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Chora: intervals in the philosophy of architecture
Vol. 1 (1994) i s s n 1198-449x
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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 Euclids Retreat
Caroline Dionne 1
2 The Breath on the Mirror: Notes on Ruskins 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-Clarks Circling the Circle of the
Caribbean Orange
Michel Moussette 197
Contents
viii
Preface
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
Preface
Preface
Preface
cinematic, and architectural spaces that have appeared in previous volumes of chora, including his own work on Tarkovskys Nostalgia in
volume 1, Juhani Pallasmaa offers a reading of Alfred Hitchcocks 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 Wittgensteins involvement in actual architectural
tasks and draws some unexpected and fascinating conclusions.
xii
Chora
V E RY
narrow wall
Caroline Dionne
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
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
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
Caroline Dionne
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, untrsformable 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 strge participati 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 hd (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
dimensi. 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 Dodgsons 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
Caroline Dionne
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, Carrolls 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
Caroline Dionne
If we follow Borgess 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 ones 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 Euclids 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 dont, but the mind, the imagination, is able to travel very fast,
9
Since the Hatter and the March Hare quarreled with Time, he wont do
a thing they ask (with the clock). Since then, it has always been six
oclock 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
Caroline Dionne
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
Caroline Dionne
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 ones surroundings and ones 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.
14
15
The Mock Turtle and the Griffin reenact the Lobster Quadrille. Drawing
by Lewis Carroll for the manuscript of
Alices Adventures under Ground (London:
Macmillan 1886)
Caroline Dionne
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
18
Caroline Dionne
notes
3
4
6
7
8
19
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
20
Caroline Dionne
18
19
20
21
21
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 1545.
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, Alices Adventures in Wonderland, in The Annotated Alice, 97.
24 Ibid., 99101.
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
Caroline Dionne
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
tralize space Hermes is able to set space in movement [mobiliser lespace]. See Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pense chez les grecs (Paris:
Franois Maspero 1969), 97101. 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 Borgess Fictions. See Borges, Death and the Compass, in Labyrinths (New York:
New Directions Books 1962), 87.
Merleau-Ponty uses this sentence from Pascals Penses: 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
34
35
36
37
38
24
Chora
26
Mark Dorrian
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 Polidoris 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 Marks, 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 mans 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 (17:21214).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
27
28
Mark Dorrian
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 Shelleys hoary German knight,
clad in armour, stooping over the infants cot, comes from Dantes Purgatory. (The Divine Comedy is, of course, a constant reference throughout Ruskins 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:
29
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
32
Mark Dorrian
Sculpted head,
Santa Maria Formosa
33
plague-winds 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 Ruskins 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 (19:3289).
Ruskins 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
Mark Dorrian
Mark Dorrian
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 mans 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
Mark Dorrian
Ruskins illustration of
the ignoble grotesque
(from CaRezzonico?)
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). Raphaels 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 Ruskins 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 Ruskins 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
Mark Dorrian
Pilaster, Ospadeletto
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 Ruskins 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 viewers 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 Ruskins
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 Ruskins 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
Mark Dorrian
44
Mark Dorrian
6
7
8
9
10
sity Press 1971), 37099; Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Ruskin and the Art of the
Beholder (Cambridge, ma, and London: Harvard University Press 1982),
11139; Raymond Fitch, The Poison Sky: Myth and Apocalypse in Ruskin
(Athens, oh, and London: Ohio University Press 1982), 197202; 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: Ruskins Insatiable Grotesque, Assemblage 32 (1997): 10825; Lucy Hartley,
Griffinism, Grace and All: The Riddle of the Grotesque in John Ruskins
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), 8194.
David Hume, The Life of David Hume, Esq: Written by Himself (London:
W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777), 78; 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 quun livre, cest toujours un enfant n avant terme, qui me
fait leffet dune crature assez rpugnante en comparaison de celle que
jaurais souhait mettre au monde, et que je ne me sens pas trop fier de
prsenter aux regards dautrui. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Reponses
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), 34; on
Venice as seductress/bride see John Rosenberg, The Darkening Glass: A
Portrait of Ruskins Genius (New York: Columbia University Press 1961),
7980.
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 19037). On the sirens
see also 19:1779 and 29:26272.
45
46
Mark Dorrian
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, 32956. 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: Ruskins Serpent
Imagery, in The Ruskin Polygon, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Faith M.
