c h o r a: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture Managing Editor: Alberto Pérez-Gómez Volume 1 (1994) Edited by Alberto Volume 2 (1996) Edited by Alberto Volume 3 (1999) Edited by Alberto Volume 4 (2004) Edited by Alberto
Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell
Chora 4: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture
Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture
C H O R A v o l u m e
f o u r
Edited by Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell
McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca
ch o r a is a publication of the History and Theory of Architecture graduate program at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. manag i n g e d i to r Alberto Pérez-Gómez e d i tors Alberto Pérez-Gómez, McGill University Stephen Parcell, Dalhousie University advi s o ry b oa r d Ricardo L. Castro, McGill University Jose dos Santos Cabral Filho, Universidade Federal De Minas Gerais Dirk de Meyer, Ghent University Marco Frascari, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Donald Kunze, Pennsylvania State University Phyllis Lambert, Canadian Centre for Architecture David Michael Levin, Northwestern University Katsuhiko Muramoto, Pennsylvania State University Juhani Pallasmaa, University of Helsinki Stephen Parcell, Dalhousie University Louise Pelletier, McGill University s e creta r i a l as s i s ta n t Kathleen Innes-Prévost Susie Spurdens For author information and submission of articles please contact http://www.mcgill.ca/arch/theory/index.htm © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2004
i s bn 0 - 7 7 3 5 - 2 5 0 3 - 3 (cloth) i s bn 0 - 7 7 3 5 - 2 5 0 4 - 1 (paper) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2004 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed on acid-free paper in Canada Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Chora: intervals in the philosophy of architecture Vol. 1 (1994) i s s n 1198-449x i s bn 0 - 7 7 3 5 - 2 5 0 3 - 3 (issue 4, bound) i s bn 0 - 7 7 3 5 - 2 5 0 4 - 1 (issue 4, pbk.) 1. Architecture - Philosophy - Periodicals. 1. McGill University. History and Theory of Architecture Graduate Program na1.c46 720’.1 c94-900762-5 Typeset in Sabon 10/13 by David LeBlanc, Montreal
Contents
Preface ix 1 Lewis Carroll, A Man out of Joint: The Anonymous Architect Of Euclid’s Retreat Caroline Dionne 1 2 The Breath on the Mirror: Notes on Ruskin’s Theory of the Grotesque Mark Dorrian 25 3 Alberti at Sea Michael Emerson 49 4 The Rediscovery of the Hinterland Marc Glaudemans 83 5 The Colosseum: The Cosmic Geometry of a Spectaculum George L. Hersey 103 6 On the Renaissance Studioli of Federico da Montefeltro and the Architecture of Memory Robert Kirkbride 127 7 Architecture, Mysticism and Myth: Modern Symbolism in the Writing of William Richard Lethaby Joanna Merwood 177 8 Gordon Matta-Clark’s Circling the Circle of the Caribbean Orange Michel Moussette 197
Contents
9 Geometry of Terror: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window Juhani Pallasmaa 211 10 The Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli Alberto Pérez-Gómez 245 11 Simplex Sigillum Veri: The Exemplary Life of an Architect David Theodore 287 12 Ranelagh Gardens and the Recombinatory Utopia of Masquerade Dorian Yurchuk 313 About the Authors 339
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this fourth volume of chora continues a tradition of excellence in open, interdisciplinary research into architecture. While the basic editorial interests and questions remain unchanged, a shifting emphasis reflects the concerns of a new generation of architects and scholars. The chora series has sought to articulate alternatives to a facile formalism in contemporary architecture, while rejecting nostalgic or reactionary solutions. The question of how to act responsibly in architecture remains paramount. In the first years of the new millennium, however, this question must take account of our increasingly more powerful electronic tools for formal innovation. Computers are now able to generate new forms that are totally “other” from our traditional orthogonal building practices. This can lead to projects and buildings of complex and novel shape that may be oblivious to their cultural context, intended programs, historical roots, ethical imperatives, and the experiencing body. In recent years we have witnessed an accentuation of gnostic tendencies with respect to history. This suggests that what we have made has nothing to teach us, particularly if it is older than the Second World War, and that only rational models or an introspective pseudonaturalism could be a legitimate (instrumental) methodology for design. Perhaps arising from desperation due to difficulties encountered in practice, this historical gnosticism has become almost fanatic. Even in arguments put forward under the guise of critical theory, one senses a disturbing myopia that disregards the historical origin of issues that supposedly have surfaced only recently. Yet only history in its broad sense – as the “shifting essence” of architecture, within the larger context of our inherited spiritual and philosophical tradition – can help us distinguish between significant innovation and fashionable novelty. The essays in this volume are driven by a genuine desire to seek architectural alternatives to simplistic models based on concepts of aesthetics, technology, or sociology. Their refreshing readings of our tradition acknowledge both the continuity of our philosophical and cultural landscape and the differences encountered in diverse spaces and times. In the ix
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absence of a living architectural tradition, these “stories for the future” reveal possibilities in places that are often ignored by conventional historiography and science. While avoiding the dangerous delusions of absolute, transparent truth represented by a single master narrative, they recognize the need for histories to guide ethical action in architecture. The growing impact of the internet and other light-based media continues to create problems for architecture. Society remains suspicious of the importance of lived space, with its uncanny weaving of spatiality, temporality, and light. Light, like space and time before it, may soon become a commodity; even its absolute speed has now been successfully modified. Nevertheless, chora, as a crossing of the human and the morethan-human worlds, remains the space of human communication, of communion, of Eros and dreams: the space of architecture. Architecture affects us deeply, despite our predilection for the screen of our PowerBook, and not surprisingly, mental pathologies are on the increase. The architect’s work issues from the personal imagination, and an appropriate mode of discourse is needed to prevent this work from becoming a simplistic formal play or an irresponsible will to power. chora continues to pursue a reconciliatory architecture that respects cultural differences, acknowledges the globalization of technological culture, and points to a referent other than itself. As in previous volumes, these eleven essays explore concrete historical topics within a critical framework that suggests possibilities for action. This selection includes Marc Glaudemans’s original speculation on the nature of urban space, beyond a dualistic concept of nature versus culture or bounded versus unbounded. Exploring the relationship between the Greek chora and the hinterland of modern (seventeenth-century) Amsterdam, Glaudemans’s conclusions are provocative in our age of megalopolis. In a topic related to the crucial theatrical dimension of chora (prominent in the first volume of this series), George Hersey also addresses the origins of our tradition. In his interesting study of the Roman Colosseum he articulates the importance of a cosmic geometry in the place for spectaculum in Rome. Echoing Hersey’s concerns in the eighteenth century, Dorian Yurchuk’s analysis of Ranelagh Gardens examines the theatricality associated with architectural meaning during the early modern period. This detailed case study demonstrates the cultural relevance of spaces for play-acting, which are often disregarded in our quest for the “tectonic” aspects of architectural precedents. x
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Three essays in this volume examine early Renaissance subjects. Michael Emerson, in his study of Alberti, with particular reference to Cusano, attempts to redefine Renaissance architectural space with respect to cosmography and geography. Emerson admirably accomplishes the difficult task of describing its otherness, without resorting to concepts of ancient, medieval, or modern. Robert Kirkbride offers a reading of the Umbrian studioli as a crossing of medieval memory practices and the new emerging philosophical interests of the Renaissance. While the Urbino and Gubbio studioli embody knowledge, Luca Pacioli’s architectural writings demonstrate how this capacity of architecture is concentrated in the hands of the craftsman. Alberto PérezGómez’s exhaustive reading of the treatises of Luca on architecture demonstrates the nature of the craft as the epiphany of theological wisdom, akin to alchemy. Three essays in this volume discuss the work of nineteenth-century British figures. Joanna Merwood and Caroline Dionne both articulate possibilities for architecture emerging in the wake of the final disintegration of a Western cosmological picture. Merwood examines the true possibilities of modern symbolic intentionality in the writings of William Lethaby, often misleading in his self-expressed purpose. Dionne discusses architectural lessons to be found in the works of the poet and mathematician Lewis Carroll. The writer of Alice never accepted (like Edmund Husserl) the final demise of Euclidean geometry and its substitution by non-Euclidean geometries. Mark Dorrian’s perceptive essay on Ruskin’s theory of the grotesque raises the issue of mimesis in relation to the “new subject” which emerges in Europe after the demise of the ancien regime. Ruskin, who questioned the power of the reductive camera lucida to reveal anything of substance about reality, was nevertheless fascinated by mirrors and by the capacity of the daguerreotype to reveal monstrosity – the “other side” of reality – through its “index.” This awareness opened up strategies, later developed by Walter Benjamin, for the engagement of new forms of representation in architectural endeavours. Two of the three essays devoted to twentieth-century topics pursue spatial poetics in architecture by invoking other artistic disciplines. Michel Moussette eloquently describes the accomplishments of Gordon MattaClark, whose architectural interventions and literal deconstructions have defied categorization. Continuing the series of reflections on dramatic, xi
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cinematic, and architectural spaces that have appeared in previous volumes of chora, including his own work on Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia in volume 1, Juhani Pallasmaa offers a reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, a film that has now attained cult status in some architectural circles. Closing this trilogy on twentieth-century “architects,” David Theodore explores ethical/formal questions in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher of language whose concerns have often been regarded as naturally kindred to those of architects. Theodore pays careful attention to Wittgenstein’s involvement in actual architectural tasks and draws some unexpected and fascinating conclusions.
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Lewis Carroll, A Man out of Joint: The Anonymous Architect of Euclid’s Retreat Caroline Dionne
Chora
Lewis Carroll, A Man out of Joint
a
V E RY
narrow wall
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all … They’ve a temper, some of them – particularly verbs, they’re the proudest – adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs – however, I can manage the whole of them! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”1
Humpty Dumpty is sitting on a very high, narrow wall. It is indeed a precarious situation that nonetheless allows him to claim a kind of mastery over words. Unlike Humpty Dumpty, we shall never completely restrain the words’ plurality of meanings; the words will always evoke much more than what we want them to say – or much less. Because language is polysemic, there is an ambiguity that cannot be resolved. A language is a system. Any system, no matter how complex it may appear, always circumscribes a certain field or realm – a world. The rest is left outside, rejected or not addressed. It is the beauty of systems to be self-sufficient. In our “modern” attitude there is a tendency to step outside a system in order to build, just beside it, another one that is antagonistic to the former. The union of those two systems then constitutes another system. However, there may be a way to avoid delusion. It is possible to enter a system, work within its limits (precisely at the limit) and create a new component (a critique) that induces a slight movement. In the mind, in the imagination, all antagonistic systems can coexist, and it is the attribute of poetry to reveal such paradoxes. The paradox (para-doxai) is an image of “reality.”2 It is an ambivalent and somehow disturbing expression of the real. Language and geometry may be more than systems, and there may be a link, however oblique and tenuous, between art and science that coincides with the land of geometry. In our world, space and time are paradoxical notions; their geometrical behaviour is perplexing. By looking at the transformations of Euclidean geometry in the work of Lewis Carroll and focusing on the border as a place to dwell, we shall investigate the “making” of space.
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a nonsense in movement The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things – but the oddest part of it was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.3
In the realm of nonsense and absurdity, Lewis Carroll was a pioneer.4 His work reveals the paradoxical nature of meaning, the actual coexistence of unrelated or antagonistic notions. Nonsense should not be understood as an absence of meaning but rather as a surplus of sens, a combination of opposite directions (sens) and meanings (sens) that coexist. Between these opposites there is necessarily a limit – a point, a plane, a body; a certain Humpty Dumpty sitting on a very narrow wall – that separates both. It is in between and therefore cannot be fixed; it moves, it transforms itself, or else it appears to be fixed, but only for a certain time, because the mind always oscillates between the two sides. In a sense, this is Humpty Dumpty’s tragic end. The limit is always becoming; it is the site of events. A pure becoming can never be achieved, because it would then be.5 Nonsense expresses this coexistence of opposites but also reveals the opposition, and therefore, presents the dichotomy. Nonsense, approached in such terms, would be the linguistic expression of our paradoxical encounter with the world. Paul Valéry
Geometric behaviour:The dancing ostrich. From “Lewis Carroll logicien,” a postface by Ernest Coumet to Lewis Carroll, “Logique sans peine,” Oeuvres (Paris: Robert Laffont 1989)
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evoked this encounter in similar terms. The soul of man follows the movement of an irreal dance. The beautiful dancer represents both form and idea and can be perceived only in movement. Phaedrus: She is dancing yonder and gives to the eyes what you are trying to tell us … She makes the instant to be seen … She filches from nature impossible attitudes, even under the very eye of Time! … And Time lets himself be fooled … She passes through the absurd with impunity … She is divine in the unstable, offers it as a gift to our regard! … Eryximachus: Instant engenders form, and form makes the instant visible. Phaedrus: She flees her shadow up into the air. Socrates: We never see her but about to fall.6
There is an immense distance, yet a wonderful proximity, between the realm of Ideas and our perception of the world. There is a land in between that Plato would call “space.” The limit is a space – an interstitial space. The space of the limit has no magnitude, yet it is a space, a land, the land of geometry. This space does not exist, it becomes – or else, it allows for things to happen. It is between the words and the things, yet it is what constitutes both. In essence? In fact? It is hidden inside the things and at the surface of things. Through language – through speech – this entre-deux is uttered at a certain moment and becomes real. Geometry participates in that utterance. It evinces a common desire to describe, to reveal, to order. the land of geometry “While you’re refreshing yourself,” said the Queen, “I’ll just take the measurements.” And she took a ribbon out of her pocket, marked in inches, and began measuring the ground, and sticking little pegs in here and there. “At the end of two yards,” she said, putting in a peg to mark the distance, “I shall give you your directions.”7
Geometry occupies a central position in the development of Western philosophy, both in the way it tends to be related to the expression of ideas – its inextricability from language – and in the way we construct meaning and understand these ideas, somehow, in geometrical (or mathemat4
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ical) terms.8 Virtually, we tend to organize fragments of thoughts, to give a shape to an idea or to “build” a structure around it. We make our point, we follow a line (of thought), and eventually we get caught in a circular argument. In this process the participation of the geometrical and mathematical realms is implicit. Numbers and geometric figures were understood from the time of the early Greek philosophers until the nineteenth century as mediators between the world of man and higher instances: they constituted a way to access knowledge. This strange interference of both the geometrical and the mathematical realms in human thinking led the most ancient philosophers to believe that man’s soul could be a number moving itself.9 Geometry has a privileged status in the history of architectural theory and practice. From Vitruvius until the end of the eighteenth century, geometry is discussed prominently in all architectural treatises. Its status gradually changes until it becomes, in the late eighteenth century, a mere instrument of applied technology, as it appears in the work of Durand.10 From a conception that posits geometry as an art – something that mediates between the human and the divine – we then come to an understanding of geometry as a tool for the use of the architect. In the mind of the engineer/architects who followed Durand’s précis, geometry became a design mechanism, an extremely simplified geometrical object: a grid on which plans, sections, and elevations could be drawn with efficiency. In the realm of our contemporary architectural practice, ambiguity of language – in drawings and in written forms – is generally avoided and architects tend to accept, uncritically, the rules of systematic geometrical descriptions as part of the design discipline; they use geometry as a tool regardless of its relation to philosophy and language. The architectural “grid” continues to be used as a tool for design in most architecture schools. “Geometry is the Science of Measuring the Land.” In his Mathematical Praeface to the Books of Euclid, published in 1570, John Dee gives us a definition of this Arte Mathematical. But what land, exactly, does geometry measure? Dee refers to remote times and places and to the wars and injustices that took place when man started to measure and divide the earthly ground, creating frontiers and naming pieces of land that became his property or the property of a nation. “Till, by Gods mercy, and mans Industry, The perfect Science of Lines, Plaines, and Solides (like a divine Justicer) gave unto every man, his owne [land].”11 5
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Dee defines both the mathematical and the geometric entities. His definitions reveal the paradoxical interval occupied by Euclidean geometry. For, these beyng (in a maner) middle, betwene thinges supernaturall and naturall: are not so absolute and excellent, as thinges supernatural: nor yet so base and grosse as things natural: But are thinges immateriall: and neverthelesse, by materiall things able somewhat to be signified. And though their particular Images, by Art, are aggregable and divisible: yet the generall Formes, notwithstandyng, are constant, unchangeable, untrãsformable and incorruptible. Neither of the sense, can they, at any tyme, be perceived or judged. Nor yet, for all that, in the royall mynde of man, first conceived … A merveylous newtralitie have these thinges Mathematicall and also a strãge participatiõ betwene thinges supernaturall, immortall, intellectual, simple, and indivisible: and thynges naturall, mortall, sensible, compounded and divisible.12
The three realms of “things” are different and remain distant, even though they constantly interact. It is precisely in this “in between” constituted by geometry that man can reach the idea of infinity. All Magnitude, is either a Line, a Plaine or a Solid. Which Line, Plaine or Solid, of no Sense, can be perceived, nor exactly by hãd (any way) represented: nor of Nature produced: But, as (by degrees) Number did come to our perceiverance: So, by visible formes, we are holpen [helped] to imagine, what our Line Mathematical, is. What our point, is. So precise, are our Magnitudes, that one Line is no broader than an other: for they have no bredth: Nor our Plaines have any thicknes. Nor yet our Bodies, any weight: be they never so large of dimensiõ. Our Bodyes, we can have Smaller, than either Arte or Nature can produce any: and Greater also, than all the world can comprehend.13
In the modern era, geometry was gradually transformed by the development of infinitesimal calculus in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and ultimately by the new geometries that developed in the nineteenth century and began to be “applied” in Dodgson’s time.14 The notion of geometric infinity was gradually appropriated by modern man. As the possibilities of knowledge became infinite, the world of man was also extended to infinity. Once infinity became part of the world, the geometrician sought to describe not only the simple ideal figures of Euclidean geometry but all possible figures in the conic sections between 6
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these ideals. In the mind of the scientist the mathematical formulas became accurate “models” of reality: the whole of creation could be described in algebraic terms.15 The universe, according to this concept, is there to be deciphered and understood through mathematics and scientific experiments. The language of science attempts to resolve the distance between the words and what they describe; geometry undergoes instrumentalization. In the scientific milieu of the nineteenth century, Euclidean geometry was not rejected outright. Rather, it became a particular instrument, one of many, within a broader and more generalized geometry that claimed to explain every phenomenon. Euclidean principles have also tended to be misconceived. Today they are understood as stiff, instrumental, and systematized explanations of reality, while nonEuclidean geometries are seen as new formal realms that describe reality and the universe more accurately. In the nineteenth century the scientific utopia became reality. Scientists in specialized and autonomous disciplines participated with great enthusiasm in the scientific endeavour; for them it was the only way to find the true nature of the world. The episode of the “Map of the Ocean” in Lewis Carroll’s famous poem The Hunting of the Snark is quite telling in this regard: He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. “What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?” So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply, “They are merely conventional signs!” “Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank” (So the crew would protest) “that he bought us the best – A perfect and absolute blank!”16
The man of the industrial revolution, this man of science, ventured into unknown territory, leaving behind all points of reference from the 7
“Ocean Chart.” From Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits (London: Macmillan 1876)
past. The scientific endeavour became frightening once its abstract concepts were equated to or supplanted lived experience. The real that we know through mathematical models is an approximation of reality, but it claims to be more real than experience itself. In Sylvie and Bruno, Carroll’s intricate novel, a certain German professor entertains the children with a map of his town on which everything was marked down. The map measured one mile on each side, and reading it was quite problematic, because the map, when totally open, would cast a shadow over the farmers’ crops. It was then decided that the land itself would serve as a map: indeed an ingenious idea. The “image” thus acquires a value equivalent to the reality it was intended to evoke. The industrial revolution was a theatre of technological innovation in which machines were developed at a disorienting pace: utensils that would simplify the lives of men. 8
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As this new status of technology reached architecture, buildings also became utensils. As a result of this direct link between words and things, the language of poetry loses its value of truth. Myths and poetry – story-telling through works of art – are no longer understood as means of rendering the world habitable. But, as Borges explains, There is no basic [essentielle] dissimilarity between the metaphor and what scientists call the explanation of a phenomenon. They both constitute a link established between distinct things … Hence, when a geometrician asserts that the moon is a quantity that develops in three dimensions, his means of expression is no less metaphorical than that of Nietzsche, who prefers to define the same moon as a cat walking on top of the roofs.17
If we follow Borges’s argument, the scientific truths are equally deceptive and, like myths and poetry, remain temporary and fragile; they are continuously shaken by the new problems that appear to the scientist. The archaic meaning of the word “truth” indicates an ethical dimension: to be true in one’s action, character, or utterance; to be sincere.18 But the modern scientific mind is concerned more with whether a statement is true or false, even though this may be irrelevant to a deep comprehension of things. Hypotheses must find proofs. Observed effects must have corresponding causes. All of this could have started when geometricians decided to prove Euclid’s axiom about parallel lines. Some Euclidean principles, regardless of how paradoxical they may appear to the modern reader, had not needed to be proven. The definitions of the point and the line, for example, were “given.” In our tactile experience, in which hands follow the edges of a table, parallel lines do not meet. For the eyes, looking toward the horizon, they do meet. For the painter, willing to create an image that would convey a sense of the real, they do meet on the canvas. For Euclid, in this entre-deux occupied by geometry, parallel lines are parallel, and therefore they do not meet. “But who would need parallel lines to meet,” wrote Dodgson in Euclid and His Modern Rivals. For some nineteenth-century geometricians, they meet somewhere at infinity, and because infinity has become part of the world, they meet somewhere in the thickness of the trace left by the pen – or at the South Pole. From a chosen angle, from a certain point of view, either they meet or they don’t, but the mind, the imagination, is able to travel very fast, 9
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encompassing all imaginable points of view. Valéry wrote, “And is not the true the natural frontier of the intelligence?”19 In the work of the poet the two opposite situations can coexist at this frontier and “touch” each other. Might it be the task of the artist to reveal such paradoxes, allowing us to seize their evocative beauty? The word “task” suggests an ethical dimension that remains outside the “good or bad” dichotomy. For poetic language to escape from methodological application, it must speak about something common. Poetry does not follow a linear path but one that is discontinuous and fragmented. Poetry is not limited to literature and art. Even modern technology has this potential for poetic expression, rather than being strictly a burden.20 Carroll’s work expresses the scientific dependence on this mode of thought. Both sides of his work come together in the way he criticizes the pragmatism of Victorian society with its scientific mind-set and fallacies.21 Created through nonsense and humour, his work is resistant to a complete analysis or demystification and cannot be exhausted by any literary movement. It oscillates within the thin line that connects Romanticism and Surrealism and separates art from science.22 His work unhinges a concept of time that reduces it to quantity (associated with money) and a concept of space as a homogeneous set of coordinates. It participates simultaneously in the modern scientific debate and the realm of fiction and poetic imagination. Lewis Carroll’s work demonstrates the tight link between these two modes of thought – the “art-science” interdependence – and this is also a key to understanding the transformations of architectural thinking since the beginning of modernity. a big revolving door Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.” “If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.”23
Since the Hatter and the March Hare quarreled with Time, he won’t do a thing they ask (with the clock). Since then, it has always been six o’clock – tea-time – and the trio is constantly moving around the table. Alice then ventures to ask, “But [what happens] when you come to the 10
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beginning again?” “Suppose we change the subject,” the March Hare interrupts, yawning.24 Space and time are intricate notions. Our concept of such notions has undergone successive transformations within the tradition of Western philosophy. Changing interpretations of the Euclidean principles may have something to do with these transformations. In some ancient mythologies, space and time were gods that could not be separated: they were two expressions of the same order.25 In their concept of the world, space was not a preexisting and autonomous entity. It had to be ordered and created, but mostly it had to be kept alive and recreated now and then.26 Space and time were works of art. So-called Cartesian space has lost this qualitative aspect; it is a homogeneous, infinite set of combinations of coordinates. It is a quantity that can be measured and reduced to horizontal and vertical planes and intersections. Cartesian time is a quantitative and autonomous notion that is no longer dependent on – or predicated on – space. In homogenized space, horizontality, verticality, and depth are equivalent, with no particular qualitative aspect.27 A tower is the same as a tunnel. In The Vision of the Three T’s, Dodgson criticizes the modern concept of space as homogeneous, removed from time and without gravity. In the story an architect arrives at a construction site dressed in an outfit that he claims is atemporal, completely outside the transience of fashion, with ribbons that defy gravity. He can find inspiration in a piece of stilton; the materiality of the building is irrelevant. Cheese or stone, it is all the same; only form matters.28 In a concept of space as something that preexists, the wall becomes a denuded limit that subdivides space. Notions of temporality and the evanescence of things are eclipsed. When time is removed from space – as in basement spaces lit by artificial light (the first space into which Alice advances after falling down slowly in the tunnel) – space becomes frightening, as if it were created by something overwhelming and horrifying, something entirely other.29 The cyclic nature of archaic times cannot be retrieved. In order to express this transformation of the concept of time, Gilles Deleuze writes, using a verse from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Time is out of joint, time is unhinged. The hinges are the axis on which the door turns. The hinge, Cardo, indicates the subordination of time to precise cardinal points, through which the periodic movements it measures pass. As 11
Lewis Carroll, A Man out of Joint
long as time remains on its hinges, it is subordinated to extensive movement; it is the measure of movement, its interval or number. This characteristic of ancient philosophy has often been emphasized: the subordination of time to the circular movement of the world as the turning door, a revolving door, a labyrinth opening onto its eternal origin.30
In the modern era, the geometric figure of the concept of time changes, or else it is observed from a different point of view. Time and movement remain in a close relationship, but the roles are inverted. It is now movement which is subordinated to time … Time thus becomes unilinear and rectilinear, no longer in the sense that it would measure a derived movement, but in and through itself, insofar as it imposes the succession of its determination on every possible movement. It ceases to be cardinal and becomes ordinal, the order of an empty time … The labyrinth takes on a new look – neither a circle nor a spiral, but a thread, a pure straight line, all the more mysterious in that it is simple, inexorable, terrible.31
Deleuze makes a reference to Borges; the labyrinth is inexorable because it is “the labyrinth made of a single straight line which is indivisible, incessant.”32 Today, the big revolving door of time is out of its joints, off its hinges, fragmented, dislocated, no longer following a circular path in space. The time is out of humour – out of himself. Time as we now tend to conceive it is the linear time of modern history. The time line extends infinitely in both directions. But there can be a double reading of time. Time can be conceived as both linear and cyclical. On the one hand, time is a constant repetition of the same present. On the other hand, there is nothing but the past, always subsisting, and the future, always insisting. In between is the same limit, the geometric space of the event. Meaning consists precisely in this event; it is always becoming: always so close and yet so remote. This site of action may be the logos of the encounter of space and time. Both the linear and the cyclical dimensions are expressed in the timespace fragments in the Alices. Alice falls into the depths of the earth but progressively returns to the world of the surface, reconquers space and time, and creates spaces that allow for things to happen: in-between spaces. The spaces that Alice experiences are always different expressions of the same space. These spaces oscillate between worlds that are 12
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different but equally real. The limit, the borderline between these worlds, contains – or becomes, itself – another world. The limit cannot be reduced to a plane; it expands into a zone. This limit is actually where things happen, where the passage of time is traced. The perception of space is not impassive, it implicates one’s surroundings and one’s state of distraction or concentration. But mostly it involves the postures that the body adopts in movement, mood, bodily humours, and humour. The perceiver is not in space. Space does not preexist. The perceiver, like Alice, is actually creating spaces: a succession of time-space fragments that cannot be isolated but constitute a continuous becoming.
Alice is caught in space. From Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures under Ground (London: Macmillan 1886)
If time is conceived through movement and rhythm and is rendered visible by light and shadows, then light is not simply another material for instrumental use by the architect. Light is the life of objects. Even though space is bound to time and human perception, the materiality of the building does not disappear: it is what one perceives. Things come together in a kind of nonfixity, a flow, a tide. The rhythm is created by a succession of material aggregates and silences. The rhythmic matter is continuously transforming itself. In Lewis Carroll’s work the characters of the books are continuously transforming themselves, successively becoming other. The same phenomenon happens to the reader. As Octavio Paz notes in The Bow and the Lyre, Lewis Carroll’s prose becomes poetry through its rhythmic 13
Illustrations by Max Ernst for the French translation by Henri Parisot of The Hunting of the Snark show the frequent transformations of the characters in Lewis Carroll’s work: the hyperbolic Bellman appears differently in each of these illustrations. From Lewis Carroll, La chasse au Snark (Paris: L’age d’or aux Éditions premières 1950)
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The Mock Turtle and the Griffin reenact the “Lobster Quadrille.” Drawing by Lewis Carroll for the manuscript of Alice’s Adventures under Ground (London: Macmillan 1886)
sequences of images. The reader is continuously recreating these images, following the rhythm of the poem that not only invokes his imagination but puts his whole body into a different posture. According to Paz, this enables the space of the book to emerge into the world. Even though Lewis Carroll’s work expresses almost everything through nonsense, the spatial-rhythmic quality of his writing conveys a deeper meaning. We comprehend it; we are comprehended by it.33 If the construction of the story is good, it calls for a real participation of the reader-speaker who builds, in a rhythmic and corporeal manner, a meaning. This can be called a ritournelle.34 Our perception of built space has to do with the common activities that it shelters; with that ritournelle whistled by our body, every day, in the successive depths of this rhythm-space. We inhabit and tame architecture in order to make it belong to us, who belong to it. We render it familiar and eventually construct a meaning dancing a ronde within the walls. 16
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Now we are at home. But home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organise a limited space … Sonorous and vocal components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it … From chaos, milieus and rhythms are born. This is the concern of very ancient cosmogonies … Every milieu is vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component.35
Space is not perceived in a homogeneous way. Some stanzas of a poem become more familiar, while others remain obscure. We bring together these perceived spatial fragments, but not in a rational way. Instead we follow a logic of nonsense, as in the oneiric creation of a story. It is the alternation of “known” territories and “less-known” spaces that creates a rhythm.36 It is this difference that possesses the primary rhythm, although repetition is also rhythmic.37 The difference is again this “inbetween,” this limit. It is again the land of geometry.
Dum and Dee, drawing by Franklin Hughes. From Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (New York: Cheshire House 1931). 17
Max Ernst, Lewis Carroll’s Wunderhorn (Stuttgart: Manus Press 1970).
inhabiting the limit Working within the limits of language, Lewis Carroll creates a new language in order to express lingering questions of humanity. They sound, they appear completely new, new-born. Language ceases to be a fixed system but is conceived as growing continuously into something else: a language that is alive. Words enter into a dance, they play, and sometimes they eat each other: Snark! Lewis Carroll wrote for children, or to be more precise, on behalf of children, putting into words their fascinating vision of the world.38 In the same way, we could say that Lewis Carroll wrote for Euclid, on his behalf, trying to express the essence of geometry, its unquestionable truths. In the Alices, geometric figures become characters. Space and time also become characters; they speak to us, revealing to the reader their paradoxical nature. Euclid finds, in Wonderland, a retreat where he can escape from his modern rivals and possibly enter into a dialogue with the new geometries. Between fiction and the real, between day and night, in this space of ambiguity, opposites come together and our perception becomes what it always was: a hallucinatory experience. The limit, the border, is a world of possibles.
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notes
1
2
3 4
5
6 7 8
This essay is based on a speech I gave at The Lewis Carroll Phenomenon – An Interdisciplinary and International Centenary Conference for the Centenary of the Death of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, at the University of Wales, Cardiff, in April 1998. The text suffered substantial modifications due to the distance – both spatial and temporal – that separates me from this event. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, in The Annotated Alice, with introduction and notes by Martin Gardner (London: Penguin Books 1960), 269. The Latin doxai can be translated into English as “opinion.” In that sense a paradox can be understood as being contrary to common sense or commonly accepted opinions, or at least as questioning the common sense. Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 253. The work of Lewis Carroll follows a logic of nonsense that is expressed through different means. The nonsensical particle can be a word that circulates and connects odd notions. It can also be a portmanteau (a word created from the meanings of different words, such as “mimsy,” which is “flimsy” and “miserable”). In some texts, the whole structure of the tale follows a logic of nonsense: two stories move in different rhythms on each side of an odd limit. On these literary processes, see Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press 1990). Plato emphasizes this dualism between being and becoming when he writes in the Parmenides, “the younger becoming older than the older, the older becoming younger than the younger – but they can never finally become so; if they did they would no longer be becoming, but would be so.” See Plato, Parmenides 154–5, trans. F.M. Cornforth, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (New York: Bollingen Foundation 1961), 946. Paul Valéry, “Dance and the Soul,“ Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York: Pantheon Books 1956), 58. Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 211. Michel Serres, Les origines de la géométrie (Paris: Flammarion 1993). According to Serres, geometry remains outside cultural differences and dogmas, and in the same way, outside singular scientific moments. In this
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9
10
11 12 13 14
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16 17
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sense, geometry is common to humanity. But the logos it measures remains mysterious and somehow original to all origins. John Dee, The Mathematical Praeface to the Elements of Euclid (of Megara) (London: John Day 1570), 4. In this passage Dee expresses the primordial status of mathematics and geometry in human affairs; he refers to the most ancient philosophers but unfortunately does not give more precision to the identity of these thinkers. As Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier explain, “Durand’s mécanisme de la composition supported his new rational and specialized theory, free from metaphysical speculations … In his précis, Durand expressed the notion that architects should be unconcerned with meaning; if the architectural problem was efficiently solved, meaning would follow … The aim was to represent the project objectively; the subjective observer we associate with perspective’s point of view was consistently ignored.” Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, ma, and London: mit Press 1997), 298–9. Dee, The Mathematical Praeface, 14. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 13. Even though infinitesimal calculus was important for the development of non-Euclidean geometries, the changes remained at the level of ideas until the end of the eighteenth century. The link between infinitesimal calculus and metaphysical notions is explicit in the work of Leibniz. We perceive a kind of transposition in his work of the paradoxical notion of time (both linear and cyclical) to a more general notion of space, or to be more precise, of our perception of space. His work also evinces how ideas create images in the mind: it illustrates how geometry participates in our understanding of complex notions. See Leibniz, Monadology, in G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing 1989), 213–15. Algebra is an absolute language, and its signs no longer refer to reality. It is an abstract language in which numbers do not have symbolic values. Even infinity (∞) becomes a number for the mere end of solving mathematical problems. Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, in The Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth 1996), 683. Jorge Luis Borges, “La métaphore,” in Autour de l’ultraïsme: Articles non
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20
21
recueillis (Paris: Oeuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard 1993), 843–4. My translation. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1993), s.v. “true.” Paul Valéry, “Dialogue of the Tree,” in Collected Works, vol. 4, 168. In this sentence, intelligence should be understood not strictly as the intellectual capacity but rather as the possibility to distinguish, to perceive, to understand. In that sense what is true is always what separates opposites and cannot be found on either of the sides; it lies in the acknowledgment of the difference. It is not surprising that scientists currently interested in quantum physics might see Lewis Carroll as a precursor. Physicists are now acknowledging the inevitable temporality of phenomena. The notion of time becomes essential once their aim is not only to describe an instant (a picture or a model of reality) but to comprehend a phenomenon (which cannot be described with the same equation in two temporal directions). Poetic language, the language of metaphors, is needed to describe the qualitative aspects of the successive transformations of matter. These physicists are trying to describe phenomena that are not very large or infinitesimally small but phenomena that occur in between, in the world of everyday life. These phenomena cannot be idealized; their appearance and tangibility are unavoidable, and therefore, their temporality becomes part of the equation; even the formula or algorithm is time-bound and always in transformation. C.S. Peirce (1839–1914), Lewis Carroll’s contemporary, formulated the first principle of pragmatism: “One’s concept of the effects of a thing are equivalent to one’s concept of the thing itself.” This maxim is the methodological basis of conceptual analysis. The eventual analysis of these concepts (intellectualized consequences of action) can be confronted with reality through experience (intellectual and practical experimentation); this reasoning is called abduction. Peirce formulated the triadic relation of the sign to its object, where every concept of being is mediated through the intellectualization of the interpreting consciousness. In the end, truth is what is accepted by a community of scientists after careful experiments and abductions. (What I tell you three times is true.) Throughout his work, Carroll tries to show the inherent circularity of such logic. See C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1934), 1, 90–3, 186.
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22 Paz expresses this idea of a romanticism that is not merely nostalgic for the past or a reactionary attitude against the industrial revolution and the scientific mind-set but a romanticism that is trying to reconcile the mythos and the logos. Such movements as Romanticism and Surrealism are visions of the world that can travel underground, through history, and reappear when they are least expected. Octavio Paz, The Bow and the Lyre (Austin, tx: University of Texas Press 1973); see chapter 8 and especially 154–5. 23 “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” The famous riddle was never answered in the story itself or by its author. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in The Annotated Alice, 97. 24 Ibid., 99–101. 25 In Greek mythology, Hermes and Hestia are gods that form a strange couple, or as Jean-Pierre Vernant says, “a problematic couple.” They are often depicted together, tightly associated with each other, but unlike the other divine couples, “they are not husband and wife … or brother and sister … or mother and son … or protector and protected.” Rather, they seem bound together through their common friendship (philia) with mortal human beings. Hermes and Hestia, unlike the other gods who have their own realm in Olympus, are gods that dwell on earth amongst men, and for that reason are tightly linked to “earth.” Hestia is associated with the centre of spaces, with the circular fireplace (hestia) at the centre of the house. She is the symbol of stability, of immutability, of unity: the central point, the one, from which all points of the sphere of the celestial bodies – the cosmos – are equidistant. On the other hand, Hermes is the god that symbolizes movement. “If he manifests himself at the surface of the earth and, with Hestia, dwells in the houses of mortals, Hermes does so in the fashion of a messenger.” He is everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous and ungraspable, associated with doors and roads, with all the spaces and actions that exist outside the stability of the house. “If they make a couple … it is because the two divinities are situated on the same plane, because their actions are applicable at the level of the real, because the functions that they fulfill are connected … It can be said that the couple Hermes-Hestia expresses, in its polarity, the tension that can be read in the archaic representation of space: space necessitates a centre, a fixed point that possesses a specific value and from which directions can be oriented and defined, all qualitatively different; but space presents itself, at the same time, as the place for movement which implies a possibility for transition and passage, from any point to any other point … Hestia is able to ‘cen22
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26 27
28
29
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31 32
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tralize’ space … Hermes is able to ‘set space in movement’ [‘mobiliser’ l’espace].” See Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les grecs (Paris: François Maspero 1969), 97–101. My translation. The earthly ground remained somehow chaotic and unpredictable compared to the visible order of the celestial bodies. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains in Phenomenology of Perception, our experience of height is very different from that of horizontal distances, and depth is perceived (in movement) not just through vision but also through touch, smell, hearing, and taste. The link between perception and reason (body and mind) and between man and the world involves our temporal existence. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1962), 255. It is interesting to read here the influence of John Ruskin, for whom the encounter of the human sensibility and the work of art was of great importance. Ruskin was defending such an attitude against pragmatism. For him the materiality of architecture was primordial: one should ask the stone what it has to say. A stone could tell the story of how it was crafted and could reveal the passage of time upon its face. But what we make of this story is itself another story. See John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London: Collins 1960). On this notion of “same, different and other,” see Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretation: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press 1974). Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press 1997), 27. Ibid., 28. The ancient labyrinth is a vivid demonstration of this union of time and space. It is circular and is bound to the space created by the dance and its rhythm. There is an entry and an exit, a beginning and an end, but it expresses the constant “being lost” of life itself. The modern labyrinth can be imagined as an infinite line, as is admirably described in Borges’s Fictions. See Borges, “Death and the Compass,” in Labyrinths (New York: New Directions Books 1962), 87. Merleau-Ponty uses this sentence from Pascal’s Pensées: “Je comprend le monde et le monde me comprend.” In the English version to which I am referring, the translator uses the word understanding: “I understand the world … it understands me.” The French meaning of the word is double: 23
Lewis Carroll, A Man out of Joint
34
35 36
37 38
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it can mean “understanding” in an intellectualized way, but it can also mean “to comprehend” in a physical way, that is, “to circumscribe” or “to encompass.” The rhythmic aspect of our perception of spatio-temporal fragments is similar to the rhythm involved while reading a story, a rhythm that affects our bodily postures and generates the “space” of the book. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 408. The ritournelle is a round or a nursery rhyme; in the translation of Mille plateaux the word “refrain” is used. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press 1987), chapter 11; in French, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2 (Paris: Minuit 1980). Ibid., 311–13. It is in such territories that we can walk at night and find our way without seeing anything. It is in such space that we happen to know every detail of a wall, the very disposition of each object. On this notion of rhythm in the ritournelle, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 314. As Gilles Deleuze remarks, “To write is not to recount one’s memories and travels, one’s loves and griefs, one’s dreams and fantasies … The ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life. To write for this people who are missing.” See Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 4.
The Breath on the Mirror: Notes on Ruskin’s Theory of the Grotesque Mark Dorrian
Chora
Ruskin’s Theory of the Grotesque
this paper has its origins in an extended footnote to an essay that attempted to theorize the historical relationship between the terms “monstrous” and “grotesque.”1 Its focus is on certain metaphors (it is concerned specifically with references to the breath, to the mirror, and to the Fall) that Ruskin deploys in his theory of the grotesque, as expounded in volume 3 of The Stones of Venice.2 The paper emerges from two basic questions: what is the relationship between monstrosity (and, more generally, “form”) and the breath as it appears in Ruskin’s account of the grotesque, and how does the “monstrous” operate within the system of categories that structures Ruskin’s text? It concludes by sketching a connection between Ruskin’s metaphorics and his early enthusiasm for the daguerreotype photographic process. A peculiar trait that writers often display is a tendency to describe their books as children. An interesting and not uncommon variant occurs when they consider these children to be in some way bad-born: perhaps defectively conceived, wayward, ill-starred, or even monstrous. So, for example, David Hume, reflecting upon the commercial failure of his Treatise of Human Nature, described it as falling “dead-born from the press”;3 and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in an interview with Paul Ricoeur, confessed, “It seems to me that a book is always something of a prematurely born child and mine strike me as quite repugnant creatures compared with what I would have liked to have brought into the world, and of which I do not feel too proud when they are exposed to the sight of others.”4 Probably the best-known statement of this kind, however, is in Mary Shelley’s 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, written for a reprinting of the novel: “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.”5 This introduction was produced by Shelley in answer to a request from her publisher for an account of how her book came to be written. In it she recalled the events of that wet summer spent by Lake Geneva, when Byron challenged the four of them (Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, John Polidori, and Byron himself) to write a ghost story. She describes how, in the days leading up to the nightmare that prompted the writing of the book, she had read from a collection of German ghost stories. One of these in particular had gripped her: the tale of a ghostly
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patriarch who was fated to destroy the younger sons of his descendants. He came to them as they slept in their cots and, bending over, kissed them, and “from that hour [they] withered like flowers snapped upon the stalk.”6 In this story there is something of the vampire, the creature who, through the kiss, sucks away the sap, the blood, the life-force. In his study of the vampire myth in Romantic literature, James Twitchell has noted that while tales of the blood-sucking monster may have appeared in England by the eighth century, the word “vampire” is not evident in English writing until the early 1700s.7 In fact, the first British vampire novel was to be John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), published three years after that summer in Switzerland. We should note at this stage the character of the vampire as a liminal figure who has a special relationship with the mirror (which tells the “truth” of the creature): it is both alive and dead and neither alive nor dead. It is a creature that both collapses and lives between categories. The imperative is not to kill it (which is impossible as it is not alive) but to resolve it. Venice has a similar liminal status (between death and life) and a similar vampiric character. Twitchell stresses the extent to which narratives of the female vampire (or “lamia”) turn on seduction: usually a young man encounters “an older supernatural temptress who somehow drains his energy, leaving him weak and desperate.”8 Certainly to Ruskin writing in his later years, it seemed that this city (to which he had devoted so much of his life and energy and which he had once wanted to draw, as he wrote of St Mark’s, “stone by stone – to eat it all up into my mind – touch by touch”) had seduced and distracted him.9 He wished, he wrote in his 1883 epilogue to Modern Painters III, that he had never seen Venice, “seen her, that is to say, with man’s eyes” (4:352). I regard it, he said in the autobiographical Praeterita, “more and more as a vain temptation” (35:296). His closing words on the sea-city recall his reflections on the sirens, who, he had earlier argued, were, in the Homeric conception, “phantoms of vain desire,” demons of the imagination (and hence of the desire, not of the ears, but of the eyes) whose song, whose breath, poisons and withers (17:212–14).10 With the kiss we are within a thematics of the “breath,” a pneumatology (where pneuma is “breath” or “spirit”). If the breath is the medium by which something “foreign” passes into the body (whether
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inspiration or contagion), it is also the means by which something might be drawn out or confiscated. The phantom that Shelley described acts out a demonic inversion of divine “inspiration,” the breathing-into that animates base material (“clay” or, as St Augustine described it, “slime”) and that reappears as motivated and intentional speech. When the breath is withdrawn, the body falls to putrefaction, decay, and, to associate it in advance with an aesthetic category, decadence. In some ways, then, this seems aligned with the Judas-kiss that betrays, that consigns to death, and that appears, as we shall see, as a “species of monstrosity” in its perversion of the divine kiss. In his historical study of the kiss, Nicholas Perella stresses its relationship to the idea of the unification or fusion of two within one: this hinges, he argues, on the set of concepts and values associated with breath. Breath is not just a point of connection between one human being and another; it is also the point of communion between mankind and the divine. In the Symposium Plato mentions “that courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes, Love of his own nature infuses into the lover.”11 As Perella puts it, “we are led to consider with sympathy that theory which holds that the kiss has its origins in the magical idea of the infusion of a power or the exchange or union of ‘spirits’ or ‘souls’ carried by or even identified with breath and, sometimes, with saliva.”12 Thus the belief, known to the Romans, that the soul of someone at the point of death could be drawn back by a kiss. In the Christian tradition, there are two great kisses bestowed by God upon man. The first, described in Genesis (2:7), is of the vivifying of man by God’s breath (which, according to St Augustine, instilled within man his rational soul). The second is Christ’s bestowing of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles when he appeared to them for the first time after the resurrection: “He therefore said to them, ‘Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I also send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed upon them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:21–2). Commenting on this passage, St Augustine writes, “For he in some way placed his mouth to their mouth when he gave them the Spirit by breathing upon them.”13 This insufflation of the Spirit could be thought of as an insemination (which, in turn, hyperbolizes the character of the breath, in its alternate guise, as a possible contaminant).14 Perella writes, “Paul taught that a
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union between the soul and God could take place on the level of transcendent Spirit, but only insofar as a man has been pneumatized, impregnated by the divine Spirit.”15 The gnostic Gospel of Philip (second or third century ad ) explicitly links the kiss, the Spirit as logos, and impregnation: … out of the mouth … the logos came forth thence He would nourish … from the mouth And become perfect. For the perfect Conceive through a kiss and give birth. Because of this We also kiss one another. We receive conception from the grace which is Among us.16
Thus, the breath as Spirit unites with the Word. Indeed the breath is the very substance of the spoken word and the voice. As Ruskin put it, “The air [is] the actual element and substance of the voice, the prolonging and sustaining power of it” (19:342). The breath, through the voice, is thus associated with the ontotheological notion of what Derrida has called the “transcendental signified” – the ultimate and final source of meaning, the Voice of Being. Derrida writes of the privilege accorded to the voice in Western thought: “[It] is heard (understood) … closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier … [it does] not borrow from outside of itself, in the world or in ‘reality,’ any accessory signifier, any substance of expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the element of ideality or universality. The unworldly character of this subject of expression is constitutive of this ideality.”17 Perhaps the clearest counterpart to Shelley’s hoary German knight, clad in armour, stooping over the infant’s cot, comes from Dante’s Purgatory. (The Divine Comedy is, of course, a constant reference throughout Ruskin’s writings.)18 Here, Statius is describing the development of the human embryo. Through the natural, physical process, two souls develop: the vegetative (that lives) and the sensitive (that feels). When this occurs, God bends over the infant and breathes into it the intellective, contemplative soul that fuses with the others:
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Open your heart to what I now reveal: when the articulation of the brain has been perfected in the embryo then the First Mover turns to it, with joy over such art in Nature, and He breathes a spirit into it, new, and with power to assimilate what it finds active there, so that one single soul is formed complete, that lives and feels and contemplates itself. (And if you find what I have said is strange, consider the sun’s heat that turns to wine when it joins forces with the juice that flows).19
The kiss that destroys or dissolves life is then to be understood as a monstrous act insofar as it is a deviation from, or even inversion of, the “natural” and sacred teleology of the kiss. In his Hexaemeron, St Ambrose said of the kiss of Judas: “Hence the Lord, condemning His betrayer as a species of monstrosity, says: ‘Judas, dost thou betray the Son of Man with a kiss?’ That is to say, changing the emblem of love into a sign of betrayal and a revelation of unfaithfulness, are you employing this pledge of peace for the purpose of cruelty? And thus by the oracular voice of God reproof is given to him who by a bestial conjunction of lips bestows a sentence of death rather than a covenant of love.”20 Although the contents page of the third volume of The Stones of Venice gives the mild appellation “Third, or Renaissance Period,” we have to get there by way of the ominous title page, severely labelled “The Fall.” Ruskin’s elaboration of a theory of the grotesque comes in the third section of this volume (entitled “Grotesque Renaissance”). His account is highly nuanced and thematically rich and is structured by a proliferating series of categories organized by a primary, “vertical” opposition between what he calls the noble grotesque and the base grotesque. He tells us at the start that he had not intended to consider this most painful period, but (and here he opens the theme of the mouth) “I found that the entire spirit of the Renaissance could not be comprehended unless it was followed to its consummation” (11:135–6). It is as if the 30
Sculpted heads, Palazzo Corner della Regina
late, base grotesque of Renaissance Venice has, in some sense, swallowed what has gone before. Here the Fall becomes the gulp, the slide from head to belly, from the sublime to the disgusting. Ruskin introduces his discussion of the Grotesque Renaissance through a complex rhetorical gesture that is analogous to covering one’s eyes and then opening the fingers to see through: that is to say, an act that speaks of both protection and fascination. Although he is unwilling, he says, to pollute the book by illustrating any of its worst forms, he at the same time advises visiting them and even provides the reader with an itinerary and commentary for a walking tour. Starting at the church of Santa Maria Formosa, we visit, in turn, San Moisè; Santa Maria Zobenigo (whose rebuilding in 1678 was financed by the Barbaro family);21 San Eustachio (known as San Stae); the heads on the bases of the Palazzo Corner della Regina and the Palazzo Pesaro (Ca’Pésaro); Longhena’s church of the Ospadaletto; and finally the Bridge of Sighs. Let us now recall the ghost story that Mary Shelley read and surmise that in some sense the bad kiss (or “bad breath”) of which the story speaks, is at the beginning of, or even inaugurates, monstrosity. The kiss in the ghost story comes, in fact, to be about two children: the horrific image of the withered child and Mary Shelley’s own “hideous progeny,” to which the story gave birth through the “womb” of the nightmare. 31
Ruskin’s Theory of the Grotesque
Church of the Ospadeletto (Santa Maria dei Derelitti)
Ruskin starts his walking tour of grotesque Venice at Santa Maria Formosa, and he devotes special attention to it. He recounts at length the story of the festival commemorating the rescue of the brides of Venice, in which the Doge, accompanied by twelve maidens, annually visited the old church. We are to picture this, Ruskin says, as we approach the tower of the church built upon the site. Into this scene erupts the mask carved on the base of the tower: “A head – huge, inhuman, and monstrous – leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant; for in that head is embodied the type of evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline; and it is well that we should see and feel the full horror of it on this spot, and know what pestilence it was that came and breathed upon her beauty, until it melted away like the white cloud
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Sculpted head, Santa Maria Formosa
from the ancient field of Santa Maria Formosa” (11:145; my italics). Here at the (mythic) beginning – both of Ruskin’s account (start here! he says) and of the grotesque phenomenon – in this paradigmatic, almost absolute instance of the base grotesque, the breath enters. It is a polluting, contaminating breath before which form itself withers. Later, in an aside, he notes that even the teeth on the sculpted head are represented as decayed (11:162). This deforming miasma, emitted in Venice, whose issue is monstrous and which inverts the morphological powers that Ruskin later ascribed to Athenian insufflation, seems to drift through his subsequent thinking, perhaps to reappear as the ominous “plague-wind of the eighth decade of the nineteenth century” of his later writings, the symbol, as Raymond Fitch puts it, “of a power opposed to the cohesive and vital energy he invoked in his uses of the term ‘purity.’”22 The
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plague-wind’s hiss suggested its serpentine character, and the wind itself was linked by Ruskin, cryptically, to “an evil spirit, the absolute opponent of the Queen of the Air” (34:68).23 At many points in Ruskin’s writing, such as in his frequent insistence on and defence of inspiration, a pneumatology is evident. His most elaborate treatment of the topic is contained in his eulogy to the myth of Athena, The Queen of the Air (1869). This text allows us to delineate a series of related ideas within which the theme of the breath is, for Ruskin, conceptually located and expounded and which seems retrospectively to govern, at least in outline, the metaphorics of the breath in his writing on the grotesque contained in The Stones of Venice sixteen years before. As queen of the air, Athena extends her sovereignty over physical and spiritual realms: physically she has power over the atmosphere, over calm and storm; spiritually “she is the queen of the breath of man, first of the bodily breathing which is life to his blood … and then of the mental breathing, or inspiration, which is his moral health and habitual wisdom” (19:305). The placing of this bodily breathing and mental breathing together under the spiritual might make us suspect that the distinction between them is less clear than it may seem at first: this is later confirmed, for “whenever you draw a pure, long, full breath of right heaven, you take Athena into your heart, through your blood; and with the blood, into the thoughts of your brain” (19:328–9). Ruskin’s ostensible focus in the second section of The Queen of the Air, entitled “Athena Keramitis,” is on Athena as a life-giving power. His approach is circumspect, but in a passage that he later claimed defined the use of “spirit” in all his writings, he observed the translation of the Greek pneuma (wind or breath, he tells us) into spirit or ghost, while stressing that the “spirit of man” in all “articulate” languages means his “passion or virtue” (19:352). Acknowledging the dependence of life on the chemical action of air, yet concerned to defend against any thoroughgoing scientific materialism, he attempts to construct a distinction between the mere “chemical affinities” of matter (which can produce only “indefinite masses”)24 and the transcendent presences of air and sunlight, upon whose kiss (we might say, looking back toward Dante) the formative process is initiated: hence, as Ruskin puts it, the “Myth of Athena, as a Formative … power” (19:354). Seen in this way, insufflation is first and foremost a matter of morphology: spirit (which 34
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Ruskin equates with “life” or “breathing”) leads to form and is thereby to be distinguished, via the moment of air and light, from what is simply force: “For the mere force of junction is not spirit; but the power that catches out of chaos, charcoal, water, lime, or what not, and fastens them down into a given form, is properly called ‘spirit’” (19:357). Our delight in form and colour in nature bears witness to the presence of the same spirit as our own in nonhuman life and thus allows Ruskin’s exemplar of formal beauty, the flower, an unlikely element of a pneumatology, to take a central place within it.25 In the final volume of The Stones of Venice, Ruskin had referred his work on Venice to a theological language of Types in which the world was written; and in the chapter “Grotesque Renaissance” he had commented on the snake in such terms.26 In The Queen of the Air, he extended his discussion of this “Word of God,” this “divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth” (19:359, 363). Here the characteristics and meaning of the serpent, in its opposition to that of the bird, are placed under the sign of its breathlessness: in it, we are told, “the breath or spirit is less than in any other creature” (19:360). “It scarcely breathes with its one lung (the other shrivelled and abortive)” (19:363). As “the symbol of the grasp and sting of death” it is also the earthly creature whose deathly and withering kiss presents the most persuasive and biblically resonant inversion of divine insufflation (19:363). Often conflated in Ruskin’s iconography with the woman as seductress,27 the serpentine kiss was a Judas-kiss, “or, in one word, treachery” (7:399). This kiss was more than venomous; it was leech-like, a strangely vampiric kiss – one that sucked, that withdrew, that emptied out, that possessed. Shortly after the publication of The Queen of the Air, Ruskin recorded a dream in which he battled with a woman-snake only to have “another small one [fasten] on my neck like a leech, and nothing would pull it off.”28 During the previous year, when he had been assailed frequently by serpentnightmares, he had dreamt of a beautiful snake that, he told a young companion, was an innocent one but that when he touched it, “became a fat thing, like a leech, and adhered to my hand, so that I could hardly pull it off.”29 For Ruskin the snake, presenting an image both terrifying and sensual, with a strange obsessive beauty that slides easily into obscenity, seems, of all natural forms, to have had an essential relationship with the grotesque.30 It is no surprise to find the character of bird and serpent myths acting for him as a point of discrimination regarding 35
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“the moral state and fineness of intelligence of different races” in a way almost identical to the presence or absence of the “noble grotesque” as he had described it in The Stones of Venice (19:366; 11:187). For Ruskin the grotesque is closely related to the concept of the Fall and is even, in the last instance, identified with it. The date of the fall of Venice is put at 1423, when Foscari became Doge. The decline in question was not just in the moral character and pursuits of Venice’s inhabitants, the compost in which the base grotesque roots and blossoms as a kind of fleur du mal; it was also a fall in the vigour, power, and consequence of the Republic. This association between, on one hand, luxury, licentiousness, and the pursuit of pleasure and, on the other, the atrophy of the nation was by no means new. Jeanne Clegg suggests that in the case of Venice this linkage begins with Gilbert Burnet’s report on the city after his visit in 1685 and continues in Pope’s Dunciad, which “links dissoluteness with naval, and hence economic and political impotence. There is no energy, no fertility in this sexuality, only languor and abandon.”31 While the base grotesque emerges and flourishes cancerously within the city during its Fall, the grotesque is, at the same time, embedded by Ruskin in a broader argument in which it becomes figured as the key characteristic of all lapsarian art. In Ruskin’s schema it is the main purpose of the faculty of imagination to, as he puts it, apprehend “ultimate truth.” This truth is not something that can be sought out by a human being but is presented or given. It comes of its own accord and is not mastered but masters. “The vision, of whatever kind, comes uncalled, and will not submit itself to the seer, but conquers him, and forces him to speak as a prophet, having no power over his words or thoughts” (11:178). Ruskin, drawing an explicit connection with Pauline pneumatology, thus defends the Platonic opposition between inspiration and art as set out in the Phaedrus, and the privilege accorded to the former. This breathing-in, this insufflation, even manifests itself as a madness (the famous “madness of God” of the Phaedrus) that properly marks the irreducible division between the higher and lower worlds. The vision presented by the imagination is figured as in a mirror that is (as a plane of symbolization) interposed between the human viewer and the divine. Now Ruskin seems to suggest that a clear and calm mind can recapture “as in a perfect mirror” what is presented to it, through it (11:179), but before an inconstant and ill-educated mind, the image fragments 36
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and warps under the passions. As he elaborates this trope, however, the possibility of the perfect mirror seems to recede. Onto the mirror of the fallen soul, he tells us, the Devil breathes, misting and polluting it, obscuring, in a kind of pneumatological play between divine inspiration and its other, the truth that flickers upon it. We must “sweep the image laboriously away,” but still we arrive at an image that is necessarily distorted, given the human condition: “the fallen human soul, at its best, must be as a diminishing glass, and that a broken one, to the mighty truths of the universe round it; and the wider the scope of its glance, and the vaster the truths into which it obtains an insight, the more fantastic their distortion is likely to be, as the winds and vapours trouble the field of the telescope most when it reaches farthest” (11:181). It is precisely this play of the sublime image of divine truth upon the agitated surface of the fallen soul that gives rise to the grotesque. Thus, at its most elevated the grotesque merges into the sublime, that is to say, the faithful apprehension of the image. Ruskin calls the sublime rare, and in fact we are led to suspect that it is more a regulatory ideal than an actual possibility. The sublime, in short, would be the magical union of the specular image with its referent: in Platonic terms, a union of the “copy-child” with its “Father.” It would be the effacement of the plane of symbolization taking place on the plane of symbolization. Indeed, Ruskin speaks a little later of the time when “that great kingdom of dark and distorted power, of which we all must be in some sort the subjects until mortality shall be swallowed up of life … and neither death stand between us and our brethren, nor symbols between us and our God” (11:186). The “mirror stage” described by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan is a point in the development of the child when it constructs, through identification with the image in the mirror, the phantasm of a coherent self in what Lacan calls the “jubilant assumption of his specular image.”32 The “mirror-stage” of the Ruskinian grotesque is the opposite: here the mirror fragments, warps, and morcellates what is presented to it. For Baudelaire the “monstrous phenomenon of laughter” was the index of man’s fallen condition;33 for Ruskin it is the enduring presence of the grotesque. The account of the grotesque that Ruskin sets out is coordinated by two asymmetrically positioned dualities. The first, the “vertical” opposition already mentioned, distinguishes the noble and ignoble grotesque. The nature of the distinction between these two categories 37
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(which carry a clear metaphysical charge, with the noble grotesque being described as “true” and the ignoble “false”) is the main subject of Ruskin’s investigation. Whereas the former is the product of a healthy and well-proportioned mind (“I believe,” writes Ruskin, “that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations, or men, more sure than the development, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque” [11:187]), the latter is the poisonous flowering of a degraded and abject humanity. Its most base forms are “evidences of a delight in the contemplation of bestial vice, and the expression of a low sarcasm, which is, I believe, the most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall” (11:145). The second duality is introduced through Ruskin’s claim that in almost all cases the grotesque is composed of two elements: the fearful and the ludicrous. Depending on the relative dominance of these elements, the specific character of the grotesque phenomenon becomes defined as either terrible or sportive (11:151). There is no straightforward correspondence between the categories that constitute each duality (noble/ignoble; terrible/sportive); rather Ruskin’s text suggests that the terrible and the sportive terms operate across the noble/ignoble distinction. But while this is asserted, it is at the same time problematized by changes that occur in the character of the terrible grotesque as it shifts across the divide from noble to ignoble. In the realm of the noble grotesque, fearful elements receive adequate expression, but insofar as they appear in the domain of the ignoble, they seem to have devolved into something that evokes only “disgust.” Consequently, the ignoble workman, we are told, “may make his creatures disgusting, but never fearful” (11:170). Again, the ignoble grotesque has “no Horror. For the base soul has no fear of sin, and no hatred of it: and however it may strive to make its work terrible, there will be no genuineness in the fear; the utmost it can do will be to make its work disgusting” (11:176). Thus, while the sportive grotesque traverses the noble/ignoble distinction and lodges in both locations, the terrible grotesque seems primarily to find purchase in the noble, its fearful aspect tending to disqualify its appearance within the ignoble. If we look now at where Ruskin’s text touches on the question of monstrosity, we will find that it is a characteristic associated primarily with the ignoble grotesque and therefore also with the ludic. For example, the degraded architecture erected during the final period of the Fall of Venice is characterized by “deformed and monstrous sculpture” (11:135), as in 38
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Ruskin’s illustration of the ignoble grotesque (from Ca’Rezzonico?)
