Rethinking Architectural Historiography

Dana Arnold, Elvan Altan Ergut, Belgin Turan Ozkaya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134236282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Rather than subscribing to a single position, this collection informs the reader about the current state of the discipline looking at changes across the broad field of methodological, theoretical and geographical plurality. Divided into three sections, Rethinking Architectural Historiography begins by renegotiating foundational and contemporary boundaries of architectural history in relation to other fields, such as art history and archaeology. It then goes on to critically engage with past and present histories, disclosing assumptions, biases and absences in architectural historiography. It concludes by exploring the possibilities provided by new perspectives, reframing the discipline in the light of new parameters and problematics.

This timely and illustrated title reflects upon the current changes in historiographical practice, exploring potential openings that may contribute further transformation of the disciplines and theories on architectural historiography and addresses the current question of the disciplinary particularity of architectural history.

Part I
Boundaries

1
Art history and architectural history
Eric C. Fernie

Academic turf wars may be entertaining, but they are seldom productive. No one has rights, as a scholar, over any part of the historical record, and all evidence is open to all of us to use in pursuit of answers, regardless of our labels. That, however, is a privileged view, applicable to those with private means or very large grants. In the world of economic necessity, with its institutions, departments and funding streams, teaching makes unavoidable demands for boundaries, and research, with an increasing stress on collaborative projects and centres, even in the humanities becomes more institutionalized; and of course there is the matter of where the graduates get jobs, what might be called the reception theory of academic survival. In choosing the taxonomy of knowledge as its theme for the year, CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Cambridge University) called attention to both these aspects of the academy, the ideal and the real so to speak, concerning which I wryly noted that H. G. Liddel and Robert Scott, having given the meaning of taxis as ‘disposition’, add ‘especially of military forces’.¹

The main aim of the conference was to examine the place of the history of architecture in the taxonomy of knowledge, with particular regard to departmental contexts.² Architectural history is taught for the most part in departments of art history and schools of architecture, and to a lesser extent in departments of history, archaeology and architectural history. It is obvious that all departmental boxes have their own working assumptions, but let me illustrate the point. The booklet for the Leeds International Medieval Congress for 2003 contains a set of maps of the region, Leeds City centre, roads around the sites, the sites themselves and the individual buildings on them. These maps were provided by the School of Geography of the University and are excellent, except for one detail. All the diagrams have north lines, except for those of buildings; and, as some of the drawings are printed with a direction other than north at the top of the page, with some buildings it is almost impossible to find your bearings. So there is a professional quirk: diagrams of buildings are plans, not maps, and plans do not need, perhaps do not deserve, north lines. Even if this is the fault of one illogical geographer, it nonetheless illustrates the existence of mental categories based on disciplines.

That brings me to the aim of this essay, which is to assess the value of studying architectural history in the particular box of the history of art, and, I should immediately add, this is what I have always seen myself as doing. To provide a focus for this assessment, I am going to offer a brief account of a building, namely the eleventh-century cathedral at Speyer. Its status is almost unrivalled in German political history, both at the time of its construction and after. This status is echoed by the chief item in its bibliography: Hans Kubach and Walter Haas’s Der Dom zu Speyer of 1972; the text and plates volumes are each like a domestic brick, and the volume of drawings, at 30 cm by 43, is almost the same size as a Roman sesquipedalian tile, that is, 1 ft by 11.2, or 29.6 cm by 44.4. The text volume has 1,142 pages, and the plates volume 1,699 photographs.³

The city of Speyer is situated on the west bank of the Rhine, on the stretch of the river running north from France to the Netherlands. The present form of the cathedral is largely as it was built from 1030 by the German emperor Conrad II (emperor 1024–39) and refurbished in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries by Henry IV (emperor 1056–1106), though with extensive restorations. It is vast, with six towers and a profile imposing even by the standards of the industrial age (Figure 1.1). The crypt contains the tomb of Conrad, making the building the mausoleum for the Salian royal house and putting it in the same category as St Denis and Westminster Abbey. The sources and meanings of Conrad’s building are almost all to do with the Roman Empire, using both non-Christian and Christian precedents, such as the fourth-century basilica at Trier for the elevation, and the contemporary church of St Peter in Rome for the plan of the crypt.

Figure 1.1 Speyer Cathedral from the south-east. (Hans Kubach and Walter Haas, Der Dom zu Speyer, 3 vols, Munich 1972, plate 125.)

It is the same with Henry’s work. The Vita Bennonis Osnabrugensis records that, in or shortly before 1082, Bishop Benno of Osnabrück, ‘well versed in the art of architecture, was brought to the city of Speyer by order of the King’ to repair the building, which had been erected ‘with too little caution [up to] the bank of the River Rhine’. Henry took the opportunity to refurbish the building, most notably adding the groin vaults in the nave and probably the rib vaults in the transepts (the dates of the vaults have been much debated, at times somewhat chauvinistically). There are Roman sources for both: thermae of the third century such as those of Caracalla or Diocletian in Rome for the groins, and the sixth-century Hagia Sophia in Constantinople for the ribs. And of course the Corinthian capitals have a Roman source. There are also features from contemporary Italy, such as the sculpture around the windows of S. Abbondio in Como, dedicated in 1095, which make it look as if everything from Italy was thought of as ‘Roman’, even if it was clearly contemporary. Thus, while problems with the damp courses and water ingress may have been the immediate reason for the work, this relentless aggrandizing and stress on classical sources make it difficult, despite the counter arguments, to ignore the fact that the work started within a few years of the investiture contest of 1077, and Henry’s humiliating defeat at Canossa at the hands of Pope Gregory VII.

