Reeve, Matthew M. (ed.): Tributes to Pierre du Prey. Architecture and the Classical Tradition, from Pliny to Posterity. 288 pages, 203mm x 282mm x 64mm, 1,429g, ISBN 13: 9781909400122, 100 €
(Harvey Miller Publishers, Turnhout 2015)
 
Compte rendu par Paul Ranogajec
 
Nombre de mots : 2775 mots
Publié en ligne le 2019-04-24
Citation: Histara les comptes rendus (ISSN 2100-0700).
Lien: http://histara.sorbonne.fr/cr.php?cr=2576
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          Continuities and transformations of the classical tradition in architecture have been the major focus of the American-Canadian scholar Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey’s research and writing. This festschrift in his honor appropriately takes up the broad theme of architectural classicism in a series of 17 essays, plus an introduction, arranged chronologically. Several subthemes emerge despite the lack of groupings or headings within the table of contents. Overall, the collection is uneven in quality and leaves unexamined important questions about classicism itself as a historical and artistic category, although it advances knowledge on several of the specific topics it treats.

 

         The first section deals with antiquity and the middle ages and has a dual focus on the display of monuments and the transformation of classical models. Mark Wilson Jones’ essay, “The Origins of the Orders: Unity in Multiplicity,” opens the volume by taking up the design genesis of the classical orders. Extracting ideas from his recent book (The Origins of Classical Architecture, Yale 2014), Jones argues for the multiplicity of factors in the creation of the canonical classical orders in Ancient Greece, against single-minded interpretations that have been advanced from Vitruvius onwards. He describes the classical as “promiscuous” in its power “to provoke contrasting readings.” This is a strong opening essay, setting an appropriate tone and mindset for the reader in approaching the volume’s other explorations of classicism.

 

         Next, in “Some Other Literary Villas of Roman Antiquity besides Pliny’s,” Guy Métraux turns to the practice of ekphrasis in epistolary descriptions of Roman villas. Taking a cue from du Prey’s own celebrated book, the Villas of Pliny from Antiquity to Posterity (Chicago 1994), Métraux examines ekphrasis as a “teaching tool of rhetoric”—specifically a progymnasma, or beginner’s exercise—and shows how some of the ancient masters of architectural ekphrases used them as amusements for themselves and friends. He looks at written accounts by Seneca the Younger and Sidonius Apollinaris, placing the celebrated ekphrases of Pliny the Younger into a longer communicative context. Covering the trope of personality, the otium-negotium opposition of leisure and business pursuits, and the moral suasion of the villa, the common thread uniting the three writers was their commitment to the idea of the “symbiotic relationship” between a villa and its owner.

 

         Judson J. Emerick presents a case study of two related buildings in “The Tempietto del Clitunno and San Salvatore near Spoleto: Ancient Rome Imperial Columnar Displays in Medieval Contexts”—one of the longest essays in the collection. He focuses on the ways in which interpretations of the monuments fit into patterns that obscure the actual historical variety of medieval architecture as well as the continuity of classicism, especially in central Italy, well past the time of the Roman empire. He drives toward a larger point of view about how an obsession with periodization in art history causes scholars to lose sight of continuities that are otherwise clear in the historical record. His description of the Roman Corinthian order as “Empire imagery”—in which different elements of Hellenistic decoration are loosely assembled into discernible patterns across the Roman and post-Roman world—bears the brunt of this large historiographical challenge. Although the point is sound in itself, the argument needs to be expanded with much more evidence from a wide geographic survey to really show its far-reaching consequences for the discipline. The essay stands as a challenge to scholars to pursue this important idea further.

 

         In the final ancient-medieval essay, Eric Fernie, in “Romanesque Historiography and the Classical Tradition,” surveys the changing use of the term Romanesque in relation to its perceived or denied associations—by its critics and historians—with ancient classicism. Fernie moves quickly from writer to writer, jumping from Giovanni Rucellai in the 1460s to English writers of the 18th century within a few paragraphs. Like Emerick, Fernie takes to task art-historical obsessions with labels and strict periodizations. Unfortunately, the essay runs out of steam before it concludes, ending abruptly with a strange non sequitur about romanesco broccoli. The whole essay only very loosely fits together as a historiographic exercise, although it too provides something of a starting point for future work.

