The Archaeology of Section Author(S): Jacques Guillerme, Hélène Vérin , Stephen Sartarelli Reviewed Work(S): Source: Perspecta, Vol
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Yale School of Architecture The Archaeology of Section Author(s): Jacques Guillerme, Hélène Vérin , Stephen Sartarelli Reviewed work(s): Source: Perspecta, Vol. 25 (1989), pp. 226-257 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567147 . Accessed: 27/12/2011 17:07 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Yale School of Architecture and The MIT Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Perspecta. http://www.jstor.org The Archaeologyof Section JacquesGuillerme and Helene Verin 1. The term "lack"or manque Originally, the Lacanian mythologists tell us, archaeological remains (traces)into the in Lacanian mythology refers to there was lack,whence arose representation, observance of architectural diagrams (traces) "a presence made of absence." which is the germinal form and precondition Jacques Lacan, Ecrits:A Selection, of all activity of knowledge and planning.' Of the countless but often unrecognizable translated by A. Sheridan vestiges of ancient Rome, three stand out (New York:Norton, 1977), p. 65. In the beginning, as concerns the architec- for the charismatic effect they have on the tural section, was the ruin, more specifically, minds of archaeologists; these are three 2. CodexAtlanticus (Milan: the Roman ruin: the ensemble of the ruins monuments which have particularlyfostered Biblioteca Ambrosiana), folio 850, of the Urbswhich displays to the magnetized the objectification of sections. On the one previously 310 recto, b. gaze of humanist nostalgia all the stages of hand, we have the amphitheater of Flavius, the vestiges' decline and all the breaches better known as the Coliseum, and the baths that time has wrought on the outer shells of of Caracalla;on the other, the rotunda of edifices extolled by scholars. Ruins are, in the Pantheon. All were abundantly contem- short, the traces of decay's ravages and lack plated, admired, observed and drawn. The on the resistant mass, and hence the contours first two greeted one's eyes with the gaping and aspect of structures which constitute the breaks in their structures and with the very bodies of monuments. It is to the hands semi-preserved arrangement of their vaulting of time that we owe the bringing to light systems. The Pantheon, on the other hand, of the frameworks that architectural techne had come down through the centuries nearly conceived, worked, erected and finally intact, with its interior disposition visible dissimulated in the temporarily completed and easily represented but its internal appearance of perfect construction. structure remaining hidden. Its constructional apparatusremained hypothetical and pro- The problem we would like to address here is voked a vast range of divergent conjectures. that of retracing the steps by which inventive The joining of the orthogonal structure of citizens, from the reasoning artisan to the the peristyle with the incurvation of the main curious philologist, were able to translate the body was especially titillating to the imagina- "natural"images of breaks in ancient ruins tions of archaeologists. Already in Leonardo's into stable schemata of sectional contours in work a hastily executed sketch poses this the documents made by the traveler as well question without insisting on one particular as the projects made by the artist. To put it solution; hesitation is a meaningful symptom another way, we would like to glimpse the of this "visionary"who nevertheless worked many stages where the acute and questioning rigorously and carefully at outlining the gaze of technicians paused to contemplate details of arches (as in the tiburioof the Milan in order to transform the observation of cathedral).2 226 - - : *.*I-*-- ....: ....... *-"'*y"". ' -' :t' . ', . ~. F,. \~~~~~~~~~~~~~1 . 1 r\--i^i. ^S. II ?.^ 2 1. Attributedto Bramante,sheet of drawingsof ancientruins. 2. Anonymous,partial view of the RomanColiseum, late 15th century. 3. Sangalloil Gobbo,external struc- ture of the amphitheaterof Verona. 4. Leonardoda Vinci,sketch of the tiburio at the Milan Cathedral. 