Seeing Susanna

Viva il Barocco!

Capella Maggiore, S. Maria di Loreto, Rome

The great intellectual strides in art history have long been made, at least for those of us in love with the Renaissance and Baroque. But of course, universities are still producing art historians, and they need something to do. What the latest generation seems to see as its mission is incrementally dismantling the grand constructs of their “grandparents”: Panofsky, Wittkower, Blunt, et al; their intellectual “parents,” being their PhD advisors, are for the moment safe, and have indeed opened the doors to this approach.

Enter the new generation of art historical publications, enabled by Yale University Press above all, where a single book attempts to make a singular (if possible head-turning) point, again, and again, and again. I have been, for lack of alternatives, reading some of these books lately—Todd Olson’s Poussin and France (le robe!), Kathleen Wren Christian’s Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome (acquisitiveness triumphs over humanism), Estelle Lingo’s François Duquesnoy and the Greek Ideal, Stuart Lingo’s Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (vaghezza!), Tracy Ehrlich’s Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Italy (green hectares)—and have found it hard going. Staking out a contrary position vis-à-vis some commonly accepted topos—Baroque Classicism, the strictures of the Council of Trent, etc.—or making a case for a new, “modern” interpretive framework—“the self,” prestige as program, politics before art, form over meaning (note the relevance to our modern world)—means that new art and architectural historical publications beat the reader into submission by making one presumably novel point repeatedly, albeit in ever so subtly different phraseology. These are books that really want to be essays. And because they are so single-minded, they are often blind to other, often more self-evident, propositions that are at least equally as valid.

Take, for example, the trendy interpretation of the classical tendencies in seventeenth century sculpture under the new theme “the Greek manner.” While Estelle Lingo has adopted Charles Dempsey’s proposition of a Greek current in certain Baroque classicists, she has embraced it so fully that every aspect of the Fleming’s art is filtered through that lens: never mind that Duquesnoy couldn’t distinguish Hellenic from Hellenistic, nor that his allies like Poussin and Sacchi had not a single Greek painting available to them; Duquesnoy’s agenda was for her exclusively, and presciently, neo-Grec. Of course, his most important commission, the St. Andrew for the crossing of St. Peter’s, was executed under Bernini’s watch and (at least for me) may actually beat the maestro at his own game; and his most recongized work, the one if any reproduced attached to his name—the S. Susanna from the Madonna di Loreto—displays a dynamic contrapposto and complex spatial response that has nothing to do with the static, self-contained, self-absorbed posture of a Doryphorous or Athena. Consider the Susanna: a paradigmatic Roman noble virgin, perhaps even related to the emperor Diocletian, positioned in a niche to the right of the high altar and the venerated fifteenth century painting around which the church and its polichromy is designed; the saint gestures across her body toward the altar, her gaze engaging the worshipper and her finger foucsing their gaze; no evident force from the spectator’s point of view motivates the gathering of her mantle up and to the left (her proper right arm being effectively invisible from outside the chancel), and the languid inclination of her head toward us counteracts this leftward thrust of mantle and indication. In sum, this is from any normative point of view a wholly Baroque sculpture, engaging, activated, dynamic. It is only from the impossible point of view—above and from the left as she is invariably photographed in art historical literature—that a case can be made for her anti-Baroque “classicism” or anti-Roman “Greekness.”

My diligent devouring of these texts has brought me, finally, to one that I am mostly so far enjoying: Michael Cole’s Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammannati and Danti in Florence. I am enjoying it because his point is thus far diverse and nuanced enough that I don’t feel browbeaten. Like the great works of the Old Masters, a work of art history should be broad minded and just a little subtle.

LOST ARTS

Drawing in Perspective

Ghiberti, Detail from the East Doors of the Florentine Baptistery

Arguably, the single greatest invention of the Renaissance in art was linear perspective. In place of the naïve, if fascinating, medieval approximation of perspectival space, Brunelleschi (scholarship has repeatedly pointed back to him for this) discovered a method—which the ancients themselves did not possess—of documenting the three-dimensional world accurately on a two-dimensional surface. His great rival Ghiberti learned the inventor’s lesson and applied it to his eastern doors to the Baptistry: the famous Gates of Paradise, seen from precisely the same vantage point as the renowned (if lost) painting of the Baptistery with which Brunelleschi displayed his discovery, present a series of scenes that apply the technique to the complex world of relief. From Alberti’s treatise On Painting—two of the three books of which are primarily concerned with delineating form and space in perspective—perspective, along with basic anatomy, defined the grounding upon which all Old Masters would construct their fictive worlds.