the carved head at the base of the tower of the church of Santa Maria Formosa: “huge, inhuman, and monstrous – leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be beheld for more than an instant” (11:145). Unwilling, even for didactic purposes, to publish such an abomination, Ruskin substituted another image, described as “utterly devoid of intention, made merely monstrous,” to illustrate the ignoble late Renaissance grotesque of Venice (11:190).34 The ignoble grotesques produced by “Inordinate Play,” we are told, will be forms “which will be absurd without being fantastic, and monstrous without being terrible” (11:161). Raphael’s grottesche in the Vatican are precisely the result of such play: “an unnatural and monstrous abortion” (11:171). Finally, the ignoble workman, incapable of drawing upon models that nature presents, is satisfied when seeking to express vice “with vulgar exaggeration, and leaves his work as false as it is monstrous” (11:177). On one occasion only is monstrosity admitted to the noble grotesque, and here it is ultimately grounded in fearful phenomena presented by nature (11:169). In Ruskin’s account, then, the ludicrous, and not the fearful, is the primary locus of monstrosity: to understand this we must pursue the implications of his system of categories. In Ruskin’s view, grotesque phenomena are to be understood as arranged in a hierarchy at whose upper limit the grotesque is surpassed and the absolutes of divine beauty and terrible sublimity are revealed 39
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(11:165–6). Through the beautiful and the terrible, the fundamental conditions of man’s existence gain expression: their presence in nature sets a constant demonstration before man of the existential choice with which he is confronted. The terror in man that is provoked by nature springs from his interlinked fears of death and sin. Through this coupling, nature’s destructive phenomena gain a moral effect. Faced with the terrifying convulsions of nature that announce the strike of the thunderbolt, the human soul is appalled; and, even beyond this “there is an occult and subtle horror belonging to many aspects of the creation around us, calculated often to fill us with serious thought, even in our times of quietness and peace” (11:164). Now the terrible grotesque, ultimately grounded in the truth presented through nature, emerges with the apprehension and expression of the awful imminence of death and sin. From this, from its sensitivity to the truth of man’s existential condition, it gains Ruskin’s commendation. However, the apprehension that conjures the terrible grotesque is defective: it fails (or refuses) to plumb the full horror and truth of what it contemplates, and so it falls short of the sublime. The grotesque is produced through this lack, but what is absent is, at the same time, discerned. The master of the noble grotesque feels the resonance, senses the depths, of what is withheld from him. This present absence is not evident to the workman of the ignoble grotesque: he “can feel and understand nothing, and mocks at all things with the laughter of the idiot and the cretin” (11:167). We can now see that the double movement of the “monstrous” in Ruskin’s text, upward to the heights of the noble grotesque and, much more notably, downward to the most abject ignoble grotesque, involves a curious inversion whereby the ludicrous, by its very nature, becomes terrible. This is because the ludic, as manifested in the ignoble grotesque, must become, in the last instance, an object of fear: where the trace of the monstrous within the noble grotesque comes as an expression of the presence of sin in the world, the bloated monstrosity within the ignoble grotesque is both the symptom and the actualization of sin. With the monstrous ignoble grotesque we are no longer witnesses to representations of representations: instead, the object has advanced into actuality, this movement producing, out of its ludicrousness, its fearful character. In Ruskin, this effect is produced by the supposedly indelible link between the deed and the moral condition of the doer. Thus, too, the connection between the monstrous and the disgusting in Ruskin’s dis40
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Pilaster, Ospadeletto
course, insofar as we take disgust in its Kantian sense as what cannot be held back by representation and advances upon the viewer, “insisting, as it were, upon our enjoying it, while we still set our face against it.”35 Indeed the open mouths, lolling tongues, and slavering chops of the sculpted heads to which Ruskin points suggest this advance in another way: the polluting breath’s overcoming of the prophylactic distance associated with the purely optical. The base grotesque, as the result of a disregard for what is propitious, linked to hubris, bestiality, luxuriousness, sarcasm, and mockery, for the theistic imagination does not merely record but calls down an imminent retribution. Indeed, a biblical fate hung over the Venice of the ignoble grotesque, and Ruskin, echoing the dying speech of the Doge in Byron’s play Marino Faliero, closes: “That ancient curse was upon her, the curse of the Cities of the Plain … By the inner burning of her own passions, as fatal as the fiery rain of 41
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Gomorrah, she was consumed from her place among the nations; and her ashes are choking the channels of the dead, salt sea” (11:195). In conclusion, I would like to speculate, in a very conjectural way, about Ruskin’s enthusiasm for the photographic process known as the daguerreotype during the period when he began to work on The Stones of Venice.36 In his brilliant essay “Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique,” Alan Trachtenberg has analyzed the singular power of these strange images and the complex discourse that grew up around them and within which they were embedded. The daguerreotype process produced no negative, so each plate was unique and irreplaceable. Yet, as Trachtenberg puts it, the positive /negative nexus was embodied on the face of the plate, the image shifting between these poles as the plate was tilted with respect to the viewer’s eye. The image upon the copper plate was polished to a high shine and was usually set below a gold-plated mat. According to Trachtenberg, “Daguerrean portraits lend themselves to a discourse in which atavistic fascination with images as magical replicas, as fetishes and effigies, mingles with sheer pleasure in undisguised technique, in the rigours of craft.”37 The discourse on the daguerreotype that flourished in the 1840s and 1850s was, as Trachtenberg puts it, a mixed discourse of science, technique, art, and magic. What I want to focus on in the context of Ruskin’s metaphysics of the grotesque is the contemporary popular rhetoric on the daguerreotype as a mirror with a memory. In the period of its popularization, the daguerreotype seemed to capture something beyond the mere “image” of the referent; it seemed “too real to be understood as just another copy of the world.”38 Instead, the process seemed to capture something essential about the sitter, the very essence or identity of a person, fastened down and suspended within the tain of the mirror. The daguerreotypes conjured animistic notions of “life” in the image; some of the popular fiction of the 1840s and 1850s imagined that one might fall in love with a daguerreotype or that daguerretypes might fall in love with one another. In short, the daguerreotype seemed to realize the uncanny union or fusion of the image with the referent in a way suggestively in accord with Ruskin’s clear seeing, as implied negatively in his metaphysics of the grotesque. The daguerreotype reproduced most closely, albeit in the “fallen” world, the optical and cognitive event upon whose terms Ruskin figured his regulatory ideal, the prelapsarian mirror of the soul that unites with the divine truth (to which might we say, the “cam42
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era” of the imagination is witness?). The mechanical apparatus, through its apparent transparency before the referent, effects something like a prosaic version of the ecstatic effacement of self that Ruskin had experienced in 1842 before the mountains at Chamonix (4:364).39 Although Ruskin’s comments on the daguerreotype are resolutely down to earth, certain moments in his writing suggest more: in a letter written to his father from Venice in 1845, dated 7 October, he says, “I have been lucky enough to get from a poor Frenchm[an] here, said to be in distress, some most beautiful, though small Daguerreotypes of the palaces I have been trying to draw … It is very nearly the same thing as carrying off the palace itself – every chip of stone & stain is there.”40 In some senses the daguerreotype was more than “carrying off the palace”: it seemed to disclose the real to perception with a finer grain than did the reality it recorded. Thus we have the image of Ruskin, as described in another letter to his father eight days later, stumbling around St Mark’s, his eyes fixed on a daguerreotype: “I have been walking all over St Mark’s Place today, and found a lot of things in the Daguerreotype that I never had noticed in the place itself.”41 The only way one might make sense of the great prosyletizer of the visual, walking around Venice, eyes fixed, like a modern tourist, on an interpretative document, is if that document, here the daguerreotype, is more than interpretative. (We should note here that the daguerreotype, through its very fidelity, always contained an aspect that was somewhat monstrous. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables, published in 1851, as was the first volume of The Stones of Venice, we are introduced to a daguerreotypist, Holgrave, whose ancestors practised witchcraft. His art is a modern technico-magical variant of the black arts practised by his forerunners. At one point he confesses a sin of the same order as Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein: “I misuse Heaven’s blessed sunshine by tracing out human features, through my agency.”42 This is an impeccably monstrous moment: the trapping, or deviating, or turning of Nature’s power against itself through art. We are almost invited to see his peculiarly animated daguerreotype portraits as little monsters.) The curious closeness of the photograph and its referent is a recurring theme in histories and theories of photography. It is usually framed in terms of the ontology of the photograph: its status as the record of an emanation from an object (whose real existence is therefore presupposed). It is the force with which the photograph returns us to, or better, 43
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instantiates the referent that underpins Roland Barthes’s comment that it produces that “rather terrible thing … the return of the dead.”43 However, this “return of the dead” is not a straightforward return to life; like the liminal creatures of which we spoke at the beginning, it is more a condition of both life and death, neither life nor death. The photograph operates both between and on the outside of the conceptual opposition. As Derrida wrote on the occasion of the death of Roland Barthes, “The versus of the conceptual opposition is as substantial as a camera’s click. ‘Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.’ Ghosts: the concept of the other in the same … the dead other alive in me. The concept of the photograph photographs all conceptual oppositions, it traces a relationship of haunting which perhaps is constitutive of all logics.”44 Thus, one feels that the photograph has always had a strange affinity with Venice, that city between life and death that travellers in the early nineteenth century described as a phantasm, a dream, or a city of sleepwalkers and that Ruskin called “a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak – so quiet – so bereft of all but her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and which the Shadow” (9:17). notes I am grateful to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal for the award of a visiting scholarship from May to August 2000, during which this essay was completed, and to Zoe Quick for conversations. 1 “On the Monstrous and the Grotesque,” written in 1996 but published in Word & Image 16, no. 3 (2000): 310–17. See also Mark Dorrian, “Monstrosity Today,” Artifice 5 (1996): 48–59. Versions of the current paper were presented at the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians held in Edinburgh on 7–9 April 2000 and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal on 7 July 2000. For some comments on the “formless” in Ruskin’s Lamp of Beauty see Mark Dorrian, “Surplus Matter: Of Scars, Scrolls, Skulls, and Stealth,” in Architecture: The Subject Is Matter, ed. J. Hill (London: Routledge 2001), 193–206. 2 For interpretations of Ruskin’s grotesque, see George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
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3
4
5
6 7 8 9
10
sity Press 1971), 370–99; Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press 1982), 111–39; Raymond Fitch, The Poison Sky: Myth and Apocalypse in Ruskin (Athens, oh, and London: Ohio University Press 1982), 197–202; Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995); Paulette Singley, “Devouring Architecture: Ruskin’s Insatiable Grotesque,” Assemblage 32 (1997): 108–25; Lucy Hartley, “Griffinism, Grace and All: The Riddle of the Grotesque in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters,” in Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque, ed. Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow, and David Amigoni (Aldershot, Hants., and Brookfield, vt: Ashgate 1999), 81–94. David Hume, The Life of David Hume, Esq: Written by Himself (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777), 7–8; “Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.” “Il me semble qu’un livre, c’est toujours un enfant né avant terme, qui me fait l’effet d’une créature assez répugnante en comparaison de celle que j’aurais souhaité mettre au monde, et que je ne me sens pas trop fier de présenter aux regards d’autrui.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Reponses à quelques questions,” Esprit (November 1963): 629. Mary Shelley, introduction (1831) to Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Version, ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Broadview Literary Texts 1999), 358. Ibid., 355. James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, n c: Duke University Press 1981), 7. Ibid., 39. Jeanne Clegg, Ruskin and Venice (London: Junction Books 1981), 3–4; on Venice as seductress/bride see John Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius (New York: Columbia University Press 1961), 79–80. Bracketed references in the text refer to The Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, and New York: Longmans, Green 1903–7). On the sirens see also 19:177–9 and 29:262–72.
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11 Cited in Nicholas J. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretive History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-Erotic Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press 1969), 5. 12 Ibid., 6 13 Ibid., 18. 14 On semen as a pollutant, see William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press 1997), 103–5. 15 Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 45. 16 The Gospel of Philip, trans. R.M. Wilson (London 1962), 34–5, cited in Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 20. 17 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1998), 20. 18 In their General Index Cook and Wedderburn give almost four doublecolumned and minutely printed pages of references to The Divine Comedy alone (39:150–4). 19 Dante’s Purgatory, 25.67–78, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington, in: Indiana University Press 1981), 271; Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 19. 20 Hexaemeron, 6.9.68, in Hexaemeron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel, trans. John J. Savage (New York 1961), 278; cited in Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane, 29. 21 As far as Ruskin was concerned, this church was the epitome of the hubris and impiety characteristic of the period when the Venetian base grotesque flourished. It was, he said, “entirely dedicated to the Barbaro family; the only religious symbols with which it is invested being statues of angels blowing brazen trumpets, intended to express the spreading of the fame of the Barbaro family in heaven … A huge statue of a Barbaro in armour, with a fantastic head-dress, over the central door; and four Barbaros in niches, two on each side of it, strutting statues, in the common stage postures of the period” (11:149–50). 22 Fitch, The Poison Sky, 2. 23 Ibid., 6, 573–4. 24 Cf. the case of Frankenstein and his creation, which was vivified not through “inspiration” but through “chemical” processes; as such its condition failed to escape that of the “dark, shapeless substances” of which Shelley spoke in her introduction (Shelley, introduction (1831), 356). 25 “The Spirit in the plant – that is to say, its power of gathering dead matter out of the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own chosen shape –
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26
27
28 29 30
31 32
33
34 35
is of course strongest at the moment of its flowering, for it then not only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy” (19:357). On typology and allegory in Ruskin, see Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, 329–56. In The Stones of Venice Ruskin writes: “Now the things which are the proper subjects of human fear are twofold: those which have the power of Death, and those which have the nature of Sin. Of which there are many ranks, greater or less in power and vice, from the evil angels themselves down to the serpent which is their type, and which, though of a low and contemptible class, appears to unite deathful and sinful natures in the most clearly visible and intelligible form” (11:166). See Marc A. Simpson, “The Dream of the Dragon: Ruskin’s Serpent Imagery,” in The Ruskin Polygon, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Faith M. Holland (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1982), 21–43. The Diaries of John Ruskin, 1835–1898, ed. Joan Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (Oxford: Clarendon 1956), 685. Ibid., 644; for an interpretation of these dreams as phallic-autoerotic see Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass, 169. For example, “in the religions of lower races, little else than these corrupted forms of devotion can be found; all having a strange and dreadful consistency with each other, and infecting Christianity, even at its strongest periods, with a fatal terror of doctrine, and ghastliness of symbolic conception, passing through fear into frenzied grotesque, and thence into sensuality. In the Psalter of S. Louis itself, half of its letters are twisted snakes; there is scarcely a wreathed ornament, employed in Christian dress, or architecture, which cannot be traced back to the serpent’s coil” (19:365). Clegg, Ruskin and Venice, 17–19. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton 1977), 2. Charles Baudelaire, “Of the Essence of Laughter and Generally of the Comic in the Plastic Arts,” Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P.E. Charvet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1981), 145. Although Ruskin states this sculpted head is from the Palazzo Corner della Regina, it is more likely to be from the base of Longhena’s Ca’Rezzonico. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon 1961), 174.
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36 On Ruskin and the daguerreotype, see Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: a Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984), 132–4; Michael Harvey, “Ruskin and Photography,” Oxford Art Journal 7, no. 2 (1985): 25–33; Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry; Karen Burns, “Topographies of Tourism: ‘Documentary’ Photography and The Stones of Venice,” Assemblage 32 (1997): 22–44. 37 Alan Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique,” in The Portrait in Photography, ed. G. Clarke (London: Reaktion Books 1992), 173. 38 Ibid., 175. 39 See the description in Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder, 117–19. 40 Ruskin in Italy: Letters to His Parents, 1845, ed. Harold I. Shapiro (Oxford: Clarendon 1972), 220. 41 Ibid., 225. 42 Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity,” 181. 43 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage 1993), 9. 44 Jacques Derrida, “The Deaths of Roland Barthes,” in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty, ed. H.J. Silverman (New York and London: Routledge 1988), 267. All photographs © the author.
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Alberti at Sea Michael Emerson
Chora
Alberti at Sea
I live on a sea. At my window the street ends in the blue infinity. All that water is coming on, and I wonder that it graces to stop, just there. It does not have to stop, you know. Have you seen what happens to houses on the shore when the water reclaims a few feet? The shoreline does not limit the sea. The sea makes the shoreline by stopping. Eugene Gendlin, “Nonlogical Moves and Nature Metaphors”1
the sea is traditionally the site for a wide range of practical, theoretical, and ethical investigations concerning motion and constructive spatial practices. The manner of their collation, like the sea itself, is not fixed and responds to time and place. Three nautical terms – water, navigation, ship – are the shifting objects of this essay’s investigation of spatial practice and fluidity in the early Renaissance works of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72). This investigation poses the following questions: what sort of place was Alberti’s sea? what traditions informed his aquatic investigations? and what were the difficulties of constructive, spatial engagement that water posed to the possibility of rational order. Responses are explored in three parts. The second part discusses the navigational influences in Alberti’s works of cartography and surveying, Descriptio Urbis Romae (c. 1450) and Ludi Rerum Matematicarum (c. 1450–1), within the context of the speculative cartography of his contemporary, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64). Finally, a reading of the shipbuilding scenario in Alberti’s allegory Fatum et Fortuna (c. 1430–40) suggests architecture’s role in navigating the contingencies of the early Renaissance world.2 the material issue of water Leon Battista Alberti had a fondness for maritime imagery and a lively interest in the practical arts of navigation and naval and aquatic construction. Several of his early architectural and engineering projects were associated with water, including an early design for the Trevi fountain and a reconstruction project for the Bridge of Hadrian, both in Rome.3 In the “anonymous” autobiographical sketch Vita Anonima (1437) he notes that he often questioned shipbuilders and other craftsman “to learn what rare and hidden special knowledge they might hold.”4 Traces of 50
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these activities can be discerned in De Re Aedificatoria’s scheme for righting the walls of St Peter’s using nautical rigging and the inclusion of sailor’s lore on the properties of certain winds (10.17.362; 4.2.99). Such nautical issues would have been treated more extensively in De Navis (On Ships), a short work on shipbuilding and navigation, now lost, which was to have been appended to the treatise. Water itself was a recurring concern, with the most lengthy consideration occurring in book 10. This interest is foreshadowed in Vitruvius’s first-century bc treatise De architectura, the acknowledged guide and foil for De Re Aedificatoria, and indeed much of Alberti’s tenth book follows closely Vitruvius’s book 8.5 However, the respective authors’ approaches to this material were conditioned by very different concerns, traditions, and worldviews, differences that define the possibilities of Alberti’s aquatic interventions. Over the course of his Ten Books, Vitruvius gives considerable attention to each natural element, but only water is singled out for a discrete investigation, with book 8 devoted solely to descriptions of different waters and the methods for their detection and control. The length and quality of this discussion has led to speculation that his professional career included time spent with the Roman cura aquarum, the public works office responsible for the construction and maintenance of the city’s aqueducts and sewer systems, a claim further supported by a passage from Frontinus’s De aquis urbis romae (100 ad), where Vitruvius is credited with standardizing plumbing pipe sizes.6 However, to justify his watery interests, Vitruvius looked beyond the profession itself, noting that “naturalists, philosophers, and priests alike judge that all things consist of the power of water.”7 This ontological argument for the primacy of watery substances Vitruvius borrowed from early Greek thought, especially that of the Presocratic philosopher Thales of Miletus (active sixth century bc), who is mentioned at the beginning of book 8 as having “declared that water was the first principle of all things.”8 Thales himself was something of a “universal man” to the Greeks, often cited as a paradigmatic sage, albeit with a distinctly aquatic bent – among other feats, he is credited with diverting a river, devising a method for measuring distance from land to ships at sea, and authoring a work on celestial navigation.9 Vitruvius’s observation that water nourishes, grows, and sustains all creatures is again traceable to Thales, whose arguments concerning a watery first principle were physiological rather than meteorological in nature.10 In book 9 this focus on water’s 51
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animating qualities underscores Vitruvius’s delight in the machines of Ctesibius, some of which, when driven by water, could “produce effects borrowed from nature,” such as birdsongs, or animated statues.11 Indeed, throughout books 9 and 10, Vitruvius’s many designs for machines that use water as a power source or regulator evidence his notion of water as not only a generative principle but a benevolent prima materia that lends itself generously to the architect’s skillful manipulations. The attention Vitruvius gave to water, then, is explained as the result of a generative ontological condition that is revealed across a wide range of endeavours, in which architecture is implicated both as a discrete discipline and as one performed for and informed by the others. Despite his fascination with the early Greeks’ fluid ontology, Vitruvius’s confidence in the architect’s ability to manipulate water was predicated on his faith in the closed cosmology that defined the classical Greek order of the world and the elements that constituted it, an order that in the fifteenth century was increasingly problematized. The risks that water posed to the cosmos’s rational armature were well known to Aristotle, who remained the primary source of Western cosmology well into the Renaissance: “None of the natural philosophers made fire or earth the one infinite body, but either water or air or that which is in between them, because each of fire and earth has clearly a determinate place, but these others are ambiguous between up and down.”12 For Aristotle, water’s difficulty is determinacy (horismos), which would be obscured if the material confusion of the sublunar realm were not organized into discrete, concentric regions. However, the late medieval attacks on these aspects of his world machine would come not from material speculation but from the theological need to reconcile pagan learning and Christian truth. Particularly apt is the example of the Spaniard Paul de Burgos who in 1429 offered an Aristotelian exegesis of the biblical account of the third day of creation, when God gathered the waters and the dry land was made to appear (Gen. 1:9). For Burgos, this act is accomplished by moving the centre of the watery sphere, which was coincident with the terrestrial sphere’s centre, to an eccentric position, leaving the terrestrial sphere partially revealed – a neat feat, but one accomplished at the expense of the cosmos’s concentric symmetry.13 And yet Burgos’s formulation is quite restrained compared to some of the speculations being offered at this time. Conjectures concerning divine omnipotence and the 52
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way God’s infinity could be manifested in the cosmos had become common, if not quite orthodox, during the late middle ages and had led a small but vocal minority to question, if not refute, notions of centrality and finitude.14 Such theological difficulties were exacerbated by increasing participation in the observation and recording of nature, which was the cause of an increasing frustration with the earth-centred world system’s inability to account for celestial phenomena and with the difficulties this posed to the accuracy of the church calendar, with its astronomically determined cycle of feast days. Recent scholarship has done much to dismiss the previous image of Alberti as theologically indifferent.15 Nevertheless, it is evident that Alberti was less given to explicit theological speculation than he was to its appropriation and transformation within the forms of the classical humanist tradition. As with Burgos, this resulted in difficulties not remediable within the conventions of late medieval thought. Alberti, like Vitruvius, recognized water’s many useful and delightful qualities and went to great lengths to define those that were especially propitious for the health and good order of human settlements. Book 10 of De Re Aedificatoria, “in which the restoration of buildings is described,” is dedicated to the identification, description, and regulation of various waters as they bear upon architecture, with brief digressions on the problems of fire, temperature control, insect infestation, and wall maintenance. In this context, Alberti too mentions Thales (10.1.320), but Alberti’s physiological interest in water presents a metaphorics of disease rather than generation. Of two types of building faults described in book 10, both are framed by this medical concern: human failings are remediable by human means, as “physicians maintain that once a disease has been diagnosed it is largely cured”; however, against the faults wrought by Nature, which in book 10 are primarily aquatic, “the body has no defense” (10.1.320). Indeed, Alberti recognizes no relationship between humanity and the sea based on physiological or ontological presumptions: “Others claim that the sea breathes in and out naturally, and so remark that no man ever breathes his last except when the tide is going out, as though this were proof of some affinity and sympathy between our human life and the movement and spirit of the sea” (9.12.349). Similarly, Alberti introduces his discussion of water in book 10 by noting that he is not interested in “philosophical questions” of whether or not the sea is water’s place of rest or the moon the source of tides and instead 53
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urges that we “not neglect what we see with our own eyes“ (10.3.325). Such advocacy for the direct observation of nature is a touchstone for much of Alberti’s work and constitutes a clear break with the more speculative naturalist traditions of both Vitruvius and the Middle Ages. However, this empirical turn does little to ameliorate water’s difficulties and in fact reinstates watery problematics passed over or easily resolved by Vitruvius. For Alberti, Vitruvius’s watery first principle comes to be understood as Nature. This Nature is, of course, a creative entity, but its principles of generation consistently elude Alberti. In book 10 he weighs evidence as to whether bodies of water are the result of continuous accumulation of rainfall or atmospheric condensation: “Some maintain that perpetual springs are not poured out, as though contained in some vessel, but that wherever they appear, they are continually generated by air” (10.3.327). Alberti is here rehearsing a debate found in Aristotle’s Meteorology concerning the origin of rivers; Aristotle notes that rainfall alone cannot possibly account for all standing water and believes that mountains may act as sponges, absorbing moisture from the air and thereby making up the difference.16 Citing the lack of rivers in arid climates, Alberti is at first sympathetic to the rain hypothesis, but he notes condensation of dew and a sponge’s ability to absorb humidity as evidence to the contrary (2.8.47). A similar prevarication occurs in his treatment of stone, as he ponders “whether it was derived from a viscous mixture of water and earth, which hardened first into mud and then into stone; or whether it is composed of matter condensed by the cold or, as is said of gems, by the heat and by the rays of the sun, or whether in fact stone is formed like everything else, from a seed that Nature had implanted in the earth.” As with water, Alberti debates elemental generation as the result of either condensation from a material matrix or a more basic material accumulation. Significantly, where Vitruvius too raised these issues, they occurred as an entirely descriptive exercise of received knowledge and gave rise to no questioning or doubt.17 For Alberti, however, the debate ends without resolution, his having decided only that “Nature is not at all easy to understand and very perplexing” (10.3.327). For Vitruvius water’s formlessness made it a suitable image of primordial substance. For Alberti water is not only genetically illusive but also presents an adversary to the architect, who is responsible for imparting material order to the world. In Alberti’s treatise the experience 54
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of aggressive waters is subject to the same rage he feels toward the dissolution and decay wrought by time and human ignorance, forces that are themselves described as participating in the “vast shipwreck” of ancient culture from which few buildings or architectural writings, except those of Vitruvius, were spared (6.1.154). Architecture and the waters become adversaries in this scenario, with bridges, buildings, and bulwarks not just erected on or for the sea but directed at it as if they were weapons: “The greatest diligence and utmost care is demanded to restrain the fury and power of the sea. For the sea will often defeat all art and workmanship, nor will it be conquered easily by human effort” (10.12.350). Such violent imagery is common in Alberti’s discussions of water, as when he uses Propertius’s verse to make a point concerning the care that must be given to harbour construction, for here one must “Conquer or be conquered / Such is the wheel of love” (10.12.351). This martial analogy was already explicit in book 1, where he noted that “in buildings the covers [i.e., roofs] are the weapon with which they defend themselves against the harmful onslaught of weather” (1.11.26).18 For Alberti, then, material order is secured by force of arms, as he recasts architecture from victim of the sea’s aggression to weapon and instrument of restraint. Neither theory nor judicious use of material nor sheer labour is itself sufficient in this conflict, as aquatic place-making activities in De Re Aedificatoria become agents of order within an antagonistic relationship with a malevolent prima materia. This formulation, though quite apart from Vitruvius’s classical calm, was certainly not unprecedented. Alberti’s problematics of generation and security suggest a recovery of Old Testament notions of the sea as an ambiguously generated and perilous semidivine force, whose restraint requires architectural intervention. For the ancient Hebrews, as for Alberti, water’s difficulty can be traced back to its obscure origin; the book of Genesis (1 and 2:4–25) indicates that the watery Deep coexisted with God in a primordial state, and thus was not created ex nihilo but “separated.” The earth, too, has a claim to precosmogenetic existence, as it is not the result of the sort of divine will that brought forth light or the dome of the heavens but rather “appears” from where the seas had been gathered (Gen. 1:9). Although the watery Deep eventually submitted to divine control, it retained its chaotic power. This rage for disorder figured in the deluge, which was not itself the direct result of God’s anger but rather of His utilizing 55
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Noah building the ark. Bodleian Library, Ms. Barlow, f. 53
the waters’ inherent destructive power for His own ends, for when “the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened” (Gen. 7:11) the waters relentlessly moved to erase creation from above and below. The waters’ jealousy of their ontological primacy and their desire to return to this condition required divine vigilance, a situation that Job, like Alberti, phrased in martial terms: “Am I the Sea, or the Dragon, that you set a guard over me?” (Job 7:12).19 Creation, then, was enacted through a divine generative power that both constructed and restrained, as God secured places for both the terrestrial and the aquatic in the material order of the world. And while the constructive process was typically identified as an architectural mode of production, it necessarily relied on the clearing of a foundational ground that the limiting process enacted. As such, the two were habitually cast together, as when the writer of Proverbs states, “When he assigned the sea to its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker” (Prov. 8:29–30). 56
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Water’s difficulties, then, refuted Alberti’s attempts at rational deliberation of the processes of material generation and architectural production, precisely because, as he acknowledged, the sea’s formlessness and irregularity offered no tangible link to the human body or its architectural correlate, nor was it comprehensible to the mind. However, if the material forms of architecture were destined to succumb to the waters and their ambiguous motions, a more cooperative spatial order could be realized through the experiential geometries of a body at sea. In the early Renaissance, such geometries occurred in the instruments and cartography of navigation. charting motion Aristotle recognized a world of experience quite apart from the logical stability and regularity of geometricians’ and philosophers’ deductive truths. This was a world of opinion, deliberation, and variable degrees of probability, rather than demonstration and truth, a world known intimately but never predictably by physicians, farmers, judges, and navigators.20 For the Greeks, these were the stochastic arts, from stokhos, “to aim at.”21 While both architecture and navigation were categorized as arts, they were distinguished according to their ends: architecture had as its end material production, whereas navigation and its related arts had their end in the completion of the act itself (the ship brought safely to port, the verdict justly handed down, and so on). Early Renaissance humanists and ancient Greeks, architects and sailors alike, alleviated the contingent expectations of these ends by relating their disciplines to the demonstrable truths of geometry. However, a difference between the architects’ and the navigators’ geometries can be determined from their “celestial” figures, the Vitruvian man and the mariner’s “sky clock.” Like the Vitruvian figure, the sky clock used the image of the human body to bring regularity to an unstable sublunar world. But while the Vitruvian illustration chiefly represents a formal celestial harmony, the sky clock subordinated such concerns to the moving body’s relationship with celestial time. In Pierre Garcie’s book of sailing instructions, Le grant routier (1520),22 the figure’s centre remains the navel, but here is placed the pole star, the mariner’s celestial guide since antiquity.23 Around him spins the dome of the heavens, whose stars are depicted between windpoints in the figure’s outer ring. Mariners 57
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Illustration from Le grant routier, 2 ed. (1521)
committed to memory the midnight position of the pole’s “guard” stars in Ursa Minor relative to the human figure for various times of the year. The guards then became the “hour hand” for a twenty-four hour celestial clockface. At midnight in mid-July, for example, the guards were found at the figure’s right arm, due west of the pole; if during that time the sailor spied the guards at the head, or above the pole, he knew it to be 6 a.m.; if at the feet, 6 p.m. Without such knowledge of time, the pilot could not adequately determine the speed and distance on which the possibility of his knowing his position relied. 58
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During the period he was preparing his architectural treatise, Alberti took up the related issues of surveying and cartography in two short works, Descriptio Urbis Romae (Description of the City of Rome) and Ludi Rerum Matematicarum (Mathematical Games). In Joan Gadol’s influential interpretation, these works are seen to have drawn upon the cartography of medieval navigation to align themselves with a new perspectival visuality and its geometrized modes of representation.24 Despite much recent interest in medieval and Renaissance cartography, this interpretation has been virtually unchallenged.25 The geometrical speculations of Alberti’s contemporary, Nicholas of Cusa (1401–64), suggest nautical and cartographic processes in which the interests of mathematical accuracy, instrumental utility, and spiritual activity coincide. Cusanus, too, was one of the period’s cartographic innovators, having directed the construction of a map of central Europe exhibiting such novel features as Ptolemaic projections, scales, copper plate engraving, and punch-type lettering.26 Among these innovations, it was the map’s proportional precision that occasioned both physical and spiritual motions. In his Compendium (1463), Cusanus ascribed these motions to homo cosmographus (man the cosmographer). From the centre of a city, the cosmographer dispatches messengers through five gates to gather information of the world beyond. The image hinges on Bonaventure’s medieval body metaphor: the city walls are the extent of a human body, the five gates the five senses.27 Upon the messengers’ return, the cosmographer compiles their information and from it produces a “well-ordered and proportionally measured map.” He then “turns toward the map; and, in addition, he dismisses the messengers, closes the gateways, and turns his inner sight toward the Creator-of-the world, who is none of those things about which the cosmographer has learned.”28 In medieval maps, formal elements such as cities and topographical features received value through their symbolic relations to otherwise invisible spiritual realities. What the activities of homo cosmographus suggest is less an eschewal of traditional value than a reconfiguration of the valuation process, so that it was at once more immediate, as it originated in an active sensual engagement with the world, and delayed, as that experience was then channelled inward and upward, following a Pythagorean notion of divine proportion. In Cusanus’ use of Ptolemaic projection, it was the actively perceived mathematical relations among 59
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the various terrestrial cartographic features that both determined their position and occasioned the ascent to the divine. Cartography, then, was impetus and an aid to both physical and spiritual motions.29 For Cusanus the value of proportion and metaphor lie in their holding fundamentally distinct and irreconcilable phenomena in relation to one another. This third, proportional term was conditioned but never entirely determined by the objects it held together. Proportion could then be manipulated to weave together a world of difference and disjunction into looser configurations. For example, in De Docta Ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance, 1440), Cusanus understood the significance of the principle of learned ignorance to be a function of its openness to proportional scaling procedures: “This learned ignorance I have, in the one who is the truth, now set loose in these books, which on the basis of this same principle can be compressed or expanded.”30 In book 1, these procedures were, like the map, relational and geometrized: “If we want to use finite things as a method of ascending to the simply maximum [i.e., the divine], we must first consider finite mathematical figures along with their attributes and relations; then we must transfer these relations to corresponding infinite figures; and finally we must, at a still higher level, apply the relations of the infinite figures to the infinite simple” (1.12.102). Such thinking bears the marks of the aquatic displacements that occasioned it; decades earlier, Cusanus had grown weary of his attempts to come to terms with the “ways” (via) of medieval thought, attempts that were unproductive “until returning by sea from Greece when by what I believe was a celestial gift from the Father of Lights, from whom comes every perfect gift, I was led to embrace incomprehensibles incomprehensibly in learned ignorance, by transcending those incorruptible truths that can be humanly known” (Dedicatory Epistle, 205–6).31 Cusanus, the son of a boatman on Germany’s Moselle River, received the illumination on a return trip from Constantinople, where he was among a group of Papal emissaries sent to bring the Eastern patriarchs to the Council of Farrera. The most evident textual trace of that experience occurs during a discussion of the relativity of place: How would a passenger know that one’s ship was being moved, if one did not know that the water was flowing past and if the shores were not visible from the ship in the middle of the water? Since it always appears to every observer, whether on the earth, the sun, or another star, that one is, as if, at an immov60
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able center of things and that all else is being moved, one will always select different poles in relation to oneself … Therefore, the world machine will have, one might say, its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, for its circumference and center is God, who is everywhere and nowhere.32
For Cusanus, a body at sea is a perceptual centre within a horizon that is revealed again moment by moment. To fix his position within it, the navigator abstracted elements of the horizon through measures, logs, and charts to create a textual or figural memory of a moment that briefly defined his place. Because of this literal self-centredness and the continual displacements that produced it, taking measure of where one was at sea reversed terrestrial means of finding place. Terrestrial surveying began with the assumption that the surveyor occupied a primary position from and by which he would determine other positions. The navigator, however, assumed the stability of a series of distant positions in order to determine his own. In a later work, Idiota de sapientia et de mente (The Layman on Wisdom and the Mind, 1450), Cusanus stated that to locate oneself among such variability, the mind (mens) operated as a “living” compass (circinus) whose expansions and contractions determined the measure (mensura) through which the proportions between one thing and another were known. In this way, the proportioning activities of homo cosmographus allowed a mediation of the aquatic and terrestrial worlds, whereas De Re Aedificatoria‘s homo faber (man the maker) did not. The relational epistemology of Cusanus’s cartography in fact refigures a long line of nautical speculation concerning the nature of place. In his Physics, Aristotle identifies two places: the first is the cosmos itself; the second is specific to individual bodies. The former is a general and shared place that can accommodate the movements of both itself and the bodies contained within. To establish that the cosmos can be both finite and perpetually moved, he imagines a cosmic body composed entirely of water: “Hence, a body is in place if, and only if, there is a body outside it which surrounds it. So, even if such a thing [a body with no surrounding body outside] were to come to be water, its parts will be moved, since they are surrounded by one another, but the whole will in a sense move and in a sense not. For considered as a whole it does not alter its place altogether, but it moves in a circle.”33 Cosmic motion is rotational, not rectilinear, as the latter would 61
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necessitate a further level of containment within a super-cosmological place, which would then logically fall within another, and so on. If the hierarchical distinctions linking the earth to the heavens are to be maintained, the ultimate containment must occur at the final celestial sphere, beyond which is no-place. The bodies within this singular cosmological place occupy their own places, as well. Water functions to define a particular body’s immediate place in two ways. First, water’s ability to move into a vessel and displace completely the air previously there is an important illustration of place’s ability to tightly adhere to and define even ambiguous bodies. This point is important, for if the placeful cosmos provides room for and embodies being in a general sense, it is this placeas-vessel that orients such beings within the vertical structure of Aristotle’s cosmology: “Every place should have ‘above’ and ‘below’; and that each body should naturally move to and remain in its proper places, and this it must do either above or below.”34 Second, to define place as “the first unchangeable limit of that which surrounds,” he presents the image of a river-borne ship: “Just as the vessel is a place that can be carried around, so place is a vessel which cannot be moved around. So when something moves inside something which is moving and the thing inside moves about (e.g., a boat in a river), the surrounding thing functions for it as a vessel rather than as a place; place is meant to be unchangeable, so that it is the whole river, rather, that is the place, because as a whole it is unchangeable.”35 The example reveals the limits of Aristotle’s inquiry: the problem he sees is ontological, not locatory, and he worries himself about defining how a body can be in place, not about how to discern where that body and its place may be. To the extent that place can locate a body, it does so as natural place, the qualitatively distinct location where a body finds stability and regularity. How place carries this orientation is puzzling: while Aristotle acknowledges that place occurs only where a body is present, he is very clear that place, unlike body, has no matter, extension, or form, although all these things seem to contribute to it. He also states that place remains when a body moves on, but how it might endure or prefigure another body’s emplacement is not explained. Removed from such material associations, place in Aristotle’s understanding cannot be a metrically determined phenomenon; the reciprocities that obtain in his placeful situations occur between a body and its immaterial container, and not in the measurable relations among bodies themselves. 62
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The indeterminate place of water, however, disturbs this immaterial notion of place, and after Aristotle has taken great care to separate place from body, place in the example of the ship nevertheless relies on the material stability of the riverbank for its definition, due to a sort of “uncertainty principle”: no flowing river can confidently be said to be unchangeable, and therefore by Aristotle’s definition it cannot be a boat’s place. One could argue that the river responds in a similar way to the example of the cosmos composed entirely of water; the river’s parts would rotate around themselves and establish the finality of place. However, the watery cosmos is a unique situation, as its final containment is the result of there being nowhere else for it to go. For the ship the indeterminate nature of water place seems to require a more material, and therefore potentially metrical, mode of relation. And this, at last, brings us to Alberti. The Descriptio itself is a short work and includes a scant several hundred words of explanation, followed by several tables of coordinates for his sightings of the various buildings and landmarks of Rome. No map has ever been traced to it. Nevertheless, it looms large in accounts of the development of Renaissance spatiality, primarily because such rigorous measurement was not a commonplace occurrence in late medieval Europe. Surveying itself remained a textual rather than a cartographic art, as the task of defining and describing property was most often carried out in written reports.36 Of the exceptions to this situation, the best-known and most widely discussed, prior to the reintroduction of Ptolemaic mapping in the early fifteenth century, was the medieval portolano, a nautical chart and typically the most geographically precise representations of land mass and shore detail available. Most of the extant portolanos have survived because they were safe from the deterioration of the sea within the libraries of shore-bound scholars who were covetous of the cartographic accuracy navigators imparted to their charts, but there is no doubt that their primary purpose was to serve ships at sea. The portolano’s most evident formal characteristic is its network of windlines, a series of straight lines radiating from sixteen points in circular distribution around the map. It was neither necessary nor intended that the lines refer to actual courses between specific ports of call, for the exigencies of actual navigation made sailing along a single course rare, if not impossible; tacking into the wind or adrift in currents, navigators were continually updating their course against their heading.37 63
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Pisan chart, showing the coast of Italy (late thirteenth century). Bibliothèque Nationale
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The windlines, then, did not themselves determine course but, rather, allowed headings and courses to be figured. Using his dividers and ruler, the navigator found among the dense distribution of preprinted lines the one parallel to his heading. To ameliorate the process, windlines were color-coded: the main winds in black, half winds in green, and quarter winds in red. The navigator then transferred the distance he had made on that wind to the chart, using scaled rulers printed along the chart’s edges. Having determined distance and direction from the point of his last calculation, the navigator could then prick his new location on the chart, from which he could then determine what changes were necessary to achieve his desired course. The techniques used to construct portolanos are less clear. The earliest extant portolano, the carte pisane (c. 1290), shows a grid at the periphery of the radiating windlines, although what role it may have played in locating topographical features is unclear. A description of the geometrical process for constructing the network of windlines survives, but it is doubtful that such lines were active determinants of coastal form, due to the same lack of alignment with major ports and headlands mentioned above. Intriguingly, maps of various times and places show much standardization of information and gradual increase in both breadth and precision. This has led some to speculate about the existence of a “master” map. However, it is usually assumed that the portolanos were initially produced with information provided by ship’s captains and their logs and then expanded and revised over time.38 Alberti himself may have hinted at such a process in his architectural treatise when he notes that “sailing too, as almost every other art, advanced by minute steps” (6.2.157). The development of map-based medieval navigation, nautical historian E.G.R. Taylor notes, established an affinity between the new geometrical instruments of navigation and those of terrestrial place-making: “The pilot was now required to furnish himself with the two instruments that always lay to the hand of the practical geometer – hitherto only the architect or master-mason and the surveyor – namely, the ruler and pair of dividers or compasses.”39 The compass in both cases allowed scaled translations between actual material conditions and their representations: from stone to template, from landform or sea to map.40 However, Alberti did not simply copy the techniques used to create portolan charts but appropriated the way they were used. The mapping in Descriptio 65
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Alberti’s horizon and radius. From Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (1969)
Urbis Romae was performed using a “horizon,” an instrument of Alberti’s design consisting of a flat, circular disk marked along its edge with forty-eight primary degrees (gradus) and three more marks (minuta) between each degree, with a similarly marked rotating radial arm on top that also served as sight guide. He set the horizon atop the Capitoline hill, oriented it north, and sighted the city walls, the river’s course, and architectural elements such as churches and civic buildings. After noting the position of each object relative to the horizon, their distances were most likely walked off and scaled to the radial arm. It is, in fact, a process similar to that of the mariner’s traverse board, a navigational aid developed by sixteenth-century English pilots. Drawing on compass and chart techniques learned from the Italians, the English sailors would peg the wind-rose board with the wind followed over the previous half-hour, with the temporal regularity performing the standardizing function of Alberti’s minutes. Similar though the two techniques appear, there are substantial differences. Alberti’s great advantage over the navigator was the benefit of a stable, central position to perform his sightings, which allowed him to confidently establish many peripheral positions/courses from a single spot. Furthermore, Alberti directly sighted his peripheral places from atop the Capitoline hill, whereas the portolan existed precisely because points of departure and arrival were not mutually observable. Thus, the scope of the portolanos, although certainly not on the order of a mappa 66
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mundi, was broad, with even the smaller maps operating on a regional level. One may instead want to consider the Descriptio’s relation to the portolan to be a second-order relation. The isolario, or island atlas, was a nautically derived map form whose scope and surveying process closely matched Alberti’s. Like the portolan, it was an Italian innovation. While there is some evidence that such books were in fact taken to sea, the isolario’s origins lie as much in quattrocento humanism’s renewed fascination with Greek culture as in the functions of late-medieval navigation. In 1420 Cristoforo Buondelmonti finished the manuscript and maps for the first of such works, Liber Insularum Archipelagi, which combined geographical and historical descriptions of Aegean islands in Latin prose with maps of each island. In the 1480s, Bartolomeo dalli Sonnetti produced the first printed isolario, rendering Buondelmonti’s prose descriptions in his own Italian verse, along with a woodcut chart for each island. Sonnetti reveals his mapping procedure in the preface to his work, claiming that he will “demonstrate with true effect how I have searched the Aegean sea, and how with compass to the wind, I have stepped repeatedly upon each isle, its ports and bays, its rocks both bare and filled with growth, and with a stylus marked their true position on the chart.” True to his stated method, compass roses are inscribed under and around each island’s coastal outline.41 However such maps could easily have been taken from high ground without instrumentation, and indeed they exhibit the sort of conventionalized outlinework that Alberti’s Descriptio, with its strict coordinate system, consciously seems to avoid. So then why did Alberti insist on such strict mathematization? He was fascinated by the aesthetic qualities of highly geometrized cartography, referring to such maps, in a passage later excised from Musca, as “beautifully depicted in triangles, rectangles, hexagons, with intersecting parallels drawn perpendicular to one another.”42 To give the reader a better sense of the possibilities of Alberti’s cartographic procedures, the mapping exercises he put forth in his Ludi Rerum Mathematicarum offer related interests within a different mathematical and authorial context.43 Sighting again through the horizon, he noted the positions of various objects in the landscape. As in the Descriptio’s exercise, this allowed one line of position to be drawn from the initial observation point to the points observed. However, the sightings described in the Ludi are performed with a plumb line rather than a radius and sightings were taken 67
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through the plumb line, for rather than simply walking off the distances to fix final positions, the surveyor is now instructed to “go to a place which has been seen from the first one and place your instrument flat and in such a position that it lies on the line of that same number through which you first saw it on your instrument. That is, place it so that a ship which had to navigate from the first to the second place could go along the same wind-line.”44 Alberti then sights back not only to the first point, but through to one of the other peripheral points, thus effecting for that point two lines of position. In a second exercise, Alberti establishes a baseline by taking careful measurement of the distance between the first two points. Following the angular determinations from each of these two points to the third, he could determine their distances by simple trigonometry. Triangulation’s “promise of perfection” is predicated on the fact that each position is mathematically dependent on other geographical phenomena for its positioning.45 However, these methods of triangulation, which Gadol describes as principles “long familiar to navigation and nautical surveying”46 and which Alberti himself appears to acknowledge, were nothing of the sort. Triangulation of a ship’s position against a coastline was not possible until the development of mathematically precise coastal maps, which did not occur with any regularity or success until well into the eighteenth century.47 Within the circumscribed world of Mediterranean navigation, the medieval navigators’ familiarity with coastal elevations would have rendered such techniques superfluous. Alberti, it seems, was addressing prospective applications as well as practical realities, and thus, although not given over to Cusanus’s intensive manner of geometrical conjecture, Ludi Rerum Mathematicarum can be seen to open onto a similarly expanded field of meaning. Indeed, the very title of the work evidences this notion. The mathematics of proportional triangles was neither new nor terribly complicated, even by fifteenth-century standards, and this is perhaps the reason he titled these exercises ludi (games). The book’s purpose, however, was not trivial, as Alberti originally sent the work to Meliaduso d’Este, brother of his late friend Leonello, then on monastic retreat for training in the administration of abbeys. Alberti urged the young cleric to both “contemplate and put into practice” the principles contained therein.48 Such instructions are consonant with Renaissance neoplatonism’s interest in serio ludere, or serious games. Cusanus, for whom games were primarily an ethical 68
Distance measurement. From Abel Foullon, Descrittione et uso dell’Holometro (1564)
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endeavour, states concerning his own De Ludo Globi (The Game of Spheres, 1460), “In fact some branches of knowledge have their instruments and games; arithmetic has its number games, music its monochord – nor is the game of chess or checkers lacking in the mystery of moral things. Indeed I do think that no honest game is entirely lacking in the capacity to instruct.”49 Hugh of St Victor’s twelfth-century treatise Practica Geometriae posited two realms of geometrical operation: “The entire discipline of geometry is either theoretical, that is, speculative, or practical, that is active.”50 Alberti’s work contains problems typically found in the practical treatises, such as taking measurements across rivers or of tower heights, but he playfully disrupts such distinctions by hinting at another, contemplative dimension. That Alberti intended his geometry to be the subject of contemplation in the rigorous manner of Cusanus is doubtful. Nevertheless, by setting out his cartographic method within the contemplatively charged rhetoric of games, Alberti acknowledged that navigational practices and instruments presented, beyond pragmatic chartings, an opportunity to contemplate a different sense of place, one informed by the relations between bodies occupying a mobile, rather than a static, place. After the initial sightings, the starting position was no longer of primary concern, as it became only one of many points that might prove useful in determining further positions. Thus, in proceeding from point to point, Alberti’s mapping technique made operational Cusanus’s maxim – the centre could, indeed, be anywhere – a notion that itself arose from at-sea experience. And, as in the navigational geometry that defined such experience, each potential centre and the person occupying it were relationally determined. raising ships Aquatic situations have so far been seen to offer both destabilizing and stabilizing possibilities for Alberti’s understanding of architectural bodies; if the material problematics of water frustrate his attempts at constructing place, the geometries of the sea offer better opportunities. It is widely known that Alberti considered architecture an ethical project; what is it that allowed him to think so? What were the conditions within which the relational space of ethics was achieved? And what role did architecture play in establishing this place? 70
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In the book of Proverbs, a wise man measures the limits of his mind against the perplexing motions of creation: “Four [things] I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a girl” (Prov. 30:18–19). How does the constructed, architectural body of the ship and its navigations figure in this catalogue of natural motions? A tentative answer is suggested by the movements of the text itself, which are twofold. First, particular motions are effected within and conditioned by spatial relations; the eagle’s motion takes place within the sky, the snake’s on the rock, and so on. Second, as the passage moves forward, these relations map out a spectrum of generative reciprocities defined at one end by the material instinct of the animal world and by the erotic motions of humanity at the other. Occurring at the limits of these, the ship occupies a unique position in the order of creation, as the possibility of its navigation (its “way”) is derived from both the basic material contingencies of water and the (re)productive powers of humanity. Neither self-activated nor solely manipulated from the outside, through its ambiguous motions the ship is revealed as the architectural collation of matter, reason, and desire. Alberti brings these concerns together in his Intercenales (c. 1430–40), where a consideration of the ethical status of construction appears in the short maritime allegory “Fatum et Fortuna.” The allegory opens with Alberti up late at his desk, studying the ancients’ notions of fate. Feeling dissatisfied with their remarks, he dozes off and falls into a dream, whereupon he arrives in a dreamworld atop an impassably steep and rocky mountain populated by countless shades. At its base he observes a turbulent river “which flowed into itself,” into which the shades descend by a narrow pass. Upon entering the river, the shades take the form of children, gradually progressing toward old age as they make their way to the opposite shore, only to become shades again when it is reached. Alberti asks a shade the river’s name and is told it is Bios, or “in Latin, the river is called Life (Vita) and the age of mortals, and its bank is called Death (Mors).” The shade then instructs Alberti in the various manners of crossing the river, each with an allegorical association. Larger ships are empires and are especially prone to difficulty: “They are dashed amid the rocks by buffeting waves, and often capsize, so that even the most skilled and seasoned are scarcely able to swim through the wreckage and the throng of 71
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Isidorean T-O map (1472). British Library
endangered shades.” However, with a worthy helmsman/ruler and diligent practice of virtue among the crew, such manner of navigation is of benefit. More praiseworthy are those shades who “from the beginning rely on their own strength in swimming to complete their passage through Life.” Most fortunate of all are those who help others in their crossings by constructing for them the planks on which are inscribed names of the liberal arts. With wings and winged sandals they walk godlike across the waves, removed from the tumult of the sea below. Second to them are those whose wings and sandals are not perfect and who thus do not fully escape the water, but who have expanded and brought about new planks with fragments salvaged from the many unfortunate wrecks. Alberti closes the allegory with the wish that some day he too will achieve the fame given the worthiest of shades. Alberti’s description of the dreamscape presents a figure well known to the cartographers of his day. Up through the fifteenth century, ancient representations of the world as a relatively flat, rounded body surrounded by an encircling ocean survived in t-o maps.51 The name refers to the map’s representational conventions: a circular earth of three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe, one for each of Noah’s three sons, sep72
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arated by the t of three great rivers flowing into a surrounding ocean.52 For Alberti, such overtly symbolic conventions as the t-o map presents had given way to a more mathematically rigorous mapping system. But the traditional figure remained for him a significant literary device and contemplative figure. The encircling ocean in such representations lies at the edge of the earth. It is such a liminal position between the earthly and heavenly realms that contemplative activity seeks. Raphael Patai has given direct evidence of Hebrew borrowings of Greek marine/architectural terminology. Some are as inconsequential as the word for “bilge water,” but among them is the Talmudic appropriation of the Greek Okeanos as Oqyanos, the “green line that surrounds the whole earth,”53 a definition that corresponds to the Greek concept of a watery circumference to the world.54 But the shoreline, the terminal point of the sea, is especially appropriate. The sea shifts with waves and tides, with storms and seasons, its surges and recessions are observable, its tides somewhat predictable,55 but its boundlessness frustrates precise measuring. This resistance to measure defines the lifespan of Alberti’s shades when made human by the vivifying waters and underscores both the inevitability and indeterminacy of mortality. Alberti’s interest in shipwrecks and shipbuilding was more than metaphorical. In 1446 he supervised the attempt to raise an ancient Roman ship from the bottom of Lake Nemi, south of Rome.56 In choosing Alberti for the task, Cardinal Prospero Colonna praised him in suitably humanist terms as “an excellent geometer and the author of very fine books on the art of building.”57 Alberti’s solution was to use empty casks strung across the lake as a floating base for a series of hoists and winches that imported Genoan divers attached to the submerged wreckage with ropes and large iron hooks. Although in the end only a small part of the wreckage was raised, the project garnered Alberti much acclaim.58 Information obtained in the endeavour regarding the construction of ancient ships appears in book 5 of De Re Aedificatoria, but in a cursory manner. Alberti instead refers readers to his more extensive treatment of shipbuilding in his treatise De Navis (c. 1446), a short work, now lost, which was to be appended to an early edition of the book (prologue, 6).59 A second book pertaining to the operation, De Motibus Ponderis, ostensibly treating the mechanical principles of weights learned during the operation, has also been lost. In the Vitruvian tradition, nautical 73
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motion results from the application of mechanical force, with the action of the wind on a sail and a pilot on the rudder described by the principles of the fulcrum.60 The glimpse of De Navis that Alberti provides focuses on naval applications of military technology and corresponds to the general consideration of military camps in book 5. But he does provide an outline of shipbuilding theory, in which he extends his physiognomic metaphor of construction, noting, “In building a ship, the ancients would use the lineaments of a fish; so that its back became the hull, its head the prow; the rudder would serve as it tail, the oars as its gills and fins” (5.12.136). For Alberti, the Old Testament mystery of a ship’s vivification is explicitly mathematized according to a set of ideal proportions: length-to-breadth ratio of a cargo ship, 3:1; of a clipper, 9:1; height of mast to ship length for all ships, 1:1. If these lineaments were laid out correctly, with the proper flaring and tapering from bow to stern, the ship would indeed be fish-like, moving through the waters “as if of its own accord” (5.12.137). Alberti previously dismissed the idea of a connection between humanity and the sea precisely because the sea presented itself as an entity of disordered motion. Now, the proportionally derived ship establishes the possibility of humanity’s inhabitation. These ratios of the ship, then, like those of Cusanus’s map, offer an alternative response to the violent character of Alberti’s static aquatic constructions. But if Alberti’s body presented no inherent connection between himself and the sea, it does not present such a connection with other such bodies either. Such relationships are established only through the products of constructive endeavour. His is not yet an ethics of intimacy with those around him; it is an investigation of the mediated condition of intersubjective encounters. If the sea is an especially propitious place for ethical inquiry, it is the objects manufactured for, and sometimes against, this setting that allow such inquiry to occur. But at the core of each of these is the larger question of the ethical function of architecture in the early Renaissance. conclusion Architects and theoreticians have recently expressed a fascination with the sea. Case in point: Jeffrey Kipnis, who has declared himself “obsessed by a spatial sensibility that geometry in and of itself is inadequate to 74
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engender … the geometry of the vast, hushed, viscous, deep space of the ocean,” an obsession he believes pervades architectural discourse.61 Those given to this sub-marine sensibility seek to engender new modes of architectural behaviour by opposing lingering essentialist, realist, and determinist strains in architecture (associated with Euclidean geometries) with a structural metaphorics of fluidity that draws upon recent Continental philosophy, especially the work of Gilles Deleuze. This paper has been concerned less with Deleuzian thought per se than with his observation that the geometries of the sea (“smooth spaces”) and those of the built environment (“striated spaces”) exist within each other, become each other, and do so in a complex series of interactions between subjects and architectural objects that, despite attempts at generalization, always occur as historically specific, embodied events. These events, when given over to reflection, do not lose the traces of their respective geometries, but rather become inscribed in new ways, in thinking, in writing, and, possibly, in building and mapping.62 The possibilities and frustrations of aquatic place in the early Renaissance promote a way of thinking and acting that recognizes the world’s surfeit of meaning, approaching it not as an ineffability or an insurmountable obstacle to understanding but rather as an opening for places, built, written, or otherwise, in which shifting horizons of experience are acknowledged and vigorously explored. notes 1 Eugene T. Gendlin, “Nonlogical Moves and Nature Metaphors,” Analecta Husserliana 19 (1985): 383–94. 2 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge: mit Press 1988). Further notes will be given in the text. Descriptio Urbis Romae, ed. and Italian trans. Giovanni Orlandi, in Convegno internazionale indetto nel V Centenario di Leon Battista Alberti, Roma-Mantova-Firenze, 25–29 aprile 1972 (Rome: Accademia Nazional dei Lincei 1974): 129–37; Ludi Rerum Mathematicarum, ed. Cecil Grayson, in Opere volgari di Leon Battista Alberti, vol. 3 (Bari: Laterza & Figli 1973); “Fate and Fortune,” in Dinner Pieces, trans. David Marsh (Binghampton, ny: The Renaissance Society of America 1987), 23–27. 3 On the fountain, see Charles Burroughs, “Alberti e Roma,” in Leon Battista 75
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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13
14
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16 17 18
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Alberti, ed. Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel (Milan: Electa 1994), 134–57. Alberti describes the bridge in dra 8.6.262. Renee Watkins, “L.B. Alberti in the Mirror: An Interpretation of the Vita with a New Translation,” Italian Quarterly 30 (1989): 5–30. Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999). See Rowland’s introduction to Ten Books on Architecture, 5–6n41. Ibid., 8, preface, 96. Ibid.; also 2.2.35. G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), 76–99. Ten Books on Architecture, 8, preface, 96; Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 91. Ten Books on Architecture, 9.8.116–18, on water clocks; and 10.3.122–9.128, on drums, wheels, screws, pumps, organs, and an odometer. Aristotle Physics 3.5:205a30–35. Translations from Aristotle’s Physics Books III and IV, trans. Edward Hussey (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983). See W.G.L. Randles, “The Evaluation of Columbus’ ‘India’ Project by Portuguese and Spanish Cartographers in the Light of the Geographic Science of the Time,” in The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed, ed. Ursula Lamb (Aldershot, England: Variorum 1995), 12–26. The history of this development is treated extensively in Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1957); also, Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1986). Important in this regard is Mark Jarzombek, On Leon Battista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories (Cambridge: mit Press 1989). Jarzombek traces Alberti’s use of medieval theological sources to argue his relation to mystical humanism. W.E. Knowles Middleton, A History of the Theories of Rain (London: Oldbourne 1965), 9–10. Vitruvius, De architectura 8.23.98–103. In Profugiorum ab Aerumna (c. 1442), a temple’s roof symbolizes virtue’s battle against vice. For a discussion of this work, see Christine Smith, Architecture and the Culture of Early Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press 1992), 3–18. The splitting of the Red Sea is recounted in similarly militaristic terms
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24 25
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(Exod. 14:22–15:18). See Thomas B. Dozeman, God at War: Power in the Exodus Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press 1996), 158–9. Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 1112a18ff. On the role of deliberation in the development of Western thought, see A.C. Crombie, “Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities,” in The Rational Arts of Living, ed. A.C. Crombie and Nancy Siraisi (Northampton, ma: Smith College Studies in History 1987), 53–101. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986), 302–3. Facsimile reproduction in Waters, Rutters of the Sea. Thales of Miletus is reputed to have identified the Little Bear constellation, in which the pole star is located, in the sixth century bc. See Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 86–7. Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1969), 168–95. John Pinto sees the medieval nautical chart as a precursor to Alberti’s “ichnographic” map but defers the analysis of such connections to Gadol, “The Renaissance City Image,” in The Rational Arts of Living, ed. Crombie and Siraisi, 205–54. For Robin Evans, such maps as Alberti’s are symptomatic of a change in geometry’s function from formal generation toward description, in The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries (Cambridge: mit Press 1995), 44–6. Liane Lefaivre is more speculative in likening the Descriptio’s map to both nautical charts and the Hynerotomachia’s island map of Cythera, in Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Cambridge: mit Press 1997), 126–31. Most closely aligned with Gadol is Robert Tavernor, who praises the maps for their accuracy and laments the continued use of “impressionistic” and “sensational” maps such as the Mirabilis Romae Urbis, in On Alberti and the Art of Building (New Haven: Yale University Press 1998), 13–18. Michel Destombes calls Cusa “une grande influence pour la promotion des études géographiques et astronomiques en Italie et dans le Sud de l’Allemagne.” His astronomical instruments are extant in his library in Kues. See “La diffusion des instruments scientifiques au haut moyen age au xve siécle,” in Marcel Destombes: Selected Contributions to the History of Cartography and Scientific Instruments, ed. Günter Schilder, Peter van der Krogt, and Steven de Clercq (Utrecht: hes Publishers 1987), 242. On the controversial history of the map, see Dana Bennett Durand, The 77
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28
29
30
31
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Vienna-Klosternburg Map Corpus (Leiden: E.J. Brill 1952), 252–66; and more recently, Tony Campbell, The Earliest Printed Maps, 1472–1500 (London: British Library 1987), 35–55. Campbell notes the similarity between Baltic coastal outlines on nautical charts and those on Cusanus’s map. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, trans. Ewert Cousins in Bonaventure (New York: Paulist Press 1978), 69: “It should be noted that this world, which is called the macrocosm, enters our soul, which is called the smaller world, through the doors of the five senses as we perceive, enjoy and judge sensible things.” Nicholas of Cusa, Compendium, trans. Jasper Hopkins in Nicholas of Cusa on Wisdom and Knowledge (Minneapolis, mn: Arthur J. Banning Press 1996), 409–11. I have amended Hopkins’s translations to retain the original cosmographicus where he has it as “geographer.” For Pauline Moffitt Watts, Cusanus’s homo cosmographicus marks a profound shift in Christianity’s notion of spiritual journey, from that of the pilgrim (viator) to the hunter (venator). See her “From the Desert to the New World: The Viator, the Venator, and the Age of Discoveries,” Renaissance Studies in Honor of Craig Hugh Smith, vol. 1, ed. A. Morrogh et al. (Florence: Giunti Barbèra 1985), 519–30. Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia, trans. H. Lawrence Bond, in Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings (New York: Paulist Press 1997), Dedicatory Epistle, 206. Emphasis added. Further references are given in the text. On the circumstances surrounding Cusanus’s voyage, see H. Lawrence Bond, “Nicholas of Cusa from Constantinople to ‘Learned Ignorance’: The Historical Matrix for the Formation of the De Docta Ignorantia,” in Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: E.J. Brill 1996), 135–43. For Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle the experience of place in Cusanus’s illuminative event is an example of epideictic rhetoric: “Place may be a geographical fact. It is also a rhetorical topic,” and “the reference, even if fundamentally literal, is more significantly symbolic.” See her “Cusanus At Sea: The Topicality of Illuminative Discourse,” Journal of Religion 71 (1991): 180–201. That Cusanus’s illuminative event may be significant as a fundamentally geographical and literally embodied experience of place is precisely what I intend to address. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance, trans. H. Lawrence Bond, in
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33 34 35 36
37
38 39 40 41
42
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Nicholas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings (New York: Paulist Press 1997), 2.12.160–1. Physics 5.5: 212a31–35. Trans. Edward Hussey in Aristotle’s Physics, Books III and IV (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983). Ibid., 4.4: 211a1–10; also, 212a21–5. Ibid., 4.4: 212a14–20. P.D.A. Harvey, “Local and Regional Cartography in Medieval Europe,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 1, ed. J.B. Harvey and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1987), 495. The process of attaining the desired course from a deviation was called “resolving the traverse” and required the use of two trigonometric tables. The operation is described in Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 117–21. P.D.A. Harvey, Medieval Maps (London: British Library 1991), 39–49. Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 111. Marco Frascari, “The Compass and the Crafty Art of Architecture,” Modulus 22 (1993): 3–15. For a general history, see Cartographical Innovations: An International Handbook of Mapping Terms to 1900, ed. Helen M. Wallis and Arthur H. Robinson (St Albans: Map Collector Publications 1982), 320–3. On Buondelmonti, see Hillary Louise Turner, “Christopher Buondelmonti and the Isolario,” Terrae Incognitae 19 (1987): 11–28. There is a reprint of Sonnetti’s Isolario, intro. Frederick Goff (Venice, 1485; Amsterdam: Theatris Orbis Terrarum 1972). Frank Lestringant sees sixteenth-century French interest in the “singularities” of the island as part of the development of a scientific world view, in “Fortunes de singularité à la Renaissance: Le genre de l’‘Isolario’,” in Écrire la monde à la Renaissance (Caen: Paradigme 1993), 17–48. Quoted in Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Texts and Renaissance Readers (Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan Press 1997) 66n47. Opere volgari 3, 163–9. Ibid., 164: “Fatto questo, andrete altrove in luogo pur simile e veduto de questo primo, e porrete il vostro instrumento, e statuiretelo che proprio stia sulla linea medesima di quel numero per quale voi prima lo vedesti al diritto sul vostro instrumento, cioè che se da quella torre prima sino a qui una nave avesse a navicare, verrebbe per quel medesimo vento segnato.” Translation by Gadol, Alberti: Universal Man, 175.
