Emulation: VI.2 Sights and Sounds

Concert in the Cathedral of Lucca Marking the Restoration of a Painting

Last evening, in the cathedral of Lucca, an incredibly beautiful concert was given by the relatively newly-formed group VoxAlia. What I found especially notable was the integration of the visual and aural, first by the presentation of the newly restored painting and altar of The Visitation (the painting by Jacopo Ligozzi, 1596), the altar surround a revised version of a design by Giorgio Vasari. Standing by the altar, adjacent to the chapel of the Volto Santo, the new cathedral rector Don Mauro Lucchesi first introduced Archbishop Benvenuto Italo Castellani with some apposite words on the arts and culture in the church; after the bishop spoke, the scholar in charge of the restoration, Dott.ssa Antonia D'Aniello presented a bit of its history; she was followed by a spokesman for the restoration team. Then we moved on to the pews for the concert, under the direction of Livio Picotti. 

The singers entered from the sacristy singing a solemn chant (not in the program), after which they assembled at the altar in a circle to sing Hildegard von Bingen’s O Viridissima Virga, the musical quality highlighted as much aurally as visually by their formation. The program was organized around readings from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Life of Mary, and while the music was mostly Monteverdi and before a discordant note was introduced with Poulenc’s Litanies a la Vierge Noire (why must modern sacred music be so anguished and harsh, even ugly?). Each section of the program was introduced by the readings, which were accompanied by the presentation of a relevant icon painting to the assembled, processed from the altar down the central aisle. Finally, with the inevitable encore (they are de rigueur in Italy) the group moved again, singing as they went, to the altar to conclude the evening.

Maestro Picotti’s credits list him as architect-musician, and his dual background showed in his attention to the spatial and visual dimensions of the music. With Early Music the recovery of something like the original effect of the music is usually confined to the musical, but the spatial and visual accompaniment are no less essential to revivifying music that deserves to be heard as often, and as well-performed, as possible. To imitate the lost original sense of the music one almost must, perforce, emulate—attempt to rival by working to integrate as much information and sense experience as possible.

http://quilucca.corrierenazionale.it/eventi/2013/06/04/news/40282-Restaurato-l-altare-della-Visitazione-nel-Duomo-di-Lucca

Emulation: VI.1 Humanism, Humanities, and the Utilitarian

Let Others Rail...

Two recent essays, in the very different sources of The New Republic and The New Criterion, say many of the same things about the state of the humanities and humanism in contemporary, dare I call it, culture. I recommend them, and in some ways wish I had written them myself. But I would only offer, vis-à-vis the arts, that the same utilitarian mentality that seems to be driving our universities, public policy, and even philosophy (how often is an intellectual position justified on the basis of its utility?) is just as prevalent in the arts, where the mechanics of realism and the coding of urbanism substitute for the richer culture of art and building we once had (albeit centuries ago).

"Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture"

A Defense of the Humanities

by Leon Wieseltier | May 28, 2013

For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life….

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113299/leon-wieseltier-commencement-speech-brandeis-university-2013#

JUNE 2013

Ave atque vale

by Donald Kagan

I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but also the world was born yesterday, a feeling that they are attached to the society in which they live only incidentally and accidentally. Having little or no sense of the human experience through the ages, of what has been tried, of what has succeeded and what has failed, of what is the price of cherishing some values as opposed to others, or of how values relate to one another, they leap from acting as though anything is possible, without cost, to despairing that nothing is possible. They are inclined to see other people’s values as mere prejudices, one no better than another, while viewing their own as entirely valid, for they see themselves as autonomous entities entitled to be free from interference by society and from obligation to it….

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Ave-atque-vale-7653

Emulation: V.1 The Golden City

IN MEMORIAM: Henry Hope Reed, Jr. September 25, 1915 – May 1, 2013

Henry Hope Reed passed away on the first of May, and I wanted to add my voice to the list of those like my colleague Steve Semes, and David Brussat at the Providence Journal, in honoring Henry and what he stood for. Not that I always saw eye to eye with him. When I won my (rare for a classicist) fellowship to the American Academy in Rome (the Steedman Prize, no longer an Academy fellowship, yet won in the old fashioned way, by design competition—but that’s another story), Henry visited me in Philadelphia and encouraged me to do what Rome Prize winners had once done, measured drawings. While I did draw much on site in Rome, I have always believed we best process the lessons of the past when we try to design in the same manner (thus Emulatio…). But I would like to make a case for what Henry represented that I strongly endorse, something slowly withering on the vine of domestic "good taste."

A proposed chapel for the Notre Dame campus, by the author

Henry Hope Reed and Classical America co-founder John Barrington Bayley (who published Letarouilly on Renaissance Rome) advocated the Grand Manner. While this was partly a matter of taste—and a taste for European architecture in particular—it was also civic, and heroic. Henry’s book The Golden City (out of print—it deserves to be republished, and with a courageous foreword!) was not only an argument against Modernism, it was an argument for great architecture—not the merely pleasing, or “traditional”—and for heroic, civic architecture. An architecture of cities more than towns, and certainly more than the private and suburban. An architecture that lifts the spirits out of our value-engineered world, "embellished" in the old sense of making something more beautiful by enriching it. I have long maintained that, for those of us who aspire to doing great architecture, the opportunities are few if any today; but we must at least draw what we want to do, to show the world that it is, in fact, possible. It is only possible if we are capable, and we are only capable if we can prove that we are. Henry was himself highly capable—as advocate, polemicist, and connoisseur—but he was also heroic, urban, and grand in so many ways. He was not risk-averse, but he was prudent in his valuing of the past as a model for the future. Will we see his like again?