Piranesi's Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta

If there was any skill once so essential that is now almost lost again, it is this. Virtually no architect trained in the last decade or so has any command of perspective drawing, owed largely to the computer’s insidious overtaking of the entire design process. For all of the wonders the computer can do in perspective—not unlike the calculations on the calculator it would be tedious to do by hand—the architect who relies on the software’s ability to generate perspective surrenders his or her own capacity to invent—not document, but create—perspectival space. Make no mistake, Sketch-Up does not sketch, and Piranesi™ is no designer: software only processes data fed into it, and the data perforce is only parameters, not Space.

Lost in the translation to software is also the architect’s capacity to learn on site by drawing; when perspective is a struggle, and therefore an impediment to drawing, a fruitful loop (yes, a pun) of exchange between invention-study-invention is closed.

Sadly a lost art with architects, perspective has performed only a marginal role with the burgeoning revival of training in realist painting. Since realists only document what they see, they do not need the skills of documenting imaginary space (nor imaginary, idealized figures), and require just enough grounding in perspective to accurately locate horizon lines and vanishing points. In fact, most realist figurative art today involves only notional space, just enough credible context to ground a figure or a still life. But just as Pietro Bellori’s critique of Caravaggio was that he was a slave to the model, so too an artist without command of perspective is slave to the phenomenal world, especially today a rather banal one (thanks to the architects).

Perspective construction is tedious, and remains so even after mastery. What makes an artist or architect facile with it is enough experience with the tedium to have fully absorbed its basics, its fundamental logic, so that fluency of perspective thinking is possible. It might be fun to fly around in a virtual space generated by software, but it is no substitute for the release of the imagination afforded by Brunelleschi’s gift.

Sketch for a capriccio

Pienzan Civility:

Fausto Formichi and the Museo della Città e del Territorio

Pienza is on the map since I first visited as a student in 1980. Colin Rowe, Jeffrey Blanchard and Judy Di Maio brought us by bus at the end of a nine day odyssey to this little town on a hill; I remember more of the bus sickness than the town, but I have come back to it armed with more knowledge, and more love, of what it has to offer in the years since. Back then no one but diehard architects sympathetic to tradition made the journey off the via Cassia to Pius II’s home town. Today Pienza is on any serious Tuscan traveler’s to do list, as much for its pecorino as its piazza. Yet has anyone really learned from Pienza and its rapport with the Val d’Orcia? The lessons are seemingly (to me at least) so obvious; and yet it is their simplicity, a limpid alternative to the murky thinking behind the sloppy sprawl of the last thirty years (of which even Tuscany has made itself victim), that makes them so challenging to our modern mediocre muddle.

Enter Fausto Formichi. I arrived in Pienza on a recent Sunday with a small group of graduate students in urban design from the University of Notre Dame, and my colleague Douglas Duany. Fausto met us—a largish man with a generous manner—and offered us a glimpse of the new museum of Pienza and its territory (for which he and Giancarlo Cataldi have produced a handsome catalogue, Aión Edizioni). But Pienza is seemingly so clear, what more could a museum of a town that is itself a home of the Muses possibly reveal? And yet Fausto, an architect who has worked tirelessly for decades to document and restore his hometown, patiently unpacked for us the rich, compelling history of the geology, geography, and typology of this early Renaissance jewel. Pienza, indeed, has more to offer than even the lessons scholars have described in the last few decades: it is a powerful model of a rich, sustainable rapport between town and country, history and innovation, urbanism and architecture. It is beautiful, but it is above all relevant.

Bureaucratic issues prevent the museum from opening so far, but when it does it must be on any serious architect, urbanist, or italophile’s itinerary; more than that, though, we must build the world as Pienza shows us how. As Fausto said to me, what use would there be for all of this if we didn’t use these lessons to build well today?

