ROMA DOCET
Learning Lessons From Rome Today

David Mayernik
July 2007
 

EVER have more American art and architecture students been in Rome, not in more than half a century has there been a body of students dedicated to learning the classical tradition there (the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture), and yet perhaps never have the lessons of Rome seemed so opaque to their audience. The problem, in no small part, is due to the fact that the modern socio-political reading of the history of art and architecture has so inextricably tied any place, and Rome especially, to the particularities of its power structures that the past has been made more than ever a foreign country. What, in that frame of reference, can be gained from a city built by emperors, cardinals, barons, and popes?

         The other “problem” of Rome as a model is its seemingly inimitable layering, the records of millennia of habitation. Much has been made of the Roman palimpsest, and it is certainly one of the city’s real appeals. But, since this cannot be replicated, then surely “Rome” cannot be replicated or even learned from?

         And yet Rome is an exceedingly successful, not to mention beautiful, modern city, destination again of what used to be called the jet set (now really anyone who can afford a $70 ticket to Ciampino on Ryanair), whose history is marked as much by how it destroyed its past as preserved it. Something about the place, it seems, transcends the exigencies of its making. For students of urban design, architecture, and the arts, let me offer this beginning of a list of things Rome can still teach us today. The list documents aspects that are either particular to Rome, or particularly marked there; they are in all cases meant to be considered goods--antidotes or alternatives to their opposites which typically obtain in American cities. Most can be gleaned from the Nolli map, that remarkable documentation of mid-eighteenth century Rome that marks an historic point after which little new was constructively added to the city fabric. The list includes:

I. The Nolli map itself, with its almost polemical documentation of the relationship between public, semi-public, and private space
• Nolli documented how Rome perceived itself
• Treating churches, theaters, and palazzi cortili as open spaces equivalent to piazze stresses the complex interplay, and analogies, between these spaces

II. Figural space; buildings that defer to space
• Piazza S. Ignazio and Piazza S. Maria della Pace are classic cases that were reshaped, or carved out, from the dense matrix of stuff around them
• The relationship between the Piazza del Collegio Romano and the Palazzo Doria-Pamphilj speaks to the primacy of the figure (the space) over the ground (the palazzo)

III. Marking points of entry/arrival
• For all of Rome’s complexity, there is a diagrammatic clarity to the marking of points of entry (city gates) and arrival (Porta di Ripetta)
• This is as true for going into the city as going out into the countryside

IV. Taking advantage of topography
• The famous seven hills, plus the Janiculum and Pincio, were taken advantage of for their prospects (the view from Piazza del Quirinale) and prominence (the Acqua Paola)
• Important moments of ascent—the Scalinata di Spagna being a classic case—were marked and celebrated

V. Celebrating the essentials of urban life (open space, water, walking)
• Especially in the abitato, the continually inhabited part of the city, piazze served as vital relief from the density around them, and were commensurably invested with remarkable design energy
• All cities and citizens depend on water, but few elsewhere have so consistently acknowledged and celebrated this mundane fact of life
• while carriages had their impact on seventeenth and eighteenth century Rome, the city is primarily organized around walking (whether strolling or marching in procession)

VI. Juxtaposing positive formal order and benign disorder
• The disorder may have been a fact on the ground, but its presence enriches the experience of the overlaid (and in some cases underlaid) formal order
• The formal order, though, was the only order desired by those who shaped the city, and it is really only these strategies that can serve as lessons (since the complex disorder of the abitato was the result of forces, including chance, that we cannot replicate); formal order then is the lesson of Rome’s builders more so than of Rome’s physical self

VII. a limited palette of building materials and ways of making walls, openings, and roofs, combined with an inventive approach to the classical language
• travertine and marble, brick, and the ubiquitous stucco make the walls, clay barrel tiles the roofs. Period.
• the classical orders, even when naively understood in the years between antiquity and the Renaissance, establish the syntax of every monumental building and much of the fabric
• at the same time, the classical language never became a regimented system, imposed with unchanging regularity, but in fact displays the greatest possible variety, especially in the reconciliation of column and wall

VIII. buildings that echo or refer to each other across the city and across time
• Bramante composing St. Peter’s from the Basilican of Maxentius and Constantine and the Pantheon (with the Tempietto added for good measure)
• St. Peter’s and Lateran, the Lateran and St. Peter’s

IX. a clear hierarchy between fabric and monument in elevation, and a relative ambiguity between the same in plan
• S. Agnese in Piazza Navona and the Palazzo Pamphilj
• the courtyard of S. Maria della Pace
• Palazzo Altieri, Palazzo Doria-Pamphilj; palazzi generally

X. the city as a continual artistic work in progress
• no pope who contributed to the Rome of the Nolli plan ever thought the city was “done,” or perfect, much less inviolable
• the recycling of the past was, apart from the most debased Dark Ages, always directed toward building a better city

XI. the human figure in painting and sculpture integrated with architecture
• figures primarily in the service of amplifying architecture
• a ubiquitous desire to tell stories and convey meaning; idealized and heroic bodies are the primary conveyors of allegorical meaning

XII. a lost culture of the artistic academy
• formally at the Accademia di San Luca, and informally in artists’ ateliers, an ongoing conversation about the inheritance from the past
• artists in competition with each other, and with antiquity, to exceed and excel

        This list is admittedly formalist, and that is partly to immune the forms from the baggage of the meanings (about which I have written in Timeless Cities); and while I am an advocate of building meaningful places, I want in this case to detach the medium from the message in order to stress its translatability. There are many ways in which we can learn from cities of the past, and those that seem least unlike ours may superficially seem to be more suitable models. Rome, on the other hand, is the best model precisely because it is exceptional. Indeed, it is exceptional, but it is not an exception: Rome is the rule.