Learning from Letarouilly

a new expanded edition out now from Dover

Paul-Marie Letarouilly’s Edifices de Rome Moderne, and to a lesser extent his subsequent volumes on the Vatican, have shaped our perception of the Renaissance ever since their publication in 1840. Their reprints as part of the American Renaissance at the turn of the last century, and again in the 1980’s, acknowledged their unparalleled role in unpacking Renaissance Rome in ways that could be useful to modern architects. In this John Barrington Bayley’s Letarouilly on Renaissance Rome holds a unique place, because it is part reprint of, part meditation on, both the Rome Moderne and Vatican volumes. Part of Classical America’s mission of making available the knowledge of the past that architects once had had, Bayley’s book was also his view of Letarouilly’s value, and the value of Rome generally, to an American audience. This is, as I have written elsewhere, still a controversial point. If there is such a thing as “American” architecture it is surely a melting pot—or more of a minestrone—of various cultures and movements; but its standards, at least as regards classicism, have to depend on European and British models. Just as Rubens saw the Genoese palazzo as an excellent model for Antwerp’s burghers, architects like Charles McKim saw Letarouilly as a font of forms for American building—from libraries to residences. As Bayley recognized, the great mediator of that Roman Renaissance resource was Paris, and that city features heavily in his text.

Letarouilly on Renaissance Rome is organized by type—piazza, courtyard, palace, etc.—or place—Palazzo Massimo, the Vatican—and each chapter is introduced by Bayley’s observations. This has the advantage of giving greater clarity to the order of the plates, and of having a mediating voice to make sense of them. The new edition from Dover includes fifty additional plates of both Rome and the Vatican, with a new introductory essay that puts Bayley and Letarouilly in context.

Other Letarouilly efforts are ongoing elsewhere. At the University of Oregon Prof. Jim Tice and his team have been working to insert Letarouilly’s plans in their Nolli plan context, tremendously useful for understanding each. Prof. Kevin Hinders at the Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has spent years photographing extant Roman buildings from the same vantage point as Letarouilly’s views.

This passion for a French architect’s engravings of Renaissance Rome is sponsored as much by the love of Rome itself as the plates. Without that passion no great work can be done, and without acknowledging the transcendent value of Rome no great work can be built.

Emulators of the World, Unite

Every artist has to decide for themselves, at some early stage of their careers, how they see themselves in relationship to the past. Even the most avant-garde artist makes such a choice, if by negation. For those interested in engagement with tradition, that choice often falls to some kind of imitation—whether literal replication, or the pessimism behind presumed inferiority with respect to the past. Who today, one could ask, would have the hubris to think they can rival Bernini, or Cortona, or Borromini? Yet that is how they saw their relationship with each other, and their contemporaries with them: emulation, rivalry by imitation, or competitive deference are each different ways of describing the same thing—a critical optimism about the possibility of exceeding one’s contemporaries or predecessors.

            I had the chance to see the wonderful Guardi show at the Museo Correr in Venice a couple of weeks ago, and learned that Guardi’s compositions often began with a Canaletto print—which he then transformed and translated into his own idiom of composition and brushstroke. It partly explains the often unconvincing perspectives in Guardi’s work that they are imitative without fully comprehending, but his brushwork comes off instead as a deliberate challenge to his more successful contemporary’s increasingly mechanical painting technique. Guardi was not mimicking Canaletto, he was challenging him—partly on Canaletto’s terms, partly on Guardi’s own. If their critical fortunes have oscillated vis-à-vis each other, it is only to say that they can never be confused with each other, that their affinities only serve to highlight their differences.

            In another way, I saw the opening of a show in which I participated, of foreign artists working en plein air in Civita Castellana; the work of today’s plein air painters is a unique case of a living emulative tradition, where every artist acknowledges in some way or another the achievements of Corot and other models. The same might also be said of the genre of still life.

            Maybe only a handful of fresco artists plays on the same emulative field; with so little opportunity there is really no emulative camp of classical figurative painters; portraiture, but its particular nature, resists comparison with previous work, except among the most elemental compositions (all the rhetorical staffage of Old Master portraiture is anathema today). In architecture most classicists are too timid to be emulative, and the opportunities are not there in reality to prove them wrong (if we had a culture of paper architecture maybe the comparison could be made, but I may be the only practicing architect today who values that).