Emulation: IV.1 Hadrian and Augustus’ Pantheon

I Have a Theory

About that portico…. There are two types of classical architects, those who are troubled by the portico of the Pantheon—more specifically, its somewhat awkward relation to the intermediate block between it and the rotunda—and those who are not. I have been, it should be said, one of the latter, but I cannot help taking account of the many arguments against the portico, especially those of Mark Wilson Jones. So, in light of my meditations on emulation, let me offer a theory that might explain the anomalies as intentional, perhaps even essential to the building’s meaning.

Caveat lector: what follows is mere speculation. But in a case where no documentation exists as to intent, other than the material remains themselves, what else is one to do? The question is, does an explanation resolve a question in way that is, if not efficient, at least effective in tying up as many loose ends as possible (Ockham’s razor). I hope the following measures up.

Let’s start with the “dedication,” which fooled so many for so long. In no other case does a Hadrianic building invoke an older dedication so explicitly and prominently. Why would Hadrian have done it? To mask the innovation of his newer rotunda? Perhaps, but what if that dissembling were driven by a concomitant desire to recreate or rebuild what had actually been there, and append to it his own contribution? Little is known about the Augustan Pantheon, but it is presumed to have been a fairly canonical Roman temple, with portico and rectangular cella like the temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus.

Augustus did, of course, defeat Marc Antony and Cleopatra’s forces at the battle of Actium, and thus absorbed definitively Egypt into the Roman Empire. What better way to concretize that absorption than a temple portico, its column shafts made of Egyptian granite? This early exercise in Egyptian import might explain the imprecision in the column shafts.

So, here is my conjecture about the Pantheon’s portico: that it is a literal, not metaphorical, rebuilding of the portico of the older temple destroyed by fire, and the employment of spolie from that building explains the lack of reconciliation with the intermediate block, and the discrepancies of column shalf/capital heights noted recently by Lothar Hasselberger. As reconstruction, it was allowed to be—even demanded to be—distinct or detachable from the rotunda-cum-block erected behind. The anomalies at the juncture, therefore, are not problems, but deliberate accentuations of differences.

This would be wholly within the framework of ancient understandings of emulation, neither archeological nor radical. They juxtapose and integrate disparate pieces to form a more ambitious whole. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

PS: my book The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture is scheduled to be published by Ashgate (UK) in November 2013 

Emulation: III.3

Giotto, The Crib at Greccio

St. Francis and the Renaissance

troubadour |ˈtroōbəˌdôr; -ˌdoŏr|

noun

a French medieval lyric poet composing and singing in Provençal in the 11th to 13th centuries, esp. on the theme of courtly love.

• a poet who writes verse to music.

ORIGIN French, from Provençal trobador, from trobar ‘find, invent, compose in verse.’

from the Oxford English Dictionary

The new pope chose the name Francis. So in a sense did his model, who was baptized Giovanni (either his father later chose Francesco because he wanted him to be a worldly—i.e. French—businessman, or he preferred the name Francesco out of his own affinity for French troubadour music). Francesco d’Assisi is a paradigmatic figure of the Italian Middle Ages, shaped in a culture of crusades, poverty, nascent urbanism, internationalism, and a Church in crisis. With regards to the theme of Beauty, Francesco may seem a poor fit—more devoted to Lady Poverty and Sister Moon, he eschewed wealth and its attendant luxury, and lived the life of a mendicant and mystic.

Yet Francesco was also the great popularizer of the Nativity crèche (presepio in Italian); one of his first good works was manually rebuilding the dilapidated stone church of the Porzincula; and the pope who sanctioned his order had a vision of him supporting the papal basilica of the Lateran. Francesco was, in nuce, a devoted supporter of religious imagery and architecture. He also, almost single-handedly, reoriented Gothic art from the hieratic, impersonal, Byzantine manner to something more naturalistic, intimate, and popular. Arguably, then, he was a founder of what would become the Renaissance; Giotto is unthinkable without San Francesco, so too Leonardo and Raphael’s Madonnas, and Vasari’s whole trajectory of the buona maniera would not have its impetus without Francesco’s popular piety.

Bernini, S. Francis in Ecstasy, Raymondi Chapel

And if Giotto was not possible without Francesco, neither was Bernini the artist of Baroque spirituality. San Francesco may be responsible for the Madonnas that found their fulfillment in Raphael, but his own mysticism and its culmination in the stigmata would also sponsor the images of ecstasy that Barocci painted and Bernini carved. The synthesis of naturalism and mysticism that the saint from Assisi represents is the essence of Italian art in its flowering, budding in the fifteenth century and blossoming in the seventeenth.

The tension for St. Francis’ followers was their desire to honor him and his desire for simplicity. When we visit S. Francesco in Assisi today, it seems a riot of color to American ideas, “ornate” in ways we aren’t always comfortable with. Yet what makes the upper and lower churches there so remarkable are the frescoes, and this is the humblest of all artistic media—lime and sand plaster, painted with earth pigments suspended in water. Poorer than that, one cannot get. What makes it art, and remarkable, are the form and meaning endowed on it by the artist and iconographer. If the new Pope Francis I wants a “poor church,” fresco is a good place to start. And durable buildings, as S. Francesco himself built them, are their essential foundation.

primo pensiero for a Stigmata

Bernini, Raymondi Chapel, S. Pietro in Montorio