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- © David T. Mayernik,
Architect &
Painter
This article is grounded in two fundamental assumptions: that there is no modern equivalent of the evocative, enobling and humanizing urban culture that Rome represents; and that it is important, even imperative, that we reacquire the methodologies by which we may create such "civil-ized" environments again. My intention is to re-awaken Mnemosyne, or Memory (the Mother of the Muses), by illuminating some of the subtle mnemonic strategies of Roman Humanism. This is not a piece of art-historical analysis, but rather a "treatise-by-implication", advocating the reappropriation of both the formal and poetic strategies of Humanist design.
The loggia of the Casa dei Cavalieri di
Rodi above Trajan's Forum, Rome
MNEMOTECTONICS
Classical mnemotechnics (conscious memory techniques) were intimately dependent upon visual imagery. Hellentistic writers on the subject oscillate between recommending real or imaginary buildings, streets and cities as loci for ideas and words. Real or imaginary, what is of interest to the architect is the reliance on places to store ideas (the visual memory was considered to be strongest of the mnemonic faculties, and so one relied on the stronger to aid the weaker). Such a reliance on images of places to remember rhetorical texts suggests that, conversely, when the Hellenistic architect thought about buildings and cities, he imagined them containing memories of ideas, and so some of the same rules which governed the making of memory cities for the rhetorician also informed the process of making cities memorable. This process or art, as a corollary to the science of mnemotechnics, I would call Mnemotectonics. It manifests itself in three forms: imaginary or intellectual memory "bridges", ephemeral structures and parallel public processions, and permanent memory structures.
Outside the Aurelianic walls and along the Tiber River, Baldassare Peruzzi designed the Villa Chigi (now Farnesina) in c.1505 for Agostino Chigi. Soon after its completion he was frescoing its facade with mythological subjects no doubt suggested by his patron's iconographer. As is usual for the period, the frescoes are decorative, learned and allegorical at the same time, and intended to literally comment on the patron's life, interests, and character. The probable thematic undercurrent of the frescoes was a represention of the "Loves of the Gods" (a broad and yet potent source of images for the large expanses of wall to be painted). When the Villa was purchased by the Farnese later in the 16th century, the new owners, who had engaged Michelangelo for the completion of their urban palazzo immediately across the Tiber, solicited the artist/architect's advice on their acquisition. He proposed the bold scheme of linking their new suburban villa to their urban palace with their own bridge, dramatically taking possession of both sides of the river. The project was as expensive as it was inspired, and came to (almost) nothing.
MEMORY THEATERS
Communal Florence strung her public processional allegories together out of existing conditions, inventing different narratives by the sequence in which urban chapters were read. Florentine ritual paths are therefore notable in that they relied solely on existing urban patterns and sacred spots (amplified by ephemeral structures), and reverberated little back to new permanent urban design. The memory of the narrative, then, depended exclusively upon the resonance of its ritual.
The public processionals of Venice, meanwhile, are notable for two characteristics intimately bound up with that city's image of herself. Venetian public ritual was perhaps more rigorously structured and hierarchical than that of any other city; and, she used the city as a stage in a way more literal than any other. The Serennisima's processions didn't engage the whole city in the manner of Florence, but focused instead on Piazza di San Marco and the Giudecca; as a result, urban design in Venice revolved almost exclusively around the Piazza, articulating its arcades with an insistent rhythm that virtually concretized the form of her public ceremonies.
Now that the burden of art-historical connoisseurship no longer obscures the value of meaning in the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and urbanism, it is possible to understand the formative role of meaning as a generative force to humanist disegno. For example, the trite simplifications of art-historical labels like "mannerism" have precluded seeing the poetic conceit underlying Giulio Romano's cortile of the Palazzo del Te, where the dislocated triglyphs and agressively rusticated keystones are not products of whim or a subversive mind, but are in fact the direct result of the cataclysmic forces operating within his frescoed room of the Fall of the Giants. Such a reading of the integration of the fictive realm with the real is borne out by the stables of the same palazzo complex, frescoed on the inside with the Labors of Hercules; in fact, only eleven of the twelve Labors are painted, while the stable building itself stands for the scene of the Horses of Diomedes.
