the culture of emulation depends on a canon of achievements, and some consensus on what defines excellence. For the classical artist, that canon has its roots in the art and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome, but is by no means confined to that. Emulation also presumes that one can, indeed must, apprehend the principles by which the canon is achieved, or else one is reduced to merely copying the forms. And if one apprehends the principles, one is prepared to develop new forms to add to the canon, since the principles need to be constantly applied to new and different needs and contexts, not to mention that each interpreter of them brings his or her own predilections to solving problems. The canon thus grows, and evolves.

On a day when a pope resigns—as some would claim, for the first time in 598 years, although it could be argued that no pope in history retired from office for precisely the reasons that Benedict XVI outlined—it is apropos to consider the radical, the traditional, and the nature of the classical. Benedict’s scholarly outlook, in many ways, has affinities to the classical. And in his capacity to do something radical or revolutionary, he operates very much as a classicist. A classicist is not a traditionalist. A classicist believes in principles more than precedents. There is nothing "traditional" about Benedict’s resignation from office.

The Classical Tradition (Belknap/Harvard) is a weighty tome edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis. It is an odd book: neither encyclopedic nor introductory, it at once assumes the reader’s deep curiosity about the classical tradition and general lack of familiarity with it; it wants desperately to be relevant (Pop culture references abound), and revels in the esoteric; it makes a case for the continuity of “the classical tradition” across the millennia yet worries not a little about its imminent demise. The February 21 edition of the New York Review of Books tackles the tome in a review by Stephen Greenblatt (The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: W. W. Norton; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton) and Joseph Leo Koerner (The Reformation of the Image, U. of Chicago). Their “The Glories of Classicism” seems to want to poke holes in the pretense of being able to put this subject in a book, especially today. As they say, ‘With this ambition comes a set of difficult problems that may be summed up in three words: “The,” “Classical,” and “Tradition.”’ Like the Holy Roman Empire, there may be no “the,” no “classical,” and no “tradition” (discuss amongst yourselves). And certainly Grafton et al wouldn’t disagree. But the many scholars who contributed to this remarkable if odd book had a different end in mind: not to summarize in any definitive way “the classical tradition,” but to collect much that is relevant and seductive about it and drop it into the culture like a time capsule or life raft, something to hold onto when all else goes the way of Gangnam Style or Twitter (admit it, you know it’ll happen eventually).

Although the reviewer’s elective affinities are revealed in leaving the last words to Marx and Nietzsche, they do have a point about “tradition.” Using the word to refer to the classical is fraught, and perhaps folly. There really hasn’t been a classical tradition since the fall of the Roman Empire, but rather a series of (albeit prolonged) self-conscious recoveries of it. While the last may have ended decades if not centuries ago, there are those like me who would want to see another one. And if we want it we need to acknowledge classicism’s radical nature, its selective capacity to reject what is its nemesis and embrace what is essential; and each classicist may disagree in larger or smaller measure about the nature of each. What largely defines a classicist is that one considers oneself so, and a classicist has no particular interest in tradition per se; nor does he or she worry that the best is the enemy of the good; nor if they are architects do they care much about context. Jacopo Sansovino's Library on the Piazzetta S. Marco owed little directly to its architectural context.

Classicists are traditionalists with higher standards.

Emulation: II.1

Opera and Rhetorical Gesture

Last year at this time I had just finished the drawings for Chicago’s Haymarket Opera company’s production of Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers, and this year I’ve designed two additional sets, a palace and a port, for their production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Last year I posted on the integration of the arts and opera; this year, in concert with my book on emulation, I want to offer something brief on the emulative relationship of the arts.

After the Charpentier performance last year I was struck by the image of live actors in period costume performing in front of the sets I’d designed, and it prompted me to compose a painting based on a moving scene in the opera where, on the death of Eurydice, Orpheus curses the “implacable gods.” Reverberating back from the drama, my composition recalled the approach to rhetorical gesture that Poussin had developed, and I wanted to integrate the “actors” and the setting in both formal and rhetorical ways.

What I had learned in the course of thinking about the first performance was the ways in which performance gesture in the Baroque depended on painting, even as painting itself was often “theatrical” and dramatic. Those interdependencies were reciprocal and ongoing, despite what some art historians might prefer to see as a more linear borrowing. Seeing for myself what dramatic action does to static scenes made me appreciate even more Poussin’s rhetorical gestures, for example in the Metropolitan Museum’s Rape of the Sabines; and I wonder if anyone has looked into Poussin’s attendance at the theaters of Rome?