While they could not even be outlined within the scope of this essay, a proper study could also include, among other things, how the building was designed, especially the geometry used, how it was built, including the masonry techniques, how it was funded and how it affected the region in which it stands.

The later history of the building is equally interesting. Additions and alterations in the gothic style are nugatory, from which one can conclude that the romanesque building was probably considered special. Our knowledge of successive German invasions of France since 1871 tends to obscure the fact that before that date the relationship between the two states was reversed. Louis XIV’s seizure of Alsace and Lorraine in the late seventeenth century brought the boundary of France to within a few miles of Speyer. When the town was sacked in 1689 Louis XIV commanded that the cathedral be spared, but fire still engulfed it, destroying much of the nave. In 1772 the west front was rebuilt by Ignaz Michael Neumann (son of Balthasar). A noteworthy aspect of this is that Neumann respected the romanesque style of the original. Apart from Christopher Wren’s fragment at Ely, this sort of approach is hard to parallel anywhere at this time.

In the 1790s, when the French again occupied the town, their view of the cathedral was explicit: it represented the imperial German past and had to go, so they drew up a plan to turn it into a parade ground, using the western massif as a triumphal entrance arch. The plan was vetoed by Napoleon. After Waterloo, the Germans decided to remove the eighteenth-century west front and build one on the lines of the original romanesque design, with the Bavarians here playing the same role in the German renovatio as the Prussians with the cathedral in contemporary Cologne. After the Second World War General de Gaulle followed in the spirit of 1689 and 1792 in demanding that the Franco-German boundary north of Alsace be moved to the Rhine, which would have made Speyer a French city. It is possible that embarrassment on the part of the United States over having rejected de Gaulle’s demand contributed to their agreeing to France being given a seat on the Security Council of the United Nations in the same deliberations.

Turning now to an assessment of the value of an art-historical context for the history of architecture, and starting by identifying the wide range of disciplines involved in this study of Speyer Catheral, those that appear to be necessary for using the textual evidence include the disciplines of those loosely called historians, that is, those for whom palaeography and languages are essentials, and who concentrate on various overlapping specialisms, such as the political, constitutional, social, economic and ecclesiastical. For the material evidence there are the disciplines of archaeologists, scientists (such as chemists and petrologists), architectural historians, cultural historians, architects, engineers and geographers.⁴ Architectural history has, therefore, as one would expect, a central role to play among these disciplines. The question is, can it fulfil that role if it is studied in an art-historical context?

Thinking of the weaknesses and strengths of the history of art as a discipline, and starting with the weaknesses, the most obvious is the concentration on the individual artist. This is the biography industry, producing monographs on the life and work of Leonardo, Rembrandt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Picasso, etc. – works that tend to ignore contexts, be self-contained, discussing the authentication of objects and the so-called development of the artist’s work. Hence Dana Arnold’s comment, when we were organizing the conference, that art history encouraged searches for authorial authenticity. This does not make sense to a medievalist as there is only a tiny handful of names to choose from and those are cardboard characters (like Benno of Osnabrück). There is, however, a partial parallel in medieval studies, in the concentration on buildings as individual objects, like pieces in an exhibition.

Concerning style, what Nikolaus Pevsner is often and rightly accused of overemphasizing, this is the chief tool of art history, the Kunstgeschichte of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Heinrich Wölfflin, and what Marvin Trachtenberg has referred to as a ‘mythical Kunstwissenschaft’, which is ‘inherently asocial in its abstraction’.⁵

There is also a practical problem, that of recognition, in that 99 per cent of the population sees architectural history as separate from art history: art is painting and sculpture, architecture means buildings, as the arrangements of bookshops indicate. Organizations that ignore the distinction, such as the Royal Academy, are likely to be continuing a traditional view.

These points constitute a strong case against the relevance of the history of art for the history of architecture, and doubtless there are many more. It is also true that art historians are their own worst enemies, as I do not know of any other discipline that so assiduously plays down and even attacks its worth: I am not an art historian, I am a cultural historian, an archaeologist, a historian of visual culture, or a social historian; art history is only about connoisseurship, let’s discuss the end of art history, etc. And yet, a good case can be made that taking full account of the individual work of art and using stylistic analysis can also be strengths, leading to insights that would be difficult to obtain in other ways.

The chief point about the work of art is that it is not necessary for art historians to restrict themselves to authentication and the treatment of the object as a work of art: I have tried to illustrate a much wider approach in my thumbnail sketch of Speyer Cathedral. But it is equally important that we should also, where appropriate, treat the building as a free-standing work of art, because at least some of the patrons, architects and users themselves appear to have done so, meaning that we have a reason, indeed a duty, for doing so as well. I think, for example, of the exterior of the thirteenth-century late romanesque abbey church of St George at Limburg-an-der-Lahn on the Rhine, where the reconstructed painted exterior surfaces are absolutely distinguished from the ground at the base of the walls; or Norman Foster’s Swiss Ré building in St Mary Axe in the City of London, in the twenty-first century, which makes no acknowledgement of the surrounding buildings or even the ground on which it stands. Why was all that money spent on buildings like these if they were not intended to be seen and appreciated as individual objects?

While the criticisms of style analysis described earlier are all justified, as with the work of art there is another side to the question. One of the most revealing aspects of a culture or society lies in what it considers good style, or, to put it at its most ephemeral, stylish. If one wants an indication of the social importance of style one need only think of the six-year-old re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Mapping Architectural Historiography
• Part I: Boundaries
• Part II: Critical Engagements
• Part III: Reframings