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Frames of References … FRAMES OF REFERENCES … UDC 316.774:069 FRAMES OF REFERENCES – ART MUSEUMS AS UNIQUE VISUAL MEDIA Aneta Hristova; Meri Batakoja Saints Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, Macedonia Abstract: The age old activity of collecting arts is not I. INTRODUCTION intrinsically dependent on the art museum as separate architectural type. How was the art museum as an Despite the broad frame of interfering social and independent structure conceptualized and why? What political references of the awakened, hedonistic 16th was the idea behind that concept? Was it created as a medium consciously and what kind of messages was it century society being far more comprehensive than th supposed to deliver? What kind of unique “textual” the architectural one, it is in the very course of the 16 overlaps the various disciplines of archaeology, art and 17th century classical architectural theory where history, politics, literature, science and architecture we can find the emerging awareness of its potential as created in order to produce what we today recognize as a powerful, self-conscious media for artistic art museum space? This study focuses on the crucial representation. Within the general theoretical dispute, historical moments of the late 17th century when such the emergence of art museum as architectural type is questions were posed for the first time within the one of the most stratified one. Its long formative classical discourse of the French architectural theory history represents a dense cobweb of intertwined which followed the consolidation of French absolutism significances: the politics in the court of Louis XIV for and the foundation of the Royal academies of arts and sciences, until the mid 19th century when the answers to the setting of museum’s institutional frame; the way those questions were finally exemplified in built the musaeum was etymologically and philosophically architecture. The study gives a comprehensive overview constructed as classical ideal in the 17th and 18th of the cultural context art museums as public century studies and encyclopedias; the way it was institutions emerged from and became new spatial transposed in the architectural theory as architectural models for collective cultivation. episode of the Querell des Anciens et Modernes; the way it was imagined and interpreted throughout the Keywords: architectural theory, public buildings, art multiply architectural competitions organized by the museum, media, referential frame, modernism, typology Acadèmie in the period between 1770s-1790s; the way all those efforts diminished both in the final 53 КУЛТУРА / CULTURE, 12/ 2015 conversion of the Louvre Palace as the first public discussions were based derived from philosophy and musée in 1793 and in the architecture of every new the natural sciences, and were not specific to public art museum in the 19th century Western World. architecture: in the spirit of Descartes’ rationalist philosophy, the basic principle of all discussion was II. THE POLITICAL BEHIND THE CLASSICAL AND VICE VERSA raison, with an absolute belief in the authority of Antiquity. Mathematics played a key role in achieving A. The Foundation of the Royal Normative Classical certitude, while geometry was the basic instrument of Style in the 17th Century French Architectural Theory all beauty. The transposition of the classical legacy from the At first, architectural theory in the Acadèmie Italian to the French art theory in the 16th century and followed the literary theory (Boileau, La Bruyѐre) the course of the French architectural theory towards holding the belief that greatness and perfection could the classical synthesis in the 17th century stood firmly be achieved only by imitating Antiquity, which implied on the political and ideological platform of the French reading aloud of Vitruvius and Renaissance authors: Absolutism, reaching its peak in the reign of Louis XIV. Palladio, Scamozzi, Vignola, Serlio, Alberti, Viola, Whereas in the 16th century in Italy the academies Cataneo. The basic positions of the Acadèmie of beautѐ were associations of independent artists free to make universelle were prescribed and processed in a their own status and select their members, in France standard form, although the Acadèmie simultaneously the foundation of the visual arts academies was traced its autonomous discourse on the task of bon programmed by the state authorities (Richelieu, goût opposing the ideals of the enlightened liberalism Colbert) and prescribed, commissioned and carried to the royal normative rationalism personified as the out by the King. The Enlightenment and the “Blondel – Perrault” conflict.4 centralized Absolutism formed, as H. V. Kruft states Completing the difficult task to make a new revised “an unholy