Emulation: I.1

News from Hadrian’s World

  

the Madonna di Loreto and Trajan's Column, from Piazza Venezia

I’m winding up my manuscript on Emulation to deliver to the publisher. It’s been rewarding writing the book, largely because I have learned so much about the nature of emulation, and learning about it has been fueled by trying to describe it in action (as I see it), in historical examples of painting, sculpture, and architecture. I plan on posting examples of the kind of explications I’ve made in the book as a series, at least once a month, until the publication date in year or so. I’ll welcome comments, especially those that will help hone the argument before it’s too late!

But a recent news story has amplified my excitement about one of the book’s speculations, and I’m posting here a trial run of an interpretation of some newly unveiled archeological excavations around the Piazza Venezia (stories in Italian at Corrriere della Sera, in English at The Guardian).

Trajan's Column and fragment of a column
from the temple's portico (?)

One of the examples of emulation that I’ve treated is the Imperial Fora in Rome. The Fora seem to be classic cases of urban architectural emulation, as Caesar rivaled the Roman Forum, then Augustus Caesar’s, etc., culminating in the Forum of Trajan, the ne plus ultra of the fora, but also a case apart. In the emulative spirit, I tackled a vexing aspect of Trajan’s Forum, the fact that no temple has been found (presumably beyond the Column, wherein were interred the emperor’s ashes). It is said Hadrian designed the temple posthumously for his revered predecessor, and that it was the building of which he was most proud—which is saying something for the patron/architect of the Pantheon.

My insight is that the reason the temple has not been found, even though it presumably would have been on axis and thus partly under what is today open ground (i.e. relatively easy to excavate), is that it is in fact under the Renaissance church of the Madonna di Loreto. Antonio da Sangallo’s round (or really octagonal encased in a square) church is the largest, complete Renaissance centrally planned church in Rome. It is twinned by the eighteenth-century church of Ss. Nome di Maria, about which I will have more to say in a future post.

The reason no one to my knowledge has conjectured this is that the church is not on the axis of the Forum. And it is round. My speculations are based on the architecture we associate with Hadrian, his penchant for round or centrally-planned buildings and complexes, and his villa’s capacity to reconcile disparate axes. What if Hadrian’s temple to Trajan was round, was oriented perpendicularly toward the Forum’s axis, and was encased in a partially encircling precinct wall (not unlike Bernini’s church at Ariccia)? The plan here shows a conjectural reconstruction, with a peripteral colonnade to address the fact that the fragment of a 2m diameter column shaft of green marble lying near Trajan’s Column has always been assumed to belong to the portico of the temple, and its size implies an unusually large temple. But if the church, relatively modest in size, is built over the cella, then the temple’s scale could be increased by the colonnade wrapping it, a precursor to the Temple of Venus at Baalbek. See the plan.

the recently revealed curved wall edging the auditoria

But here’s where it gets really interesting, and topical. In recent weeks the Italian press has covered the unveiling of the excavations near the Loreto church for the building of a new metro line. And what I saw for the first time in person last Friday was a part of what has been found, supposedly the site of an auditorium of Hadrian’s (used especially for philosophical discourses). The most exciting part for me is a curved bit of wall that seems to be centered on the Loreto church, and it has been described as part of a street wall. Which, to my mind, seems to confirm my conjectural reconstruction of the precinct wall of the presumed temple.

Find the site at 41°53'45.61" N  12°29'01.10" E

Note that the orientations of the buildings beyond the Trajanic complex are roughly north-south, parallel and perpendicular to the ancient Via Flaminia/Via Lata (the modern Via del Corso); this is, of course, also the orientation of the monumental complexes of the whole Campus Martius.

As the drawings for my Forum plan have evolved only over the last few of months while illustrating the evolving manuscript, it seems downright providential that this new evidence has come to light just now. I would welcome any constructive observations, including illustrated ones, that can help make sense of what seems to be the beginning of a whole new understanding of how the Imperial Fora plugged into their contexts, and even more importantly, the spirit of adventure in the classical tradition that Hadrian's architecture represents.

And, at the start of the new year, I wish everyone who strives to emulate

Buon Anno Nuovo!