Holland (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1982), 2143.
The Diaries of John Ruskin, 18351898, 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 serpents coil (19:365).
Clegg, Ruskin and Venice, 1719.
Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, crits, 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 Longhenas CaRezzonico.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith
(Oxford: Clarendon 1961), 174.
47
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Chora
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these activities can be discerned in De Re Aedificatorias scheme for righting the walls of St Peters using nautical rigging and the inclusion of
sailors 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 Vitruviuss first-century bc treatise
De architectura, the acknowledged guide and foil for De Re Aedificatoria, and indeed much of Albertis tenth book follows closely Vitruviuss
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 Albertis 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
citys aqueducts and sewer systems, a claim further supported by a passage from Frontinuss 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 Vitruviuss 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 waters
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way Gods 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 systems 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 waters 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 Albertis 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 waters place of rest or the moon the source of tides and instead
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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 Albertis 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 waters difficulties
and in fact reinstates watery problematics passed over or easily resolved
by Vitruvius.
For Alberti, Vitruviuss 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 Aristotles 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 sponges 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 waters 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 Albertis treatise the experience
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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 Albertis discussions of
water, as when he uses Propertiuss 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 seas 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 Vitruviuss classical calm, was certainly not
unprecedented. Albertis 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, waters
difficulty can be traced back to its obscure origin; the book of Genesis
(1 and 2:425) 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 Gods anger but rather of His utilizing
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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. 8:2930).
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Waters difficulties, then, refuted Albertis attempts at rational deliberation of the processes of material generation and architectural production, precisely because, as he acknowledged, the seas 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 mariners 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 bodys relationship with celestial time. In Pierre Garcies book of
sailing instructions, Le grant routier (1520),22 the figures centre remains
the navel, but here is placed the pole star, the mariners celestial guide
since antiquity.23 Around him spins the dome of the heavens, whose stars
are depicted between windpoints in the figures outer ring. Mariners
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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
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Alberti at Sea
Pisan chart, showing the coast of Italy (late thirteenth century). Bibliothque 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 charts
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 ships
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
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Albertis 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 Albertis 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 rivers 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 mariners 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
Albertis minutes.
Similar though the two techniques appear, there are substantial differences. Albertis 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
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mundi, was broad, with even the smaller maps operating on a regional
level. One may instead want to consider the Descriptios 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 Albertis. Like the portolan,
it was an Italian innovation. While there is some evidence that such
books were in fact taken to sea, the isolarios origins lie as much in quattrocento humanisms 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 Buondelmontis 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 islands 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 Albertis 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 Albertis 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 Descriptios 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
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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.
Triangulations 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 surveying46 and which Alberti himself appears to acknowledge, were nothing of the sort. Triangulation of a ships 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 Cusanuss 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 books purpose, however, was not trivial, as
Alberti originally sent the work to Meliaduso dEste, 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 neoplatonisms interest in serio ludere,
or serious games. Cusanus, for whom games were primarily an ethical
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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. 30:1819). 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 eagles motion takes place within the sky,
the snakes 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. 143040),
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 rivers 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
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Alberti at Sea
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.
Albertis 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 maps representational conventions: a circular earth of three continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe, one for each of Noahs three sons, sep72
Michael Emerson
Alberti at Sea
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
ships 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 humanitys inhabitation. These ratios of the ship, then, like those of Cusanuss map, offer an
alternative response to the violent character of Albertis static aquatic
constructions.
But if Albertis 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
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Michael Emerson
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 worlds 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): 38394.
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, 2529 aprile
1972 (Rome: Accademia Nazional dei Lincei 1974): 12937; 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), 2327.
3 On the fountain, see Charles Burroughs, Alberti e Roma, in Leon Battista
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Alberti at Sea
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
76
Alberti, ed. Joseph Rykwert and Anne Engel (Milan: Electa 1994),
13457. 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): 530.
Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999).
See Rowlands introduction to Ten Books on Architecture, 56n41.
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), 7699.
Ten Books on Architecture, 8, preface, 96; Kirk, Raven, and Schofield,
Presocratic Philosophers, 91.
Ten Books on Architecture, 9.8.11618, on water clocks; and
10.3.1229.128, on drums, wheels, screws, pumps, organs, and an
odometer.
