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Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture, mit Press, Cambridge Massachusetts and London, England, 1996, 598 pages, isbn 0262
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When Gian Lorenzo Bernini travelled to Paris in 166c, he was accompanied, during the final part of his journey, by Paul Freart, Louis xiv's special envoy. In a subsequent letter to his brother, Freart described a conversation with the great Italian architect, who had told him that 'the beauty of everything in the world (and therefore of architecture also) consisted of proportion; which might also be called the divine part of any thing, since it derived from Adam's body; that it had not only been made by God's Own hand but also in His image and likeness; [and that] the variety of the orders arose from the difference between man's body and woman's'. In the second chapter of his latest book, The Dancing Column, Joseph Rykwert relates this story, and it appears, at that stage, to provide a fairly good indicator of the central concern of his study: namely the relationship between classical architecture and the human But it is undoubtedly the key theme, the reader soon finds out that there is much while body. more in this massive volume besides this. Rykwert is one of the most important architectural scholars of his generation. He is noted for bringing a well-informed anthropological perspective to bear on his objects of study, and hence also for introducing unfamiliar material (from both anthropology and archaeology) into architectural discourse. As this was true of his early book The Idea of a Town (subtitled the Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World), so too it is true of The Dancing Column. In this regard, a comparison with John Onians' Bearers of Meaning (1988) is revealing. The two studies ostensibly seem to be close, despite the brevity of Onians' treatment of classical Greece: both are dealing with the issue of 'meaning', and there is an (inevitable) overlap in the buildings they discuss. Onians, however, is primarily interested in the manipulation of the orders as signifiers, and in his text the explanatory weight falls onto the political context within which the buildings were realised. So, for example, he interprets the use of both Doric and Ionic columns in the Parthenon and in the Propylaea in terms of Pericles' vision of Athens as the centre of a new Panhellenic unity. For Rykwert the immediate political context is less of an issue and is often passed over. Instead his main concern lies with the origins of the orders, with their emergence in systems of representation within which the basic structures of human experience body/world, man/woman, life/death are articulated. When Onians writes of the temple of Apollo at Bassae, with its Doric exterior, interior Ionic colonnades, and axially-positioned single Corinthian column, he interprets it as a last elegiac tribute to Pericles' Panhellenic ideal; when Rykwert writes of the same building he relates it to the Vitruvian account of the procreation of the orders (upon whose sexual nature he insists), the solitary daughter-column being enfolded in turn by the mother- (Ionic) and father- (Doric) orders. In an important sense The Dancing Column is an extended meditation upon Vitruvius. The Vitruvian text, as Rykwert points out, develops two kinds of account regarding the mimetic —
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relationship between bodies and buildings: on one hand there is the singular, constant, canonic figure of the homo bene figuratus, the 'well-formed man' whose perfect proporexemplar for architecture; and the other there are the myths which tionality stands as an
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relate how the orders were established and which account for their differential characteristics. This distinction plays something of a structuring role in Rykwert's book. But where the theme of the microcosmic and geometricized body is examined relatively briefly (early on, in Chapters m and iv), the consideration of the origins of the orders expands to fill the second, and major, portion of the book. The ensuing discussion is diverse and allusive and here I can indicate only its broad contours. The reader will get a sense of its spread if I say at the outset that the section on the Doric alone includes an examination of possible Egyptian precedent, discusses the Egyptian djed column and its relationship to the body of Osiris, gives a detailed historical account of the elements of the order, and considers optical adjustments and surface coloration as well as dealing with the material outlined below. The Doric form must have been established, we are told, in wood and terracotta at least, by the time of the first Olympic games in 776 bc. The Dorians, whose name it carried, claimed descent from the sons of Hercules; and Rykwert, who will return to the theme of the identification of the Doric column with the mythic hero, suggests that the robust Doric form referred to this legendary paternity. Since the Doric order was developed for temples, its evolution must be studied in the context of the development of the temple itself. The naos, the Greek temple, was an innovation of the first millennium bc, but it had an important precursor, Rykwert infers, in the Mycenean palace. Certainly temenos, a word that later came to describe the sacred enclosure within which the Greek temple sat, had been used to of estate In the a Mycenean designate king or hero. his palatial hall the king would receive tributes and display his grandeur; its central hearth and four surrounding columns is echoed, for Rykwert, in the subsequent early shrines with their two columns and central hearth. In response to the question of the meaning of the early columns for their builders, the author turns our attention to the Lion Gate at Mycenae itself, with its famous triangular panel above the lintel on which is carved a column and beam sitting on an altar, flanked by lions. This is, Rykwert suggests, perhaps the first explicit representation of a consecrated column and beam and is to be understood as an apotropaic image of the guarding of the city. That the column in the panel is male, that it was analogous to the male body, is argued by reference to Minoan representations of the male figure whose 'inverted' taper, narrowing from the shoulders to the feet, seems to be echoed in Minoan and Mycenean columns. Of all sites, it was the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi that had, Rykwert argues, archetypal status for the whole of Doric building. Here a sequence of shrines succeeded one another, the first being commemorated ritually, according to Pausanias, by the burning of a laurel hut. By the time of his visit, the great second stone temple was extant on the site, the first stone building having been destroyed by fire in 544 bc. From here, the book follows the cult of Apollo Daphnephoros, examining the development of the temple form. The story is one 99
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of the change from apse-ended 'hairpin' buildings to rectangular forms; from buildings with a central line of columns supporting the roof ridge (and with or without external colonnade) to the double internal colonnaded nave-and-aisles arrangement; and from timber and brick, to wood and terracotta, to stone. The temple of Hera at Olympia, the earliest surviving temple to have the double internal colonnade was, Rykwert notes, the most famous temple of mixed construction in Vitruvius' time. Its wooden columns began, piecemeal, to be replaced in stone as votive gifts soon after the temple was built. When Pausanias visited the temple in the later second century ad there was still an oak column standing among the stone ones.