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45 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1997), 16–25. 46 Gadol, Alberti: Universal Man, 175. 47 Paul Carter, “Dark with Excess of Bright: Mapping the Coastlines of Knowledge,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion 1999), 125–47. See also E.G.R. Taylor, The Geometrical Seaman (London: Hollis & Carter 1962), 85–6. 48 Gadol, Alberti, 168. The translation is hers. 49 Nicholas of Cusa, De ludo globi, trans. Pauline Moffitt Watts (New York: Abaris Books 1986), 55. On serio ludere, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W.W. Norton 1958), 222, 236. 50 Cited by Shelby, “Geometrical Knowledge,” 395–421. 51 On Anaximander, see Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 104–5. See also Indra Kagis McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1993), 25–32. 52 Leonardo Dati coined the term “t-o map” in 1422 in his widely distributed book of geographical lore, Della sphera. 53 Raphael Patai, The Children of Noah (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1998), 112. 54 On okeanos, see Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 10–17. 55 Tidal charts are known from the fifteenth century on. 56 The ships are now thought to have been extravagant pleasure barges built by the emperor Caligula (37–41 ad), but evidence at the time pointed elsewhere, as lead pipes found with the wreckage were inscribed with the name of his precursor, Tiberius (14–37 ad). Even then, Alberti attributed construction to the later emperor Trajan (91–118 ad) at 5.12.136, presumably because his reign’s extensive building program created a more palatable association for Alberti’s patron than either of the earlier, infamous emperors. Many of the details of the raising and additional information regarding the lake and its environs are found in Pope Pius II’s commentaries, in Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope, trans. Florence A. Gregg, ed. Leona C. Gabel (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons 1959), 16–19. See also Gustina Scaglia, “Alberti e la meccanina della tecnologia descritta nel ‘De Re Aedificatoria’ e nei ‘Ludi matematici’,” in Leon Battista Alberti, ed. Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel (Milan: Electa 1994), 316–29. 80
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57 Girolamo Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti (Florence: G.C. Sansoni 1882), 314; passage translation from Franco Borsi, Leon Battista Alberti: The Complete Works, trans. Rudolf G. Carpanini (New York: Rizzoli 1989), 27. 58 Further archeological attempts at Lake Nemi met with similarly dubious results. In the 1930s, Italian engineers extracted the remains of Caligula’s two pleasure barges by draining the lake. The recovered hulls, although missing their superstructure, were on display in a lakeside museum until destroyed in a skirmish with retreating German forces in 1944. See Lionel Casson, Ships and Seafaring in Ancient Times (Austin, tx: University of Texas Press 1994), 137–40. Alberti’s description of the ships’ materials and construction techniques matches that given by Casson. 59 For a brief discussion of the history of this lost work, see Gadol, Alberti: Universal Man, 204n78, and more fully in Franco Borsi, Alberti: The Complete Works, 213–15. 60 Ten Books on Architecture, 10.3.123. 61 Jeffrey Kipnis, “(Architecture) after Geometry – An Anthology of Mysteries,” Architectural Design 67, nos. 5–6 (May–June 1997): 42–7. 62 “What distinguishes the two kinds of voyages is neither a measurable quantity of movement nor something that would be only in the mind, but the mode of spatialization, the manner of being in space, of being for space. Voyage smoothly or in striation, and think in the same way … But there are always passages from one to the other, transformations of one within the other, reversals” (emphasis added). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press 1987), 482.
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The Rediscovery of the Hinterland Marc Glaudemans
Chora
The Rediscovery of the Hinterland
La photo accoutuma les yeux à attendre ce qu’ils doivent voir, et donc à le voir; et elle les instruisit à ne pas voir ce qui n’existe pas, et qu’ils voyaient fort bien avant elle. Paul Valéry1 It’s a misty autumn day, and the scenery is lost in fog. Later in the morning the fog disappears and it slowly becomes possible to perceive the world around as the silhouettes of trees and houses appear. Around noon, the sun finally breaks through, the clouds drift apart, and the horizon widens into the distant line that unites all things in a grand coherence: the world has become a landscape. Ton Lemaire2
with the above quotation the Dutch philosopher Ton Lemaire started his essay “The Appearance of Landscape,” which describes the evolution of a neutral space into a meaningful landscape. Apparently “landscape” is not an a priori category; it has to emerge from the disordered elements of the world. This arrangement of things into a new, coherent order called landscape follows not only the rhythms of the day or the seasons but also the course of every human life.3 Consequently, the epiphany of landscape should be understood as a process that is largely mental, not only for every individual but also for the collective culture.4 Every culture has to become familiar with its landscape and even with the category of landscape itself. However, the awakening to this new phenomenon often occurs at the moment of its supreme disappearance, when it loses its autonomy and becomes integrated into the urban space of the city. To recognize and to understand this process is the main issue of this essay. Lemaire’s fundamental argument about the appearance of the landscape invokes phenomenology: What is the meaning of landscape and nature? What do time, space, and experience signify with regard to landscape? In this context, what is the significance of the historical dimension of our landscapes? Phenomenology, derived from the Greek phainomai (appearing), seeks the essence of things, their being. Whatever this essence may be, much can be learned from the etymology of the words, from how things are given names in language. The first part of this essay is an etymological enquiry. All of the terms mentioned in this 84
Jakob van Ruysdael, View of Haarlem (1628–82). Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 62 cm. Mauritshuis,The Hague
brief introduction are historically and culturally defined constructions. They do not possess the neutral objectivity, the mathematical precision, that modern science demands of its concepts and terms. Few terms have been more manipulated or more widely defined than “landscape” and “nature,” but also “city” and “culture.” Before these various terms can be defined in relation to one another, it is important to stress that their “differences” are mental in the first place. This was evident in the Lemaire quotation: the world became a landscape to the spectator, the observing individual. The architectural theorist Mark Wigley pursues this mental aspect of perception: “A building,” he states, “can no longer be separated from the gaze that appears to be directed at it. Before having a certain look, the building is a certain way of looking.”5 This is an important observation. Moreover, we may substitute other terms for the term “building.” Using almost the same words, Simon Schama was able to describe the perception of landscape: “Before landscape can ever be a repose for the senses, it is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.”6 85
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Landscape, consequently, has become a cultural phenomenon, a mental construction. In the introduction to his book Landscape and Memory, Schama illustrates this statement with an example from the visual arts. He quotes a passage from a lecture by the Belgian artist René Magritte, in which Magritte discusses La condition humaine, a fascinating painting of a painting that has been placed in front of the view that it portrays, so that neither painting nor view are clearly distinguishable. “This is how we see the world,” says Magritte, “We see it as being outside ourselves, even if it is only a mental representation of what we experience on the inside.”7 Schama interprets this statement as an illustration of mental projection. Whatever exists beyond the windowpane of our understanding needs a design before we can discern its form and identity and eventually “enjoy” what we see. Culture, convention, and cognition enable this form to appear on our retina and perhaps to be experienced as beauty. Culture, convention, and cognition: these are the filters that enable the mind to turn the world into a landscape. In this very short overview four similar points of view ascribe a fundamental effect to our perception of things. Seeing is a form of projection, coloured by the observing subject itself. Moreover, this projection not only regards the passive transformations within the mind of the spectator; we should also ascribe a transforming impact to our look: the look itself changes what is being looked upon. This certainly applies to landscape, especially as it is viewed from the city. Lemaire repeates the notion that landscape is an urban view of the world, an engagement of culture and nature. All landscapes are the result of the mutual permeation of man and environment, of nature and culture, he writes, following Oswald Spengler’s observations from his Decline of the West (1918–22).8 An integrated understanding of the phenomena of city and country, nature and culture, could lead to a refined conception that would benefit many of the current issues in architecture and urban design. This understanding would imply, in the first place, that we regard the city in its territorial appearance. The word “territory” refers to landscape in two ways: as it appears to us in reality and as it is imagined by the mind. The term is introduced because it is a basic concept in the disciplines of architecture, urban design, and building. To mark the ground is one of the most fundamental acts of architecture. It is precisely what transforms a piece of land into a territory (from terre and terra; soil, earth). 86
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René Magritte, La Condition Humaine (1934). Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. Private collection
Architecture and urban design are essentially territorial, and the city, as their communal product and project, could be understood as landscape, territory.9 The question, of course, is what we would gain from this perspective. It is certainly not meant to deny the difference between city and country but to understand this difference in light of their resemblance. To attain this goal, several concepts and terms have to be redefined, anticipating the understanding of the city as territory. To return to phenomenology, its modern founder, Edmund Husserl, stated that each term and each system derives its meaning from two dimensions: the formal dimension, corresponding to the structure or the form of the system itself, and the transcendental dimension, the reference of each element to the reality of what Husserl called the Lebenswelt.10 In architecture one of these dimensions often remains absent. Architecture is then either reduced to a purely formal exercise without the symbolic (in Husserl’s terms, “intentional”) content that 87
F. de Wit, Map of Amsterdam (1482).The bailiff walked the dotted route (added by the author) three times without interruption, then twice, divided into four pieces spread out over four days. Gemeentearchief Amsterdam
used to be its very essence, or it becomes an impenetrable metaphysical or philosophical argument, devoid of the praxis of an applied science.11 I would propose a phenomenological approach that studies the dual phenomenon of city and country with regard to both dimensions: the formal and the transcendental. The main question here concerns the difference between understanding the city as a “territory-city” and maintaining the traditional image of the city. To begin to answer these questions, a few detours will contribute to a phenomenology of the city, each from a different point of view. the idea of the city: the etymology of the greek P O L I S and the concept of territory-city To consider the idea of the city, I shall first revert to the (alleged) origin of the phenomenon, how the city revealed itself both in language and in reality. The Western idea of the city is often derived from the Greek 88
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polis, the political community that originated during the eighth century bc. Although cities existed before that time, the Greek polis introduced the notion of a contrast between city and country, between culture and nature. On the Greek mainland this contrast had not been clearly evident before the eighth century. The nomadic communities had been part of their natural environment; they didn’t profoundly change the landscape that provided them with their means of life. The contrast appeared with the genesis of the sedentary space of the city, and it has dominated thinking and doing up to the present.12 Historically, the relation of city and landscape has always been problematic: each has been understood as the other’s antagonist. This is even evident in etymology: the English word “country” is derived from the Latin contra, meaning “opposition.”13 There is, however, an older, perhaps more fundamental, reading of city and country in which this contrast is not an issue, at least not in such a dialectical manner. This reading originated not in the discipline of “urban design,” which dates only from the nineteenth century, but in the fundamental and often religiously based act of grounding a city. In two recently published studies this understanding of the city has been explicated.14 In Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek CityState, François de Polignac states that the phenomenon of the Greek polis is not convertible to the traditional modernist concept of “city.” The significance of the polis was more general and rather vague, like our notion of “site” or “place.” In ancient Greece it referred to the “space” for the politeia, the civil society. This immaterial space was symbolized by material, spatial objects, such as statues and sanctuaries. This is de Polignac’s main thesis. The polis could be conceived as a new type of space, the (religiously based) territory of the city. The genesis of such a territory was associated with a change in the execution of rituals. In the eighth century these rituals began to be performed in a well-defined, permanent place. The undefined space of the former landscape – the landscape of the Iliad and The Odyssey – was becoming organized to distinguish sacred and profane places. This “territory” – a term used explicitly by de Polignac – was clearly different from the untouched nature outside the polis. Still, it was much more extended than the innercity itself, the Greek asty. This city-territory was defined by three zones, each with a different kind of sanctuary. De Polignac distinguishes the urban (within the innercity itself), the suburban (asty-geiton, just outside the inner-city borders), 89
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and the extra-urban territory, in Greek, chora, some six to twelve kilometres outside the city.15 The extra-urban sanctuaries served as both signposts and frontier-guards. They signified the space of human presence in general and the city’s own territory in particular. The fact that these two zones were identical indicates an inseparable unity between the city and its hinterland, its territory. Rilke poetically clarifies this notion of the city-territory in an essay called Über die Landschaft (On Landscape): “That was the landscape in which one lived. But strange was the mountain, where the gods roamed, of inhuman identity, the headland, without a statue to be seen from afar, the abysses, never even discovered by a herdsman. They were unworthy of words, an empty stage, until man intervened and filled the decor with pleasure or tragedy. Wherever man appeared, all things stepped aside to provide mankind with the space it needed.”16 Insofar as these sentences need any explanation, the “statue to be seen from afar” signifies the extra-urban sanctuary that was often dedicated to the city’s most important hero. From the elevated viewpoint of the acropolis, the distant sanctuaries and statues often could just be seen, making the entire space of the city perceptible and clearly differentiating it from the wild and unspoiled space of nature beyond the polis. De Polignac argues that the Greek polis is to be regarded as a polycentric city. The term polis used to refer only to the acropolis, but from the eighth century onward it referred to the city as a whole. This is important. The architectural theorist Indra Kagis McEwen draws from de Polignac’s argument that the city used to be understood (before Aristotle) as a territory. She concentrates mainly on the importance of religious and cultural acts for activating the space of the polis and emphasizes that this territory was to appear by a permanent “re-making” or “re-weaving” of its surface.17 This is where the term “epiphany” – in Greek, epiphaneia – returns to our argument, in its double significance as both “appearing” and “appearance,” surface. This process of “making visible” was part of the mental understanding of the city. The religious and cultural space of the polis could continue to exist only if its residents regularly re-confirmed or re-generated it (from the Greek genesis, meaning birth or origination). This was done through regular acts of agriculture, but also by visiting the widespread sanctuaries and executing the appropriate rituals. Determining the right spot, building the sanctuary, and visiting it to execute 90
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rituals was a means of “letting appear” (in Greek techne), which is subsequently related to the Greek word for “creating,” poiesis.18 To create, to make, was understood as a “letting appear” that could make something visible. This “something” is to be understood as a certain “order,” as we shall soon see. Plato defined the term poiesis in his Symposium: “the cause of everything that arises from the non-being into being is creation, poiesis.”19 For Plato, this order is made visible not only by the creative action of the artist or the expert; the making of anything generates a certain order, makes this order visible (Heidegger speaks of Her-vorbringen). By creating a city, it is the order – the kosmos – of the polis that is being made visible.20 Although these etymological readings may seem rather hard to grasp, it is clear that the Greek “city” was understood as a concept rather than a material object, a formal appearance, or a concrete site (the topos). This abstract concept was personified by the eternal fire of the city’s gods. Remember the legend of Aeneas, who carried with him the fire and the “soul” of Troy: Considere Teucos Errantesque Deos agitataque numina Trojae. The city and the gods are with Aeneas; they cross the seas, and seek a country where it is permitted them to stop.21 Consequently, it is hardly surprising that, according to the Greek historian Thucydides (460–399 bc), the Athenian commander Nicias told his army that they would be a city wherever they settled, because “men are the city, not the walls and ships without them.”22 From the mother-city – the metropolis – this concept was spread, enabling a new polis to be founded, or better, made to appear. As in the later case of the Romans, a distinction was being made between the city as a collection of architectural objects (urbs) and the city as a “way of life” (civitas).23 Together, they defined the domain of the polis. from the greek P O L I S to renaissance amsterdam: extrapolation of an obsolete theory There is, of course, much more to be said on the subject of the polis and its territorial aspects, but here it has been a detour in support of our main issue, the coherence of city and country. From de Polignac and McEwen we learned that the city always generated a much more extensive space than it covered physically. The city claims a territory by cultivating it, by making maps of it, and by dominating it in a military, economical, 91
Detail of The Renewed Map of North Holland and West-Friesland by Jan van Jagen (1778), after Joost Jansz Beeldsnijder’s map of 1557. Gemeentearchief Amsterdam.The banpalen drew a circle around the city
juridical, and cultural sense. In fact, the city not only claims a territory, it is one. This knowledge is not new, but recently it has received renewed attention, not only in archaeology (de Polignac) but also in architectural history (McEwen). Preceding this new attention, Joseph Rykwert proposed an understanding of the city as a conceptual model, based on a detailed reading of complex cultural, social, and societal processes, as well as a precise study of specific topographic situations.24 For an understanding of these ideas in the light of the territory-city concept, two recent studies of Amsterdam are illuminating.25 In the first, Agnes Schreiner considers the meaning of certain processions, mainly those made by the city’s schout (chief of police), which were governed by a very strict protocol. Schreiner regards these processions as a means to “let appear” – in this case – a juridical “order”: “The procession is an 92
Rembrandt van Rijn, de Obelisk (1650), etching. Amsterdam Historisch Museum
appearing, an appearance, not a phenomenon.”26 It is a way of giving appearance to something that has no appearance of its own. The law, the religion, and the city itself are not substantial objects. As Schreiner writes, “During the procession of the Stedemaagd and as long as it lasted, the city could be experienced.27 Only in the circular movement of the procession we experience the presence of the city. What counted for the city also counted for the law, religion, the fair. They were not; they became during the procession and only as long as it lasted.28 In my opinion, these rituals, which were still being executed during the eighteenth century, were also a manifestation of Heidegger’s Her-vorBringen, the “letting appear” of something, as in techne and poiesis. This is shown even more clearly in the second study, by Anne van Dooren, who reconstructs the juridical territory of Amsterdam in the sixteenth century. Like the chora of the Greek polis, this was an area of some five miles around the city marked by statues placed out in the field, in this case, six so-called banpalen.29 The city was permitted to render justice throughout a certain area, also outside the city-walls. Where the chief of police (the schout) or his servants appeared, “there appeared the city,” as van Dooren emphasizes.30 But even without their personal appearance, the law of the city was indicated by the banpalen, which were placed alongside the major arterial roads. As the map clearly shows, these stone obelisks defined a circle around the city, and as with the polis, there was no clear boundary, such as customs stations: just 93
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The garden of Prince Maurits in The Hague. From Hendrick Hondius, Onderwijsinge in de perspective conste (The Hague, 1623)
signs in the open field. These signs, however, were understood by everybody. In case of a banishment, they indicated the forbidden area, the space of the law. Because of juridical reorganization, these banpalen fell out of use. This is partly why the Rembrandt etching Landscape with Banpaal (1650) has long been regarded as an imaginary landscape. People simply couldn’t imagine this stone obelisk in a typical Dutch landscape.31 The studies of both Schreiner and van Dooren seem to prove that a territory is related to a specific feature of the everyday world, be it religious, juridical, political, or otherwise. The statues of Apollo and Hera in the extra-urban territory of the polis and the banpalen, in the open fields of Amsterdam, both express the essentially territorial character of the city: they are both signs of the city’s space, and in Husserl’s terms, are connected to the Lebenswelt. the analogy in the landscape: the garden as a symbol of an “earthly paradise” As with van Dooren’s study of the juridical territory, it is possible to reconstruct the “leisure-territory” of the city. This emphasis on leisure and pleasure is important because it may illuminate aspects of the landscape in relation to the city. Otium, literally “empty time,” always was an important feature of city life. Farmers often regarded the city mis94
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takenly as a place of endless leisure time,32 but the city’s wealth often was manifested most strongly in the countryside. There are famous examples: Rome had countless suburban villas, described by Pliny (who owned two large villas himself) and Virgil (who glorified country life in his Bucolica and Georgica). Florence, in the fifteenth century, was dominated by the Medicis, who built wonderful villas and gardens overlooking the city. Venice saw a real villeggiatura in the sixteenth century, with Palladio’s villas as a classical masterpiece of architecture. In England, the love of the countryside beautifully coincided with an obsession for classical Italy, resulting in Chamber’s Palladianism and the rise of the Jardin Anglo-Chinois, even though these gardens were inspired more by the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain, Poussin, and Dughet than by the real landscape of the Roman campagna.33 Amsterdam could also be included as a historic example. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, Amsterdam saw the rise of an extensive villa landscape, which has never before been studied from the perspective of a territory-city relationship.34 In this essay I would like to investigate only a few phenomenological implications of such a perspective through a single (but not atypical) example. The main supposition is that the garden or the villa is comparable to a sanctuary or a banpaal, both as a body of knowledge and as a phenomenon of a higher order that represents something else: in this case, the city. Of course, the garden has always been understood as a representation of the landscape, but here the city and landscape are very much connected, both substantially and conceptually. It is well known that “garden” is related (through etymology and history) to paradise. The word “paradise” is derived from the Greek paradeisos, from the Old Persian pairidaeza, which denoted an “enclosed garden.”35 The oldest gardens, including those in the Netherlands up to the eighteenth century, were clearly fenced or even surrounded by a garden-wall. The garden was considered a microcosm, a representation of the supposed order of the universe, and was different from nature, where that order usually was not perceptible. Knowledge manifested in the garden was understood by most learned contemporaries. The baroque garden, with its formal layout, had to be understood – just like the city – as the representation of a specific worldview. A well-known Dutch example is the seventeenth-century Hofwijck, the country-house of Constantijn Huygens, secretary of the stadholder Frederik Hendrik.36 95
Hofwijck, projected upon the Vitruvian body (from the 1547 edition of Martin and Gouljon). Courtesy of Robert Jan van Pelt. First published in Art History 4, no. 2 (June 1981): 150–74
The design of the country-house and its garden represented the architectural theory of Vitruvius, which had been closely studied by Huygens and his friends, the architects Pieter Post and Jacob van Campen. The layout of the garden followed the anthropomorphic principles outlined in Vitruvius’s De architectura. The various parts and characteristics of Huygens’s body guided the composition of the extensive poem Hofwijck (1653). In the layout of the garden the house itself occupied the place of the head, and like the human head it represented reason and thinking and was the site of Huygens’s famous library. The orchard represented the chest and the heart of the Vitruvian body. Whenever Huygens, in his poem, strolled in the garden, he travelled simultaneously through a depiction of himself. “The key to my heart is the same as the key to this garden,” Huygens wrote, indicating that he identified his own body with the universal body in the garden design. Whenever Huygens walked through his own image, which encompassed the universe of his garden, he simultaneously experienced and invoked the supposed universal geo96
New Map of Loenen, C.C. van Bloemswaerdt (1726?), 62 x 92 cm. North is on the right side. Utrechts Archief
metrical order of the universe.37 This simultaneity is not only metaphorical but can be reconstructed in the proportions of the garden layout. When we observe the garden and the poem side by side, it becomes even clearer that both garden and poem describe the body of the aging Huygens. Moreover, they represent a strong humanist morality. One may conclude that this garden is not only an individual work of art but also a major cultural phenomenon that has to be understood in its historical context. When Huygens, for example, uses the image of the human body as a microcosm, this has to be understood within the micro/macrocosm debate of the 1650s. This garden, but also the garden in general, must be understood as part of culture, as one of its representations. This is why Johan Huizinga pleaded in the 1920s for a cultural history of the garden.38 Whenever the worldview – the Weltanschauung – changes, the gardens also change, as is demonstrated convincingly throughout history. The garden as a sign is an essential part of the conceptual model of the city. 97
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pan oramic vista “È dalla finestra del presente che noi osserviamo il passato,” as Benedetto Gravagnuolo wrote in his history of urban design: it is through the windowpane of the present that we observe the past.39 “This is how we see the world,” as Magritte noted, “We see it as being outside ourselves, even if it is only a mental representation of what we experience on the inside.”40 Both observations can be regarded as illustrations of my argument. Trying to describe a phenomenon in language – bringing together les mots et les choses (Michel Foucault) – is itself a cultural activity. Our perceptions of city and landscape are always grounded in culture and, moreover, as Wigley demonstrates, even have an evident impact on the objects themselves. The main hypothesis here is that “landscape” was defined, recognized, and created by the city (understood, as Thucydides did, as its citizens); it is an engagement of culture and nature. This, however, is not a generally accepted perspective. In the history of architecture (but even more so in the history of urban design) the territorial dimension of the city is often underestimated.41 This misunderstanding has led to the present situation, in which the city is both the stage and the perpetrator of a paralyzing dialectical opposition between culture and nature. This opposition is paralyzing because it is unjustly connected to the phenomenon of the city. In the ancient definitions – as discussed in this essay – the city provided a means of reconciliation between culture and nature. Through creative making – from cultural artifacts to the city itself – a strong link was established between the people and their environs. Alberto Pérez-Gómez proposes that this creative act – in Greek, poiesis – was a form of reconciliation between man and the world.42 He also proposes that this was explicit until the end of the Renaissance and remained influential until the eighteenth century. This unity between man and the world, between theory and praxis, number and symbol, subsequently disappeared in favour of a polarization. The lonely wanderer from the Romanticist paintings of Caspar David Friedrich appears against the background of a grand and hostile nature of which humankind is no longer a part. This, then, is the paradox: although scientific development has resulted in a huge expansion of specialized knowledge about the world, we have become more and more estranged from it, while apparently losing the capacity to know nature from within. The 98
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quest for “nature” has been a common nineteenth- and twentiethcentury phenomenon; however, the search has always been in vain. “It is no use to dream of an unspoilt wilderness far away,” as Thoreau wrote at the end of his life, “there is none.”43 After a life of searching in vain, he reached the conclusion that he would not find in the wilderness of Labrador a greater savageness than in the back of beyond Concord. This longed-for savageness was a state of mind, completely dependent on the spectator. This attitude would have been completely out of place before the Cartesian split of the seventeenth century. One didn’t think of nature as an état d’âme, a state of mind, because it was the permanent background of everybody’s life and because it had no absolute value. As we have seen, nature had to be defined, ordered – in other words cultivated – in order to have any significance at all, and this was an assignment for art. Nowadays, when the mutual infiltration of city and landscape is no longer a choice but a fact, this might be a more fertile attitude. The city itself, both as an artifact and as a conceptual model – the two dimensions of Husserl – is a cultural and historical configuration, as well as the habitat in optima forma in which we all live. The activities of both thinking and building the city must reassess this inevitable observation. notes 1 Paul Valéry, Vues (Paris, 1948), 366: Photography has trained the eyes to expect that which they should see, and therefore to see it, and has instructed our sight to disregard that which doesn’t exist and which our eyes were well capable of seeing before its time. 2 Ton Lemaire, Filosofie van het landschap (Baarn: Ambo 1970), 7. All foreign quotations are translated by the author unless stated otherwise. 3 In this sense, Lemaire defines adolescence as a “spatial crisis.” Ibid. 4 Epiphany, from the Greek epiphaneia, which signifies “appearing” but also “appearance” and “surface.” 5 Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, ma, and London: mit Press 1995), 2. Italics are mine. 6 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins 1995), 6–7. 7 Ibid., 12. 99
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8 Lemaire, “Between Wilderness and Wasteland,” in Wasteland: Landscape from Now On, ed. F. Giersberg (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers 1992), 11–14. 9 “La ville est un territoire particulier ou une combinaison de territoires.” Marcel Roncayolo, La ville et ses territoires (Paris: Gallimard 1990), 19. 10 Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik (1929), quoted in Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1983), 5. 11 Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, 5. A convincing study of these (intentional) origins of architecture is Indra Kagis McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor: An Essay on Architectural Beginnings (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1993). 12 I think this is an important remark, even though M.I. Finley pointed out the “unbridgeable divide” in the history of cities created by the Industrial Revolution. “The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977): 305–27. 13 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), appendix. 14 François de Polignac, Cults, Territory, and the Origins of the Greek CityState, translated by Janet Lloyd (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1995); McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor. 15 De Polignac, Cults, Territory, 21–2. 16 Rainer Maria Rilke, Het landschap (‘s-Gravenhage: Stols 1944), 8–9. Originally published as Über die Landschaft (1902). 17 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor, 81. 18 Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre (Tübingen, 1962), 12–13. For an English translation see The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row 1977), 10–11. 19 Ibid., 11: “Jede Veranlassung für das was immer aus dem Nicht-Anwesenden über – und vorgeht, ist poiesis ist Her-vor-Bringen.” Plato Symposium 205b. 20 This supposition of both Heidegger and McEwen is confirmed in Greek etymology, as the word nomos means not only “to take possession of” or “to inhabit” but also “arrangement” or “order.” Consequently, ”to dwell” is a form of “letting appear” of an order, of poiesis. This is also the starting point of Heidegger’s philosophy of dwelling; see “Bauen Wohnen
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21 22 23
24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
36
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Denken” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954), translated into English as “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (New York: Doubleday 1955), 145. Thucydides Peloponnesian War 7.77. “The urbs of the Trojans, the material part of Troy, has perished, but not the Trojan civitas” (Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, 145). The distinction is still alive in modern language: in both French and English the word for a sophisticated, urban etiquette is derived from the Greek polis: politesse and politeness. Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1976), 23–5. Both are published in Agnes Schreiner, Henny Bouwmeester, and Anne van Dooren, In de ban van het recht (Amsterdam: 1001 Publishers 1991). Ibid., 24. The Stedemaagd, the “City-virgin,” a sculpture of the goddess of the city, was comparable to Athenia polia, the goddess of the (Greek) city in general and Athens in particular. Schreiner, Bouwmeester, and van Dooren, In de ban van het recht, 24. Like “banishment,” the “ban” was an autonomous juridical area from which one could be expelled, or banned. Schreiner, Bouwmeester, and van Dooren, In de ban van het recht, 58. Ibid., 64–9. André Corboz, “Le territoire comme palimpsest,” Diogène 121 (1983): 16. For a comprehensive overview, see James S. Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses (London: Thames & Hudson 1990). This was the subject of my phd research at Eindhoven University of Technology, Theory and History of Architecture. For a comprehensive etymology, see Erik de Jong and Marleen Dominicusvan Soest, Aardse Paradijzen: De tuin in de Nederlandse Kunst, 1500–1800 (Gent: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon 1996), 20. Frederik Hendrik (1584–1647) was the chief of state during the last part of the Eighty Years War. Hofwijck was not part of the Amsterdam cityterritory but was located in the vicinity of the city of The Hague. Robert Jan van Pelt, “Mens en kosmos in Huygens’ Hofwijck,” OASE 41 (1994): 11–31. The garden as a cosmological representation is still a
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38
39 40 41
42 43
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common theme in literature. An example is the novel by Hector Bianciotti, La Busca del Jardin (1976). When the central figure of the novel finds out that the garden – his world – was merely a spitting image of famous gardens elsewhere, his perception of the world was shocked: “The exact moment at which the image of the garden stopped being personal and was projected [in a book] at unknown places, was when the garden itself stopped being the universe and became a temporary reality” (10). It is striking that the garden is often where one either loses or recovers one’s innocence: for example, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and the Czech movie The Garden (1995). Erik de Jong, Natuur en Kunst: Nederlandse tuin- en landschapsarchitectuur, 1650–1740 (Amsterdam: Thoth 1993), introduction. The book is a Dutch thesis on garden and landscape architecture between 1650 and 1740. It contains a summary in English. Benedetto Gravagnuolo, La progettazione urbana in Europa, 1750–1960 (Milano: Editori Laterza 1991), xii. See note 5. This observation may seem most applicable to the European context, where many historic cities still retain their vestigial closed form. However, this considers only the formal dimension of the city and can be misleading. Corboz was quite right when he stated that “l’espace urbanisée est moins celui où les constructions se suivent en ordre serré que celui dont les habitants ont acquis une mentalitée citadine” (“Le territoire comme palimpsest,” 17; translation: Urbanised space is better defined by the (mental) space of residents that acquired an urban mentality than by the close arrangement of buildings). In this sense, the European continent, even more than other parts of the world, is fully “urban,” and seemingly remote areas, such as the Alps and almost the entire coastline, are part of the urban territory, the hinterland of the large metropolitan areas. Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, 10. Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape, ed. Robert L. Rothwell (New York: Shooting Star Press 1991), 126–7.
The Colosseum: The Cosmic Geometry of a Spectaculum George Hersey
Chora
Fig. 1 The Colosseum today. Photo: McGill University, School of Architecture
the colosseum was begun by Vespasian in the year 70 and completed by Domitian in 82.1 Erected on the site of a marshy artificial lake in the gardens of Nero’s palace, the building received its name, we are told, from a huge statue of that emperor that once stood near. In its heyday the structure was subject to several rebuildings. Then, from the eighth to the nineteenth century, it endured a long, often painful afterlife. During this millennium it was variously despoiled as a quarry for building stone, shunned (or frequented) as a playground for demonic forces, and venerated as a world-famous ruin. In early descriptions it is billed as the Flavian emperors’ gift to the people, a recompense for the crimes of Nero that would replace his monuments and his memory.2 So it is ironic that in more recent times the Colosseum has been known by that Neronian name rather than by its proper one, the Flavian Amphitheatre. It is equally ironic that it has been seen, par excellence and in its own right, as a theatre of crime, a monument to the martyrdom of Christians, but doubtless it was this role as a martyrs’ memorial that helped assure its survival. 104
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The building proper is a tall, four-storey, masonry oval – a great bowl slung from outer rings of stacked barrel vaults. The seats were simple stone or concrete benches erected on the tops of ramped barrel vaults that radiated outward from the building arena core. The seats ran continuously around the caveae, or seating sections, exactly as in many modern stadia. For the emperor, the senate, and other privileged persons there were special tribunals, called suggesta, with more comfortable seats, located at what one might call the fifty-yard line. Women, except for those in the upper classes, who could sit in the suggesta, were segregated into the topmost seats in the cavea summa. Figure 2 shows some of the main subdivisions of the seating areas. All were named and coded so that a ticket-holder would know, at least approximately, where to sit. Some seats were inscribed with the names of their permanent occupants. Around the upper storey, above the last set of seats, was a colonnade with a heavy entablature and outer wall. This supported one of the Colosseum’s wonders, its fabric ceiling or velarium. On rainy days and days of hot sun the great canopy was unfurled across the entire cavea. Down below, in the centre, the arena consisted of a wooden floor, often covered with sand, garden elements, or theatrical scenery. Underneath were corridors and rooms for animal and human actors, props, and the like. A plumbing system drained the whole building and supplied each floor with drinking-water and bathroom facilities.
Fig. 2 Section of Colosseum, restoring the interior. From Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, 17th ed., revised by R. A. Cordingley (New York: Scribner’s 1963). Labels added
The Colosseum
In contrast to Greek theatres, which were scooped out of hillsides, the Colosseum is a freestanding building. While it had long been possible to erect masonry buildings of comparable size and height, the construction of such a building was probably possible only after the invention of concrete. But the Colosseum is only partly of this material. The walls and piers are travertine-faced brick and tufa, and while the vaults themselves are mostly concrete or cement conglomerate, stone was also used for vaulting – mostly lightweight pumice.3 Nonetheless, the sheer amount of concrete used in the Colosseum was unprecedented. geometry The Colosseum is one of a series of large, thick-framed civic structures, the so-called imperial fora, that the early emperors opened up within the dense urban tissue of ancient Rome. As Greg Wightman has recently shown, these public places were designed in accordance with strict geometrical principles – a relative novelty at the time – though the relationships from one forum to another did not accord with the overriding axes and symmetrical alignments that later architecture inspired by these Roman projects – neoclassicism, Beaux-Arts – would insist on.4
Fig. 3 Part of a modern model of Rome in the early fourth century CE. The Forum of Trajan is in the lower lefthand corner. Museo della Civiltà Romana
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The Colosseum’s oval geometry distinguishes it from most Greek and Roman theatres, though other oval Roman theatre structures – all of them amphitheatres – do exist. But theatre buildings, both Greek and Roman, normally were circular or semicircular. Indeed, quite apart from theatrical structures, the circle and half-circle were favourite Roman forms. They appeared as exedrae in baths and fora, in huge tombs such as those of Hadrian and Augustus, in small tombs, and everywhere in temple plans. And how would an ancient Roman go about laying out a plan like the Colosseum’s? Let us assume, for the moment, that he was planning to create an ellipse – a well-known and beautiful oval that, unlike many other such shapes, has a continuous curve. Ellipses have been known from the time of Archimedes and Apollonius of Tyana.5 If the people who laid out the Colosseum intended an ellipse, they would first establish two foci on the central horizontal x axis. These must be reflectively symmetrical across the central vertical y axis. At the two foci the ellipsemaker then drives stakes into the ground. Each end of a long rope is attached to one of the stakes. Then a workman takes another stake, sharpened so as to mark a groove in the ground. Moving the stake all the way round, outside the two foci, he draws the largest shape that the rope will permit. In other words, the rope travels through the three positions in the diagram, plus all their other possible positions, in a 360degree rotation. The result will be an ellipse. The nearer the foci are to each other, the more nearly circular the shape will be; the further they are apart, the longer and narrower the ellipse becomes. (A circle may be defined as an ellipse whose two foci are coincident at the circle’s centre.) At the smaller scale of an architectural drawing, one could do the same with a pencil, string, or thread and a pair of tacks. Until very recently, when computer software could automatically draw ellipses of every size and shape, this was one of the main ways in which these forms were laid out. However, it has recently been claimed that the Colosseum is not an ellipse. The scholar making this claim, Mark Wilson Jones, says that the Colosseum, like most (but not all) other Roman amphitheatres, is a nonelliptical oval formed from the arcs of overlapped circles. Jones soon plans to publish on the subject, so meanwhile I will simply believe him when he says, “I have been able to establish this [fact] without a shadow of doubt.”6 107
Fig. 4 An ellipse, with f1 and f2 as the foci. Any line from f1 to f2 that also hits the perimeter must be the same length as any other line that does so. Therefore, the three lines shown here are all the same length
Fig. 5 An oval formed from two circles and from arcs of large circles below and above
Figure 5 shows such an oval, shaped approximately to the Colosseum’s footprint. It is laid out as a perimeter of arcs from a pair of circles joined together by arcs of much larger circles. There are several ways to lay out such a shape at the scale of a building. One is to find the centres of the two circles from which the large arcs are taken (figure 6). Note that an oval shaped like the Colosseum, with its very large upper and lower arcs, would require an enormous space of clear ground on which to construct the circles. The radii of these two arcs would be almost double the Colosseum’s width of c. 574 Roman feet (512 English feet), so the total amount of clear space would have to be about 1,000 Roman feet wide – almost a tenth of a modern mile. Oval amphitheatres erected in the countryside would, of course, have fewer problems finding clear space than one like the Colosseum, in the middle of a city. Alternately, one could construct a chubbier oval (figure 7) with shorter radii, but if the site were crowded and urban, as was the Colosseum’s, there would be no space to lay out the shape. Finally, one could lay out the arcs in a convenient out-of-town field and then make a template of that part of the circle one wished to copy – or even half of this curve, since it is bilaterally symmetrical. I show the curve with a horizontal baseline and a set of vertical lines, called “normals,” perpendicular to it (figure 8). The normals meet the arc’s curve from the inside and map out its shape. Such a map would then be easy to transfer and reproduce at the building site using taut ropes, rulers, and set squares. 108
Fig. 6 Plotting the arcs of the Colosseum with full circles
Fig. 7 Plotting a chubbier oval with full circles
Fig. 8 Plotting an arc using normals
Fig. 9 An Egyptian hieroglyphic fragment plotting a curve using normals, as in the preceding diagram. From Jean-Philippe Lauer, La Pyramide à degrés: L’architecture (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale 1936)
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Fig. 10 Ptolemy of Alexandria’s system for a planet’s orbit around the sun
It is worth noting, by the way, that just such a diagram was discovered by Jean-Philippe Lauer at the site of the Step Pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara in Egypt (figure 9). This curve was for a vault profile, not a plan, but the same system would work for a plan such as the Colosseum’s. The characters inscribed between the normals on the Egyptian fragment would be the measures of their respective lengths. This system of laying out very large arcs would date from around 2800 bce. However, laying out an ellipse, with its interior foci, is much easier than the multiple-arc system, and provides fewer opportunities for mistakes. cosmos We need not pursue the question of ellipse versus oval as if they were two mutually exclusive shapes. One reason is that all ellipses are ovals. Shortly after the Colosseum was built, Ptolemy of Alexandria was to prove that, with proper manipulation, overlapped circles can produce absolutely any closed curve, including every sort of true ellipse.7 Figure 10 is my reconstruction of Ptolemy’s theory that planets travel around the sun in large, circular orbits (cycles), while at the same time revolving in smaller circular orbits (epicycles). I have shown one pair of epicycles with the planet at its outer limit and another pair with the same planet (there is only one) at its epicycle’s inner limit. The ellipse indicates the position that the planet would seem to have, revolving in its cycle and, simultaneously, in its epicycle, at the four positions used by a putative astronomer in making observations of the planet’s position. Oval planetary orbits were proven by Kepler, but they had been proposed for centuries. Philolaos the Pythagorean (fifth century bce), for 110
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example, held that the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon all moved through what he called “oblique circles,” i.e., ellipses, unlike the other planets.8 Undoubtedly, these thoughts came about because astronomers made highly selective, rather than nearly continuous, observations of a planet’s position. But my interest here is simply to show that overlapping circles, whether or not they are planetary orbits, can easily map out oblong closed curves. In other words, the epicyclic theory is one more way of making ovals – including ellipses – out of overlapping circles. Whether or not the Colosseum was constructed as an ellipse or as a set of arcs, most modern drawings do show it as an ellipse. In plan (figure 11), the Colosseum is shown not as a single ellipse but as a set of concentric ellipses.9 That is, the successive closed curves of the various parts of the cavea, from interior to exterior, seem to become gradually more circular, being 6:5 on the perimeter. The ellipse, which follows the back of the cavea ima, is 5:4 in proportion, and the innermost ellipse, that of the arena proper, is a very elongated 7:4. A definitive discussion of all these questions will come, presumably, with Jones’s article.10 The Colosseum seems to embody some of the ideal dimensions and ratios that Vitruvius proposes for public buildings and that we are told were used in Greek architecture as well, though modern measurements suggest that site errors may have distorted some of the values. Jones thinks that these “wrong” numbers are not errors but simply that ideal dimensions were never intended. Thus he writes that “the width of the arena at the Colosseum is 163 [Roman] ft, not 160,” which means that its length-width proportion, 163 3 318 Roman feet, is 1:1.95, not quite a 1:2 ratio. However, 163 versus 159 (the “correct” width for a 1:2 ratio) is only about a 1 percent error. That seems acceptable when one considers that the builders worked with stakes and ropes (which stretched and shrank according to weather and handling). Indeed, comparable site errors occur today, despite all the benefits of modern technology. In addition, the height of the Colosseum to its main cornice is exactly 163 Roman feet, which puts it in a 1:1 ratio to the arena’s width. The cavea proper, meanwhile, excluding the exterior arcades, is 639.9 feet long and 530.4 wide. This would approximate a 6:5 ratio with about a 2 percent error. The outer walls, which measure 694 3 574 Roman feet, might be rounded off to 700 3 575 (giving respective errors of 1 percent and .1 percent). These latter values imply that the Colosseum’s basic planimetric footprint was constructed on a 25-foot module, though, of 111
Fig. 11 The Colosseum, Rome (70–82 CE), plan. From Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, 17th ed., revised by R. A. Cordingley (New York: Scribner’s 1963)
course, given the oval shape, all sorts of other, irrational values would have to be used for measurements during actual construction. There is a reason for going on at length about ovals, ellipses, epicycles, and ideal ratios. We have just seen that Ptolemy proved that almost any closed curve could be produced with arcs of circles, and we saw that he did this because he wanted to map out planetary orbits. Indeed, almost all the mathematical work that was done on closed circular and spherical forms, ancient and early modern, was done by astronomers.11 This was even more evident in ages when armillary spheres (models with planetary orbits shown as movable rings) were the main ways of understanding the actions of the cosmos.12 And that, in turn, seems to explain why we often portray the heavens as spheres and hemispheres and why
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domes (hemispheres) are decorated so frequently with heavenly symbols and personages such as suns, moons, and the houses of the Zodiac. Roberto Luciani informs us that in this spirit the Colosseum’s velarium, its sky, was painted blue and ornamented with images of the firmament.13 Lightning, thunder, and other cosmic events were also frequently produced in the Colosseum by the scenic technicians. The building became even more cosmic in the middle ages. The legend grew that it had been a temple of the Sun. The whole building, it was said, was once covered with a bronze dome. Under that dome stood a colossal statue of Phoebus holding a celestial orb (this would have been the “colossus” of the “Colosseum”).14 In the fifteenth century Leone Battista Alberti wrote that all circuses (the word essentially means orbit or circle), not just the Colosseum, were constructed with twelve entrances to honour the twelve houses of the Zodiac, and with seven metae or race-markers in honour of the seven planets. He adds that chariots raced around the arena in imitation of the orbits of the heavenly spheres and that participants wore colours symbolizing the cycle of the four seasons.15 sacrifice The Colosseum’s postclassical reputation as the site of hundreds, thousands, of Christian martyrdoms only increased its cosmic associations. Luciani notes that not a single ancient author or contemporary witness speaks of the building as the site of specifically Christian martyrdoms.16 Yet it probably owes its survival, ruinous as that survival was, to this pious opinion. It is a belief that has reigned for centuries, and reigns still. Who can forget St Augustine’s vivid picture of the howling spectators drunk with cruelty, with the spouting blood, with the dismembered Christian bodies, with the sense of the whole great bowl as an open maw?17 Or Prudentius’s picture in the year 658 of the delicate Vestal, seated on high in her upper tribunal and commanding, thumbs-down, that the killers impale yet another holy martyr?18 This belief in the Colosseum as a place of Christian martyrs fuelled the Roman trade in relics. The trade – one could almost call it an industry – flourished during late antiquity and the early middle ages. One reason was the Church’s rule, in the Second Council of Nicaea of 787, that no
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altar could be consecrated in Catholic Christendom without a valid relic being lodged in it.19 If Christian bones were not so thick in the Colosseum’s entrails as once was thought, bones in general were plentiful there, due to the games.20 (And, I hardly need add, Christians were often martyred outside the Colosseum.) The Church’s obsession with the Colosseum often crops up in Christian literature and hagiography. There was a tale that the building’s original architect was a Christian named Gaudentius, whose epitaph is preserved in the basement of ss Luca e Martina in Rome. It states that, having built the Colosseum, and with all the glory that it gave to Rome, Vespasian rewarded Gaudentius with death. But, the inscription adds, Christ has prepared a better theatre for Gaudentius in Heaven.21 Another ancient example of Colosseum martyrology, this one non-Christian, is the story in Josephus that, like the walls of Babylon and the pyramids of Egypt, the Roman arena had been erected by Israelite slaves (twelve thousand of them, says a later commentator, none other than the Marquis de Sade). Their foreman, we read, was thereupon offered as a sacrifice at the inaugural games.22 The deaths of Gaudentius and the unnamed Israelite accord well with the Colosseum’s role as a place of sacrifice.23 It was the very fact that they were sacrifices that made the games so grisly. According to Seneca, in the morning events, men (usually prisoners, but in later times professional gladiators) would be thrown to hungry wild animals, usually lions or bears, who were encouraged by the crowds to devour their human victims. If a gladiator had the luck or skill to survive, he would then face further opponents – animal, human, or both. The fights almost always continued until one of the participants died. By evening, the arena was piled with corpses.24 These deaths were sacrifices to the gods whose statues and altars stood all round the arena.25 The poet Martial emphasizes the Colosseum’s religious role. He describes the whole of it, in fact, as “an altar wrought of many horns,” i.e., decked with the trophies of animal sacrifice.26 The sacrifices also belonged to the cult of the divine emperor, to which all Roman citizens had to pay reverence (and to which the Christians took such exception). Other divinities who were particularly worshipped in the games were Hermes, Jupiter, Apollo, Ceres, Charon, and the Dioscuri. As a religious event, each game was preceded by a pompa circensis in which statues of the gods were carried. The sacrifices all had individual 114
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Fig. 12 Roman medal of Domitian awarding prizes for the Colosseum games, 88 CE. British Museum, London
status – as “solemn games,” “state games,” “votive games,” and the like. There were the Ludi Magni dedicated to the Capitoline Jupiter. Some games lasted one day only; others continued for a week or two. By the end of the Empire the Colosseum was being used for these purposes fully 177 days each year.27 The sacrificial nature of the Roman games came from the Greek funeral games that were their older cousins. One early Greek liturgy, for example, consisted of slaughtering prisoners on the tombs of recently dead heroes. The Romans did the same. The purpose of the deaths was to placate the Manes, the soul of the person whose funeral was being held. The Manes were thought to inhabit his remains and his tomb. Livy mentions sacrifices involving human victims as early as 216 bce. He records great increases in the number of these contests over all the years bce.28 These game-sacrifices were normally accompanied by banqueting, a tradition that held good at the Colosseum. At the conclusion of a fight the spectators would toast the victors as well as the gods of the fight. Very large numbers of victims, especially animals, could be sacrificed. At the Colosseum’s inauguration, according to varying accounts, either five thousand or nine thousand animals were killed. During the venatio (animal sacrifice) held in the year 106 in honour of his Dacian triumph, Trajan had eleven thousand animals killed.29 In the medal of the year 88 (figure 12), Domitian receives victors in the imperial suggestum. The inscription reads, “Domitianus Augustus, when he was consul for the fourteenth time, founder of the sacred 115
Fig. 13 Mosaic from ancient Thysdrus, now El Djem.Third century CE. Museo del Bardo,Tunisia. From Katherine M.D. Dunbabin, The Mosaics of Roman North Africa: Studies in Iconography and Patronage (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1978)
games.” He leans forward from the imperial suggestum, flanked by columns and with details above that portray the rigging of the velarium. The two gladiators, ceremonially dressed in togas, have been given a sack of prizes, probably food and wine. In a third-century mosaic (figure 13), five celebrants seated in the cavea ima drink to a pile of bulls. The inscription makes it clear that the men are rooting for the gladiators, whose names are inscribed there. The lower inscription reads, “The bulls are silent and sleep.” Beyond the sacrificial bulls, two priests or attendants are distributing wine. This particular scene took place not in the Roman Colosseum but in the almost equally huge North African amphitheatre of Thysdrus, still standing in what is now the Tunisian town of El Djem. 116
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There was a further sacrificial aspect on many occasions. When a gladiator died, two actors would emerge into the arena dressed as Hermes and Charon. The two “gods,” whose task it was to conduct souls to the Underworld, would take up the body of the dead gladiator and carry it offstage. Afterward, gladiators’ corpses were usually handed over to families or fans for burial. Nor did the magico-religious aspect of it all stop here. The relics of the fighters were greatly valued. Their blood was a remedy for sterility and impotence. A woman who combed her hair with a dead gladiator’s sword could expect a fertile marriage. His equipment and clothing protected against the evil eye.30 If Christians probably were not often martyred in the Colosseum, they were nonetheless dead set against the games. To them the games were not simply grisly, they celebrated a rival religion and glorified rival gods. As Luciani writes, “With its liturgy, its sacrifices, its hysteria and the presence of images of the pagan gods, as well as the divinized emperor, the arena represented for the first Christians a kind of devil’s palace, the seat of the Antichrist.”31 The first Christian emperor, Constantine, prohibited the games entirely, but later Christian emperors sometimes relented. For example, Honorius at first merely forbade senators to have gladiators in their service, but then in 403 or 404, a Christian monk named Telemachus entered the arena during the games to preach against them. The crowd was infuriated, and Telemachus was killed. As a result, Honorius issued a full prohibition against the games. ruin-love and architectural parasitism We have seen the Colosseum as it was to its builders and first users, and we have seen its arena, at day’s end, as a landscape of ruined bodies. All this takes us up to the end of the games in 523. Now I would like to move on to the building’s long afterlife, in which it came to be revered, almost worshipped, in and of itself, as a great ruined body. I will look at this cult in terms of what I will call “architectural parasitism.” In biology a parasite is any organism that lives on or in another organism and obtains its nutriment either by eating the host’s food or, as a frequent alternative, by eating the host.32 But parasites are not all bad; indeed, they have been seen as one of nature’s essential strategies. Nor are they all microscopic. Cowbirds lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, knowing that the latter will feed and rear the interlopers.33 Bees, such as 117
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the mason bee Osmia bicolor, occupy abandoned snail shells and refit them with walling made from pebbles. They too are parasites of a sort. They don’t eat their hosts, but they do exploit the hosts’ abandoned body parts.34 We might even call the mason bees “ruin-dwellers.” But for centuries, for most of its life, the word “parasite” has in fact referred to human beings. The Greek words para and sitos mean “others’ grain,” “others’ food.” In antiquity a parasite was someone who literally or figuratively fed at someone else’s table. In return he was supposed to flatter his host. Ever since, and flattery aside, parasites generally have been thought of as pests, despite their often constructive role. We can apply this to architecture. A building’s users are also its usersup – its parasites. Think of what happens, say, to a historic cathedral, castle, or palace. The visitors wear out carpets and tile floors, mark the walls, and bore, annoy, insult, manipulate, or otherwise wear down the staff (we will consider the staff to be part of the monument’s organism – its autoimmune system). Yet at the time, the very presence of these tourist-parasites is flattering. They are there to admire and to take away with them something of the building’s beauty. Sometimes they do this quite literally.
Fig. 14 Maarten van Heemskerck, Self-Portrait before the Colosseum (1553). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
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This has been happening to the Colosseum for centuries. I will here define the Colosseum’s parasites as the tourists who stole souvenirs, as the masons who quarried it for building stone, as the vandals who destroyed it for fun, and even as the vegetation that for centuries grew up around and in it and that occupied it, choked it, distorted it, and ultimately threatened to bring it down. The Western relish for ruination is present in the most ancient witnesses. Isaiah, speaking of Babylon’s present “glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency,” prophesies that their city will be abandoned by its human population and be invaded by the beasts of the desert; “their houses shall be full of doleful creatures,” says the prophet. And how he relishes the forsaken towers and abandoned fora he describes in the cities that have earned Jehovah’s wrath!35 But the greatest of parasites is Time. As Ovid puts it: “Time, devourer of matter, and you, envious old age, with the fangs of mortality destroy everything, eating it gradually away into a slow, weakened death.”36 A perfect definition of architectural parasitism, you might think, though the poet here has in mind the bodies of two once-beautiful humans: the wrestler Milo of Crotona and the aged Helen of Troy, who “weeps when she looks in the mirror and sees her hag’s wrinkles.” But my real point is that ruin-worshippers (unlike Milo and Helen) actually like wreckage. When they weep at the architectural equivalent of hag’s wrinkles they weep with pleasure. And they like the parasites that bring it about – the toads, snakes, bandits, and contadini that eat away at former greatness. Maarten van Heemskerck’s self-portrait of 1553 (figure 14) was painted seventeen years after he had returned to Holland from Rome. The artist’s dapper dress and warily pleased expression contrast expressively with the ruined Colosseum behind him, which, as he sees it in memory, is almost reverting to wild nature. The upper-floor vaults are already savage, and vegetation triumphs across its skyline, where once the blue cosmos of the velarium swayed. Of its ghostly crowds of gladiators and martyrs there now remain only a few spidery ciceroni. In the middle ground we see the artist as he was during his Roman stay, preserving the picturesque wreckage, praising, in a picture, its beauty. Collectors can also be architectural parasites. A French visitor to the site of Plato’s Academy in Athens remarked in 1675, “It is not possible to dig into six feet of earth without finding some precious antique.”37 119
Fig. 15 John Andrew Graefer,The Ruins, Giardino Inglese, Caserta (1792). Photo by Julie Dionne
This antique, it hardly needs saying, could and would be taken home – in the cultural sense, consumed. Or think of Lord Elgin, removing the Parthenon sculptures and taking them to Britain.38 Byron even calls Lord Elgin (and all his countrymen) parasites, vermin, who had riven “what Goth, and Turk, and Time have spar’d.”39 The world’s great modern museums, indeed, were formed from objects collected in this parasitic spirit. The process, of course, continues. So powerful did the ruin cult eventually become that in the eighteenth century, landscape gardeners built imitation ruins – mimickings of parasitized architectural corpses.40 One of the most impressive is the ruderi on an island in the Giardino Inglese at Caserta, built in 1792 by John Graefer for Ferdinand IV, King of the Two Sicilies. This handsome artificial corpse consists of a brick, plaster, and tufa tempietto with denuded tympanum, a stained and blasted wall whose niches shelter headless statues, and a beautiful wreck of a Corinthian portico. All of it is deep in weeds and surrounded by a stagnant lake – a house quite literally full of doleful creatures (figure 15). Nineteenth-century ruin-fanciers particularly liked to see such wild vegetation seize and occupy an ancient, once-glorious pile. This was par-
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ticularly the case with the Colosseum, whose ruin was considered a judgment on pagan Rome and those who had martyred Christians in its arena. Charles Dickens actually exulted as he watched the building’s slow-motion collapse: To see it crumbling there, an inch a year, its walls and arches overgrown with green, its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its porches, young trees of yesterday springing up on its rugged parapets and bearing fruit … to see its pit of fight filled up with earth, and the peaceful cross planted in the centre, to climb into its upper halls and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin, all about it, the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimius Severus and Titus, the Roman Forum, the Palace of the Caesars, the temples of the old religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked, wonderful old city … It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Colosseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved the heart as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin. God be thanked: a ruin.41
That was published in 1846. As time went on, the monument’s invading vegetation gained a sacrosanct quality comparable to that of the Colosseum itself. It was often said that the plants growing in the Colosseum represented exotic species whose seeds had been brought to Rome in the feed provided from distant lands for the animals used in the games. In 1855 an Englishman, Richard Deakin, even published an illustrated botanical treatise entitled The Flora of the Colosseum. Some plants, such as the aptly named Paliurus spina-Christi, as well as the Asphodelus fistulosa, were said to grow in the Colosseum and probably nowhere else.42 The building had a unique ecology. To despoil it of its parasitical plants was to force possibly unique species to go extinct flora that, due to their outlandish provenance, had their own tales to tell about the Colosseum’s fauna. Right along with the thought of botanical parasitism came the delightful idea that all this beautiful stone and concrete architecture, hewn, shaped, carved, and polished, was roughening and subsiding back into a state of nature. Architecture was turning into mountain landscape. To one painter the ruined Colosseum already resembled the crater of a volcanic mountain. “This,” wrote Thomas Cole, “was the vaulted crater of
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human passions, and here burst forth with devastating power its terrible flames, and the roar of eruption cracked the sky.”43 Cole wrote that in 1832. In 1869 the Goncourt brothers similarly saw the building – and, indeed, most of Rome around it – reverting to a primordial pre-architectural state. “The grass has burst forth, that same oblivious grass that is everywhere. Its rough masses have invaded the seats, and the ruined tribunals have turned back into reddish foliage … Trees have erupted, woven vines have bearded step upon step and covered shadowy openings eighty feet wide … Blocks of stone have turned into natural rock.44 When, in later years, familiar Roman monuments began to be stripped of the vegetation that was choking them, ruin-lovers objected. And in 1888 the Times newspaper complained that deprived of its botanical parasites, the monument had become “hideously vulgar.” D’Annunzio called the cleanup campaign “a blighting blizzard of barbarism menacing all the greatness and loveliness that were without equals in the memory of the world.” In 1905 the travel-writer Augustus Hare issued a call to stop what he called the “vandalism” of purging the Colosseum of its “marvellous flora.”45 Writing in the same year, Henry James lamented that in the Colosseum “the beauty of detail has disappeared almost completely, since the thick spontaneous vegetation has been removed by order of the new government.”46 conclusion In its heyday as an arena and long afterward as a fabulous ruin the Colosseum was quite literally a spectacle, and (like other amphitheatres) the building was in fact called a spectaculum.47 It was a spectacle of the world. Its crowds, its victims, came from all parts of the known world. The poet Martial, in a series of epigrams about the Colosseum, asked, “What race is so distant, so barbarous, Caesar, that from it no spectator comes to your city?”48 He hailed it as the greatest work in human history, greater than the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, greater than Babylon, greater than the Mausoleum at Helicarnassos. Spectaculum and spectator connote the act of seeing. Another name for the Colosseum does the same: amphitheatre. ue9atron can mean “the spectators,” “those who are looking.” Indeed, the races that came to fill the stands were part of the spectacle, as were the emperor and his court, senators, the Vestals, the priests. In short, the Colosseum was three 122
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Roman medal issued by the Senate after Titus’s death in 81 CE. British Museum, London
things: a place to see for its own sake; a place in which to watch the sacrifices; and a place, a world in which to be seen.49 I thus return to and end with the Colosseum’s cosmic qualities. In postclassical lore the building was a model or talisman for the Earth as the centre of the universe. “As long as the Colosseum stands, Rome stands; when the Colosseum crumbles, Rome will crumble. And when Rome crumbles, so will the world,” wrote the Venerable Bede in c. 700.50 In this same spirit, in 1328 Ludwig of Bavaria issued medals based on imperial prototypes (figure 16). The Colosseum was depicted on these medals, which were inscribed, Roma Caput mundi regit orbis frena rotundi (Rome, head of the world, holds the reins of the circling orb). Even today, seen from the air, the great old skeletal spectaculum stares up to heaven like a giant unblinking eye – the eye of Earth’s orb, of Rome’s circling world. notes 1 The best and fullest new book is Roberto Luciani, Il Colosseo (Milan: Fenice 2000, 1993), with full bibliography. Other items are noted below. 2 Seneca Moral Epistles 1.7, to Lucilius; Martial De spectaculis 2. 3 M. Wilson Jones, “Designing Amphitheatres,” Römische Mitteilungen 100 (1993): 391, with earlier bibliography; note especially J.C. Golvin, L’Amphithéâtre romain; Essai sur la théorisation de sa forme et de ses fonctions (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard 1988). 123
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4 Greg Wightman, “The Imperial Fora of Rome: Some Design Considerations,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56 (March 1997): 64–85, with copious earlier bibliography. 5 Alexandre Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus, Kepler, Borelli, trans. R.E.W. Maddon (New York: Cornell University Press 1973). 6 Jones, “Designing Amphitheatres,” 394. 7 Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution, 23–4. See also Germaine Aujac, Claude Ptolomée, astronome, astrologue, géographe (Paris: Éditions du cths 1993); John Phillips Britton, Models and Precision: The Quality of Ptolemy’s Observations and Parameters (New York: Garland 1992). 8 Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution, 39. 9 Note the large number of staircase accesses, known as vomitoria. They suggest that in case of fire or earthquake the Colosseum probably could have been emptied quickly enough to comply with the building codes in force today. 10 In the meantime, see Luciani, Il Colosseo, 56–7. 11 Thomas L. Heath, Greek Astronomy (London, 1932); D.R. Dicks, Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1970). 12 F. Nolte, Armillarsphäre (Erlangen, 1922). 13 Luciani, Il Colosseo, 83. 14 There had been a colossal statue of Nero, which Vespasian transformed into a sun god, on the site. Martial Epigrammata spectacula 2.70. 15 Leone Battista Alberti, L’Architettura [De Re Aedificatoria, 1485] (Milan: Polifilo 1966) 2, 751. 16 Luciani, Il Colosseo, 10. 17 Confessions 6.8 18 Prudentius Contra Symmachum 2.1091–1101. 19 U. Mioni, Il Culto delle reliquie nella chiesa cattolica (1908). 20 For the legendary twenty-eight wagonloads of martyrs’ bones buried beneath the floor of the Pantheon, see Susanna Pasquali, Il Pantheon: Architettura e antiquaria nel settecento a Roma (Modena: Panini 1996), 25. These, however, came from cemeteries, not from the Colosseum. But, of course, it was the practice to bury those who died in the gladiatorial battles and venationes (wild animal duels) in cemeteries outside the city walls. 21 Luciani, Il Colosseo, 57–9. This is another way to think of the Colosseum as cosmic.