Aristotle Physics 3.5:205a3035. Translations from Aristotles 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), 1226.
The history of this development is treated extensively in Alexandre Koyr,
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 Albertis 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), 910.
Vitruvius, De architectura 8.23.98103.
In Profugiorum ab Aerumna (c. 1442), a temples roof symbolizes virtues
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), 318.
The splitting of the Red Sea is recounted in similarly militaristic terms
Michael Emerson
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Alberti at Sea
27
28
29
30
31
32
78
Vienna-Klosternburg Map Corpus (Leiden: E.J. Brill 1952), 25266; and more
recently, Tony Campbell, The Earliest Printed Maps, 14721500 (London:
British Library 1987), 3555. Campbell notes the similarity between Baltic
coastal outlines on nautical charts and those on Cusanuss map.
Bonaventure, The Souls 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), 40911. I have amended Hopkinss translations to retain the
original cosmographicus where he has it as geographer.
For Pauline Moffitt Watts, Cusanuss homo cosmographicus marks a profound shift in Christianitys 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 Barbra 1985), 51930.
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 Cusanuss 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), 13543. For Marjorie
ORourke Boyle the experience of place in Cusanuss 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): 180201. That
Cusanuss 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
Michael Emerson
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
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Alberti at Sea
Michael Emerson
81
The Rediscovery
of the Hinterland
Marc Glaudemans
Chora
Jakob van Ruysdael, View of Haarlem (162882). Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 62 cm.
Mauritshuis,The Hague
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 Ren
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 Spenglers observations from his Decline of the West
(191822).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).
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Marc Glaudemans
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 Husserls 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
Marc Glaudemans
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 didnt 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 others 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, Franois 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
Polignacs 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
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 citys 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 ber 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 citys 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 Polignacs
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
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Marc Glaudemans
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 citys
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 (460399 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,
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Detail of The Renewed Map of North Holland and West-Friesland by Jan van Jagen
(1778), after Joost Jansz Beeldsnijders 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 citys 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
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 couldnt 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 citys space, and in Husserls
terms, are connected to the Lebenswelt.
the analogy in the landscape: the garden
as a symbol of an earthly paradise
As with van Doorens 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
Marc Glaudemans
takenly as a place of endless leisure time,32 but the citys 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 Palladios villas as a classical masterpiece of architecture. In England, the love of the countryside beautifully coincided with an obsession for classical Italy, resulting in Chambers 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
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 Vitruviuss De architectura. The various parts and characteristics of
Huygenss 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 Huygenss 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.
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Marc Glaudemans
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 didnt think of
nature as an tat dme, a state of mind, because it was the permanent
background of everybodys 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 Valry, 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 doesnt 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),
67.
7 Ibid., 12.
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Marc Glaudemans
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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 ones
innocence: for example, in Chekhovs The Cherry Orchard and the Czech
movie The Garden (1995).
Erik de Jong, Natuur en Kunst: Nederlandse tuin- en landschapsarchitectuur, 16501740 (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, 17501960
(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 lespace urbanise est
moins celui o les constructions se suivent en ordre serr que celui dont
les habitants ont acquis une mentalite 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.
Prez-Gmez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, 10.
Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape, ed. Robert L. Rothwell
(New York: Shooting Star Press 1991), 1267.
Chora
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 Neros 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.
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George L. Hersey
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: Scribners 1963).
Labels added
The Colosseum
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 Civilt Romana
George L. Hersey
Figure 5 shows such an oval, shaped approximately to the Colosseums 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 Colosseums 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 Colosseums,
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 arcs 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. 9 An Egyptian
hieroglyphic fragment
plotting a curve using
normals, as in the preceding diagram. From
Jean-Philippe Lauer, La
Pyramide degrs:
Larchitecture (Cairo:
Imprimerie de lInstitut
franais darchologie
orientale 1936)
109
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 Colosseums. 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 Ptolemys 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 epicycles 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 planets position.
Oval planetary orbits were proven by Kepler, but they had been proposed for centuries. Philolaos the Pythagorean (fifth century bce), for
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George L. Hersey
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 planets 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 Joness 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 arenas 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 Colosseums basic
planimetric footprint was constructed on a 25-foot module, though, of
111
Fig. 11 The Colosseum, Rome (7082 CE), plan. From Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture
on the Comparative Method, 17th ed., revised by R. A. Cordingley (New York: Scribners 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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The Colosseum
George L. Hersey
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 Colosseums 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)
George L. Hersey
The Colosseum
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 dont 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 elses 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 buildings 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 monuments 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 buildings beauty. Sometimes they do this
quite literally.