Drawing, and Drawing Well

Tangible Standards

S. Carlo ai Catinari and its Convent, Rome

Michael Graves’ editorial on drawing in the New York Times has sparked many reactions in the architecture community. I reviewed his book of drawings from his time in Rome several years ago, and over the years have given copies of his excellent essay on “The Necessity for Drawing: Tangible Speculation” to my students, since I like him am concerned not only that students don’t draw, they don’t really know what drawing is for or how it works in the design process.

But let me take this in another direction. Drawing has been in crisis longer than the advent of the computer. From the moment architects abandoned the accumulated knowledge of the classical tradition in the middle of the last century, drawing has become one of those things, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, that is not so remarkable that it is done well, but that it is done at all. Naïve drawing, which Graves cultivated as much as Le Corbusier, Hejduk, and Krier, became a slightly disingenuous, aw shucks, I’m just sayin’ kind of performance, not wanting to be measured against real drawing achievements from the past while asserting the value of the hand in the face of an increasingly faceless, technologically-driven profession.

Fountain of Tivoli, Villa d'Este

But people like John Blatteau and Steve Bonitatibus were simultaneously revivifying classical drawing for architecture, especially wash rendering; and in the art world many artists were recovering the skills of accurate figurative drawing. Some remarkable draftsmen like Randy Melick have made themselves absolutely measurable against the finest draftsmen of the past. This has been hard won, but perhaps even harder among architects than artists since there were fewer threads of continuity across the middle of the century in architecture.

If drawing is in crisis it is certainly due to ever more sophisticated software; but it is also due to ever less able draftsmanship among the profession’s “leaders.” Let me say, though, that it is wholly within our abilities, and incumbent on us, to not only draw, but draw well. Drawing should be desirable, something worth emulating. Just drawing for its own sake won’t cut it.

Diogenes and Alexander, modello

I’m just sayin’.

all drawings on this post © David Mayernik

Emulation and Imitation

Making Distinctions

I’ve been writing a lot lately toward my book on Emulation, and have increasingly realized how little appreciated is emulation as a primary means of operation in the Renaissance and Baroque, but also how often it is conflated with imitation. In fact, I think imitation as a mode of artistic production, rather than an aspect of artistic formation or apprenticeship, is one of the consequences (and parallel causes) of neoclassicism in the later eighteenth century. Until then, and after the Middle Ages, imitation of artistic models was either a part of an artist’s atelier formation, or a defining characteristic of provincial or journeyman artists without aspirations to novel achievement. What almost all the artists and architects we think of as masters were doing was, in some way or another, emulating—or rivaling—either contemporary or past masters; this was not always eristic, or critical, but it did provide a competitive framework for artistic achievement. In other words, this is how artists saw themselves vis-à-vis their peers, and how they wanted to be evaluated. The nature of emulation is inherently optimistic, and I would argue the nature of academic classicism after the eighteenth century is either pessimistic (too imitative) or too engaged by style rather than ideas.

That being said, I have realized that I have been framing my own self-education in the classical tradition as an emulative exercise for the last thirty years, whether consciously or not; what was conscious was my sense that I only imitated to apprehend information, never to define myself. For better or worse I have wanted to be considered not an imitator of some Old Master model, but a legitimate “contemporary.”

As a model of a process of self-education I’m posting here two small exercises in modeling: one a copy of a bozzetto of Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, the other an original high relief medallion of the Rest on the Flight Into Egypt. The intentions of the former are fairly self-evident: apprehend the technique and energy of Bernini’s model, not as a literal copy but as a free copy, where some sense of the looseness of technique is a condition of speed and spontaneity. The medallion, on the other hand, is an exercise in modeling a relief that tends toward sculpture, and wanting to suggest narrative within the tightly prescribed boundaries of the frame. As an emulative exercise it does not take on any particular model, but is meant to be invested with the plasticity of form of Bernini’s rivals’ (Algardi) and followers’ (Guidi, etc.) exercises in high relief, and Bernini’s concern for the concetto. The kind of thing, in other words, one might have done in Rome around 1700.

