Or, Is There Such a Thing as Classical
Creativity?
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| So-called Arch of Drusus, Rome |
My interest in emulation was as an
antidote to the modern compulsion for imitation among classicists, a defeatist
attitude motivated by longing for lost glories and the lack of ability to reach
them again without directly replicating them. Emulation, I’ve argued, was
actually the dominant mode of classical artists and architects vis-à-vis their
forebears; imitation was for novices and amateurs. At least until the late
eighteenth century.
But emulation, I argued in my book, was
mostly an aspect of formal rivalry; Renaissance artists and architects strove,
beyond that, to be intellectually inventive—novel, “creative,” capable of bizzarrie and extending the tradition. Neither
conservative nor nostalgic, the Renaissance was an optimistic time that
privileged invention, that fecund word that they would have used instead of our
word creativity, because they would have said only God can be creative (making
something out of nothing). What we humans can do is invent, discover, find
ideas. Not rehash old ideas, but find new ways of thinking by digging into the
past, revivifying the past by reinterpreting it.
In architecture the evolution of forms
and types was primarily motivated by meaning. The Romans combined their older
triumphal vaulted passage (fornix) with triumphal columns to create a new type,
the arcus, during the time of Augustus. The accumulation of typologically
legible elements—vault/arch and column—yielded a more complex meaning and
created a new type. One hears occasionally in classicist circles of the “fornix
motif,” but the thing being described—a trabeated surround to an arch—was
neither proper to a fornix nor was it a motif. The triumphal arch (arcus) more
commonly deployed columns en ressaut, emphasizing their autonomy as
freestanding columns, not part of a bay-spanning system. Here’s a short video
I’ve created illustrating the evolution of the type:
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| The Theater of Marcellus Seen from the Campidoglio |
What is called a “fornix motif” should
really be known as a “theater system,” since it was in fact proper to the
façades of Roman theaters (and amphitheaters), and it formed not so much a
motif (a detachable, discrete ornamental form) as a repetitive system of
articulation. This too was a Roman invention. And both the nature of the
triumphal arch and the theater façade were clearly understood by Renaissance
architects who developed a properly linguistic use of classical
forms—systematic, articulate, meaningful—to invent a new kind of architecture,
capable of evolution while remaining legible and expressive.
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| Porta Savonarola, Padova, by G. M. Falconetto |
That is what we lost with neo-classicism
and the Beaux Arts, and what we need to recover if we really want a renaissance
today. It takes careful looking at the past, careful reading of the best
historians, and the recovery of skills that the artists of the Renaissance had.
An act of will, in other words.
