Physics
Envy and Archaeology Today
I
presented a talk at a conference about Architecture and Archaeology on the via
Appia on 10 September. “The Archaeology
of Invention” was meant to suggest how, and why, we might recover a productive
relationship between architecture and archaeology. Not being an archaeologist in the modern
sense myself, but interested in ancient buildings, I thought it was useful to
posit some questions about why as a culture we do archaeology at all (the
ancients didn’t, neither did the medievals), what it has to do with the making
of architecture, and what might be a kind of ideal archaeological landscape.
Piranesi figured large in the talk, based
on a quote by the artist that furnished the title for John Pinto’s recent book,
Speaking
Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth Century Rome (Michigan). I rendered the quote in English
slightly differently than Pinto’s source; here’s my reading:
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 my eyes.
Pinto
summarizes what was so different between Piranesi’s day and ours:
In the eighteenth century there was a
reciprocal relationship between the act of archaeological reconstruction and
the practice of modern architecture.
Pinto, p. 42
and
In fact, Piranesi encouraged what he
called “ragionevole congettura,” or
responsible [I might say ‘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
Confronted
by the ruined majesty of ancient Rome, architects and artists from the
fifteenth through at least the eighteenth century weren’t intimidated, they
were inspired. Not so, apparently, today’s archaeologists. After my keynote
some of the talks dealt with the latest digital surveying technology, point
clouds and 3D models. Fair enough. But those speakers felt compelled to define
themselves as engaged in knowledge,
of the scientifically verifiable kind (as opposed to, of course, art, or
matters of judgment); one even cited Karl Popper’s falsifiability definition of
science. But these surveyors are engaged in the collection of data, not
proposing the theories that Popper was trying to qualify. Data, of course, can
be falsified, but is not in and of itself a falsifiable theory. It simply is. Of
course, there is better data. But the question, it seems to me, is what to do
with the data beyond determining which splotch on a ruin needs to be cleaned?
Should whole sections of aqueducts be rebuilt in part to stabilize them but
also to restore their place in the landscape? How much of stub walls from a
Roman circus should be rebuilt to give a better sense of what the place once
was like?
These questions raise problems of
conjecture, and risk. “Science,” of the data collection kind, is risk free. And
it’s certainly more comfortable to be in the technologically determinant world
of data gathering than in the wilds of artistic conjecture. But every choice
about the archaeological landscape is a judgment, not a fact. To rebuild or
not, to restore or not, is not, as one of the speakers suggested, a question of
cost and efficiency. It is a question of why we do archaeology at all, what it
is the past has to say to us, and what we have to say in response.
Thus, my capriccio on the Circus of
Maxentius. Thinking about what a reconstruction of the circus might be like, I
wondered about returning its spina’s obelisk from the Fountain of the Four
Rivers in Piazza Navona (the former Stadium of Domitian), but bringing the
fountain back along with it. To restore is, in its way, to contaminate; why not
embrace the contamination, aiming not for philological reconstruction but a
kind of fertile reinsertion of the scattered remains with the baggage they’d
acquired in the intervening centuries? So too Cecilia Metella, which I show
restored with its tumulus and cypresses but retaining its medieval battlements.
And the carceres, or starting gates,
of the Circus get restored in a Borriminian vein to recall the Pamphilj context
of the Four Rivers.
A serious proposal? No, nor is it
scientific. But it would be a vastly pleasanter place, with its pool fed by the
nearby Almone river cooling the otherwise desiccated landscape of the current
circus (it was awfully hot and dry trudging around there and drawing and
painting this summer). And if a great Roman family of an earlier century had
acquired the property and had the means they might have done something similar.
By instead displaying the desiccated cadaver of a late Imperial villa as
somehow a scientific fact rather than an aesthetic landscape we lose the chance
to dream, to invent in a way like Piranesi and his predecessors would have. And
we are, whether we can admit it or not, the poorer for it. That is a fact.
