EMULATION

Orphée Triomphant!

2012-02-28T17:35:00.001-05:00

Congratulations to Craig Trompeter and Ellen Hargis for bringing Marc-Antoine Charpentier's La Descente d'Orphée aux Enfers marvelously back to life in Chicago; and to Russell Wagner, maker of cellos, periaktoi, and beautiful music. It was an absolute joy of a collaboration, and maybe only in Chicago could such serendipity happen.

Some photos, for flavor....

only in Chicago

before the dance

Ellen Hargis, bringing it all together
(foreground, L to R: myself, Ellen, Meriem Bahri, Craig Trompeter)

what the critics said:
Chicago Tribune

New York Times

Chicago Classical Review

Opera III

2012-02-11T15:31:00.001-05:00

THE INTEGRATION OF THE ARTS

on designing sets for the Haymarket Opera Company of Chicago’s upcoming performance of Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphèe aux Enfers:

http://haymarketopera.org/events.html

Serlio's Tragic Stage

The stage buildings for it [Tragedy] should be those of characters of high rank, because disastrous love affairs, unforeseen events and violent and gruesome deaths (as far as one reads in ancient tragedies, not to mention modern ones) always occur in the houses of noblemen, Dukes, great Princes or even Kings. Therefore (as I said) in scenery of this sort there should only be buildings that have a certain nobility,…

Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Volume I, Books I-V, trans. V. Hart and P. Hicks, Yale, 1996, Book II, p.88

Opera was the ne plus ultra of the Baroque integration of the arts, and the development of opera sets across the seventeenth century was closely linked to developments in architecture and painting. While architects designed sets based on sixteenth-century techniques of perspective, they were also developing real spaces that deployed the illusionism of the theater; ancient versions of these perspectival sets had been described briefly in the Roman architect Vitruvius’ treatise, and were later codified graphically in Sebastiano Serlio’s Renaissance treatise. For Serlio each set—Tragic, Comic, or Satiric—represented the essential character of each type of drama. Tying words to images had been Roman as well: Horace had aphorized ut pictura poesis (as in painting, so in poetry), which painters used to lay claim to the status of poets in paint. This fluid relationship between words and images was paralleled by the contemporary concern for integrating words and music; if the vox humana was the paradigm of instrumental music, words were made more meaningful and affective by being set to music. So poets painted in words, and music was the expressive vehicle for conveying as much the sense as the beauty of the words. As music reached new heights of expressive potential it became natural to think of it as even the primary conveyor of meaning:

I have been more sensibly, fervently, and zealously captivated, and drawn into divine raptures and contemplations, by those unexpressible rhetorical, uncontroulable perswasions, and instructions of musick’s divine language, than ever yet I have been, by the best verbal rhetorick.

–Thomas Mace, Musick’s Monument, London, 1676, p.118 cited in H. James Jensen, The Muses’ Concord: Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts in the Baroque Age Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976p.69-70

The idea that images could metaphorically convey the worlds of words and ideas made the visual arts poetic and rhetorical. Seventeenth-century paintings, rooted in this Renaissance outlook, were illusionistic, affecting, and narrative; the great debate of the period was only on whether painting was more like epic poetry (big gestures, lots of figures) or tragedy (focused action and fewer figures). Charpentier’s sojourn in Rome and Italy no doubt made him alive to this articulate visual word.

Charles Le Brun's Expressions

The seventeenth century set great store by the power of images to convey specific messages; character could be read in the gestures of a hand and the expressions of a face; Louis XIV’s Director of the Arts, Charles Le Brun, had in fact provided artists a catalogue of characteristic expressions. The settings of paintings and operas themselves were understood to be articulate, structuring and informing the painted or performed plot; Charpentier would have been too late in Rome to know Poussin (he died in 1665), but that artist’s calculated landscapes influenced his compatriot and Poussin’s brother-in–law Gaspard Dughet, whose frescoed landscapes find echoes here; the influential Salvator Rosa also has something to do with the rocky underworld. But since imagery was also static, it had to convey multiple moments in the story—hinting at what came before and what was to come after. For us then each set, although distinct in character, also links to the other, bridging the disparate worlds of the drama’s two acts—hopefully not unlike Charpentier’s articulate music.

Detail of the Underworld Set, Orphèe

PS: Pastiche: Good thing or bad thing?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/9032518/The-Enchanted-Island-Metropolitan-Opera-Live-in-HD-review.html

Opera II

2012-01-20T21:11:00.000-05:00

on designing sets for the Haymarket Opera Company of Chicago’s upcoming performance of Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphèe aux Enfers:

http://haymarketopera.org/events.html

If the classical visual artist sometimes feels out of step with the world, it’s good to remember the world is complex, and there are many strands of Beauty being woven while the thread is being unraveled elsewhere. Craig Trompeter, Ellen Hargis and the rest of the Haymarket Opera company are proof of the talent and energy in the Early Music world, and their wonderfully counter-cultural project of staging Baroque operas in Chicago has afforded me the privilege of providing the sets—something, it is worth remembering, architects and artists once did as a matter of course, but do so rarely today.

*********

We know Piranesi as a printmaker, but he signed many of his prints Architetto (or Architetto Veneziano, or Venetus Architectus), and his earliest perspectival compositions may have been made for the stage; one wonders about the plays or operas he had in mind for his Carceri, or Prisons. The architect who transformed Torino in the eighteenth century, Filippo Juvarra, spent his first years in Rome after winning the Accademia di San Luca’s Concorso Clementino designing the theater and stage sets for Cardinal Ottoboni (patron also of Handel, Scarlatti, Corelli, Vivaldi and Caldara). Louis-Jean Desprez was an architect and painter who designed many spectacular sets for Sweden’s Drottningholm Theater (if he was little rewarded for it in the end). The painter of ruins Hubert Robert also designed gardens inspired by his paintings, but it is less well known that he designed the interiors of a theater at Versailles.

In the seicento the English diarist John Evelyn wrote of Bernini that he “gave a public opera wherein he painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, writ the comedy, and built the theatre." It is often said that Pietro da Cortona’s figures borrow poses from the stage, but it is just as true that performers of the time borrowed expressions and gestures from paintings and sculptures; Cortona, not coincidentally, designed the entry to the theater at the Palazzo Barberini. The fourth great seicento Roman architect, Carlo Rainaldi, was also a very accomplished musical composer in the spirit of Carissimi.

Why this excursus down Mnemosyne lane? Because in a time when there is precious little art left in architecture, a well-rounded architect can, as architect/artists once did, find challenging, rewarding things to do outside of mainstream practice. If the modern classical architect might be inclined to make everything—table, coffee pot, spoon—look like a miniature building, his or her Renaissance and Baroque predecessor (who was likely a painter or sculptor as well) was versatile enough (grazie a disegno) to invent solutions to disparate things according to their natures. Sebastiano Serlio’s architectonic Tragic and Comic Stages were accompanied by the oft-forgotten woodland Satyric Stage; Serlio, it should be remembered, trained under the painter/architect Peruzzi. It should also be noted that architects in the past, vis-à-vis their modern counterparts, actually designed relatively few buildings, although these were often more time-consuming, and vastly more substantial, than the modern building enterprise today. They spent the rest of their time engaged in a host of cultural activities, for which Evelyn’s Bernini is the paradigm. As for painters, maybe nowhere else today is the pastoral landscape, or perspectival colonnade, or Salvator Rosa-esque grotto as acceptable as on the stage.

Is this artist/architect ideal a reasonable expectation, or even aspiration, today? The answer might be, will there be any culture left without it? Competent buildings, despite their recent dearth, are still fairly easy to accomplish. Great buildings, instead, are rarer breeds, and an artist/architect who dreams of great things in a mediocre age must perforce direct her or his energies to accomplishing something of greatness, even if it can’t be bricks and mortar. That work might remain on paper, but it might also manifest itself in ephemera, or on canvas, or in models. And on the stage.

