THE PAST, HISTORY, HISTORICISM AND THE ZEITGEIST
An Alternative Classical Point of View
David Mayernik
March 2010
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Donna alata, & vestita di bianco, che guardi indietro, tenga con la sinistra mano un libro, sopra del quale mostri di scrivere, posandosi col piè sinistro sopra d’un sasso quadrato, & a canto le sia Saturno, sopra le spalle del quale posi il libro, ov’ella scrive.
A winged woman, dressed in white, who looks backward, holding in her left hand a book upon which she is shown writing, resting her left foot on a square stone, and next to whom is Saturn, on whose back is set her book where she writes.
historicism noun:
1 the theory that social and cultural phenomena are determined by history; the belief that historical events are governed by laws. 3 chiefly derogatory (in artistic and architectural contexts) excessive regard for past styles.
—Oxford English Dictionary
WHY IS THE IDEA OF HISTORY so problematic for classicists today? Many seem unaware of any historiography after the early twentieth century, when cultural history still labored under those nineteenth century prejudices that eventually engendered twentieth century modernism. Those classicists who choose to chafe under the modernist’s “historicist” tag try to defeat it by denying the very existence of a Zeitgeist—that belief in the “spirit of the age” that underpins all modernist polemics. At the same time they cannot deny, indeed they loudly decry, the plain fact that the modernist spirit holds absolute sway in the art world, in public architecture, even in sustainability circles. Certainly there is a dominant cultural ethos today, a hegemonic worldview that may, admittedly, depend for its existence on a conviction that it must exist and should be shaped. If the Modern Zeitgeist didn’t exist there would be no need to rail against it; what classicists no doubt mean to rail against instead is the notion that the zeitgeist has been predetermined, and they’ve been left out of its determination.
Lacking a solid grasp of history, classicists slip into historicism. But historicism is in fact a roadblock for both modernists and classicists. The trap of avoiding historicism for modernists is their self-delusion of continual reinvention; the trap for classicists who flatten historical discourse is the trivial quotation of period styles. The former fault is certainly harsher to live with, as it kills the past and offers nothing equivalent in its place; but the latter is more insidious and facile if perhaps comforting, but ultimately eviscerating to anything of substance within the classical tradition. Each way of disengaging or engaging history in its own way prevents us from fully recovering the richness of a past that humanist culture enjoyed before the Enlightenment.
There is first the archaeological impulse downward into the earth, into the past, the unknown and recondite, and then the upward impulse to bring forth a corpse whole and newly restored, re-illuminated, made harmonious and quick.[1]
Within the idealized nineteenth century to which many a modern classicist would like to retreat, belief in historicism—the notion that history has its own trajectory, that History itself is an independent agent, and that its phases can be labeled and distinguished—drove all sorts of stylistic movements as architects sought to define what their age’s geist should be: from the Greek Revival to neo-Gothicism to Beaux-Arts Eclecticism, the difference between nineteenth century historicism and that of the twentieth seems to be that the former age saw history as a mine of styles to draw upon self-consciously in order to shape their own, while the latter saw all preceding styles as dead ends to be avoided. Both views, in fact, are isolated from the approach to the past known by all preceding centuries and cultures. For the world before Hegel, History did exist—but she had a muse named Clio and a very different agenda; the past in the pre-modern world was both more alive and more remote than it has been since our self-imposed crisis of historicism. In order to reject the pitfalls of modern historicism in all its guises, therefore, the humanists’ more complex and fruitful understanding of history offers the best critical alternative.
Naturally, we need modern historiography to unearth the pre-modern world’s understanding of their place in history. Indeed, now that modernism (beginning in the eighteenth century; vide Joseph Rykwert’s The First Moderns[2]) has severed the continuity with the past we once enjoyed, we absolutely need historians to help us understand how things once were, to look at the world of Bramante and Borromini like they themselves might have seen it; as they themselves would have said, we need to know the causes of things in order to understand them. There is no contradiction in this; objective historiography divorced from a modernist agenda is the only way to recover the past. And without a credible understanding of why artists and architects of past did what they did, we are doomed to merely mimicking their results, not their process; mimicry of form can only generate simulacra, whereas imitation of process can generate new, living work. For an abbreviated list of historical writings that offer a wealth of inspiration to modern classicists, please see the appendix.
There is much good scholarship on the pre-modern understanding of history, and being only an amateur I cannot pretend to synthesize all of it. What I would like to offer instead are some conjectural characteristics of the pre-modern world’s understanding of history and of the past; hopefully it is self-evident how they distinguish themselves from modern historicist notions.
- History as the record of great people meant to serve as models; Plutarch’s exemplary historical figures, the lives of the saints, or Vasari’s Lives of the Artists all bring to life historical models whom we can emulate
- Natural history and the wonders of past achievements; Pliny the Elder describes at once the wonders of nature and of human artifice, both worthy of admiration and sources of inspiration
- A Past loaded with baggage and meanings that can and should be recovered: the question of “which antiquity (Republican or Imperial Rome?)” and the Instauratio Romæ (Restoration of Rome, or a New Athens, etc.) haunted medieval and Renaissance cities as they sought to define themselves; recovering Early Christianity was a recurring topos for post-antique Christian Rome
- History and the Poetics of Evocation: Augustus harkening back to Republican Rome, Hadrian to Augustus, Pope Julius II to ancient Rome
- Critical history and the relative value of various periods (the past is not all equally good); connoisseurship of the past helped to distinguish those parts worthy of emulation from those to be avoided: Raphael recognized the divergent quality of the parts of the Arch of Constantine, the best of which were reused spolie; Vasari decried the modern Greeks (Byzantines) and the Goths while praising the ancient Greeks and Romans
- History as a tool of criticism: Vitruvius allied with the best of the Greeks against “modern” Rome’s fascination with grotesques
- The trajectory of History and Progress or Decline: the aspects of choice and will inherent in Ovid’s Golden Age and subsequent descent (and its possible return), or Vasari’s Three Generations building toward perfection, are very different from the inevitably cyclical cultural trajectory that Winckelmann and the first moderns posited
- History and Memory; the past as a source of poetic allusions and allegorical narratives: the mythical Romulus-Quirinus became an ante-type for Bernini’s St. Andrew at S. Andrea al Quirinale
HISTORY IS NOT AN AUTONOMOUS AGENT, nor does it have an agenda or proceed according to its own laws; instead, History can be a muse, and as our primary doorway to the past it is essential that we who would like to see classical humanist culture live again develop a fuller appreciation of what we have lost, in order to avoid the trap of historicism—Clio’s nemesis.
APPENDIX
Some Writings on the Past
Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past, Yale
Joseph Connors, “Virtuoso Architecture in Cassiano’s Rome,” Ian Jenkins, ed., Cassiano Dal Pozzo's Paper Museum. London
Irwin Panofsky, “Winged Time,” Studies in Iconology, Westview
Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies
Ingrid Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome, Cambridge
Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, MIT
Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome, Indiana
[1] Thomas H. Greene, “Resurrecting Rome: The Double Task of the Humanist Imagination,” Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, Binghampton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, p. 41
[2] Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, MIT Press, 1980