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George L. Hersey
This has been happening to the Colosseum for centuries. I will here
define the Colosseums 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 Babylons 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 Jehovahs 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 hags wrinkles.
But my real point is that ruin-worshippers (unlike Milo and Helen)
actually like wreckage. When they weep at the architectural equivalent
of hags 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 Heemskercks self-portrait of 1553 (figure 14) was painted seventeen years after he had returned to Holland from Rome. The
artists 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 Platos 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 spard.39 The worlds 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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George L. Hersey
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 buildings
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 monuments 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 Colosseums 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. DAnnunzio
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
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George L. Hersey
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 Colosseums 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 Earths orb, of
Romes 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, Rmische Mitteilungen 100
(1993): 391, with earlier bibliography; note especially J.C. Golvin, LAmphithtre romain; Essai sur la thorisation de sa forme et de ses fonctions
(Paris: Diffusion de Boccard 1988).
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The Colosseum
4 Greg Wightman, The Imperial Fora of Rome: Some Design Considerations, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56 (March
1997): 6485, with copious earlier bibliography.
5 Alexandre Koyr, The Astronomical Revolution: Copernicus, Kepler,
Borelli, trans. R.E.W. Maddon (New York: Cornell University Press 1973).
6 Jones, Designing Amphitheatres, 394.
7 Koyr, The Astronomical Revolution, 234. See also Germaine Aujac,
Claude Ptolome, astronome, astrologue, gographe (Paris: ditions du
cths 1993); John Phillips Britton, Models and Precision: The Quality of
Ptolemys Observations and Parameters (New York: Garland 1992).
8 Koyr, 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, 567.
11 Thomas L. Heath, Greek Astronomy (London, 1932); D.R. Dicks, Early
Greek Astronomy to Aristotle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1970).
12 F. Nolte, Armillarsphre (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, LArchitettura [De Re Aedificatoria, 1485] (Milan:
Polifilo 1966) 2, 751.
16 Luciani, Il Colosseo, 10.
17 Confessions 6.8
18 Prudentius Contra Symmachum 2.10911101.
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, 579. This is another way to think of the Colosseum
as cosmic.
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125
The Colosseum
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, 2467.
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.
126
Chora
Urbino studiolo (c. 1476), Palazzo Ducale.View toward northeast corner, with ideal city at right.
Photo by author
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
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 Giorgios 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 Castigliones 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 Federicos mentors Pope Nicholas V, Piero de Medici,
and Leonello dEste which had been inspired by Petrarchs 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 dEste: 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
130
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 librarys 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 ones bedchambers, recommending that the Wifes Chamber should go into the
Wardrobe; the Husbands 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 dEste
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 Albertis advice
concerning the insulation of stone walls: If you wainscot your Walls
132
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 Federicos 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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Besides the [Ducal] library there is a small chamber, designated the studiolo,
in the Princes 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
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
Vespasianos 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 Dukes favourite authors, including Livy and St
Augustine.20 Later in the evening, the studiolo offered a convivial setting
for conversation, seemingly the days 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 Sforzas 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
Robert Kirkbride
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 Dukes 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 Virgils 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 Federicos ducal insignias are found elsewhere in the chamber, it
might be argued that the studiolo was completed following Federicos
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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142
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STUDIOLI
143
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 Federicos 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 Federicos
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
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 Federicos 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 works historia (or subject), he might well be
describing the principles behind the studioli:
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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 painters
richness will acquire favour.45
Robert Kirkbride
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 Federicos
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 ones 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 ones mindfulness to the construction site of ones 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
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[Synestors 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
ones 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 Ciceros 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: Ciceros 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 Federicos 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 Baldis 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 Bisticcis 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,
153
Gubbio. Floralegium
ornament at ceiling.
Photo by author
Robert Kirkbride
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 ones life.
In particular, memory became the ideal vehicle to facilitate the search
for an immutable, invisible God. Augustines 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
156
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157
A Renaissance example
of the architects 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 architects 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 3:1017, 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
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160
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161
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
Robert Kirkbride
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
Peters 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 minds 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
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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
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 Federicos 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 virt.