Opera I

2012-01-07T08:30:00.000-05:00

Emulating Artists’ Lives

Emulation isn’t just about style or maniera, but also about looking to artists of the past for the kinds of things they engaged in, emulating their careers as much as their art, learning from how they juggled and interwove disparate disciplines. Disegno—meaning both drawing and design—was the thing that allowed painters to become architects, architects to design figurative buildings, and everyone to collaborate in that greatest of all collaborative exercises: opera.

As I’ve said previously, there is seemingly little space for real classicism in the visual arts today; but in the Early Music world there are legions of wonderfully accomplished performers and impresarios who are making beautiful music live again. I’m thrilled to be working with some of those people, the Haymarket Opera Company of Chicago, on designing sets for their upcoming performance of Charpentier’s La Descente d’Orphèe aux Enfers:

http://haymarketopera.org/events.html

As we develop the sets I'll say more about periaktoi, illusion, and narrative scenography.....

Does classicism have a future?

2011-12-31T10:34:00.002-05:00

It all depends on how you define its past, and what you think of our present….

“To which the retort is: maybe it is precisely because professors of the classics have refused to engage with modern theory and persisted in viewing the ancient world through rose-tinted spectacles (as if it was a culture to be admired) that the subject is in imminent danger of turning into an antiquarian backwater.”

—Mary Beard, “Do the Classics Have a Future?” New York Review of Books, January 12, 2012, [my italics]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/do-classics-have-future/?pagination=false

The above quote is from a consideration of the state of the classics in culture and education today. The author is in fact attempting a defense or, perhaps better, an optimistic projection, of the classics’—that is, knowledge of Latin and Greek—role in our culture, and she ends with a rather elitist argument for the classics as the province of a small cadre of scholars, and a celebration of their capacity to induce wonder. One wonders, then, why that pleasure should be reserved for a small few (which would not include me, since I was unfortunate enough to attend Catholic school immediately after the Second Vatican Council in a diocese all too eager to embrace the Council’s baby with the bathwater approach to Latin), but I am much more troubled by the parenthetical statement in the quote that opens this posting: as if it was a culture not to be admired?! If we do not find things to admire in the past, why bother studying it? Sure, the Romans could be awful, but they could also be just, rational, creative, adventurous, and ambitious. They gave us law and architecture as we know it, multi-culturalism, and a civilizing habit that underpins European cities from London to Paris. Collectively they could be ruthless, individually they could be the epitomes of tolerance, reason, and fairness. If the “great man” theory of history has lost its luster, it is no wonder we judge the past on its collective actions, and generally the worst of them.

But since I should be blogging about the arts, lets turn to the classical today. Perhaps never in the last thirty years has it been in such crisis—there is currently no great voice of support for it, there is overwhelming cultural momentum against it, and even many of its supposed supporters have lost their sense of what defines it. I would argue it has something to do with the fact that we have not connected the dots between the greatest achievements of our past—the Old Master tradition, if you like, in the arts, or the Renaissance tradition in architecture—and our modern aspirations (do we even have any?). At the end of one year and on the cusp of a new, I will leave this as a question, and offer the floor to other voices from the recent and remote past for consideration (NB: they can not all be reconciled). Beatum Annum Novum.

If you know your history,

Then you would know where you coming from,...

—Bob Marley, Buffalo Soldier

Sooner or later we learn to throw the past away

History will teach us nothing

—Sting, History Will Teach Us Nothing

History can not teach us, but we can learn from it.

—Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column

Evening comes, I return home and enter into my study; and up there I change out of that daily attire, full of mud and grime, and I put on refined, dignified clothing; and thus changed I allow myself to enter into the ancient courts of men of old where, affectionately received by them, I partake of that food that is mine alone and for which I was born; where I am not embarrassed to speak with them, and inquire of them the reasons for their actions; and they, by virtue of their humanity, respond to me; and I don’t feel for four hours of time any boredom: forgetting every anxiety, not fearing poverty, not worrying about death; I am completely transformed through them.

—Niccolò Macchiavelli, letter to Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513 [my translation]

[I treat] history as a mirror, with the help of which I can adorn my own life by imitating the virtues of the men whose actions I have described. It is though I could talk with the subjects of my Lives and enjoy their company every day, welcome him as my guest,... and select from his career those events which are the most important and the most enduring to record. As Sophocles has written, “What greater joy could you attain than this?” and what could do more to raise the standards by which we live?

—Plutarch, Life of Timoleon

Diogenes & Alexander

GROUNDHOG DAY

2011-12-17T14:15:00.004-05:00

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Going Back

nostalgia

ORIGIN late 18th cent. (in the sense [acute homesickness] ): modern Latin (translating German Heimweh ‘homesickness’ ), from Greek nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain.’

—OED

Adam Ant

Since the members of the jury of the erstwhile classical prize known as the Driehaus Award (this year’s winner, Michael Graves), along with the I[C]A+A (see my earlier post), are in a mood to lead us back to the ‘80’s and Postmodernism, I’ve decided to relax and go along for the nostalgic ride—if only because pop music back then was so much more interesting than it is today. And perhaps, in a certain way, those tantalizing glimpses back to the past that PoMo offered as an antidote to sterile Modernism did open up the doors to a whole series of nostalgias that, in a few cases, led to more serious stuff. I think about my own trajectory from juvenile Postmod devotee to young classicist as, to be frank, partly tied to the romantic classicism in certain strands of early ‘80’s alternative music, some of which I offer here for your aural and visual retro-stimulation:

OMD, Souvenir http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swzp1eeOMj4

Ultravox, Vienna http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9WdUgn0XkU&ob=av2e

Adam Ant, Stand and Deliver http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPgHbt0ODr4

After all, the Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm Maclaren went on (after an interlude founding Bow-Wow-Wow—loved them!) to record an opera-inspired album (Fans). Not wholly coincidentally, I’m currently designing stage sets for a Baroque opera company in Chicago (about which more anon):

http://haymarketopera.org/events.html

Like the movie Groundhog Day, perhaps, if we relive the ‘80’s, we can get it right this time ‘round and not be blindsided again by the neo-Modernism that was lurking just behind Graves’ pink pediments. Perhaps too, like the music industry over-managing the trajectory of pop music—giving us formulaic edge (Lady Gaga) instead of real edge (Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics)—we can avoid this time the facile acquiescence to the needs of the development industry that New Urbanism has succumbed to. In other words, we should listen to more of these folks

Lena Lovich (Lucky Number)
Nina Hagen (African Reggae)
Flying Lizards (Money)
Siouxsie and the Banshees (Arabian Knights)
Sue Saad and the Next (Young Girl)

and less of Bananarama and the Go-Go’s (not that I didn’t appreciate the latter once upon a time).

So, thanks to the folks at the Driehaus Prize for making me feel young again! And here’s to the guys in the tricorn hats. Like Sid said, I did it My Way:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIXg9KUiy00

Appendix: more Nostalgia Inducing Elements (thanks Colin)

The Stranglers, All Roads Lead to Rome http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q--Dg2fZvtA

Roman Holiday, Don’t Try to Stop It http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMXYcPnySxg

PS: Why I love my generation:
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/the_performance_that_got_elvis_costello_banned_from_americas_favorite_laten

In Memoriam

2011-11-27T13:59:00.000-05:00

Lux Feminæ: Montserrat Figueras 1942-2011

On November 23, 2011 the world lost the presence of the magical Catalan chanteuse Montserrat Figueras, wife of Jordi Savall and co-founder with him of Hesperion XXI, interpreter par excellence of the Early Music vocal repertoire—especially those haunting, exotic sounds she called up from the ancient sibyls and female saints, but also Sephardic grandmothers and Baroque composers. Her and Jordi’s label currently features her visage and voice on their home page:

http://www.alia-vox.com/

My wife and I had the good fortune to see the two of them at Ravinia a few summers ago, and she was (unlike so many others) even more powerfully haunting and gently commanding on stage than on their magical discs. While she left a raft of recordings that will comfort us as long as they last, she is one of those few artists about whom those who love them feel as if they know them somehow, and I for one will miss her like a dear friend. No doubt her equally brilliant and compelling husband is wracked with emotions no one else can comprehend, but for those of us who have followed them at least since the film Tous Les Matins du Monde there is the sense that M. Sainte Colombe embodied a presence of that loss.

