arts and crafts

The Artist and the Artisan

Cathedral, Civita Castellana (Lazio)

OK, so there’s the Romantic idea of the humble artisan toiling away anonymously for love of God and his craft. And then there’s reality: the Cosmati father and son who proudly signed their names in the architrave over the portico of the cathedral in Civita Castellana; the artisans who were, historically, just as likely to work for private patrons as the Church—think of wedding chests, picture frames, painted tiles, etc.; and as for craft, the distinction between art and craft is a modern construct that does just as much violence to the nature of craft as it does to art. At the level of the material object, there is no inevitable difference between art and craft in pre-Modern culture; what, perhaps, separates them is the intentionality, the conceptual idea and/or the meaning that is intended in the work. While the craftsman might or might not be knowing in what he does and how he decides to do it—he might be either an advancer of a traditional skill or he may simply be its continuer—the artist is expected, required even, to know how and why he does what he does. So, some (of course not all) craftspeople know exactly how and why they do what they do, and may be quite articulate about it; and they may also invest their work with meaning, a poetic intent that transcends mere form. Naturally not every picture frame needs to be meaningful, but an artisan who is conscious of the decorum a frame requires does indeed contribute to the contextualization, and therefore a part of the meaning, of the picture.
Witness the marvelous Florentine carver Carlo Puccini (http://woodcarving.altervista.org/?lang=eng); from a family of architects, his chosen artistic metier is carving in wood, something he does with a bravura freehand style, investing often complex baroque forms with a lively touch, and a bit of a rustic (“rustic” in the sense of the Baroque music of Corelli) edge. Carlo knows exactly what he’s doing when he makes a frame (see the quote from Frank Zappa at the head of his website—for the rest of the quote go here). Many of his clients are looking for copies of furniture, frames, etc., sometimes translated from other media (like stone or stucco); some, like me, present him with a design (for the frame holding my painting of Diogenes and Alexander, next to Carlo in the photo). He is also capable of invention, although it is the nature of most folks who want something new-traditional that they’re not prepared to take risks. I don’t want to Romanticize what is, in this modern world, a challenging life, but Carlo is an absolutely lovely human being as well as artist, and I attribute some of that to the satisfaction he gets from his work (of course, his work gives him satisfaction in part because he is a lovely human being). And, while not as aggressively self-promotional as the Cosmati, neither is he anonymous: he works on the ground floor in via Ghibellina, just up the street from the Casa Buonarotti, so he is “on show” to passersby.

Carlo Puccini in his shop in Florence

He is by no means alone in a country that still, despite the best efforts of our culture to kill them, is filled with active, talented, youngish (diversamente giovane), and knowledgeable masters of carving, painting, plastering, and intarsia—the latter perhaps best represented by the phenomenally able, and charming, Daniele Parasecolo in Todi: http://www.woodinlaysitaly.com/. These modern masters have to be smarter, more alert and articulate than their predecessors, partly in order to defend what they do. If these folks survive, it is because they are actively engaged in their craft; which means it is practically an obligation for those of us who love what they do to give them every opportunity to practice their art.

School of Bari

The Weight of the Past

Bari Cathedral from the South

I resisted the temptation to title this entry “School of Rocks,” since the Politecnico di Bari’s research on stone construction is too important to be taken lightly. I presented a paper at the first of what will hopefully be many ReteVitruvio conferences there last week, and was literally astounded by the quality of analysis and documentation the Bari doctoral students are doing. To mention only a few names, Marco Stefano Orsini, Francesco Scricco, Ubaldo Occhinegro, Enrica Leonardis, Vincenzo Minenna, Fiore Resta, Stefania Petralla, and Graziella Fittipaldi all presented outstanding papers in the Costruzione sessions on Tuesday May 3 (find the full program as pdf’s on the ReteVitruvio site). Director Claudio D’Amato Guerierri deserves a lot of credit for having shaped this research agenda and sustained its quality, and now its dissemination. Would that it plant seeds of change in the construction world—imagine stereotomy being a useful skill in building today!

If there was anything that gave me pause, it was the constant sense that the rigor of their historical research was continually buffetted by the notion that they would have to transform/adapt/abstract it to make it relevant as modern practicing architects. In some of the presentations by others this implied the use of steel, or the deliberate abstraction of form. The weight of the past for Italians is something that gives form and rigor to their studies, but also blocks their will to fully practice from within a tradition. The scientific approach to the past, while yielding a treasure trove of knowledge, also inhibits a living artistic engagement with it.

I presented my paper “The Inevitable Project: Avoiding the Formally Arbitrary Through Analysis and Poetics” as part of the Didattica sessions, and my hope is that it offers a way out of that impasse through an engagement with classical architecture as language—a means, and not an end, in other words (find the paper as a pdf by following The Inevitable Project link at the Academia Chiron). Jaap Dawson’s “Building Before We Build” also offered a mythical framework for the building act: an invitation to invite the gods to the design table (it made me think of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Random House): “A life in which the gods are not invited isn’t worth living. It will be quieter, but there won’t be any stories.” p. 387).

Repairing the Nets in Bari Vecchia ("rete" means net)

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.