In Virgils Rome, virt represented military valour. From Federicos
vantage, the notion of virt 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 Federicos day, in fact, the
artifacts themselves were considered virt. Whether manifest as a painting or a room, a palace or a city, virt effected an empathy between
human emotions and the sensible realm of materials. As an integration
of the visible and invisible, virt 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 virt in the realm of human affairs.
Above all, virt 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
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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 others 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 8:78) and classical pedagogy (Ciceros 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
6
7
8
9
i0
i1
i2
i3
i4
i5
168
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
Kemps introduction to Albertis 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 Duchesss 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
Robert Kirkbride
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
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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 bodys 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 1015 (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 Prez-Gmez, 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, 90102.
40 See Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilsons Cabinet of Wonders (New York:
Pantheon Books 1995), 78.
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52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
174
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 198791), 3789.
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, 3.1415. 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, 4.110114. Also
Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 18.
Robert Kirkbride
176
Chora
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, Lethabys
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:
Diderots 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
Joanna Merwood
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 Lethabys 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
180
Joanna Merwood
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)
181
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 Mller 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 Lethabys
writing in order to facilitate a historical continuity between the magical
architecture of the past and the scientific building of today.10
Edward Burnett Tylors 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
Lethabys use of the comparative theory was related to Tylors 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 Spencers
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,
Lethabys 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. Tylors view that the several depart182
Joanna Merwood
ments of life are inextricably interwoven and interdependent in primitive societies was the basis of Lethabys 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. Spencers idea of the originary meaning
of form being lost through time, although remaining present as a trace,
is essentially the same as Lethabys.
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 Franois Lenormant, the French Assyriologist,
whose book Chaldean Magic (1874) was Lethabys principal source on
matters magical.19 Lenormants 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
Joanna Merwood
185
Joanna Merwood
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
Ruskins 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 Frazers religious totem was animated. Lethabys 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 Mandevilles
fourteenth-century Voyages and Travels and the Early English Romance
of Alexander. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Francesco Colonnas 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 Lethabys post-Ruskinian ideals and sought a renewal of classicism.40 Lethaby himself largely abandoned Gothicism in favour of a more abstract
187
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. From William Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891)
Joanna Merwood
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, Tylors 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 childs sand pit or a birds 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 Worringers Art as Human Psychology, published in Form in
189
190
Joanna Merwood
It is this position that has led many writers to describe Lethabys 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 Lethabys 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
alchemists ability to convert material from one form into another.
Throughout his writings Lethabys 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.
191
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 earths circumference, and Viollet-le-Ducs Dictionnaire de
larchitecture (222), concerning the medieval custom of painting a ceiling
to represent the sky.
4 Lethaby, Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, 6.
5 Edward Burnett Tylor (18321917) 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 (18441912) 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
(18541941) wrote The Golden Bough, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan
1890), building on Tylors 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 (18661943), review of F. Byron Jevons, An Introduction
to the History of Religion, in Lanne sociologique (1898). See Honigmann, Development of Anthropological Ideas, 165.
192
Joanna Merwood
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
194
Joanna Merwood
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 Scotts sources in German theories of Einfhlung see David Watkins 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 Wlfflins 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
18601900 (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
Chora
Yes. This is a Caribbean Orange or a winter circus. Everybody knows that circuses go south in the winter, right? So
its a winter circus. Its 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
years. Nor do we want to write years. So lets 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 lets 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 buildings 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
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 dont.6 Another quotation. To get the ingredients going. I
see in the formal aspect of past building works a constant concern with
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
Michel Moussette
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 lets 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. Wasnt 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 buildings
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 buildings 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
Michel Moussette
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.
Michel Moussette
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-Clarks 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
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
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
Bibliothque 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 youd 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. Lets name them. Non.u.mental. An.architecture.
Capitalization of first letter as permanent feature. Important projects
also forgotten. Lets 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 Riopelles observations on hunting can be found in
Riopelle, Oeuvres Vives, ed. Michel Ttreault (Montreal: Art International
208
Michel Moussette
10
1993). Riopelle spent most of his life painting wild geese. He now lives
peacefully on le-aux-Oies, where he roams around in a hearse.
