Architecture and ekphrasis: Space, time and the embodied description of the past

By Dana Arnold

Architecture and ekphrasis examines how eighteenth-century prints and drawings of antique architecture operated as representations of thought. Using original archival material, it considers the idea of the past in the period, specifically how it was discovered and described, and investigates how space and time inform visual ekphrasis or descriptions of architecture. The idea of embodiment is used to explore the various methods of describing architecture – including graphic techniques, measurement and perspective – all of which demonstrate choices about different modes of ekphrasis. This well-illustrated, accessibly written study will be of interest to academics and students working in a broad range of subject areas. It will also be an essential teaching tool for increasingly popular cross-disciplinary courses.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526150288

Dana Arnold

Dana Arnold is Professor of Architectural History, University of Southampton and Director of the Centre for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism

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SERIES EDITORS

Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon

Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.

These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders.

Also available in the series

Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias      Mia L. Bagneris

Bound together: Leather, sex, archives and contemporary art      Andy Campbell

Staging art and Chineseness: The politics of trans/nationalism and global expositions      Jane Chin Davidson

Travelling images: Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture      Anna Dahlgren

Empires of light: Vision, visibility and power in colonial India      Niharika Dinkar

Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution      Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro-García and Victoria H. F. Scott (eds)

Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing      Kimberly Lamm

Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai      Jenny Lin

Engendering an avant-garde: The unsettled landscapes of Vancouver photo-conceptualism      Leah Modigliani

The ecological eye: Assembling an ecocritical art history      Andrew Patrizio

Migration into art: Transcultural identities and art-making in a globalised world      Anne Ring Petersen

Copyright © Dana Arnold 2020

The right of Dana Arnold to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

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First published 2020

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Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Prolegomenon

1  The past

2  Time

3  Space

Epilogue

Select bibliography

Index

Figures

1 Pompeo Batoni, Francis Basset, 1st Baron de Dunstanville and Basset , oil on canvas, 1778 (© Museo Nacional del Prado)

2 Etienne Duperac, ‘A View, showing the position of several of the more important ancient Roman edifices’ ( Urbis Romae Sciographia Ex Antiquis Monumentis Accuratiss Delineata (1574–1691), engraving, 1604 (British Library, London, UK © British Library Board / Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved)

3 Giovanni Battista Falda, ‘Prospettiva del Giardino dell eccellentis Signor Duca Mattei alla Navicella sul Monte Celio, Roma’, from Li Giardini di Roma , engraving, 1690 (British Library, London, UK © British Library Board / Bridgeman Images. All rights reserved)

4 Henry Flitcroft, Pantheon in the garden at Stourhead, Wiltshire, UK, 1753–54 (Shutterstock / tviolet)

5 Sebastian Serlio, the classical orders, from Five Books of Architecture , book IV, fol. 3, 1611 (English edition) (Wikimedia / public domain)

6 Vitruvius, ‘Essempio delle Cariate’ [Caryatids] from De architectura [ On architecture ], c .1567 (annotated and illustrated Italian edition) (Cornell University Library / public domain)

7 Andrea Palladio, ‘Interior of the Pantheon, Rome’, from I quattro libri dell´architettura , book IV, chapter XX, p. 81, 1570 (Wikimedia / public domain)

8 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man , pen and ink on paper c .1490 (Wikimedia / public domain)

9 Vitruvian Woman , digital image (Shutterstock / glyph)

10 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, ‘A View of the Tower of the Winds’, from The Antiquities of Athens , Volume I, chapter III, plate I, 1762 (Wikimedia / public domain)

11 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, ‘Elevation of the Tower of the Winds’, from The Antiquities of Athens , Volume I, chapter III, plate III, 1762 (Wikimedia / public domain)

12 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, ‘Study of details of the interior, Tower of the Winds’, from The Antiquities of Athens , Volume I, chapter III, plate IX, 1762 (Wikimedia / public domain)