 

         The two following essays by John Beldon Scott and Gauvin Alexander Bailey, respectively, open the longest section of the book on classicism in the post-medieval period through the 19th century. Scott, in “Uses of the Past: Charles V’s Roman Triumph and Its Legacy,” treads well-known territory in examining the triumphal entry of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V into Rome in 1536. In his view, the procession initiated a centuries-long reimagining of the Roman Forum as a ritual space, up to Hitler’s 1938 entry into the city. Presenting Charles V’s procession as a “revival,” Scott perhaps unwittingly limits the interpretive resonance of the Forum as ritual space, falling back on a previously conventional but now diminished conception of classical tradition as mere revivalism. Bailey, in his ambitiously titled essay, “Classicism in a Rococo World: Steadfastness and Compromise in Late Colonial South America,” pursues an existing although not exhausted avenue of scholarly research on Latin American colonial classicism by focusing on two Italian Jesuit architects who worked in the region in the early 18th century: Giovanni Andrea Bianchi and Giovanni Battista Primoli. Although the essay is largely descriptive of their church designs and patronage, the concluding section—alas, only one paragraph long—provocatively interprets these architects’ work in Argentina and the Paraguay Reductions. Perhaps overly reliant on the kinds of stylistic labels and periodizations that Emerick and Fernie critiqued in their respective essays, Bailey suggests that these buildings initiated renewed attention to Italian cinquecento classicism—particularly based on Sebastiano Serlio’s Doric order—as against the Baroque “international style” of the 17th century. This more austere Serlian classicism was seen as a Christianized version of Roman-Augustan classicism, the architectural style of the Roman empire at the time of Christ. In Bailey’s view, the millennial ideology coursing through colonial missionary society was the perfect catalyst for such architectural resonances. Once again, the essay here pursues only the first step toward a fuller understanding of its topic.

 

         The next five essays deal with aspects of architectural illustration—drawings and engravings—and imaginative reconstructions of the classical past. Sally Hickson’s essay, “Girolamo Porro: Engraver and Publisher in Venice,” picks out the theme of sight and insight, arguing, fairly obscurely, that the paired terms “function as a metaphor for the centrist view that the Venetian cartographic eye cast upon” the world beyond the city in the age of burgeoning European colonialism. What she means by “centrist” is not clearly spelled out. The essay feels unfinished and unfocused, its connection to a broader “classical culture” referenced by the author remaining unclear. Although the subject is of great intrinsic interest, and certainly important to a full consideration of the classical tradition as a cultural phenomenon, the essay is one of the weakest in the book.

 

         By contrast, in what is perhaps the book’s most cogently argued essay, “Acanthus Leaves and Ostrich Feathers: Claude Perrault, Tradition, and Innovation in Architectural Language,” Una Roman D’Elia assesses Perrault’s design for a French classical order that substituted ostrich feathers for the conventional acanthus leaves. Although never built for its intended use at the Louvre, Perrault’s design gave expression to his view that the orders provide an architect scope to invent. D’Elia, using traditional art-historical method to interpret the nationalist impulse behind Perrault’s endeavor, presents a compelling case. David McTavish’s essay, “Classical Themes and Creative Variations from the Sixteenth Century: Two Unpublished Drawings of Palace Facades Related to Giulio Romano,” is similarly traditional in its approach. He attributes the drawings, with reservations, to Jacopo Strada, a pupil of Giulio Romano who worked with the master at Palazzo Te in Mantua, and who possibly intended them for engraving and publication. They are discussed as examples of variations on a theme, a standard practice in both Romano’s circle and in classical design more generally. Similarly, Janina Knight, in “Two Drawings by Giovanni Battista Montano in the Canadian Centre for Architecture,” presents two reconstructions of Ancient Roman monuments by Montano, part of a Renaissance tradition of imagining Roman buildings as they might have been or could be again. Both archaeological and imaginative, Montano’s drawings harness “the freedom provided by the medium of drawing,” according to Knight, seeing them as evidence of the reign of licentia in Renaissance classicism.