From Donald Walls interview with Gordon Matta-Clark, in Gordon
Matta-Clarks 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 Users 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 Mathmatique 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-Clarks 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-Clarks Work in
Paris, October 85 (summer 1998): 6589.
Transforming elements into fields is a favourite strategy of what might
be named, quite inappropriately, Anti-Architecture. See Michel Parent,
Vauban (Paris: Fral 1971): 96104, for an illustration of Sbastien Le
Prestre de Vaubans dfense en profondeur, where elements are progressively multiplied and disseminated over a field. In a striking parallel in
hockey, the Buffalo Sabres Dominik Haek 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 Foucaults Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(New York: Pantheon 1977). Also see Michel de Certeaus commentary,
Micro-Techniques and Panoptic Discourses: A Quid pro Quo, in
Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis, mn: University of
Minnesota Press 1986).
209
bibliography
1943
Birth of Gordon Matta-Clark and his twin brother, Batan.
1963
Poetry studies at La Sorbonne, Paris.
19649 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 someones driveway but most of it is gutter space and curbstone. Beautiful photographs.
1974
Splitting and Bingo (Bin.go.ne).
1975
Days 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. Jacobs
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 Hitchcocks Rear Window
Juhani Pallasmaa
Chora
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 Jeffs 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. Thats 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
214
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;
215
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 dont you shut
up. Although the tenants have outside friends, they remain strangers to
each other. You dont know the meaning of the word neighbour, says
the strangled dogs 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 Ren Magrittes
painting La rponse imprvue (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
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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
Hitchcocks 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 Stellas (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 Hitchcocks
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 Hitchcocks
films are the metaphysics of a perfect, enclosed world. The fact is, I
practise absurdity quite religiously, he confesses.16
219
Jeff considers the significance of Mr Thorwalds kitchen tools while kissing Lisa
The murderers 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 viewers imagination. Peeping into the
apartments through the photographers telephoto lens and binoculars is
a bit like channel-swapping with a remote.18 Lisa Fremonts metaphors
Its opening night of the last oppressing week of L.B. Jeffries in a
cast, I bought the whole house, and The shows over for tonight,
as she pulls down the window shade in front of Jeffs 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 Ren Magrittes painting
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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 murderers 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 Jeffs
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 Jeffs 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 murderers 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 viewers imagination and feeling of suspense, for instance, in the sequence when Lisa is in the murderers apartment and the policemen finally arrive to save her.
223
Juhani Pallasmaa
Experiential
movements in the
courtyard and
through the block
(drawing by the
author)
Doyle
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, its 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 voyeurs gaze. The duality of the gaze
is expressed by Jeff as he suspects murder: Its 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 Velazquezs painting Las Meninas, in which the
location and role of the viewer have also been a subject of philosophical
contemplation.25
Were 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, Franois Truffaut notes when interviewing Hitchcock about
his intentions in Rear Window.26 Jeffs 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 pittoresques 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
228
Juhani Pallasmaa
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 protagonists 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 Descartess 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. Jeffs 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 Jeffs 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 spectators 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 Weve become a race of Peeping Toms, warns
Stella. The way you look into peoples 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 nurses 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. Im not much on rear-window ethics,
replies Lisa to his semirhetorical question. At first both Lisa and Stella
disapprove of Jeffs snooping (window shopper, accuses Stella) but
later become keen peepers themselves. The murderer realizes he is being
229
Juhani Pallasmaa
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 Jeffs (the
spectators) 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
Jeffs 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 Jeffs 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 Benthams 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 Benthams panopticon had its
predecessor in Louis Le Vaus menagerie at Versailles. At the centre of
231
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 Jeffs binoculars. The
Peeping Tom is basically the photographers room, and its spatial location in the apartment block enables the ensuing situation. The set Rear
Windows 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 Paramounts 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
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Juhani Pallasmaa
and doors, and the walls in Jeffs 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 murderers laundry parcel) would not have been possible in
natural light.37 The artificial lighting for this colossal set required all of
Paramounts 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 Foucaults well-known analysis; his picture of the cells in the
ideal panopticon-prison corresponds exactly to Hitchcocks 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 Windows panopticon.