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22 Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, Voyage d’Italie (1776), Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pauvert 1966). 23 Luciani, Il Colosseo, 113–32. 24 Seneca Moral Epistles 1.7, to Lucilius. 25 Rosella Rea, L’Anfiteatro Flavio (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato); “L’Anfiteatro flavio. Competizioni atletiche e spettacoli anfiteatrali: Il punto di vista dell-intellettuale,” in Lo Sport nel Mondo Antico [exhibition catalogue] (Rome: Quasar 1987), 79–86; M. Di Macco, Il Colosseo: Funzione simbolica, storica, urbana (Rome, 1971); Roberto Luciani, “Ludus Magnus,” L’Urbe 3–4 (1989): 37–46; Kathleen Coleman, “’The Contagion of the Throng’: Absorbing Violence in the Roman World,” Hermathena 164 (1998): 65–88. 26 Epigrammata spectacula 1. 27 Luciani, Il Colosseo, 122. 28 Livy Ab, urbe condita 21.57.7. 29 Luciani, Il Colosseo, 139. 30 Ibid., 129–30. 31 Ibid., 173. 32 Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (New York: Viking 1994), 114. For parasites and appearance, see Parasites and Pathogens: Effects on Host Hormones and Behavior, ed. N.E. Beckage (New York: Chapman & Hall 1997); Randy Thornhill and Steven Gangestad, “Human Facial Beauty: Averageness, Symmetry, and Parasite Resistance,” Human Nature 4 (1993): 237–69. 33 Scott Robinson, F.R. Thompson III, T.M. Donovan, D.R. Whitehead, and J. Faaborq, “Regional Forest Fragmentation and the Nesting Success of Migratory Birds,” Science 267 (1 April 1995): 1987–90. 34 Karl von Frisch (with the collaboration of Otto von Frisch), Animal Architecture, trans. Lisbeth Gombrich (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold 1983), 71. 35 Isaiah 13:19–21. Quoted by Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1953), 2. 36 Metamorphoses 15.234–6. 37 Georges Guillet de St-Georges, An Account of a Late Voyage to Athens, etc. (London: Herringman 1676). Quoted by Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, 158. 38 Christopher Hitchens et al., The Elgin Marbles: Should They Be Returned to Greece? (London: Chatto & Windus 1987).
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39 In “The Curse of Minerva” and “Childe Harold” (13), from which the line comes. Quoted by Hitchens, The Elgin Marbles, 60. 40 Barbara Jones, Follies and Grottoes (London: Constable 1953). 41 Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (Leipzig: Tauchnitz 1846), 846. Quoted by Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, 200. 42 Richard Deakin, The Flora of the Colosseum (1855). See Luciani, Il Colosseo, 246–7. 43 Thomas Cole, Notes at Naples (1832), in Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 1964). Cole painted the Colosseum interior in this same year (a painting now in the Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, ny). 44 Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Madame Gervaisais (1869). 45 Quoted by Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, 202. 46 Henry James, Italian Hours (1909). 47 Vitruvius De architectura libri 10.5.6. 48 Martial Epigrammata spectacula 3. 49 And indeed the root of the word “theatre” is ue9atron, I see. Herodotus Histories 6.21, Aristophanes Equites 233. In short, the word focuses not on the stage but on the seating, the cavea. 50 Patrologia Latina 94.543.
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On the Renaissance Studioli of Federico da Montefeltro and the Architecture of Memory Robert Kirkbride
Chora
Urbino studiolo (c. 1476), Palazzo Ducale.View toward northeast corner, with ideal city at right. Photo by author
the S T U D I O L I of the ducal Palaces of Urbino and Gubbio offer elegant demonstrations of architecture’s capacity, as a discipline and medium, to transact between the mental and physical realms of human experience. Constructed in the late fifteenth century for the renowned military captain Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, the studioli may be described as treasuries of emblems, since they contain not things but images of things. Over the past five centuries these chambers have themselves become emblems for the intellectual milieu at the Court of Urbino, crystallizing a unique humanism that bridged the mathematical and verbal arts, as well as the liberal and mechanical arts. Owing to their comprehensive iconographic programs – which encompass the seven liberal arts,i the Christian virtues,2 and the heraldic imagery of the Montefeltro, as well as the personal accomplishments of Duke Federico – the studioli are often described as encyclopedic containers of universal knowledge. However, careful review of these emblems 128
Gubbio studiolo (c. 1482), Palazzo Ducale.View toward northwest corner, with instruments of measure and architecture located in the cabinet directly below the word “INGENIOQ(UE)” (genius). Photo by author
and their perspectival arrangement reveals that the studioli might have served more as a rhetorical medium for stimulating thought than as representations of a complete body of knowledge. Considered in light of pedagogical traditions, these chambers may be appreciated as associative engines whose unique visual composition assists an occupant/observer to forge new constellations of meaning from a largely traditional set of images. As such, the studioli extend an ancient legacy of open-ended architectonic models that were conceived to activate the imagination and exercise the memory as an inventive, and not merely recapitulative, agency for knowing. The following investigation approaches the studioli from a vantage that has not yet been explored: their position within the occidental tradition of memory architecture. By reviewing the rhetorical dimension of architecture in classical Rome and the Middle Ages and offering comparison with salient aspects of the studioli, this article joins recent scholarship on the 129
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history of memory training with iconographic analyses of these Renaissance chambers.3 By drawing on images found within the studioli, as well as literary sources readily available to Duke Federico and the members of his court, this inquiry hopes to underscore the rhetorical applications of the studioli while examining their dense weave of tradition and innovation.4 introductory description The Gubbio and Urbino studioli are capstones to the ambitious building program sponsored by Duke Federico da Montefeltro from the 1460s until his death in 1482 at the age of sixty. During this period Federico had enlisted two architects – first Luciano Laurana and later Francesco di Giorgio Martini – to redesign the numerous palaces and fortifications of his expanding dukedom. Completed during di Giorgio’s tenure – Urbino in 1476 and Gubbio in 1482 – the studioli reflect an intense collaboration among the many scholars and artists that Federico and his half-brother Ottaviano degli Ubaldini had gathered to their court. Indeed, although various artists have been championed as their progenitors, any definitive attribution for these chambers is highly contestable, if not somewhat beside the point. Ultimately, the studioli offer testament to the urbane atmosphere cultivated at Urbino, a convivial intelligence that was also to be conveyed through Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. As with their authorship, the function of the studioli is not easily pinpointed: they belong to a rubric of small Renaissance chambers described by such interchangeable terms as gabinetto, cameretta, scrittoio, and studietto, which were used by their patrons to overlapping and often uncategorical ends.5 Immediate precedents to the studioli include the “studies” of Federico’s mentors – Pope Nicholas V, Piero de’ Medici, and Leonello d’Este – which had been inspired by Petrarch’s writings on the benefits of solitude and leisure for intellectual pursuits.6 Appropriate provisions for such idyllic preoccupations were often represented in the portraiture of scholarly church fathers and included such items as described by Leonello d’Este: “As well [as books] it is not unseemly to have in the library an instrument for drawing up horoscopes or a celestial sphere, or even a lute if your pleasure ever lies that way: it makes no
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Above: Urbino, south wall.Traditionally, the astrolabe (at left) was used in astronomical observations, astrological speculation and mnemonic training.The armillary sphere (at right) offered a model of the universe representing the motion of the planets. Photo by author
Right, top to bottom: Urbino, north wall. Lute with two broken strings and recorders. By traversing the studiolo the viewer “activates” several optical phenomena, such as the “moving” recorder, whose open end appears to follow the viewer. Photos by author
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noise unless you want it to. Also decent pictures or sculptures representing gods and heroes. We often see, too, some pleasant picture of St. Jerome at his writing in the wilderness, by which we direct the mind to the library’s privacy and quiet and the application necessary to study and literary composition.”7 The humanist theme of privacy and quiet, which formed a common thread among these chambers and their owners, occupied one side of a more ancient debate concerning the respective values of an active or a contemplative life. For his own part, Petrarch had resuscitated classical authors such as Pliny the Younger, who in his private letters described his study to be located near the bedroom and furnished with a bookpress, or wall-cupboard. Not coincidentally, Leon Battista Alberti, who dedicated an early version (1452) of his De Re Aedificatore to Federico, described therein the separation that should characterize one’s bedchambers, recommending that “the Wife’s Chamber should go into the Wardrobe; the Husband’s into the Library.”8 In addition to his architectural concerns, Alberti was also occupied by the dialectic of the vita activa/vita contemplativa.9 Through his own treatise on the subject,10 as well as others that extol the virtues of investing in artistic endeavours, Alberti deeply influenced a younger generation of powerful and wealthy soldier-scholars, including Leonello d’Este and Federico, who negotiated their turbulent political climate as much by tactical eloquence as by militaristic valour. The incentive among this new ruling elite to be equally adept with pen and sword was expressed by Vespasiano da Bisticci: “It is difficult for a leader to excel in arms unless he be, like the Duke [Montefeltro], a man of letters, seeing that the past is a mirror of the present. A military leader who knows Latin has a great advantage over one who does not.”11 At first glance, the studioli appear quite similar: while relatively small in footprint (14.8 square metres at Urbino and 13 at Gubbio), both are tall spaces, fitted with a gold and azure coffered ceiling set 5 metres above a floor of terra cotta tiles. This configuration provided large wall surfaces at intimate proximity, an ideal arrangement for a bold perspectival composition that would invite closer inspection of its subtle and exacting craftsmanship. The lower portion of both chambers is panelled with intarsia (inlaid wood), ostensibly elaborating on Alberti’s advice concerning the insulation of stone walls: “If you wainscot your Walls
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Ducal Palace, Urbino. Axonometric projection, drawn by Renato Bruscaglia
with Fir or even Poplar, it will make the House the wholsomer, warmer in Winter, and not very hot in Summer.”12 In both studioli the intarsia illusionistically depicts a series of low benches and book-presses fitted with latticework doors (some closed, some ajar) containing select books, scientific and musical instruments, armour and weaponry, family crests of the Montefeltro, and numerous honours bestowed upon Federico during his enormously successful military career. Both studioli also contained a thematic series of paintings that occupied the area between the intarsia and ceiling. Beyond these basic similarities, however, there are notable differences. The location of the Urbino studiolo within the Ducal Palace reveals as much about Federico’s unique approach to governance as his interest in history and innovative architecture. Instead of building his palace as a hermetic fortress, as did many of his contemporaries, Federico and his
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architects conceived, in Castiglione’s words, a palace “furnished … with everything suitable that it seemed not a palace but a city in the form of a palace.”13 The convergence of the civic and domestic realms depicted by this statement is not exaggerated: with the exception of the private apartments and the Duchess’s wing (to which only Federico and Ottaviano held the keys), the citizens of Urbino enjoyed a liberal access to the Ducal Palace that was quite uncommon in its time.14 Quite likely, this degree of freedom reflected an implicit pact between Federico and his subjects in response to the demise of his younger (legitimate) brother, Duke Oddantonio, who after less than one year of imprudent rule was assassinated in his bedchamber by a group of citizens.15 Auspiciously, the studiolo was positioned between the public and private zones of the palace: to be precise, between the Duke’s bedchambers and the Sala delle Udienze, or council chamber. The studiolo also occupied a liminal perch between the palace/city and the dukedom, offering egress to an exterior loggia that provides a sweeping view of the lands surrounding Urbino. While little information is available from contemporary sources concerning the Gubbio studiolo, currently installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, we are fortunate to have inherited valuable (if slender) accounts of the Urbino studiolo and the role it would have played in Federico’s daily activities. In his biography of the Duke, composed in the late sixteenth century, Bernardino Baldi offers this cryptic description: Detail of previous figure, redrawn by author, showing the position of the studiolo (1) between the public and private zones of the palace. Room 5 is the Sala delle Udienze, 3 and 4 are the Duke’s bedchambers, and 2 is a loggia that offers a generous view of the countryside and the main entrance to Urbino
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Four of the twenty-eight uomini illustri, Urbino studiolo.Top (left to right): Euclid, and Federico’s teacher,Vittorino da Feltre. Bottom (left to right): Federico’s close friend Cardinal Bessarion and Albertus Magnus. Photo by author
Besides the [Ducal] library there is a small chamber, designated the studiolo, in the Prince’s apartment, around which are wooden benches with their legs and a table in the middle; all made of the most diligent craftsmanship in intarsia and intaglio. From the intarsia – which covers the wall from the floor to the height of a man or a little more [2.68 meters] – up to the ceiling, the walls are subdivided by a number of paintings [28]. Each painting portrays a famous ancient or modern writer, and includes a brief note of praise summarizing their life.16
The portraits of the twenty-eight uomini illustri greatly illuminate the scope and demeanour of scholarship pursued by Federico and his court. Each philosopher, poet, lawyer, ruler, and influential contemporary represented a dialectical position concerning the nature and uses of knowledge and wisdom: ancient and modern, sacred and profane, Aristotelian and Neoplatonist. This mixture of illustrious heroes reflects the need for one to maintain a balance in one’s affairs, to temper one’s own actions and positions in the political arena. The cultivation of the ancient virtues of prudence and temperance was not merely a by-product of humanist conceit but a matter of political and professional survival.17 Regarding the use of the Urbino studiolo, Vespasiano da Bisticci provides significant clues: “In summer, after rising from table [mid-day] and giving audience to all who desired, [Federico] went into his closet to attend to his affairs and to listen to readings, according to the season. At 135
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vespers [evening] he went forth again to give audience.”18 Later, after the evening meal, “the Duke would remain for a time to see if anyone had aught to say, and if not he would go with the leading nobles and gentlemen into his closet and talk freely with them.”19 It can be imagined that the studiolo offered the Duke a ruminative atmosphere during the time of day traditionally known as siesta. From Vespasiano’s comment, it is apparent that Federico, after having granted audience in the early afternoon in the Sala delle Udienze, would withdraw to the studiolo, at times accompanied by a reader who would read selections from the Duke’s favourite authors, including Livy and St Augustine.20 Later in the evening, the studiolo offered a convivial setting for conversation, seemingly the day’s final activity before the Duke retired to his bedchamber. While less important politically than Urbino, Gubbio was the birthplace for both Federico and his heir, Guidobaldo, and was therefore highly significant to the Montefeltro for reasons of dynastic continuity. Moreover, following Battista Sforza’s marriage to Federico in 1460, the Gubbio Palace became her favourite residence. It is quite possible then,
Ducal Palace, Gubbio. Partial plan of ground floor. Chamber I, termed “gabinetto,” signifies the studiolo, whose ceiling and intarsia are now installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Archivio di Stato, Florence, Fondo Urbinate, Classe III, F. XXXII
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Urbino.View toward southeast corner with lectern in a studiolo-within-a-studiolo (left), a positive organ by Juhani Castellano (right), and a bench and cabinet door that hinge open to fulfill their represented function. See Pasquale Rotondi’s hypothetical arrangement of a bench and lectern at the southeast corner, below. Photo by author
as Luciano Cheles has noted, that the renovation of the palace by Francesco di Giorgio Martini was intended to commemorate the Duchess, as well as to celebrate the birthplace of the heir.21 As a result, there are subtle differences between the studioli. Unlike the Urbino studiolo, a between space par excellence, the Gubbio studiolo was a more private cul-de-sac, situated at one end of the palace library. Moreover, instead of the uomini illustri, Gubbio featured a cycle of seven allegorical paintings, each depicting a liberal art as a goddess who offers a manuscript or symbolic object (representative of the respective art) to a mortal. Of the original seven, only the images of four have survived: Ptolemy with astronomy, Costanza Sforza with music, Federico with dialectic, and Guidobaldo with rhetoric. This last portrait formerly occupied the most central position in the chamber.22 It is even more difficult to discern a “functional” use of the Gubbio studiolo. For example, while particular areas of the Urbino intarsia folded out into furniture, the paneling in the Gubbio studiolo was entirely fixed. Unlike at Urbino, there are no hidden cabinets or bookshelves, nor was there apparently any free-standing furniture. Nonetheless, there are several clues that point to the uses of the studiolo, the first of which may be deduced from the cycle of allegorical portraits. In Dialectic, the Duke is shown genuflecting before the goddess and is either receiving or returning a closed book. Curiously, Federico’s gaze is focused not on the goddess but beyond the frame to the adjacent portrait, which depicts his son Guidobaldo receiving an opened book from 137
Left: Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (1472–1508) with the goddess Rhetoric. National Gallery, London Right: Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1422–82) with the goddess Dialectic. Originally in the Gubbio studiolo, relocated to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin and destroyed during World War II. Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin
Rhetoric. The goddess gestures to the verso page while training her gaze upon us, the observers who would be standing in the centre of the chamber. From this privileged position, which maximizes the effect of the perspectival illusion, we can imagine ourselves in the shoes of the young Prince – his own image fixed eternally under the Duke’s watchful gaze – raising his own eyes to meet those of the placidly stern goddess of Rhetoric. The incentive to attend to his studies must have been enormous. Another clue is found in the only section of intarsia not immediately visible upon entering the chamber. Here we find the image of a lectern, on which a manuscript of Virgil’s Aeneid is illusionistically opened to the passage describing the death of Pallas,23 likely a reference to the death of Duke Federico. Above the lectern there is a circular mirror bearing the letters g.ba.ldo.dx, signifying Duke Guidobaldo. Since Federico’s ducal insignias are found elsewhere in the chamber, it might be argued that the studiolo was completed following Federico’s death. However, one could easily counter that the program for the chamber had been conceived, or adapted, in preparation for the inevitable transference of the dukedom to, as Castiglione describes it, “a motherless little boy of ten years.” Regardless of the exact timing, the educa138
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Gubbio, window niche. A mirror, traditionally associated with the cardinal virtue of prudence (and thereby with memory), with initials proclaiming “Guidobaldo, Dux.” Photo by author
tional theme of the studiolo, underscored by the portraits of the liberal arts, would have been most appropriate for a young prince. Seen in this light, the general tone of the Gubbio studiolo is slightly more “studious” than at Urbino: there are fewer visual “tricks”; the container of bonbons, readily “shared” at Urbino, is placed on a cabinet shelf at Gubbio. From contemporary accounts, Guidobaldo was an avid student: he was fluent in Greek and could read many manuscripts in the Ducal Library that Federico, who had received only rudimentary training in Greek grammar, could not. More notably, Guidobaldo was admired for his “remarkable powers of memory,” which had been acquired through “judicious and habitual exercise.”24 As such, the studiolo of Gubbio might be seen as an educational compass, conceived to assist the young prince in his navigation of the political uncertainties of the day and to continue the ascendant legacy of the house of Montefeltro. From a historical vantage, the studioli are most often regarded for their display of mathesis universalis, a proportional harmony underlying all universal phenomena that may be apprehended through the mathematical arts and translated through the medium of architecture to frame thought and action. In the studioli, this commensurable harmony is 139
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manifest in the virtuoso marriage of intarsia and the recently formalized principles of perspective.25 Given the evidence provided by Federico’s biographers and comments from notable scholars of the Court, including those offered by the Duke himself, it might appear that the Court of Urbino held the mathematical arts in preeminence to the verbal arts.26 In his famous patent of 1468, which awarded Luciano Laurana the architectural commission for the Ducal Palace at Urbino, Federico declared, “We deem as worthy of honour and commendation men gifted with ingenuity and remarkable skills, and particularly those which have always been prized by both Ancients and Moderns, as has been the skill (virtù) of architecture, founded upon the arts of arithmetic and geometry, which are the foremost of the seven liberal arts because they depend upon exact certainty.”27 While this passage might seem to summarily quell any further doubts on the matter, we must take into consideration a curious detail: if the arts of arithmetic and geometry were perceived as preeminent to the verbal arts and noting that the program of the Gubbio studiolo in particular was dedicated to all of the liberal arts, why then was Guidobaldo depicted with the art of rhetoric and not with one of the mathematical arts? This question may be addressed on (at least) three levels. In humanistic pedagogy, the verbal arts offered precepts for the early stages of learning, and in fact the construction of the Gubbio studiolo coincided with this period of Guidobaldo’s education.28 Second, highly cultivated skills of diplomatic eloquence and persuasion were required to negotiate the interlacing wiles of an Italic peninsula constantly in turmoil, whether among its own factious powers or in the shadow of the encroaching Ottoman Empire. Guidobaldo’s tutor Ludovico Odasio considered the “powers” of eloquence and an extensive acquaintance with history to be “the great aim of a princely education.”29 Duke Federico’s own successful career had greatly hinged upon the interception of and response to a discrediting letter written by his lifelong nemesis, Sigismondo Malatesta.30 The third and most comprehensive response forms the basis of this essay. During the Renaissance – and particularly at the court of Urbino – categorical divisions of thought and learning were more fluid and hypothetical than one might expect: the pursuit of one mode of learning was perceived, not as contrary to, but rather to the benefit of another.31
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For example, architecture was perceived to offer a bridge between the mathematical arts, which lend themselves to mechanical practices, and the art of rhetoric, a discipline significant to the cultivation of memory and eloquence. While architecture represented a virtuous consummation of mathematics, as is evident in Federico’s patent, it served also as an educational model for memory-building. Thus, the study of rhetoric was not necessarily limited to oral and verbal expression. By the architectonic nature of its precepts, rhetoric was associated with mathematical expression, even if indirectly; nonetheless, consistent with the tendency of history to alight upon the unusual and overlook the commonplace, evaluation of the studioli has stressed the historical significance of their perspectival compositions. Consequently, over time the more traditional and, hence, less extolled rhetorical and mnemonic undercurrents have become somewhat obscured. It is possible to enrich our understanding of the studioli by pursuing a line of inquiry hinted at by Alberto Pérez-Gómez: “the [studioli] intarsia constituted the stage for a new orbis studiorum, a new definition of knowledge distinct from medieval theology but not distant from its aspirations.”32 How did the studioli serve to redefine the “sphere of knowledge”? In what ways are they similar to and different from medieval and classical precedents? While addressing these concerns, my aim is also to examine the role of architecture in this transformation of knowledge. Traditionally, architecture has provided a concrete, organizational metaphor for learning and memory-training, with the practice of constructing buildings serving as a pedagogical mirror to the intimate process of self-edification. As a medium uniquely conducive to rhetorical and material investigation, architecture has enabled the mind to ask itself (even to conceive of asking itself) such experiential dilemmas as are reflected in the following passage from St Augustine’s Confessions: “The power of the memory is prodigious, my God. It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am. This means, then, that the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. But where is that part of it which it does not itself contain? How, then, can it be part of it, if it is not contained in it? I am lost in wonder when I consider this problem. It bewilders me.”33
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on architecture, memory, and icono graphy Augustine’s comparison of memory to a sanctuary reflects the deep association between architecture and memory. This kinship stems from a fundamental awareness that in order to preserve the stuff of memory for future recollection, it must first be collected and carefully stored in a manner that enables the mind’s eye to compose and recombine the materials of experience at will, as a given situation demands.34 Through its tactics of containment, architecture helps the mind envision a spatial matrix that expresses and recursively facilitates mnemonic practices. By constructing this matrix, or model, of the mind’s workings within the mind itself (the kernel of Augustine’s wonder and bewilderment),35 one edifies oneself as container of the universe of one’s experience. Consequently, architecture historically has served educators as an ideal model for learning, by furnishing mnemonic armatures that help the mind render knowledge and experience accessible and comprehensible.36 Before our experiences may be stored as the stuff of memory, however, they must be presented in a form that may be grasped by the mind. According to Aristotle, memories are ideas, abstracted from sensual stimuli, that the mind cannot apprehend without a representative image.37 Augustine echoes this thought, “The things which we sense do not enter the memory themselves, but their images are there ready to present themselves to our thoughts when we recall them.”38 While it is now a common notion that the other senses offer significant contributions to the formation of personal memory (even triggering the confounding episodes best described as synaesthesic) the faculty of vision has been traditionally considered the central agency, the “noble sense,” of memory and reason. Despite their pivotal role in preserving sensuous perceptions, mnemonic images do not inherently mean anything. Reduced to their essence, they offer mental switches, or conduits, that help one’s mind constellate ideas from among the elements and experiences at hand.39 This does not diminish but rather reinforces the importance of the representation since from Aristotle on, memory treatises concur that the images used for memory must be sensuously striking for an idea or experience to be fixed securely in the mind and thus available for recollection. As Albertus Magnus describes it, “Wonder is like ‘a systole in the heart’
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… someone witnesses something amazing, but what matters most is not ‘out there’ … but deep within, at the vital emotional center of witness.”40 Over time, of course, images do accumulate associated meanings, the residue of prolonged use and familiarity. Iconography, “the description or illustration of any subject by means of drawings or figures,”41 provides a valuable investigative tool that peels back the surface layer of emblematic works such as the studioli. However, iconographic analyses too readily attribute a direct correspondence between image and meaning, a misleading presumption. The intrinsic value of mnemonic imagery is precisely its capacity to convey different meanings to different people under ever-changing circumstances.42 With this in mind, then, it is inappropriate to pursue a final, “exhaustive” assessment of the studioli. A less axiomatic approach is necessary to recollect those mnemonic origins of the studioli that iconographic analysis has not yet revealed and possibly cannot adequately engage. For example, a notable shortcoming in this mode of inquiry is its tendency to emphasize the intellectual value of an image at the expense of its experiential qualities. The emotional impact of an image – its capacity to move a viewer figuratively and literally, inwardly as well as outwardly – is often downplayed, if not entirely ignored. This is a significant oversight, since an image provides a lasting influence on the eye of the mind only if it has adequately stimulated the corporeal eye. Scholarship has had great difficulty addressing certain perspectival illusions in the studioli that engage the observer physically but evade categorical assessment. These illusions are not merely sleights of hand-eye coordination; they evoke an ambience of wonder that is ideal for stimulating the mind, and especially the memory. A more comprehensive appreciation of the studioli calls for a mode of investigation that delves beyond iconographic groundwork to engage the dense layering of their imagery and the phenomenological impact of their composition. The question we should ask of the studioli is not only “what do they mean?” but “how do they work?” the phenomenology of the
STUDIOLI
There are multiple layers of experience awaiting a visitor to the studioli, whether one proceeds by curiosity and instinct or follows a manual or
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Urbino, west wall. Chess pieces. Photo by author
docent. Most visitors are drawn immediately to examine the intarsia at close proximity: there is an almost overpowering desire to touch the wood paneling, a tactile component decidedly truncated by museum etiquette. Others follow clues in the perspectival arrangement and search for standpoints from which the overall composition may be appreciated. After a visitor has perused the chambers, two modes of apprehending the studioli become evident: observation at rest and observation in motion. “Observation at rest” corresponds to those fixed standpoints from which the illusion snaps into full focus. Conversely, “observation in motion” refers to optical effects that are detectable only while traversing the rooms. For instance, shadows seem to appear and disappear, depending on the position of the observer with regard to certain objects; the shadow that extends from the tip of the mace in the Urbino studiolo offers a prime example. Other objects, such as the flutes and recorders on the bench, appear to follow the viewer across the chamber. Likewise, the latticed cabinet shutters appear to swing open and closed according to the observer’s own movement, evoking the unearthly sensation that the “contents” of the rooms are being manipulated by one’s own eyes. Further levels of reading unfold only gradually. Some emblems are purely two-dimensional, including the heraldic devices (imprese) of the Montefeltro, as well as the various awards Federico had accumulated during his career, from his appointment as Knight of the Pope and pro144
Emblem of the Ermine, from the dado of both studioli.The ermine represented purity and loyalty: “non mai” refers to the tradition that an ermine would rather die than soil its own pure white coat.The King of Naples awarded Duke Federico with the Order of the Ermine in August 1474. Olga Raggio has suggested that the presence of the ermine and the phrase “non mai” might also have served to refute any question of Federico’s involvement in the assassination of his younger brother, Duke Oddantonio da Montefeltro, in 1444. (See the Metropolitan Museum of Art catalogue, “The Liberal Arts Studiolo from the Ducal Palace at Gubbio,” 28.) Photo by author
motion to the status of Duke to his celebrated induction into the chivalric Order of the Ermine and Order of the Garter.43 Other emblems represent three-dimensional figures that hover enigmatically between the realms of material objects and intelligible ideas. For example, the astrolabe and chess pieces refer not only to their practical uses for astronomical calculation and gentlemanly gamesmanship but also to established precepts of memory-training and lessons in prudent governance. The boundary between the two- and three-dimensional is not always so crisp, however. The ermine that is emblematically depicted in the dado below the studioli cabinets elsewhere appears to dangle from the collar that Federico had received from the King of Naples; in both studioli this collar dangles from a drawer or cabinet. As another example, the illusionistic shadows cast beneath the benches and within the cabinets “originate” from actual apertures in the rooms, further blurring the distinction between actual and ideal. Taking into consideration Federico’s monocular vision, which avoided the optical dilemma that was to beguile Descartes over a century later, one can imagine how marvelously real the cabinets and their contents would have appeared to the Duke.44 145
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There are other forms of play in the studioli that were highly conducive to memory-work, such as the series of verbal puns in the east wall at Urbino. Directly behind the central image of the ideal city is a bookpress, which Pliny had described in his letters as an armarium. The studiolo-within-a-studiolo to the right of the Ideal City represents a place of study that was known also as an armariolum. On the other side of the ideal city we find Federico’s armour, known as arma: furthermore, an arsenal for arms and armour was called an armamentum. With the weapons and instruments of scholarship disposed throughout their cabinets, each studiolo thus may be seen as both an armariolum and an armamentum, a witty conflation of the vita activa and vita contemplativa. It is vital in the studioli to appreciate the emotional impact of the subject material as well as the compositional technique. When Alberti, who discusses this at length in his treatise On Painting (1435), describes the appropriate nature of a work’s historia (or subject), he might well be describing the principles behind the studioli:
Urbino, east wall. Book-press (armarium) at centre with panel of the ideal city, studiolo-withina-studiolo (armariolum) at right, and Federico’s armour (arma) at left. Soprintendenza per I Beni Artistici delle Marche, Urbino
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A “historia” you can justifiably praise and admire will be one that reveals itself to be so charming and attractive as to hold the eye of the learned and unlearned spectator for a long while with a certain sense of pleasure and emotion. The first thing that gives pleasure in a “historia” is a plentiful variety. Just as with food and music, novel and extraordinary things delight us for various reasons but especially because they are different from the old ones we are used to … When the spectators dwell on observing all the details, then the painter’s richness will acquire favour.45
All of these effects contribute to a perception that the studioli were conceived to engage the entire body as well as the eye, a tactic that would enhance the memorability of the intellectual content of the chambers while conveying the mastery of the artisans and magnificence of the patron. To this end, the studioli provided the Montefeltro dukes with treasuries of images that were readily preserved within the memory, particularly that of a visiting dignitary, who would then recount to others the marvelous “sorts” of wisdom cultivated at the Montefeltro court. From this point of view, the studioli would have served quite naturally in a propagandistic capacity, although this aspect should not be overstressed. While the Urbino studiolo occupied a highly political position in the palace and the affairs of the Duke, the studiolo at Gubbio was more private and less disposed to such “propagandistic” uses. In light of the deep tradition of memory architecture, as well as the profound influence of classical Roman culture on Federico’s humanist court, the studioli should be considered, first and foremost, as idealized settings in which Federico and Guidobaldo would compose themselves and their thoughts as part of their responsibilities of governance. on classical architectural mnemonics Can it be that the memory is not present to itself in its own right but only by means of an image of itself? Augustine Confessions 10.15
In Plato’s Theatetus, an enquiry on the nature of knowledge, Socrates compares the memory to an aviary: “Let us make in each soul a sort of aviary of all kinds of birds … When anyone takes possession of a piece of knowledge [a bird] and shuts it up in the pen, we should say that he 147
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Gubbio, window niche. A caged parrot. At Urbino, a cage containing two parrots is “suspended” alongside a mechanical clock. Parrot in Italian is papagallo. In 1475 Federico received the Golden Rose from Pope Sixtus IV at the Vatican Palace in the Camera papagalli, a room adjacent to the Pope’s bedroom that was reservsed for confidential negotiations. Photo by author
has learned or has found … knowledge; and knowing, we should say, is this.”46 Unfortunately, while a cage may seem a logical metaphor for memory, if the “birds of knowledge” are permitted to fly about at will, even within the confines of our own “cage,” we might very well reach in and retrieve a dove instead of the parrot we had sought. In order to prevent such mnemonic misapprehensions, it is vital to design memory structures carefully. As Hugh of St Victor warns, “Confusion is the mother of ignorance and forgetfulness, but orderly arrangement illuminates the intelligence and firms up memory.”47 A retracing of mnemonic models reveals a polithetic evolution in design, from simple architectonic containment toward increasingly elaborate strategies of memory edification.48 As in the studioli, more complex models often incorporated earlier models into their design, through extended memory techniques such as “nesting” or “concatenation.”49 These techniques increased memory capacity by storing knowledge securely while providing the mind’s eye with an array of possible routes for mental perambulation and, consequently, thought-permutation. At least as early as classical Greece, beehives and their forulae,50 as well as dovecotes and their loculamentae,51 were among the commonplace vessels easily transposed into the mind as models for memorytraining. Due to the cellular, lattice-like construction of these containers, bits of information could be discretely stored and then quickly recom148
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bined and re-presented as required for a given rhetorical demonstration. The memory was cultivated not merely for the recapitulation of stored information but as an imaginative engine for mixing and reinventing experiences and ideas from the exterior world within the interior chambers of the imagination. “You were trained to furnish the rooms of the mind,” Mary Carruthers has stated, “because you cannot think if you do not have something to think with, and thinking is the mark of the citizen.”52 The demonstration of one’s well-furnished memory through inventive oration conveyed one’s capacity for crafting thought, a skill highly admired at least until the end of the Renaissance. Subsequently, the perception that we make our own thoughts, from any and all available materials, has gradually given way to the more passive notion that thoughts are things we simply have.53 As a student became adept at these memory exercises (and in general, as the human mind contrived more elaborate matrices for expanding mental and mnemonic skills), the architecture of buildings and cities provided ideal abodes for the materials of memory. The classical Greek and Roman tradition of “architectural mnemonics” consisted of the careful arrangement of images, representing ideas and rhetorical arguments, in palaces and cities constructed in the mind.54 In this training, physical architecture offered a quarry for an imaginative, inner reconstruction of the exterior world. One would extract spaces and ornament from the buildings encountered in daily life and recompose them within the mind as fantastic, personalized palaces outfitted with numerous storage locations for images and expressions of wisdom. As a result, amid rhetorical debate or presentation, one could call upon rhetorical passages at will, and re-present them in an appropriate sequence through the mental navigation of a given palace/treatise. Significantly, striking (or monstrous) construction details were considered to be the choice materials for mnemonic construction, in that they provided the mind with secure memory-fixtures.55 If the locations for memory-placement were too ordinary, or even too poorly “illuminated,” errors would occur.56 With this in mind, it is reasonable to speculate that physical architectural ornament not only influenced but was in turn influenced by the procedures of architectural mnemonics. This would have been especially true where sponsors of architectural construction were educated in rhetorical mnemonics, as in classical Rome. The architectonic expression of thought became firmly associated with the liberal 149
Left: Urbino, north wall. Intarsia capital with ornament of the scopas (a hand-brush).This symbol of purity had been absorbed into the dynastic emblems of the Montefeltro through Federico’s marriage to Battista Sforza in 1460. Photo by author Right: Urbino, north wall. Intarsia capital with ornament of exploding grenade. Federico was renowned (and feared) as a military leader for his use of heavy artillery as well as his tactical genius. Photo by author
art of rhetoric within the education of the Roman aristocracy. For a culture defined by political oration and legal debate, the architecture of individual palaces and the city provided a ubiquitous map and legend (as well as a mental stage-setting) for composing one’s thoughts – and composing oneself – for the theatre of civic participation. Vitruvius attests to the significance bestowed upon rhetoric during this period: “Advocates [lawyers] and professors of rhetoric should be housed with distinction, and in sufficient space to accommodate their audiences.”57 The first part of this phrase offers insight into the value that the practice of rhetoric had gained as an educational/theatrical performance, with a rhetorician earning fees “on the scale of those given to a prima donna in our time.”58 The second part of the phrase, which suggests that spaces were created within the private residence to house these rhetorical performances, is even more notable.59 Certain areas of the Roman house were designated as places to “enter into thought,” with the physical architecture and ornament articulating an ambience conducive for thought, as well as the sensuous conduits for guiding one’s mindfulness to the construction site of one’s memory. In book 2 of De oratore, an enquiry into the ideal philosophical orator, Cicero offers a few examples of these domestic settings.60 The character Antonius recounts how Simonides of Ceos had discovered the principles 150
The cubiculum from the Villa of Fannius Synestor, Boscoreale (40–30 BC), now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Photo by Schecter Lee
of architectural mnemonics from the banquet table by placing images (imagines) in an orderly set of architectural locations (loci) in his memory.61 Elsewhere in the dialogue, Antonius and Crassus take a siesta to contemplate their responses to matters that others had placed before them. Antonius chooses to compose his thoughts while walking in the portico.62 Crassus, on the other hand, retires to an exedra where he devotes “all this midday interval to the closest and most careful meditation.”63 Aside from the portico and exedra, there is another chamber in the Roman house, the cubiculum, to which Crassus (and Cicero, who had purchased Crassus’s house) could retire, to meditatively compose himself and his responses. Obscure in its origins and function, this chamber remains to this day somewhat misunderstood. The Oxford English Dictionary renders cubiculum (as well as its derivative cubicle) as “bedroom,” a logical assessment given its Latin root cubare, to recline. Otherwise, Vitruvius mentions the cubiculum only once, noting simply that “private rooms [cubicula] and libraries should look to the east, for their purpose demands the morning light.”64 Pliny the Younger offers a more informative comment in his Epistolae, evoking a studious ambience: “My cubiculum has a press let into the wall which does duty as a library, and holds books not merely to be read, but read over and over again.”65 151
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A well-preserved cubiculum extracted from the villa of Fannius Synestor at Boscoreale may be visited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In accord with traditional scholarship,66 the label describes the cubiculum as a bedroom; to this end a small couch has been placed in the room. Although this particular piece is not original to the chamber, its inclusion is not erroneous. The error lies in the assumption that the couch would have been used for sleeping and not for other activities. As Philo, envoy to the Emperor Caligula, observed, “The couches upon which the Romans recline at their repasts shine with gold and pearls.”67 Repasts and siestas were not utilized merely as periods of eating and sleeping, as their English translations suggest. Instead, as may be gathered from Cicero, this period of the day and the setting of the cubiculum would have been utilized for “business, for conversation with particular friends, for reading and contemplation.”68 Carruthers elaborates:
Urbino. Pasquale Rotondi’s hypothetical arrangement of a bench and lectern at the southeast corner (recall view toward southeast corner with lectern, above)
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[Synestor’s cubiculum is] just large enough for a single couch. The word Cicero uses, lectulus, meant not just a bed for sleeping, but one for conversation and study – perhaps because of its partial homophony with legere, lectus (“gather by picking” like flowers) and “read.” Its walls are all painted in panels, intercolumnia, with fantastic, theatrical architecture … The murals make a “theater” of locations that, apparently, was assumed to be conducive to inventional meditation – not because it provided subject-matter, but because the familiarity, the route- (and rote-) like quality, of such a patterned series in one’s most tranquil space could help provide an order or “way” for compositional cogitation.69
In addition to the peripatetic mode of composition preferred by Antonius, Romans meditated in a reclined position – in both the public exedra and the more private cubiculum. The linguistic interpolation of bed and reading, via Cicero’s lectulus, was to continue into the Renaissance: the lettiera was a standard form of bed during the fifteenth century. However, as is evident in the contemporary portraiture of the scholarly church fathers, the appropriate posture for thought had changed from a reclined to a seated position: Cicero’s “day-bed” was replaced as the furniture-for-musing by the reading lectern. Not surprisingly, lecterns figure prominently in both the Gubbio and Urbino studioli. At Gubbio, the lectern served a prominent role in commemorating Federico’s death. In the intarsia at Urbino, a large lectern is featured in the studiolo-within-a-studiolo: adjacent panels even fold out to form what may have actually served as a bench and reading stand, as Rotondi has suggested. Furthermore, in Baldi’s description, there was originally a table placed in the middle of the Urbino chamber. Although the exact character of this table is not certain, it is quite likely that it would have been a lectern, since Federico used the studiolo not only to read alone, but to be read to by another.70 From da Bisticci’s accounts, it is apparent that Federico used the Urbino studiolo in a manner similar to the Roman cubiculum. In the Sala delle Udienze, Federico received visitors seeking counsel. After hearing their news or requests, Federico would retire to the studiolo, ostensibly to consider and compose his responses by consulting the appropriate authorities and their commentaries on the subject. To draw an even more concrete connection between the studioli and cubiculum,
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Gubbio. Floralegium ornament at ceiling. Photo by author
we might return to Pliny’s phrase. While it is interesting to note that Pliny’s manuscript was present in the Ducal Library of Urbino,71 it is even more interesting to note that Luciano Cheles, in his analysis, crops the words cubiculi mei from his citation of Pliny’s phrase, perhaps due to its traditional misinterpretation as “bedroom.”72 When the studious significance of the cubiculum is restored, we realize that Cheles was more correct in his comparison than perhaps even he was aware: the physical description of Pliny’s cubiculi concurs precisely with the physical arrangement of the Urbino studiolo. In a related note of interest, Virgil in his fourth Georgic speaks of the bees’ cells as cubilia and of the bees retiring for the night in their bedchambers.73 In ancient tradition, scholars were likened to bees, whose diligent investigations afield gather nectar to produce honey.74 This trope became somewhat less metaphoric during the medieval epoch, when monasteries would literally buzz with the sounds of cogitation, as brethren “ate the book” and ruminated.75 While the steady hum of softly vocalised lectio had been all but silenced by the advent of the printed page, the trope was incorporated by Francis Bacon in 1626 as a fundamental image of the scientific method, when he likened the scholarscientist to a bee in the first chapter of the Novum Organum. It is not at 154
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all far-fetched, then, to draw a comparison between the mnemonic imagery of classical forulae, the floralegium (literally, the reading of flowers) found in the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts, and the floral ornament often found along the margins of architectural settings of study. Nor is it stretching the point too far to envision the cubiculum, entwined within the genealogy of these pedagogical metaphors, as a cell in which the scholar/bee would distill and preserve the sweet nectar of experience. The Montefeltro studioli represent elaborations upon this genealogy. In the studiolo at Urbino, Federico distilled the rewards of the person he had proven to be; the studiolo at Gubbio served as an incubator for the Duke that Guidobaldo was to become. on the medieval S A N C TA M E M O R I A and the mechanisms of memory I have explored the vast field of my memory in search of you, O Lord! And I have not found you outside it. St Augustine Confessions 10.24
Even before the fall of the Roman Empire, the pedagogical objectives and procedures of memory-training had begun to change markedly. Due to the influence of the fathers of the early Christian Church – Paul, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, and Gregory the Great (all of whom had been extremely well-versed in the art of rhetoric)76 – the role of memory expanded from storage and inventory to foster skills of seeking and invention. Classical architectural mnemonics were transformed by Christian theologists into sancta memoria, or holy recollection, a monastic practice that centred on the cultivation of memory through a process known as aedificatio (self-edification). No longer a mere choreographic display of the “birds of knowledge,” memory came to be seen as a way of thinking in its own right, as a process of inventive wayfinding to be practised throughout the pilgrimage of one’s life. In particular, memory became the ideal vehicle to facilitate the search for an immutable, invisible God. Augustine’s comment that God is not to be found “outside” the memory follows from a sinuous line of logic surmising that God, as the Maker of all things, fabricated human memory and therefore, as “Lord of the Mind,” dwells in some “cell” or 155
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“sanctuary” located therein.77 Memory offered a dwelling place for God, as well as a means to draw nearer to God. Through concentrated meditation, the search of one’s fields of memory would reveal God’s wisdom, providing an inward model for a pilgrimage of the external world. As Augustine implores, “Whisper words of truth in my heart … while I withdraw to my secret cell [cubiculo] and sing you hymns of love, groaning with grief that I cannot express as I journey on my pilgrimage. Yet I shall remember the heavenly Jerusalem and my heart shall be lifted up towards that holy place.”78 The approach to God called upon holy recollection. To recollect, one must first have constructed within the mind the means to recollect. Gregory the Great elaborated on Augustine’s image of “memory-lifting,” placing it central to the practice of meditation: “a soul placed far from God creates a kind of machine, that by its means [the soul] may be lifted to God.”79 Memory became, in Gregory’s words, a machina mentis – a machine of the mind to stimulate and guide thought and action. Through meditation exercises, the matrices of memory architecture could be expanded indefinitely. Although the orbis studiorum of Augustine’s world was bounded by God, this was far less constricting than one might imagine. Since God was not to be found outside the memory, the circumference of the orbis studiorum was determined elastically by the capacities of one’s memory: hence the emphasis placed on the cultivation of mnemonic powers. Truth as interpreted through the meditative exercises of sancta memoria is not to be confused with either the knowledgeable demonstrations of a classical education or, even less, with a scientific truth as substantiated by hard, reproducible evidence. The craft of memory-building followed a very different sort of logic: truth in sancta memoria was inventively fabricated through the process of aedificatio, in which the craft of edifying thoughts mirrored the edifying craft of architecture. As Gregory the Great describes it in Moralia in Job, “First we put in place the foundations of literal meaning [historia]; then through typological interpretation we build up the fabric of our mind in the walled city of faith; and at the end, through the grace of our moral understanding, as though with added color, we clothe the building.”80 Among the various pedagogical devices implemented in the habitus of memory construction, architecture served as the central operative metaphor for this ongoing construction, particularly with regard to its
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material practices of fabrication. Memory as a practice of wayfinding drew upon architecture as a process. Building became valued as a gerund, an active state as well as a simple enclosure. By entering into (a) memory-building, one ascended from the world toward God in a state of contemplative love. The architect’s machina, a mechanism for hoisting blocks of masonry into place, served as an operable metaphor for this ascent, due to its pivotal role in the construction of divine structures such as cathedrals and monasteries, but even more importantly, due to the overarching notion that God the Architect would have used such a mechanism – a machina universalis – while fabricating the universe.81 In his Etymologiae, Isidore of Seville extracts the word maciones (mason) from the Latin machina, citing the tradition of the architect/ inventor who, like Daedalus, designs the walls of buildings as well as machines that facilitate their fabrication.82 For Gregory the Great the machina represented the act of contemplation, energized by love, that enabled one to elaborate on the foundations of historia and “build up the fabric of [the] mind.”83 As the integral mechanism of aedificatio, the practice of contemplation facilitated the discovery/fabrication of a universe within one’s memory, empowering one to emulate in small compass the labours of God the Architect. Previously, in book 10 of his enquiry into the ideals of architecture, Vitruvius had defined a machine somewhat less metaphorically as “a continuous material system having special fitness for the moving of weights.”84 He then distinguished between machines (machinae) that are “driven by several workmen” and instruments (organae) that “carry out their purpose by the careful handling of a single workman.”85 This pragmatic observation, while clearly intended as a matter-of-fact account of the process of construction, foreshadowed a central motif of sancta memoria. The operation of machines required collaborative effort to transport materials too heavy for one person. This simple fact supplied the practitioners of aedificatio with a rich source for allegorical interpretation. As the lesson of the Tower of Babel illustrates, without appropriate planning and prudent guidance, all collaborative projects are easily sabotaged by miscommunication, even those with a clear and common purpose. As caretaker of the process of construction and the chief fabricator who translates the intangible ideals of a community into its places of gathering,
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A Renaissance example of the architect’s machina. Drawing of the hoisting mechanism designed by Filippo Brunelleschi to construct the Duomo at Florence. From the sketchbook of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, court architect of Urbino
an architect is invested with profound ethical responsibility. For the tradition of sancta memoria, the architect’s machina, representing the practice of meditation, was conveyed to the site of memory-building as an ethical device essential to the procedures of self-edification. The collaborative nature of construction offered other allegorical dimensions. Buildings such as cathedrals and monasteries were continuously under construction, their final form manifesting centuries of communal effort and an aggregation of ornamental character, as bestowed by legacies of architects and master-masons. The indefinite duration of this construction should not be reduced to matters of technological capability but should rather be understood as a reflection of ontological aspirations quite removed from our own. From the peripatetic St Paul to his monastic descendants, rhetoricians and educators of sancta memoria played on the image of architecture as an exercise for building personal character and communal identity. In 1 Corinthians 3:10–17, St Paul refers to himself as a wise master-builder, claiming to have laid the foundations of a Christian doctrine whereupon others would continue to build within themselves – each as a temple wherein God dwells. Subsequent authors, such as Gregory the Great and 158
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Hugh of St Victor, attended to the methods of interpretation by which each student would raise, internally and uniquely, an allegorical superstructure upon the foundations of historia.86 Although constructed with commonplace materials available to everyone – biblical stories, architectural settings and ornament – one’s memory architecture was a personal creation, reflecting the unique character cultivated through one’s habituation to the precepts of aedificatio. While this mnemonic architecture was invisible to others, one’s character was not, expressing itself outwardly in the worldly fruit of one’s labours, as well as one’s temperament and interaction with others. By aedificatio, one built personal character and also found guiding principles for everyday life. The practice of aedificatio was thus intimately personal and yet ultimately communal. Although one’s memory structures were visible only to oneself, all who practised aedificatio were united by the notion that each continued the work of God, as architects of their own lives and as participants in the ongoing fabrication of truth. As St Paul exhorts, “We are fellow workers with God, you are God’s building.”87 Nonetheless, the convivial aspirations of sancta memoria did not diminish, but rather fortified, personal expression. In the Didascalicon (1128), a treatise on education particularly significant for its treatment of both the liberal and mechanical arts,88 the Augustinian Hugh of St Victor divided the stages of learning into the lectio divina and meditatio. The lectio – “reading” or “study” – trained one’s aptitude for thought “by the order and method of exposition and analysis, including the disciplines of grammar and dialectic.”89 The meditatio was more advanced, drawing on the skills honed by the lectio but not bound by its rules or precepts. Hugh elaborates: “[meditatio] delights to range along open ground, where it fixes its free gaze upon the contemplation of truth, drawing together now these, now those ideas, or now penetrating into profundities, leaving nothing doubtful, nothing obscure. The start of learning, thus, lies in lectio but its consummation lies in meditation.”90 Meditational composition was characterized by a free play of association and was not obliged to follow a prescribed path.91 Nonetheless, it was essential for meditation to have a target destination to orient one’s inner pilgrimage. In monastic meditation, all roads led to the New Jerusalem, Augustine’s City of God.92 Apart from the evocative account of its foundations and general character in Revelations 21, the New Jerusalem was as open to imaginative 159
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interpretation as the mnemonic models and mechanisms conceived to assist in one’s journeys. The fruit of study, then, was to envision the ideal city within oneself as a communal building site for memory, energized and supplied with the materials gathered from one’s diligent investigations afield. While providing an inner source of hope and fortitude by the promise of an ideal state unassailed by fortuna and the fragility of human affairs, the City of God also served as a constant reminder that citizenship in the hereafter was determined by the character of one’s actions in the here and now.93 A well-trained memory was considered central to the cultivation of prudence, the virtue of discernment between, as Cicero describes it, “what is good, what is bad, and what is neither good nor bad.”94 Traditionally associated with wisdom by way of sapientia (the term used by Cicero), prudence surveys the cause and effect of past, present, and future, offering inner counsel on the most appropriate course for one’s actions. Whether employed in the fabrication of thoughts or buildings or in the governance of a city, prudence was considered an essential moral compass for one’s participation in the field of human interaction. The intangible objective of the New Jerusalem did not diminish, but rather elevated, the value of material works, particularly those that assisted in mnemonic composition. Knowledge of a material art was thought to provide a “sort” of wisdom, since the accumulation of experience enables one to conduct one’s craft with increasing acumen and foresight.95 Similarly, memory-building was thought to refine one’s natural abilities through habitual training, a procedure considered by Aristotle to be central in the development of one’s character (éthos) and the pursuit of ethical excellence.96 As a result, products of artisanry were often termed virtù, because they conveyed thought beyond the realm of the senses, toward divine contemplation. Cogent examples of such virtù are offered by medieval picturae – actual paintings, or mental images painted with words – that were conceived to be borne between the eyes of the body and the eye of the mind as guides to contemplation. Also referred to as mappae, the picturae were composed of imagines agentes: activating images that, like the imagines of classical architectural mnemonics, stimulated cogitation and facilitated mnemonic navigation.97 Picturae assisted in the memorization of significant narratives by supplying the memory with cues for the turning
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points of a given storyline. These visual prompts also furnished one’s meditations with loci with which to insinuate narrative compositions of one’s own. Meditation stimulated the discovery and fabrication of alternate routes among one’s memory structures, “drawing together now these, now those ideas” as one explored the heuristic causeways of the memory. Nonetheless, in order to prevent the flow of one’s thought from wandering too far astray, it was essential for meditation to have provisional limits, or guides.98 In addition to the destination of the New Jerusalem, picturae provided meditational composition with a starting point and the visual channels and ornaments (ductus) to convey the mind’s eye among the imagines agentes of a given narrative.99 Less significant than where meditation began was how it began: for a well-trained memory, the point of departure consisted of any phrase or image that adequately stimulated the emotions and triggered the recollective process. In ways akin to the Roman cubiculum, picturae offered many visual apertures for an observer to catch hold of and enter into thought. One might, for example, follow Aristotle’s suggestion to begin from a central location and proceed by considering the images on either side.100 The representation offered a space of thought, a visual setting conducive to mental perambulation. During contemplation of a pictura, whether in its presence or in recollection, the mind’s eye literally would enter the picture plane and navigate among the images, generating new associations and courses for thought.101 Ductus offered provisional tracks for the pilgrim’s progress. Connective pictoral filaments, such as architectural ornament, served literally as conduits for the flow of one’s thought: redirecting it, altering its pace, and drawing the mind’s eye along a narrative path while providing opportunities for digression and invention. The imagines agentes provided mnemonic markers along this flow, evoking within the observer the emotions appropriate to respective narrative passages and renewing the observer’s interest and participation. This space of engagement was not necessarily limited to a single pictura but could be elaborated into a thematic cycle. In addition to its role in articulating physical and mental pictures, ductus would conduct an observer along extended narrative sequences within a cathedral,
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Urbino, centre panel of east wall.The ideal city, seen at distance through the arcade. At left, a basket of fruit, traditionally associated with charity and concord; at right, a domesticated squirrel, representative of prudence. Photo by author
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throughout a monastic compound, or as an episode of the worldly pilgrimage. Picturae could be mounted onto wooden panels and assembled contiguously to create intimate, contemplative settings, as at St Peter’s and Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.102 Narrative cycles could also be dispersed strategically throughout a larger construct as markers for ritual processions; the “twelve stations of the cross” exemplifies a traditional narrative that was frequently incorporated into the ornamental fabric of a cathedral and the ritual choreography of its congregation. Architecture, in addition to its metaphoric dimensions, provided a prosthetic for the mind, a physical matrix that set thought in motion by engaging the entire sensory apparatus of the body. The cathedral provided the medieval mind with an “engine for prayer,”103 facilitating private compositional meditation and communal ritual proceedings, as well as the perambulatory flow of pilgrims across Europe toward the earthly Jerusalem. In this context architectural ornament, in representations as well as buildings, offered a ductus that conveyed the mind’s eye between the exterior world and the interior seat of witness. With the theological and moral underpinnings of Christian doctrine, the ornamental language of architecture was conceived and refined as a topological guide to visualizing social conduct.104 Through sancta memoria, mnemonic architecture became a mode of invention as well as a container for inventory. Study was considered a
Urbino, north wall. “With [the influence of ] virtù so does one scale the stars.” Photo by author
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lifelong endeavour rather than a liminal phase; a lifetime of finding and keeping to the Way, as a pilgrim en route between the lost Zion and the dream of the New Jerusalem. Historia served as the foundations upon which the edifice of one’s life would be constructed. Lectio prepared the adept with the tools and procedures for crafting thought and thereby edifying oneself. The practice of meditatio cultivated one’s habits in emulation of God the Architect. By building with the materials in memory, through the metaphor of aedificatio, one negotiated everyday life while contributing to the unceasing fabrication of the New Jerusalem. conclusion:
V I RT U T I B U S I T U R A D A S T R A
Although their objectives were different, classical architectural mnemonics and sancta memoria addressed the same fundamental question: how can one integrate personal experience and preexisting constructs of knowledge and truth? In essence, how does one live among others? Within these two pedagogical traditions, memory offered a site of reconciliation. Whether utilized as a visual matrix to assist in public oration and disputation, as in classical Greece and Rome, or as a habitual exercise of self-edification, the architecture of memory offered a mental theatre for actively participating in the apprehension of truth and the determination of knowledge.105 Like the Roman cubiculum and medieval picturae, the Renaissance studioli offered physical “theatres of locations” conducive to contemplation. However, the studioli also manifested a profound transformation in practices of envisioning knowledge; their comprehensive perspectival arrangement signalled a shift from the inward habit of mnemonic composition toward a more extroverted mediation of the world by the corporeal eye and its prosthetic instruments. The studioli demonstrated the emergence of a quantitative methodology for representing reality, a scientia mechanica centred on the belief that humans might participate directly in the inner workings of the universe. Nonetheless, within the studioli this transformation appears as a syncretic overlap rather than an abrupt departure, with mechanical practices such as perspective serving to recalibrate deeper rhetorical traditions. The passion with which Federico and his scholars embraced the mathematical arts was mixed with a deep appreciation of a history that had been recorded and recovered primarily through 164
Urbino, detail of ideal city seen in illustration of Urbino, centre panel of east wall, above. Photo by author
the verbal arts. As such, the studioli are distinctly removed from, and yet akin, to their classical and medieval precedents. The studioli were intricately wrought from many philosophical and artisanal traditions: their imagery encompasses subjects that, to our backward gaze, often appear contradictory, if not irreconcilable. A key to understanding Federico’s world – which turned upon such virulent debates as the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, scholastic and mechanical science, pagan and Christian wisdom – may be found in the multiple aspects of the notion of virtù. In Virgil’s Rome, virtù represented military valour. From Federico’s vantage, the notion of virtù had accumulated the moral and ethical overtones of medieval Christianity, as well as the skills demonstrated in the crafting of thought and material artifacts. By Federico’s day, in fact, the artifacts themselves were considered virtù. Whether manifest as a painting or a room, a palace or a city, virtù effected an empathy between human emotions and the sensible realm of materials. As an integration of the visible and invisible, virtù provided a means to reach the divine and to insinuate oneself within the pantheon of communal memory. Architecture, by its lineaments and ornament, provided a tangible medium for the expression of virtù in the realm of human affairs. Above all, virtù represented a well-tempered personal character: in particular, a balance maintained between active participation in contemporary affairs and contemplative pursuits. For Federico, these two states 165
Portrait of Federico and Guidobaldo, ca. 1475, painted by Justus of Ghent.The young prince’s position at the Duke’s right knee recalls the ancient Roman practice of demonstrating patrolineage. Photo by Massimo Listri
were cooperative, if not codependent. Architecture provided a material and metaphoric expression for this integration. Recalling the visual and verbal pun of the armarium/armamentum and the ideal city located between them, one might draw a phrase from Vitrivius to appreciate Federico’s affinity for this discipline: “architects who without culture aim at manual skill cannot gain a prestige corresponding to their labours, while those who trust to theory and literature obviously follow a shadow and not reality. But those who have mastered both, like men equipped in full armour, soon acquire influence and attain their purpose.”106 Until well into the Renaissance, a well-trained memory was considered an indispensable recombinatorium for ideas and a speculative mechanism for change. While we tend to imagine the early Renaissance humanists to be encaged in a closed universe, awaiting the liberating flights of Columbus and Copernicus, Federico da Montefeltro’s rise from military captain to Duke offers an illustrious example of the capacity to intervene in one’s own fate. Federico, like Alberti, was an illegitimate child; his life accomplishments demonstrated to his contemporaries that the hermetic cycle of noble birth could be negotiated. By an appropriate integration of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa, one could ascend within the prevailing social and political structures. The studioli may be seen as open manuals for navigation, providing Federico and Guidobaldo with treasuries for personal experience, sources of willpower, and templates for action. 166
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How would Federico have conducted a new guest through the studiolo? Did he have an ideal narrative, propagandistically conceived? Or would he have tailored a unique itinerary to each visitor, according to his perception of the other’s vested interests? To what extent were the narratives extemporized? Had Federico cultivated a repertoire? Would he have indulged a guest to muse aloud, to ask questions to which he could then knowingly respond? Would he have permitted, possibly even encouraged, visitors to touch the intarsia? Although the exact appearance and use of mnemonic palaces and cities vanished irretrievably with their authors, we may discern the following from the evidence available: at the moment of their physical completion, in the presence of their patron, architect, scholarly consultants, and artisans, the studioli embodied a deep history of ideas and practices of knowing, gathered and presented in a highly innovative manner. Over the ensuing five hundred years, the studioli have accumulated further layers of significance from the glosses of scholarly interpretation. The absolute and original meaning of the studioli proves elusive, if not beside the point. It is precisely by their capacity to engage the observer – to draw us into speculation on the possible meanings of particular images, as well as the potential meanings constellated from clusters of images – that these chambers reveal their quintessence. The studioli do not represent total knowledge but offer an architectonic matrix within which the observer figures as a vital participant-agent in retrieving associations and forging them anew. notes 1 The seven liberal arts consisted of the mathematical arts (the “Quadrivium”: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) and the verbal arts (the “Trivium”: grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric). 2 The Christian virtues include the four cardinal virtues – justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance – adopted from the Old Testament (Book of Wisdom 8:7–8) and classical pedagogy (Cicero’s De inventione). The theological virtues are faith, hope, and charity. 3 For the history of memory training, see Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria (Torino: G. Einaudi 1995); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), and The Craft of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998); Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard 167
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5
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of the Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993); and Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1966). Since 1985 valuable iconographic research on the studioli has been presented by Luciano Cheles, Maria Grazia Pernis, and Virginia Grace Tenzer. The earliest surviving catalogue of the Ducal Library of Urbino, the Indice Vecchio (hereafter abbreviated as i.v.), was published between 1482 and 1490 by the ducal librarian Agapito. Cosimus Stornajolo, Biblioteca Vaticana: Codices Urbinates Graeci (Rome: Ex Typographeo Vaticano 1895). A seventeenth-century plan of the Ducal Palace at Gubbio lists its studiolo as “Gabinetto.” Recent scholarship has illuminated the position of these rooms in the origins of the contemporary museum as spaces of inquiry newly emerged between the private and public sphere. See Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature (Los Angeles: University of California Press 1994). Luciano Cheles, The Studiolo of Urbino: An Iconographic Investigation (University Park, pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press 1986), 23. M. Baxandall, “Guarino, Pisanello and Manuel Chrysoloras,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 196. See also Cheles, Studiolo, 36. Leon Battista Alberti, The Ten Books of Architecture, 1755 Leoni Edition (New York: Dover Publications 1986), bk. 5, chap. 17. Like Federico, Alberti was an illegitimate child. As a result, he was deprived of his inheritance, and throughout his life he had to strike a balance between intellectual and economic pursuits. Leon Battista Alberti, De Commodis Literarum atque Incommodis (On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Scholarship) (1428). See Martin Kemp’s introduction to Alberti’s On Painting (New York: Penguin Books 1991), 3. Vespasiano da Bisticci, The Vespasian Memoirs, trans. William George and Emily Waters (London: George Routledge & Sons 1926), 99. Vespasiano was a bookseller in Florence and also ran a copy-house, providing Federico with numerous manuscripts for the Ducal Library. Alberti, Ten Books, bk. 10, chap. 14. Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Leonard Opdycke (New York: Horace Liveright 1929), 9. Alterations to the Duchess’s wing were not completed until after the death of Battista Sforza in 1472. For an account of this rather indecorous episode, see Maria Grazia Pernis and Laurie Schneider Adams, Federico da Montefeltro and Sigismondo
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Malatesta (New York: Peter Lang 1996), 25. i6 Bernardino Baldi, Della vita e de’fatti di Federigo di Montefeltro, duca di Urbino (1604) (Rome: F. Zuccardi ed. 1824), 3 vols. Also cited by Cosimus Stornajolo, Biblioteca Vaticana, xiv, i.g. My own translation, with assistance from Anna Botta and Arielle Saiber. See also da Bisticci, Vespasian Memoirs, 101. i7 Even a highly cultivated condottiere was not immune from scrutiny regarding flaws of character. Sigismondo Malatesta, an elder rival of Montefeltro who greatly influenced Federico’s patterns of patronage, was both renowned and feared for his intelligence and battle skills. Over time, however, his penchant for extremism – for example, his overzealous advocacy of the neoplatonist Gemisthus Pletho – alienated his patrons and eventually led to his excommunication. i8 da Bisticci, Vespasian Memoirs, 109. i9 Ibid. 20 Iris Origo, “The Education of Renaissance Man,” Horizon 2, no. 3 (1960): 68. 21 Cheles, Studiolo, 26. 22 Rhetoric and Music are at the National Gallery in London. Dialectics and Astronomy were destroyed in Berlin during World War II and exist now only in photographic record. 23 i.v. no. 492. 24 “His [Guidobaldo’s] powers of memory were especially remarkable, and by judicious and habitual exercise were extended with advancing manhood. He is said to have possessed that rarest gift of never forgetting anything he wished to recollect, and to have repeated with perfect accuracy successive pages which he had read only once, some ten or fifteen years before.” James Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans 1851), 296–7. Also: da Bisticci, Vespasian Memoirs, 107. 25 While Alberti composed the first formalized treatise on the art of perspective (De Pictura, 1435) his velo technique was employed more often as a rhetorical explanation of the geometric principles of Brunelleschi’s experiments than as an actual method of construction. As James Elkins has pointed out in The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1994), “most measured Renaissance architectural scenes were done using visual-ray methods,” rather than the velo method. Although Alberti was certainly an influential figure in the Court of Urbino, the perspectival 169
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composition of the studioli seems to have been influenced instead by the methods described by Piero della Francesca in his De prospettiva pingendi, composed while at Urbino under Duke Federico’s patronage (see Elkins, Poetics, 84–9, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli,” in this volume). Regardless, the studioli contain the most comprehensive examples of perspectival intarsia to have survived the ravages of time – of despoliation, relocation, fire and woodworms. Vespasiano da Bisticci frequently cites the Duke’s inclination toward mathematics and architecture. However, as an examination of the contents of the Ducal Library illuminates, while this inclination may have been remarkable for its time, it was not at all to the detriment of but was, rather, complementary to the practices of rhetoric and the verbal arts. D.S. Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance (London: Macmillan 1970), 165. See also Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (New York: W.W. Norton 1971), 67n2. Training in the verbal arts commenced at age six or seven. Guidobaldo was born in 1472 and the Gubbio studiolo was constructed between 1476 and 1482. Dennistoun, Memoirs, vol. 1, 298. Federico’s response, “a masterpiece of libelous eloquence,” not only annulled Malatesta’s charges but was in turn used sixteen years later by Pope Pius II as the basis of an excommunication trial brought against Malatesta. Nicholas of Cusa conducted the trial, which concluded with the burning of a straw effigy of Malatesta on the Compidoglio. See Pernis and Adams, Federico da Montefeltro, 29–33. From ancient Greece and Rome through the Renaissance, letter-writing was considered a significant rhetorical practice. See Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979) 224. Medieval and Renaissance treatises on education offered unceasing variations on the number and nature of these arts. Within the Court of Urbino, Luca Pacioli offers various categories for knowledge in his De Divina Proportione. See Pérez-Gómez, “Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli.” Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1997), 262, caption 2.57. St Augustine Confessions (London: Penguin Books 1961), 10.8 (i.v. no. 39).