 

         John Pinto’s brief essay, “Ruins and Restitution: Eighteenth-Century Architects and Antiquity in the Bay of Naples,” rounds out the section on drawings. Largely recapitulating the argument of his 2012 book, Speaking Ruins, Pinto looks at depictions of Roman ruins by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Hubert Robert in the mid-18th century. Interpreting their work in light of du Prey’s term “restitution” as a more capacious word to substitute for the overly concrete “restoration” and “reconstruction,” Pinto sees Piranesi and Robert as both engaged in a project of imaginatively interpreting classical antiquity. He shows how both took up the roles of antiquarian and artist depending on purpose and fancy, thereby creating “indelible images” that to this day color our perception of antiquity.

 

         Editor Matthew Reeve’s own contribution to the volume, “‘A Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome’: Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, and the Narratives of Gothic,” stands alone thematically and in its departure from a strict focus on classicism. He assesses the Strawberry Hill villa in relation to Walpole’s novel, The Castle of Otranto. Positioning Gothic as the “aesthetic other” to classicism, Reeve very interestingly weaves together kinaesthetic and narrative experiences of both the building and the book to show how Strawberry Hill undermines the (supposedly) comforting “mimetic impulse” of classicism. He proposes that the “jarring effects” of the house are revealed to be “even more combative and transgressive” when seen in relation to Walpole’s “fragmented” Gothic story. Although provocative, the reader may wonder to what extent Reeve too uncritically takes up the conventional understanding of classicism and the Gothic as a dichotomous pair. Whatever the historical sanction for this in the case of Walpole’s own thought, the mimetic aspect of classicism is merely asserted here rather than established by argument.

 

         The following two essays turn to 19th-century Quebec, Canada. In “The Gibbsian Tradition in Nova Scotia,” Peter Coffman examines a strand of ecclesiastical architecture of Nova Scotia that sought to affirm the identity of a conservative, British Loyalist society among the settlers of the Annapolis Valley following the American Revolution. Using architecture to differentiate themselves from republican-leaning settlers elsewhere, Anglican churches under the patronage of bishop Charles Inglis looked to James Gibbs’ St Martin-in-the-Fields in London as the model. Coffman acknowledges the mutability of meaning in architecture by noting that within two generations, the shift to Gothic as the new marker of Englishness would have been unimaginable to Inglis.

 

         Meanwhile, in “Thomas Baillairgé and Victor Bourgeau: Architects, Architectural Practice, and the Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Church in Quebec,” Luc Noppen examines the two major architectural figures of the region in the 19th century. Unlike Coffman, Noppen is chiefly concerned with historiographic issues, arguing that the history of Quebecois architecture “needs a change of perspective” if scholars are to better understand the different modes of practice exemplified by these two architects. For Noppen, Baillairgé was an “architect-designer” and Bourgeau was a “master builder.” It is unclear why the distinction must be so clearly drawn, as early in the essay Noppen writes that his aim is to show how the two “became ‘architects’” by focusing on the issue of architectural production. And although Noppen insists that “the entire built landscape of Quebec’s capital city” is important for understanding Baillairgé, the essay focuses only on church design. The gap between conceptual aims and execution makes the essay difficult to follow through to its conclusions.

 

         The final section includes two essays on 20th century architecture. In “The Stadio dei Marmi in Rome: Inventing a Classical Stage for the Colossal Heroes of Fascist Italy,” Sebastian Schütze writes about a specific instance of architecture and sculpture in the development of the uomo fascista, or Fascist Man. The essay focuses on the 60 marble figures atop the upper register of the stadium that, in Schütze’s words, give it a “classicizing quality.” The figures were intended to illustrate the risk-taking, courage, resolution, poise and aggressiveness associated with the uomo fascista. Without traditional iconography or narrative, the figures were ciphers for the collective image of the Fascist Man, rather than being conceived as individuals with character traits. Unfortunately, the reasons that a classical formal repertoire was settled on do not receive much attention, and there is an uninterrogated assumption that classicism easily monumentalizes such fascist conceptions.