233
Edward Hopper,
Eleven A.M. (1926)
painting themes in
R E A R W I N D OW
Juhani Pallasmaa
Juhani Pallasmaa
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 Jeffs 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 Jeffs 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 Woolrichs short
story of the same name, to which Hitchcock added some authentic material about two macabre crimes; thus the films 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
wifes 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 audiences
suspense by creating a smoke screen of macabre humour: And for me,
suspense doesnt have any value if its not balanced by humour.45
Innocent macabre comments by Jeff and Stella inveigle the audience into
imagining that a womans 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! Thats
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; Shes scattered all over
town. A leg in the East River ; and The only way anybody would
get that ring [Stellas 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
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Juhani Pallasmaa
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
Hitchcocks 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 Hitchcocks toast49
notes
i Interview by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinma
190 (May 1967). Quoted in Franois 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 mayors office, a filmmaker today may use a real address if the property owners permission is
obtained. Correspondence between Peter Reed (Museum of Modern Art,
New York) and the author, 13 January 1997 and 12 November 1998.
3 Franois Truffaut, Hitchcock (London: Paladin Grafton Books 1984),
31920.
4 Walter Benjamin, Naples, in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York:
Schocken Books 1978), 167.
5 Paul Virilio, Lhorizon ngatif (Paris: Galile 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 McCalls magazine two years after
completing Rear Window. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and
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Juhani Pallasmaa
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
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Juhani Pallasmaa
244
Chora
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 Gods 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
Alberto Prez-Gmez
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. 41029 ce), and
Isidore of Seville (Liber numerorum, late sixth to early seventh century ce).
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Luca Paciolis 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 Platos 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
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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
deBarbari, 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 deBarbari offers
Jacopo deBarbari,
Portrait of Luca
Pacioli in His Study
(c. 1498). Museo
di Capodimonte,
Naples
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 Euclids 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 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.
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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 Paciolis 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 Paciolis 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 Francescas 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
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was exemplified by the artists and the alchemists 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 Plinys 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 Paciolis 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
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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 Pieros Trattato dabaco and in Paciolis works, however, a greater
interest in abstract problems is evident. In the section on geometry of his
Trattato dabaco, for example, Piero deals exclusively with the measurement of abstract polygons and polyhedra. Then, following Euclids Elements, he explains how to measure the five regular and other irregular
solids inscribed in a sphere. In Pieros 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 Paciolis more elaborate discussion. Piero, commenting
on Euclids 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.
Pieros second mathematical treatise, devoted exclusively to the five
regular bodies, continues to discuss mathematical problems in abstract
terms. Unlike his Trattato dabaco, the Libellus de Quinque Corporibus
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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 Platos 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 tetrahedrons 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 Euclids 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 Euclids Opera. This relationship, as we
shall see, is also crucial in the development of his arguments in the Divina proportione.
paciolis
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
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259
D I V I N A P R O P O RT I O N E
Although it seems less focused than the Summa, Paciolis 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 Pieros text on the five regular bodies translated into volgare.
Paciolis 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
Paciolis 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,
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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 Copernicuss 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. Paciolis 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
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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
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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
267
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 Paciolis 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 craftsmans 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 Pythagorass discovery of the proportions of the right268
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Paciolis 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 Paciolis 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 architects 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
271
The frontispiece of
Solomons Temple, from
Divina proportione
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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 Paciolis 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 Paciolis analogy between linear perspective and proportion and
underscores his belief in perspectives general usefulness for architecture.
Significantly, he notes the irrational distance between the eyes and the
back of the head (the primal equilateral triangles 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 Gods vision during the fifteenth century.
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Examples of letters
from Paciolis alphabet,
from Divina proportione
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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 Paciolis 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 proporcin (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 dor; 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. DOoge
(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.
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282
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22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
283
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
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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
62 Ibid., 166.
63 Ibid., 1701.
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 Keplers 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 lart 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 Leonardos 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 Drers in Unterweisung der Messung (Nrnberg, 1525), and Drer was certainly influenced by Pacioli.
66 See Pascale Barthlemy, Le verre dans la Sedacina totius artis alchimie de
Guillaume Sedacer, in Alchimie art, histoire et mythes (Paris: s.e.h.a
1995), 20333.