13 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘Temple of Neptune at Paestum’, from Differentes vues de quelques restes de trois grandes edifices qui subsistent encore dans le milieu de l’ancienne ville de Pesto autrement Posidonia qui est située dans la Luganie , plate X, 1778 (Google Books / public domain)

14 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Iconographiam Campi Martii antiquae urbis (Map of the Campus Martius of ancient Rome), etching in six plates, 1757 (Yale University Art Gallery / public domain)

15 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ‘View through the Herculaneum Gate, Pompeii’, pen and brown ink over black chalk, 1778 (© Photo SCALA, Florence)

16 Domenico Comparetti, ‘Ground plan of the Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum’, from La villa ercolanese dei Pisoni: I suoi monumenti e la sua biblioteca , plate 24, 1883 (Wikimedia / public domain)

17 Albrecht Dürer, ‘Draughtsman making a perspective drawing of a reclining woman’, woodcut, c .1525 (Wikimedia / public domain)

18 After Leonard Knyff, ‘View of Chatsworth House’, in Nouveau théâtre de la Grande Bretagne: ou description exacte des palais de la reine et des maisons les plus considerables des seigneurs et des gentilshommes de la Grande Bretagne … , 1708 (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020)

19 Forced perspective gallery by Francesco Borromini, 1653, Palazzo Spada Museum, Rome (Shutterstock / ValerioMei)

20 Andrea Pozzo, ‘Tribuna d’Architettura ornata’, in Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum , vol. 2, figure 15, 1698 (Internet Archive / public domain)

21 Joseph Highmore, octaedron (octahedron), in The Practice of Perspective, On the Principles of Dr. Brook Taylor… , plate XXIII, 1763 (Google Books / public domain)

22 Colen Campbell, ‘The East Front of Stourhead in Wiltshire, seat of Henry Hoare Esqr’, Vitruvius Britannicus , vol. 3, plate 42, 1725 (Public domain)

23 Thomas Malton the Elder, pop-up from A Compleat Treatise on Perspective, in Theory and Practice; on the Principles of Dr. Brook Taylor… , 1775 (Wikimedia / public domain)

24 Robert Adam, ‘Plan and wall elevations for the entrance hall at Syon House’, pen and wash, 1761. SM Adam, vol. 39/3 (© Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama)

25 Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Lecture Diagram 52*: The Temple of Neptune at Paestum’ (?after Giovanni Battista Piranesi), pencil and watercolour, c. 1810 (© Tate, London, 2020)

26 Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Lecture Diagram 17: Principles of Rectilinear Perspective’ (after Thomas Malton Senior), pen and ink, c. 1810 (© Tate, London, 2020)

27 Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Lecture Diagram 48: Pedestal of the Column of Antoninus Pius’, pencil and watercolour over transfer ink, c. 1810 (© Tate, London, 2020)

Acknowledgements

My fascination with ekphrasis and the resonance between verbal and visual descriptions of architecture started almost as soon as I began to study art history. These concerns about how the practices and processes of recording influence our conception and understanding of the past have remained with me. Spatiality, temporality and the biographical trace have been predominant themes in my writing in recent years, where I have sought to question perceived, canonical norms and establish modes of enquiry that transcend a particular historical instance. Here I combine these preoccupations to explore how space, time and the notion of embodiment inflect on visual ekphrases of the architecture of the past.

The support of my editor, Emma Brennan, during the preparation of this book has been much appreciated. I am also greatly indebted to Dr Clare Barry who has given me invaluable assistance in the sourcing of the images and in compiling the index. Most of all, I wish to thank Nigel King. His strength and poise in recent years has been an inspiration, as has his invaluable enthusiasm for and confidence in my ability to complete this book.

Prolegomenon

DESCRIPTION [desciptio, Lat.]

1. The act of describing or making out any person or thing by perceptible properties.

    Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. I. London, 1755.

