Where Do Ideas Come From?

Or, Is There Such a Thing as Classical Creativity?

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:

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.

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.

Untrodden Territory

The Challenge of Emulation

Many art historians will be taken aback by the unapologetic nature of these proposals, but one can appreciate Mayernik’s book even while rejecting some of his premises because it offers something essential to discussions of Renaissance imitative practice: an insistence on the artists’ creative engagement with tradition.

Elena Calvillo, review of The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture, in Renaissance Quarterly, Winter 2014, p. 1332

I’m pleased The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture was recently reviewed in Renaissance Quarterly (Winter 2014). The reviewer argues that what I cover in the book is “well trod,” but in fact during my research and since I have not come across much, if any, Renaissance or Baroque scholarship that explicitly and correctly uses the term “emulation,” with its sense of rivalry (i.e. aiming at victory, in the words of Erasmus): certainly no studies on the visual arts, apart from those on ancient Roman sculpture and Napoleonic painting, where emulation is the primary theme. I don’t think, in fact, historians are attuned to an emulative mode of thinking, precisely because, as the reviewer notes, the notion of advancement in the arts is foreign to them; historians are good at tracking down artists’ sources and precedents because it is not unlike what they do in the archives, but they don’t allow themselves to think in terms of better or worse, and don’t recognize artists’ competitive streak because they don’t share it (not to imply that historians aren’t competitive with each other, but it’s not as dominant a trait as it was for the artists they study). Anthony Grafton and James Grossman’s recent essay in The American Scholar is quite good on the humility required of the historical researcher.

Robert de Cotte, Palais Rohan, Strasbourg
detail

Sine it’s been a year since the book appeared, it may be worth commenting on the difficulty I’ve found in getting the book reviewed, and even being invited to lecture on it by ostensibly sympathetic organizations like the ICAA (their Washington DC chapter being a notable exception, for which I’m grateful). I was also surprised to find at last February’s INTBAU conference Unpacking Pastiche that some of my colleagues, leaders in “traditional” architecture, weren’t troubled by the concept of pastiche, indeed proudly claim to practice it. Clearly, then, the notion of emulation is, if not only foreign to most contemporary classicists and traditionalists, in fact troubling. It seems to fly in the face of the deference they display to past heroes, even minor ones.

If pastiche is not as problematic as it should be for classicists, what about kitsch? Roger Scruton can’t help reveling in kitsch’s durability in the face of modernist condescension (recently for the bbc magazine, 15 years ago for City Journal), but surely an argument for tradition or the classical shouldn’t cozy up to the vulgarities of kitsch. Modernists were indeed right that, by the early twentieth century, much academic and representational art had become either maudlin or cloying, drained of intellectual force and inventive energy. That, though, is a problem of the nineteenth century, but does not apply to art of the eighteenth or earlier. So reconstituting representational art from its nineteenth-century residue is not the thing to do, and certainly claiming kitsch as a defense of representational art’s appeal doesn’t help either.

An unjustifiably forgotten book is Michael Greenhalgh’s The Classical Tradition in Art (1978)[1]. Greenhalgh argues for the idea of the classical tradition as effectively a product of the Renaissance; defines a living classical tradition as not slavishly devoted to the past; and locates the death of the tradition with Ingres (I might located it slightly earlier, but I too would position Ingres outside the idea of a living classical tradition). For some reason the Renaissance and Baroque are not today the defining periods for the classical that they were for Greenhalgh and his generation, even as they were for Gromort; and it is in large measure this that makes the idea of emulation anathema to contemporary classicists.

As we end a year and embark on another, here’s to the hope that the Renaissance and Baroque are re-appreciated for their essential role in the classical tradition. And that emulation is not feared, but embraced.

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[1] http://rubens.anu.edu.au/new/books_and_papers/classical_tradition_book/

Learning from Pienza

Pius Emulation

TASIS has posted a series of videos about their campus design here. This one discusses the role of Pienza as a model for thinking about the relationship of buildings to landscape, of urban space and community, and the role of rhetoric in architecture. All in 2 minutes and 41 seconds.

Shoutout to Michele Josue for making the video.

A THOUSAND WORDS

Renaissance, Inside and Out 

Gli strumenti delle meraviglie

TODAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO'S ELEGANTLY AUSTERE ROCKEFELLER CHAPEL, the groups The King's Noyse and Piffaro joined forces under the auspices of the city's premier early music ensemble The Newberry Consort to perform music from the Renaissance court of Ferrara. What a wonderfully transporting experience it was, and I was only somewhat saddened to see it not as well attended as one might hope. My experience in Italy of Early Music events is that they are popular, in every sense, and the crowd is often quite young (and funky). Not so today. But, no matter, the performers were top notch, and they were having fun to boot.

I've found one of the biggest challenges for those of us who love the Old Masters is making the connections with others of similar, if parallel, interests. Why is there not more synergy between early music and contemporary classical artists and architects (apart from the fact that the classicists aren't all that enamored of the Renaissance, as I've written before, even if they can't help loving Italy)? One way to start is following the links on this post to those resources that are out there, and keep following them down the rabbit hole--you never know what might turn up.

Noble Warriors I

Turning up outside the Rockefeller was, strangely enough, a small cohort of medieval knights in armor, reenacting ad hoc a bit of knightly battle. They were oblivious to the concert that had just gone on a few hundred feet away, and some of my fellow audience amusedly stumbled on these erstwhile Round Tablers. Full of good cheer and ladened with heavy armor, they were happy to chat and display their chivalrous combat. And what's wrong with that? Would that these serendipities happened more--or maybe they're happening all the time and no one notices.

Noble Warriors II

So, like the Mayne Stage chalkboard from my previous post, here's to only in Chicago, and pictures worth a thousand words.

Oh, and by the way, they're doing Bach St. Matthew's Passion at the Rockefeller on Palm Sunday....

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.