The angels have gained a voice only the earth could generate.

Not to Praise, But to Bury

2011-11-16T15:56:00.001-05:00

In response to some of the conference supporters who questioned my questioning of the conference Reconsidering Postmodernism, I offer this from Architectural Record:

Old Debates for a New Era at Postmodernism Conference

November 14, 2011

An aesthetic that mined the past gets a historical consideration of its own at a New York City symposium.

By Fred A. Bernstein

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/2011/11/Postmodernism-Conference.asp

“Lumping the classicists together with Robert Venturi—whose use of columns and architraves, even its supporters concede, can be superficial and ironic—seems a disservice to both.

Yet several speakers claimed that postmodernism made it possible for classical architecture to flourish in the United States and England. “Postmodernism allowed for that opening; you have to be thankful for that,” said the London classicist Demetri Porphyrios. But it seems likely that the opposite is also true—that postmodernism, as popularized by Venturi, Charles Moore, and Philip Johnson, made any use of classical orders suspect.”

I rest my case.

Cheap Tricks

2011-10-25T15:42:00.001-04:00

Up In Smoke: Anish Kapoor’s Venetian Wisp

Visiting Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice recently unfortunately involved dealing with “artist” Anish Kapoor’s installation “Ascension,” and apparently my lack of appreciation is actually matched for once by the critical press:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/how-anish-kapoors-venice-installation-went-up-in-smoke-2291993.html

This trite macchina of mystery is really just a cheap trick, and speaks to the poverty of thought in so much modern culture. Indeed, the great burden of our time is not modernity, but mediocrity, and Kapoor’s mechanistic misfortune only looks the more trivial when juxtaposed to Palladio’s solid masterpiece, not to mention next to the often bizarre juxtapositions of modern and traditional life that abound in this wonderfully strange city. Indeed, when I commented to the staff at the church’s campanile that the work was “strange,” they sardonically replied that there are lots of strange people that pass through their doors, and when I followed with a more critical comment on the lack of respect for the sacred space the work evidenced they simply agreed.

Leaving the church and finding a barge with concrete mixers churning by only made the insipid installation’s shock value seem like little more than schlock value. And the strange scene of a massive cruise ship slipping by the edge of the Fondamenta Nani near San Trovaso was more distressingly poignant than any Rube Goldberg contraption that The Bean’s creator could come up with.

Would that we still, instead, made real macchine like the Salute....

Rubens and Rome

2011-10-06T15:02:00.000-04:00

EMULATION CHAINS

It’s not for nothing that I chose my sketchbook drawing of Rubens’ Descent from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral as the current background for the blog: it’s both one of my most ambitious Old Master sketches, and a testament to the Flemish master’s ability to combine Baroque energy with Roman gravitas. Happily, this weekend I found myself in S. Trinità dei Monti at the top of the Spanish Steps, and looked more closely at Daniele da Volterra’s earlier treatment of the same subject, long held to be (before its degradation) one of the perhaps three finest paintings in Rome (along with Raphael’s Transfiguration and Domenichino’s Last Communion of St. Jerome). I hadn’t paid so much attention before to what was undoubtedly Rubens’ source, or point of departure, for his canvas: the fame of the Roman fresco a natural challenge for the talented foreigner; the chain, if apocryphal, leading back to a possible idea of Michelangelo’s; the mastery of bodies in space, especially the robust figure extended over the transverse beam of the cross—a clear borrowing, albeit reversed, in the Antwerp painting; the narrative juxtaposition of the deposition and mourning; and the challenge of da Volterra’s foreshortening of Christ’s weighty, pallid body.

It is telling to note what Rubens’ changed in departing from his model. His canvas shows a more rustic, or less abstract (and so more credible) cross, and equally credible rustic ladders. He has reduced the number of figures somewhat, and reintegrated Mary’s mourning with the action. A soldier (Longinus?) no longer supports Christ’s body on the latter (an aversion to what armies had done to his beloved Antwerp?), but rather the Apostle John. He rejects the virtuoso display of foreshortening for a more natural, if contrapposto, sagging of the Savior’s body into the arms and sheet or pall that supports him. For all of its artifice Rubens’ revision of his model is more focused, natural, earthy and powerful; but it is more graceful at the same time. Art had moved on from the post-Michelangesque agendas of the mid-sixteenth century, and this canvas, on which he lavished so much care, is Rubens’ manifesto of a new art, rooted in past masters but exceeding them, only partly on their own terms.

Postmodern Follow-up

2011-09-21T02:48:00.000-04:00

Thoughts from an old friend

I’ve heard from several people sustaining my piece on the odd notion of Reconsidering Postmodernism; one in particular, artist Anthony Visco, offered a more substantive lament, which I am posting below. Anthony was somebody I mentioned in my piece, and he was an important influence on my work as I struggled toward something more serious and classical. His thoughts may resonate with others as well; please offer any responses to him directly….

Life: Before and After the PoMo Party

When I first received the notice of the conference I thought, how sad, do we have to go back?

Was PoMo the end of something or the beginning of something? Or, was it simply a bridge for the Decons? It has become more apparent that it is still too soon to know either. If it was anything it was the beginning of the end of trying to fit classicism into modernism, mixing a Mondrian with a Rubens. It didn’t work.

I sometimes look at our modernism and post modernism as our “mannerism” much like that period between the Renaissance and Baroque, or, Counter Reformation, but with only less bravura in the works.

As a church artist I do not find this ironical or coincidental that this mannerism should parallel Vatican II just as the first mannerism followed the Council of Trent. After all, both were and remain a period of reform. In fact, when we hear Pope Benedict XVI say it is time to “reform the reform” we are hearing the new beginnings of what I see as a counter reformation in art and architecture. We can already see this already in the church architecture of Thomas Gordon Smith, Duncan Stroik, and James Mc Crery. Note bene: remember that modernism was the first time the Church had ever followed a secular movement. Now as it frees itself, it will be much quicker than in the secular world where political correctness continues to shackle and condemn the content and origins of any Western cannons, either in art or architecture.

I never planned or wanted to be a postmodernist, nor did I consider myself to have ever been one. Coming back from a Fulbright in Florence, I was trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I was and continue to do the best I could with what I had, which was no classical training whatsoever. So if the work looked “mannerist”, which it was often accused of being, I couldn’t help it. Often it looked awkward and not in sync with the architectural context, as the work was either for a modernist church of drywall and exit signs or renovated post Vatican II 19th century churches that had received a gift and chose not to purchase something from “church depot”, or the catalogue of religious goods stores. My work most times looked inappropriate in both places, as I never worked with the architects living or dead. And so, for the classicists, I wasn’t classical enough; for the modernists, I was a moribund copyist trying to revive the past.

Things started to change drastically once I met John Blatteau, then President of the Classical America Philadelphia Chapter. Aside from being introduced to other architects and a library of books, like Ware’s American Vignola, and of course, Drafting of the Orders, I learned I was not only not crazy but I wasn’t alone! We would talk about the sisterhood of art and architecture and how wonderful it would be if someday we two could do a church together, something I imagined and drew over and over again. Sadly the PoMo years passed by and church design commissions where all around but none came our way. Still stuck on post Vatican II rhetoric and purposely confusing the word “contemporary” with “modernist,” Philadelphia failed to build any church that would lead us out of the desert. And so for forty years we wandered watching the work given to the “hired hand” again and again. All the while the exit out was right there. I regret for John, and myself, as well as all the others capable of pointing the way out, never having received that opportunity as we watched the Archdiocese of Philadelphia chose one bad architect after another, and over a dozen new churches be built that everybody continues to hate. It all would remind me of what a teacher once warned me that it was “difficult to be talented and desire to make high art in a low art period”. “This”, he added, “is a low art period.”

