INTERNATIONAL ROMANISM

On our return to Rome we passed through Stockholm for a few days at the end of August. I’ve wanted to see the palace of Drottningholm since Thomas Rajkovich and I won the International Competition for the Minnesota State Capitol Grounds in 1986. Minnesota, heavily populated by Nordic immigrants, has a spectacular State Capitol building by Cass Gilbert, but the grounds he reserved in front of it had never been developed. Our competition winning design projected formal terraces and gardens, along with bridges connecting the Capitol with downtown St. Paul. Despite winning (albeit by a narrow margin) we met tremendous resistance to executing our project, partly driven by a native sense that our scheme was too “Mediterranean,” somehow not connected to the reality of the Minnesota climate and landscape. Nostra culpa: we should have immediately after winning gotten on a plane and flown to Stockholm, to photograph Tessin’s Royal Palace and the gardens at Drottningholm. The latter is a spectacular sequence of spaces beginning at the water, through the palace and on to a series of terraces, parterres, and woods (where you’ll find a ‘Turkish tent’ and a ‘Chinese pavilion’). Somehow the provincialism implicit in the idea of regionalism has embedded itself in our culture, making moderns immune to influences not, seemingly, indigenous. Drottningholm is gloriously dependent on French and Italian precedents; at its marvelous theater the king imported French actors and designers and Italian opera singers. To do this was the height of sophistication, an acknowledgment that culture was absolute, and one either had it or imported it. “Too Roman” would not have been a critique; instead, it was trumpeted as a claim to a place on the cultural stage. Since then, however, even Sweden hunted for a “national style,” like so many other European cultures: anything but classical.

National Romanticism was the rather bizarre late phase of pre-Modernist culture, where a desire to detach individual nations from the unifying effects of classicism led them to some very convoluted constructs: neo-medievalism, eclecticism, proto-classicism. Sweden, where Italy and the Renaissance held sway over their consciousness even in the middle of the nineteenth century, and where there really was not much notable culture to speak of before the Renaissance, tried desperately to invent something uniquely theirs around the turn of the last century. The pinnacle of this project was Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm City Hall. I admit to being quite partial to this building in my early transition from modernist to classicist; and many who never really left that post-modern middle ground still love it. But it is, to a classicist, so odd to see the desire for a “national” style manifest itself in a highly personal pastiche of Venice: the Doge’s Palace rendered with the palette of the Frari! Neither its idiosyncrasies nor its Venetian-ness merit the term ‘national,’ and yet modern histories will be more sympathetic to its spirit than to that of Tessin’s Royal Palace—so powerfully Roman in its formal structure (and yet no pastiche of any Roman building). It draws on Bernini’s work most deliberately—the Louvre, St. Peter’s, Ariccia— and yet it is of its place and time.

What makes the Royal Palace ‘Swedish’ is a patron’s willingness to do it, something Bernini didn’t have at the Louvre. And what makes Tessin a classicist is that commitment to the Beautiful as manifest in the best of the classical tradition, wherever it is found.

Following Frescoes

On August 19 the Gallery of Bond Hall at the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture will host a show of David Mayernik’s preparatory drawings and paintings for his recently completed frescoes at the Palmer Performing Arts Center at TASIS Switzerland and the chapel at the church of S. Cresci in Tuscany. The show will remain on view until September 17.

Fresco painting is sufficiently rare to evoke only romantic associations with Italy and the Renaissance, but in reality there is a modest renaissance of modern fresco painting going on today, with places to study and new work available in the United States and Italy. It is this that Mayernik documents in his new website Fresco Trail, which allows travelers to find his work and eventually the work of other modern fresco artists. If you can’t make it to South Bend to see the show, keep in mind the itinerary throughout Italy and Ticino that can be followed as a modern fresco trail. If we long for the achievements of the past, we need to celebrate their recovery in the present.