227 The fact is that the rotunda is the emblem- means, whether naive or mannered, tend atic monument on which speculators in to express an encounter between Revelation 5 matters of architectonics have long and and History. insistently expended their energies. They go so far as to impose on its form the imaginary But here one must recall one of the most and vivid breaking up of the outside onto audacious strokes of genius of the Renais- the inside, and thereby contribute to the sance, that of representing the cosmos teaching and justification of the art of spaccato, through the double correlation of the con- or vertical section. One of the most note- cave and the convex by the use of globes. worthy of such examples is found in the Compared to this, the twofold figuration of Chlumczansky Codex, which presents side by the Pantheon seems little more than a timid side two drawings by the same anonymous application of the same principle. Imagining 5 hand, dated circa 1500.3 The first is a simple the antipodes was an act of conceptual and crude elevation; the second one looks like invention that made it possible to represent 3. CodexChlumizanskl (Prague: a primitive spaccato.The positioning and the earth as a distinct object of our sensible, Library of Czech National Museum), stroke of the spaccatoare rather awkwardcom- immediately intuitive rootedness.6 It was also folio 71; W Jufen, in the manuscript pared to current standards. Yet its merit, the condition for being able to configure, in Memoireset monumentsPiot, vol. 68 indeed its purpose, lies in presenting a draw- plastically identical and similarly manipulable (Paris: 1987), p. 161, points out ing of the mental operation which embraces, ball-shapes, the miniaturization of the two that "the two views... are copies, all at once, the interior and exterior of the spheres of the natural macrocosm, the globe probably the only ones, of a lost edifice as well as the thickness that separates of the earth and that of the concave celestial model that probably dates from the them. Here we have indeed a "tectonic" sphere. Thus one became accustomed to con- same period as Giuliano's drawings cut-out whose pattern seeks to show the sidering side by side, as it were, simultane- and comes from his entourage"; he structure or "inner workings." It is thus a ously, the inside and outside of things, within refers to folios 37 recto and 38 recto diagram (trace)more thought-out and more hand's reach; within the reach of that "instru- of the odexBarberini, Lat. 4424. elaborate than the traditional images of ment of instruments,"7 the sign and means of breaches which give a glimpse of scenes a rationality that analyzes and synthesizes, 4. Among the many examples, belonging to such unusual compartments breaks down and reassembles modifications of see folio F3 recto of the Grant of the universe as Hell or the Empyrean.4 scale. The cosmological artifice of the spheres Kalendrieret compostdes begiers The elaborated type exemplified in this of the world was de jure the expression of a published at Troves in 1529 by drawing from the Chlumczansky Codex also conceptual bravado that henceforth autho- Nicolas Le Rouge. It is, of course, stands apart from such imagery which rized the enterprising advancement of the but one example; the artifice of revives mystical fables and whose figurative artifices of architectural graphic figuration. representing the break in a wall can be found as early as in the deco- rations adorning Greek vases when they illustrate an episode taking place inside a dwelling or cave. 5. Often cited in this connection is the convention whereby the Nativity is represented in Renaissance art within a decor of ruins. 6. "... today, under the round machine / New lands and diverse peoples / have been found by dint of great effort," one reads in the "Foreword"of the Descriptionof Geographyattributed to Marco Polo and published in Paris in 1556. 7. Aristotle referred to the hand as the "instrument of instruments" in Parts of Animals, 687 a-sq. o 228 The Archaeologyof Section allegory of i ?. ?? ....a. t. ' 7.. part of ell, 1529. __ca.1-.792. -................... 1550. .. FromLthe5.Grant Crlur 5. From LeKaleon Grantin Rome, Kalendrier ansk T ~ ~~~~~~~~8. Anonymous, exploded section of ,x:. 8 hell, of 1 part5 29. j6. "ruin," P. Baltens,the ; _ _ q b. etompost7a,de bergiers,viwca..j .1500. Lequeu, s elevation and C1 4; |j;rL|l fi| ! }the it Pantheon in Romne,Chlu znsk 8 JacquesGuillerme and Helene Verin 229 8. See Wolfgang Lotz, Studiesin Let us return momentarily, however, to the Italian RenaissanceArchitecture figure in the Chlumczansky Codex. It is (Cambridge, Mass.: 1977), pp. 18- emblematic, we said, of the questioning gaze 21. The important point here is the cast on the structures of edifices whose reference to a view of Hagia Sofia, appearance is reconstructed artificially in two copied from a model by Ciriaco dimensions. This gaze is instructive for the l d'Ancona from the first quarter of questions it poses and for the answers it the fifteenth century. provides beyond a merely playful attitude to a truly pioneering one. This attitude is 9 et in a famous in the 9. See Hermolao Barbaro al., expressed drawing Royal y?. C. Plini Naturalis Historiaelibros Collection at Windsor of the so-called Castigationes,(Basel: 1534), p.