During those years I would go to the foundry to work on my reliefs for Bryn Mawr Presbyterian, watching large works be cast for many Pomo buildings around the country Yet the PoMo architects would walk in the foundry to approve another sculptor’s work in progress for one of their buildings, see someone (me) or not see (me) working on a Christ figure or an Assumption relief, and would dismiss it based on narrative content. In fact it was because of this issue of narrative content alone that no Pomo architect ever wanted to include my work (or any else like it).

After drafting the Orders, I could not take PoMo work too seriously. I knew better. It was like studying anatomy for me, and I took to it instantly. Measuring a column by diameters was no different than measuring a body by its number of heads (the common unit in anatomical cannons of proportions); there was such direct correlation between the measuring of the orders and that of the human figure that it became all the more obvious as to why the Catholic Church would employ this corporeal form of architecture to represent the Body of the Church. I couldn’t wait to show Blatteau my first rendered elevation of a Corinthian capital!

Yes, we saw some figures reintroduced to PoMo architecture; but then again in the 80’s the figure, as long as it lacked content, was making a temporary comeback even in the galleries as well. However just as the figures on or in the PoMo building always seemed to lack content, real narrative content, they did as well in galleries and institutions of painting and sculpture: perhaps because the buildings themselves lacked the true sense of the corporeal so inherent in the proportions of classical orders. The orders for me are akin to anatomy for the figurative artist, indispensable. PoMo did not follow that anatomy; or followed it only in part. It was a stripped classicism, stripped to the bone. Where modernism had thrown it away, Pomo dug it up and had the skeleton rearranged. As for fleshy parts, it gave us eye lashes, teeth, nails and hair, often making a deliberate confusion between inner and outer body parts. Any hierarchy of proportions remained vague at best.

Should the PoMo Masters think themselves the Forerunners of the “New” Classical Movement, what do we then call those who, like John Blatteau, had been practicing all along? Forerunners to the Forerunners? Or was Blatteau too old fashioned to have known that one must be modernist first and then convert? As John once said when I complained about how more and more modernist European painters and sculptors were becoming, he noted “Classicism is in exile here and living here in America”.

What I find sad here is that we hadn’t, and perhaps haven’t yet, accepted the true heart of classicism. Perhaps if there is anything good to come of this conference it will be this one point. As I said above for the Church, we have turned the corner both here and in Europe. I meet architects, painters, and sculptors—both here and abroad—who are either working with classical architects on new churches or embellishing those classical buildings that had been stripped during the modernist renovations. Yes there still are a few churches to be suffered that will be done in that post Vatican II Pomo gathering space, clam shell pew arrangement with a walk-in baptismal tub all done in the interfaith style, or what I prefer to call “Hagia Ikea”. But their generation of priests and architects are on the way out and will soon join the nether world. As we leave the desert, where we left the garden is where we shall reenter with the most corporeal plan of all, the Cruciform. Gloria tibi Domine!

Anthony Visco

www.anthonyvisco.com

Reconsidering Postmodernism

2011-09-08T16:11:00.001-04:00

Glory Days?

There’s something vaguely depressing about the idea of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art staging a conference called Reconsidering Postmodernism:

http://classicist.org/programs/conferences/detail/conference-reconsidering-postmodernism/

It sounds a bit like a dreaded high school reunion where the jocks recount their big achievements on a small stage, or the ‘60’s crowd attending a recent Rolling Stones concert. Those days are past and, for whatever their glory, have essentially nothing to offer us today. For classicists like me (and I count myself in that camp as both artist and architect), Postmodernism was a high school we couldn’t wait to graduate from, a way station on the road to something more substantial, richer, more rewarding. Admittedly, I was shaped by a PoMo education that gave me tools–analytical, compositional, conceptual–that I still use; but the architecture that resulted from it was a thin, jokey, naïve, clunky, awkward pastiche of the great architecture of the past, and thanks in no small part to Tom Rajkovich (who saw through it earlier than I did) I moved on to the real thing; and once I had I didn’t spend too much time looking back. That saved me (I vainly hoped) from the withering critiques of the post-Postmodernists by the Decons, et al, who too easily pilloried the PoMo icons for all of their shaky pretense; unfortunately, those who took classical architecture more seriously were lumped in with our less serious “mentors” by the neo-Mods, and classicism in a way has never achieved the status it deserves because of the sins of our fathers. Thanks for that.

Apart from what seems, to me at least, a really bizarre idea for a conference by the ICA&A, one wonders about its content. The age of Postmodernism was also the age of nascent classicism; where, then, are Allan Greenberg and John Blatteau in the program? Having worked for John, who had little patience for Postmodern jokes, I can imagine at least one of those two serious classicists who happened to be practicing during those glory days poking holes in any nostalgia for the brief reign of the jocks. And then, what about the &A part of the organization? What about postmodern painting and sculpture? I remember the work of Carlo Maria Mariani, Edward (Ted) Schmidt, and Tony Visco being legitimate alternatives to Abstraction, Conceptual Art, etc. From what I can tell, there is no place for art at this conference, even though one of Michael Graves’ greatest achievements was reintroducing figurative art into his projects, like his unrealized painted room with Ted Schmidt for the Clos Pegase winery.

I spoke last year in Venice on the 30^th anniversary of the Biennale’s Presence of the Past, and I lamented the role of History disappearing from architectural education after Postmodernism; but I didn’t lament the disappearance of Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo.

Sadly, what this seems to be about is an admitting of defeat by the classicists in a world increasingly hostile to what we do, and a longing for a moment in the past when everything seemed a little freer. But it was a sloppy, insubstantial time, and being much of an autodidact I’ve had to struggle for decades to shed the postmodern attitudes that prevented me from doing serious classical work; the idea of turning back the clock, essentially unlearning what I’ve learned in the last quarter century, seems more like a nightmare than a dream.

Reconsidering Postmodernism? No, Thanks. I graduated a long time ago.

Perfect Painting: de Piles' List

2011-08-25T04:14:00.002-04:00

Ranking Artists "Rationally"
Without too much comment, I present the Louis XIV era French theorist Roger de Piles' rankings of artists according to a tally of their individual qualities; suffice it to say, while I'm intrigued by the idea, and sympathetic to de Piles' partisanship for "color" or the "Rubenistes," I would quibble with the particulars (how does Michelangelo wind up so far down, below Abraham van Diepenbeeck?).

Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres (1708)

arranged from highest to lowest

Painter	Composition	Drawing	Color	Expression	*Total*
Raphael	17	18	12	18	65
Rubens	18	13	17	17	65
Annibale? Carracci	15	17	13	13	58
Domenichino	15	17	9	17	58
Charles Le Brun	16	16	8	16	56
Guido Reni	x	13	9	12	?
Van Dyck	15	10	17	13	55
Vanius	15	15	12	13	55
Correggio	13	13	15	12	53
Titian	12	15	18	6	51
Rembrandt	15	6	17	12	50
Tintoretto	15	14	16	4	49
Giulio Romano	15	16	4	14	49
Eustache Le Sueur	15	15	4	15	49
Leonardo da Vinci	15	16	4	14	49
Otho Venius	13	14	10	10	47
Primaticcio	15	14	7	10	46
Teniers	15	12	13	6	46
Taddeo Zuccari	13	14	10	9	46
Andrea del Sarto	12	16	9	8	45
Federico Barocci	14	15	6	10	45
Perin del Vaga	15	16	7	6	44
Sebastiano del Piombo	8	13	16	7	44
Francesco Salviati	13	15	8	8	44
Veronese	15	10	16	3	44
Guercino	18	10	10	4	42
Giovanni Lanfranco	14	13	10	5	42
Abraham van Diepenbeeck	11	10	14	6	41
Palma il Giovane	12	9	14	6	41
Jacob Jordaens	10	8	16	6	40
Lucas Jordaens	13	12	9	6	40
Daniele da Volterra	12	15	5	8	40
Giorgione	8	9	18	4	39
Holbein	9	10	16	3	38
Giovanni da Udine	10	8	16	3	37
Michelangelo	8	17	4	8	37
Parmigianino	10	15	6	6	37
Albrecht Dürer	8	10	10	8	36
Federico Zuccari	10	10	8	8	36
Murillo	6	8	15	4	33
Pietro Testa	11	15	0	6	32
Jacopo Bassano	6	8	17	0	31
Palma il Vecchio	5	6	16	0	31
Sebastian Bourdon	10	8	8	4	30
Cavalier D'Arpino	10	10	6	2	28
Caravaggio	6	6	16	0	28
Giovanni Bellini	4	6	14	0	24
Lucas van Leyden	8	6	6	4	24
Gianfrancesco Penni	0	15	8	0	23