Learning from Letarouilly

a new expanded edition out now from Dover

Paul-Marie Letarouilly’s Edifices de Rome Moderne, and to a lesser extent his subsequent volumes on the Vatican, have shaped our perception of the Renaissance ever since their publication in 1840. Their reprints as part of the American Renaissance at the turn of the last century, and again in the 1980’s, acknowledged their unparalleled role in unpacking Renaissance Rome in ways that could be useful to modern architects. In this John Barrington Bayley’s Letarouilly on Renaissance Rome holds a unique place, because it is part reprint of, part meditation on, both the Rome Moderne and Vatican volumes. Part of Classical America’s mission of making available the knowledge of the past that architects once had had, Bayley’s book was also his view of Letarouilly’s value, and the value of Rome generally, to an American audience. This is, as I have written elsewhere, still a controversial point. If there is such a thing as “American” architecture it is surely a melting pot—or more of a minestrone—of various cultures and movements; but its standards, at least as regards classicism, have to depend on European and British models. Just as Rubens saw the Genoese palazzo as an excellent model for Antwerp’s burghers, architects like Charles McKim saw Letarouilly as a font of forms for American building—from libraries to residences. As Bayley recognized, the great mediator of that Roman Renaissance resource was Paris, and that city features heavily in his text.

Letarouilly on Renaissance Rome is organized by type—piazza, courtyard, palace, etc.—or place—Palazzo Massimo, the Vatican—and each chapter is introduced by Bayley’s observations. This has the advantage of giving greater clarity to the order of the plates, and of having a mediating voice to make sense of them. The new edition from Dover includes fifty additional plates of both Rome and the Vatican, with a new introductory essay that puts Bayley and Letarouilly in context.

Other Letarouilly efforts are ongoing elsewhere. At the University of Oregon Prof. Jim Tice and his team have been working to insert Letarouilly’s plans in their Nolli plan context, tremendously useful for understanding each. Prof. Kevin Hinders at the Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has spent years photographing extant Roman buildings from the same vantage point as Letarouilly’s views.

This passion for a French architect’s engravings of Renaissance Rome is sponsored as much by the love of Rome itself as the plates. Without that passion no great work can be done, and without acknowledging the transcendent value of Rome no great work can be built.

Emulators of the World, Unite

Every artist has to decide for themselves, at some early stage of their careers, how they see themselves in relationship to the past. Even the most avant-garde artist makes such a choice, if by negation. For those interested in engagement with tradition, that choice often falls to some kind of imitation—whether literal replication, or the pessimism behind presumed inferiority with respect to the past. Who today, one could ask, would have the hubris to think they can rival Bernini, or Cortona, or Borromini? Yet that is how they saw their relationship with each other, and their contemporaries with them: emulation, rivalry by imitation, or competitive deference are each different ways of describing the same thing—a critical optimism about the possibility of exceeding one’s contemporaries or predecessors.

            I had the chance to see the wonderful Guardi show at the Museo Correr in Venice a couple of weeks ago, and learned that Guardi’s compositions often began with a Canaletto print—which he then transformed and translated into his own idiom of composition and brushstroke. It partly explains the often unconvincing perspectives in Guardi’s work that they are imitative without fully comprehending, but his brushwork comes off instead as a deliberate challenge to his more successful contemporary’s increasingly mechanical painting technique. Guardi was not mimicking Canaletto, he was challenging him—partly on Canaletto’s terms, partly on Guardi’s own. If their critical fortunes have oscillated vis-à-vis each other, it is only to say that they can never be confused with each other, that their affinities only serve to highlight their differences.

            In another way, I saw the opening of a show in which I participated, of foreign artists working en plein air in Civita Castellana; the work of today’s plein air painters is a unique case of a living emulative tradition, where every artist acknowledges in some way or another the achievements of Corot and other models. The same might also be said of the genre of still life.

            Maybe only a handful of fresco artists plays on the same emulative field; with so little opportunity there is really no emulative camp of classical figurative painters; portraiture, but its particular nature, resists comparison with previous work, except among the most elemental compositions (all the rhetorical staffage of Old Master portraiture is anathema today). In architecture most classicists are too timid to be emulative, and the opportunities are not there in reality to prove them wrong (if we had a culture of paper architecture maybe the comparison could be made, but I may be the only practicing architect today who values that).