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34 Research has established that the fabrication of this matrix is neither purely theoretical nor merely metaphorical. As neurologist Wilder Penfield discovered in the 1950s, much of the brain is connected not to the sensors along the body’s surface (skin, eyes, ears) but instead to a representation of the body (the “homunculus”) that is mapped directly onto the surface of the brain. In other words, in our daily peregrinations, the mind functions by creating a small representation of “itself.” Sensory stimuli are gathered from throughout the body and conveyed through neural centres to this homunculus, which then serves as a switchboard for the rest of the brain. Currently, research is focusing on the degree to which the body map/homunculus may be trained or retrained. 35 St Augustine Confessions 11.5. 36 A recent study summarized: “Architecture education is really about fostering the learning habits needed for the discovery, integration, application, and sharing of knowledge over a lifetime.” Ernest L. Boyer and Lee D. Mitgang, Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice (Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Learning 1996), xvi. Architecture continues to provide a model of integrated thought and action. Currently, educators are calling on the interdisciplinary skills of architects to assist in the reevaluation of learning – not merely for the physical design of educational buildings but to participate in the reorganization of the curriculum. Moreover, even in the protean, nonmaterial realm of cyberspace, architecture serves as an operative metaphor: the Internet Architecture Board is an international technology advisory committee responsible for the worldwide integration of computer hardware and infrastructure. 37 Aristotle De memoria 450a 10–15 (i.v. no. 214 and 215). Luca Pacioli reiterates this notion in his De Divina Proportione: “nothing can be grasped by the intellect unless it has been previously offered to perception in some way.” See Pérez-Gómez, “Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli.” 38 St Augustine Confessions 10.8. 39 It is significant to distinguish between semiotics and mnemotechniques: there is no inherent meaning in a memory image. See Carruthers, The Craft of Thought, 178, and 331n23. See also Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria, 90–102. 40 See Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders (New York: Pantheon Books 1995), 78.
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41 Oxford English Dictionary, S.V. “iconography.” 42 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 257. 43 These accolades were received in the fall of 1474, just before the construction of the Urbino studiolo. 44 In 1451 Federico’s right eye was destroyed and his nose broken in a ceremonial joust. This accident and Alberti’s recommendation for the pictoral treatment of this disfigurement contributed to Federico’s famous profile. See Alberti, On Painting, bk. 2, 40, and note 43. 45 Ibid., 40. 46 Plato’s Theatetus, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. M.J. Levett (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 1992), 197d. Marsilio Ficino’s translation of this work was included in his Commentary on Plato’s Convivium … de amore (i.v. no. 221). 47 De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum (appendix a of Carruthers, Book of Memory, 261). See also Carruthers, Book of Memory, 33. “Inventory” and “invention” have the same etymological origins. This kinship is fundamental to the tradition of memory-training: inventive thought could not occur without a careful inventory of the materials of experience within the memory. 48 By evolution I do not mean to suggest a categorical history of visuality but rather, as Foucault and Crary have discussed, a genealogy of practices that may be retraced. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1990), 6; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press 1980), 117. This genealogical character has also been described by Barbara Duden as polithetic – consisting of discontinuous yet overlapping strands, as in a hemp rope. Duden, Disembodying Women (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 1993), 90. 49 “Nesting” entails the placement of memory images one within the next, as in a “Russian doll.” “Concatenation” consists of forging links by which to construct extended chains, such as the ancient catena aurea (or golden chain). 50 “The word forulos is of uncertain derivation, but foros, of which it is clearly the diminutive, is used by Virgil for the cells of bees.” J. Willis Clark, The Care of Books (Cambridge: University Press 1901), 31. “Complebuntque foros et floribus horrea texent.” Virgil Georgics 4.250 (i.v. no. 492). 51 Loculamentum is used by Columella to describe the cells for bird-nests and beehives (De re rustica 8.8 and 9.12.2, respectively; i.v. no. 438) and 172
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52
53 54
55
56
57 58 59 60 61
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by Vitruvius as a small box in which is placed a mechanism for measuring distances. Vitruvius, Ten Books of Architecture, trans. F. Granger, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 1983), 10.9.2; i.v. nos. 291 and 292. Mary Carruthers, “The City in Our Minds: Memory Makes Poetry at the Met,” Poetry Calendar 23, no. 1 (January 1999): 11. “There is no thinking, only thinking with.” Dan Rose, “Micro-Speculum,” The DNA-Photon Project, 1925–1995. Carruthers, Craft of Thought, esp. introduction and chap. 1. See Carruthers, Book of Memory, 71: “The ‘places and images’ [loci and imagines] scheme of artificial memory – which I call the ‘architectural mnemonic,’ a term more accurate than Frances Yates’s ‘Ciceronian mnemonic’ and less misleading than the Renaissance’s ‘the art of memory’ – is described most fully in Rhetorica ad Herennium, which is dated 86–82 bc, just after Cicero’s De inventione.” One might safely describe these details as monstrous, since they provided the memory with visual cues by which to demonstrate (de + mostrare, to show) thoughts. For a rich discussion of this notion, see Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture (Savage, md: Rowman & Littlefield 1991). Significantly, we now believe that errors of memory (including inaccuracy and forgetting) occur in the process of recollection. In antiquity and the medieval mind, memory errors were believed to occur during the process of collection, due to a failure to transform sense-impressions into secure mental images. Vitruvius Ten Books of Architecture 6.2 (i.v. no. 291). Granger, introduction to Vitruvius Ten Books 2.25. Ibid. i.v. no. 447. See also Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 223. Simonides “discovers” architectural mnemonics by re-membering the fragments of the instant prior to the catastrophic conclusion of a lyric poem he had recited for the members of the banquet. For the full account, see Cicero De oratore, 2.86, and Frances A. Yates, Art of Memory, chap. 1. “(in porticu) a structure that provides the intercolumnia [intercolumnar loci] often recommended as backgrounds for memory work.” Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 177. Cicero De oratore 3.5.7, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library. Vitruvius Ten Books 6.4.1. Vitruvius should not be taken too literally: just as his measurements and proportions often did not correspond with the 173
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65 66
67 68 69 70
71 72 73 74 75
76 77 78 79
80
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actual structures, his rules of proper orientation seem to reflect his ideal, rather than actuality. The cubiculum from the villa of Fannius Synestor faced north. Epistolae 2.7.8: “Parieti eius cubiculi mei in bibliothecae speciem armarium insertum est quod non legendos libros sed letitandos capit.” See The History of Private Life, vol. 1: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed. Paul Veyne, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1987–91), 378–9. As conveyed through Pliny the Younger Natural History 9.35. (i.v. no. 353). Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 178. Ibid. “una tavola nel mezzo …” Bernardino Baldi, cited by Cosimus Stornajolo, Biblioteca Vaticana, xiv, i.g. We know only that the “table” was decorated in intarsia and was last accounted for in an inventory of 1609: “935 Tavola de noce intarsiata, con le scantie de sotta da tenere li libri fisse nel muro.” Fert Sangiorgi, Documenti Urbinati (Urbino: Accademia Raffaello 1976), 149. i.v. no. 464. Cheles, Studiolo, 22. Virgil Georgics 42.243 (i.v. no. 492). See Proverbs 6:8, “Go to the bee …” The image of “eating the book” has deep origins. See Ezekiel 3:1. Also, St Jerome (Commentarium in Ezekiel 3:5 [i.v. no. 25]) notes that “Eating the book is the starting-point of reading and of basic history. When, by diligent meditation, we store away the book of the Lord in our memorial treasury, our belly is filled spiritually and our guts are satisfied.” Also St Augustine Confessions 10.14; Carruthers, Book of Memory, 44; Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 86. Augustine taught rhetoric before his conversion to Christianity. Augustine Confessions 10.25. Ibid., 12.16; 10.17. Gregory the Great, Expositio in Canticum Canticorum 2 Corpus christianorum, series latina 144, 3.14–15. Also Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 81. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job (i.v. no. 65), Prologue: “Epistola ad Leandrum,” 3 Corpus Christianorum, series latina 143, 4.110–114. Also Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 18.
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81 Augustine Confessions 11.5. See Carruthers, Craft of Thought, esp. chap. 1. 82 Isidore of Seville Etymologiae, 19.8.1–2 (i.v. no. 79). 83 “The machine of the mind is the energy of love.” Also, “Indeed the vigor of love is a machine of the mind which, while [the mind] draws away from the world, lifts it on high.” Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, 6.37.58 (Corpus christianorum, series latina 143, 328.118–19). Note also Pietro Bembo’s discourse on contemplation and love at the conclusion of Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (290–303). Bembo’s description of the ascent from corporeal desire through contemplative love is deeply influenced by the writings of Marsilio Ficino and clearly echoes Hugh of St Victor’s Didascalicon. See also Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 23 and 81. 84 Vitruvius Ten Books 10.1.1. 85 Ibid., 10.1.3. 86 See Carruthers, Craft of Thought, esp. 16–21. 87 1 Corinthians 3:9. Also Augustine’s Confessions 10.16. 88 i.v. no. 87. See Jerome Taylor’s translation, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor (New York: Columbia University Press 1961). Also Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 33–50. 89 See Carruthers, Book of Memory, 162. 90 Hugh of St Victor Didascalicon 3.7–10, 92–3. Also Carruthers, Book of Memory, 162. 91 Augustine Confessions 10.17. 92 There were three copies of St Augustine’s City of God in the Ducal Library of Urbino (i.v. nos. 40, 41, and 58). See also Augustine Confessions 12.15. 93 Ibid., 11.28, and 10.16. 94 Cicero De inventione 2.53, 160. Beyond this definition, Cicero continues: “Its parts are memory, intelligence, and foresight. Memory is the faculty by which the mind recalls what has happened. Intelligence is the faculty by which it ascertains what is. Foresight is the faculty by which it is seen that something is going to occur before it occurs.” Also, the Book of Wisdom (8:8): “She [Wisdom] knows the past, she forecasts the future.” For a thorough discussion of memory and prudence, see Carruthers, Book of Memory, esp. 61–71. 95 Prudence is an “intelligence capable, by a certain judicious method, of distinguishing good and bad; likewise the knowledge of an art is called Wisdom; and again, a well-furnished memory and experience in diverse matters is termed Wisdom.” Ad Herennium, 3.2.3 (i.v. no. 445). 175
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96 Nichomachean Ethics 1103a17 (i.v. nos. 205–208). 97 St Augustine Confessions 10.11: Cogitare – “to think or to collect one’s thoughts. For in Latin the word cogo, meaning I assemble or I collect, is related to cogito, which means I think, in the same way as ago is related to agito or facio to factito. But the word cogito is restricted to the function of the mind. It is correctly used only of what is assembled in the mind, not what is assembled elsewhere.” See also Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 33: “Cogitatio (con + agito, “move, rouse”) is defined in rhetoric … as a combinative or compositional activity of the mind. It necessarily uses memory, because it combines imagines from memory’s store.” 98 In memory training, silva, the forest, represented confused and disordered material. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 62. This notion has continued in modern Italian through the idiomatic expression imboscata, to be confused, or literally, “in the woods.” 99 See Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 261, although ductus is discussed in various forms and to various ends throughout this work. 100 Ibid., 201. 101 J.-P. Antoine, “Mémoire, lieux et invention spatiale dans le peinture italienne des xiiie et xive siècles,” Annales ESC 48 (1993): 1447–69. 102 On picturae and tabulatum, see Carruthers, Craft of Thought, esp. 198–205. 103 Ibid., 263. 104 The role of architectural ornament in mnemonic work suggests a new approach to understanding Alberti’s seemingly contradictory discussion of concinnitas, wherein architecture is to be whole and irreducible, and yet structure is somehow distinguished from ornament. It might simply derive from a matter of translation. As Carruthers notes: “Bede uses the verbs ornare and decorare throughout his description [of picturae]; they are untranslatable in modern English, since we insist on conceptually separating decoration from function. In Latin, these verbs encompassed both.” Craft of Thought, 205. 105 The Latin quotation in the heading for this conclusion is from Virgil: “With [the influence of] virtù so does one scale the stars.” Aeneid 9.11.38–44, and the Studiolo of Urbino. 106 Vitruvius Ten Books 1.1.2.
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Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth: Modern Symbolism in the Writing of William Richard Lethaby Joanna Merwood
Chora
Symbolism in the Writing of William Richard Lethaby
for many years in the early part of this century, William Richard Lethaby, a respected teacher and architectural writer acknowledged as an authority on modern design, maintained a correspondence with Harry Hardy Peach, the owner of a Leicester basketware factory. In these letters the two men discussed the weather, the war, Lethaby’s “town-tidying” campaign, architectural competitions, recent publications about design, and, most of all, the shocking state of art in modern England. On a particular morning in February 1923, Lethaby sat down at his desk to answer a letter from Peach. He particularly wanted to comment on something his friend had recently drawn to his attention: Diderot’s definition of “art.” Very interesting about the Diderot Encyclopedia. The definition of art is interesting as showing how quickly words alter their value. I take it the definition would now be of “science” and although I have long been against nonsensical views of art, and have felt that most of art was science in operation, yet the ideal and essence of operation (and art) is to go beyond the known of science by imagination … adventure and experiment. Art then I would say was the expanding experimental application of science in human service – something like that!1
This dashed-off note to a friend rephrases a position Lethaby had long maintained. By this stage in his life he had abandoned any reference to the “mythical” or the “magical” as the embarrassing enthusiasm of youth. However, his view of art as “science in operation” represents not a reversal but an extension of his early writing on architectural symbolism. The attempt to define art in relation to culture had been with him since 1891, when he wrote his first book, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, a complex, corrupt, and sometimes confused examination of the role of architecture as a universally understood symbol of belief in preclassical society. Ruskinian notions of the inherent morality of art, claiming nature as the model for the creative imagination, met a new aesthetic partly derived from symbolist art and literature in which pure mass, shape, and line were explored as potentially containing psychological associational value. Drawing on contemporary theories of creative production and aesthetic perception, Lethaby examined the relationship between architecture and culture that had existed in the premodern past, in order to create a new relationship for the twentieth century. 178
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The problem of European architecture during the years 1880–1900 was one of identity and self-representation. The modern era was almost a century old, but its built form had yet to be decided. Experimental forms drawing on new architectural typologies, historical precedent as well as simple technological innovation represented a fundamental redetermination of the role of ornament in architecture and meaning in design. The repression of the late nineteenth-century English contribution by historians of the Modern Movement depended on the perception that technological advances were rejected by English architects of the previous generation. While it certainly may be claimed that Lethaby and his contemporaries Mackmurdo, Gimson, and Prior did not embrace the aesthetic of machine production, they always acknowledged industrialization as central to the modern condition. In general their approach was not to adapt architecture to technology but to examine how architecture could “work” in the technological era. Their writing played out a complex renegotiation of the role of architecture in society. They took an interest not only in the new sciences of technology and construction but in the new sciences of society and the mind; sociology, anthropology, and psychology. This search for the symbolism of modernity drew from both “high” and “low” sources in Lethaby’s writing. His fascination with the mystical was the product of both the spirituality of Ruskinian thought and the general rise of interest in alchemy, ancient magic, and Eastern religion in late nineteenth-century England. In his writing the popular strain (leading to spiritualist movements such as Theosophy in its most extreme form) was entirely interwoven with the medieval sensibility of the symbolist writers and artists. It is here that stories about magical buildings are told through architecture, mysticism, and myth. When he wrote his first book, Lethaby was thirty-four years old and a draughtsman in the office of Richard Norman Shaw. Spending long solitary hours in the British Museum, he pieced together fragments of ancient and contemporary writings that reinforced his mystical understanding of architecture and informed his writing. The resulting book appeared in this way not as an architectural history but rather as an unscholarly but deeply felt search for the revelation of original meaning. “One of my purposes in this essay,” he wrote, “is to open up a view of building and the crafts wider than ‘aesthetic’ appreciation, an understanding deeper than chronological cataloguing.”2 His sources were not 179
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Left: The Jewel Bearing Tree. From William Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891) Right: The Labyrinth. From William Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891)
from the architectural canon but from contemporary works in the fields of archaeology and anthropology.3 Unstructured, dense, and wideranging in its reference, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth was an attempt to discover the mythical origins of architecture. Mythology as it was explored through art, literature, and the new field of anthropology was of major interest to architects of Lethaby’s generation. His book is divided into twelve sections, each of which seeks to explain an architectural symbol found in myth. Highly poetic in style, these chapters reveal themselves largely through stories: “The JewelBearing Tree,” “The Planetary Spheres,” “The Golden Gate of the Sun,” “Pavements Like the Sea,” and “Ceilings Like the Sky.” Although maintaining a distinct separation between ancient mythical understanding and modern culture, Lethaby was fascinated by the role of architecture in early society as “embodied magic.” Plundering ancient mythology, he resurrected the primal role of architecture as the built archetype of a universally understood cosmology. Lethaby divided the world into mythical and scientific periods that corresponded to two ways of thinking about building – “ancient magic architecture” and “modern scientific building.” In mythical societies, he wrote, architecture acted as a magical
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Left: Pavements like the Sea. From William Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891) Right: The Heavenly Gate of the Sun. From William Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891)
symbol of the universe or as the built expression of the mythopoeic state. “The intention of the temple (speaking of the temple idea as we understand it) was to set up a local reduplication of the temple not made with the hands, the World Temple itself – a sort of model to scale, its form governed by the science of the time; it was a heaven, an observatory and an almanack.”4 The origin of all building, whether temple or dwelling, was the mimicry of “nature” through sacred symbolism. Lethaby’s understanding of myth was informed principally through the contemporary anthropological writing of Andrew Lang, Edward Burnett Taylor, and James Frazer, in which there was a vast reappraisal of mythical understanding.5 Although seen as retaining and perpetuating a dangerous element of superstition, myths were no longer viewed as diverting stories but as representations of belief or “an explanation of nature.”6 Myth was a form of “savage reasoning.”7 In his 1887 text Myth, Ritual and Religion (from which Lethaby admitted that he had cribbed his own title) Andrew Lang hypothesized that there is a state of the human mind in which myths are “natural and rational” – this state is the “mythopoeic” state and is common to all cultures.8 “We may see that the progress of science is merely the framing and destruction one by one
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of a series of hypotheses, and that the early cosmogonies are one in kind with the widest generalizations of science – from certain appearances to frame a theory of explanation, from phenomena to generalize law.”9 Lethaby cited the German philologist Max Müller as an authority who had found evidence of this universality in similar stories told in medieval Germany, ancient Greece, and modern India. This desire to rationalize, or classify myth as a branch of human knowledge, to see ancient magic as the original science, was carried over into Lethaby’s writing in order to facilitate a historical continuity between the magical architecture of the past and the scientific building of today.10 Edward Burnett Tylor’s doctrine of universality stated that all mythical cultures have the same basic concept of the world. He went about proving this by using the comparative method of analysis. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss later pointed out in criticizing the British school of anthropology, comparative theory emphasizes similarity rather than difference.11 Indeed, in his rambling narrative William Lethaby compared ancient Egyptians, medieval masons, and contemporary Chinese, picking and choosing his examples almost at random from diverse texts, to show that the geometries and symbols of their architecture had the same basis. For him this was proof that the magical element of architecture that had once existed in our own culture was universal to all cultures and times. His concern in Architecture, Mysticism and Myth was to demonstrate the origin of all world religions in a similar, if not the same, concept of the universe, a doctrine based on the primal role of the products of human creativity as “magic amulet, charm, fetish.”12 Lethaby’s use of the comparative theory was related to Tylor’s theory of “survival,” in which elements of prelogical society were seen to have survived into the present day. Myths in particular were regarded as reliquaries of early mentality. In “The Sources of Architectural Types,” one of his few writings on architecture, the sociologist Herbert Spencer applied this theory of “survival” to architectural ornament. In Spencer’s view all ornament originally had a function. During the evolutionary process, these forms lost their functional purpose but continued to be used out of habit, attaining the abstract status of “beauty.”13 Imagining ornament to have an original purpose more sacred than pragmatic, Lethaby’s understanding of “function” differs from that of Spencer. After Tylor, he adopted the concept of cultural integration, in which all parts of a culture are interrelated. Tylor’s view that “the several depart182
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ments of life are inextricably interwoven and interdependent” in primitive societies was the basis of Lethaby’s understanding of architecture in premodern times.14 It was not only possible but inescapable that architecture had an association with the general concept of the natural elements of the universe as magical. Spencer’s idea of the originary meaning of form being lost through time, although remaining present as a trace, is essentially the same as Lethaby’s. The theory of animism, in which all things have souls and are invested with spirits, formed the basis of much anthropological research of the late nineteenth century. Differentiating magic from religion, anthropologists argued that magic need not involve the agency of supernatural beings such as gods but that objects themselves had the ability to effect change.15 James Frazer expanded this animism into a theory of totems.16 His Totemism (1887) explained the idea common in “primitive” cultures that the soul is external to the body. The totem was defined here as the receptacle of the soul. Considered dangerous precisely because they had an inherent intentionality, totems contained occult powers and demonic possibilities. Magic was produced sympathetically through imitation and contiguity by “using objects whose qualities are analogous to the desired effect.”17 This concept of magic which Frazer expanded on in The Golden Bough (1890), was widely influential.18 The common anthropological belief that all religion was derived from magic was repeated by François Lenormant, the French Assyriologist, whose book Chaldean Magic (1874) was Lethaby’s principal source on matters magical.19 Lenormant’s book, more popular than scholarly, presented translations of ancient Chaldean tablets with cuneiform inscriptions. Lethaby made much use of these “Chaldean inscriptions” as an authority on ancient custom and ceremony, describing the origin of religious ritual in magic ceremonies performed to placate evil spirits.20 Since most of the tablets Lenormant described are magic spells of various sorts, they satisfied the late Victorian fascination with magic and Eastern mysticism in general. Eastern religious texts achieved an enormous popularity when translations were first widely distributed in the late nineteenth century. The Veda of Hinduism, ancient Sanskrit hymns extolling the deities who personified natural and cosmic phenomena, were of particular interest to those who dabbled in the occult.21 Kenneth Clark makes the case for a relationship between late nineteenthcentury medievalism and ethnology in a common desire for knowledge 183
Magical Instruments. From Éliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic (translated 1896)
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of “primitive” or pre-Renaissance understanding.22 Lethaby’s interest in Eastern religions may have been initiated partly by his growing belief that Gothic architecture was heavily influenced by the East. Emphasizing the strong influence of Byzantium on Western Gothicism was the sole aim of his 1904 book on medieval art.23 However at the time of writing Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, Lethaby was yet to develop such a scholarly interest in Eastern texts. Attracted by the lyricism of the translations of Eastern myths and by the possibilities of Eastern magic, he tapped instead into the vague understanding of Eastern mysticism widely disseminated into popular thought through contemporary literature, spiritualist societies, and music hall “mediums.”24 The most extreme nineteenth-century enthusiasts of Eastern mysticism sought to revive a knowledge of spirituality that could once more precipitate change. In his 1856 text, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Éliphas Lévi wrote that his goal was to “revolutionize heaven and earth by the creation of a new dogmatic symbolism.”25 By this he meant the discovery of the key to ancient alchemy, through which one could literally transform matter and manipulate natural law. Describing him as a “modern magician,” Lethaby often quoted the pseudonymous Lévi, a defrocked French priest who blended oriental religion with occultism.26 Recognizing that modern alchemy had the discoveries of science to draw upon, Lévi attempted to find a place for the mystical practice of alchemy in contemporary life. “The secret agent of the magnum opus … is Magnetized Electricity,” he wrote. “The union of these two words does not reveal us much, nevertheless they perhaps enclose a force which can revolutionize the world.”27 To such practitioners of the occult, recovery of the alchemical doctrine, by ancient or modern methods, meant that symbols could again achieve direct identification with that which they represented. To Lévi the evocation of symbols relied essentially on the “force of will” of the invoker. He introduced a modern psychological reading of alchemical symbols when he wrote, “The significance of symbols [of the Tarot] varies in essence and extent with each individual … The Great Arcanum is the secret of will-ability.”28 Thus, the ability of the magician/artist to change the world by transforming material or creating art objects was due to the expression of his will. Lévi’s idea of magical creation depends on the existence of a single, powerful artificer, a magus, whose “force of will” has the power to mold matter.
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The popular and scholarly discourse clashed over this conception of the artist’s individual creative power. For Riegl, art was autonomous and could not be shaped by a single person alone.29 Although it is doubtful that he shared Riegl’s concept of the autonomy of the art form, Lethaby, too, argued strongly against the view of the architect/creator as a solitary genius who creates out of his own unique sensibility. For him, the act of creation was based on ritual, or ceremonial magic, as an expression of a collective consciousness rather than a single mind. He made no distinction between “high” and “low” art, seeing art as representing the “will” of society – Riegl’s kunstwollen. Holding the same view of the social function of magic that the English anthropologist A.R. RadcliffeBrown would later propose, he argued that magic embodied the desires and needs of whole cultures, rather than the psychological need of the individual.30 Artistic reception, as well as creation, was a communal activity. Lethaby’s writing implicitly criticized the individual theory of architectural reception put forward by some of his peers. For example, Arthur H. Mackmurdo no longer regarded pictorial symbolization as an appropriate way of seeing. He maintained that the sensuousness of pure form had a more direct connection to the mind of modern man. Symbols were fetishes for primitives, he wrote; only a developed intellect could appreciate pure form, which he described as “mood-made character.” “The realistic art,” he wrote, “is as impossible as it is wanting in force of interest.”31 Arguing against this separation of higher and lower understanding of art in modern society, Lethaby emphasized the collective nature of the understanding and creation of architecture in ancient times, based on a deeper understanding of “Nature.” To Ruskin, who was critical of the effects of industrialization on architecture, it was the medieval craftsmen who most embodied the ideal of collective creation as an act of faith, penance, and veneration. Echoing this sentiment, Lethaby defined medieval architecture as “the harmonious association of all the crafts.”32 In his text, the Middle Ages represented the most refined sensibility of the prescientific era. The architect/artificer had reached the pinnacle of his abilities as a magician: as one who had a spiritual connection to his material and could mould it to reveal its true self.33 According to Ruskin, Gothic building was almost alive in the way it changed from part to part according to the whim of its creators. In his writing Gothic architecture is zoomorphosed in its adaptability: “It can 186
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shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, coil into a staircase, or spring into a spire with undegraded grace and unexhausted energy.”34 Lethaby took Ruskin’s concept of living architecture to an extreme of vitality. From its origins and up until the Renaissance, he wrote, architecture was truly animated, just as Frazer’s religious totem was animated. Lethaby’s sky ceiling and sea floor partake of this alchemical ideal. Created not by an individual, but through the sacred ritualistic activity of a culture, art was “an instrument of magic.”35 The object was not just a representation but the thing itself. Changing form by alchemical magic, art always remained the totemic agent of desire brought to life through sacred ritual. In 1890 Lethaby designed a stained glass window for a house in Bromley, Kent, in the “medieval” style, incorporating a quotation from The Romance of Merlin.36 However, like Morris and Ruskin, his interest in medieval art extended far beyond an aesthetic appreciation. Highly poetic, his understanding of medieval architecture and much of his knowledge of the mystical symbolism of the Middle Ages came from the literature of the time. Chaucer is quoted on the title page of Architecture, Mysticism and Myth.37 Dante, whom Ruskin made much use of in The Stones of Venice, is also quoted, as is the fictional Sir John Mandeville’s fourteenth-century Voyages and Travels and the Early English Romance of Alexander. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Francesco Colonna’s fifteenthcentury Italian romance describing architectural fantasies, seemed to hold a particular fascination for Lethaby.38 He invoked these texts for their fantastic and beautiful descriptions of the symbols that make up the chapters of his book. Saturated with references to precious stones and metals, cosmological classification, and magic numbers, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth attempts to demonstrate the deep alchemical significance of architectural symbolism through literary reference.39 Why did Lethaby cite these romances as evidence, giving them as much authority as the surviving examples of ancient and medieval architecture? One answer can perhaps be found in his distrust of the examples that were available, many of which had deteriorated due to vandalism or restoration (two acts that were comparable in his view). It was in these literary sources and not in archeological accounts that the true romance of medieval architecture was made apparent. Around 1905, the architectural discourse turned away from Lethaby’s post-Ruskinian ideals and sought a renewal of classicism.40 Lethaby himself largely abandoned Gothicism in favour of a more abstract 187
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“Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.” From William Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891)
architectural symbolism. While he did not reject Ruskin’s teaching in favour of an architecture of aesthetic autonomy, as did Geoffrey Scott under the influence of Wölfflin and Burckhardt,41 he increasingly turned to psychology for an explanation of the meaning of architectural form. In 1924 he rewrote Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, retitling it Architecture, Nature and Magic. Conceding that the earlier book was “very insufficient and in many ways feeble,” he wrote, “second-rate and second-hand authorities were mixed up with true 188
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sources, and the whole was uncritical and inexpert.”42 This new edition attempted to cast architecture as the symbol of the psychological make-up of man throughout his historic progression. “The Gothic art of the Middle Ages was an outcome of the whole mind and feeling of the times. In a recent essay, I tried to show that it was inspired (unconsciously) by the forest life and forest psychology (The Legacy of the Middle Ages) … the buildings were produced by the same minds and hearts that produced the forest ballads.”43 In this book Lethaby introduced the words “psychology” and “unconscious” into his writings for the first time. The nineteenth-century prefiguring of psychoanalysis relied on a close reading of the face and head to provide a direct visual understanding of the inner soul. This direct visualization of symbol established a link between psychology and the arts.44 Anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took a psychological point of view that advocated “culture as the manifestation of thought.”45 For example, Tylor’s theory of the development of primitive cultures depended on those cultures developing increasingly more complex ideas. In his thesis the collective consciousness of a society was no different from the sum of individual thought.46 In Architecture, Nature and Magic, Lethaby started to present this psychological appreciation of levels of development, the perception of symbols, and their identification with certain wider ideas. The earliest constructive works of man – holes for shelter, pits for burial, and clay vessels – would quite obviously have been more or less round in general like a child’s sand pit or a bird’s nest. At the same time an observant man must have noticed that the sun in the heavens was a perfectly true example of the same shape. A “general idea” of the circle was thus reached … This recognition of a type in the heavens and of man-made imitations on earth would have seemed a mystery – as indeed it was – and every such imitation must have had something of a magical character.47
Art was seen as the history of the human will, which reveals to us “the actual psychology of mankind.” To Lethaby the Renaissance was a fundamental break in the history of human thought. Once again opposing the “magical” ancient world and the “scientific” modern world, he now declared the impossibility of reconciling the two. One of his new sources was Worringer’s “Art as Human Psychology,” published in Form in 189
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Gothic (1912).48 In Abstraction and Empathy (1908) Worringer had described art as answering a mental need particular to its own time, recognizing the different perception of different eras. Lethaby was probably drawn to Worringer by his description of Gothic art and architecture, which assumed for the Middle Ages a fundamentally different relationship between man and the wider world than the relationship we now experience. Thus, Lethaby had a psychological explanation for the creation of the Gothic architecture that he so admired, an explanation that was comparable to Ruskin’s consideration of its aesthetic appeal to the eyes of nineteenth-century man. In Form in Gothic Worringer defined three classes of “original types of mankind”: primitive, classical, and oriental. Each group had a unique artistic expression, based on its relationship to the phenomenal world. To primitive man, art was an “absolute symbol” designed to counteract the “arbitrary” experience of the visual world: “He employs the magic powers which, in his thoroughly logical conception, reside in these clear, stable, inevitable line symbols, by covering all his cherished belongings with these magical signs; and first and foremost seeks to make his person taboo by ornamental tattooing.”49 This psychological understanding of magic was quite different from Lethaby’s earlier, romantic understanding. The chapter entitled “Ornament and Style” in Architecture, Nature and Magic betrays the new influence of Worringer’s theory, quoting his equation of ornament with tattoo. However, from the evidence of his own writing, he merely touched the surface of Worringer’s theory. He did not make the same fundamental distinction between linear and organic art. Nor did he shift his attention from the objects of perception to perception itself or from the collective to the subjective individual. In a lecture given to the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1910 entitled “The Adventure of Architecture,” Lethaby explicitly and damningly recanted his previous thesis. He adamantly opposed the possible adoption of a “Magic Style” due to the influence of his writing: “Building has been, and may be, an art, imaginative, poetic, even mystic and magic. When poetry and magic are in the people and in the age they will appear in their arts, and I want them, but there is not the least good in saying ‘Let us go to and build magic buildings. Let us be poetic.’ Yet let me say again, it is because I want these things that I face this problem.”50
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It is this position that has led many writers to describe Lethaby’s theory as protomodernist, as “a search for the absence of style.”51 While this view does have a certain currency (he was clear in his criticism of “the treadmill of style-mongering”),52 Lethaby’s theory comes from an English tradition that in its Romantic antecedents is fundamentally different from Continental modernism. He classified architectural symbolism not in terms of form (i.e., contour, colour, space, and line) but in terms of a deeply poetic understanding of built form as a text describing our relationship to the world. For him the recovery of this poetic understanding would be through science – but through science considered as the brave new form of faith with “a new magic wonder of its own.”53 He continued to emphasize the communal nature of architectural creation but this was now the expression of some vague and ill-defined “common current language.”54 He was sure that this language would be found not in any “vague idea of an abstract and absolute proportion” but in a spontaneous agreement.55 By end of his life the “living force” Lethaby so admired in medieval architecture, the idea of “vitality” that had captured his imagination in the writing of Ruskin, had been converted into a scientific “spirit of experiment in building.”56 This was prompted not by a rejection of the poetic in architecture but by a rejection of the architecture of formal stylistics that he saw all around him.57 Since it was not part of the everyday architectural vocabulary of the day, the word “experiment” may seem peculiar, until we remember the role of experiment in natural magic. In the twentieth century it was the engineer who embodied the ancient alchemist’s ability to convert material from one form into another. Throughout his writings Lethaby’s goal was to renegotiate the role of architectural symbolism, always maintaining its moral role and its social necessity. He struggled to incorporate the psychological theories of form to fit his essential understanding of architecture as a “common” art, collectively imagined and created art. Lethaby took the totemic view of myth from anthropology and attempted to give life to a modern symbolism through the conception of architectural creativity as a renewed mystical practice. To return to the formulation proposed earlier, architecture could only “work” in a technological society through the definition of science, not in opposition to art, but as the true myth of modernity.
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notes 1 William Richard Lethaby, letter to Harry Hardy Peach, 18 February 1923. Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects Library. 2 William Richard Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891; London: Architectural Press 1974), 17. 3 The only architectural sources Lethaby mentioned explicitly in Architecture, Mysticism and Myth were Vitruvius (236 and 241), concerning the human body being used as a unit of measurement of building and the measurement of the earth’s circumference, and Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire de l’architecture (222), concerning the medieval custom of painting a ceiling to represent the sky. 4 Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 6. 5 Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) is generally regarded as the founding figure of cultural anthropology. His many works include Researches into the Early History of Mankind (London: J. Murray 1865), Primitive Culture (London: J. Murray 1871), and Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (London: Macmillan 1881). He proposed that society, like a natural organism, progressively evolves and that all cultures are part of a unified whole. Andrew Lang (1844–1912) wrote Custom and Myth (London: Longmans, Green 1884), Myth, Ritual and Religion (London: Longmans, Green 1887), and Magic and Religion (London: Longmans, Green 1901), in which he was concerned with the reappearance of certain common elements in myths and fairy tales. He stressed the need for a systematic accumulation of information to establish a rational basis for understanding early man and his beliefs. James Frazer (1854–1941) wrote The Golden Bough, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan 1890), building on Tylor’s work and explaining many ancient and contemporary myths and rituals in relation to the cult of kingship. 6 Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 32. 7 John J. Honigmann, The Development of Anthropological Ideas (Homewood, il: Dorsey Press 1976), 126. 8 Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 4. 9 Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 9. 10 Ibid. 11 Marcel Mauss (1866–1943), review of F. Byron Jevons, An Introduction to the History of Religion, in L’année sociologique (1898). See Honigmann, Development of Anthropological Ideas, 165. 192
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12 Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 33. 13 Michael W. Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson 1989), 305. 14 Honigmann, Development of Anthropological Ideas, 115. 15 Ibid., 157. 16 Ibid., 150. 17 James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 10–12, 30–1. 18 Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (London: Collier Macmillan 1987), 225. 19 François Lenormant (1837–83), La magie chez les Chaldeens et les origines Acadiennes (Paris: Maisonneuve 1874), translated by W.R. Cooper as Chaldean Magic: Its Origin and Development (London: S. Bagster & Sons 1877), 70. Lenormant’s main area of study was ancient Mesopotamia, which he studied through its cuneiform language. “Chaldea” refers to the land bordering the head of the Persian Gulf. “‘Chaldean’ also was used by several ancient authors to denote the priests and other persons educated in the classical Babylonian literature, especially in the traditions of astronomy and astrology.” One of Lenormant’s other books was entitled Les sciences occultes en Asie (Paris: Maisonneuve 1874–75). 20 Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, 71. 21 Lethaby mentions “the cosmogonic theories in the Veda” that were summarized by H.W. Wallis in the Academy (November 1887) and explained the origin of the world as a “building,” in much the same way that a house is constructed. Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 16. 22 Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (London: Constable 1928), 302. 23 W.R. Lethaby, Medieval Art: From the Peace of the Church to the Eve of the Renaissance, 312–1350 (London: Duckworth 1904). 24 For example, Emma Hardinge Britten, a New York medium, published Art Magic (New York: William Britten 1876), a work of “divine dictation” through which Mrs Britten made public the words of an “Adept,” a spiritual being who spoke to her. In 1877 Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, published Isis Unveiled (New York: J.W. Bouton 1877), an “exposition of Egyptian occultism,” also dictated by invisible hands. The relationship between mysticism and architecture was explored at this level. In 1875, at the founding meeting of the Theosophical Society in New York, a Mr J.G. Felt gave a lecture entitled “The Lost Canon of Proportion of the Egyptians.” Citing a formula known only to initiates, Mr Felt 193
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25
26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
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proposed to discover the practice of incantation used by the ancients to raise spirits as well as pyramids. Rudolf Steiner, a more well-known Theosophist who later rejected the movement in favour of his own religion, Anthroposophy, extended his theory of curative education into the building of schools and hospitals. See Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (1993; New York: Schocken Books 1995), 50–3. Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse-Louis Constant 1809?–1875), The Mysteries of Magic: A Digest of the Writings of Éliphas Lévi, trans. Arthur Edward Waite (1886; Mokelumne Hill, ca: Health Research 1996), xix. Lévi’s main works on magic are Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris: G. Baillière 1856), Histoire de la magie: Avec une exposition claire et précise de ses procédés, de ses rites, et de ses mystères (1860; Paris: Éditions de la Maisnie 1976), and La clef des grands mystères (Paris: G. Baillière 1861). In 1862 he started the series Philosophie occulte with Fables et symboles (Paris: G. Baillière), followed by La science des esprits (Paris: G. Baillière 1865). Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 142. Lévi, La clef des grands mystères, 207. Lévi, The Mysteries of Magic, xl. Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament (1893), trans. E. Kain (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992). A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge: The University Press 1922). Arthur H. Mackmurdo, “The Spiritual in Art,” Hobby Horse 1 (1884): 1–13. William Richard Lethaby, “Art and the Function of Guilds” (1896) in Form in Civilisation (London: Oxford University Press 1922), 205. W.R. Lethaby, “Some Northhamptonshire Steeples,” Art Journal (1889): 231. Quoted in Godfrey Rubens, William Richard Lethaby: His Life and Work, 1857–1931 (London: Architectural Press 1986), 94. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851–53; London: Collins 1960) 179. William Richard Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic (New York: G. Braziller 1956), 88. Rubens, Lethaby, 94. “And upon pelers gete, of Jasper longe / I sawgh a temple of glas ifounded strange.” Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, title page. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 140.
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40 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1960), 45. 41 Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism (1914; London: The Architectural Press 1980). For a wider discussion of Scott’s sources in German theories of Einfühlung see David Watkin’s introduction. Scott rejected the Ruskinian Gothic revival that had dominated English architecture since the mid-nineteenth century in favour of a renewed classicism influenced by Wölfflin’s writings on the Baroque. 42 Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic, 15. 43 Ibid., 140. 44 Mary Cowling, The Artist as Anthropologist: The Representation of Type and Character in Victorian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 87. 45 Honigmann, Development of Anthropological Ideas, 116. 46 Later writers in French sociology, such as Durkheim, Hubert, and Mauss, proposed that societal institutions such as law and religion were to be studied separately from individual behaviour. They believed that there is a collective consciousness that differs from individual psychological considerations. Ibid., 175. 47 Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic, 18. 48 Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic (1912), ed. and trans. by Sir Herbert Read (London: A. Tiranti 1957). 49 Worringer, Form in Gothic, 17. 50 W.R. Lethaby, “The Adventure of Architecture” (1910), in Form in Civilization (London: Oxford University Press 1922), 92. 51 Mark Girouard, Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement 1860–1900 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1977), 227. 52 Lethaby, Architecture: An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of the Building (London: Williams and Norgate 1912), 245. 53 Lethaby, Architecture, Nature and Magic, 16. 54 Lethaby, “The Adventure of Architecture,” 67. 55 Lethaby, Architecture, 239. 56 Ibid., 68. 57 It was not only in building but in architectural history that Lethaby lamented this failing. In the conclusion to Architecture, Nature and Magic he wrote, “Modern histories of old ‘architecture’ have been accounts of how mere forms appeared to our eyes apart from any meaning they might have” (144). 195
Gordon Matta-Clark’s Circling the Circle of the Caribbean Orange Michel Moussette
Chora
Matta-Clark’s Circling the Circle
Yes. This is a Caribbean Orange – or a winter circus. Everybody knows that circuses go south in the winter, right? So it’s a winter circus. It’s a circus because it sets a stage for people, sets a kind of stage from the ground up. Circus – basically, the reason for “Circus” in my own dyslexic manner means “circle” through which you operate. It means a circle in which you circle – a place of activity, a circle for action. Gordon Matta-Clark1
architecture as middle zone. A place between sky and earth. Closed upon itself. Where everything is either too shallow or too deep. At zero and infinity there is not much to be experienced. No wind no sun no rain. Only dust. Dust coming in. From everywhere. Inexorably relentlessly etc. Dust accumulates. Has to be carried away. In garbage bags bins crates trucks etc. Dust layers over dust layers. Everywhere. Someone once initiated dust breeding. Élevage de poussière. And it reached quite a price per square inch. But no repeat. Wonder why. You can wonder why. Anyway the second law of thermodynamics is clear. Someday probably not tomorrow or the day after everything will have transformed into dust. That is in fact rather cold dust. The sighting of a dust cloud will be quite an event. Comparable in our terms to a coup de foudre. Or to the close encounter with the moon of a faraway planet. The universe as a big dust-producing machine. Zero infinity and dust. But that is only if you believe in progress. That is only if you don’t have circles on your mind. Machines everywhere. Autistic children often dream that they are machines. Or geometrical figures. Vacuum cleaners washing machines and televisions. Office buildings shopping malls and bungalows. All machines. Imagine that something not quite right is going on. Or maybe do not imagine at all. Just build a machine and couple it to another machine. “Where?” is our problem. For now. The middle zone. Again. Maybe it is possible to incorporate the underground the sky and the building. Someone who played chess as a kid with our previously mentioned Dust Breeder once said that. Well maybe that is possible. We shall see. Maybe when the sentences get longer and the quotation marks begin to multiply. When the concepts are exposed and the power tools put to work. Then maybe something will happen. We shall see. Things take years to happen and we do not want to talk 198
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years. Nor do we want to write years. So let’s quote someone. Right now. Otherwise we shall not be convincing anyone. Worthy of that name. Anyone. And as Gordon Matta-Clark says, “You have to walk.”2 Opening the middle zone. What does that mean. Two things mainly. Two verbs actually. To capture and to unbalance. But that has to be qualified. We cannot stop here and unveil the lively bibliography. Not right now. We would not have convinced anyone. So let’s cut it out. The capture. How do you capture the wind the sun and the rain. How do you capture the underground. The answer is, you have to build a machine. A capture machine. And to do so you have to dance au pas-de-deux, learning the building’s own particular ways. To dance with the building is to make the building dance. Is to make everyone dance in a tangle of light feet. A specialist of the hammer once wrote that “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”3 So we become the building and the building becomes us. Part of us is trapped in the building. Part of the building is trapped in us.4 We enter the becoming of the building. We plunge into surfaces. Into the condensed strata that are the traces of process. Of years. But still no question marks. Not right now. We shall come back to surfaces later. First we shall hunt. Very quickly. Just as an example. The act of killing is secondary in hunting. Most important is the becoming. The good moose hunter occupies a volume that is not human. He breaks branches eight feet above the ground and makes too much noise when drinking 199
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at the lake. Breathing and walking follow what appears at first as nonrhythm. A moose rhythm.5 Second we shall dance. Not too quickly. Because dancing with a building is not so easy. Just try. And see. Finding the centre is everything. Not the geometrical centre. That would be too easy. Rather an elusive centre. One that can never be totally circumscribed. “I work similarly to the way gourmets hunt for truffles. I mean, a truffle is a fantastic thing buried somewhere in the ground. Very fleshy, esteemed as a prize food. So what I try to find is the subterranean kernel. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes I don’t.”6 Another quotation. To get the ingredients going. “I see in the formal aspect of past building works a constant concern with
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting. Englewood, NJ, 1974
the center of each structure. Even before the Splitting, Bin.go.ne and Pier 52 projects, which were direct exercises in centering and recentering, I would usually go to what I saw as the heart of the spatial-structural constant that could be called the hermetic part of my work, because it relates to an inner-personal gesture, by which the microcosmic self is related to the whole.” Centring machines and capture machines. Machines that capture. But no domestication involved here. Sky remains sky. Wind remains wind. Ask how so. Answer. Because you are walking. Because you have to 200
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walk. There are no images. Maybe some layered close-ups. But certainly no outside. Only an inside where everything plays and dances. Even as death lurks around the corner as it is fond of doing. But this might sound vague. So let’s get back to machines. Unbalancing machines. Ugly. Replace. Vertigo machines. Yes. Vertigo machines that bring us into motion with the sky, the underground and the building. “To visit his final works was to be seized by vertigo, as one suddenly realized that one could not differentiate between the vertical section and the horizontal plan (a perceptual undifferentiation particularly dangerous in a piece of Swiss cheese full of holes reflecting one into the other and in all directions), as if in order to learn ‘what space is,’ it was first necessary that we lose our grip as erect beings.”7 That the carpet, the old linoleum, and the plywood all be pulled at once from under our feet. But not to get to any profound depths. Rather to live within the surface. To fall in all directions at once. In the surface. Or maybe rather to explore an extremely densified shallow depth. Where the real and the imaginary are compressed together. “Aspects of stratification probably interest me more than the unexpected views which are generated by the removals – not the surface, but the thin edge, the severed surface that reveals the autobiographical process of its making.” This points to a movement that can be followed. Maybe. To put it simply: from depth towards surface. Like Alice. Wasn’t depth the starting point? If we may say so. So depth as starting point. Digging under the foundations of an art gallery to expose from below the building’s “enormous compressive confining forces.” Building houses high-up in the trees. Crawling through a rope tunnel over a ravine at two hundred feet above the closest ground. Always to gain a vantage point. Above and below the plane of the Middle Zone. And later. Cutting every column of an art gallery at midpoint and inserting a small metal cube in which the entire building’s forces would have been concentrated. Splitting in two an entire house.8 Along a line at midpoint. The centre at the centre springs into mind. There is something literal about these actions. There is also depth to them. Not much to do with machines. At this point. So far. But watch this. “Physically penetrating the surface seemed the logical next step.” The next step is away from elements as such. Establishing fields.9 The next step dances with “what is already there.” However inappropriate “what is already there” may seem. “There is a kind of complexity which 201
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Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect. Paris, 1975
comes from taking an otherwise completely normal, conventional, albeit anonymous situation and redefining it, retranslating it into overlapping and multiple readings of conditions past and present.” So. Matta-Clark and surfaces. Not quite the first thing that springs to mind. Maybe we are walking in the wrong direction. Maybe we should have waited somewhere. But then. First things that spring to mind do not lead anywhere. They stand. Domesticating the unknown by means of the familiar is best left to museum builders and cattle raisers. Something like that. Moose and truffles respond differently. And our concern here is machines. Machines are not deep. Machines are not moral. Machines produce. Machines couple with other machines. Dance. Cut. Centre. Walk. Boil. Dance. Fall. Mix. Dance. Walk. Capture. Blend. Cook. Chop. Centre. Cut. 202
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The machines produce layer upon layer. Layered surfaces for which there is a great demand. Square feet are doing quite well. For now. Layers can be taken out of context and put into crates. Beautiful wooden crates. And then taken all over the world. Valencia. Santiago. Chicago. To name just a few as there will be many more. In the proper environment these surfaces will last for very long. Temperature at about twenty degrees Celsius and humidity at about 30 percent. No direct sunlight. Even better. Imagine. There are photographs. Most of them taken by the artist himself. They are powerful. Very wonderful. Their size is impressive. They convey. Beautifully. But you have to wonder. Matta-Clark certainly did. The exhibits are a “profound dilemma.” There is a “price to pay” and “my work pays more.” “The installation materials end up making a confusing reference to what is not there.” How does one answer this relentless demand for surface? “The desire for exhibiting the leftover pieces hopefully will diminish as time goes by. This may be useful for people whose mentality is oriented towards possession. Amazing, the way people steal stones from the Acropolis. Even if they are good stones they are not the Acropolis.” The extracted surfaces come in many sizes and shapes. Some are soft some are hard some are carpeted some are clad. They are the leftovers of leftovers. And some order is now most obviously required. We could build an imaginary museum for the extracted surfaces. That would certainly be a break. Not even trying to go beyond our analogous thinking. Our architected thinking.10 Our orderly thinking so needful of examples.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect. Paris, 1975
Photowork. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting. Englewood, NJ, 1974
A sculptor sculpted lonely elongated figures. Build him a long corridor connected to a thin tower right in the middle of nowhere. A painter painted horror in dark basements while the war raged high above. Build him a labyrinth of concrete with only screams of light coming in. Another painter painted painting after painting of fluttering wild geese. Then build him a huge barn on stilts with roof-doors open to the sky of a slow river. And along this direct track. What can we make of Matta-Clark? Geometry springs to mind immediately. So geometry we shall follow for the time being. 1.0 The first step is to build a surface we may inhabit. This will be the beginning of our museum. Sort of an index for the leftover pieces. A simple two-dimensional plane. Easily representable on a piece of paper. Or in one’s head. 1.1 Our first axis is time itself. We shall call it the Building Works Line. It goes from looking for the centre at the centre to falling in all directions at once. Something like this: Treshole, Datum Cuts, Splitting, Bin.go.ne., Pier 52, Conical Intersect, Office Baroque, Caribbean Orange. 204
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1.2 Our second axis is all about representation. We shall call it the Extracted Surfaces Line. To keep things simple we shall concentrate on photographies. Some eventual “others” can put some order into Matta-Clark’s other extracted surfaces. Into the heavy wall sections and into the unsteady grainy silent black-and-white movies. This is how our second line goes: Documentation Photographs, Walkthrough Photographs, Photoworks that are a “sort of documentation/time evolution of the piece,” Photoworks that are a “kind of narrative which is subject to all kinds of variations.”11 2.0 The second step is to obtain a volume by projecting the surface of the index into space. This can be done only by following our two lines. Our two curved lines as we shall see. 2.1 Extracted Surfaces Line. In some of the Photoworks there no longer exists a “confusing reference” made to an experience outside the gallery. No direct attempt to be faithful to a “beyond.” These Photoworks use the Building Work “as a kind of stage” and “as a point of departure.” They are a simple play that produces an image where all sense of gravity is lost. Where the Swiss Cheese Vertigo roams again. And most of them were produced by a direct work on the negatives. Collaging and montaging. The performance of the cut then becomes something important. Almost structural. You have only one chance. Sort of. The time of the cut becomes related to the time of the exposed photograph. To the time of the experienced photograph. Tape cut and negative margins are visible. The traces of the collaging and montaging are left in a manner qualified as “deliberately artificial.” And this certainly points to interesting directions. The most obvious is a circular one. 2.2 Building Works Line. Another circling back toward a “point of departure.” Quickly. As usual. Matta-Clark. By moving from centre to periphery comes back to centre. Moving toward the surface gets back to depth. Using “what is already there” connects to what is “beyond.” 3.0 But if our lines circle back toward the origin, they still do not intersect it. In other words we have spirals and not circles. We would have circles only if we stood very far above our surface and maintained a complete immobility in relation to our coordinate system. 4.0 Our museum now could be described by the points corresponding to spiraling axes set in two different planes. The irregular surfaces 205
Matta-Clark’s Circling the Circle
would be many and hard to sweep clean. The infinite janitor skewed into space could leave only the wind and rain to clean up the building. But it might be time for us to move on. Out of these conditions. To circle new circles. To look at them from all sides. Peering from above. Investigating from below. Setting it all into motion and going wherever they go. So we are leaving geometry. And going back to machines. Already. Machines that add layer upon layer. Taking the initial condition and “redefining it, retranslating it into multiple readings of conditions, past or present.” Pushing the established limits so that the elements lose their hierarchy.12 In fact, the elements disappear. The threshold, the staircase, and the column are gone. Only a field is left. A field of elements? Maybe. It does not really make any difference. The multiple layers are pushed toward a limit. Compressed within a surface. An “about to be disintegrated level.” Compress and Flatten. In Caribbean Orange the raindrops are horizontal and the sun shines from underground. The orange is
Leftover pieces. Gordon Matta-Clark, Bingo. Niagara Falls, NY, 1974
Gordon Matta-Clark, Caribbean Orange. Chicago, 1978
sliced diagonally. Typical Caribbean fashion. We could not care less about being orthogonal. A whole set of right angles has just gone down the drain. Elements have stopped relating to another level. Elements have never related so strongly to another level. They have never been so alive and so dead. In their very own way. But we are not stopping anywhere. Be it an orange peel or a raindrop, a surface or a storm. We are following a movement. That of the section revealing the “thin edge, the severed surface.” All this could easily lead to a tale of infinity and transcendence with famous philosophers and poets as main characters. Or to Piranesi and the importance of walking and crawling in relation to the infinite. But it won’t. Not this time. Rather. Surface and geometry as others. Others that can be brought within the vicinity of life but that always remain unfamiliar. Vertiginous. And if life is all about depth is there a precise point, an actual hinge between depth and surface? Is this what these machines are all about? The artist is alive. A-live. Easy enough to understand. He is subject to tides, like all of us. Or is it the waves that pull at the moon? Anyhow, when twin-brother Batan jumps out the window of Matta-Clark’s seventh floor studio, depth kicks back in. Forget Pier 52. Forget Conical Intersect. Dig Descending Steps For Batan in humid earth. In lightless cold basement. And from then on, something was wrong. Something in deep centre was wrong. Death was lurking around the corner. But quickly back to surfaces. Last cut. The act of cutting. As more important for Matta-Clark than the extracted surfaces. Or even the “final” result. The simple tracing of the dissection lines already making the machine vibrate. Layers beginning to project. Space. “I don’t know 207
Matta-Clark’s Circling the Circle
what the word space means either. I keep using it. But I am not quite sure what it means.”13 The word space. And then the cut itself through the strata. Through the first layers of sedimentation. That wonderful thin edge. Through the structure. The whole house creaking. Sawdust flying everywhere. Maybe it is best when dealing with dust to get a job at the Bibliothèque Nationale and write books. Maybe not. Just another layer. Even if the blade might kick back. Anytime. At certain moments more than others. Push the tool over its limits. But do not force it. Do not force it. Twice is enough. Do not force it. Thrice is too much. So you’d be better to chop it up. Chop mushrooms, seaweed, frog legs. Mix with marrow and rice. Stuff beef bone. Once all is eaten make necklace with bone and wave bye-bye to satisfied customer. Food was important. We could not have afforded to waste Food. But certain words have been forgotten. Some very important. Let’s name them. Non.u.mental. An.architecture. Capitalization of first letter as permanent feature. Important projects also forgotten. Let’s not name them. Almost named them. Almost is often. If only we could stand. But that would be the end. For a couple of minutes. The building projects all destroyed. Interventions as specific. Calibrated. To that exactly. To dust exactly. To nothing left standing. Surface and depth. Depth and surface. Dust. But goes on. Dancing. We shall see. With circles and machines and other machines. We shall see. Only thing important. Known. You have to walk. You can only walk. notes 1 Judith Russi Kirshner, “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark,” in Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Corinne Diserens (Valencia: ivam Centre Julio Gonzalez 1992), 392. 2 Kirshner, “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark,” 390. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin 1978), 17. 4 Artist Dennis Oppenheim marvelled at how Matta-Clark managed to trap deep parts of himself within his Building Works. See his comments in Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective, ed. Mary-Jane Jacobs (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art 1986), 21. 5 Painter Jean-Paul Riopelle’s observations on hunting can be found in Riopelle, Oeuvres Vives, ed. Michel Tétreault (Montreal: Art International
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6
7
8
9
10
1993). Riopelle spent most of his life painting wild geese. He now lives peacefully on Île-aux-Oies, where he roams around in a hearse. From Donald Wall’s interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, in “Gordon Matta-Clark’s Building Dissections,” Arts Magazine 50, no. 2 (May 1976): 79. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations are from this interview. Yve-Alain Bois, “Treshole,” in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books 1996), 191. For what appears to be an interesting influence on Matta-Clark, see the work of his father, Roberto Matta-Echauren, especially “Mathématique Sensible – Architecture du temps,” Minotaure 11 (1938): 43, an article describing a true vertigo machine that would bring human verticality to the forefront of consciousness. The cuts do have a certain violence and crudeness to them. They are an attack on a certain way of life and were certainly read that way, especially in Europe, where a “politicized public” accused Matta-Clark of “exploiting the sanctity of domestic space.” Matta-Clark’s work certainly does tap into this sanctity but the objective is not to overcome the system. It is rather an idea of subversion that deploys itself within the existent perceptual, social, and built frameworks. For more on Matta-Clark not equating “his cuttings with the wanton destruction of buildings,” see Pamela L. Lee, “On the Holes of History: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Work in Paris,” October 85 (summer 1998): 65–89. Transforming elements into fields is a favourite strategy of what might be named, quite inappropriately, Anti-Architecture. See Michel Parent, Vauban (Paris: Fréal 1971): 96–104, for an illustration of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban’s défense en profondeur, where elements are progressively multiplied and disseminated over a field. In a striking parallel in hockey, the Buffalo Sabres’ Dominik Haçek has revolutionized goaltending by departing from the butterfly style to invent a completely new “horizontal” style. I am not being ironic here. A nice and appropriately architectural example of using a “space of thought” and its discourse to get somewhere else is Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon 1977). Also see Michel de Certeau’s commentary, “Micro-Techniques and Panoptic Discourses: A Quid pro Quo,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press 1986).