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_de_Piles

The complete list is transcribed here from Manlio Brusatin, Histoire des couleurs (Paris: Flammarion, 1986, pp. 103–104), reproduced in Elisabeth G. Holt, Literary Sources of Art History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 415–416)

PERFECT PAINTING

2011-08-11T23:04:00.002-04:00

Coming soon, a post on recovering the old idea of perfect painting....
In the meantime, for a sense of where this is going, see this from the Humanist Art Review a while back:
http://www.humanistart.net/reviews_pompeo.htm
A dopo,
E.

arts and crafts

2011-06-11T08:09:00.000-04:00

The Artist and the Artisan

Cathedral, Civita Castellana (Lazio)

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

Carlo Puccini in his shop in Florence

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

School of Bari

2011-05-10T14:55:00.012-04:00

The Weight of the Past

Bari Cathedral from the South

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

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

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

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

Seeing Susanna

2011-04-19T15:25:00.003-04:00

Viva il Barocco!

Capella Maggiore, S. Maria di Loreto, Rome

The great intellectual strides in art history have long been made, at least for those of us in love with the Renaissance and Baroque. But of course, universities are still producing art historians, and they need something to do. What the latest generation seems to see as its mission is incrementally dismantling the grand constructs of their “grandparents”: Panofsky, Wittkower, Blunt, et al; their intellectual “parents,” being their PhD advisors, are for the moment safe, and have indeed opened the doors to this approach.

Enter the new generation of art historical publications, enabled by Yale University Press above all, where a single book attempts to make a singular (if possible head-turning) point, again, and again, and again. I have been, for lack of alternatives, reading some of these books lately—Todd Olson’s Poussin and France (le robe!), Kathleen Wren Christian’s Empire Without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome (acquisitiveness triumphs over humanism), Estelle Lingo’s François Duquesnoy and the Greek Ideal, Stuart Lingo’s Federico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Painting (vaghezza!), Tracy Ehrlich’s Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Italy (green hectares)—and have found it hard going. Staking out a contrary position vis-à-vis some commonly accepted topos—Baroque Classicism, the strictures of the Council of Trent, etc.—or making a case for a new, “modern” interpretive framework—“the self,” prestige as program, politics before art, form over meaning (note the relevance to our modern world)—means that new art and architectural historical publications beat the reader into submission by making one presumably novel point repeatedly, albeit in ever so subtly different phraseology. These are books that really want to be essays. And because they are so single-minded, they are often blind to other, often more self-evident, propositions that are at least equally as valid.

Take, for example, the trendy interpretation of the classical tendencies in seventeenth century sculpture under the new theme “the Greek manner.” While Estelle Lingo has adopted Charles Dempsey’s proposition of a Greek current in certain Baroque classicists, she has embraced it so fully that every aspect of the Fleming’s art is filtered through that lens: never mind that Duquesnoy couldn’t distinguish Hellenic from Hellenistic, nor that his allies like Poussin and Sacchi had not a single Greek painting available to them; Duquesnoy’s agenda was for her exclusively, and presciently, neo-Grec. Of course, his most important commission, the St. Andrew for the crossing of St. Peter’s, was executed under Bernini’s watch and (at least for me) may actually beat the maestro at his own game; and his most recongized work, the one if any reproduced attached to his name—the S. Susanna from the Madonna di Loreto—displays a dynamic contrapposto and complex spatial response that has nothing to do with the static, self-contained, self-absorbed posture of a Doryphorous or Athena. Consider the Susanna: a paradigmatic Roman noble virgin, perhaps even related to the emperor Diocletian, positioned in a niche to the right of the high altar and the venerated fifteenth century painting around which the church and its polichromy is designed; the saint gestures across her body toward the altar, her gaze engaging the worshipper and her finger foucsing their gaze; no evident force from the spectator’s point of view motivates the gathering of her mantle up and to the left (her proper right arm being effectively invisible from outside the chancel), and the languid inclination of her head toward us counteracts this leftward thrust of mantle and indication. In sum, this is from any normative point of view a wholly Baroque sculpture, engaging, activated, dynamic. It is only from the impossible point of view—above and from the left as she is invariably photographed in art historical literature—that a case can be made for her anti-Baroque “classicism” or anti-Roman “Greekness.”

My diligent devouring of these texts has brought me, finally, to one that I am mostly so far enjoying: Michael Cole’s Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammannati and Danti in Florence. I am enjoying it because his point is thus far diverse and nuanced enough that I don’t feel browbeaten. Like the great works of the Old Masters, a work of art history should be broad minded and just a little subtle.

LOST ARTS

2011-03-08T21:11:00.002-05:00

Drawing in Perspective

Ghiberti, Detail from the East Doors of the Florentine Baptistery

Arguably, the single greatest invention of the Renaissance in art was linear perspective. In place of the naïve, if fascinating, medieval approximation of perspectival space, Brunelleschi (scholarship has repeatedly pointed back to him for this) discovered a method—which the ancients themselves did not possess—of documenting the three-dimensional world accurately on a two-dimensional surface. His great rival Ghiberti learned the inventor’s lesson and applied it to his eastern doors to the Baptistry: the famous Gates of Paradise, seen from precisely the same vantage point as the renowned (if lost) painting of the Baptistery with which Brunelleschi displayed his discovery, present a series of scenes that apply the technique to the complex world of relief. From Alberti’s treatise On Painting—two of the three books of which are primarily concerned with delineating form and space in perspective—perspective, along with basic anatomy, defined the grounding upon which all Old Masters would construct their fictive worlds.

Piranesi's Piazza dei Cavalieri di Malta

If there was any skill once so essential that is now almost lost again, it is this. Virtually no architect trained in the last decade or so has any command of perspective drawing, owed largely to the computer’s insidious overtaking of the entire design process. For all of the wonders the computer can do in perspective—not unlike the calculations on the calculator it would be tedious to do by hand—the architect who relies on the software’s ability to generate perspective surrenders his or her own capacity to invent—not document, but create—perspectival space. Make no mistake, Sketch-Up does not sketch, and Piranesi™ is no designer: software only processes data fed into it, and the data perforce is only parameters, not Space.

Lost in the translation to software is also the architect’s capacity to learn on site by drawing; when perspective is a struggle, and therefore an impediment to drawing, a fruitful loop (yes, a pun) of exchange between invention-study-invention is closed.

Sadly a lost art with architects, perspective has performed only a marginal role with the burgeoning revival of training in realist painting. Since realists only document what they see, they do not need the skills of documenting imaginary space (nor imaginary, idealized figures), and require just enough grounding in perspective to accurately locate horizon lines and vanishing points. In fact, most realist figurative art today involves only notional space, just enough credible context to ground a figure or a still life. But just as Pietro Bellori’s critique of Caravaggio was that he was a slave to the model, so too an artist without command of perspective is slave to the phenomenal world, especially today a rather banal one (thanks to the architects).

Perspective construction is tedious, and remains so even after mastery. What makes an artist or architect facile with it is enough experience with the tedium to have fully absorbed its basics, its fundamental logic, so that fluency of perspective thinking is possible. It might be fun to fly around in a virtual space generated by software, but it is no substitute for the release of the imagination afforded by Brunelleschi’s gift.