alliance”1 in the creation of these translation of Vitruvius, the latter got the chance to institutions, thus conducting the course of the 17th present his own body of theory in which he attacked century Royal Academy of Architecture (Acadèmie the eternal classical principles, specifically the concept Royal d’Architecture, 1671), which “ruled over the of proportion, giving a way to a more empirical architects, students, contractors, royal buildings, method of achieving beautѐ that introduced usage as provinces, towns” and became “a mighty instrument in an aesthetic premise. It was, among symmetry and the service of the central power”.2 proportion, accepted by his successors at the The task of the Acadѐmie consisted of the passing Acadèmie who claimed that “when building, it is no of resolutions, which were eventually to be less important to dispose the rooms skillfully than it is incorporated into a normative architectural aesthetics to adorn the facades finely”5 (Fig. 1) and ultimately in the establishment of a “national” French order (idea initiated by Philibert Delorme).3 At the beginning, the principles on which the Acadѐmie’s 54 FRAMES OF REFERENCES … of the four fundamental concepts that defined the quality of the architecture work: bon goût, ordonnance, proportion and convenance, owe to its respectful member Germain Boffrand (1667-1754), another concept was systematically introduced in architectural theory – that of caractѐre. Caractѐre revoke the Vitruvian concept of decor, concerning the appropriateness of form and content, i.e. the attribution of specific quality to the function or to the occupant of the building. With the concept of caractère Boffrand redefined the role of the aesthetics now focusing on the effect derived from visual rhetoric which traced the course of the “Revolutionary architecture” and the so called architecture parlante. Fig. 1 Claude Perrault. Ordonnance for the five kinds of His treatise earned thematic elaboration with columns after the method of the Ancients, 1683 39 Jacques - Francois Blondel, who assigned particular caractѐres to particular types of building, giving the Focusing on the aspect of Vitruvian dispositio highest character sublimitè to important public rather than the aesthetic tasks of architecture, the late buildings. He also extended the notion of character as 17th century French theorists made space distribution an expression of function to the overarching idea of the substantial architectural concept and an style as an expression of effect, which he maintained instrument of the further programmatic classification to have autonomous cultural background recognizable of building types. as a “true architecture”. During the mid 18th century alongside a B. The Relativist Architectural Aesthetics and the reorientation towards a normative classical style Concept of “Architecture Parlante” in the Late 18th emerged a Rousseau-ist school of thought which Century French Architectural Theory derived every architectural tenet directly from the In accordance to its task, at the first half of the 18th rationally justifiable archetypes, with Marc Antoin century the Acadèmie Royal d’Architecture proceeded Laugier being the principle herald. He declared that all with the theoretical debates advocating the primacy of architectural rules should derive from Nature and all taste over function and vice versa, which accentuated architectural processes were imitations of processes the importance of the relationship between the basic of nature, exemplified by the primitive hut as the aesthetic concept and the utility value of the building, origin of all the possible forms of architecture. (Fig. 2) while abolishing the notion of normative architectural doctrine. After the Acadèmie approved the definitions 55 КУЛТУРА / CULTURE, 12/ 2015 to their extreme with logical vigor.6 Etienne Louis Boullѐe (1728-99) was the first to imply the visual effects of the solid geometrical bodies into a series of “poetic” images which he comprehended in an imaginary architectural museum, showing the rhetorical power of the architectural drawings: “In time, one would have a museum of architecture containing all that could be expected of the art from those cultivating it”.7 Boullѐe’s desire towards monumentality, both in size and appearance, best illustrated at his monument to Newton, ultimately led his ideas to pure abstraction and his search for character de grandeur to symbolism of the sublimity of the divine bond between Architecture and Nature. Fig. 2 Marc-Antoine Laugier, Frontispiece to Essay on (Fig. 3) Architecture (Essai sur L’Architecture) ,1753 36 For Laugier, the primitive hut embodied all structural logic and regarded the Orders not as ornamental features but as constituent parts of a building, thus overcoming
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