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11 For a revealing discussion of the Photoworks, see Kirshner, “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark,” 393–4. 12 There is a critical tendency to bunch all of Matta-Clark’s works together and hence to downplay any development. An understanding of the absence of hierarchy in the later work of Matta-Clark can however be found in Yve-Alain Bois, “Treshole,” 280–1n15. 13 Kirshner, “Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark,” 394.
bibliography 1943 Birth of Gordon Matta-Clark and his twin brother, Batan. 1963 Poetry studies at La Sorbonne, Paris. 1964–9 Architectural studies at Cornell University with Richard Meier, Michael Graves, et al. Meets Robert Smithson and works in collaboration with Dennis Oppenheim. 1969 Land of Milk and Honey, lone survivor of a series of “paintings” done with wine, food, and agar. 1970. Almost begins to work for Richard Meier. Hole project unsuccessfully attempts to reveal gallery foundations from underneath. Things are not going well. 1972 Datum Cuts. Open House. Trip to South America. 1973 Treshole. Reality Properties: Fake Estates. Purchase and documentation of fifteen totally unusable interstitial spaces auctioned off at twenty-five dollars apiece by New York City. “A foot or two of someone’s driveway but most of it is gutter space and curbstone.” Beautiful photographs. 1974 Splitting and Bingo (Bin.go.ne). 1975 Day’s End (Pier 52). Conical Intersect (Quel Can) in Paris. Opening of the restaurant FOOD. Special unforgettable meals including Bone Meal and Live Sea Shrimp in Hardboiled Egg Meal. 1976 Window Blow-Out at Cornell. Descending Steps for Batan. Jacob’s Ladder rope bridge in Kassels. 1977 Office Baroque in Antwerp. Sous-sol de Paris movie. 1978 Caribbean Orange (Winter Circus) in Chicago. Plans for Time Sphere Launch on Times Square. Marriage with Jane Crawford. Death from cancer at age 35. All works by Gordon Matta-Clark (and pictures of the artist) are reproduced courtesy of the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, Weston, ct.
Geometry of Terror: Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window Juhani Pallasmaa
Chora
Hitchcock’s Rear Window
Hitchcock … is so emotional that he pretends to be thinking only of the money. François Truffaut1
mathematics of the stage with its precision of mathematical thought, Rear Window (1954) is probably Alfred Hitchcock’s most perfectly constructed film. It takes place during four days, from Wednesday to Saturday, and the events are filmed from the window of one apartment and mostly through the eyes of one person: the magazine photographer L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart), confined to a wheelchair with his leg in plaster. Everything takes place in a block of apartments at 125 West Ninth Street in Greenwich Village, at the south end of Manhattan – or more precisely, within the buildings surrounding the courtyard. The address is made up; in reality this part of the street has no such number, because it changes into Christopher Street before reaching number 125. The fictional address presumably is due to a practice established by the Motion Picture Association of America, which requires that a film crime shall not take place at a real address.2 However, 125 Christopher Street was the address of the film murderer before the street name was changed, and the apartment block in the film was modelled on an actual building located at this address. Most of the buildings around the courtyard are typical American tenements built in the grim Federal Brick style. On the extreme right is a multistorey plastered building next to a four-storey brick house, and directly in front is a small two-storey building, to the left of which is an alley leading to the street. On the extreme left, another red brick building is so high that the upper storeys never appear in the film. The partly paved and planted courtyard has various levels, and at the right rear is a part jutting out with a roof terrace joined to a glass-fronted studio flat. L.B. Jeffries’s home is a two-room apartment. The film takes place in the living room, which has a kitchenette separated by cupboards. It contains a bay window overlooking the yard, a fireplace, a door to the bedroom (various essays on the film refer to a bathroom, but there is no other place in the flat where the implied bedroom could be located), and a front door three steps up from the floor. The bedroom door is opened only once, when the protagonist’s girlfriend Lisa goes in to change into 212
Jeff surveying his neighbours through the telephoto lens of his camera
Jeff and Detective Doyle
her nightgown. This mysterious room, which is never shown to the audience, is a familiar Hitchcockian psychological theme that appears also in the film Rebecca, in which the door of a locked room is never opened. During the period of Jeff’s convalescence, a high bed has been moved into the bay, and other furnishings have been moved to allow for his immobility and treatment. The extreme spatial restrictions of Rear Window – the film is seen from the perspective of a person bound to one spot and everything takes place within one huge set – was a stimulating challenge for Hitchcock: “It was a possibility of doing a purely cinematic film. You have an immobilised man looking out. That’s one part of the film. The second part shows what he sees and the third part shows how he reacts. This is actually the purest expression of a cinematic idea.”3 213
Reconstruction of Jeff’s apartment (drawing by the author): 1 bay window, with three windows that can be opened; 2 high bed; 3 side table; 4 kitchen furniture; 5 open shelves in three parts, with photographs, etc. below cupboards; on the opposite side, presumably kitchen cupboards; 6 table with broken camera, photographs, etc.;
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7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
carpet; low drawer; easy chair; low table; lamp suspended from ceiling; table lamp; fireplace; three steps up to the door; trunk; possibly a balcony for the bedroom;
Reconstruction of the courtyard (drawing by the author): 1 Jeff’s apartment; 2 stair/hallway; 3 bedroom (never shown in the film); 4 lower courtyard; 5 part of the songwriter’s studio apartment; 6 roof terrace attached to the studio apartment; 7 ground floor: the sculptress’s apartment; first floor: Miss Torso’s room; 8 first floor: Miss Torso’s balcony; 9 first floor: Miss Torso’s bathroom; 10 ground floor: the sculptress’s terrace; 11 stair to Miss Torso’s balcony; 12 corridor (on all three floors); 13 balcony with emergency stair;
14 ground floor: Miss Lonelyhearts’s kitchen; first floor: the Thorwalds’ kitchen; and second floor: dog owner couple’s kitchen 15 ground floor: Miss Lonelyhearts’s living room; first floor: the Thorwalds’ living room; second floor: dog owner couple’s living room; 16 ground floor: Miss Lonelyhearts’s bedroom; first floor: the Thorwalds’ bedroom; second floor: dog owner couple’s bedroom; 17 Mr Thorwald’s flower bed; 18 lady with a bird cage; 19 room of the newly married couple; 20 passage to the street; 21 restaurant with Miss Lonelyhearts’s table
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the characters in the film Walter Benjamin’s description of the theatrical character of the townscape of Naples is an exact picture of the combined stage and auditorium in Rear Window: “Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theatres. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes.”4 The tenants observed through the windows of their apartments are like a collection of butterflies in glass-covered cases – the director even puts this idea into the mouth of the photographer: “They can … watch me like a bug under glass, if they want to.” The tenants form a crosssection of New York’s colourful populace: a songwriter-composer, a young dancer keeping her figure trim, a sculptress, a middle-aged spinster longing for male company, passionate newlyweds, a childless couple doting over their little dog, a salesman (Raymond Burr) and his invalid nagging wife, and the film’s protagonist, the magazine photographer L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart) and his wealthy, fashion-conscious girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly), who lives in the high-rent district of Park Avenue and Sixty-third Street “and never wears the same dress twice.” There’s a heat wave going on, so everyone keeps their windows open, and to while away the time the convalescent photographer in his wheelchair begins to observe what’s happening in the courtyard. “The field of vision has always seemed to me comparable to the ground of archeological excavation,” writes Paul Virilio.5 Despite being so contrived and restricted, the apartment block in the film is a rich excavation of city life, in which the layers are exposed only gradually. The tenants form a closed community for whom the outside world appears distant; it is seen in the film only as a painted silhouette and a narrow view of the street. “What you see across the way is a group of little stories that … mirror a small universe,” Hitchcock said about the world in his movie.6 Lower-middle-class life was familiar to him from his own childhood in the suburbs of London. The first images of the film give a cheerfully humorous description of daily activities of the inhabitants and pigeons within the enclosed realm of the courtyard. A black cat running across the stairs in front provides a subtle, superstitious omen. As the story advances, the air becomes heavier, shadows grow darker, and the sense of gravity increases. The 216
The murderer and his wife
space begins to wrap around the viewer like a dark, strangling garment. The tenants never encounter each other, except for a brief exchange of words between the sculptress and the salesman at the beginning of the film, which the salesman crudely terminates with “Why don’t you shut up.” Although the tenants have outside friends, they remain strangers to each other. “You don’t know the meaning of the word neighbour,” says the strangled dog’s owner to her neighbours in this most dramatic scene in the film. Not until the scream following the discovery of the strangled dog do they come into the courtyard space; meanwhile, the darkened windows reveal the dog strangler and wife murderer withdrawn from the group. He can be seen smoking a glowing cigarette in his darkened apartment. The darkness of this window, reminiscent of René Magritte’s painting La réponse imprévue (1933), is undoubtedly one of the most evocative darknesses in cinema. An equally tangible void is the silence of the telephone at the moment Jeff realizes he has confirmed his identity to the murderer. In this scene the camera moves temporarily and unnoticed into the courtyard to view the characters from below as a single wide-angle shot from the perspective of the strangled dog. This deviation brings about one of the most dramatic scenes in the film. “The size of the image is used for dramatic purposes,” says Hitchcock about his cinematic dramaturgy.7 217
Hitchcock’s Rear Window
the logic of terror The suspense in the film is based on the irrefutable logic of terror. Hitchcock slowly builds in the audience a stream of suspense that he dams until the final cataractic release. Hitchcock planned his film so precisely that after it had been edited, only a few dozen metres of film remained on the cutting-room floor.8 As an artistic masterpiece, Rear Window weaves innumerable details into a faultless fabric in which allusions and hints criss-cross unendingly in all directions. Every episode or line appears to contain meanings and allusions. Miss Torso (Georgine Darcy), the nickname given to the shapely dancer, intimates mutilation, the central theme of the film. The little dog is killed because “it knew too much,” an allusion to the film Hitchcock directed twice (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934 and 1956). Hitchcock even wrote an enigmatic article about his wife Alma entitled “The Woman Who Knew Too Much.”9 The words of the songs heard in the background always relate ambiguously to the scene. Colours, too, contain meanings: for example, Miss Lonelyhearts (Judith Evelyn) is coded in green; her dresses are always shades of emerald green, and there are no other green clothes in the film. Rear Window is an exceptionally visual film; the sections without dialogue constitute 35 percent of the entire film. Hitchcock’s initial idea was to have the musical background consist entirely of the piece of music gradually composed by the songwriter during the course of the film. He has expressed his dissatisfaction with the music in the film,10 although his idea is realized to the extent that the songwriter plays his new record to Miss Lonelyhearts at the end of the film; this episode, in fact, starts one of the stories that will develop after the film has ended. The composition is entitled “Lisa,” in accordance with the female protagonist. Rear Window is truly a masterpiece of artistic condensation: its richness and logic are revealed only after seeing it several times. But great works always contain a great number of redundancies, depths, and levels. The narrative logic of the film, its architectural messages, role characterizations, atmospheres and secret hints, camera angles and shot compositions, space and image details, and words and music constitute a mosaic that builds up the suspense with the infallibility of the geometrist.
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Juhani Pallasmaa
The film ends like a geometrical exercise at school – qed – which was to be demonstrated. “Clarity, clarity, clarity, you cannot have blurred thinking in suspense,” as Hitchcock says.11 the situationality of meaning Hitchcock stresses the importance of pictorial and material expression and makes the narrative dialogue subservient: “Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”12 Hitchcock is interested less in the stories than in the way they are told. “The impact of the image is of the first importance in a medium that directs the concentration of the eye so that it cannot stray. In the theatre, the eye wanders, while the word commands. In the cinema, the audience is led wherever the director wishes.”13 Hitchcock’s ability to reveal the hidden feelings and moods of the characters with a simple gesture, rhythm, or camera angle frees the dialogue for its contrapuntal purpose. Accompanying the everyday pictorial narrative, lines are spoken that have quite surprising or absurd dimensions, such as the insurance nurse-therapist Stella’s (Thelma Ritter) story of how she foresaw the Great Crash of ’29 from the number of times her patient, the boss of General Motors, visited the toilet: “When General Motors has to go to the bathroom ten times a day, soon the whole nation is ready to let go,” she remarks. “Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake,” Hitchcock has said in his characteristic capricious humour.14 This presumably implies that his films do not attempt to imitate the realism of everyday life but are artistic constructs, cinematic still-lifes whose minute details form a perfect, logical structure. A work of art is always a deliberate condensation and representation, whereas everyday life is too loose and unfocused to be a story. “What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?” Hitchcock concludes.15 Another meaning of Hitchcock’s metaphor of a slice of cake is, of course, the simultaneously entertaining and metaphysical essence of his films – the image of a cake makes one think of cinematic slap-stick humour, but on the other hand Hitchcock’s films are the metaphysics of a perfect, enclosed world. “The fact is, I practise absurdity quite religiously,” he confesses.16
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Hitchcock’s Rear Window
the extraneous and the contradictory The extraneousness of the events, their intermingling and occasional triviality – such as the helicopter at the beginning of the film hovering over the buildings to gawk at the bathing beauties on the flat roof – increase the credibility and irrevocability of the main story in much the same way that mundane and incidental details appear in the epic works of the great painters of history. Titian’s monumental painting Presentation of the Virgin brings a touch of ordinary life through irrelevant episodes: a countrywoman selling eggs, a boy playing with a dog, and a mother with a child in her lap, talking to a monk. A story achieves the aura of real life when it does not proceed too linearly and obviously; the individual will of the narrator-director controlling the events appears to submit to the overriding power of destiny. Fear and love are contradictory and mutually exclusive emotions. In Rear Window suspense and fear often develop alongside the love affairs: the scenes in which Lisa and Jeff are kissing, the intimacy of the newlyweds behind the drawn blinds, the men fawning over Miss Torso, and the lovelorn Miss Lonelyhearts. Even the murderer is having an illicit love affair. Alongside the yearning and problematics of love, there are powerful erotic suggestions and sexual symbols, such as Lisa’s pining for love and Miss Torso’s erotic teasing. On the other hand, Jeff rebuffs Lisa’s approaches but obviously is interested in observing the intimate life of the dancer from a distance. Jeff has both phallic symbols (the telephoto camera) and manifestations of frigidity and impotence (a leg in plaster and immobility). Jeff’s rebuffing of Lisa and his occasional rudeness are not explained by their difference in class or customs, as he would have it. The events in the lives of the tenants develop independently of the main story, but occasionally the climaxes of these separate stories are connected: for example, Miss Lonelyhearts’s preparations for suicide at the same time that Lisa faces a dangerous situation in the murderer’s apartment. Hitchcock creates a feeling of terror through carefully juxtaposed scenes when the mind is most receptive, such as when a bloodcurdling scream from the yard interrupts Lisa displaying her enticing lingerie, when the murderer is cleaning the butcher’s knife and little saw while children can be heard playing, or when Lisa is kissing Jeff while his mind is preoccupied with the significance of the murder weapons. 220
Jeff considers the significance of Mr Thorwald’s kitchen tools while kissing Lisa
The murderer’s gardening hobby also belongs to this series of contradictions. The occasional background sound of a soprano practising scales simultaneously lulls the audience into a benign sense of security but invokes a premonition of fear from the higher notes. “Emotion is an essential ingredient of suspense,” writes Hitchcock.17 spectacle The lives of the tenants in Rear Window are observed in the lit rooms behind uncurtained windows, like separate silent films or tv programs. The window of the newlyweds, with its white shade pulled down, is like a cinema screen without a film projected onto it, and the contents of this film are aptly left to the viewer’s imagination. Peeping into the apartments through the photographer’s telephoto lens and binoculars is a bit like channel-swapping with a remote.18 Lisa Fremont’s metaphors – “It’s opening night of the last oppressing week of L.B. Jeffries in a cast,” “I bought the whole house,” and “The show’s over for tonight,” as she pulls down the window shade in front of Jeff’s curious eyes – all indicate a show. “Preview of coming attractions,” says Lisa, as she flashes the overnight bag containing her nightgown, is also a reference to the cinema-like structure of the story. The transfer of the action from one window to another – as if moving from one screen to another – creates a comical effect but also brings to mind René Magritte’s painting 221
René Magritte, L’evidence éternelle (1930). The Menil Collection, Houston
L’evidence éternelle (1930) of a woman’s body painted in parts on five separate, juxtaposed canvases. Actually, Jeff appears to create the story of the film in his own mind, as he interprets the meanings of the unrelated events he observes and almost directs how they will develop. The whole story might just be a dream or a hallucination brought on by his immobility. He also cuts the film into montages by transferring his view (= camera’s view = spectator’s view) from one window and episode to the next and by selecting the image frames and distances with his own eyes through the alternative optics of the telephoto camera and binoculars. Jeff is both the film’s director and spectator, and Rear Window is a metaphor for making and viewing a film. The director himself confesses the cinematic essence of the film: “Rear Window is not about Greenwich Village; it is a film about cinema, and I do know cinema.”19 mirror-images The narrative of Rear Window is structured through a number of mirror-images, reversed relations, and character metamorphoses. For instance, as Jeff and Lisa are enjoying their lobster dinner brought from a top quality restaurant, Miss Lonelyhearts has her lonely supper with an imaginary male companion. Hitchcock has pointed out an essential reversed symmetry in the film: the photographer is immobile while his fiancée moves freely, whereas with the Thorwald couple on the opposite side of
Juhani Pallasmaa
the courtyard, the wife is bedridden while her husband comes and goes freely.20 The photographer hero seems to conceal a yielding helplessness, whereas the coddled fashion girl exhibits reckless courage as she climbs into the murderer’s flat. She has no escape route, and the frightened hero verbalizes the fear of the viewer who feels guilty for having allowed the woman to put herself in this danger. The travelling salesman, who tends flowers in the garden, is revealed first as an aggressive character, and finally as the cruel killer of his wife. But at the moment he enters Jeff’s room, helpless and pitiful, he is capable only of uttering the frustrated question, “What do you want from me?” An essential role reversal is the unexpected change from pursued to pursuer, after the murderer discovers his surveyor. This incident even reverses the location of the auditorium and the stage. The identity of the viewer in relation to the protagonist also shifts; most of the time we see what Jeff sees, but during the three occasions when he is asleep, we see more. the realism of the set The apartments are like stages stacked one upon the other, like urn recesses in a columbarium, with no access to the rest of the normal anatomy of an apartment block, to staircases and corridors; only the flats of the salesman and Miss Lonelyhearts are connected to a corridor. The young man in the flat just rented on the left reopens the front door, in order to carry his bride over the threshold, but where the door leads remains unclear. The block of apartments in the film is like a tree lifted from its roots, without access to the ground water. Nor are the plans of the apartments “real,” as they have been flattened against their facades, so that everything can be seen through the camera in Jeff’s room; such one-sided flats are sometimes called “railroad flats.”21 For example, the flats of the Thorwalds and Miss Lonelyhearts are approached unorthodoxly through a kitchen. And where is the murderer’s bathroom located, the walls of which he is shown to be washing? Hitchcock even utilizes the blank wall spaces between windows, out of sight from the camera, and vague reflections in the open window panes to stimulate the viewer’s imagination and feeling of suspense, for instance, in the sequence when Lisa is in the murderer’s apartment and the policemen finally arrive to save her. 223
The stage of the film
The apartment block in Hitchcock’s film appears to have been built like a mountain, a canyon, with excavated flats that apparently lack another side, despite the audience’s narrow view of a rear street with a restaurant that appears in the opening between the buildings. The courtyard and the apartments facing it form a huge stage surrounded by what appears to be a hidden backstage where the occupants move from the street to their flats. The author has been unable to obtain the set drawings for Rear Window, but we can assume that subtle perspectival distortions have been made in the geometry of the courtyard as well as the individual rooms. These deviations from orthogonality would facilitate the intended shots as seen from Jeffries’s room. The scenographer of a film must know laws of optics and perception more accurately than an architect. Certain vertical and horizontal planes presumably have been tilted toward the sight line of the camera – in the manner of tilted table tops in cubist paintings – to provide the required visibility and frontality. The wall for the newlyweds is clearly positioned diagonally, and the back wall of the Thorwalds’ bedroom is probably also skewed, although it appears orthogonal. Besides, the film has not been shot consistently from the protagonist’s room, as it appears to us experientially. 224
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the physical map of the film Peter Wollen regards the series of places in a film as its structural elements: “Building up the story of a film … also means drawing a psychical map. In watching a film we form in our minds diagrams of the relationship between the different places on which the film is constructed, and of those routes the characters use in or between these places.”22 Since most of the routes used by the characters in Rear Window are hidden in the unknown backstage, the audience cannot form the kind of psychical map that Wollen mentions. The exit from Jeff’s flat to the street is somewhere to the left behind the audience. The murderer creeping up the stairs to Jeff’s flat brings the unfamiliar rear of the building into the audience’s imagination, and it is this unfamiliar rear that maximizes the threat: at this stage the threat is not just the rather pathetic Mr Thorwald but the labyrinthine unfamiliarity of the building itself. The true identities of the tenants, their invisible, intimate life and subconscious, appear to be concealed in this backstage. The threat is not contained in what is shown but in what is not shown. The terror is not in the scene projected on the screen but in the minds of the audience.
Experiential movements in the courtyard and through the block (drawing by the author)
Doyle
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The wheelchair-bound photographer has to leave his front door unlatched so that his girlfriend, insurance company nurse, and detective buddy can enter; the three steps leading to the door prevent the wheelchair patient from opening it. The knowledge that the door is unlocked increases the threat of the footsteps creeping up the stairs in the finale of the film; curiously, one hardly pays attention to this minor architectural detail before the stairs are emphasized by the threat of the approaching murderer. An extra dimension of terror is provided by the narrow strip of light under the door, with its ominous, guillotine-like shape. When the passage lights suddenly go out as the footsteps reach the door, it’s like the blade falling. Hitchcock says that fear was his special cinematic field: “My special field [I have split] into two categories – terror and suspense … terror is induced by surprise, suspense by forewarning.”23 He goes on to define the difference between the two: “Suspense is more enjoyable than terror, actually, because it is a continuing experience and attains a peak crescendo fashion; while terror, to be truly effective, must come all at once, like a bolt of lightning, and is more difficult, therefore, to savour.”24 the geometry of voyeurism The film tells the story of a murder and its exposure, but its central philosophical theme is actually the voyeur’s gaze. The duality of the gaze is expressed by Jeff as he suspects murder: “It’s not an ordinary look … the man behaves as if he is afraid someone is watching him.” The complicated relationship between the viewer and the viewed in Rear Window brings to mind Velazquez’s painting Las Meninas, in which the location and role of the viewer have also been a subject of philosophical contemplation.25 “We’re all voyeurs to some extent, if only when we see an intimate film. And James Stewart is exactly in the position of a spectator looking at a movie,” François Truffaut notes when interviewing Hitchcock about his intentions in Rear Window.26 Jeff’s voyeurism is not, however, a sexual perversion, but more the professional curiosity of a photographer. Although the concept of private life would appear to be self-evident, the twenty-eight hundred-page History of Private Life shows that it has both an interesting history and a multiplicity of dimensions.27 In a drawing from The Art of Living (1945), published a few years before Rear 226
Apartment block as the stage for various lifestyles and social classes. From Tableaux de Paris, Le magazine pittoresque, 1847
Window, the well-known cartoonist Saul Steinberg shows a similar dissected apartment block exposing the private lives of its tenants.28 But even Steinberg had his predecessor; as far back as 1847 Le magazine pittoresque’s cartoonist depicted in his Tableaux de Paris different lifestyles and social classes within the framework of a single building. The fascinating attraction of privacy is also exemplified by the success of a small Manhattan theatre in the mid-1960s. The stage of the theatre was a small flat that could be viewed from a small auditorium through a one-way mirror. The flat was rented to a family who lived their daily life unaware of being on stage and being watched. The theatre was open twenty-four hours a day and the seats constantly sold out – until the city authorities closed it for being “inhuman.”29 227
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The voyeuristic stage and private performances of Rear Window are also connected to the private peep shows, the tableaux vivants, of Parisian brothels in the nineteenth century. “That’s a secret, private world you’re looking at out there. People do a lot of things in private that they couldn’t possibly explain in public,” says Detective Doyle (Wendell Corey) to Jeff. As an introduction to the voyeuristic content of the film, the bamboo shades rise slowly underneath the credits, like a view opening below drowsily raised eyelids; this is also a reference to the gradual awakening of the unsuspecting sleeping photographer to the reality of murder. The shades are likewise a metaphor for the stage curtain; as they rise, they reveal the courtyard, the scene of the unfolding drama. This introduction to the theme of voyeurism is also present in the hovering helicopter ogling at the scantily dressed girls on the roof terrace; we know what the pilot is seeing because a moment earlier the viewer has seen two women enter the terrace and throw their bathrobes over the balustrade. Throughout the film, the camera – the voyeuristic eye – is bound to the wheelchair in the photographer’s room, except for the climax, when the murderer pushes his exposer out the window, and the camera moves outside, along with the photographer. At this very moment, the residents
Lisa and Jeff are alarmed by the scream of the dog owner
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who have been viewed turn into active onlookers. The camera also pops outside during the scene of the strangled dog, but the spectator hardly realizes that it has momentarily strayed into the courtyard. The camera is outside, the protagonist’s realm of awareness during the three sequences when he is asleep: at the very beginning when the scene is introduced, when Thorwald leaves his room early on Thursday morning with an unidentified woman, and in the very last sequence when he is asleep with both legs in a cast. The middle sequence is particularly important because it enables the viewer to know more than the protagonist. In analyzing Descartes’s writings on reading, the philosopher David Michael Levin uses the term “bodiless reader.”30 The protagonist in Rear Window and the spectator are likewise bodiless observers. Jeff’s immobility eliminates the physicality and tactility of experience and transforms it into something purely visual; the eye subordinates the other senses. Scratching his itchy leg under the plaster with a Chinese back scratcher epitomizes Jeff’s loss of movement and touch. His complete reliance on vision represents the spectator, alone and bound to his chair in the darkness of the cinema. It is this spectator’s immobility that lulls him into a regressive, dreamlike state. the morality of voyeurism “The New York State sentence for a Peeping Tom is six months in the work house … You know, in the old days, they used to put your eyes out with a red-hot poker … We’ve become a race of Peeping Toms,” warns Stella. “The way you look into people’s windows is sick … Sitting around, looking out of the window to kill time is one thing – but doing it the way you are, with binoculars and wild opinions about every little thing you see is … is diseased,” Lisa scolds Jeff. “What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change,” says Stella when warning Jeff of the dangers of peeping. At the end of the film the murderer literally fulfills the nurse’s idea by pushing Jeff out the window – to see the inside of his flat from the outside for the first time. Jeff ponders whether it is ethically acceptable to spy on people through his telephoto lens. “I’m not much on rear-window ethics,” replies Lisa to his semirhetorical question. At first both Lisa and Stella disapprove of Jeff’s snooping (“window shopper,” accuses Stella) but later become keen peepers themselves. The murderer realizes he is being 229
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Jeff in his wheelchair. Publicity photograph for Rear Window
watched only when, following Lisa’s hand movements, he notices the position of his observer. At this dramatic moment Jeff changes from being the surveyor to being the surveyed, and all of a sudden his former victim gains the upper hand. In trying to delay the approach of the murderer in his flat, Jeff blinds him with flashbulbs. In the eyes of the murderer, his field of vision is toned red – showing his temporary blindness and increasing rage. In this scene the contrast between darkness and light assumes an obvious symbolic meaning. On two occasions Jeff’s suspicions about the crime appear to be unfounded. The main characters in the film, as well as the audience, are temporarily disappointed that no murder has been committed after all. This feeling of disappointment induces a sense of guilt that involves the audience even more closely in the story. Whether a murder has been committed is important also to the moral acceptability of peeping. “I wonder if it’s ethical [to watch a man], even if you prove that he didn’t commit a crime?” muses Jeff. In his book Downcast Eyes, the philosopher Martin Jay brings out Freud’s views on the relationships between the desire to know, sexuality, and voyeurism: “Freud came to believe that the very desire to know (Wisstrieb), rather than being innocent, was itself ultimately derived 230
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from an infantile desire to see, which had sexual origins. Sexuality, mastery and vision were thus intricately intertwined in ways that could produce problematic as well as ‘healthy’ effects. Infantile scopophilia (Schaulust) could result in adult voyeurism or other perverse disorders much as exhibitionism and scopophobia (the fear of being seen).”31 surveillance and the surveyed: the panopticon But Rear Window also philosophizes about the distance between the surveyor and the surveyed. In the film the latter are always distanced by the courtyard or some technical gadget (window, camera lens, binoculars). Lack of sound in most of the sequences seen across the courtyard turns these events into fragments of more archaic silent film; this increases the sense of distance and also suggests comical readings. Distance promotes a sense of helplessness and loneliness, as well as a subconscious feeling of guilt from being a Peeping Tom. The fact that the subjects of Jeff’s (the spectator’s) interest never look back turns the spectator into a Peeping Tom whose feeling of guilt also makes him feel he is being scrutinized. There is an important psychological difference between the events in Jeff’s room and those in the apartments opposite: the former are theatre, whereas the distant episodes are cinema. Walter Benjamin discussed the psychological difference between these two art forms in one of his bestknown works: “The artistic performance of a stage actor is definitely presented to the public by the actor in person; that of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera, with a twofold consequence … The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole.”32 The audience experiences the events in Jeff’s room as a continuum, but those in the apartments opposite as unrelated fragments. Another element in the film is the duality of the voyeuristic gaze: simultaneously spectacle and surveillance. “Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance … We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine,” concluded Foucault.33 In his book Discipline and Punish Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as the main theoretical means for explaining how man became the object of surveillance in the institutional control, scientific research, and behavioural experiments of modern society.34 Bentham’s panopticon had its predecessor in Louis Le Vau’s menagerie at Versailles. At the centre of 231
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the building was an octagonal pavilion containing the king’s salon, on every side of which large windows looked out onto seven cages containing different species of animals; the eighth side was reserved for the entrance. Similarly, in the Rear Window menagerie there are seven flats being scrutinized and an alley from the street to the courtyard! But Foucault perhaps dismissed the possibility of simultaneous spectacle and surveillance, which is what Hitchcock’s film is all about. Vincenzo Scamozzi’s design for the stage of Andrea Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico (1584) in Vicenza, a vista of seven different streets, is likewise reminiscent of the panopticon, as well as the set in Rear Window. The film raises peeping to the third degree: 1 the movie camera watches; 2 the photographer watches through his telephoto camera, and 3 the audience in turn watches the events through the illusion projected onto the screen. Rear Window is a heightened central perspective film, which brings to mind the perspective drawing device used by the Renaissance artist in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Man Drawing a Reclining Woman (1538). The point of projection of the central-perspective, Jeff, is simultaneously a member of the cinema audience and the first-person narrator of the story. In using a perspective device an artist normally requires an assistant, just as Lisa, Stella, and Doyle function as Jeff’s legs in his investigations. CA M E R A O B S C U R A
and the stage as a machine
The photographer tied to his room becomes both camera and projector, as well as a camera obscura representing his own room.35 “Can I borrow your portable keyhole?” asks Stella, taking Jeff’s binoculars. The Peeping Tom is basically the photographer’s room, and its spatial location in the apartment block enables the ensuing situation. The set – Rear Window’s panopticon – was made under the supervision of Joseph MacMillan Johnson and Hal Pereira, and is perfect as the logical architectonic projection of the story. The set, with its courtyard, gardens, streets, cars and thunder showers, was made in Paramount’s largest studio, Stage 18, which measured fifty-five by thirty metres and was twelve metres high.36 It was the largest set ever built for Paramount, and included thirty-one flats, of which twelve were fully furnished. Hitchcock himself supervised the construction, which took six weeks. The structures contained seventy windows 232
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Camera obscura. From Athanasius Kircher, Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1649)
and doors, and the walls in Jeff’s flat were removable to allow for all possible camera angles. The lowest level of the courtyard was built below the studio floor. Filming the events in the individual flats and all the small objects (the ring, pearl necklace, the name Eagle Road Laundry on the murderer’s laundry parcel) would not have been possible in natural light.37 The artificial lighting for this colossal set required all of Paramount’s equipment. As much as the narrative itself, the structure of the film relies on the spatial relationships and geometry of the tenants’ flats, the courtyard, the alley to the street, the street itself with the restaurant on the opposite side, and the view above of the south town silhouette. The apartment block is a stage machine that produces the narrative according to the script. The set is thus a variation on the theme of the promenade architecturale – architecture subordinated to a linearly advancing story. It is also the architecture of surveillance and domination according to Michel Foucault’s well-known analysis; his picture of the cells in the ideal panopticon-prison corresponds exactly to Hitchcock’s cinematic panopticon: “They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible … Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from where he can be seen from the front by the supervisor, but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.”38 The scene in which the apparently naked dancer is in her bathroom and the murderer in the corridor leading to his apartment, separated by only the thickness of the wall, exemplifies the solitary cells in Rear Window’s panopticon. 233
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M. (1926)
painting themes in
R E A R W I N D OW
Edward Hopper’s painting Night Windows (1928), the theme of which is an illuminated room in the house opposite, is like something out of the voyeurist world of Rear Window. Miss Lonelyhearts, waiting for her imaginary companion or contemplating suicide, is also like one of Hopper’s paintings – for example, Automat (1927), with its lonely woman sitting in a café – even the green colour of her dress appears in Hopper’s painting. It is evident that Hitchcock was fully acquainted with the works of Hopper, for he had the Bates house in Psycho (1960) built according to the artist’s painting House by the Railway (1923). Many of Hopper’s other paintings are also related to the voyeurist theme of Hitchcock’s film. In Night Hawks (1942) and New York Office (1962) the subjects of external scrutiny are a night bar and an office, while Apartment Houses (1923) and Room in New York (1932) are intimate interiors of private homes. Girlie Show (1941) draws directly on the sexual content of voyeurism, whereas in Eleven A.M. (1926) a naked woman is staring fixedly at the courtyard from an open window, thus problematizing the entire issue of voyeurism. Finally, in Office in a Small Town (1953) a lonely man in an office appears to be surveying and commanding his immediate surroundings in much the same way as L.B. Jeffries in the film. A figure looking out of a window has been a familiar motif in painting since the Renaissance. However, the spectator, the artist, is always in the same space as his model, with his or her approval. On the other hand, looking from the outside through a window into a room became 234
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popular only in the twentieth century. By its very nature, a window is meant for looking out, not in. A view of the inside from the outside confuses and perverts the ontology of the window and makes it a voyeuristic instrument, as the subject is not conscious of being under external scrutiny. The inside is always definitely somebody’s territory, whereas the outside is anonymous. hitchcock and duchamp The voyeurism of Rear Window and the boundary between private and public domains create a link to some of the central themes of modern art. The best-known work dealing with the nature of voyeurism is undoubtedly Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (1944–66), which the artist was making at the same time that Hitchcock was making his film. Duchamp made his final work in complete secrecy, as it was believed he had given up art altogether. Both the film and Duchamp’s enigmatic work are studies in fixed-eye central perspective, the interaction of intimate privacy and voyeurist gaze, and the intertwining of eroticism and violence. An intimate event becomes public when a crime has been committed and a district attorney becomes involved. In Duchamp’s three-dimensional composition, a woman lying with her legs apart on a reedy shore, a gas lamp raised in her left hand, is observed through two holes in an ancient Spanish timber door. In the background sparkles an electrically operated illusionary waterfall. The young, fair-haired female figure’s hairless pubes are indecently exposed directly in front of the viewer’s eye, in the dazzling light of a diorama. The perspective diorama composition suggests a narrative of sexual perversions or violence, but the event remains unexplained.39 The way in which the spectator’s mind seeks a causal logic from the hints in Duchamp’s construction is reminiscent of the way Jeff perceives the logic of the series of unrelated episodes he sees from his window. “Let’s start from the beginning, Jeff, tell me everything you saw … and … what it … means,” says Lisa as she realizes that a crime really could have taken place, regardless of her initial suspicion. Duchamp’s work arouses a simultaneous feeling of scopophilic excitement and voyeuristic shame. The incident in Hitchcock’s film is exposed as a crime, but the incident in Duchamp’s work remains forever enigmatic; is this Duchamp’s perfect crime? But, as Octavio Paz notes in his essay on Duchamp, “We pass 235
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from voyeurism to clairvoyance.”40 Likewise, in Rear Window the voyeurist gaze ultimately leads to clairvoyance and the mental purification that characterizes a work of art. the roles of objects The language of objects plays a central role in this film, as in all Hitchcock films. “I make it a rule to exploit elements that are connected with a character or a location; I would feel that I’d been remiss if I hadn’t made maximum use of those elements,” says Hitchcock about the importance of location and objects in his films.41 The photographer’s 35-mm reflex camera naturally plays a fetishistic leading role. The objects in Jeff’s room (revealed by a magnificent continuous shot, moving from the childless couple sleeping on the fire-escape platform, through several of the flats, to a medium close-up of Jeff’s head, and finally to the objects in his flat) offer clues to why he is in a wheelchair with his leg in plaster: the photographs indicate his profession; the close-ups of racing cars, a military explosion, and a burning car in a war zone reveal the dangers he loves; and the shattered 8x10 view camera signifies the accident on his last assignment. The shot ends in a framed negative of a beautiful woman next to a pile of magazines with the same image on the cover. The camera is Jeff’s tool and livelihood, but during the film it changes into a means for observing, warning, and investigating and ultimately becomes a weapon of self-defence.42 The earlier slide photographs of the garden – in which the murderer has buried something – are another dimension of the camera. In the murderer’s apartment the murder weapons (the knife and saw), the aluminum jewelry sample case that was used to convey the dismembered body, and the rope-bound trunk containing the wife’s belongings (Jeff and his assistants, as well as the audience, are temporarily led to believe that the trunk contains bits of the body; “He better get that trunk out of there before it starts to leak,” says Stella) represent violence. The rope conjures an unpleasant association with hanging in the spectator’s mind. The murdered woman’s ring and handbag also play a role in the story. As Jeff is trying to find proof for the crime in the murderer’s tools of violence, Lisa deduces the course of events through the victim’s handbag, jewelry, and wedding ring. Lisa’s slipping the ring onto her own finger has a double meaning in its reference to her ardent desire to marry 236
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Jeff. Lisa’s fashionable clothes – particularly her overtly provocative diaphanous nightgown – and her fetishism for expensive objects related to her value world create a powerful symbolic tension compared to the mundane lower-middle-class existence of Jeff and his fellow tenants; “Well, maybe in the high-rent district they [wives] discuss; in my neighbourhood they still nag,” Jeff observes. The apparent contradiction between the wealth of Lisa’s family and profession and the photographer’s impoverishment (“I have never more than a week’s salary in the bank”) is continuously emphasized by Jeff. But in his book Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary connects photography and money in a way that eliminates superficial class differences: “Photography and money become homologous forms of social power in the nineteenth century. They are equally totalizing systems for binding and unifying all subjects within a single global network of valuation and desire … Both are magical forms that establish a new set of abstract relations between individuals and things and impose those relations as the real. It is through the distinct but interpenetrating economies of money and photography that a whole social world is represented and constituted exclusively as signs.”43 There is thus no real contradiction between the worlds of Lisa and Jeff; from the beginning they both belong to the same power elite. The characters in the film are treated as objects. All of them remain nameless except for the murderer, whose name Lisa spells out letter by letter, thus emphasizing his identity. The dancer and the ideal of perfection that Lisa represents are personifications of magazine femininity and erotic desire. In his immobility and helplessness Jeff is also transformed into an object that the others have to move and care for. In the end even the murderer loses his vileness and repugnance when revealed as the pitiful product of an unfortunate fate he has only tried to conceal. Due to their prototypicality all the characters in the film represent their own genre-models and concepts. This objectivization of characters maintains an air of parody, regardless of the tragedy. fiction and reality In Hitchcock’s films the audience is so gripped by suspense that the obvious theatrical unreality and the architectonic incredibility of the buildings can no longer release or moderate the reality of terror. Architecture 237
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has lost its normal meaning and has submitted to terror. On the other hand, the staged background can also be seen as a striving for absolute truthfulness. At the end of the film the police arrive in Jeff’s room only a few seconds after being alerted, but in fact the Sixth Precinct of the Manhattan police is actually on Tenth Street, just opposite the entrance to Jeff’s flat. The Hotel Albert, where Jeff lures the murderer, was on the corner of Tenth Street and University Place when the film was being made; since then it has been refurbished as an apartment block. The script of Rear Window was based on Cornell Woolrich’s short story of the same name, to which Hitchcock added some authentic material about two macabre crimes; thus the film’s fictional crime acquires a realism from two real-life cases. In the Patrick Mahon case, a man murdered a woman, dismembered her body, and threw the bits one by one from a train window, except for the head, which he burnt. In the Dr Crippen case, a man murdered his wife and also dismembered her body. For a long time he managed to delude friends who were curious about his wife’s disappearance by telling them she had gone to California. He was recognized while making his escape by steamer in the company of his mistress disguised as a boy, due to his wig and lower set of false teeth.44 humour and fantasies It is characteristic of Hitchcock to raise the threshold of an audience’s suspense by creating a smoke screen of macabre humour: “And for me, ‘suspense’ doesn’t have any value if it’s not balanced by humour.”45 Innocent macabre comments by Jeff and Stella inveigle the audience into imagining that a woman’s body has been dismembered in one of the flats and the bits carried away in the sample case: “That would be a terrible job to tackle, just how would you start to cut up a human body?”; “Just where do you suppose he cut her up? … Of course – the bathtub! That’s the only place where he could have washed away the blood” (during this comment from Stella, Jeff is trying to eat bacon for his breakfast); “In a job like that it must have splattered a lot”; “She’s scattered all over town. A leg in the East River …”; and “The only way anybody would get that ring [Stella’s wedding ring] would be to chop off my finger.” The film does not show the murder or the dismemberment, not even a drop of blood, but they appear even more realistically in the minds of the audience. The nocturnal moment when the murder takes place is 238
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marked by a woman’s muffled shriek and the sound of a glass breaking, but at this stage the audience is not ready to appreciate the meaning of these almost imperceptible sounds; this they acquire later when the audience returns in its mind to the chronology and logic of the drama. The night thunder that accompanies these sounds probably gives the audience a feeling that something tragic has occurred. The events that the audience imagines are more impressionable. “I have always felt that you should do the minimum on the screen to get the maximum audience effect,” said Hitchcock about his principle of cinematic minimalism.46 At the end of the film the audience is forced to imagine the part of the woman’s body that was buried in the flowerbed, after hearing that Thorwald had dug it up and put it in the victim’s hat box. This episode brings to mind the Mahon case, in which the murderer also had trouble disposing of the victim’s head. During the film the spectators and actors in the spectacle change places on two occasions: Lisa moves from the auditorium to the stage (the murderer’s flat), and conversely, the murderer moves from the stage to the auditorium (Jeff’s flat). But the murderer also steps into the domain of the audience: Thorwald’s arrival takes place quite clearly behind the vulnerable and unprotected back of the audience. In the traditional theatre the spectator is inviolable, but when Jeff is violently attacked at the end of the film, the psychological security created by the theatre illusion is shattered. the realism of dreams In his films Hitchcock reveals that behind everyday reality there is another reality. As he says, “Things are not as they would appear to be.”47 An object or place becomes horrifying and unreal when we are able to see through its normal realism; beyond realism there is always surrealism. Subconscious, forgotten, and suppressed images seep through the ordinary consciousness dominated by the superego; without noticing it, our brains and nervous systems chart the dangers lurking behind the familiar. Even the faces of our mothers are transformed into frightening, eroded landscapes if we stare so long that their familiar and loved features lose their ordinary meanings. In Hitchcock’s films it is the wavering between ordinary consciousness and dreams that predominates: the unreality of reality and the reality of unreality. 239
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“For a director who bothers to really open his eyes, all the elements in our lives contain something make-believe,” wrote Jean Renoir in his autobiography.48 This becomes particularly clear when we watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The film is a conscious dream. But even the artistic stages of architecture are always something other than the sum of their material structures. They are primarily mental spaces, architectural representations, and images of the perfect life. Architecture, too, leads our imagination to another reality. Man does not live by murder alone – he needs affection, encouragement and every now and then – a drink. Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s toast49
notes i Interview by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma 190 (May 1967). Quoted in François Truffaut, Truffaut by Truffaut (New York: Harry N. Abrams 1985), 201. 2 In 1953 moviemakers had to refrain from using actual addresses for murderers. Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Doubleday 1979), 217. According to the New York City mayor’s office, a filmmaker today may use a real address if the property owner’s permission is obtained. Correspondence between Peter Reed (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the author, 13 January 1997 and 12 November 1998. 3 François Truffaut, Hitchcock (London: Paladin Grafton Books 1984), 319–20. 4 Walter Benjamin, “Naples,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books 1978), 167. 5 Paul Virilio, L’horizon négatif (Paris: Galilée 1984), quoted in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990; Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1995), 1. 6 Truffaut, Hitchcock, 324. 7 Ibid., 327. 8 Alfred Hitchcock, “Rear Window,” in Focus on Hitchcock, ed. Albert J. LaValley (Englewood Cliffs, nj: Prentice Hall 1972), 43. 9 Hitchcock published this article in McCall’s magazine two years after completing Rear Window. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and
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Interviews, ed. Sidney Gottlieb (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1995), 51–3. “I wanted to show how a popular song is composed by gradually developing it through the film until, in the final scene, it is played on a recording with a full orchestral accompaniment. Well it didn’t quite work out the way I wanted it to and I was quite disappointed.” The song, which is heard in the scene of the composer’s party, is “Mona Lisa,” which became a hit five years later, sung by Conway Twitty. Patrick Humphries, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (London: Bison Books 1986), 120. Jane E. Sloan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Filmography and Bibliography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1993), 20. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 332. Alfred Hitchcock, “Film Production” (1965), in Hitchcock on Hitchcock, ed. Gottlieb, 216. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 135. Ibid. Ibid., 392. Ibid., 89. It is fairly certain that when Rear Window was being planned and shot in the first half of the 1950s, Hitchcock did not have tv channel-swapping in mind, but more likely film watching. Truffaut, Hitchcock, preface. Ibid., 324. Stefan Sharff, The Art of Looking in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (New York: Limelight Editions 1997), 7. Peter Wollen, “Architecture and the Cinema: Places and Unplaces,” Rakennustaiteen seuran jäsentiedote 4 (Helsinki 1996): 14. Sloan, Alfred Hitchcock, 19. Alfred Hitchcock, “The Enjoyment of Fear” (1949), in Hitchcock on Hitchcock, ed. Gottlieb, 120. See Michel Foucault, “Las Meninas,” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books 1994), 3–16. Truffaut, Hitchcock, 321. A History of Private Life, Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, general editors (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press 1986). Saul Steinberg, The Art of Living (London: Hamish Hamilton 1949). The source remains unidentified. The author recalls reading a small note about this theatre at the end of the 1960s, possibly in Architectural 241
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30 31
32 33
34 35 36
37
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Design. Ludwig Wittgenstein perceptively observed the strange duality of voyeurist interest: “There can be nothing stranger than seeing a person during his everyday pursuits, when he believes that no one is observing him. Let us imagine a theatre with its curtain rising to reveal a person alone in a room, walking back and forth, lighting a cigarette, sitting down, etc. We would suddenly see this person from outside in a way that we can never otherwise see him – as if we could see a chapter of a biography, as it were, with our own eyes. This would be awful and, at the same time, more miraculous than anything a poet could make people act or speak on the stage.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Yleisiä huomautuksia, ed. George Henrik von Wright and Heikki Nyman (Helsinki: Werner Söderström 1979), 215. Translation from Finnish by the author. The English version is entitled Philosophical Remarks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1975). David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993), 347. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1994), 332. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (London: Fontana/Harper Collins 1992), 228. After writing the paragraph about the idea of the panopticon, I read Robert Stam and Roberta Pearson’s superb article “Hitchcock, Rear Window: Reflexivity and the Critique of Voyeurism” in A Hitchcock Reader, ed. Marshall Deuterbaum and Leland Poague (1986; Ames, ia: Iowa State University Press 1994), 198–206. The writers also connect the idea of the panopticon to Rear Window. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage 1979), 200. Stam and Pearson also mention the camera obscura device as one of the frames of reference in Rear Window. The set and lighting arrangements for Rear Window are described in David Atkinson, “Hitchcock’s Techniques Tell Rear Window Story,” American Cinematographer (January 1990): 34–40. The word “laundry” alludes to the French mass-murderer Henri Désiré Landru, upon whom Chaplin had based his film Monsieur Verdoux eight years earlier, in 1947. This observation originates from Heikki Nyman’s ingenious and detailed analysis in an unpublished study: Heikki Nyman, Hitchcockin kosketus, Alfred Hitchcockin elokuvat, part 3 (1951–6).
Juhani Pallasmaa
38 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200. 39 Octavio Paz gives the following vivid description of Duchamp’s work: “The visitor goes through a low doorway, into a room somewhat on the small side, completely empty. No painting on the plastered walls. There are no windows. In the far wall, embedded in a brick portal topped by an arch, there is an old wooden door, worm-eaten, patched, and closed by a rough crossbar made of wood and nailed on with heavy spikes. In the top left-hand corner there is a little window that has also been closed up. The door sets its material doorness in the visitor’s way with a sort of aplomb: dead end. The opposite of the hinges and their paradoxes. But if the visitor ventures nearer, he finds two small holes at eye level. If he goes even closer and dares to peep, he will see a scene he is not likely to forget. First of all, a brick wall with a slit in it, and through the slit, a wide open space, luminous and seemingly bewitched. Very near the beholder – but also very far away, on the ‘other side’ – a naked girl, stretched on a kind of bed or pyre of branches and leaves, her face almost completely covered by the blond mass of her hair, her legs open and slightly bent, the pubes strangely smooth in contrast to the splendid abundance of her hair, her right arm out of the line of vision, her left slightly raised, the hand grasping a small gas lamp made of metal and glass. The little lamp glows in the brilliant three-o’clock-in-the-afternoon light of this motionless, end-of-summer day. Fascinated by this challenge to our common sense – what is there less clear than light? – our glance wanders over the landscape: in the background, wooded hills, green and reddish; lower down, a small lake and a light mist on the lake. An inevitably blue sky. Two or three little clouds, also inevitably white. On the far right, among some rocks, a waterfall catches the light. Stillness: a portion of time held motionless. The immobility of the naked woman and of the landscape contrasts with the movement of the waterfall. The silence is absolute. All is real and verges on banality; all is unreal and verges – on what?” Octavio Paz, “* water writes always in * plural,” in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (Munich: Prestel 1989), 145. 40 Ibid., 157. 41 Truffaut, Hitchcock 328. 42 Rear Window has many parallels with Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom (1960), in which a camera is used as a murder weapon. The protagonist is a young photographer who murders women and meticulously records the act with his 16-mm film camera. In the end he even films his own death. 243
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43 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 13. 44 Truffaut, Hitchcock, 333–4. 45 Alfred Hitchcock, “Why I am Afraid of The Dark” (1960), in Hitchcock on Hitchcock, ed. Gottlieb, 144. 46 Alfred Hitchcock, “A Redbook Dialogue” (1963), in Hitchcock on Hitchcock, Gottlieb, ed., 146. 47 Neil P. Hurley, Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock’s Fright and Delight (London: The Scarecrow Press 1993), 2. 48 Jean Renoir, Elämäni ja elokuvani (1974; Helsinki: Love-Kirjat 1980), 60. The English version is entitled Jean Renoir: My Life and My Films (London: Collins 1974). 49 Hurley, Soul in Suspense, 111.
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The Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Chora
The Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli
The philosophers call the purest substance of many corruptible things the “quintessence.” That is to say, mortal heaven, extracted by human craft. The quintessence is superior. That is, our Lord God’s heaven, in regards to the four elements, is incorruptible and unchangeable, so the quintessence occupies a similar place regarding the lower world … Mortal heaven is incorruptible in regards to the four qualities of the human body, and so it is naturally proven that our quintessence, that is mortal heaven, is incorruptible in itself. So it is not hot and dry in fire, nor cold and wet in water, nor hot and moist in air, nor cold and dry in earth. On the contrary, our quintessence is as incorruptible as heaven. The Book of Quintessence1 The quintessence separates in the vessel, having the colour of the sky which you can see by a diametrical line which divides the upper part, that is the Fifth Essence, from the lower, that is from the impurities which are of a muddy colour. De Secretibus 2
the importance of luca pacioli’s late fifteenth-century work on the golden section and its applications to stereotomy has never been properly grasped. Despite his personal acquaintance with Alberti and Leonardo, his knowledge of Vitruvius’s treatise, and his presence in important architectural contexts such as Urbino and Milan, mainstream architectural history has generally ignored his work. Pacioli’s plagiarism of Piero della Francesca’s work, as well as a lack of evidence that Pacioli’s contemporaries were interested in his book, have not contributed to challenge scholarly perceptions about the relative obscurity and marginality of his work. Although there is a whole section devoted to architecture in his Divina proportione,3 “applications” of the golden section in design are characteristically difficult to diagnose. An “irrational” proportion (1:1.618), easy to construct geometrically as an operational device, the golden section can be found easily in built examples, and this has created skepticism about its intentional use, particularly in the wake of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century mystifications of the topic.4 Pacioli was first and foremost a Franciscan professor of theology: “Ordinis Minor, Sacra Theologie Magistri in Artes arithmetice & 246
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An image from Pretiosissimum Donum Dei. Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal, Paris, ms. 975, f. 13
geometrie.” This is how he presents himself in the dedication of his compendium on arithmetic, geometry, and algebra, the Summa de arithmetica geometria proportioni et proportionalita.5 The primary aim of his work was to “demonstrate” theology through applied proportion, wherever these ratios might be found in divine and human works: from organic growth and the composition of the soul, to accounting, art, and architecture. His theory represents a crucial yet neglected aspect of Renaissance architectural discourse that was never explicitly followed up, not because of its theoretical nature but because Pacioli spoke of difficult things and tried to demonstrate the notion that mathematical numbers in both theory and practice merely prepare the student for divine numbers. This belief seems to continue a late-antique and medieval interest in numerology with a rather different lineage than traditional Biblical exegesis – a tradition that includes Nichomacus of Gerasa (c. 100 ce), Martianus Capella (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, c. 410–29 ce), and Isidore of Seville (Liber numerorum, late sixth to early seventh century ce). 247
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Luca Pacioli’s life-long work, from the practical concerns of his Summa to the more esoteric issues in his Divina proportione, was always guided by a conviction about a preexisting ontological unity that was subsequently broken into the dualities and multiplicities of the mortal world. He sought to understand how the lowly mechanical arts could become a “ladder” for the spiritualization of matter. The relative importance of arts and crafts (such as painting, sculpture, perspective, architecture, and mechanics) and of disciplines (such as rhetoric, poetry, military arts, philosophy, alchemy, and medicine) depends on their capacity to demonstrate how sublunar multiplicity could be reconciled with the divine monad, thus becoming vehicles for the knowledge of Truth. In the tradition of medieval arithmology, ultimately derived from Plato’s Timaeus, the monad is the originating principle (unit) of the number series and is formally identified with God.6 The monad is not a number but an essence, a “potential number,” as a point is a potential figure. According to Capella, the monad is all that is good, desirable, and essential – a notion that was explicitly introduced into Renaissance theology by Nicholas of Cusa in his influential work De Docta Ignorantia. In the introductory remarks to his two major works, the Summa and the Divina proportione, Pacioli names the important painters and architects of his own time, together with mathematicians and astrologers from antiquity and the present and quotes Solomon “nel secondo de la sapientia … nothing is without number, weight and measure.”7 “Quantity is noble and excellent, it is what makes substance eternal … Nothing truly can be known to exist among natural things without number.”8 For Pacioli, all numbers are analogical and are related to higher truths; his aim was never simply to engage in “formal” geometrical manipulations, as might be inferred from his fascination with the “golden” proportion. Geometry is a vehicle to demonstrate the primary status of the monad. His obsession with “solving” problems of area and volume was invariably an obsession with showing “equivalence” among figures and thus to reconcile differences. Pacioli was always aware of the crucial distinction between a mathematical point and a point in the real world. They should not be confused; “mathematics is abstract and subtle … [yet] it should always be considered as kindred to sensuous matter.”9 In this Pacioli seems to follow the program set for mathematics by Nicomachus in his introduction to Expositio rerum mathematicorum: “For it is clear that these studies are like 248
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ladders and bridges that carry our minds from things apprehended by sense and opinion to those comprehended by the mind and understanding, and from those material, physical things, our foster brethren known to us from childhood, to the things with which we are unacquainted, foreign to our senses, but in their immateriality and eternity more akin to our souls, and above all to the reason which is in our souls.”10 the lesson It is in his Franciscan habit that Pacioli appears in a woodcut printed several times in the Summa, as well as in the famous portrait by Jacopo de’Barbari, now in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples.11 In both images he addresses us as a teacher and is prepared to demonstrate, with his various mathematical and geometrical implements, the wonders of revealed Truth to all who might listen. The painting by de’Barbari offers
Jacopo de’Barbari, Portrait of Luca Pacioli in His Study (c. 1498). Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
The Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli
many details about his lesson. On the table lies a beautifully bound volume with the letters li. r. lvc. bvr. (Liber Reverendi Lucae Burgensis) identifying it as a book by Pacioli himself. On top of the book is a wooden dodecahedron, described by Pacioli as the symbol of the “quintessence” because its construction subsumes the other four (the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, and icosahedron) and because it must be constructed from the divine proportion, the golden-section ratio that is inherent in the pentagonal faces of the solid. With his left hand Pacioli points to the words liber xiii in an open book, while the pointer in his right hand is directed toward the geometric diagram on a slate with euclides inscribed on the side of its frame. Clearly, Pacioli is demonstrating proposition 8 of the thirteenth (and last) book of Euclid’s Elements, where Euclid discusses the regular bodies: “If an equilateral triangle be inscribed in a circle, the square on the side of the triangle is triple the square on the radius of the circle.”12 This theorem is crucial for nesting regular bodies into a sphere. It is also the beginning of speculation about the “squaring of the circle,” the attempt to construct a square whose perimeter would be equal to the circumference of a circle inscribed in the square (a problem that was recognized as impossible only in the nineteenth century, when the irrational constant π was understood). In other words, this theorem was believed to be the geometrical key to the potential “solution” of duality into unity. It was a significant reference in the discourse of logical reason for architects, alchemists, mathematicians, and Trinitarian theologians until the late eighteenth century.