The long eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of new languages of architectural description, both verbal and visual. Here, I am concerned with the significance of graphic representation, as evident in drawings but more prevalently in prints, for the discovery of the ancient world and as a means of developing and disseminating architectural ideas in the eighteenth century. I wish to concentrate on the relationship between drawings and prints both in terms of their materiality and how they operate as engines of history. Fundamental to this are the ways in which the architecture of the past is described.

This book focuses on examples of graphic representations of architecture as they appear in architectural treatises, as well as publications of studies of particular antique buildings or sites, during the long eighteenth century. I argue that these images are in fact a form of writing, in the full sense of the word, as they have syntactical and linguistic qualities that convey both ideas and experience. This line of enquiry allows us new understandings of how these images functioned as both an inspiration to architectural imagination and practice, and the ways in which they have influenced how histories have been formulated. Instances of the relationship between the verbal and the visual are explored at the intersection of theory and archive. And these anachronistic juxtapositions work to disrupt established hegemonies about the description of the built past during the long eighteenth century. Perhaps most importantly, this study explores the gap between written and visual descriptions of architecture. More precisely, this book is about what the visual allows us to explore and convey that the verbal does not. In order to unpack this we need to take a few steps back and begin by thinking about how we might use words to describe a piece of text. We would instantly notice that the linguistic construction of our description runs parallel to the text we are describing.¹ They are both progressive and follow syntactical formulae, which in the West we read left to right. My question here is how does this process inflect on our description of the visual world?

For those of us trained as art historians in the West, we are used to perceiving and reading pictures as we would a text – as a linear progression from left to right. Our analysis of composition is frequently biased by such readings. The flatness of the canvas helps underscore this mode of seeing and describing a painting as if it were a text.² But our experience of architecture is rather different. Architecture is both the flat articulated spaces of a building and the space that it encloses. It is at once an experiential and a visual phenomenon. As a consequence, our perception of architecture cannot be a process of reading or looking from left to right. Our eyes will move randomly across the surfaces of a building concentrating on chance details. Our bodily and visual experience of height, light, sound and texture cannot be described within/using the syntagmatic structures of discourse as, unlike the relationship between text and text, they do not run in parallel. As such, verbal descriptions can be at odds with the architecture or spaces they attempt to describe. What, then, does a visual description reveal, allow or release that a verbal one cannot? Does it, for example, tell us something about gender in relation to the representation and experience of the architecture of antiquity?

The linguistic qualities of images

With these caveats in mind, I want to begin with the concept of ekphrasis – the verbal description of a work of art or, indeed, its re-creation through language. The roots of this process in the literature of classical antiquity need not concern us here. Suffice to say that the rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis, first found in Homer and thence Philostratus, Lucian and other classical writers, is an established system of translating the visual into the verbal.³ Importantly, here this is achieved through the action of choosing details and inevitably the choice of certain details means that the same object can be represented differently. Clearly, this process has had a substantial impact on the way in which we write about art and there are many erudite analyses of the influence of ekphrasis on the development of the history of art.⁴ There is no doubt that description or narration is an essential process in the discipline of art history where the analysis of the visual is bound up in linguistic practices.⁵ What I am arguing here is that the visual representation of architecture also operates as a kind of ekphrasis. It is at once a means of both describing an actual object and translating it into a different mode of representation. An image of architecture, like an ekphrasis, chooses details in order to narrate or describe its subject. The mode of graphic notation of these details operates in the same way as words (language) to present architecture in a certain way. The various graphic conventions of architecture conform to linguistic principles, and through their selective representation of details images work to interpret architecture. As a consequence, they make visible what may not have previously been apparent and engaging with the imagination, whilst making the building seem ‘real’. This is important for my theme as I aim to argue that images of architecture – specifically here the architecture of antiquity – operate as a kind of language; they have descriptive qualities. The acts of verbal and visual description share a distance from that which is being described and it is this distance that makes ekphrasis possible.