Sketch for a capriccio

Pienzan Civility:

2011-02-08T14:56:00.009-05:00

Fausto Formichi and the Museo della Città e del Territorio

Pienza is on the map since I first visited as a student in 1980. Colin Rowe, Jeffrey Blanchard and Judy Di Maio brought us by bus at the end of a nine day odyssey to this little town on a hill; I remember more of the bus sickness than the town, but I have come back to it armed with more knowledge, and more love, of what it has to offer in the years since. Back then no one but diehard architects sympathetic to tradition made the journey off the via Cassia to Pius II’s home town. Today Pienza is on any serious Tuscan traveler’s to do list, as much for its pecorino as its piazza. Yet has anyone really learned from Pienza and its rapport with the Val d’Orcia? The lessons are seemingly (to me at least) so obvious; and yet it is their simplicity, a limpid alternative to the murky thinking behind the sloppy sprawl of the last thirty years (of which even Tuscany has made itself victim), that makes them so challenging to our modern mediocre muddle.

Enter Fausto Formichi. I arrived in Pienza on a recent Sunday with a small group of graduate students in urban design from the University of Notre Dame, and my colleague Douglas Duany. Fausto met us—a largish man with a generous manner—and offered us a glimpse of the new museum of Pienza and its territory (for which he and Giancarlo Cataldi have produced a handsome catalogue, Aión Edizioni). But Pienza is seemingly so clear, what more could a museum of a town that is itself a home of the Muses possibly reveal? And yet Fausto, an architect who has worked tirelessly for decades to document and restore his hometown, patiently unpacked for us the rich, compelling history of the geology, geography, and typology of this early Renaissance jewel. Pienza, indeed, has more to offer than even the lessons scholars have described in the last few decades: it is a powerful model of a rich, sustainable rapport between town and country, history and innovation, urbanism and architecture. It is beautiful, but it is above all relevant.

Bureaucratic issues prevent the museum from opening so far, but when it does it must be on any serious architect, urbanist, or italophile’s itinerary; more than that, though, we must build the world as Pienza shows us how. As Fausto said to me, what use would there be for all of this if we didn’t use these lessons to build well today?

Now it is time for me to wake up and put to some use these ways of life which we read about daily and reflect on. For always to collect pieces of wood, stones and mortar would seem very foolish if you built nothing with them. But this edifice which we must construct to live well is so arduous, difficult and laborious, that it can scarcely be completed even if we begin young. Nevertheless I for my part have a will to try.[1]

[1] Letter from Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolò Niccoli, trans. by and cited in Thomas H. Greene, “Resurrecting Rome: The Double Task of the Humanist Imagination,” Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, Binghampton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, p.45

2011-01-16T15:26:00.002-05:00

Cherubs in the Snow: Cold Classicism

Bracketing our autumn, we returned to the US via Copenhagen: a revelation. Often perceived as the little sister to Stockholm, it has nothing to envy in its Swedish sibling. Seeing a vital urban culture in a cold climate is itself valuable, since Midwesterners will often make excuses for a lack of urban culture by pointing to the weather (“we’re not Mediterranean”); central Copenhagen on a snowy Saturday evening was bustling with holiday shoppers, couples on dates, kids on sleds. While the urban life aspect warmed my heart, my eyes were treated to an elegant eighteenth century fabric, graceful yet restrained, classical without many of the trappings, and therefore eminently buildable today. And I would argue that it is precisely the beauty of this city that makes it a place people want to be on an otherwise inhospitable evening—the city is worth it, indeed it rewards you beyond the effort.

For all of that discretely elegant fabric, though, the spectacular site in Copenhagen is the Amalienborg palace(s), really a whole urban sequence beginning at the sea and extending to the so-called Marble Church, bisected by the axis connecting this district back to the historic center. There is, really, nothing as elegant as a coordinated classical eighteenth century ensemble, and this has to be one of the best ever realized (many remained on paper at the French Academy or the Accademia di San Luca). Amalienborg is, in fact, just like a Concorso Clementino project realized by an architect under the spell of Gabriel. Disposing four symmetrical palaces on the diagonal axes through the square generates a dynamic ensemble and allows the street network to pass through—albeit transformed by the experience. North-south is the sea/church axis, visually unimpeded; to the west the street entering from the old town passes through a colonnade, not matched to the east as the street leaves again for a contemporary eighteenth century neighborhood.

2010-11-11T07:45:00.006-05:00

Absence of the Past

Thirty years ago I visited the Venice Biennale while a student with the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Studies Program. That was the year of the first architecture biennale, with the theme The Presence of the Past. Next week I will be speaking at the Constructed Environment conference in Venice, my talk being “The Absence of the Past: Whither History Thirty Years After The Presence of the Past.” For all of post-Modernism’s obvious faults, it did mark a time when the past, or history, was relevant and even essential to architectural discourse, but not so today. Indeed, even classical and traditional architects are suspicious of history (and historians), which has relegated historical knowledge to a remote corner of contemporary discourse. I will be advocating the value of history—as a critical component of the “inevitable” project, as a source of poetics, as intellectual raw material generally—for both architectural design and the architect’s capacity to offer historical insights (as in my reconstruction of Alvise Cornaro’s Teatro for Venice, shown here). Much of the poverty of architectural discourse today, among Modernists and Classicists, is due to an almost complete avoidance of historical reference. History is a Muse, but she is also a ruthless judge. If we want things to get better, if we want to measure up to the past, we need to know much more about it.

If only historians weren't so bent on rendering their research trendy (enough with all the references to "self-fashioning"!), and had abandoned any sense of the narrative trajectory of their writing, they might make a more appealing case for their relevance. See an earlier post for the value of venerable historical writing.

en plein air

2010-10-14T03:32:00.011-04:00

EMULATING ON SITE

These images of en plein air paintings done in Rome (in roughly two hours) illustrate the emulator’s task of representation (what one sees) combined with a deference to a tradition (how one sees). The modern notion of realism puts a high value on direct observation, but seemingly ignores the tradition of how others have observed the same subjects. If one emulates in the classical tradition when working en plein air, one is conscious of the tradition of plein air painting even in the choice of subject. Composition of subject, in other words, is just as important as technique.

FYI, the Columns of the Temple of Apollo next to the Theater of Marcellus in Rome owe a debt to Panini, while the Urn from the courtyard at Sta. Cecilia was a subject of Piranesi.

More en plein air work can be seen at davidmayernik.com

2010-09-02T16:00:00.004-04:00

INTERNATIONAL ROMANISM

On our return to Rome we passed through Stockholm for a few days at the end of August. I’ve wanted to see the palace of Drottningholm since Thomas Rajkovich and I won the International Competition for the Minnesota State Capitol Grounds in 1986. Minnesota, heavily populated by Nordic immigrants, has a spectacular State Capitol building by Cass Gilbert, but the grounds he reserved in front of it had never been developed. Our competition winning design projected formal terraces and gardens, along with bridges connecting the Capitol with downtown St. Paul. Despite winning (albeit by a narrow margin) we met tremendous resistance to executing our project, partly driven by a native sense that our scheme was too “Mediterranean,” somehow not connected to the reality of the Minnesota climate and landscape. Nostra culpa: we should have immediately after winning gotten on a plane and flown to Stockholm, to photograph Tessin’s Royal Palace and the gardens at Drottningholm. The latter is a spectacular sequence of spaces beginning at the water, through the palace and on to a series of terraces, parterres, and woods (where you’ll find a ‘Turkish tent’ and a ‘Chinese pavilion’). Somehow the provincialism implicit in the idea of regionalism has embedded itself in our culture, making moderns immune to influences not, seemingly, indigenous. Drottningholm is gloriously dependent on French and Italian precedents; at its marvelous theater the king imported French actors and designers and Italian opera singers. To do this was the height of sophistication, an acknowledgment that culture was absolute, and one either had it or imported it. “Too Roman” would not have been a critique; instead, it was trumpeted as a claim to a place on the cultural stage. Since then, however, even Sweden hunted for a “national style,” like so many other European cultures: anything but classical.

