Transient Cities 3
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Transient Cities 3 CHAPTER 1 Transient Cities: Representations of Urban Destruction in European Iconography in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries Marco Folin (translated by Mark Weir) European cities are built on rubble. The rubble of an ancient past, primarily: ruins that continued to crumble following the fall of the Roman empire practi- cally wherever there had been an ancient settlement—“semirutarum urbium cadavera,” as Saint Ambrose was already referring to them at the end of the 4th century.1 It is certainly no coincidence if the first realistic urban representation in medieval iconography to have come down to us, a view of Verona drawn for Bishop Raterio in the tenth century, took the city’s ancient monuments as its focal points. Indeed, for all their dereliction these were considerably more im- posing than the modest layerings made in subsequent centuries.2 The ruins of Roman civilization would continue to feature in the urban space for several centuries, connoting and conditioning its image, whether pillaged as a source of materials or mythicized as shrines of the local collective memory.3 Even once they had been totally incorporated by the late medieval expansion, they none- theless left their mark in the layout of the blocks, the toponomy, the pattern of the urban texture. On this ancient substratum of ruins subsequent generations never stopped piling up new accumulations of debris at the feet of the Angel of History. Wars, devastations, plagues, fires, and again abandonments, earthquakes, floods, re- taliations... There is no European urban center that did not go through periodic cycles of destruction and refounding, decline and renewal, decay and recon- struction. This attribute is such an integral part of the essence of the Western city that it characterizes imaginary cities quite as much as the real ones, stand- 1 Epistolae 39 (Patrologia Latina 16, col. 1099); cf. Maria Bollini, “Semirutarum urbium cadavera,” Rivista storica dell’antichità 1 (1971): 163–76. 2 Cf. Xavier Barral i Altet, “Scelte iconografiche al servizio di un’idea autobiografica: la Verona di X secolo secondo il vescovo Raterio,” in La più antica veduta di Verona. Iconografia rateriana. L’archetipo e l’immagine tramandata, ed. Antonella Arzone and Ettore Napione (Verona: Comune di Verona, 2012), 133–52. 3 Michael Greenhalgh, Marble Past, Monumental Present: Building with Antiquities in the Mediaeval Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2009). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004300682_002 4 Folin ing as a common denominator for the great metropolises both of classical my- thology—from Troy to Atlantis—and the biblical tradition: Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Rome of the Apocalypse. It almost seems that in the West you could not conceive of a city without also automatically thinking of the im- age of its possible, indeed probable, destruction. There is no doubt that Judeo- Christian iconography exerted a highly important influence in this respect: decades ago Henri de Lubac emphasized the prime role of architectonic meta- phors in the biblical and patristic texts, and in particular the allegorical signifi- cance of destruction and construction, the primordial attribute of God himself: builder of the world “as a graceful architect” (“tamquam elegans architectus”) and at the same time its future destroyer in the dies irae.4 Thus the Flood and the construction of Noah’s Ark, the founding of Babylon and the destruction of the tower of Babel, the erection of the Temple of Jerusalem and its repeated sacking, were for centuries seen and represented as figures of the human condi- tion: metaphors of men’s obstinate desire to build, and of the ephemeral desti- ny of their constructions, doomed to end in ruins.5 In this long-term context it is hardly surprising that images of destruction should have been (and continue to be) so popular in European urban iconogra- phy. Their fortune transcends genres and uses, areas of production, the culture of those commissioning the products, chronology, and geographical location. Whether we are dealing with broadsheets or cycles of frescoes, book illustra- tions or altarpieces, travelogues or popular ex votos, it is not unusual to find—in the background or indeed at the center of the scene—a city either in ruins or in the midst of destruction. This iconographic repertoire is only apparently re- petitive: the way in which a wounded city is represented undergoes a profound change over the course of time, and these variations actually constitute one of the most significant indications of how the city was seen in the various 4 Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, les quatre sens de l’Ecriture (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64), in particular vol. 2 no. 2, 41–60; about architectonic metaphors, cf. David Cowling, Building the Text. Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). For the image of the divine architect (first found in Alanus ab Insulis, “De planctu naturae,” in Patrologia Latina 210, col. 453 and 468–69), see Ernst Robert Cur- tius, Letteratura europea e Medioevo latino (1948; reprint, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2002), 609–11; Johannes Zahlten, Creatio Mundi. Darstellungen der sechs Schöpfungstage und naturwissenschaftliches Weltbild im Mittelalter (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979); Friedrich Ohly, “‘Deus geometra’. Appunti per la storia di una rappresentazione di Dio,” in Geome- tria e memoria. Lettera e allegoria nel Medioevo, ed. Friedrich Ohly and Lea Ritter Santini (Bologna: Mulino, 1985), 189–248. 5 On the tower of Babel, in particular, cf. Silvia Maddalo, “Babele,” in Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale vol. 2 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enc. Italiana, 1992), 820–27 and bibliography..