Buy Green

Rizzoli’s Green Living is packaged rather oddly. The cover shows exactly the kind of high-tech modernist “green” architecture that the publisher thinks the public expects, whereas the content of the book offers a compelling, systematic repudiation of that approach and a seductively wide range of traditional alternatives that anyone can love. Don’t judge this book by its cover, in other words. Scholar and architect Barbara Kenda assembled the authors for the project, and Victor Deupi, Norman Crowe, and myself, once her colleagues, owe her much for creatively fusing her own research into healthy living and buildings during the Renaissance with solutions to the modern crisis of construction. This is an important, elegant book that the publisher seems not to have a clue how to market, and it deserves to reach every architect, builder, and concerned citizen’s shelf.

Rome and America

A recent drive around the East Coast brought me to a series of sites that illuminate the challenges of reconnecting American culture to its European roots. A priori this has to acknowledge the inevitable artistic provincialism of the colonies and the early United States, a subject glossed over at Williamsburg—a place at once quaint and bizarre, where the focus of the guided tours (all convincingly done, it must be said) of the most prominent buildings—the Governor’s mansion and the Capitol—virtually ignores the architecture and focuses instead on politics and social life around the time of the Revolution. A decision has obviously been made to make of Williamsburg a teaching opportunity for the history of Revolutionary America, but this has the consequence of turning its back on the whole raison d’être of having reconstructed Williamsburg in the twentieth century, which was to show what an important American small town was physically like in the eighteenth century (since so little of eighteenth century America survives). Being my first time there, I was struck by how un-urban Williamsburg is in fact, really more a loose main street collection of disparate buildings whose street width and trees preclude any sense of urban spatial definition. The adjacent college of William & Mary is in many ways more urban, but the claims for Wren’s authorship of the first building only points up the desperation of the attempt to put this humble place on the European stage, especially when one compares it to Wren’s work at Hampton Court (where the in-costume guides do, by the way, talk about the architecture) or the Chelsea Royal Hospital. We had stopped for an overnight in Frederick, MD beforehand, and here we actually found a real, vital urban environment, one that New Urban apologists should enthusiastically embrace over Williamsburg.

The excellent show Ancient Rome & America at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia did (it closes today) do a remarkable job of connecting early America to Ancient Rome, from the arts and architecture to foundation myths, political culture, and even the nature of slavery. Would that students of classical art and architecture today could have seen it—there was, amazingly, no catalogue—since it makes the point of how readily Americans were once able to learn from Europe, indeed define themselves quite precisely with relationship to European culture. Philadelphia still does, in fact, retain quite a lot of its eighteenth century fabric and monuments, and Philadelphia’s John Blatteau has been one of the few American classicists to tie his work explicitly to European models, which goes a long way to explaining why his work is so much better than most American contemporary classicism.

Buy This Book!

Now available in the United States, New Palladians (eds. A. Sagharchi and L. Steil) documents the work of 48 modern architects or teams whose work is in some way rooted in tradition. The value of this book lies primarily in the quality of the built work by those whose practice is most rooted in the classical tradition. It is still likely to be true that much of the public is unaware that such built work exists (partly because so much of it is private), or that there are such architects committed to building all’antica. This mission to disseminate (with all of its implications of seeding) is the book’s great merit, and it deserves as wide a readership as we can gather for it. What starts off as a polemical tract settles into a coffee table format soon enough, and while I am all for polemics the public is more likely to be convinced if seduced by beautiful buildings, and in a number of cases that could actually happen with this publication.

It is also one of the merits of this book that it affords equal space to each architect represented, regardless of status or quantity of built work. Set out on such a level playing field, it is no longer inevitable that the biggest firms offer the most compelling work, although there is an inevitable relationship between a client’s resources and the quality of building. Also inevitably, there is an abundance of private and developer work, and a small percentage of institutional—libraries, colleges, museums, etc.—work, which is unfortunately fairly representative of classical architecture’s market access today (and, in fact, tallies pretty well with the distribution of private and public in Palladio’s career).