Vitruvius' commentary made clear that, in contradistinction to the Doric column, the Ionic was developed as a female column. If the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi represented the Doric archetype, its counterpart for the Ionic was the Artemision at Ephesus. As Apollo and Artemis were brother and sister, it is suggested that a similar relationship might be said to exist between the Doric and the Ionic. The temple of Artemis was one of the seven wonders of the world; Cherisiphron and Metagenes were said to have written a book about it, and for Rykwert it, together with the temple of Hera at Samos, represents the beginning of the history of Ionic building in its fully developed form. In search of the origin of the Ionic column's characteristic volutes, the author moves from an examination of the early Aeolic capital, with its plant-like (or perhaps horn-like) form, to consider a series of archaic parallels from the East. In his account Cyprus emerges as a key location, for here there was a tradition of continuous Greek settlement existing in contact with Phoenicians, as well as with Egypt and Mesopotamia. The argument is that the Ionic form emerged as a syncretic phenomenon in the field of influence of a number of cultural prototypes which include fabricated 'sacred trees' and animal horns. In a fascinating passage he cites the example of Hathor, an Egyptian cow deity, whose (sometimes horned) head appears on the capitals ofthe temple at Denderah where her cult was centred. She appears also on capitals and on a stele from Cyprus that have survived, and here her hair, or wig, falls into a coil on her shoulders. Rykwert draws attention to the similarity between this image and the volutes of the Aeolic capital (he juxtaposes a photograph of an Aeolic Cypriot stele with the Hathor-headed one), suggesting that behind Vitruvius' explanation of the Ionic volutes as the curls of a woman's hair may lie the figure of Hathor. In 196c Rykwert published an important article on the Corinthian order in the journal Domus; it was subsequently reprinted in his collection of essays The Necessity ofArtifice. In his account of the Corinthian order in The Dancing Column the outline of his earlier argument remains in place. According to Vitruvius the Corinthian order sprang from a death. The death in question was that of a well-born girl of Corinth. After the burial her nurse laid a basket of her favourite pots upon her grave. By chance it was placed on an acanthus root causing the plant, when it sprouted, to curl around the basket. The sublimation of this protocapital into an order is attributed by Vitruvius to Callimachus, who happened upon the 100
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acanthus-entwined basket as he was passing by. If Cyprus was, for Rykwert, the key site for thinking about the Ionic order, Delphi is the crucial location for the Corinthian. Here was found both the first example of the 'leafy' capital, the 'proto-Corinthian' capitals of the Massalian treasury (which may have been derived from Egyptian funerary architecture), and the great acanthus-column at whose summit three sculpted female figures (associated with Dionysos) danced. Rykwert's concern is to show that here we are involved in a complex of elements associated with death and rebirth, with the continuity and immortality of the soul. The acanthus-column supported a bronze tripod which is, Rykwert notes, a ritual or honorific cauldron; a common theme in myth is the rejuvenation of the old, or the resuscitation of the dead, by the boiling of the body in such an implement. In his early article Rykwert had touched on Persephone in connection with the Corinthian; here he develops the theme, hinting that she lies behind the figure of the girl in the Vitruvian story kore, Greek for girl, was an alternative name for the goddess. Rykwert relates Persephone to her mother also to Dionysos who was her son, Zagreos, reborn after the Titans had Demeter, and dismembered him and cooked him on a tripod. This triple generation of gods all had cults linking them to agriculture and this, it is suggested, led in turn to their association with the promise of immortality. The argument is that the Corinthian order's moment of appearance must be related to the Greek 'invention' of the individual soul, an event that Rykwert sees celebrated in Plato's Phaedrus and Phaedo. In this context, a society hungering for personal salvation found the old cults inadequate, and a new representation was required. This, according to Rykwert, was achieved in the Corinthian column, which was nothing less than a personification of Kore herself. In all, this adds up to something of a bravura performance. The book displays an acquaintance with a vast range of scholarship and is scrupulously documented the notes and It themselves run to two close hundred bibliography pages. is difficult, however, not to leave with a feeling that the treatment of the material is sometimes ill-weighted. Occasionally points which seem peripheral to the argument are expounded at length, while many of the most suggestive sections are glossed. A nuanced account ofthe relationship between mimesis and metaphor would have been interesting, particularly so if related to specific moments in the discussion. At one point the author pauses to ask: '... are not columns in some sense always the holiest part of a building?' It's difficult to concur with this unreservedly (is it, for example, likely to be true of a building such as the Pantheon?), and the suggestion seems indicative of a tendency to constantly see the column as not just attending the divine, as not just marking its place of appearance, but as actually instantiating it in a way akin to the cult statue itself. This seems close to the account of mimesis that M. F. Burnyeat has given in a recent essay on Plato's Republic. Here its characteristic is understood (for example in storytelling) as the effacement of the narrator in order to realise the presence of the character which he enacts; the narrator disappears, as it were, into the character. There is something of this in Rykwert's reading of the column. On the other hand, despite the 'one central —
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analogy between the column and the body', a certain indeterminacy must, it seems, be conserved the caryatid, which for Rykwert is the column literalised, is understood as being too specifically anthropomorphic. Toward the end of the book are told that metaphor is 'this like terms in More of is of the formulation that.' generally thought specifically, of course, this is a simile, a form which Aristotle distinguished from other metaphoric usage account —
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of the distance it conserves between its two terms: it doesn't, he stressed, say that 'this' is 'that'. The condition this denotes, then, is one of similarity in difference, a condition which both achieves and holds back the relationship with the other. Mark Dorrian
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