National Romanticism was the rather bizarre late phase of pre-Modernist culture, where a desire to detach individual nations from the unifying effects of classicism led them to some very convoluted constructs: neo-medievalism, eclecticism, proto-classicism. Sweden, where Italy and the Renaissance held sway over their consciousness even in the middle of the nineteenth century, and where there really was not much notable culture to speak of before the Renaissance, tried desperately to invent something uniquely theirs around the turn of the last century. The pinnacle of this project was Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm City Hall. I admit to being quite partial to this building in my early transition from modernist to classicist; and many who never really left that post-modern middle ground still love it. But it is, to a classicist, so odd to see the desire for a “national” style manifest itself in a highly personal pastiche of Venice: the Doge’s Palace rendered with the palette of the Frari! Neither its idiosyncrasies nor its Venetian-ness merit the term ‘national,’ and yet modern histories will be more sympathetic to its spirit than to that of Tessin’s Royal Palace—so powerfully Roman in its formal structure (and yet no pastiche of any Roman building). It draws on Bernini’s work most deliberately—the Louvre, St. Peter’s, Ariccia— and yet it is of its place and time.

What makes the Royal Palace ‘Swedish’ is a patron’s willingness to do it, something Bernini didn’t have at the Louvre. And what makes Tessin a classicist is that commitment to the Beautiful as manifest in the best of the classical tradition, wherever it is found.

2010-08-18T20:49:00.003-04:00

Following Frescoes

On August 19 the Gallery of Bond Hall at the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture will host a show of David Mayernik’s preparatory drawings and paintings for his recently completed frescoes at the Palmer Performing Arts Center at TASIS Switzerland and the chapel at the church of S. Cresci in Tuscany. The show will remain on view until September 17.

Fresco painting is sufficiently rare to evoke only romantic associations with Italy and the Renaissance, but in reality there is a modest renaissance of modern fresco painting going on today, with places to study and new work available in the United States and Italy. It is this that Mayernik documents in his new website Fresco Trail, which allows travelers to find his work and eventually the work of other modern fresco artists. If you can’t make it to South Bend to see the show, keep in mind the itinerary throughout Italy and Ticino that can be followed as a modern fresco trail. If we long for the achievements of the past, we need to celebrate their recovery in the present.

2010-08-10T21:54:00.003-04:00

Buy Green

Rizzoli’s Green Living is packaged rather oddly. The cover shows exactly the kind of high-tech modernist “green” architecture that the publisher thinks the public expects, whereas the content of the book offers a compelling, systematic repudiation of that approach and a seductively wide range of traditional alternatives that anyone can love. Don’t judge this book by its cover, in other words. Scholar and architect Barbara Kenda assembled the authors for the project, and Victor Deupi, Norman Crowe, and myself, once her colleagues, owe her much for creatively fusing her own research into healthy living and buildings during the Renaissance with solutions to the modern crisis of construction. This is an important, elegant book that the publisher seems not to have a clue how to market, and it deserves to reach every architect, builder, and concerned citizen’s shelf.

2010-08-01T12:12:00.010-04:00

Rome and America

A recent drive around the East Coast brought me to a series of sites that illuminate the challenges of reconnecting American culture to its European roots. A priori this has to acknowledge the inevitable artistic provincialism of the colonies and the early United States, a subject glossed over at Williamsburg—a place at once quaint and bizarre, where the focus of the guided tours (all convincingly done, it must be said) of the most prominent buildings—the Governor’s mansion and the Capitol—virtually ignores the architecture and focuses instead on politics and social life around the time of the Revolution. A decision has obviously been made to make of Williamsburg a teaching opportunity for the history of Revolutionary America, but this has the consequence of turning its back on the whole raison d’être of having reconstructed Williamsburg in the twentieth century, which was to show what an important American small town was physically like in the eighteenth century (since so little of eighteenth century America survives). Being my first time there, I was struck by how un-urban Williamsburg is in fact, really more a loose main street collection of disparate buildings whose street width and trees preclude any sense of urban spatial definition. The adjacent college of William & Mary is in many ways more urban, but the claims for Wren’s authorship of the first building only points up the desperation of the attempt to put this humble place on the European stage, especially when one compares it to Wren’s work at Hampton Court (where the in-costume guides do, by the way, talk about the architecture) or the Chelsea Royal Hospital. We had stopped for an overnight in Frederick, MD beforehand, and here we actually found a real, vital urban environment, one that New Urban apologists should enthusiastically embrace over Williamsburg.

The excellent show Ancient Rome & America at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia did (it closes today) do a remarkable job of connecting early America to Ancient Rome, from the arts and architecture to foundation myths, political culture, and even the nature of slavery. Would that students of classical art and architecture today could have seen it—there was, amazingly, no catalogue—since it makes the point of how readily Americans were once able to learn from Europe, indeed define themselves quite precisely with relationship to European culture. Philadelphia still does, in fact, retain quite a lot of its eighteenth century fabric and monuments, and Philadelphia’s John Blatteau has been one of the few American classicists to tie his work explicitly to European models, which goes a long way to explaining why his work is so much better than most American contemporary classicism.

2010-07-07T22:35:00.007-04:00

Buy This Book!

Now available in the United States, New Palladians (eds. A. Sagharchi and L. Steil) documents the work of 48 modern architects or teams whose work is in some way rooted in tradition. The value of this book lies primarily in the quality of the built work by those whose practice is most rooted in the classical tradition. It is still likely to be true that much of the public is unaware that such built work exists (partly because so much of it is private), or that there are such architects committed to building all’antica. This mission to disseminate (with all of its implications of seeding) is the book’s great merit, and it deserves as wide a readership as we can gather for it. What starts off as a polemical tract settles into a coffee table format soon enough, and while I am all for polemics the public is more likely to be convinced if seduced by beautiful buildings, and in a number of cases that could actually happen with this publication.

It is also one of the merits of this book that it affords equal space to each architect represented, regardless of status or quantity of built work. Set out on such a level playing field, it is no longer inevitable that the biggest firms offer the most compelling work, although there is an inevitable relationship between a client’s resources and the quality of building. Also inevitably, there is an abundance of private and developer work, and a small percentage of institutional—libraries, colleges, museums, etc.—work, which is unfortunately fairly representative of classical architecture’s market access today (and, in fact, tallies pretty well with the distribution of private and public in Palladio’s career).

Make no mistake, the Palladianism of this book is a somewhat artificial construct, tacking onto the tail end of the Year of Palladio a survey of modern architects whose work can loosely be described as “traditional” (see my earlier observations on that problematic word); for those not invested in the arguments put forth in the essays at the beginning of the book (none of which, tellingly, are written by the architects whose work is most obviously “Palladian”), what some of the new work and the buildings by Palladio in Carl Laubin’s rather chilly capriccio have to do with each other may be hard to grasp. No matter. I for one am comfortable with the “Palladian” label (and no doubt many of us included are also) because it implies “classical;” and if that word shows up surprisingly rarely in the book, it may be a natural consequence of a movement that still isn’t quite comfortable in its skin, or is trying hard to band together (for strength in numbers) a body of work that actually represents quite disparate points of view. It is to the credit of the British and European editors that such a catholicity of points of view is so fairly represented. This is a much-needed book, since there has been quite literally nothing else like it out there since The Classicist’s Xth Anniversary edition, and one hopes it will be followed with some regularity by similar publications.

2010-07-03T16:46:00.006-04:00

Fourth of July, Tuscany

Brendan Hart, the monks Giovanni and Giuseppe, David M.