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 (122684), was
thought to be the author of various alchemical treatises during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
286
Chora
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, darber 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 dont harm the other man but only yourself.3
(Tractatus 5.47321: Occams 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
Architectures 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
David Theodore
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
Construction drawing
of the variable volume
combustion propeller
engine. From Wijdeveld,
Ludwig Wittgenstein
292
David Theodore
293
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. Schopenhauers as which for instance. Sometimes this would
make for much more comfortable and clearer expression, but if someone
feels it is archaic (altvterisch), 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
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David Theodore
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
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David Theodore
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 Nll) 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 Nll,
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,
Beethovens house in Schwarzspaniergasse in Vienna.
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David Theodore
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 ones 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.
Niedersterreich 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
Still from Jarmans film Wittgenstein, showing British and American variants of Sraffas gesture.
From Jarman and Eagleton, Wittgenstein
300
David Theodore
to architect Paul Engelmann and played clarinet. He published a Wrterbuch fr 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 Htteldorf, 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
Christopher Woods 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
303
304
David Theodore
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, Goethes 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 Jamess Varieties of Religious Experience,
Augustines Confessions, Tolstoys Gospel in Brief and Hadji Murad,
Hebels Schatzkaestlein, Renans Le peuple dIsrel, George Foxs Journal, and Dr Johnsons Prayers and Meditations.
Among the books he brought with him to England as a student were a beautifully made facsimile edition of Leonardo da Vincis 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
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 Werksttte and provided with new titles that pleased him better.60
David Theodore
3 Quoted in Rush Rhees, Postscript, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Littlefield 1981),
2245.
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), 689. 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 Wittgensteins 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): 3647. 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 Wittgensteins
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, 1718.
9 Waismann, Wittgenstein, 18. Likewise, he disapproved of G.E. Moores
cooperating on the book The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (1942); see
308
David Theodore
10
11
12
13
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
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.
Cornishs 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 Freuds 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), 66488.
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgensteins 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 19121914 (London: Basil Blackwell
1990), 5.
Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 7.
Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 27.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 42.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 6970.
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, 2345.
Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 30.
Basil Reeve, quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, 94.
Monk, Wittgenstein, 251.
Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 182.
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 38.
David Theodore
312
Chora
Dorian Yurchuk
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
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 Smollets character, Lydia Melford, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps, that emulate the noon-day sun.10
316
Dorian Yurchuk
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 bodys senses were stimulated, all at
once. In addition to Ranelaghs 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 Strangers 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 oclock.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 oclock.17 It
became fashionable to arrive at Ranelagh at about eleven or twelve
317
oclock 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 throngd. At least fifteen hundred well dressd 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 Smollets character Matthew Bramble has a different opinion of this arrangement: One half of the company are following one anothers tails, in an eternal circle; like so many blind asses
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Dorian Yurchuk
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 IIs 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
Jamess 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 Harriss Lexicon Technicum, peo320
Dorian Yurchuk
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 Websters 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 ones 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 ones actual position in life be not
just altered but contradicted outright. Traditionally, carnival represented
321
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Dorian Yurchuk
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 ones Reputation is at Stake, no ones
Character is responsible for it.77
MASQUERADES
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 conceald by being maskd, 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 peoples 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
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Dorian Yurchuk
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 ones appearance is closely tied to ones 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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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
Dorian Yurchuk
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 writers 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 others 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 ones inhibitions and act with impunity. The crucial difference lies in the scope of
ones 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 ones 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 internets 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 Websters 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
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, Websters Universities Dictionary Unabridged (New York:
Library Guild 1940), 1205.
3 Giles Worsley, Architectural Drawings of the Regency Period 17701837
(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: 17421803 (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 Strangers 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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Dorian Yurchuk
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, 17941795: 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.
Websters Universities Dictionary, 58.
Giles Worsley, I Thought Myself in Paradise: Ranelagh Gardens and its
Rotunda, Country Life (15 May 1986): 13804.
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.
Websters Universities Dictionary, 984.
335
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.
Websters 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.
Websters Universities Dictionary, 1251.
Sands, Invitation to Ranelagh, 50.
Cassels 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.
Dorian Yurchuk
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
338
Chora
Caroline Dionne
At the age of six months, Caroline Dionne sailed across the Atlantic ocean
twice. She cherishes her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Universit
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):
2751; 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
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 Universit de Montral.
Juhani Pallasmaa
Juhani Pallasmaa was born in Hmeenlinna, 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 Prez-Gmez
Dr Alberto Prez-Gmez 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
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