Now it is time for me to wake up and put to some use these ways of life which we read about daily and reflect on. For always to collect pieces of wood, stones and mortar would seem very foolish if you built nothing with them. But this edifice which we must construct to live well is so arduous, difficult and laborious, that it can scarcely be completed even if we begin young. Nevertheless I for my part have a will to try.[1]

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[1] Letter from Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolò Niccoli, trans. by and cited in Thomas H. Greene, “Resurrecting Rome: The Double Task of the Humanist Imagination,” Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, Binghampton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, p.45

Cherubs in the Snow: Cold Classicism

Bracketing our autumn, we returned to the US via Copenhagen: a revelation. Often perceived as the little sister to Stockholm, it has nothing to envy in its Swedish sibling. Seeing a vital urban culture in a cold climate is itself valuable, since Midwesterners will often make excuses for a lack of urban culture by pointing to the weather (“we’re not Mediterranean”); central Copenhagen on a snowy Saturday evening was bustling with holiday shoppers, couples on dates, kids on sleds. While the urban life aspect warmed my heart, my eyes were treated to an elegant eighteenth century fabric, graceful yet restrained, classical without many of the trappings, and therefore eminently buildable today. And I would argue that it is precisely the beauty of this city that makes it a place people want to be on an otherwise inhospitable evening—the city is worth it, indeed it rewards you beyond the effort.

For all of that discretely elegant fabric, though, the spectacular site in Copenhagen is the Amalienborg palace(s), really a whole urban sequence beginning at the sea and extending to the so-called Marble Church, bisected by the axis connecting this district back to the historic center. There is, really, nothing as elegant as a coordinated classical eighteenth century ensemble, and this has to be one of the best ever realized (many remained on paper at the French Academy or the Accademia di San Luca). Amalienborg is, in fact, just like a Concorso Clementino project realized by an architect under the spell of Gabriel. Disposing four symmetrical palaces on the diagonal axes through the square generates a dynamic ensemble and allows the street network to pass through—albeit transformed by the experience. North-south is the sea/church axis, visually unimpeded; to the west the street entering from the old town passes through a colonnade, not matched to the east as the street leaves again for a contemporary eighteenth century neighborhood.

Absence of the Past

Thirty years ago I visited the Venice Biennale while a student with the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Studies Program. That was the year of the first architecture biennale, with the theme The Presence of the Past. Next week I will be speaking at the Constructed Environment conference in Venice, my talk being “The Absence of the Past: Whither History Thirty Years After The Presence of the Past.” For all of post-Modernism’s obvious faults, it did mark a time when the past, or history, was relevant and even essential to architectural discourse, but not so today. Indeed, even classical and traditional architects are suspicious of history (and historians), which has relegated historical knowledge to a remote corner of contemporary discourse. I will be advocating the value of history—as a critical component of the “inevitable” project, as a source of poetics, as intellectual raw material generally—for both architectural design and the architect’s capacity to offer historical insights (as in my reconstruction of Alvise Cornaro’s Teatro for Venice, shown here). Much of the poverty of architectural discourse today, among Modernists and Classicists, is due to an almost complete avoidance of historical reference. History is a Muse, but she is also a ruthless judge. If we want things to get better, if we want to measure up to the past, we need to know much more about it.

If only historians weren't so bent on rendering their research trendy (enough with all the references to "self-fashioning"!), and had abandoned any sense of the narrative trajectory of their writing, they might make a more appealing case for their relevance. See an earlier post for the value of venerable historical writing.

en plein air

EMULATING ON SITE

These images of en plein air paintings done in Rome (in roughly two hours) illustrate the emulator’s task of representation (what one sees) combined with a deference to a tradition (how one sees). The modern notion of realism puts a high value on direct observation, but seemingly ignores the tradition of how others have observed the same subjects. If one emulates in the classical tradition when working en plein air, one is conscious of the tradition of plein air painting even in the choice of subject. Composition of subject, in other words, is just as important as technique.

FYI, the Columns of the Temple of Apollo next to the Theater of Marcellus in Rome owe a debt to Panini, while the Urn from the courtyard at Sta. Cecilia was a subject of Piranesi.

More en plein air work can be seen at davidmayernik.com

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.