 

         Also disappointing is the volume’s final scholarly essay by the late Phyllis Lambert—“Mies Klassizismus: Some Notes”—on classicism in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s work. Lambert briefly reviews both critics’ appraisals of Miesian classicism and several of his buildings, namely, the Riehl House in Potsdam, the German Pavilion at Barcelona, and the Seagram Building in New York (the last the subject of Lambert’s recent book, Building Seagram, Yale 2013). The casual tone and brevity of the essay leave little room for critical comment, and the major argument—that Mies’ classicism was about architectonics rather than style—does not advance debate beyond what the critics whom Lambert cites have already written on the topic.

 

         The final piece is a brief essay by du Prey himself, “In Praise of Mentors,” which discusses the historian’s debts to Donald Drew Egbert and David Coffin, two of his teachers at Princeton University in the 1950s and 1960s. The bulk of the essay describes the domestic classicism of du Prey’s home in Kingston, Ontario, as resulting from his appreciation of Sebastiano Serlio and John Soane, designers he first learnt about from his Princeton mentors. It is a fitting, touching tribute to the idea of classicism itself as a practice defined by mentorship and, although not mentioned here, the concept of emulation.

 

         It is unfortunate that, with the partial exception of Mark Wilson Jones’ contribution, none of the essays go very far in interrogating classicism itself as an art-historical concept. The contributors by and large assume that the reader knows what it is and what it is not. Neither is there substantial discussion of the issues of canonicity and imitation/emulation, nor of the issue Lambert raised, architectonics. Interesting each in their own ways, the essays in this collection fail to add up to something greater than the sum of the parts. It is to be regretted that the editor did not use the occasion to solicit a group of essays that, taken together, materially advance the state of debate about the classical tradition in architecture. The collection does, however, pay appropriate tribute to a great scholar and, indirectly, shows how du Prey’s mentorship achieved a lasting impact on the course of research in subsequent generations.

 

 

 

Table of contents

 

 pp.1-6 Matthew M. Reeve, David McTavish, and Peter Coffman - Pierre du Prey: An Appreciation

 

1. pp.7-26 Mark Wilson Jones - The Origins of the Orders: Unity in Multiplicity

 

2. pp.27-40 Guy P. R. Metraux - Some Other Literary Villas of Roman Antiquity besides Pliny's

 

3. pp.41-72 Judson J. Emerick - The Tempietto del Clitunno and San Salvatore near Spoleto: Ancient Roman Imperial Columnar Display in Medieval Contexts

 

4. pp.73-80 Eric Fernie - Romanesque Historiography 

 

5. pp.81-98 John Beldon Scott - Uses of the Past: Charles V's Roman Triumph and Its Legacy

 

6. pp.99-112 Gauvin Alexander Bailey - Classicism in a Rococo World: Steadfastness and Compromise in Late Colonial South America

 

7. pp.113-126 Sally Hickson - Girolamo Porro: Engraver and Publisher in Venice

 

8. pp.127-142 Una Roman D'Elia - Acanthus Leaves and Ostrich Feathers: Claude Perrault, Tradition, and Innovation in Architectural Language

 

9. pp.143-156 David McTavish - Classical Themes and Creative Variations from the Sixteenth Century: Two Unpublished Drawings of Palace Facades Related to Giulio Romano

 

10. pp.157-172 Janina Knight - Two Drawings by Giovanni Battista Montano in the Canadian Centre for Architecture

 

11. pp.173-184 John Pinto - Ruins and Restitution: Eighteenth-Century Architects and Antiquity in the Bay of Naples

 

12. pp.185-210 Matthew M. Reeve - 'A Gothic Vatican of Greece and Rome': Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, and the Narratives of Gothic

 

13. pp.211-228 Peter Coffman - The Gibbsian Tradition in Nova Scotia

 

14. pp.229-246 Luc Noppen - Thomas Baillarge and Victor Bourgeau: Architects, Architectural Practice, and the Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Church in Quebec

 

15. pp.247-270 Sebastian Schutze - The Stadio dei Marmi in Rome: Inventing a Classical Stage for the Colossal Heroes of Fascist Italy

 

16 pp.271-282 Phyllis Lambert - Mies Klassizismus: Some Notes

 

17. pp.283-287 Pierre du Prey - Postlude: In Praise of Mentors