On the fourth of July the parish of S. Cresci in Valcava (near Borgo San Lorenzo) will celebrate the feast of their little known saint, the "evangelist of the Mugello." They will also be opening to the public my recently completed frescoes of the last days of the saint and his companions, martyred in the third century under the Emperor Decius. The church, ably maintained in the face of a dwindling congregation by the Silvestrine (Benedictine) monks Giovanni and Giuseppe, has benefitted from the support of several loyal parishioners, among them Lynn Fleming Aeschliman. What is delightful for me about this year's choice of day for the celebration is that, as an American born of second-generation immigrant parents (Slovak and Italian), implicitly acknowledged on the day of our independence is the inter-dependence of Italian and American culture, by no means a one-way street. For all of our museums enriched by Italian paintings, our classical buildings built by Italian craftsman, our cuisine and our couture, Americans have given back not only our dollars to the birthplace of the Renaissance, we have invested our sweat equity--of course in the War, but also the "mud angels" of the '66 Florentine flood, the many farmhouses lovingly restored by stranieri, and now in one ancient, small, remote church a new cycle of frescoes hinting at a new renaissance. And not just there: in Florence the multitude of Anglophone realist art programs are largely American in impetus, faculty and students.

But so many places in this richest of cultural landscapes are struggling through tough economic times. So, if you want an off-the-beaten track trip to a verdant, culturally rich landscape (nearby Vicchio being the birthplace of Giotto, Beato Angelico, and Lully) for a little peace, quiet and beauty, visit the monks at San Cresci in Valcava (t. +39 055 849 5612), who can offer accommodations, fabulous simple food, and good company (although they speak very little English). Nearby Capitignano is also a lovely place to stay. It's wonderful to see the original Renaissance, but there's something to be said for keeping your eye out for the new one afoot in and around Florence. And this time America has something to offer.

2010-06-19T15:57:00.004-04:00

A Function of Time

A June day in Ariccia, south of Rome (see post from January); we went because my wife Brette has written a fabulous article on the local porchetta for Cucina Italiana, which she shared with those who helped in the research. There I met the impassioned Gino Galieti, of La Castellana (Antico Laboratorio Lavorazione Carni, or Venerable Shop for Working Meats--or something to that effect!) in nearby Genzano. What gets Gino riled up is a discussion about the industrialization of erstwhile artisan Italian meats--salumi, porchetta, etc. And what Gino has to say about the shortcuts producers have introduced into the production of cured pork--stagionato, or aged, salamis now only requiring 2 days!--could be applied to art or building. Everything we do today, it seems, with the exception of rigorists like Gino (and myself), is faking it with respect to the time and quality involved in what our culture once produced. Gino, subject to brief fits of despair, soldiers on, making his coppiette come una volta. And indeed, our only hope is combining his penchant for crankiness ("It's the chefs who don't sustain the quality producers!") with actually doing it the right way any chance we get (like painting frescoes).

Those of us involved in classical architecture lament a lot about what's missing in our culture--patronage, craft, taste--but perhaps the most fundamental thing is the value of Time. Time to draw well, time to think well, time to build well. If we can't recover the value of Time, we'll remain just faking it. And, you know, Gino's real stuff does simply taste better.

2010-06-08T12:29:00.006-04:00

Frescoes for S. Cresci

What follows is a sequence of images from the first of the last two frescoes illustrating the life of S. Cresci for a chapel next to the eponymous church in the Mugello, Tuscany; the images present the sequence of day's work, or giornate, from the sinopia underpainting through the five days required to complete the scene and its frame.

More information on the church of S. Cresci in Valcava (in Italian) from wikipedia here.

More information on the church and its frescoes from me to follow....

2010-05-11T13:19:00.009-04:00

Found in Translation

Some images, from an en plein air watercolor on the island of Ponza in 2009 to a fresco project in Lugano in 2010.

From left to right: Aldo, stucco modeler and plasterer; David, fresco painter and architect; Euterpe, Muse of Lyric and Music; Clio, Muse of History; Domenico and Andrea, decorative painters.

This is how a tradition is re-built: constant effort (even on vacation), disegno, shared skills (hoc opus hic labor est), critical standards (based on history).

2010-04-29T15:08:00.005-04:00

Know Thyself

OK, a little test for you “traditionalists” out there. How would you label this plan?

If you said “classical,” you are correct. If you said “modernist” (or even thought it) you are a crypto-Romantic neo-medievalist, or possibly a Modernist. Whatever one thinks of Ledoux, or the Enlightenment—and mind you, you don’t have to like this plan or what it represents to call it classical—it is formally ordered according to the most rigorous, and traditional, classical principles. If you see in this what Sitte saw in the Viennese ringstraße of his day, you are by nature suspicious of formal order of a geometric kind. Period. That’s of course fine, but most great architects from Bramante to Gabriel would recognize this instead as something familiar and generally desirable. Today, so many New Urbanists are suspicious of this kind of formal order that they fear it is somehow proto-Modernist. Which is probably why one of the great urban proposals of the latter twentieth century—John Blatteau’s Les Halles design—has received such scant acknowledgement for its merits; indeed, it is doubtful there has been anything better of the kind since it was submitted for consideration more than 30 years ago. And if you fancy yourself a traditionalist and don’t know who John Blatteau is, I do feel sorry for you.

Old Masters

2010-03-29T15:42:00.011-04:00

Drawing A Crowd

I have drawn in Italy since my student days almost 30 years ago. While at first I was anxious about Italians staring over my shoulder while I worked, a compliment or two went a long way to emboldening me to draw in places where crowds couldn’t be avoided. On a Gabriel Prize in France ten years after graduation I drew in the packed corridors of the Louvre, where I was jostled, filmed by Japanese tourists, and occasionally complimented. As I have grown more sure in my abilities, I have begun to relish my role as a sort of “performance artist,” since what I do is just rare enough that I see my role as partly evangelical, spreading the word about the value of drawing after the Old Masters.

In that light nothing gives me greater satisfaction than to draw a crowd of kids when I’m at work in Italy. Italian children, still largely uncorrupted by the crush of technology that buries most American kids, are instinctively fascinated by someone drawing: I can almost guarantee that Italian pre-teens will pull their parents to watch me at work, and they are not shy about expressing admiration (imagining, no doubt, that I am much more famous than I am in fact). Other kids in other places have stopped to watch me at work, but nowhere else as consistently. I believe many children, with encouragement (or at least without discouragement) from their parents, love to draw, and associate being artistic with being able to draw (i.e. represent) accurately what they see. Representational art is natural, proper to us: we have to be taught to “like” non-representational art, and since we naturally appreciate representational art we also naturally appreciate those who do it well (the Old Masters) over the moderns who mostly do not.

This anecdotal experience is related in my mind with its antipode: the hard sell of Modern art, the blockbuster push of shows like Philadelphia’s Picasso, tied in with products for sale in the shops and even the restaurant. One gets the sense that the Philadelphia Museum of Art is almost embarrassed by its pre-nineteenth century collections, so patently un-hip, stuffy, out of step with our new millennium. Taking advantage recently of a free afternoon in the City of Brotherly Love, I decided to spend it at the Museum, where the signs announced late openings on Friday evenings until 8:45pm. Paying to park in the new lot (free parking until recently was the norm), I forked over the exorbitant $16 admission fee (I skipped the special Picasso admission, to the ticket seller’s surprise), confirmed that I could leave the premises (to see the restored Waterworks) and return, and headed straight to the stairs, past Pablo and up to the Renaissance-and-after wing (the north wing, fyi). I happily drew for a couple of hours (no audience), then took a break to see the Waterworks, thinking I’d return to draw for another hour or so, then treat myself to dinner at the Museum’s restaurant. After visiting the medieval wing (top floor south) I returned to the Renaissance to draw after a terracotta bust by Benedetto da Maiano; not five minutes into it a guard stood over my shoulder, not to watch but to tell me it was time to leave the galleries—the entire upstairs closes at 5pm! This while Picasso was happily open, the great main floor lobby outside the show turned into a boisterous “cabaret” with music and drinks. No doubt covered by the dust of the past I shuffled down to the restaurant.

My server announced the menu’s special entrée was a rice dish invented for Picasso; I ordered the crab cakes.