CIVITAS DEI
1. Quintilian, quoted in Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1966, p.22 2. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974, p.15-16 3. Ibid 4. Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth Century Roman Palaces, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990, p.219 Maiorino, p.181 5. Giancarlo Maiorino, The Cornucopia Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, Univ. Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1990, p. 181 6. J. Dorat, quoted in Richard Bernheimer, "Teatrum Mundi", The Art Bulletin, 1958, p. 236 7. Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, New York: Academic Press, 1979, p.250-251. 8. Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, p.220. 9. St. Augustine, De Trinitate, IX, 6, xi, trans. Stephen McKenna, Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988, p.281 10. John Onians, Bearers of Meaning, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, p.53. 11. Calvino, p. 16 12. St. Augustine, Confessions, X 9, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin, New York: Penguin Books, 1984, p.216 back to the top :: back to articles index
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The entry court/facade of Rome's Palazzo
Barberini makes deliberate reference to that of the Pope's apartment on
the Cortile of San Damaso in the Vatican , linking their two facades
visually (as at the time of the former's construction one was visible from
the other across the city) and in the memory of anyone traversing the
city, thereby reinforcing the Barberini family's stature as a Papal
family, while consciously or unconsciously mnemonically linking the city
together. Such "memory bridges" occur again and again across the city into
the 18th century. And that the Palazzo Barberini's entry court owes a debt
of inspiration to the loggia of the Villa Farnesina seems plausible at a
purely formal level4; but what
lends such an attribution even greater credence is the Barberini passion
for the theater, and the fact that the Farnesina's loggia was the setting
for numerous rustic spetacolli . Which leads to the question of whether
the Palazzo Barberini's forecourt is really a teatro in the Baroque, urban
sense of the word, but also in a literal one, and which makes its atypical
U-shaped form comprehensible in the context of an understanding of the
City as Theater, at the same time as it refers to the Pope's Vatican
apartment and the grand public spectacle of a Papal benediction. And
"bridging" is latent in the papal title Pontifex Maximus, which originated
in the Latin for Bridge Builder.
When Annibale Caracci arrived in Rome from
Bologna in 1595, he was soon called in to fresco the Palazzo Farnese's
recently glazed loggia overlooking the Tiber. He was acutely aware of the
great precedents across the river in the villa by then known as the
Farnesina; as were the Farnese family, no doubt still haunted by
Michelangelo's "Ponte Farnesiano". The learned Farnese, their advisors and
the Caracci evolved a dense iconographic program for the palazzo's gallery
frescoes identical to that of the facade of the villa Farnesina, thereby
"bridging" allegorically what they could not physically. So for the
educated visitor to the gallery, the connection to the Villa was just as
profound as if there had been a direct way there by foot. Indeed, more so,
as the connection was one of learning, of taste and aspiration: it linked
not only two places, but two eras, that of the earlier Golden age of
Julius II and Leo X with that of Clement VIII. The Baroque referred to the
Renaissance as the latter called upon Antiquity, while Palazzo and Villa
bridged city and country via Humanist culture.
The architect/emperor Hadrian's villa
outside the city walls on the Via Tiburtina bridges the fictive and the
real. The ancient grammar textbook Ad Herennium
recommends using places visited while travelling as resources for memory
loci; since it is well known that Hadrian designed the villa as a series
of reconstructions of places he had seen while campaigning, it becomes
clear that these recognizable, discreet, and memorable forms and types are
really memory houses, distinct yet cleverly linked in several different
ways so as to allow more than one experiential "reading"; in fact, it is
quite plausible to imagine the emperor/architect walking through his villa
early in the hazy Roman campagna morning along a specific path, using the
villa to recall a particular rhetorical or poetic text. And what makes
Hadrian's Villa especially relevant to this discussion is its urban scale
and complexity, allowing it to become a civic model; what was already in
antiquity the apparent chaos of the Roman fabric was justified instead as
a potentially enriching morphology. While the post-Trajanic empire
continued to found new gridded military compounds from Britain to North
Africa, the mother city worked on her palimpsest more deliberately, and
imposed her regula only
locally (building no more self-contained imperial fora like those of
Augustus and Trajan, but instead operating selectively on the city fabric,
from the Pantheon to the Amphiteatrum Castrense).
A
seemingly un-bridgeable gap separates our modern cities from those created
by artists suffused with Humanist Mnemotectonics. Surely our built
environment lacks beauty, but it also lacks the humanizing effects of
meaning and empathy, issues which enoble not only our public life, but our
public soul. Forms that arise without meaning are arbitrary, and therefore
are at best meaningless, and at worst bearers of meanings we may not
endorse (consider the cynical commercial message of the Manhattan
skyline). Cities are our most profound cultural legacy; only when they are
valued over the Garden as the image of Paradise will we again invest them
with the thought that will make them memorable places.