Solid and hollow icosahexahedron (twenty-six-faced body), from Divina proportione. This is the same volume that appears in de’Barbari’s portrait of Pacioli 250
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On the lower left corner of the slate, a column of square roots refers to the Euclidean theorem but also suggests a connection to the golden section. Two of the numbers, 621 and 925, are close to numbers in the Fibonacci series and divide into a ratio that closely approximates the golden section proportion. The most striking feature in the painting, however, is the floating, shimmering corpo transparente on Pacioli’s right. This crystalline icosahexahedron (twenty-six-faced body) seems to be half-filled with a transparent elixir and appears both solid and hollow. It is reminiscent of the engravings (by Leonardo da Vinci) of regular and space-filling bodies that illustrate the Divina proportione. These engravings consistently illustrate the bodies in both modes, as solid volumes and as empty structures, and suggest Pacioli’s unwillingness (and perhaps inability) to show such bodies merely as “objective” geometric shapes. This simultaneity of solidity and space is likely an allusion to the “ungraspable true nature” of the primordial substance/space of the universe that is described by Plato in Timaeus, the prima materia that is both the substance of human artifacts (such as art and architecture) and the geometric space that is the place of human culture. As primordial ground, it enables humanity to recognize the identity between words and worldly things, while as primordial matter it allows for ideas to become incarnate in human constructions.13 In the painting this is strikingly evident: all eighteen squares and eight equilateral triangles are perfectly and simultaneously visible, illuminated by an unseen source of light that makes the vessel appear to radiate from within. Indeed, this sophisticated perspectival depiction of the icosahexahedron seems to represent an intentional synthesis of light (from the medieval tradition of perspectiva naturalis, a true emanation of God and the human soul) and proportion (from the newer Renaissance tradition of perspectiva artificialis, in all likelihood gleaned by Pacioli from Piero della Francesca’s De prospectiva pingendi) as vehicles for ultimate unity. Although unity could not yet be demonstrated rationally (by solving the problem of the squaring of the circle), Pacioli declared that it was still evident to the senses. The recognition of unity is equivalent to a recognition of meaning (not of “a” meaning); like erotic experience, it overwhelms our capacity to describe it, and it changes our life. The human capacity to perceive and eventually understand the reconciliation of the manifold into unity signified for Pacioli the possibility of true knowledge, which 251
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was exemplified by the artist’s and the alchemist’s ability to recognize and unify the fragmented human being that has been split in half at birth. The artist and alchemist pursue the experience of completion that gives sense to human life here and now, the elixir or alchemical gold that is nevertheless ever ephemeral and never a permanent object or accomplishment in our perennial (mortal) transmutation. The theme of reciprocity between container and contained is also present in alchemical treatises, particularly in the myth of malleable glass, the supreme analogy of the Elixir, a dream that has appeared since antiquity (e.g., in Pliny’s Natural History 36.26) and was repeated often during the Middle Ages, culminating in the late fourteenth-century alchemical text of Guillaume Sedacer, Sedacina Totius Artis Alchimie, in which the “quintessence” or “mortal heaven” is identified with glass itself. These writers tell the story of a glass-maker who was assassinated by Tiberius for having found the secret of making malleable glass. By overcoming the brittleness of glass – obviously its worst fault – this secret would have enabled glass to surpass gold as the primary goal of the alchemical opus. More about this later. In addition, the twenty-six-faced body depicted in the painting is one of two space-filling bodies that were recommended explicitly by Pacioli as being important for architects (the other is the hebdomicontadissaedron, with seventy-two faces).14 While Pacioli’s architectural recommendation of the seventy-two-faced body is accompanied by practical remarks (because it is almost spherical, it is useful for the construction of vaults, domes, and sections of domes), his preference for the twentysix-faced body remains enigmatic. Of course it too is “practical,” because it yields an octagonal plan, a familiar figure in Renaissance centralized sacred buildings. More importantly, however, it is composed of equilateral triangles and squares (dual isosceles triangles), the basic figures of creation for the architect/demiurge, as described by Plato in Timaeus. context and precedents Luca Pacioli was born around 1445 in Burgo Sancti Sepulcri (Borgo Sansepolcro), a small town in Umbria that was also the birthplace of Piero della Francesca. During his first two decades he stayed mostly in town, where he was influenced by the artistic and mathematical work of Piero. Eventually he went to Venice, and in 1464 he studied there under 252
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Woodcut of Luca Pacioli teaching the mathematical arts, from his Summa (1494)
Domenico Bragadino and was employed as a family tutor by a wealthy merchant. After a few years (c. 1470) he continued to Rome, where he lived with Leon Battista Alberti, to whom he had been introduced by Piero. In 1477 he took his vows as a Franciscan friar and subsequently taught mathematics in various Italian cities, including Perugia, Zara, Florence, Naples, Bologna, and Pisa. He also returned to Rome, where he was appointed professor in the Sapienza, and to Venice (c. 1508), where he was involved in editing Campano’s Latin translation (from Arabic) of Euclid’s Elements. During his itinerant life he wrote several treatises. Besides his published books, some of his writings still exist in manuscript form (such as De Veribus Quantitatis Cioe Dele Force Quendam Miraculose de Numeri et Quantita Continua et Vulgare)15 while others are lost, such as a treatise on algebra (probably written in Zara, c. 1481), and a translation of Euclid’s Elements into volgare (Italian), on which he possibly worked during his stay in Perugia around 1487.16 In 1496 Ludovico Sforza invited him to Milan, where he participated in the duke’s accademia and where he met and befriended Leonardo da Vinci. It was on this occasion that he decided to write his treatise on the Divine Proportion, which he published in Venice in 1509. A year 253
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later he was named commisario of the Franciscan convent in Borgo San Sepolcro, with the charge of bringing back “the perfect rule.” It was probably there or in Rome that he died, no later than 1514.17 Piero della Francesca’s dual interest in mathematics and art profoundly influenced Pacioli. This interest, however, was by no means exceptional.18 In Renaissance culture, fleshing out these relationships was crucial for demonstrating the capacity of human artifacts to reveal transcendental meanings. Pacioli apparently was asked to teach arithmetic and geometry to architects and stone-masons in his native town quite early in his life. This experience led him to write his “practical” treatise as a “complement” to Vitruvius, and it eventually became the second part of his Divina proportione. What is remarkable about Pacioli’s work is the explicit desire to demonstrate a noninstrumental, “opaque” relationship between the most abstract and the most concrete. His work, from the early Summa to the later Divina proportione, is a comprehensive examination of practical applications of arithmetic and geometry, as well as mystical numerology; architecture, as we shall see, was perhaps the most propitious site for “experiencing” this dark, “irrational” continuity. In De prospectiva pingendi Piero had defined painting as part of perspective – in his terms, as a branch of geometry: “painting is nothing but the demonstration of diminished (degradati) or augmented (acresciuti) bodies … perspective is necessary because it discerns all quantities through proportion like a true science, demonstrating the diminution or augmentation of all quantities (sizes) by the force of lines.”19 Furthermore, Piero conceived of his mathematical exploration of the regular bodies as absolutely essential for his understanding of perspective.20 Pacioli shared Piero’s obsession with proportions and proportional relationships. He invariably understood numbers and their applications in terms of proportion. As is well known, Pacioli “borrowed” Piero’s treatise on the five regular bodies (Libellus de Quinque Corporibus Regularibus) and appended it (in Italian) to his own Divina proportione. He was also influenced by Piero’s other “minor treatise,” a book on arithmetic entitled simply Trattato d’abaco. The importance of these books on arithmetic tends to be either underestimated in the history of art or misunderstood in the history of science. Piero’s Trattato d’abaco, Pacioli’s Summa, and some aspects of his Divina proportione belong to a series of similar texts that borrow exten254
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sively from one another. All seem to be derived ultimately from early thirteenth-century works by Leonardo Pisano (called Fibonacci): the Liber abbaci (1202) and the Practica geometriae (1220). Fibonacci was responsible for introducing Arabic numerals into Western mathematics and for identifying the series of numbers that yields (approximately) the golden section ratio when the higher number is divided by the preceding one. This series was generated arithmetically by adding the two previous numbers in the series: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, etc.; 1597 = 610 + 987 and 987/1597 = 0.618 (the golden number). While these books and manuals address eminently practical questions for commerce, they also include the technical mathematics that subsequent Renaissance artists and architects would use to calculate the height of a building, the area of a plot of land, or the volume of architectural elements such as columns and piers. Indeed, some of these earlier works already included similar problems. In Piero’s Trattato d’abaco and in Pacioli’s works, however, a greater interest in abstract problems is evident. In the section on geometry of his Trattato d’abaco, for example, Piero deals exclusively with the measurement of abstract polygons and polyhedra. Then, following Euclid’s Elements, he explains how to measure the five regular and other irregular solids inscribed in a sphere. In Piero’s book, the golden section first appears in the geometric exercises for the pentagon and in his demonstration of measuring a dodecahedron in a sphere. Although Piero does not call this ratio either “divine” or “golden,” the clarity of his exposition suggests that the proportion indeed must have been known in artistic circles before Pacioli’s more elaborate discussion. Piero, commenting on Euclid’s book 13, realized that “the side of a hexagon joined to the side of a decagon inscribed in the same circle results in a line divided into its mean and extreme ratio (golden section)” and consequently, “the side of a hexagon joined to the side of a decagon is equal to the side of a pentagon inscribed in the same circle.” These equivalencies have an enormous significance that Pacioli must have recognized in his association of “divine” proportion and classical architecture, particularly in the light of the symbolic value attributed to six and ten as perfect numbers in the architectural treatise of Vitruvius. Piero’s second mathematical treatise, devoted exclusively to the five regular bodies, continues to discuss mathematical problems in abstract terms. Unlike his Trattato d’abaco, the Libellus de Quinque Corporibus 255
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Regularibus does not belong to a pre-existing genre. Its focus, obviously shared by Pacioli, demonstrates a new concept of mathematics as a form of ontology. This was formalized in Pacioli’s work as an explicitly Christian ontology that fit Franciscan contemplative practices perfectly and resulted in a synthesis of different traditions from classical antiquity and the Renaissance, ranging from Euclid’s Elements and Plato’s Timaeus to medieval numerology and Biblical exegesis, as well as the “new” theology of Nicholas of Cusa, with its famous “definition” of God as a circle whose centre is ubiquitous.21 The particular point of departure for Piero’s Libellus is in books 13–15 of Euclid’s Elements.22 These three books describe the construction of the five regular polyhedra, their mutual relationships, and their
The five (regular) Platonic solids
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inscription within the sphere. This topic also appears in the first part of the Divina proportione and is clearly related to the cosmogony described in Plato’s Timaeus. Plato relates each of the five regular bodies to the natural elements: the cube, rising from a quadrangular base, gives an impression of stability and is therefore identified with the earth; the octahedron, suspended between two opposite points and turned as on a lathe, conveys an image of great mobility, like the air; the icosahedron has the greatest number of sides, and its globular form most closely resembles a drop of water; the tetrahedron’s pointed form suggests fire; and, last but not least, the dodecahedron has twelve surfaces that recall the twelve signs of the zodiac, and it encloses the greatest volume (being the closest to the sphere), so it corresponds to celestial matter. These perfect bodies have exercised an inevitable fascination through the centuries. There are indeed only five equilateral, equiangular polyhedra that can be inscribed within a sphere, and in the Renaissance these solids were often understood as the origin of all form. In Euclid’s presentation of these regular bodies, in book 13 of his Elements, the golden section plays a fundamental role as the proportion that divides a line into its mean and extreme ratio. It is included in the first six propositions and is indispensable for constructing the dodecahedron. Luca Pacioli made this explicit connection between the regular bodies and the golden section in his 1509 edition of Euclid’s Opera. This relationship, as we shall see, is also crucial in the development of his arguments in the Divina proportione. pacioli’s
S U M M A D E A R I T H M E T I CA G E O M E T R I A
P R O P O RT I O N I E T P R O P O RT I O N A L I TA
Pacioli’s more “practical” work can serve as an introduction to his more esoteric treatise on divine proportion. The Summa, published in Venice in 1494, was a large, not very handsome volume written in very bad volgare, with abundant Latin and Greek expressions and grammatical irregularities. Pacioli generally avoided Latin, to make his works accessible to artists, merchants, and craftsmen (although he does include extensive Latin quotations of Vitruvius in his Divina proportione). This interest in “popularizing” mathematical theories was indeed precocious for the late fifteenth century.23 Mathematical treatises usually were associated with classical theoria (a liberal art whose purpose was to reveal 257
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truth by contemplating the Created cosmos) and had nothing to do with practical interests. Pacioli’s deliberate attempt to make mathematical discourse accessible to artists and craftsmen, while explicitly revealing its theological implications, must be regarded not as an early modern progressive attitude but as a particular outlook on the relationship between thinking and making that needs careful qualification. The Summa was dedicated to Guidubaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino and son of the more famous Federigo. Pacioli acknowledges in the preface the influence of writers such as Alberti and Piero della Francesca and numerous artists including Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Alessandro Botticelli, Filippo and Domenico Ghirlandaio, Andrea del Verrochio, Antonio da Pollaiuolo, Pietro Perugino, and Andrea Mantegna, who have “calculated their works with level and compass.” He proclaims the importance of mathematics for all arts and sciences, including music, cartography, cosmography, the military arts, medicine, philosophy and alchemy. The book itself, however, is not concerned with artistic or scientific applications. It includes five parts: the first and most extensive deals with arithmetic and algebra, the second with its applications to commerce, the third discusses bookkeeping, the fourth compares different monetary systems, and the fifth part is a treatise on pure and applied geometry. The mathematical sources quoted by Pacioli throughout his book include Ptolemy, Euclid, Boethius, Leonardo Pisano, Biagio Pelacani da Parma, Sacrobosco (John Hollywood), Albertucci (Albert of Saxony), Regiomontanus (Johannes Müller) and, of course, Piero della Francesca. Although Pacioli’s main interest here seems to be the use of mathematics for commercial purposes, the Summa also contains extensive discussions of esoteric and mystical issues, obviously regarded by Pacioli as intrinsic to the subject matter. This concept is crucial to understand his particular interest in architecture in the Divina proportione. Numerology is present in the first part of the Summa, including the perfection of numbers and their symbolic meanings. The first perfect number (in the sense of Euclid) is six, which was also a perfect number for Vitruvius. God created the world in six days, and man, the most perfect creature, was created during the last day. Five is also excellent, because it is the number of elements in the universe and the number of regular bodies, as explained by Plato, “archimandrita de li phylosophanti.”24 The number
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seven is discussed extensively for its capacity to relate gynecological and physiological phenomena. Whole numbers are called sani (literally “healthy numbers”), while fractions are rotti (“broken numbers”). Pacioli devotes many pages to reconciling the biblical command “go forth and multiply” with the apparent paradox that fractions diminish as they multiply. For Pacioli, the covenant between the Word and the world had not yet been broken, so the Scriptures had to be understood literally. Conversely, the unambiguous nature of mathematical signs seemed to provide a perfect vehicle to grasp the Creation and humanity’s place in it. In the section on geometry, the eight general themes are related to the octo beatitudine of Christianity. Equally, one senses that his precocious interest in algebra was not unrelated to these mystical interests: “Arte magiore cioe pratica speculativa, altramente chiamata Algebra et almucabala in lingua arabica … Algebra id est Restauratio. Almucabala id est oppositio.”25 Curiously, Pacioli provides the rules for the resolution of second-degree equations in verse, using three “Latin quartets.” The sixth distintione of the first section is dedicated to proportions: the founding concept that rules everything in the human arts and sciences and manifests the harmony of all phenomena in the universe. Proportion is the thread that unites all things and is the ultimate basis for applied mathematics. Pacioli acknowledges the Franciscan Albertuccio, author of Tractatus proportionum, as an immediate source. The ontological concept of proportion in Pacioli’s work, however, owes a greater debt to the tradition that extends from Plato himself to Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum and Alberti’s concinnitas.26 Pacioli introduces this theme by alluding to the proportion that surely must exist between sin and punishment (in the Christian sense). He elaborates on the importance of proportion in various fields: in medicine (the proportion between the intensity of a sickness and a prescribed remedy), in mechanics and fortifications (between the violence of a projectile and the strength of the fortification wall), and especially in art, where proportion is “mother and queen.” In linear perspective and in the mixture of colours, emphasizes Pacioli, proportion rules everything. In architecture, proportion governs the relationship between the human body and the work. Here, Pacioli quotes extensively from Alberti, and he praises Brunelleschi’s church of San Lorenzo in Florence as an example of a modern, well-proportioned building.
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Title page of the manuscript of Divina proportione (c. 1498). National Library of Geneva, Switzerland
D I V I N A P R O P O RT I O N E
Although it seems less focused than the Summa, Pacioli’s Divina proportione is the culmination of his search for “unity” through the founding notion of proportion. It consists of three distinct parts, the last of which is Piero’s text on the five regular bodies translated into volgare. Pacioli’s mystical discussion of the golden section synthesizes Pythagorean and Platonic themes with Christian theology. More significantly, the work culminates in a section on “practical” aspects of architecture. With Pacioli’s multiple interests in the “mathematical arts,” this section on architecture is no mere coincidence. Pacioli evidently believed that architecture could fulfill the human quest for spiritual unity that underlies the mathematical demonstrations in his treatise. In the first chapter, dedicated to Ludovico Sforza of Milan, Pacioli states that he decided to write the Divina proportione after having been invited by the duke to a scholarly reunion on 9 February 1498. In this symposium, attended by bishops and theologians, as well as orators, astrologers, doctors, philosophers, and the famous Leonardo da Vinci, 260
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the duke uttered “sweet and golden words,” stating that whoever possessed a gift of knowledge and shared it with others was the most pleasing to God and the world. Convinced that mathematics is “the most true of all true things,” Pacioli decided to finish and publish his work on divine proportion, “the sublime and highest knowledge,” unknown until now as the source of all other “speculative scientific, practical and mechanical operations.”27 The first four chapters of part 1 are a fascinating account of the nature of theory and mathemata in general, including their relevance for painting, sculpture, music, perspective, and architecture. He emphasizes the origins of theory in vision, based on the wonder that likely accompanied the experience of cosmic phenomena such as a lunar eclipse.28 He insists that nothing can be grasped by the intellect unless it has been previously offered to perception in some way. The most noble sense is sight, because it enables the intellect to “understand and taste.” This “theory” is always in and of the world, in accordance with the Greco-Roman understanding of theoria as a contemplation of truth that also “saves the phenomena.” Such theory is always “discovered”; it never dictates to the hands of the artist “how” or “what” to do, yet its epiphanies are corroborated through enlightened human action. The psychosomatic unity of human consciousness (as opposed to post-Cartesian concepts) remains here a primary assumption. This “traditional” theory could never be an imaginary (scientific) construction of the world (like Copernicus’s cosmology, for instance) understood from some godly point of view. There is no semblance of a modern platonism with an autonomous ideal realm beyond the world of experience. Pacioli’s Plato is still the Greek Plato, capable of thinking the ideal through the specific, yet never forgetting the opaque nature of chora, the real human experience in which Being and becoming appear simultaneously, particularly in works of art and craftsmanship. Plato clearly states that the ultimate aim of philosophy and the arts is the moral attainment of a certain kind of life and the tuning of the soul in harmony with the universe. Timaeus states, “The sight of day and night, the months and returning years, the equinoxes and the solstices, has caused the invention of number, given the notion of time, and made us inquire into the nature of the universe; thence we have derived philosophy … All audible musical sound is given us for the sake of harmony, which has motions akin to the orbits of our soul and which, as anyone who makes intelligent use of the arts [and crafts] knows, is 261
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not to be used, as is commonly thought, to give irrational pleasure, but as a heaven-sent ally in reducing to order and harmony any disharmony in the revolutions within us.”29 Pacioli insists that this understanding is shared by his Christian sources, although he fails to mention some important works by earlier fellow Franciscans obviously part of this tradition.30 Among the Church Fathers, St Augustine is, of course, a crucial reference. In this regard, Pacioli quotes a passage from Civitas Dei about the six days of creation and the perfect number six: 31 “we must not despise the science of numbers, which, in many passages of Holy Scripture, is found to be of eminent service to the careful interpreter. Neither has it been without reason numbered among God’s praises ‘thou hast ordered all things in number and measure and weight.’”32 For Pacioli, who also quotes directly from the Scriptures (Wisdom 11:21), this signifies the correspondence between the inferior and the superior universe, the sub- and supralunar worlds. He praises existing applications of mathematics to practical endeavours in the “mechanical arts” and presents a fascinating montage of examples from disciplines that no longer seem to have much in common. After commenting on mathematical contributions to the arts of war (fortifications, towers, moats, weaponry, etc.), Pacioli continues with a seamless narrative on the importance of mathematics in the subtle theological speculations of Duns Scotus, who proved the existence of angels through Euclidean geometry.33 Mathematics, claims Pacioli, even provided the just perfection of municipal law, as is taught in the theological work of Brother Guido, who employed Euclid’s principles to explain the flooding of the Tiber. In chapter 3 Pacioli explains the etymological meaning of mathematics, from the Greek maqhmaticoz: that which is “capable of discipline”; that which is stable and therefore can be taught.34 He then defines various mathematical disciplines: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the traditional quadrivium) and adds perspective, architecture, and cosmography. In discussing these proposed additions, he declares that perspective (proportionality) is the tacit foundation of architecture and cosmography. He argues that since the ancients added music to arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, there is no reason for the moderns not to add perspective. “If music pleases the ear, which is one of the natural senses, perspective also contents the sight, which is even more dignified because it is the first gateway of the intellect.”35 While music creates har262
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monic proportions through pitch and rhythm, perspective relies on “the natural number according to all definitions, and to the measure of the line of sight” and uses arithmetic and geometric proportions. Pacioli praises the miraculous “simulacrum of the glowing desire for our salvation” painted by Leonardo in his Last Supper, so life-like that Christ’s disciples seem fully aware of the ineffable truth spoken by the Saviour: “one among you will betray me.” We see and hear the harmony in the depiction of these figures, in their acts and gestures, “more a matter divine than human.”36 For Pacioli, perspective (proportionality) contains the secret of mimesis, a quasi-divine “power” that must be engaged in the making of architecture and in the cosmographic depiction of the universe. Pacioli concludes that we must either accept that there are only three principal mathematical disciplines (mathematics, geometry, and astronomy) and that the others are subordinate, or indeed acknowledge that there are five, including music and perspective. It is significant that Pacioli leaves the question open. Again, this demonstrates the meaningful distance he maintains between the realms of the ideal (the abstract mathematical disciplines) and the real (the applied arts of representation) and points to the role of architecture and the crafts as truly “mediating” arts. After this important preamble, Pacioli explains in chapter 5 why the golden section merits the attribute of divine. He claims that this proportion resembles God himself through five major correspondences and reveals Christian truth through thirteen important properties that correspond to Christ and his twelve disciples. The first of the five major correspondences is with the absolute uniqueness of this proportion, “the supreme epithet of God Himself”; there is simply no other proportion (a:b::c:d) with the same characteristics. The second correspondence is with the Holy Trinity; this proportion demonstrates unity with only three terms, and with three terms alone. It is defined by one mean and two extremes (proportio habens medium et duo extrema) and therefore is analogous to the Trinity’s one substance in three distinct persons (f:1::1:f+1). The third correspondence concerns the impossibility of defining God in human terms; this proportion cannot be constructed with “intelligible numbers,” remaining always “occult and secret … irrational in the words of the mathematicians”37 (f, the “golden number,” is approximately 0.618). The fourth correspondence is with the immutable essence of God; the “divine proportion” is invariable and “continuous,” it arises as the constant factorial relationship between 263
The geometric construction of the golden section and its elementary properties. If AB = 1, BC = 0.618. The construction simply projects the diagonal of the halved square. In the pentagon, if the side A’E’ = 1, A’C’ = 1.618. In the golden rectangle (bottom right), if MN = 1, NP = 1.618
The “hollow” icosahedron (top) and dodecahedron (bottom), from Divina proportione. The dodecahedron, constructed with twelve pentagons, is formed by means of the golden proportion and therefore is associated with the quintessence
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consecutive terms of the Fibonacci series (mentioned above). The fifth correspondence is an analogy to the quintessence, or “celestial virtue.” In this case, Pacioli identifies the Christian God with the Platonic demiurge and Creation with the cosmogony described in Timaeus. Pacioli argues that God himself created the quintessence and from it, the four elements that compose the universe: earth, water, air, and fire. The generative function of the quintessence (God’s heaven), identified here with a prima materia, is analogous “to our holy proportion that provides formal being (according to Plato in his Timaeus) to the heaven itself, attributing to it the figure of the dodecahedron … the body made of twelve pentagons that cannot be formed without our proportion.”38 Consequently, this proportion functions as a “continuous quantity” that assigns its respective forms to the four elements: the tetrahedron to fire, the cube or hexahedron to earth, the octahedron to air, and the icosahedron to water; the quintessential dodecahedron completes the set of five regular bodies.39 “And through them, our proportion gives form to an infinite number of dependent bodies” (“space-filling” or irregular polyhedra) that provide the complex richness we normally encounter in our experience of the world. Most importantly, Pacioli concludes, without the divine proportion it is impossible to establish the geometric relationship among these bodies and to demonstrate how can they be circumscribed by a sphere and thus reconciled with a primordial unity. Pacioli proceeds to enumerate the special mathematical properties of the golden number, “which should not be understood as natural, but are truly divine.”40 The fact that 0.618(1 + 0.618) = 12; that 10:6.18::6.18:3.82, where 6.18 + 3.82 = 10; or that 1.6182 = 2.618 may seem somewhat trivial to us, but Pacioli identifies these operations with a true miracle taking place in the realm of numbers. The ninth and thirteenth “effects” demonstrate the relationship among the divine proportion, the pentagon, and the dodecahedron. The thirteenth (and last) effect concerns the proportion between the sides of the pentagon and its diagonals, and Pacioli relates this again to the quintessence (numerologically corresponding to Christ, the leader of the twelve apostles). He reminds us of Plato’s triangle as the first generative figure of the cosmos (the simplest polygon that provides the “primordial seed”), the same triangle that Euclid described as the basis for demonstrating nested regular polyhedrons (as illustrated in Pacioli’s portrait). Pacioli emphasizes that these constructions are generated by divine proportion.41 265
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Solid sphere, from Divina proportione. This is the only volume that is not shown in “hollow” mode
The following chapters discuss the regular polygons, their construction, and the proportions between their surfaces and the sphere that circumscribes them.42 Pacioli insists it is significant that there can be only five such bodies and he defines the quintessence as a “celestial virtue which sustains in their being” all other bodies. In fifteen short chapters he then describes the relative proportions among the surfaces of the bodies and their nested relationship to one another.43 This curious problem is of great importance to him. He “discovers” that not all bodies can circumscribe the remaining four and that only the dodecahedron is capable of such a feat (in fact, the dodecahedron can circumscribe a tetrahedron and a cube simultaneously), demonstrating how it is indeed the “receptacle” of all the others. Once again, the divine proportion is presented as the key to a quintessence that is both primordial matter and receptacle, the “architectural” substance and space of the universe. The “derived,” or irregular, bodies are discussed in the following eight chapters. Pacioli systematically describes the “solid and hollow” regular bodies, then generates derived bodies either by sectioning the apices to create “truncated (blunt), solid and hollow” bodies or by projecting the surfaces up to a point to generate “stellated (elevated), solid and hollow” bodies.44 These operations are “constructive” in nature, and Pacioli associates them with stone-cutting and masonry. He concludes this 266
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Above: Drawing of a truncated solid hexahedron (cube) from the manuscript of Divina proportione. National Library of Geneva, Switzerland Left, top to bottom: Solid and hollow tetrahedron, the first of the Platonic volumes, after the drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, from Divina proportione Solid and hollow truncated tetrahedron, from Divina proportione Solid and hollow stellated tetrahedron, from Divina proportione
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Solid and hollow seventy-two-faced body, the second composite solid of particular interest to architects, from Divina proportione
section with a description of twenty-six- and seventy-two-sided polyhedra that are “extremely useful in architecture.” No other space-filling bodies are discussed, despite the fact that Leonardo illustrated nearly sixty. This is significant; it demonstrates that Pacioli’s interest was not in abstract mathematical and formal problems. He pursued this topic for its relevance to the architecture of the universe and its human counterpart. Indeed, the description of the geometrical properties of the seventy-two-sided polyhedron finishes with a long digression on architecture. Pacioli emphasizes the usefulness of this polyhedron for constructing vaults and domes and refers to the Roman Pantheon, so carefully proportioned that “one sole opening is sufficient to fully illuminate it with great splendor,” as well as contemporary examples such as Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Pacioli concludes his chapter with an apology for architectural theory (understood as principles of proportion and geometry) and criticizes practice without “philosophy.” While acknowledging that masons sometimes construct good buildings without “any knowledge of Vitruvius,” he insists that a craftsman’s intuitive awareness of proportion and geometry demonstrates that everything in the world is based on “number, weight, and measure.” He laments that contemporary buildings often deteriorate very fast, due to a lack of knowledge of “the great architect and mathematician Vitruvius who wrote about this discipline and provides unequaled teaching on every sort of construction.”45 He reminds us that Pythagoras’s discovery of the proportions of the right268
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Far left: Solid hexagonal and hollow pentagonal columns, from Divina proportione. (A mistake was made in the original pairing of these images.) Left: Solid and hollow pentagonal pyramid, from Divina proportione
angled triangle is absolutely indispensable to building vertically and even to recognizing justice, “for without it, it is impossible to know the difference between good and evil, or to obtain any certain measure in our works.”46 After briefly discussing the geometric generation of the sphere from a rotating semicircle in chapter 56, Pacioli describes in chapter 57 the inscription of the five regular bodies within the sphere. Although this seems somewhat redundant, the issue here is very different. He describes a stone-cutting operation in which each of the regular bodies is carved from a sphere, and the text provides ample anecdotal evidence of the usefulness of geometry, despite the disbelief of “dumb” stone masons and other arrogant craftsmen. In one case, Pacioli and the painter Melozzo challenged an able stone mason to carve a capital in the form of one of the regular bodies. The stone mason insisted that it would be an easy task despite his ignorance of geometry but ended up spoiling many pieces of marble and giving up in humiliation. The concluding chapters of part 1 present other architectural themes that deal with prismatic and pyramidal bodies. They describe the geometric properties of cylinders, cones, columns, and pyramids and teach 269
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elementary stereometry to determine the volumes of circular columns, the approximate volume of noncircular columns, and the volume of pyramids. In the chapter that would have discussed the volumes of the regular bodies, Pacioli refers the reader to the extensive description in his Summa.47 Pacioli concludes with praise for the Duke of Urbino, whose benevolent “sight brings happiness and health to all those whose vision is troubled, truly like the sun that illuminates and gives warmth from one pole [of the earth] to the other.”48 The two final chapters in Part 1 provide a glossary and refer to the figures in the treatise that were “drawn in plan and perfect perspective by Leonardo da Vinci.” Pacioli also refers here to the “built work,” the models of the bodies (sixty in all, as he states elsewhere) that he apparently had given to the duke, together with his text. In the Sforza Palace in Milan they were “suspended from a cord with their name and a reference number,” between supports of black amber.49 Although they were made of “lowly material” because of his own limited resources, Pacioli recommends to the duke that these wondrous bodies should be carved from precious metals and fine stone. architecture and the philosopher’s stone The manuscript that became part 1 of the Divina proportione was finished on 14 December 1498. When it was being prepared for printing in Venice in 1509, it seems that Pacioli decided to add the section on architecture (part 2) and Piero’s Libellus. In the context of Pacioli’s work, this decision was not merely an arbitrary afterthought. Pacioli understood architecture as a fertile ground for seeking the culmination of the alchemical opus, since it was based on the divine proportion. Piero’s Libellus was also related directly to his concept of architecture. Part 2, on architecture, is dedicated to the masons, stone-cutters, and sculptors from his home town (all mentioned by name), who, according to Pacioli, had asked him to provide guidelines for architecture based on arithmetic and geometry. Although other books on architecture had been written in the fifteenth century, Alberti’s remained in Latin, Filarete’s and Francesco di Giorgio’s existed only in manuscript, and a translation of Vitruvius into volgare (by Daniele Barbaro) did not appear before 1556.
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Pacioli’s text draws from classical and humanistic sources, but it is not a mere simplification or reiteration of Vitruvian theories. In the preface Pacioli states that architecture is divided into three parts: sacred temples, profane structures, and private dwellings. The first two are public buildings for the “salvation” and defense of “small and large republics,” while the third caters to the wishes of individuals. Unlike Vitruvius and other contemporary writers on the subject, Pacioli defines the realm of architecture exclusively as buildings. This assumption, which would become the norm for modern architecture, was indeed a novelty in the early sixteenth century; a “materialistic” and “technical” emphasis indeed pervades Pacioli’s architectural theory. Pacioli refers his readers to Vitruvius for instruction on temples. Architecture for defending cities, on the other hand, must be discussed because the ancients did not anticipate the invention of artillery and other weapons. However, Pacioli merely devotes a few pages to the exploits of famous military men associated with his home town and his patrons and declares that the topic deserves to be discussed further. Similarly, he “postpones” a discussion of the parts and rooms of palaces and other private buildings, again concluding that Vitruvius has already shown how to design them with the appropriate proportions. With this he can now concentrate on his own original contribution to Renaissance theory, “a very necessary part for the other three that we have mentioned.” No buildings, public or private, can be well ornamented (and therefore possess true meaning) without “very finely carved stone, be it marble, porphyry, jasper, serpentine marble, or some other rock.”50 This part of architecture best “ornaments” buildings when it follows geometric proportions, and although “Vitruvius does not speak about it explicitly, believing it all too well-known,” Pacioli insists that all stone masons should know “drawing by the ruler and the compass” in order to accomplish the desired aim.51 It is crucial to note that “proportions” for Pacioli refer to the “practice” of architecture, the actual stereotomy and stereometry of stone masonry, rather than to the design of lineamenti in the mind or the architect’s drawings of plans and elevations. This is very different from the use of proportions in the better-known treatises of Alberti and Palladio. Pacioli divides his exposition of proportion into three parts, analogous to the three parts that constitute the “divine proportion” (a mean and
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The composite order, from the architectural section of Divina proportione
The frontispiece of Solomon’s Temple, from Divina proportione
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two extremes). This analogical argument locates the discussion within his general concern.52 His concept contradicts our conventional understanding of the “transformation” of the medieval mechanical arts into liberal disciplines. For Pacioli, architecture is both “material” and “mystical,” a “mechanical” craft and a “liberal” contemplative discipline, distinct aspects of architecture rather than opposing poles linked by an instrumental relationship. Indeed, Pacioli’s preface states that he will discuss the proportions of the human body as the origin of all measurements given by “the finger of God,” clarify some obscure terms from Vitruvius, describe the architectural elements (stereotomic bodies) used by contemporary craftsmen, and finally show how these elements are used in a gateway similar to that of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, following the prediction of Ezekiel and God’s “own” architecture as a model for practice.53 Although Pacioli was familiar with Vitruvius’s discussion of proportions in architecture, his own exposition of the topic is explicitly Platonic, much closer to the Timaeus than other Renaissance treatises. His chapter on the measurement and proportions of the human body discusses the “spherical” head placed by God at the highest point, “like a citadel guarding the bodily edifice.”54 Pacioli repeats his story about the importance of the senses: “nihil est in intellectu quin prius sit in sensu.”55 The head has seven orifices through which the intellect engages the external world, and when the head is afflicted by some impairment, all bodily parts suffer. Nature, “the minister of Divinity,” placed in man’s spherical head all the right proportions that correspond to the other parts of the body. This conclusion leads Pacioli to a more traditional (Vitruvian) praise for the square and the circle, “preferred by the ancients for their temples,” which could circumscribe “the horizontal body of a man” with the centre of the compass on the navel.56 A significant Platonic influence is evident in Pacioli’s discussion of the head’s proportions, “generated from the first rectilinear figure, the equilateral triangle.”57 While the triangle was unimportant for other early Renaissance writers on architecture, it was the foundation for all of Euclid’s work, and Pacioli shares Euclid’s fascination with the “first” of the polygons. The triangle played a crucial role in Plato’s cosmogony and, we may recall, in Pacioli’s own “lesson” on divine geometry as depicted by Jacopo de’Barbari. Pacioli’s discussion of the proportions of the head in profile notes the importance of “irrational” proportions that cannot be 273
The proportions of the human head based on the triangle, from Divina proportione
expressed through numbers and must remain a decision of the “perspectivist” (the painter or architect who employs proportions of “continuous quantities”). Art, he says, imitates nature and therefore must always remain distinct from it. This crucial insight qualifies Pacioli’s theoretical discourse: “The sciences and mathematical disciplines are abstract and it is never possible to make them visible actualiter. The hand can never give form to a point, a line, or a [geometric] surface,” in the way that they are described by Euclid in his Elements, even though we may use these names to refer to the marks made by pens and other instruments.58 This meditation on the proportions of the equilateral triangle also led Pacioli to a brief digression on the grid used by painters to “see” proportions in scenes and objects to be depicted on their canvases.59 This allusion to the frame and grid of perspectiva artificialis again demonstrates Pacioli’s analogy between linear perspective and proportion and underscores his belief in perspective’s general usefulness for architecture. Significantly, he notes the “irrational” distance between the eyes and the back of the head (the primal equilateral triangle’s height, which is also the dimension between the plane of vision and the seat of consciousness in the nape of the neck) that makes perspective “possible” by reconciling binocular vision with a geometric point. This “irrational” proportion of the spherical head also suggests a ubiquitous centre, a “centre at the circumference,” the famous paradox from the theology of Nicholas of Cusa that was associated with God’s vision during the fifteenth century. 274
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Pacioli discusses the proportions of the whole body in chapter 3 of part 2. He cites Vitruvius extensively, repeats the Roman author’s reasoning concerning the perfection of the numbers ten, six, and sixteen, and declares that the male body’s height is equal to ten heads, adding that measurements should be taken to the bone to avoid discrepancies between muscular and weak men.60 To understand the divisions of the body, Pacioli recommends drawing a vertical line and subdividing it. Thus, it is possible to recognize the length of the foot as one-tenth of the height, regardless of actual dimensions. Indeed, Pacioli suggests conceiving these dimensions in scale, a novel notion during the early Renaissance, “as in the case of world maps or navigation charts.”61 The following chapters describe the classical orders and their parts. Pacioli quotes Vitruvius extensively (in Latin) on the distinction between the three orders but edits out the major stories about the origin of the orders. The Ionic, for instance, is described merely as “melancholic, because as a widow it rises without arrogance,” while the ornamented and slender Corinthian capital resembles “clean and happy young women.”62 He justifies the orders’ ornamental features through an analogy to the Christian tradition in which the attributes of the saints, such as the sword, horse, and armour of Saint George or the tower in which Saint Barbara was jailed, symbolize the holy person and his or her virtues. Indeed, Pacioli declares that the “dress” makes the (public) person and thus that ornament is crucial for architecture. Although he remarks on the “erroneous rituals and divinities” of the ancients, Pacioli does not question the classical orders. His main concern is the geometric design and proportions of the various parts of the orders “for masons,” i.e., the formal and material configuration of buildings. He clearly describes the anthropomorphic proportions of the columns, with contours widening in the middle and narrowing at the bottom and top, following the relative thickness of the human body. His understanding of anthropomorphic proportions seems more literal than his sources, but his explicit interest is solidity and durability, and beauty as an independent value is never mentioned. Following this “technical” interest, chapter 8 describes where one might find “the best made columns in Italy, both ancient and modern.” He praises the new buildings in Florence, such as Brunelleschi’s Santo Spirito and his “own” Franciscan convent of Santa Croce, and is particularly impressed by the twisted columns at Saint Peter’s in Rome “that were 275
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taken from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem,” one of which has miraculous powers against evil demons. The rest of the treatise on architecture describes the disposition of columns in buildings, with long Latin quotations from Vitruvius accompanied by fragments and observations that reveal Pacioli’s true concern: the capacity of the “craft” of architecture to reconcile duality with unity through geometric operations. Speaking about “columns with sides” (pillars or “square-based columns”), he refers to the “difficult problem of proportioning the circle to the square using the science of quadratura circuli.” He then speculates that the wise philosopher who is capable of finally solving the problem may have been born already, “as for me I can demonstrate [its truth] palpabiliter [in a palpable manner, through tactile intuition], to anyone who may question it.”63 This “perceptual knowledge” of wholeness is precisely the province of architecture.64 In a special chapter on letters, Pacioli refers to the Roman alphabet as one more demonstration of the importance of the circle and the straight line.65 Letters had been objects of contemplation in the Franciscan tradition. Pacioli’s newly designed alphabet is generated geometrically to reveal the letters’ ultimate origin. He claims that the square and the circle are all one needs to design not only Roman letters but also Hebrew, Greek, and Chaldean letters. Thus, geometry is understood as the origin of writing, as the trace of God’s light upon the Tables of the Law or the minds of mortals, at the very origins of human culture and memory. The analogy with architecture is obvious: architecture can “write” in a universal language and implement humanity’s highest concerns. While acknowledging that Vitruvius never speaks of pyramids or cones, Pacioli includes a short chapter on the subject, again “for the particular benefit of masons,” and refers the reader to part 1 of his book. Similarly, in chapter 8 he offers advice to stone masons and sculptors concerning the five regular bodies. He suggests that these Platonic figures may be used as capitals or as bases of columns “according to your judgment,” to provide proper ornament and a place for speculating on the virtues of the divine proportion. Pacioli mentions an icosahedron, “the figure of water” sculpted by Phidias in the Roman Temple of Ceres, emphasizing its appropriateness to the rituals of fertility celebrated in that sacred space. Pacioli concludes his writing on architecture with two chapters about problems confronted when an architect must build in narrow sites and 276
Examples of letters from Pacioli’s alphabet, from Divina proportione
use “irrational” proportions. Compared to his contemporaries, he was much more sympathetic to medieval building operations in situ, in which the “effigy” of a building was not fixed before construction began. Pacioli declares the superiority of geometry over arithmetic, because it enables one to “draw lines and surfaces” even if the proportions are not “rational” (i.e., based on natural numbers). He shares the general Renaissance preference for using the circle and the square in architecture whenever possible and also advocates simple proportions (a third, a half, a fourth, etc.), as with Alberti and other fifteenth-century writers. Indeed, geometry has an unlimited capacity to generate order from both “continuous and discrete measurements” and is therefore more useful than arithmetic. This is clearly an allusion to the “organic,” continuous, and ultimately unknowable “divine proportion.” In fact, Pacioli argues, even though proportions originate in nature, architecture can merely approximate the natural order, which is irrational and unknowable. A clear example is Vitruvius’s argument about making the upper columns of a multistorey building one-fourth smaller than the lower columns, because the proportion should acknowledge the tapering trunks of trees. The final paragraph warns the architect not to impose obsessive symmetry and proportion on a site that may not allow it. From this careful reading of his treatise we may conclude that Pacioli’s concept of architecture was unique, perhaps similar only to the equally “unorthodox” understanding of architecture in the neoplatonic and “alchemical” Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). Pacioli’s concern is 277
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“technical” rather than “humanistic,” recalling the alchemist’s search for “gold” as a mineral “sol” that is distinct from the true sun in heaven. Indeed, alchemy insists that the quintessence is a “mortal heaven” that is not identical to God’s heaven. Analogously, Pacioli’s mathematics were never truly “of this world” but must be grasped through the senses. The aim of the architect/craftsman was not to render the ideal world as a concrete physical presence; this would be an absurd impossibility. Consequently, Pacioli was not interested in the ability of an architect/author to produce “pictures” of a future building. Although he was familiar with the new power of art (particularly the perspectival epiphanies of painting), his emphasis on craft distinguishes him from most contemporary writers on architecture. More significantly, although architecture may be a craft, it need not be devoid of a “philosophical” component. On the contrary: its discourse is mathematical and theological. Just as alchemy distinguished the material and spiritual realms while proclaiming their inseparable nature in the experience of the alchemical opus and in the self-understanding brought about through “making,” architecture for Pacioli was a craft and a philosophical discourse in search of nonduality. Only by recognizing his work in the work of the world could the craftsman/alchemist recognize himself as a nonself in communion with the eternal God. Pacioli’s portrait, in which nothing is superfluous or accidental, had revealed not only his Euclidean teaching and its allusion to divine proportion but also his interest in a stereotomic glass architecture. The “philosophical” work of the architect was modelled on the architecture of the Platonic cosmos that was echoed in God’s design for the Temple of Jerusalem. Stereotomy and stereometry offer techniques but also a philosophical understanding of what may be revealed in the process: the “ephemeral gold” that must be recognized in the unending process of transmutation that is a human work. Pacioli believed that stereotomy, the careful “geometrizing” of stone through cutting and polishing, could transmute and spiritualize lowly matter, evoking St John’s Heavenly Jerusalem made of “pure gold resembling pure glass.” Architecture, a “mediating art” par excellence, emerges from humble materials, from the earth itself, like the glass that forms Pacioli’s floating icosahexahedron and is generated artificially from lowly ashes and sand, an alchemical symbol of rebirth and salvation. In Guillaume Sedacer’s alchemical treatise, for example, glass is equivalent to the “philosopher’s stone,” a mortal quintessence with a greater digni278
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The sun and the moon framing the earth and its geometries, alluding to the relationships among the triangle, the square and the circle and the possibility of unity from duality. From an alchemical treatise by Mylius, Philosophia Reformata (Frankfurt, 1622)
ty and importance than crystal because it is generated “technically,” by human means.66 Glass is resistant to time, water, and fire and can be transformed by blowing, through the spirit (pneuma) itself. This fiery transmutation of sand and ashes, involving the last human residue, could be understood as a transformation of matter and spirit beyond death. The Franciscan professor of holy theology thus completed his lesson for the architect. Consistent with his theological belief in the “fact” of transubstantiation (the sacrificial Christian ritual in which the priest’s hands enable bread and wine to become the body and blood of Christ, while still tasting like bread and wine), Pacioli believes that architecture may effect a similar transmutation. The architecture of the universe, Pacioli’s suspended icosahexahedron generated by triangles, is made of glass and contains both a crystalline liquid and a source of light: the Elixir and the Stone, the Quintessence itself. Human architecture, as both an act of willful making and a recognition of the ever present, yet never objectifiable “space/matter,” enables humanity to “experience” unity in multiplicity. This is the “truth” of the prima materia, appearing only in “continuous [mortal] magnitudes,” and is therefore never circumscribable by the mens (mind), whose sole vocation, as Nicholas of Cusa had declared, is mensura (measurement). While the hope for an ultimate solution to the squaring of the circle remained alive in Pacioli, perhaps associated with the imminence of the Christian end of time and the messianic advent of the Heavenly Jerusalem (the ultimate realization 279
Cosmological geometries reconciling the four elements into the Quintessence (top), and the man into unity through the squaring of the circle by means of the triangle (bottom). From Sylvia Philosophorum, an anonymous seventheenth-century alchemical manuscript (Biblotheek der Rijkunstuniversiteit, Leiden, Cod. Voss. chem. q. 61, f.1, 4-12)
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of the ideal world), his meditation retained a dignified status for architecture, which had often become associated with power and wealth. Architecture had always been a problematic activity for the Franciscan order, with its vow of poverty. Following Pacioli’s alchemical path, architecture could be construed as a virtuous and ethical craft, truly a form of meditation, capable of transmuting matter (the earth) and liberating it from gravity and enabling humanity (humus) to recognize its spiritual wholeness.67 notes 1 An alchemical manuscript from the mid-fifteenth century, Sloane ms. 73, fol. 10, British Museum. 2 Alchemical text by Raymund of Tarrega, falsely assumed to be Raymund Lull (Venice, 1542), 22. 3 Luca Pacioli, Divina proportione. Opera a tutti gli ingegni perspicaci e curiosi necessaria que ciascun studioso di Philosophia Prospectiva Pictura Scultura Architectura Musica e altre Mathematice suavissima sottile e admirabile doctrina consequira e delectarassi co varie questione de secretissima scientia (Venice: Paganini 1509). The manuscript apparently was finished on 14 December 1498 and is now in the Geneva Public Library. A German translation by Constantin Wintenberg, Divina proportione: Die Lehre vom goldenen Schnitt, was published in Vienna in 1889. There is also a Spanish translation by Ricardo Resta, La divina proporción (Buenos Aires: Losada 1946 and 1959), and a recent French translation, Divine proportion (Paris: Librarie du Compagnonnage 1980). An English translation is expected in 2002. For this article I have used mostly the Spanish and French translations. 4 See, for example, Matila C. Ghyka, El numero de oro (Buenos Aires: Poseidon 1968), 2 vols., translation of Le nombre d’or; and M. Borissavlievitch, The Golden Number (London: Tiranti 1958). 5 Luca Pacioli, Summa de arithmetica geometria proportioni et Proportionalita (Venice: Paganini 1494). 6 Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction to Arithmetic, trans. M.I. D’Ooge (Ann Arbor, mi: University of Michigan Studies in the Human Sciences 1926), vol. 16, 8. 7 Pacioli, Summa, “Dedication,” quoting “Wisdom of Solomon,” 11:20b. 8 Ibid., 4. 281
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9 Luca Pacioli, La divina proporción, Spanish trans. by Aldo Mieli (Buenos Aires: Losada 1959), 65. 10 Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction to Arithmetic, vol. 16, 186–7. 11 The responsibility of Pacioli in the design of his own portrait has been well established. See Margaret Daly Davies, Piero della Francesca’s Mathematical Treatises (Ravenna: Longo Editore 1977), 74–6. 12 The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, ed. T.L. Heath (New York: Dover Publications 1956), 466–7. 13 Plato, Timaeus and Critias. See also my essay “Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation” in CHORA : Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, vol. 1 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1994), 1–34. 14 These recommendations appear in chapters 53 and 54 of art 1 of his Divina proportione. Pacioli, La divina proporción, 115–18. 15 Cod. 250, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna. 16 Had it been published, Pacioli’s would have been the first Italian translation of Euclid’s Elements. In fact, the first translation to appear was by Niccolo Tartaglia, published (with extensive commentary) in 1543. 17 For biographical information see Pacioli, La divina proporción, preface by Aldo Mieli, 15–17; Pacioli, Divine Proportion, intr. by M.T. Sarrade. Mieli mentions a biography of Pacioli by Bernardino Baldi (1553–1617), not published until 1879 by Baldassarre Boncompagni in Bulletino, vol. 12. 18 Brunelleschi’s friendship with Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, for example, lasted over forty years, and Toscanelli’s collaboration with Alberti in astronomical calculations is well documented. See A. Manetti, Vita di Filippo Brunelleschi, ed. D. De Robertis (Milan, 1976), 70; and Margaret Daly Davies, Piero della Francesca’s Mathematical Treatises, 4n10. In the Veneto, Jacopo Bellini’s experiments in perspective were encouraged by Giovanni Fontana, a writer on perspective who had studied under Biagio Pelacani in Padua. See M. Daly Davies, 5–6. 19 Piero della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, ed. G. Nicco Fasola (Florence 1942), 128–9. 20 Piero intended his book to stand “penes aliud nostrum de Prospectiva opusculum, quod superioribus annis edidimus.” Piero della Francesca, De Corpuribus Regularibus, ed. Girolamo Mancini (Rome, 1916), 488. Quoted by M. Daly Davies, Piero della Francesca’s Mathematical Treatises, 20. 21 While this famous definition has been traced back to the earlier Middle
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22
23 24
25
26
27 28 29 30
Ages (the thirteenth or even the eleventh century) by some scholars, Nicholas of Cusa’s comprehensive geometrization of theology is a considerable innovation of great significance for the Renaissance. See A. PérezGómez and L. Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1997), 16–18. Books 14 and 15 in the Campanus translation that Piero used are now known not to be by Euclid himself. See The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements. The Campanus edition in Latin, Euclidis Megarensis philosophi acutissimi …, was edited for publication by Pacioli (Venice, 1509). In the French context, for example, only Nicolas Oresme and Nicolas Chuquet were writing in French during the fifteenth century. Quoted in Pacioli, La divina proporción, preface by Aldo Mieli, 20. Mieli’s introduction includes a helpful, brief description of the contents of the Summa and its sources. He defines algebra as a major speculative art related to the knowledge of letter combinations, which in the Middle Ages constituted the basis for Jewish and Christian cabalistic practices (the contemplation of God’s name, i.e., absolute Truth, through the combination of letters). It may be worth noting in this connection that the well-known thirteenth-century Christian cabalist Raymund Lull was closely associated with the Franciscans. Ibid., 25. For a commentary on this difficult term see the glossary of the recent translation of Alberti’s On the Art of Building in Ten Books, by J. Rykwert (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1989). Pacioli, La divina proporción, 60–1. Ibid., 63. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. H.D. Lee (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin 1965), 47a. Perhaps Pacioli’s most important omission is Bonaventure, the Parisian general of the Franciscans during the thirteenth century whose mystical work was greatly influenced by Augustinian “perfect” proportions and by an obsessive numerological concern for the number six. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum was copied and distributed widely, and it is unlikely that a learned Franciscan such as Pacioli would not have known it. Following from Hugh of St Victor’s concern with the place of the mechanical arts in a Christian world (another, perhaps more understandable omission in Pacioli’s text), Bonaventure was also the author of a treatise
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31
32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
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entitled On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, also a likely precedent of Pacioli’s outlook within the Franciscan tradition. Umberto Eco (Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages [New Haven: Yale University Press 1986], 85) has emphasized the importance of Bonaventure’s interpretation of Augustine’s De musica. Bonaventure declared that the laws of aequalitas (smoothness, evenness, and uniformity) could be discovered by the artist in the depths of his own soul. In the Franciscan school we find the initial insights into the nature of artistic inspiration and its relation to self-realization, a crucial concept in Pacioli’s Divina proportione. Furthermore, Bonaventure clearly understood the relationship between love and aesthetic delight resulting from “a conjunction of the delectable and the person who takes delight in it” (In I Sent., 1.3.2). “This affection of love is noblest of all because it partakes in liberality to the highest degree … As far as creatures are concerned, nothing is so delightful as mutual love, and without love there is no delight” (In I Sent., 10.1.2). The quotes are from Eco, 67. See also St Bonaventure, Opera omnia (Florence, 1902). I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr Gregory Caicco for having raised the Bonaventure issue after reading my manuscript. Dr Caicco has written on the architectural implications of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium (M. Phil., Cambridge, 1990), and has completed a doctoral dissertation on the Franciscan tradition of architecture in the History and Theory of Architecture program at McGill University. These correspondences between Platonic cosmogony and the Biblical genesis had been formulated first in the extensive exegetical work of Philo of Alexandria (also known as Philo the Jew) c. 30b–50ce. Augustine, Civitas Dei, trans. Dodds, 11.30, cited by Christopher Butler, Number Symbolism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1970), 24. Pacioli, La divina proporción, 64. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 67. Ibid. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 70. This resonates with the later speculations about nested polyhedra in Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum. Fernand Hallyn has demonstrated convincingly the profound relationship among Renaissance theology, art theories, and early modern speculations about the structure of the uni-
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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47
48 49 50 51 52 53
54 55 56 57 58 59 60
61
verse, particularly in the cosmologies of Copernicus and Kepler. See The Poetic Structure of the World (New York: Zone Books 1993), esp. chaps. 7 and 8. Pacioli, La divina proporción, chaps. 6–23. Ibid., 83. Ibid., chaps. 24–31. Ibid., chaps. 32–48. It is important to emphasize Pacioli’s insistence on describing both the solid and void conditions in all cases. Ibid., 117. Ibid. Stereometry is also the main subject matter of Piero’s Libellus, which Pacioli added as part 3 of the Divina proportione, a deliberate inclusion that, as I will show, is indeed relevant to complete his architectural discourse. Ibid., 136–7. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 151. Ibid. Ibid., 152. Pacioli provides an image of this gateway but does not elaborate on its significance in the text. Exegetical work on the Temple was done by earlier Franciscans, and Ezekiel’s description is a well-known instance of numerology incorporated into the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the case of Pacioli’s reference, however, the Temple remains an ideal image and is never intended as an “actual” building. See my “Juan Bautista Villalpando and the Architecture of God,” in CHORA : Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, vol. 3 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1999). Pacioli, La divina proporción, 152. Ibid. Ibid., 153. Ibid. Ibid., 154. Ibid.; see chap. 2, 155–6. Ibid., 159. For the argument concerning the perfection of numbers see Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. M.H. Morgan (New York: Dover 1960), book 3, chap. 1, 73–4. Ibid., 159. 285
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62 Ibid., 166. 63 Ibid., 170–1. 64 We might recall here the “wondrous demonstration” of the squaring of the circle when a beam of sunlight is projected into a dark chamber through a square orifice and the projection turns out to be a circle. This phenomenon remained a source of wonder during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, well after Kepler’s demonstration of the “pin-hole” principle, according to which an aperture of any shape will project the sun as a circle. 65 Ibid., chap. 11, 171. Authorship of the famous alphabet by Pacioli was questioned by Geoffroy Tory in his Cham-Fleury ou l’art et science de la deue et vray proportion des lettres (Paris, 1529). It was argued that the letters had been designed by Leonardo, a rumour magnified by Giorgio Vasari. While the geometric bodies were originally Leonardo’s drawings, Pacioli took great care to acknowledge this many times in his text. Modern scholarship tends to give credit for the alphabet to Pacioli himself. This alphabet is, of course, very similar to Dürer’s in Unterweisung der Messung (Nürnberg, 1525), and Dürer was certainly influenced by Pacioli. 66 See Pascale Barthélemy, “Le verre dans la Sedacina totius artis alchimie de Guillaume Sedacer,” in Alchimie art, histoire et mythes (Paris: s.e.h.a 1995), 203–33. 67 It is worth recalling the Franciscan tradition of seeking self-realization through making, one that was never free of controversy. The ex-communicated Brother Elias, second general of the Franciscans (1226–84), was thought to be the author of various alchemical treatises during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
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Simplex sigillum veri: The Exemplary Life of an Architect David Theodore
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The Exemplary Life of an Architect
§1. let this be known right from the start, even though it comes at the very end of his book: “Tractatus §7.0: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent).1 This restraint is the best, the very best we can achieve in all things. In thinking, for instance: “The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.”2 Even in polemic, “or the art of throwing eggs,” the “difficulty is not to make superfluous noises, or gestures, which don’t harm the other man but only yourself.”3 (Tractatus §5.47321: “Occam’s razor is, of course, not an arbitrary rule nor one justified by its practical success. It simply says that unnecessary elements in a symbolism mean nothing. Signs which serve one purpose are logically equivalent, signs which serve no purpose are meaningless.) Tractatus §7.0 is a logical truth and an ethical precept.4 In the 1930s he told a friend: “To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language … This running up against the limits of language is ethics. In ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot be said … But the inclination, the running up against something, indicates something.”5 §2. His architecture, too, assumes the principle, the virtue, of simplicity. It is lucid. It shows clearly its clarity. It strives to leave out the unnecessary, the tautological. Minimal precision has thus a clear moral purpose. It “indicates something,” something important. His concern for precision, abstraction, and minimalism arises from deep ethical preoccupations: reduction need not designate a style, functionalism or formalism, but rather demonstrates right action. (Tractatus §6.421: “Ethics and aesthetics are one.”) How much did architecture mean to him? Did he have architectural genius? Does his architecture depend on his philosphy?6 He liked to say: “Work on philosophy – in many ways like working on architecture – is really more like working on the self. On your own interpretation. That is, on how you see things yourself. And what you demand of them.”7 Architecture’s contribution to transforming the world, therefore, works through a transformation of the architect: “Just improve yourself,” he told his disciples, “that is all you can do to improve the world.”8 Kundmanngasse 19, the celebrated house in Vienna he worked 288
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Door hardware for Kundmanngasse designed by Wittgenstein. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Kundmanngasse 19. Photo courtesy Terrance Galvin
on from 1926 to 1928 for his sister Margaret Stonborough, did not change his philosophy. Building it, working on it, had changed him, so that he made different demands on his philosophy. In 1929 Cambridge University accepted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his already famous first published book (1921), as his doctoral dissertation. G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell asked him a couple of questions about it for his defense. John Maynard Keynes helped him to receive a fellowship at Trinity College. But now when he started to do philosophy again, something was askew. 289
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§3. All personal reorientation is difficult. It is crippling. It is discipline. While he worked on Kundmanngasse, the nascent Vienna Circle gathered around him: Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, sometimes Herbert Feigl and Maria Kasper (later Mrs Feigl) and Rudolf Carnap. They came to his rooms. Schlick’s great culture set him at ease. He detested Carnap. Waismann took notes. But “preoccupied with other things and with his architectural work in particular, [he] was not always prepared to talk about philosophy. Sometimes he preferred to read out poems, especially those of Rabindranath Tagore, usually sitting with his back to the audience.” Later he declared these camp followers orgulous and derivative: “What the Vienna School has achieved, it ought to show not say … The master should be known by his work.”9 But showing is not picturing. At Saturday afternoon philosophy meetings in the 1930s he “related a riddle for the purpose of throwing some light on the nature of philosophy. It went as follows: Suppose that a cord was stretched tightly around the earth at the equator. Now suppose that a piece one yard long was added to the cord. If the cord was kept taut and circular in form, how much above the surface of the earth would it be?”10 To answer this riddle, we make a picture of the situation. If we have the right picture, though, the best representation, we do not necessarily arrive at the right answer. (“The most accurate picture of an entire apple tree has in a certain sense much fewer similarities with the tree than the smallest daisy.”11) §4. Here is an accurate picture of him. He had chestnut hair, was about 5’6”, patrician, never fat, an ascetic aesthete. His clothes were carefully chosen from the best English tailors, but he was known for his shabby appearance: “brown coat and grey, probably patched, flannel trousers, with open shirt and without tie.”12 He was trying to be honest. He gave away all of his inherited fortune, first anonymously to artists such as Georg Trakl, Oskar Kokoschka, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Adolf Loos, and then just away. He was at the front in World War I. In group photos he sometimes appears to be sleeping. He was a school teacher, a philosopher, a musician and a sculptor, a soldier and a gardener. He lived the exemplary life of an architect. For him “knowledge … was intimately connected with doing.”13 His own training echoed Vitruvius’s prescription for the education of an architect: manual skill, liberal arts, geometry, arithmetic, medicine, 290
A friend of Thomas Stonborough, Ludwig Wittgenstein [dressed in workman’s clothes], and construction supervisor Friedl on a balcony of the Kundmanngasse. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
astronomy, music, and philosophy, including physics. He learned to whistle, to conduct music, and to make sculpture. He built machines. When he was ten he contrived a working sewing machine out of wood. In 1910 he patented some “Improvements in Propellers applicable for Aerial Machines.” He called himself an “aeronaut”; he wanted to fly. He developed an idea for propulsion later adapted to build helicopters in World War II.14 He built kites with William Eccles, staying at the Grouse Inn at Glossop in the Derbyshire Moors amidst a clutter of books. He would be Daedalus. In Derek Jarman’s film this ambition is caught in an image: “wearing kite wings [he] picks up two lawn mower sprinklers and holds them out 291
Construction drawing of the variable volume combustion propeller engine. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein (right) and William Eccles at the Kite Flying Upper Atmosphere Station, near Glossop, c. 1908. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
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Older Wittgenstein as Daedalus. From Eagleton and Jarman, Wittgenstein
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like the propellers of a plane. The light catches the swirling water like a Catherine wheel.”15 He thought of his aeronautical experiments as a failure. But in searching for mathematical solutions to aeronautical problems, he discovered a talent and appetence for thinking about logical problems. If this was a real talent, if he could make a real contribution, he had a moral duty to exercise his talent. §5. He wrote in a note to himself: “Genius is talent in which character makes itself heard … [it shows] no mere intellectual skeleton, but a complete human being … That too is why the greatness of what a man writes depends on everything else he writes and does” [emphasis added].16 “Meaning,” “character,” “purpose,” and “symbol” have to do with culture. “A stylistic device may be useful and yet I may be barred from using it. Schopenhauer’s ‘as which’ for instance. Sometimes this would make for much more comfortable and clearer expression, but if someone feels it is archaic (altväterisch), he cannot use it; and he must not disregard this feeling either.” In the introduction to the Philosophische Bemurkungen he added: “I would like to say ‘this book is written to the honour of God,’ but nowadays this would be the trick of a cheat, i.e., it would not be correctly understood. It means the book was written in good will, and so far as it was not but was written from vanity etc, [sic] the author would wish to see it condemned. He can not make it more free of these impurities than he is himself. (Translated by Mr. Rush Rhees.)”17 “Impurities”: the problem is ethical, about having the right relationship to the work. He told a friend in conversation: “Bach wrote on the title-page of his Orgelbuchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work.”18 §6. He used his work to understand the world and himself. At first he thought: “The human body … my body in particular, is a part of the world among others, among beasts, plants, stones, etc., etc. … Whoever realizes this will not want to procure a pre-eminent place for his own body or for the human body. He will regard humans and beasts quite naively as objects which are similar and which belong together.”19 But 294
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he realized this description could lead to philosophical errors, namely, that readers might mistake its moral injunction for a philosophy of positivist objectivism. He wanted to say that philosophy should help us to resolve the delusion that there are two kinds of material, one mental and one physical. So he wrote this instead: “The world is my world: The subject does not belong to the world; rather it is a limit of the world: the world and life are one” (Tractatus §5.6–5.641). Terry Eagleton, “the most significant Marxist literary critic of his generation,”20 glosses this passage thus: “Value cannot be in the world, since it resides in the human subject; and the human subject is not an object within reality, but the limit or horizon which brings that reality into focus.”21 So who is “I”? We read in his notebooks: Now let us ask ourselves what sort of identity of personality it is we are referring to when we say “when anything is seen, it is always I who see.” What is it I want all these cases of seeing to have in common? As an answer I have to confess to myself that it is not my bodily appearance. I don’t always see part of my body when I see. And it isn’t essential that my body, if seen amongst the things I see, should always look the same. In fact I don’t mind how much it changes; and I feel the same way about all the properties of my body, the characteristics of my behaviour, and even about my memories. – When I think about it a little longer I see that what I wished to say was “Always when anything is seen, something is seen.” I.e. that of which I said it continued during all the experiences of seeing was not any particular entity “I,” but the experience of seeing itself.22
More important, and more difficult to articulate – thereof must one be silent, after all – were all the experiences of living, of culture, that “I” has. §7. He came from Vienna. The culture that he understood so well was bourgeois and artistic, with profound roots in the ways of life established around the Hapsburg court. He had a deep appreciation of Viennese aristocratic building traditions. He grew up in the Alleegasse, with its “seven pianos” and Wiener Werkstätte interiors. Bruno Walter, Gustav Klimt, Johannes Brahms were frequent guests. While he worked on Kundmanngasse, he stayed with his sister Margaret Stonborough in her baroque palace, the eighteenth-century Palais Batthyány-Schönborn, 295
Above:The Galerie in Wittgenstein’s family home in the Alleegasse. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Right: Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach, Palais Batthyány-Schönborn, 1698 –1705; the home of Margareth Stonborough in the 1920s. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
built by Johann Fischer von Erlach. His father financed the Wiener Secession exhibition building in the Karlplatz. He remained self-consciously Viennese. He liked Beethoven and Karl Kraus. He sent postcards to Adolf Loos in Paris. (Loos der einmal zu [ihm] gesagt hat “Sie sind ich!” [Loos once said to him, “You are me!”].)23 His declared influences were Ludwig Boltzmann, Heinrich Hertz, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schopenhauer, Otto Spengler, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Otto Weininger, Piero Sraffa.24 Two physicists, a logician, three philosophers, a journalist, an architect, a sexologist and an economist. Although baptized and buried a Catholic, he believed in the significance of his Jewish origins. He believed his “race” determined his thinking, his second-rate imitative “Jewish reproductive” talent, his lack of genius, his exiguous groping towards significance. Greatness in music was Beethoven, Brahms; second rate was Mendelssohn, Jewish.25 296
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Postcard from Wittgenstein to Adolf Loos, September 1925, showing where he lived as a school teacher in Otterhal. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
The times determined things, too. The things we say, the gestures we make are meaningful within a culture that shares our judgment. Thus the “great architect in a bad period (Van der Nüll) has a totally different task from the great architect in a good period.”26 This exigent charge evokes judgments not just of our work but of ourselves. Van der Nüll, architect of the Wiener Staatsoper, committed suicide when Emperor Franz Joseph expressed displeasure with the entrance. Suicide was everywhere. The poet Georg Trakl overdosed on cocaine in a military hospital near Krakow two days before he was set to visit. (“Wie Traurig, wie traurig!!!” he wrote.)27 Boltzmann killed himself the year he was applying to study with the physicist at the University of Vienna. Three of his brothers took their own lives: Hans disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay in 1903; Rudolf took cyanide in a Berlin pub in 1904; Kurt shot himself after his troops disobeyed him in World War I. (He barely escaped suicide himself. Architecture saved his life. He told Marguerite Respinger that “the design and building of the house [Kundmanngasse] had rescued him from the deep moral crisis caused by his failure as a teacher.”)28 In October 1903 he was a student at the Realschule in Linz. Adolf Hitler was there, too; they shared a history teacher who foretold the decline of the “decadent” Hapsburg dynasty.29 Here he learned that twenty-three-year-old Otto Weininger shot himself in the “death place,” Beethoven’s house in Schwarzspaniergasse in Vienna. 297
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Tractatus §4.31: truth tables
From Weininger’s Sex and Character he learned to separate love from sex, a split necessary because “sexuality is incompatible with the honesty genius demands.”30 Derek Jarman notes that he died in 1951 of “cancer of the prostate – the most unexplored of erogenous zones.”31 Jarman is probably right to insist that from our point of view the links between his hatred of disorder, his Viennese background, and his (homo)sexual guilt should be taken seriously. Not because there is some eternal truth about such links – i.e., in Ernest Jones’s conception in “Anal-Erotic Character Traits”32 – but rather because they form an adequate first description of his personality. They are the terms in which he and his peers have described him. They sketch possible moralities. He was, after all, incapable of living in a messy room or of staying in a room when sexual matters were discussed if women were present. §8. Of all these preoccupations (philosophy, sex, death), art (literature, music, architecture) was the most important. The Tractatus “assigns a central importance in human life to art, on the ground that art alone can express the meaning of life. Only art can express moral truth, and only the artist can teach the things that matter most in life.”33 Frank Ramsey once commented, “But what we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either,” but of course that is exactly how we can mean what we cannot say. That is exactly the necessity of whistling. 298
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“How can I say how much music has meant to me?” he asked in his diary.34 At Cambridge he worked with his friend David Pinsent, a musician and mathematician, on psychological “rhythm-experiments” in the psychological laboratory.35 “He had hoped that the experiments would throw light on some questions of aesthetics that interested him.”36 What was so important about aesthetics? (Even logic had to be a mere tool to art. He had told Bertrand Russell that studying logic improved one’s aesthetic judgment.)37 (The truth tables are his most important contribution to formal logic [e.g., Tractatus §4.31]; they make accurate pictures of logical problems. He came to despise them.) But logic is bounded. There are nonverbal meanings, meanings outside of language, extra-nuncupative but irrefragable. Gestures. Movements. Conditions. Places. Buildings. Friendships. Music. These are in some way aesthetic: beyond language, beyond logic. The meaningful gesture appears in a culture. “Architecture is a gesture. Not every functional movement of the human body is a gesture. Likewise, not every functional building is architecture.”38 The Italian economist Piero Sraffa, a friend of Gramsci no less, once made this distinction clear with an illogical yet meaningful gesture. “Recall the impression of good architecture,” he wrote later to himself, “that it expresses a thought. One would like to follow it with a gesture.”39 But can someone be taught to understand a gesture, gestures like kissing a photo or making music? What does understanding music mean?40 He thought about Brahms and ground his teeth together. Then he noticed himself grinding his teeth. He stopped and continued to think about Brahms, but the notes were less clear, less rich, ghostlier.41 §9. Art could connect logic and culture, but what connected logic and life? Apparently nothing. “The author of the Tractatus thought he had solved all philosophical problems. It was consistent with this view that he should give up philosophy.”42 Upon release from an Italian prisoner of war camp in 1919, he attended the Leherbildungsanhalt in the third Bezirk in Vienna to become a schoolteacher in rural Austria. Niederösterreich was like this: loneliness, music, failure. He beat on hebetudinous schoolchildren, boxing ears and pulling hair. He recited The Brothers Karamazov out loud to the village priest. He wrote letters 299
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Still from Jarman’s film Wittgenstein, showing British and American variants of Sraffa’s gesture. From Jarman and Eagleton, Wittgenstein
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to architect Paul Engelmann and played clarinet. He published a Wörterbuch für Volkschule, not a dictionary, in which language homogenizes the world, but a spelling book.43 He taught at Trattenbach, Hassbach, Puchberg, and Otterthal. He thought he had failed as a teacher, miserably failed. He went to work as a gardener in the monastery at Hütteldorf, living in the tool shed. His mother died; in 1926 he returned to Vienna to work with Engelmann on the house in Kundmanngasse.44 §10. The first house he had built was like this: “The house was constructed of wood in the local fashion. It was modest in size, with a basement, a ground floor with a few rooms, and an attic. … Because it was situated against a steep slope high above a lake (one could reach it only by rowing over) there was, among other things, a winch and cable mechanism which enabled a bucket to be lowered to hoist water.”45 It was built in 1914 near the Norwegian village of Skjolden on the shore of the Sognefjord. A simple house, but apart from the world. He returned to it
Wittgenstein’s first house, made of wood, near the Sognefjord. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Christopher Wood’s painting of Villa Savoye, 1929. From Richard Ingleby, Christopher Wood: An English Painter (London: Allison & Busby 1995)
in 1931. This was the best place for thinking (about logic and about sin). “‘Then my mind was on fire!’ he used to say.”46 Kundmanngasse, on the other hand, brought together culture and order; it is architecture that connects ways of life and logic. He sent some photos of the house to John Maynard Keynes. “A la Corbusier,” Keynes wrote to his wife Lydia – as if it were merely fashionable, like a Christopher Wood painting.47 But he had little truck with the homogenized, unlimited space of the New Architecture, its “indecent openness,”48 its functionalism. Kundmanngasse has no ribbon windows (solid over solid, void over void), no roof terrasse (the house sat originally in a large landscaped garden), no pilotis, no free plan, no technological optimism – and no harmful “superfluous gestures” either. He understood his work as precise and honest, showing the virtue of restraint, he did the least that he could at that time. That is, Kundmanngasse was a failure. “In this same sense: my house for Gretl is the product of a decidedly fine ear, good manners, the expression of a great understanding (of a culture, etc.),” he wrote. “But primordial life, wild life that tries to break out – is missing. One could also say, that it lacks health. (Kierkegaard) (Hothouse plant).”49 302
Clockwise from left: A comparison of Viennese staircases Stairs in the Palais BatthyánySchönborn. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein The grand staircase of the Alleegasse. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein Wittgenstein’s entrance hall at Kundmanngasse. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
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After finishing Kundmanngasse, he returned to Cambridge, to reading and writing, to philosophy, a revenant. His two rooms in Whewell’s Court at Cambridge were like this: The walls were bare, with the exception of a silhouette of a young woman in an elaborate gilt frame, a small bookcase and, [sic] in his bedroom a zinc bathtub which hung against the wall when not in use. The other furniture consisted of one simple wooden chair and a few [canvas] deck chairs (during lectures more deck chairs were brought in from the corridor) and, in front of the window, a folding card table used as a writing desk on which stood a fan which muffled the noise from neighbours [a piano-playing undergraduate]. On the mantelpiece was a lowpowered bulb on a retort-stand for lighting. Instead of the fireplace, [he] used an old-fashioned black stove, the pipe of which disappeared straight through the ceiling. As in Kundmanngasse there were always flowers in a vase on the windowsill, and there was a house plant. [He] changed the proportions of the (neo-Gothic) window by gluing black strips of paper across it.50
Wittgenstein’s rooms at Cambridge. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein
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“There was a metal safe in which he kept his manuscripts. The rooms were always scrupulously clean.”51 This is a hard spartan space, showing at once a concern with aesthetics (he manipulated the window proportions), moral hygiene (“scrupulously clean”), the erotic body (bathtub and nubile silhouette), purist, functional, mechanical objects (deck chairs, fan, folding card table). As usual, he organized a simple architecture that blurs the boundaries between good thinking and good living. §11. At Cambridge he tried again to write philosophy. At first he thought he would start his book with a description of nature, untrammeled nature, Goethe’s great teacher.52 It is a question of order. “If I am thinking for myself, without wanting to write a book, I jump around the theme. That is my natural way of thinking. To force my thoughts in a row is a torment for me. Should I try to do it now? I waste an unspeakable effort in ordering my thoughts, an effort that perhaps has no value at all.”53 He wrote in metaphors, apothegms, aphorisms.54 Self-knowledge is different from knowledge of objects. The former is the more urgent problem. “Scientific questions might interest me, but never really grab on to me. Only conceptual and aesthetic questions do that for me. I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems; but not to the other questions.”55 He left mostly fragments, annotations, notebooks, marginalia, an enormous Nachlass.56 His method resists systematization. It is a dialogue, a confession.57 §12. That is what he wrote; what did he read? He “was fond of short detective stories, especially those published in a detective story magazine by the American firm Street & Smith.”58 “They are rich in mental vitamins and calories” he said.59 He read American detective stories, then, but also Weininger, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, Augustine’s Confessions, Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief and Hadji Murad, Hebel’s Schatzkaestlein, Renan’s Le peuple d’Isräel, George Fox’s Journal, and Dr Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations. Among the books he brought with him to England as a student were a beautifully made facsimile edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s technical inventions, the mathematical work concerning the mechanics of Galileo Galilei, the sixteenth century Machinae novi by the Italian Veranzio Fausti, a number of seventeenth 305
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century German Theatri machinarum on mechanical and hydraulic engineering, and eighteenth century French and Italian studies on the aeronautics of ballooning. He had two works by Gottlob Frege, the logician whom he so much admired, bound in one volume with a cover of saffian leather designed by the Wiener Werkstätte and provided with new titles that pleased him better.60
An architect’s library, then, on Vitruvian subjects; yet, he died while reading Black Beauty.61 (“It is questionable if when he died he had ever come to any understanding of the number 2. Two what?”)62 §13. At Cambridge he again felt he was a failure as a teacher. His lack of connection with these shy young Englishmen had to do with his tendency toward homiletic instead of maieutic pedagogical relationships. He was farouche, scabrous, refulgent. He was accused of not being able to hold a discussion. Julian Bell circulated a poem: For he talks nonsense, numerous statements makes, Forever his own vow of silence breaks: Ethics, aesthetics, talks of day and night, And calls things good or bad, and wrong or right. Who, on any issue, ever saw, Ludwig refrain from laying down the law? In every company he shouts us down, And stops our sentence stuttering his own; Unceasing argues, harsh, irate and loud, Sure that he’s right, and of his rightness proud.
