Archaeology
and Architecture
On
Saturday 10 September I’ll be speaking at a conference about the via Appia, on
the via Appia. Reconsidering
Architecture and Archaeology is the end of a weeklong summer school looking
at the archaeological landscape. My talk will be “The Archaeology of Invention:
Excavating Ideas,” and will interpret the nature and purpose of archaeology in
light of older notions of their relationship. For Piranesi, “They’ve filled my spirit these speaking
ruins, in ways that drawings could never have been able to do, even very
accurate ones, likes those made by the immortal Palladio, which I have still
kept before of my eyes.” As the historian John Pinto says in his book Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity
in Eighteenth Century Rome, “In the eighteenth century there was a
reciprocal relationship between the act of archaeological reconstruction and
the practice of modern architecture.” [p. 42] And, “In fact, Piranesi
encouraged what he called ‘ragionevole
congettura,’ or responsible [reasonable?] conjecture. In the introduction
to the Antichità romane, Piranesi
expressed the hope that his prints would stimulate ‘una nuova architettura antica.’” [Pinto, p. 8]
I’ve been
posting on my blog Plein Air Italy some of the work I’ve done on site in Rome
over the summer, and this
most recent post deals with the place I will focus on in my talk: the tomb of
Cecilia Metella as seen from the Circus of Maxentius. I’ll be interpreting the
archaeological landscape as both a real place and an intellectual construct. I’ll
look at the ways that landscape has inspired in the past (from plein air
painting to capricci to the making of architecture), and how it might do so for
us today. For that to happen we need, if not a literal connection with the
forms of the past, at the very least a sympathy for their beauty and intention,
for their construction and articulation, in order to build in a way that is
sympathetic and equally inspiring. This obtains also for the landscape within
which the ruins find themselves. Too often today those fragments in the
landscape have been laid out “like a patient etherized upon a table,” to quote
T. S. Elliot. They are dissected and desiccated, displayed rather than discovered.
The old notion of invention as discovery is partly predicated on the power of
ruins to inspire in no small way because of how they are situated in the landscape,
including the landscape of our minds.
The image shown
here is a capriccio I intend to show how, in an allegorical way, one might rethink
the landscape of the via Appia. I’ll have more to say about it after the
conference…