The various types of images of the architecture of the past share common concerns. Perhaps most obviously are the issues of how to represent the three dimensions of the built environment in a coherent two-dimensional form and how to convey the idea of space and spatiality. Here, I want to privilege the images made of the past at a crucial moment when technology enabled new printing techniques. The printing press was an important and very obvious example of superiority over the ancient world and helped define the ‘modern’ period. Like its Renaissance predecessor – moveable type – the engraving in the long eighteenth century gave access to various forms of information about the past and in doing so appeared to overcome the barriers of time and space. The belief that it was possible to ‘publish’ the monuments of the past as engravings is not to be underestimated either for its novelty or by the differing motives for wishing to do so on the part of the antiquarian community. These diverse agendas ranged from preserving an artefact through its memorialisation in print to enhancing the perceived value and significance of a collection of antiquities. The act of representation presented fundamental choices about how monuments, including architecture, were described. Should they be textualised or should their materiality be translated into a readable two-dimensional form. Leading on from this, was textualisation a process that harked back to the descriptions of antiquity?

The relationship between text and image is important as a means of understanding how these histories of the classical past operated. And what we see here is the way in which visual illustration becomes an increasingly significant form of knowledge that is independent from the traditional antiquarian reliance on textual precedent. For instance, Bernard de Montfaucon published 15 volumes of L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures between 1719 and 1724. The wide-ranging work contained copperplate folio engravings of antiquities from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and elsewhere. Montfaucon uses illustrations to give clarity and order to what might otherwise appear the jumbled and divergent narratives of the past by acknowledging the significance of visual evidence when compared to textual sources. An English translation of this work was published in 1721–25 under the title Antiquity Explained and Represented in Diagrams. This prompted a number of antiquarians to reposition the role of images in the construction of histories. Rather than illustrations merely supporting an apparently known history, empirical observation of visual evidence could challenge the received wisdom of antiquity’s textual sources.

That said, there remained a strong tradition of text-based antiquarian scholarship. Certainly this was the case with antiquarians such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann whose study of the past divorced artefacts from their contexts.⁶ This was probably an attempt to raise the status of antiquarianism by rejecting the focus on physical remains. In his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (1755) Winckelmann introduced as systematic, chronological study of art history that provided a central plank in the evolving idea of chronology and progress in western culture.⁷ But Winckelmann relied on textual descriptions of objects to write his verbal history which has remained the standard chronology for art history. Winckelmann’s ideas also draw heavily on mid-eighteenth-century theories of language, which were seen as having developed its resources to allow a clear knowledge of things but excesses in style and rhetoric led to its degeneration. This locates Winckelmann’s analysis, or system of history, as he preferred to call it, firmly in the verbal tradition. And this verbal system was translated into English only ten years after its original publication by the artist Henry Fuseli as Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of The Greeks.⁸ Winckelmann’s major work, Monumenti antichi inediti is notorious for the poor quality of its engraved images and its lack of interest in the physicality of the monuments he records. Ostensibly a volume that records the great monuments under his care in the collection of the Pope, Clement XIII, Winckelmann chose instead to make physical monuments totally subservient to verbal texts. Indeed, his insistence on reading the iconography of monuments only in order to illuminate ancient texts saw the production of a volume in which engravings were not only inaccurate and aesthetically dull, but where bas-reliefs, statues and even paintings become almost indistinguishable. By removing ancient monuments from their historical and material contexts, Winckelmann insists that the material past is only of value in so far as its study aspires to the status of poetry.

The preoccupations of Winckelmann find a counterpoint in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön (1766). Lessing’s choice of title is the well-known marble sculpture of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being attacked by snakes sent by the gods, which was in the papal collection of antiquities in the Vatican. The work was under the care of Winckelmann, who had been appointed Prefect of Antiquities to Pope Clement XIII in 1763. The Laocoön sculpture had been unearthed