Philadelphia Story

A recent trip to Philadelphia reminded me of what a wonderful community of artists exists there, adynamic and yet nurturing environment sustained in part by old institutions and new. Philadelphia was once the home of the first local chapter of Classical America, sponsored by the presence of architects Alvin Holm and John Blatteau; their presence was perhaps natural in a city that had produced such outstanding practitioners as Paul Cret and the firm of Mellor, Meigs and Howe, and still offers an urban fabric as harmonious and rich as any in America—it may be the closest our big cities get to a European scale and continuity, but achieved within a uniquely nuanced American grid.

Philadelphia was also the home of Thomas Eakins, and the great Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts that he nurtured and in many ways defined. Even if that venerable institution has recently sacrificed some of its grounding in the realist tradition, it still shelters rigorous teachers and artists like Patrick Connors. Patrick is also a member of the equally venerable, if quainter, Sketch Club—the oldest of its kind still in existence. I had the chance to see his show there, which would have made the club’s founders Eakins and Thomas Anshutz pleased. Indeed, Philadelphia is one of those few places in America where contemporary classicists and realists exist in something like an emulative relationship with their context, both contemporary and historical. In no small part because of the Pennsylvania Academy, Philadelphia sustained a realist camp through the twentieth century, and people like Martha Mayer Erlebacher and her husband Walter helped bridge the divide between ashcan realism and the modern renaissance of realism. Today there is a wealth of talent in Philadelphia alone, and these recent generations have both benefitted from that pedagogical continuity and contributed to it. Witness the dynamic Studio Icamminati (founded by Nelson Shanks and named after the Carracci’s academy in Bologna), whose teachers include Philadelphia native Stephen Early.

Patrick Connor’s landscapes lovingly depict many of the same subjects that attracted artists of Eakins’ day. Sites along the Schuylkill like the Waterworks and the numerous bridges speak to the allure of a landscape enriched by human intervention, and sustain artists attracted to their beauty and mutability across time and the seasons. Patrick is a scholar of Eakins’ theories, especially of perspective—which manifests itself in his carefully constructed views, many of which subtly modify the setting to achieve a particular compositional intent. But he is first and foremost a painter, and it is his painterliness that gives these studied views life and light.

I won’t say anything about the new Barnes Foundation (if you can’t say something nice…) but I will celebrate Cret’s Rodin Museum, one of America’s treasures and now in a literal tête-à-tête with its new neighbor. If someone in the City of Brotherly Love doesn’t make that point, then perhaps the classical architecture movement in Philadelphia isn’t what it once was; but at least the painters are alive and well.

Pourquoi Non?

Europe in America

modern traditions

A recent trip to Québec City (my first) was a wonderfully disturbing experience. I have not experienced a more European city on this side of the Atlantic—I don’t actually believe any could exist. Part of this, of course, was the language, but much was the urban environment: I had to keep reminding myself that we drove there and did not fly. Mind you, it rained the entire time we were there, so I wasn’t charmed by the climate (winters, of course, are worse). For someone like me who believes European cities are the pinnacle of urbanism, the dearth of more directly European (or should I say pre-Modern?) inspired cities in North America must count as a loss, and I have felt so since my Rome study year—after which I continually expected to see hill towns along the highways of Pennsylvania. The European city is, I would argue, demonstrably better than the Anglo-American alternative at every physical level—continuity, figure/ground, contained public space, fabric/monument relationships, accommodation to topography, boundary between inside and outside the city—and yet our modern world convinces itself that cities should be evaluated on other terms like “vitality,” nightlife, “energy,” etc. On those terms Toronto is far and away the better city, but it does not inspire anything like the sense of serene urbanity that Québec does. I suppose a perfect city would have both—I trust they are not mutually exclusive—but since the Toronto model has dominated the last couple of centuries, I would advocate for a few more Québecs, if only because, well, pourquoi pas?

the lower town's Place Royal

Notre Dame des [short-lived] Victoires

lower town

Rue Petit Champlain

looking up to the "Château" Frontenac

opposite Frontenac

the quintessential stuff

fabric buildings (i.e. figural space)!

the happily-sited Université Laval school of Architecture
 in the old Cathedral Seminary

the seminary court

from the passage to the seminary court

looking east on Rue St. Louis
Où suis-je ?

and if you have to have highrises....