Make no mistake, the Palladianism of this book is a somewhat artificial construct, tacking onto the tail end of the Year of Palladio a survey of modern architects whose work can loosely be described as “traditional” (see my earlier observations on that problematic word); for those not invested in the arguments put forth in the essays at the beginning of the book (none of which, tellingly, are written by the architects whose work is most obviously “Palladian”), what some of the new work and the buildings by Palladio in Carl Laubin’s rather chilly capriccio have to do with each other may be hard to grasp. No matter. I for one am comfortable with the “Palladian” label (and no doubt many of us included are also) because it implies “classical;” and if that word shows up surprisingly rarely in the book, it may be a natural consequence of a movement that still isn’t quite comfortable in its skin, or is trying hard to band together (for strength in numbers) a body of work that actually represents quite disparate points of view. It is to the credit of the British and European editors that such a catholicity of points of view is so fairly represented. This is a much-needed book, since there has been quite literally nothing else like it out there since The Classicist’s Xth Anniversary edition, and one hopes it will be followed with some regularity by similar publications.

Fourth of July, Tuscany

Brendan Hart, the monks Giovanni and Giuseppe, David M.

On the fourth of July the parish of S. Cresci in Valcava (near Borgo San Lorenzo) will celebrate the feast of their little known saint, the "evangelist of the Mugello." They will also be opening to the public my recently completed frescoes of the last days of the saint and his companions, martyred in the third century under the Emperor Decius. The church, ably maintained in the face of a dwindling congregation by the Silvestrine (Benedictine) monks Giovanni and Giuseppe, has benefitted from the support of several loyal parishioners, among them Lynn Fleming Aeschliman. What is delightful for me about this year's choice of day for the celebration is that, as an American born of second-generation immigrant parents (Slovak and Italian), implicitly acknowledged on the day of our independence is the inter-dependence of Italian and American culture, by no means a one-way street. For all of our museums enriched by Italian paintings, our classical buildings built by Italian craftsman, our cuisine and our couture, Americans have given back not only our dollars to the birthplace of the Renaissance, we have invested our sweat equity--of course in the War, but also the "mud angels" of the '66 Florentine flood, the many farmhouses lovingly restored by stranieri, and now in one ancient, small, remote church a new cycle of frescoes hinting at a new renaissance. And not just there: in Florence the multitude of Anglophone realist art programs are largely American in impetus, faculty and students.

But so many places in this richest of cultural landscapes are struggling through tough economic times. So, if you want an off-the-beaten track trip to a verdant, culturally rich landscape (nearby Vicchio being the birthplace of Giotto, Beato Angelico, and Lully) for a little peace, quiet and beauty, visit the monks at San Cresci in Valcava (t. +39 055 849 5612), who can offer accommodations, fabulous simple food, and good company (although they speak very little English). Nearby Capitignano is also a lovely place to stay. It's wonderful to see the original Renaissance, but there's something to be said for keeping your eye out for the new one afoot in and around Florence. And this time America has something to offer.

A Function of Time

A June day in Ariccia, south of Rome (see post from January); we went because my wife Brette has written a fabulous article on the local porchetta for Cucina Italiana, which she shared with those who helped in the research. There I met the impassioned Gino Galieti, of La Castellana (Antico Laboratorio Lavorazione Carni, or Venerable Shop for Working Meats--or something to that effect!) in nearby Genzano. What gets Gino riled up is a discussion about the industrialization of erstwhile artisan Italian meats--salumi, porchetta, etc. And what Gino has to say about the shortcuts producers have introduced into the production of cured pork--stagionato, or aged, salamis now only requiring 2 days!--could be applied to art or building. Everything we do today, it seems, with the exception of rigorists like Gino (and myself), is faking it with respect to the time and quality involved in what our culture once produced. Gino, subject to brief fits of despair, soldiers on, making his coppiette come una volta. And indeed, our only hope is combining his penchant for crankiness ("It's the chefs who don't sustain the quality producers!") with actually doing it the right way any chance we get (like painting frescoes).

Those of us involved in classical architecture lament a lot about what's missing in our culture--patronage, craft, taste--but perhaps the most fundamental thing is the value of Time. Time to draw well, time to think well, time to build well. If we can't recover the value of Time, we'll remain just faking it. And, you know, Gino's real stuff does simply taste better.