Obviously disciples were better than collaborators. Disciples included Maurice Drury. S.K. Bose. Desmond Lee. Norman Malcolm. Friends included Engineer William Eccles. Economist John Maynard Keynes. Gardener Hermann Postl. Architect Paul Engelmann. Chartered accountant Gilbert Pattisson. Lovers included Marguerite Respinger. Ben Francis. David Pinsent. Ben Richards. The rough boys at the Prater. Georg Kreisel. Francis Skinner.63 (The list of people missing from his life, given his social connections, is also significant. Conspicuous absences include Virginia Woolf, 306
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Robert Musil, Les Ballets Russes, Arnold Schoenberg [whose music he despised], Arthur Schnitzler, anyone from Paris.) Sometimes a number of these companions might gather in his rooms for philosophical “at-homes”: at home, thinking, among friends, disciples, lovers. §14. And the riddle of the earth and the cord? Malcolm continues: ”Without stopping to work it out, everyone present [at the Saturday afternoon philosophy meetings] was inclined to say that the distance of the cord from the surface of the earth would be so minute that it would be imperceptible. But this is wrong. The actual distance would be nearly six inches … This is the kind of mistake that occurs in philosophy. It consists in being misled by a picture.”64 We should not be misled by pictures of his one white house. Kundmangasse is not a representation of the logic of the Tractatus. It does not illustrate his philosophy. His architecture is not doctrinal; it is ethical. It does not belong to a movement in architecture, but rather to the movement of his days. It consists not simply of what he built but of how he lived. “Sound doctrines are useless,” he brooded to himself. “You have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)”65 §15. Can we say what Kundmanngasse means? Is it a gesture? Can we “follow it with a gesture”? “Architecture immortalizes and glorifies something,” he wrote. “Therefore there can be no architecture where there is nothing to glorify.”66 He believed that in times to come, we might again have something to celebrate, something to monumentalize. Then ornament, his beloved baroque, would again have meaning, the architectural gesture would again be gravid and full. §16. There is no small irony that in 1971 Kundmanngasse, his “hothouse plant,” was declared a monument and spared demolition.67 notes i Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1922). 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper & Brother, 1958), 45. 307
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3 Quoted in Rush Rhees, “Postscript,” Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Littlefield 1981), 224–5. 4 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Macmillan 1990), 156. 5 Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness, trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1979), 68–9. To be sure, this is not what Heidegger meant, although it is still an insightful comment about Heidegger. Much has been written lately about the relationships between Wittgenstein (analytic) and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Husserl (continentals; a bibliography is included in Nicholas F. Grier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: A Comparative Study of the Later Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty [Albany, ny: State University of New York Press 1981]) detailing connections both superficial (e.g., Heidegger and Wittgenstein loved nature, dressed like peasants, thought music beyond the power of philosophy, etc.) and complex (e.g., the similarity of arguments and argument structures in Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty: see Philip Dwyer, Sense and Subjectivity: A Study of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty [Leiden: E.J. Brill 1990]). The Wittgenstein I detail here would differ from Heidegger on exactly this question of ethics, from Husserl on the question of science, and from Merleau-Ponty on the availability of prelinguistic experience. 6 The relationship between Wittgenstein’s architecture and his philosophy, the search for what Nana Last calls “a possible mediation between architecture and philosophy,” is the crux of most considerations of Wittgenstein as an architect; see Nana Last, “Transgressions and Inhabitations: Wittgensteinian Spatial Practices between Architecture and Philosophy,” Assemblage 35 (1998): 36–47. But it is precisely this search for a symmetry between the two, an isomorphism of philosophical and architectural structures, that I try to lay aside here. The actual forms of Wittgenstein’s buildings are quite secondary to the question of whether the shape of his entire life made him an architect. 7 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 2d ed., ed. G.H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980), 20. 8 Quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, 17–18. 9 Waismann, Wittgenstein, 18. Likewise, he disapproved of G.E. Moore’s cooperating on the book The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (1942); see 308
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10 11 12
13 14
15 16 17
18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25
Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press 1984), 92. Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 46. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 20. “Excerpts from the Family Recollections” by Hermine Wittgenstein, quoted in Bernhard Leitner, The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Documentation (New York: New York University Press 1976), 22. Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 18. “It is interesting to note that Wittgenstein’s idea of a combustion chamber together with a tangential reaction nozzle at the tip of a propeller blade was brought into practical use for the rotor blade of a helicopter by the Austrian designer Doblhoff during the second world war and is now adopted by Fairey’s for their Jet Gyro dyne as well as by others.” Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig 1889–1921 (London: Duckworth 1988), 68–9. Terry Eagleton and Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton Script, The Derek Jarman Film (London: bfi Publishing 1993), 76. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 65. M.O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Jaakko Hintikka, ed., Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of G.H. von Wright, Acta Philosophica Fennica 28, nos. 1–3 (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co. 1976), 24. Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 83. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 2d ed., ed. G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1979), 82. Colin MacCabe, preface to Eagleton and Jarman, Wittgenstein, 3. Eagleton and Jarman, Wittgenstein, 6. Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 63. Paul Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1993), note to page 32. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 19. Ibid., 16–22. Monk (Wittgenstein, 313–17) clarifies that Wittgenstein follows the racial conception of Jewishness formulated by Otto Weininger, as opposed, say, to Karl Kraus’s cultural conception of Judaism. (Both writers had great influence on Wittgenstein.) Monk also notes the reverberations of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on Jewishness with those of Hitler in Mein Kampf. For some recent speculation on the importance of the Hitler309
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26 27 28 29 30 31 32
33 34 35
36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43
44 45 46 47 48 49 310
Wittgenstein link, see Kimberley Cornish, The Jew of Linz: Hitler and Wittgenstein, Uncovering the Secret Connection that Changed the Course of History (London: Century 1998). Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 74. Monk, Wittgenstein, 119. Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 40. Cornish’s book The Jew of Linz is based on a group photo purportedly including both young Hitler and young Wittgenstein. Monk, Wittgenstein, 25. Eagleton and Jarman, Wittgenstein, 65. In this essay Jones develops Freud’s characterization of Analerotik Charakter in three categories very characteristic of Wittgenstein: orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy. Ernest Jones, Papers on Psycho-Analysis, rev. ed. (New York: Wood 1919), 664–88. Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster 1973), 193. Frank Ramsey, “Last Papers,” in The Foundations of Mathematics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1931), 238. G.H. von Wright, A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man from the Diary of David Hume Pinsent 1912–1914 (London: Basil Blackwell 1990), 5. Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 7. Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 27. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 42. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 69–70. Ibid., 28. Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 11. “The power language has to make everything the same, which shows most bluntly in the dictionary, and that makes it possible to personify time, is no less amazing than if we had made gods of the logical constants” (Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 22). Monk, Wittgenstein, 234–5. Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 30. Basil Reeve, quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, 94. Monk, Wittgenstein, 251. Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 182. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 38.
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50 Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 195. Based on D.T.A. Gasking and A.C. Jackson, “Ludwig Wittgenstein,” The Australian Journal of Philosophy 29 (1951): 234–48; Wittgenstein‘s Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1932: From the Notes of John King and Desmond Lee, ed. H.D.P. Lee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1980); and H.D.P. Lee, “Wittgenstein 1921–1931,” Philosophy 54 (1979): 211–20. 51 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 24–5. 52 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 11–12. 53 Ibid., 28. 54 Jerry H. Gill argues in Wittgenstein and Metaphor (rev. ed., New Jersey: Humanities Press 1996) that Wittgenstein believed metaphor was constitutive of reality, that meaning existed in lived relationships between the knower and the known. 55 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 79. 56 On the importance of these notes and miscellaneous materials to the understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, see David G. Stern, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” The Cambridge Guide to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluya and David G. Stern (New York: Cambridge University Press 1996), 442–76. Wittgenstein’s Nachlass is being released electronically by the Wittgenstein archive at the University of Bergen: see http://www.hd.uib.no/wab/. 57 The importance of Wittgenstein’s confessional style is explored in Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Wittgenstein The Philosophical Investigations, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George Pitcher (New York: Anchor Books 1966), 151–85. 58 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 87. He especially liked the story “Rendezvous with Fear” by Norbert Davis. 59 Ibid., 32. When these stories became difficult to get during World War II, he wrote, “If the u.s.a. won’t give us detective mags we can’t give them philosophy, & so America will be the loser in the end” (ibid., 97). 60 Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 24. 61 Guy Davenport, “Wittgenstein,” in The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: North Point Press 1981), 335. 62 Ibid. Fania Pascal, who taught him Russian, recalled that “This was the time [c. 1931] when, under the influence of Wittgenstein, young men went about saying: ‘It’s absurd to say that 2 is a number – what else could it be?’”; see “A Personal Memoir,” Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Littlefield 1981), 30. 311
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63 Monk provides standard accounts of Wittgenstein’s sexual relationships. Monk notes (passim) that it is possible to argue that all these relationships were unconsummated sexually. 64 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 46. 65 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 53. 66 Ibid., 69. 67 This irony seems to have escaped Robert Mugerauer, who, in his chapter on Wittgenstein in Interpreting Environments: Tradition, Deconstruction, Hermeneutics (Austin, tx: University of Texas Press 1995), declares that “Wittgenstein shows us that we can be at home while remaining unsettled and that a house is a monument to the activity of building” (22).
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Ranelagh Gardens and the Recombinatory Utopia of Masquerade Dorian Yurchuk
Chora
A Ranelagh masquerade ticket. Bartolozzi-Cipriani, 1776
f ro m t h e o l d h i g h g e r m a n word palla (a ball) and the Latin malleus (a hammer), we get the name of a device called a pallamaglio, a stick with a mallet at one end used for playing the French game palemaille, a precursor of modern croquet.i In this ancient game a round boxwood ball was struck with a mallet and sent through a ring elevated on a pole that stood at the end of an alley. The game was popular in Saint James’s Park in London and gave its name to the street called Pall Mall.2 314
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Soon the word “mall” became a general term for a level, shaded public walk. Some malls were located in the hearts of communities and in political centres, although today they are increasingly occurring outside these areas, totally removed from the residential and commercial fabrics of cities. While the term “mall” has recently acquired a more commercial connotation, the underlying concept has not changed. Malls continue to provide an opportunity for ostentation and observation in a constructed environment. With such issues in mind, this essay will centre on the facilities and activities of an eighteenth-century London institution called Ranelagh Gardens. This was a pleasure garden devoted to the passive and active aspects of assembly: an arena for the activity of exhibiting oneself and beholding others, a celebratory act of mutual affirmation. After examining the various devices employed to these ends, I will look into the possibilities of similar interaction in our ever more virtual society. The rotunda at Ranelagh was raised and finished under the “immediate inspection” of Mr William Jones. Jones, former architect for the East India Company, was perhaps the first British architect to be listed as an architect, rather than a craftsman, in the apprenticeship rolls.3 His building was ready for public reception in the year 1740. It remained in operation until 8 July 1803.4 Financing for this amphitheatrical structure in what came to be known as Ranelagh Gardens came from thirtysix subscribers who purchased one-thousand-pound shares. The project had received so much publicity that an overwhelming number of people came to visit the site and began to interfere with construction. A shilling admission charge was then instituted, and on Sundays, when all the rowdy apprentices had a day off, no one at all was admitted. 5 On 22 April 1742, Walpole wrote to Mann, “I have been breakfasting this morning at Ranelagh Garden; The building is not yet finished, but they get great sums by people going to see it and breakfasting in the house; there were yesterday no less than three hundred and eighty persons, at eighteen pence apiece.”6 The fact that people were willing to pay to see Ranelagh even before it was finished attests to its uniqueness in both form and concept. It also suggests that the demand for entertainment in eighteenth-century London was outpacing its supply. When completed, the rotunda stood with an external diameter of 185 feet (56 metres), an internal diameter of 150 feet (46 metres),7 and a circumference of 555 feet (169 metres).8 There were fifty-two boxes in the 315
Top:The Rotunda at Ranelagh, 1743 Bottom: Inside view of the Rotunda with the Company at Breakfast (1751)
interior arcade of the rotunda, each with benches and a table inside. When the two tiers of boxes did not suffice to accommodate the crowds, additional tables were placed in various parts of the rotunda.9 The ceiling was painted an olive colour, and around its extremity was a rainbow. Twenty chandeliers descended from the ceiling, in two circles. The space was, according to Tobias Smollet’s character, Lydia Melford, “enlightened with a thousand golden lamps, that emulate the noon-day sun.”10 316
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“When all these lamps are lighted … all parts shine with a resplendency, as if formed from the very substance of light. Then doth the masterly disposition of the architect, the proportion of the parts, and the harmonious distinction of the several pieces, appear to the greatest advantage, the most minute part by this effulgence lying open to the inspection.”11 The Ambulator, a guide book of 1782, compares the sensation of entering the illuminated rotunda for the first time to “hearing suddenly a fine concert; architecture having the same effect on the eye as music on the ear, the mind is absorbed in an extacy.”12 This comparison of architecture and music shows that being at Ranelagh was a thoroughly sensual experience. All the body’s senses were stimulated, all at once. In addition to Ranelagh’s sights and sounds, one was exposed to perfumes and sweat, food and drink, as well as to dancing and even more intimate touching. The mind had plenty of cause to be “absorbed in extacy.” Those who chose to visit Ranelagh Gardens would travel either by boat or by coach to a district in Chelsea, just outside London. Upon arriving at Ranelagh House they would pay an admittance fee and proceed to the gardens through the residence. Although the fee was too high for poorer people, it was well within reach of the middle classes.13 Besides the Rotunda, Ranelagh consisted also of formal gardens, gravel walks, a circular Temple of Pan, and a canal with an island. The amphitheatre itself was reflected in a “bason” with a fountain at its centre. According to the guidebook just mentioned, whose full title is The Ambulator; or, The Stranger’s Companion in a Tour round London; Within the Circuit of Twenty-five Miles: Describing Whatever is remarkable, either for Grandeur, Elegancy, Use, or Curiosity: Not only of Use to Strangers, but the Inhabitants of this Capitol. Collected by a Gentleman for his private Amusement, Ranelagh was, for the most part, a place of summer amusements. The season would start in April and end in July, before the families of distinction usually left London to reside in the country.14 Concerts were given in the morning, followed by a public breakfast that was included in the price of admission. Evening concerts commenced at half-past six or at seven o’clock.15 During intermissions people could stroll in the illuminated gardens to the sounds of horns and clarinets.16 After the musicians had played several pieces of music and sung several songs, the concerts usually ended around ten o’clock.17 It became fashionable to arrive at Ranelagh at about eleven or twelve 317
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o’clock at night, an hour after the concert had finished.18 American John Aspinwall noted in his diary that he “got there @ 10 o clock but as that was too early not much company … @ about twelve o clock the company became more numerous.”19 When the entertainments were over, balls were given there. There were two sets of company dancing almost every night, each with a band of musicians from the orchestra. The dancers continued on into the night, as long as they thought proper.20 On other nights the company would go outdoors to watch fireworks. After one such pyrotechnic display Aspinwall returned to the rotunda: “@ two o clock in the morning the place was most throng’d. At least fifteen hundred well dress’d and genteel women were in the room at that time and as many men … The time of leaving this fashionable place is from three to six o clock in the mornings, when the Sun is about two hours high – but few ladies of the Town there.”21 Yet there was more to Ranelagh than dancing, fireworks, and food. When William Jones completed the rotunda in 1741 it was referred to as “the amphitheatre.”22 Webster provides the following etymology: the Greek amphitheatron comes from amphi, about, and theatron, from theasthai, to see or look.23 That is an apt description of what went on at Ranelagh: people came to “look about” as well as to be “looked upon by all around.” An illustration by William Newton portrays the interior of the rotunda framed as if it were a stage set, indicating its similarity to theatres of the time.24 Like Ranelagh, conventional theatres in the eighteenth century were forms for mutual observation and active participation. Members of the audience performed as much as the actors on stage. The so-called “beaus” and “dandies” would amuse themselves and other concert-goers by taking off their wigs and combing them during a performance.25 Occasionally audience members took to the stage themselves, in riots such as those in Drury Lane and Covent Gardens theatres.26 At Ranelagh the whole space was a stage; the shape of the rotunda forced all to participate. Horace Walpole writes that to this “vast amphitheatre” came everybody who loves eating, drinking, crowding, and staring.27 Aspinwall writes that the amusement of Ranelagh “is to walk round the room & to see and be seen.”28 The Ambulator adds that “it is at once exercise and entertainment.”29 Smollet’s character Matthew Bramble has a different opinion of this arrangement: “One half of the company are following one another’s tails, in an eternal circle; like so many blind asses 318
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in an olive mill.”30 The reference by critics to asses and horses in a mill underscores the machine-like qualities of Ranelagh. The place did not just occur. It was invented, and with a very specific purpose in mind: to facilitate the patrons’ ambulating and ogling, in a London climate. Usually malls created for the purpose of promenading took the form of a long, linear walkway, often resulting from a path connecting two destinations. In that case, people would wander back and forth between those anchoring destinations, each of which could also be an event in and of itself. The promenaders could choose either to participate in that event or to turn around and walk back in the other direction. In Ranelagh, the architect set up a far more efficient system: an endless mall. The circular plan allows for unlimited promenading and provides maximum opportunity for mutual observation, regardless of the weather and time of day. All this would take place around a centrally located orchestra, efficiently and equally meting out melody in all directions. Such a closed system, totally removed from the fabric of London, was quite attractive to the inhabitants of this physically and socially dilapidated city. Among other social ills, alcoholism had become a serious problem. In January 1751 Fielding writes of “a new kind of drunkenness, unknown to our ancestors … drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence.”31 The availability of cheap gin resulted in much crime. Fielding explains that although gin was inexpensive, poor people drank so much of it that they had to steal in order to support their habits. Hogarth comments on the social implications of inebriation in his prints Beer Street and Gin Lane. The first consists of social and physical interaction among human beings. Ranelagh Gardens operates in this sensual mode. The second mode is one of withdrawal into oneself, of dulling one’s senses. In Gin Lane both the social and the physical fabric of the city crumble as a result of people’s addiction to gin. With such conditions existing within the City of London, it is hardly surprising that people would pay money to visit lavish assembly spaces located amidst clean, quiet, idyllic gardens in the nearby countryside. Also, the eighteenth-century London social scene was ripe for commercialization. The homes of the new leisure-hungry middle class were much too small to accommodate fashionable activities such as private parties, orchestral concerts, and theatres. At first, small assembly rooms offered subscriptions for such activities to the middle classes.32 319
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As “culture” increasingly “seeped through” the ranks, much more efficient entertainment “machines” such as the Ranelagh rotunda were born, with participation requiring admission fees to individual events. King George II’s Swiss master of revels, John James (Count) Heidegger, made masquerading a profit-making capitalist venture in London when he invented the masquerade ticket.33 These luxuriously designed, easily purchased documents promised their bearers entry into whole new worlds. One could just decide to go, even at the spur of the moment. In fact, well-dressed decoys were sent to walk along the Mall at St James’s Street, proclaiming loudly from time to time what charming weather it was for going to Ranelagh, encouraging spontaneous visits to the pleasure garden.34 No longer were fancy gardens, complete with ornate landscaping and architectural follies, accessible exclusively to the aristocracy. The public amusement park was born. For a small fee the average Londoner could immerse himself in a different world. Ranelagh and similar venues such as Vauxhall offered the middle class a close-up glimpse of the aristocracy. Other institutions satisfied more esoteric curiosity. Bethlehem Hospital, or Bedlam, as it was more popularly known, was a notorious hospital for mental patients. It was visited by so many people that the operators of Bedlam, just like the construction crew at Ranelagh, began to charge an admission fee to look at the inmates. Soon it was a fullfledged place of entertainment. Besides engaging in the spectator sport of lunatic-watching, the visitors could purchase fruit, nuts, cheesecake, and beer from the guards. Inmates’ poetry was sold like a theatre program. A writer in the 1753 World commented on a visit to Bethlehem Hospital: “It was in the Easter week, when to my great surprise, I found a hundred people at least, who, having paid their two-pence apiece, were suffered, unattended, to run rioting up and down the wards, making sport and diversion of the miserable inhabitants.”35 Another favourite diversion was attending executions. The gentlemen who sat in the boxes of the Ranelagh rotunda also paid for bleacher seats at executions. The more notorious the criminal, the more expensive the seat. For a half-penny one could also rent spy-glasses for a better view of the mounted heads.36 While the point of public executions was to deter people from crime, these spectacles also satisfied a growing thirst for public entertainment. This mass demand for leisure was spawned, in part, by the onset of cheaper books. With primers such as Harris’s Lexicon Technicum, peo320
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ple were able to educate themselves in their free time and pull themselves up the social ladder. Later, commercial leisure venues such as Ranelagh were marketed through the newspapers, which published not only advertisements for events but also criticism and gossip columns about them.37 Newspapers printed “masquerade intelligence” stories alongside articles about troop movements and parliamentary matters.38 To understand the newsworthiness of masquerading, it is necessary to examine the implications of attire in the eighteenth century. mask as medium Clothing can be a collection of signs, a means of communication, like language. Its conventional symbols can establish a connection between identity and the trappings of identity.39 Masquerades amount to transgressions against the sartorial social contract through “playfully or criminally inappropriate dress.” Castle draws a comparison between disguise and lying.40 By Webster’s definition, “to lie” is “to deceive and disappoint confidence; to cause an incorrect impression, to present a misleading appearance.”41 Similarly, “to disguise” is “to conceal by an unusual habit or mask; to hide by a counterfeit appearance; to alter the form of.”42 A lie verbally subverts a generally accepted “truth,” and a disguise alters one’s prescribed personal appearance. In the days of Ranelagh Gardens one would obscure oneself by employing a mask or a disguise. For those who wished only to obscure, there was the domino, a neutral costume of Venetian origin.43 It consisted of a black hooded cloak with nondescript mask that erased the identity, gender, and age of the wearer.44 The domino, while negating the form of the wearer, was also an emblem of potentiality. It fluctuated between “nonbeing” and “becoming.”45 The other option for revellers wishing to participate in the masquerade ritual was not only to obscure but also to confuse the appearance of the self. This was accomplished through impersonation. The masqueraders would superimpose new bodies over their old ones. The “self” and the “other” would become merged in time and space. For the duration of the masquerade the second identity became an extension of the body.46 The choice of characters one could assume was quite extensive, with only one underlying requirement: that one’s actual position in life be not just altered but contradicted outright. Traditionally, carnival represented 321
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opposition. In ancient Rome, Saturnalia temporarily replaced the present with Saturn’s golden age on earth. In the Middle Ages, carnivals opposed the seriousness of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture. Celebrations sponsored by the Church or the state sanctioned the existing pattern of things, reinforcing inequality. Carnivals, on the other hand, provided temporary liberation from the established hierarchies.47 This aspect of the medieval carnival was evident in the eighteenth-century masquerade. A writer in the Universal Spectator of 1792 notes that “Everyone here wears a Habit which speaks him the Revers of what he is.”48 The relationship between the face and its mask was expected to be ironic, even scandalous. Duchesses dressed as milkmaids, footmen as kings, and young ladies came “trouser’d.” A correspondent at the Guardian saw “women changed into men, men into women … ladies of the night into saints, people of the first quality into beasts or birds, gods or goddesses.” In this mundus inversus, sexual, social, and metaphysical hierarchies were reversed.49 This self-alienation was practically obligatory. People who dressed as themselves were not admitted to the masquerades.50 Although a mask portrayed what the wearer was not, it often portrayed what the wearer would like to be. Addison, a contemporary of Ranelagh Gardens, writes in Spectator 14 that at masquerades “People dress themselves in what they have a Mind to be, and not what they are fit for.”51 In his poem “The Masquerade,” Fielding muses that revellers “masque the face … t’unmasque the mind.” In an “Essay on Masquerades” in a 1777 issue of Lady’s Magazine, masquerades are described as events where people divest themselves of the “borrowed feathers” of social appearances and reveal their true natures.52 The very word “person,” though defined by Webster as “an individual human being consisting of body and soul,” derives from persona, the Latin word for “mask” (from personare – to sound through).53 This suggests that a “person” is always role-acting. In 1749 John Beard sang at Ranelagh: “Tho’ our revels are scorn’d by the grave and the wise, Yet they practice all day what they seem to despise; Examine mankind from the great to the small, Each mortal’s disguis’d, and the world is a ball.”54 In the eighteenth century the persona assigned to a person depended on his or her socioeconomic standing. Established conventions dictated which image was appropriate for various classes of people, as well as for various types of institutions. One ought to be able to distinguish a bishop from a politician or a dockworker. Likewise, a cathedral should 322
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be distinguishable from a government building or a private dwelling. Writing about architecture, Marc-Antoine Laugier refers to this “appropriateness” as bienséance, which means “propriety” or “decency.”55 According to bienséance, a building should be “neither more nor less magnificent than is appropriate to its purpose, that is to say that the decoration of buildings should not be arbitrary but must always be in relation to the rank and quality of those who live in them and conform to the objective envisaged.56 These norms pervaded eighteenth-century life, dictating one’s appearance, one’s behaviour, and even one’s aspirations. It is these norms that masquerades sought to question. The ritual of masquerade allows a person to temporarily escape his persona and inhabit a different “self.” During festivals, people living in profane time may access illo tempore, a different, primordial time.57 Castle proposes that saturnalian rituals such as masquerade try to restore a time before classification, before society had a “meed of dialectic, of masters and slaves.”58 Every ritual has “extrahuman” origins, having been created in illo tempore by a god or ancestor.59 The masquerade also has mythological roots. Defoe explains in his 1727 System of Magick; or, a History of the Black Art, “The Devil’s first Game, which he in Eden play’d … when he harangu’d to Eve in Masquerade.”60 Paradise, however, is not attainable “on demand,” at any given moment or place. Traditionally, carnivals were held in profane spaces such as town squares and streets. Under the proper conditions a profane street could become host to illo tempore. Rykwert identifies one of the conditions for collective sensorum to function: group action requires repetition, and this repetition must be rhythmic. It cannot, however, be daily and continuous. There must be privileged points, borders, and thresholds in time as well as in space.61 And yet, the operators of Ranelagh wished to operate this amusement park almost every night. Some of the masquerades coincided with traditional carnival dates such as May Day, Midsummer’s Eve, church feasts, and Mardi Gras.62 Others were held in association with coronations and royal birthdays.63 But assemblies, masked and otherwise, also began to occur for their own sake, in spite of the calendar. Like a theatre, which physically shuts out the rest of the city during a performance, Ranelagh Gardens also needed to be separate from London. It served as an interim level that, like a church, was already removed from daily activity but did not fully engage another realm until a ceremony would take place. 323
William Hogarth, “The Five Orders” (1761). Hogarth comments on fashion by categorizing period wigs “architectonically”
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For eighteenth-century English masqueraders, illo tempore may also be described as a parallel time and space of desire, which began within the space of the mask itself. The revellers inhabited their masks. Castle claims that by wearing a disguise, a person diminishes the “protective spatial bubble” that exists around individual human bodies in polite society. This allows for behaviour previously unthinkable among strangers in public: touching, embracing, fondling, impromptu dancing, etc.64 However, Castle also mentions that costumes were often “supported,” meaning that people would act as well as look like the character whose being they had assumed. A Methodist preacher was spotted walking around giving “very pathetic lectures to the ladies,” to everybody’s amusement.65 Therefore, even though the reveller’s own “personal sphere of influence” may have been partially erased, he had begun to construct a new one. He then could be said to inhabit the mask of his appropriated character literally, spiritually, and spatially. Period writings began to refer to the revellers simply as “masks.”66 The word was used to designate the whole ensemble: person and persona, body and costume. Some people, not content with the dialectic between “self” and “other,” took on two roles, creating a dialogue within the costume itself. One costume on a law theme consisted of half of a face painted black, with the word “plaintiff” written on it, and the other half of the face painted white, with the word “defendant” on it. Another period costume was that of a woman, half young and half old. Hermaphroditic disguises were also popular.67
Rotunda, house and gardens at Ranelagh (1751)
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Having occupied a mask, a Ranelagh masquerader then would try to gain entry into someone else’s identity, both figuratively and literally. A ritual exchange of words would occur between masks: “Do you know me?” or “I know you,” and “I am sure you don’t,” and “Yes, but I do,” etc.68 These exchanges indicate the simultaneous desires to defend one’s own anonymity and undermine that of others. Besides attempting to conquer identities, the revellers also sought the realm of the tangible. In the ridottos, bels pares, and masquerades of Ranelagh Gardens the social structure of eighteenth-century England was suspended.69 When wearing masks, the lower class and those with tarnished reputations could pass for respectable citizens. On the other hand, those who were assumed to be virtuous could engage in otherwise unacceptable behaviour without besmirching their good names. Behaviour in general was much freer at Ranelagh masquerades than at any other event attended by members of both sexes. Their collective sense of increased liberty spawned a “new behavioural and bodily idiom.” This liberty stemmed from the use of the mask as an “involvement shield … a portable bodily accessory” that would protect the wearer’s identity from the judging eyes of others.70 The result was a celebratory atmosphere reminiscent of the ancient sensual tradition of carnival. The root of the word, carne, suggests the underlying themes: eating (carnivorous), violence (carnage), and sex (carnal).71 The first ingredient, food, was definitely present at the Ranelagh assemblies. Matthew Bramble, in Humphrey Clinker, recalls seeing people “devouring sliced-beef, and swilling port, and punch, and cyder” at the rotunda.72 Violence at Ranelagh, for the most part, consisted of what the Weekly Journal called “absolute Freedom of Speech,” even between strangers. Walpole describes how he “took the English liberty of teasing whomever I pleased.”73 Verbal aggression was tolerated at carnival time. It was directed at neighbours or figures of authority and came from women as well as from men.74 Women especially were allowed to speak freely. Cursing, obscenities, loud joking, and the like had been the sole privilege of men, but at the masquerades, Addison complains in Spectator 14, women were using the “pert Stile of the Pit Bawdry.”75 Encouraged by burgundy and champagne, “Nymphs in loose and antick robes” and forward young ladies with “cocked hat and masculine air” would, “Amazon like, attack their gallants.”76 326
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Elizabeth Chudleigh’s infamous 1749 appearance at Ranelagh. Other women kept their disguises (and reputations) intact
Sexual freedom was perhaps the most popular aspect of the eighteenthcentury London masquerade. As the Bishop of London explained in 1725, … deprive Virtue and Religion of their last Refuge, I mean Shame; which keeps multitudes of Sinners within the Bounds of Decency, after they have broken all the Ties of Principle and Conscience … and whatever Lewdness may be concerted, whatever Luxury, Immodesty, or Extravagance, may be committed in Word or Deed, no one’s Reputation is at Stake, no one’s Character is responsible for it.77 MASQUERADES
Masquerades were especially liberating for women. In London few institutions (other than the Church) could be frequented by unescorted, respectable females. Addison writes in Spectator 8 that “The Women either come by themselves or are introduced by Friends, who are obliged to quit them upon their first Entrance.” This was “wonderfully contriv’d for the Advancement of Cuckoldom.” With masks and disguises protecting the reputations of middle- and upper-class women, social restraints such as sexual segregation were removed, encouraging female emancipation. In fact, the freedoms grew so extensive that soon many assumed any woman attending a masquerade to be a whore.78 327
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Reputation was of utmost importance in the days of Ranelagh Gardens. When a movement was begun to make masked assemblies illegal, the proposed punishment for improprieties or crimes committed while in costume was unmasking: “And, tho’ they may imagine themselves conceal’d by being mask’d, proper Care will be taken to oblige them to shew their Faces; and then their Names, and Places of Abode … printed and posted up in all public Places in London and Westminster.”79 Although the mask was utilized to exploit people’s morals and bodies in all sorts of commercial and noncommercial ways, there was another aspect of personal artifice in eighteenth-century England. Although the young Irish beauty Maria Cummings died from consumption as a result of using white lead as a cosmetic,80 professionals in the make-up and hairdressing business were concerned with the physical and moral wellbeing of the public. In 1782 James Stewart published Plocacosmos, an extensive technical manual on the “whole art of hairdressing.” An extraordinary amount of labour went into the preparation of hair in the days of Ranelagh. Plocacosmos, however, is devoted mainly to morals. After instructing the reader on the techniques of beauty, Stewart cautions against vanity.81 He mentions an ancient belief that hair is an excrement of the human body.82 According to him, “dress” is a foolish thing, and yet it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed. “Great care should be taken to be always dressed like the reasonable people of our
William Hogarth, Gin Lane (1750). The suicide of the barber (upper right corner) symbolizes the corruption of body, soul, and society
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own age, in the place we are.” We should despise dress, but not show the fact that we despise it.83 The underlying message is that the upkeep of one’s appearance is closely tied to one’s physical and spiritual wellbeing. Hogarth depicts the converse of this idea in Gin Lane. There a barber has hanged himself because he had no work.84 For his clientele, hairdressing is not a priority, since they are too busy destroying themselves with gin. Only the lowest end of the London social gamut was missing from the festivities at the gardens. This is not to say that the proprietors of Ranelagh did not try to maintain a reputation of elitism. The public advertisements promised that only people of the highest quality would be admitted to the festivities. Nevertheless, the riffraff mingled freely with the fashionable classes. “Ladies and Gentlemen of Quality” came en masse, either despite the presence of the “inferiors” or perhaps because of it. Horace Walpole provides evidence that the aristocracy enjoyed this temporary levelling: “The King was well disguised in an old-fashioned English habit, and much pleased with somebody who desired him to hold their cup as they were drinking tea.”85 Royalty, like eighteenth-century women, were glad to escape the decorum required of them at every turn and did not mind the presence of riffraff at their gatherings. In fact, they sought out such entertainment. Henry Fielding felt that some coincidence of ceremonial space might actually be a good thing, hoping that a “degree of politeness” would diffuse itself throughout the several orders of participants.86 A 1784 edition of the European Magazine criticized Ranelagh Gardens: “All sorts of people are frequently confounded or melted down into one glaring mass of superfluity or absurdity. The lower classes are entirely lost in a general propensity to mimic the finery of the higher.”87 In such circumstances it became almost impossible, in the words of Matthew Bramble, to “distinguish, nor be distinguished,”88 and yet, distinction was crucial to the eighteenth century. Laugier stresses that the job of the architect is “knowing well what is fitting to each person … the facades of houses must not be left to the whims of private persons.”89 By embellishing their habits and habitats, the new wealthy classes imbued themselves with supposed importance. Order, sartorial as well as architectural, was being subverted.
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By mingling with people of other social classes, the clientele of Ranelagh Gardens suspended the rules and regulations of the eighteenthcentury London social hierarchy, thereby opening them up for comment. By dressing unlike themselves, they criticized the sartorial code of the time. Yet, these are hardly the only conventions that the Raneleans shattered in their holy quest for chaos. Nary a paradigm would be left unrecombined after a night of masked assembly at Ranelagh. Many costumes obscured their wearer’s gender. This created a new set of surprises, adding to the overall aura of danger and excitement. The London homosexual population regularly attended Ranelagh masquerades, capitalizing on the general confusion that granted heretofore unknown liberty to them.90 This confusion was pursued consciously by the maskers. Having concealed all other vestiges of identity, there still remained the sound of one’s voice. The human voice could reveal at least one’s gender, if not one’s actual identity, so the revelers attempted to disguise their voices in various ways. A writer in the Weekly Journal in 1724 describes the result: “The first Noise which strikes your Ears upon your entering the Room is a loud confused Squeak.” In 1740 a correspondent for the Daily Advertiser refers to the scene as “This Piece of ridiculous, squeaking Nonsense.”91 Amidst all this mystification of gender, the castrati genre of singing rose to popularity.92 Cultural and national identities were also mingled. The clientele at Ranelagh seemed to have a penchant for the foreign, the unfamiliar. International costumes often made the place seem like a utopian “Congress of Nations.” A geographic fluidity resulted: the exotic was superposed on the indigenous, the Oriental on the European, dark races on the light, the North on the South, producers on the consumers, etc.93 Props were constructed to add to this sense of exotica. One such structure was called alternately a Chinese pagoda and a Venetian pavilion.94 Its identity seemed less important than the “fantasy and inconsequence” it added to the masquerades.95 The general mélange of the masked ball was heightened through the constant introduction of new costumes. Ideas were drawn from engravings, paintings, book illustration, theatrical personalities, and the antics of Bedlam inmates.96 Emblematic figures such as Fortune, Night, Day, Temperance, and Liberty were discovered in works such as Ripa’s Iconologia.97 The revellers seemed to strive for absurdity. The Weekly Journal reported various “impossible pairings”: a lion and a shepherdess, a butterfly and a 330
Masquerade scene with unholy liaisons
prize-fighter, a Devil and a Quaker, a Presbyterian parson and a nun, a cardinal and a milkmaid, etc.98 In this phantasmic world, characters were released from perspectival and chronological hierarchies. Entities from various eras mingled with members of other lands, other species, and other dimensions, and the historical danced with the fictional. They even tampered with the very mechanics of the universe by altering the cycle of night and day: they slept in the daytime and revelled from dusk until dawn. Castle likens this revocation of cosmos to a “metaphysical shockwave.”99 It did not take long for some Londoners to associate this blatantly disruptive behaviour with certain natural disasters of the day. London experienced earthquakes in February and March of 1750, soon after Ranelagh opened.100 The Church wasted no time in singling out masquerades and pleasure gardens as scapegoats for the earthquakes.101 medium as mask While Ranelagh Gardens is no more, disruptive behaviour abounds in our modern everyday life. The recombinatory sensation in the chaotic eighteenth-century London masquerades may be evident in the more recent phenomenon of channel surfing with a remote control. The resulting stream juxtaposes scenes of cooking of fowl with the live birth delivery of human quintuplets; scenes of pornography with televangelism; scenes of nature with supernature. Modern communication technology, from the reverse panopticon of the television studio to the a-centric Internet, has assumed the role of “masquerade.” On the Web, several people from anywhere in the world may take part in chaotic conversational 331
The attack on Dr John Hill at Ranelagh (1752): an actual (as opposed to a “virtual”) encounter
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“chat” events. Chats take place in virtual “rooms” that the participants select by topic and language. One such site is aptly named Masquerade. Indeed, these events faithfully replicate many characteristics of the masquerade phenomenon. Participants may reveal as much or as little about themselves as they wish. After choosing a pseudonym, the masquerader is ready to plunge into a stream of text. Participants type and send messages that appear one after another as they are received by the central computer hosting the chat. The messages appear, attached to the pseudonyms, in a colour of the writer’s choice and with whatever photographs or icons the writer wishes to include. As these messages scroll down the participants’ respective screens, they choose the ones to which they wish to respond. Sometimes a conversation starts up between participants. As in real life, anyone else who is present may eavesdrop and interject. As with the Ranelagh masquerades, much of the dialogue consists of questions. Chatters inquire about each other’s sex, age, and geographic location. A chatter may become anyone, be from anywhere, and say anything. Fourteen-year-olds may pose as adults, women as men, and wellbehaved citizens as foul-mouthed deviants. While some services charge a membership fee for chats, most are available to the general computerized public. In a chat room all are equal. And all are anonymous. As with masquerades, one may transcend one’s inhibitions and act with impunity. The crucial difference lies in the scope of one’s potential actions. While one risks moral corruption in a chat room, the body always emerges intact. Ranelagh allowed for an act to develop from a moral stage to a physical one. In a way, the online masquerade is more liberating than the one at Ranelagh, for at Ranelagh the threat of bodily pain was a factor in one’s decision making. On the other hand, the chat room does not offer the reward of bodily pleasure, regardless of the offers of “live” sex for ninety-nine cents a minute. The internet’s masquerades and the eighteenth-century ones both mediate between people. A Ranelagh masquerade, however, mediates personal space within a physical building. It is the contrast, the friction between mediated action and its environment that imbues the situations with excitement. This excitement, this tension, is exactly what is missing from cyberspace. If our minds are to be absorbed in the type of “extacy” described by the Ambulator, all of our senses must be stimulated. One of Webster’s definitions for the word “virtual” is “potential.”102 Therefore, in virtual reality one is always “becoming” and never actually achieving a state of being. 333
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That is not to say that there is no place for mediation in our lives. In an age of ideological, epidemiological, and environmental unrest, perhaps a combination of actual and mediated space is in some way essential for our survival. notes 1 Walter W. Skeat, The Concise Dictionary of English Etymology (Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth 1993), 267. 2 Noah Webster, Webster’s Universities Dictionary Unabridged (New York: Library Guild 1940), 1205. 3 Giles Worsley, Architectural Drawings of the Regency Period 1770–1837 (Washington, dc: aia Press 1991), 2, explains that craftsmen took on apprentices, while professional architects such as William Jones and those who followed him took articled students. Both apprentices and articled students received board, lodging, and professional instruction in return for five to seven years of labour. The difference was that an articled student also paid the architect a premium (Jones received £50 from Jacob Leroux in 1753). 4 Reginald Blunt, The Wonderful Village (London: Mills and Boon 1918), 84. 5 Mollie Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh: 1742–1803 (London: J. Westhouse 1946), 19. 6 Henry B. Wheatley, London Past and Present, vol. 3 (London: John Murphy 1891), 148. 7 The Ambulator; or, The Stranger’s Companion in a Tour round London; Within the Circuit of Twenty-five Miles: Describing Whatever is remarkable, either for Grandeur, Elegancy, Use, or Curiosity: Not only of Use to Strangers, but the Inhabitants of this Capitol. Collected by a Gentleman for his private Amusement (London: J. Bew 1782), 158. 8 Warwick Wroth, The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (London: Macmillan 1896), 201. 9 Ambulator, 158. 10 Tobias George Smollet, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), ed. James L. Thornson (New York: Norton 1983), 87. 11 Ambulator, 158. 12 Ibid. 13 Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 33.
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14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33
34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
Ambulator, 157. Blunt, The Wonderful Village, 89. Wroth, London Pleasure Gardens, 204. Ambulator, 158. Wroth, London Pleasure Gardens, 206. Travels in Britain, 1794–1795: The Diary of John Aspinwall, Greatgrandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with a Brief History of His Aspinwall Forebears, ed. Aileen Sutherland Collins (Virginia Beach: Parsons Press 1994), 90. Ambulator, 158. Travels in Britain, ed. Collins, 92. Wroth, London Pleasure Gardens, 199. Webster’s Universities Dictionary, 58. Giles Worsley, “I Thought Myself in Paradise: Ranelagh Gardens and its Rotunda,” Country Life (15 May 1986): 1380–4. G.L. Apperson, Bygone London Life: Pictures from a Vanished Past (New York: James Pott 1904), 61. E. Beresford Chancellor, The Pleasure Haunts of London during Four Centuries (London: Constable 1925), 85. Wroth, London Pleasure Gardens, 200. Travels in Britain, ed. Collins, 92. Ambulator, 158. Smollet, Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 84. Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 55. Neil McKendrick, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa 1982), 282. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press 1986), 11. Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 153. Anthony Masters, Bedlam (London: Michael Joseph 1977), 47. Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 32. McKendrick, Birth of a Consumer Society, 272. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 3. Ibid. Ibid., 56. Webster’s Universities Dictionary, 984.
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42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 336
Ibid., 498. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 15. Webster’s Universities Dictionary, 518. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 77. Ibid., 76. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, ma: mit Press 1968), 10. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 4. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 73. Webster’s Universities Dictionary, 1251. Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 50. Cassel’s Compact French-English, English-French Dictionary, ed. J.H. Douglas (London: Cassel 1975), 44. Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, trans. Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls 1977), 90. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World), 85. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 90. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1954), 28. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 64. Joseph Rykwert, “The Purpose of Ceremonies,” Lotus 17 (1977): 57. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 21. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 8. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 37. Ibid., 63. Jubilee Masquerade Balls, at Ranelagh Gardens, a bad Return for the Merciful Deliverance from the late Earthquakes (London: W. Owen 1750), 22. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 66. Ibid., 35. Blunt, The Wonderful Village, 99. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 34. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith 1978), 186. Smollet, Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 85.
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73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81
Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 34. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 187. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 34. Blunt, The Wonderful Village, 98. Jubilee Masquerade Balls, 9. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 33. Jubilee Masquerade Balls, 17. Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 62. James Stewart, Plocacosmos; or the Whole Art of Hair Dressing (London, 1782), 98. 82 Ibid., 172. 83 Ibid., 76. 84 Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 222. 85 Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 28. 86 Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 33. 87 Ibid. 88 Smollet, Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, 84. 89 Laugier, Essay on Architecture, 99. 90 Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 50. 91 Ibid., 36. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 62. 94 Ambulator, 163. 95 Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 18. 96 Masters, Bedlam, 51. 97 Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 68. 98 Ibid., 82. 99 Ibid., 84. 100 Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 54. 101 Masquerades were, as Walpole put it, “sacrificed to the idol earthquake” (Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 97). That same year a satirical pamphlet was published under the title The Ranelean Religion Displayed. In a Letter from a Hottentot of Distinction, now in London, to his Friend at the Cape of Good Hope. Containing the Reasons assigned by the Raneleans for abolishing Christianity, together with a true Copy of their new Liturgy (London: W. Webb 1750), 3–21. The “Raneleans,” after finding the tenets of Christianity inadequate for their needs, start a new “religion.” It is structured after the Christianity that had been practised in England at the time, 337
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with “Pleasure,” “Riches,” and “Power” quite scandalously replacing the traditional Trinity. In this pamphlet earthquakes are also invoked. First they are called upon to punish anyone who might interfere with their hedonistic faith: “That it may please thee to darken and confound with Earthquakes, the Understandings of all Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, that they may not be able to disturb thy Worship, nor interrupt thy People with unseasonable Preaching in the Duties of this House, We beseech thee to hear us.” Elsewhere in the piece the Raneleans would have earthquakes inflicted upon themselves should they lapse in their pursuit of Pleasure: “When the wise man turneth away from his own Interest, and the Man of Pleasure forgeteth the Delight of his Soul, say unto thyself, that Miracles are not ceas’d; and let the People fear and tremble, even as with the Shock of an Earthquake.” Because the two earthquakes came exactly a month apart, a third was expected in April 1750. Hundreds of people evacuated to the “innocent countryside,” which was considered to be outside the range of the wrath of God. Seven hundred and thirty coaches were counted passing Hyde Park Corner on their way out of town. Ladies made themselves “earthquake gowns” for sitting up all night outdoors. When the third quake did not materialize, people (and masquerades) returned to Ranelagh. Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 55. 102 Webster’s Universities Dictionary, 1920.
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About the Authors
Chora
About the Authors
Caroline Dionne At the age of six months, Caroline Dionne sailed across the Atlantic ocean twice. She cherishes her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Université Laval. Her favourite questions are those for which there are more (or less) than one possible answer. In the course of her graduate studies in the History and Theory of Architecture at McGill University, she has become obsessed with geometric ideas and is now working towards a phd on dimensionality in the work of Lewis Carroll. She lives on Avenue de Chateaubriand. Mark Dorrian Mark Dorrian teaches in the Department of Architecture of the University of Edinburgh, where he leads the final-year design studio and lectures in theory and historiography of architecture. His graduate studies were undertaken at iuav in Venice and at the Architectural Association in London, from which he holds his doctorate. He is currently working on A Critical Dictionary for Architecture (forthcoming from Black Dog Press) and a study of the grotesque. Recent essays include “On the Monstrous and the Grotesque,” in Word & Image 16:3 (2000); “On Some Spatial Aspects of the Colonial Discourse on Ireland” in The Journal of Architecture 6, no.1 (spring 2001): 27–51; and “Surplus Matter: Of Scars, Scrolls, Skulls and Stealth,” in Architecture: The Subject Is Matter, ed. Jonathan Hill (London: Routledge 2001). From May to August 2000 he held a visiting scholarship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where he was working on conceptualizations of the Baroque. Michael Emerson Michael Emerson has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has conducted his research in the History and Theory program at McGill University. Marc Glaudemans Marc Glaudemans studied at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he received his degree as an architect in 1994. He recently published his doctoral thesis, entitled Amsterdam Arcadia: The Rediscovery of the Hinterland. In general he is interested in the “broken” continuum of architecture, in terms of mimesis and poiesis. While the focus of his work is on the period of the sixteenth to eighteenth century, connections 340
About the Authors
to classical antiquity and to the present are investigated with a special emphasis on the relationship between city and country. Postdoctoral research is anticipated dealing with the notion of architectural geography, an analysis of territory and territorial space as expression of worldview in different cultures. George L. Hersey George Hersey, who is now retired, taught the history of art and architecture at Yale University for thirty-seven years. He is the author of thirteen books, among them Pythagorean Palaces: Architecture and Magic in the Italian Renaissance (1976) and The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture (1988). The present essay will appear as part of a forthcoming book, Euclidean Processions: A Look at Art, the Eye, and the Brain. Robert Kirkbride Robert Kirkbride was born in Philadelphia and attended the University of Pennsylvania (ba 1988, march 1990). Currently a doctoral candidate at McGill University, Kirkbride is the founder and principal of the architectural studio Elaboratory and design director for the furniture company Studiolo. He has taught design studios at the University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. He is grateful for Melissa Grey’s assistance in surveying the Urbino studiolo and the Bogliasco Foundation’s support for the completion of this article through a fellowship and residency at the Liguria Study Centre, Bogliasco, Italy (fall 1999). Kirkbride lives in New York, ny. Joanna Merwood Joanna Merwood is completing a doctoral dissertation entitled “Environments of Cure: Color Theory in Late Nineteenth Century American Architecture” at Princeton University. She received a Bachelor of Architecture from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand in 1992 and a master’s degree from the History and Theory program at McGill University in 1995. She has taught architectural design in both New Zealand and the United States. Michel Moussette After realizing at a relatively young age that it would be a herculean task to isolate a simple formula explaining the entire universe, Michel Moussette 341
About the Authors
resolved to establish with clarity the limited set of equations that govern the movement of architecture. Although waiting on top of a mountain with an empty plastic yellow-margarine container might be a good way to achieve this lofty goal, recent efforts have been directed towards forays into the land of zero and infinity, where the friction of the world exists in the form of certain clearly defined variables. Michel Moussette graduated from the History and Theory of Architecture graduate program at McGill and is continuing his academic work at the Université de Montréal. Juhani Pallasmaa Juhani Pallasmaa was born in Hämeenlinna, Finland, in 1936. He obtained a Master of Science degree in architecture from the Helsinki University of Technology in 1966. He has been the principal of Juhani Pallasmaa Architects since 1983 and professor of architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology since 1991. He was State Artist Professor from 1983 to 1988, director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture from 1978 to 1983, associate professor at the Haile Selassie I University (Addis Ababa) from 1972 to 1974, director of the exhibitions department of the Museum of Finnish Architecture from 1968 to 1972 and from 1974 to 1983, and rector of the College of Crafts and Design (Helsinki) from 1970 to 1972. Professor Pallasmaa has designed exhibitions of Finnish architecture, planning, and fine arts that have been shown in more than thirty countries, and his design works have been published in numerous exhibition catalogues and publications in Finland and abroad. He has written many articles and lectured in various countries on cultural philosophy and the essence of architecture and fine arts. Juhani Pallasmaa is member of the Finnish Architects Association, honorary fellow of the aia, invited member of the International Committee of Architectural Critics, and invited full member of the International Academy of Architecture in Moscow. He was the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University in 1993. Dr Alberto Pérez-Gómez Dr Alberto Pérez-Gómez was educated in Mexico and Great Britain and has taught in Europe and North America at the Architectural Association in London and at universities in Mexico, Houston, Syracuse, Toronto, and Ottawa. Since 1987 he has been the Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture at McGill University, where he is in charge of the History and Theory of Architecture graduate program. He has also been the 342
About the Authors
Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University and of the Institut de recherche en histoire de l’architecture in Montreal. Dr PérezGómez is the author of Polyphilo, or The Dark Forest Revisited (mit Press 1992), an erotic narrative/theory of architecture based on a kindred text from late fifteenth-century Venice. His first book, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (mit Press 1983), won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award for architectural history in 1984. His most recent book, co-authored with Louise Pelletier and entitled Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, was published by mit Press in 1997. Dr Pérez-Gómez is coeditor of CHORA : Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture. David Theodore David Theodore completed a thesis in the McGill History and Theory of Architecture master’s program, entitled “‘Aproued on my self’: Inigo Jones’ Magic Book of Palladio.” He lives in Montreal, editing The Fifth Column: The Canadian Student Journal of Architecture, researching the history of the modern hospital (a project of Professor Annmarie Adams) and writing articles about architecture for newspapers and popular journals. Dorian Yurchuk Dorian Yurchuk was born in 1970 in New Jersey. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City, while also attending classes at the New School for Social Research and at Harvard University. In 1998 he was awarded the degree of Master of Architecture, History and Theory option, at McGill University. Current research centres on the link between laughter and healing, as evidenced in sources such as Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel and Joubert’s Traite du Ris. His travels have taken him from Anchorage to Kharkiw, and he has difficulty staying indoors. He now works at an architectural restoration firm in New York City, where he beholds, probes, and reconstructs facades for a living.
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