Problem? No Problem (EAHN 2016)

Problem? No Problem EAHN roundtable “Pre-modern Architecture and the Shift of Historiography” We would like to push back a bit on the assumptions of this roundtable by reflecting on what we will position as an artificial if useful distinction: between those disciplinary habits and norms of architectural historians focussed on pre-modern epochs; and those working primarily with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our observation is that there are two distinct academic traditions at work, which can be more or less attributed to those scholars working in one historical field or another. The first being to treat the historiography of architecture separately from its history—as a kind of artefact in its own right—as might be the case in the history and historiography of modern and postmodern architecture. And the second being to embed an historiographical consciousness into historical writing, to the point where distinct studies of historiography would seem redundant. This, we argue, tends to be the case among those working on the architectural history of the middle ages early modern epochs. The distinction is rough, of course, and any discussion will throw up numerous exceptions. But it works, we think, more often than it doesn’t, and points, in particular, to the disciplinary heritage of contemporary architectural history as deriving on one hand from the modern discussion on architecture, with its inevitable tendency towards contemporaneity, and on the other from the scientific gains of art history, with its privileging of academic distance and the need to explicitly position new knowledge and fresh interpretations within the context of the field itself. Our basic contention is that, despite appearances, there is not a dearth of historiographical studies in pre-modernist architecture. The historiography of those periods preceding the modern age is instead played out on two registers. The first positions architectural history as a product of the long twentieth century itself, where its histories function as modern artefacts—even when they concern subjects that might be cast as medieval, renaissance, baroque or neoclassical. This is an extension into premodern subjects of the kinds of studies published towards the end of the twentieth century by Giorgiadis, Heynen, Tournikiotis and others into the historiography of the modern movement—namely to treat works of architectural history as artefacts of their own time, and hence modern subjects within the history of modern ideas. The spate of recent studies into the histories of the early modern age, such as Evonne Levy’s book on the modern historians of the baroque, Matthew Rampley’s study of the Vienna School

and indeed our own work on the twentieth-century historiography of mannerism and the baroque all fall within this class of studies—stepping outside of the history of the period to study that history from a distance. These works, we contend, contemporise their subjects by reducing the distance between us as readers and the historical fields treated by those same subjects by understanding how a more distant past was mediated by history since the end of the nineteenth century and rendered, one way or another, modern. The task this work deals with is to understand the nature, circumstances and effects of history’s mediation in architectural culture. This, we argue, is the study of historiography to better understand the modern era and its contemporary legacy, and in a way compounds the problem identified by the chair for this session. The second register relates to the rise over the later twentieth century of a professional art (and architectural) history that draws no operating distinction between the world of ideas and that of artistic and architectural production—and in which attention to the fine grain also demands attention to the treatment of that fine grain within the discipline to date. Therefore, historiography is processed as a matter of course within histories of the epochs under review. This mechanism can be observed in the way that the genre of artist’s lives has informed the historiography of early modern art and architecture. This historiography is, in origin, biographical, with Vasari’s Vite as one of its roots. Early modern artistic biographies are highly conventional narrative devices, structured to such an extent around tropes and anecdotes that they inevitably draw attention to their constructedness. As a consequence, the historiography of early modern architecture (and art) has always had to position itself with regard to the historiographical practices embedded in its source material. A detailed examination of this process was one of the subjects of Bernini’s Biographies. Critical Essays, edited by Evonne Levy, Steven Ostrow and myself; but the assessment of the norms and values carried in the very DNA of the discipline was already addressed in the earliest critical bibliographies of early modern sources, such as, for instance Angelo Comolli’s Bibliografia storico-critica dell’architettura civile (1788). Regarding Bernini’s biographies, Comolli’s Bibliografie weighed these sources against other historical sources such as the description of the Four Rivers’ Fountain in Giuseppe Gualdi’s diaries or the then still unpublished biography of Alexander VII by Sforza Pallavicino If Comolli’s comparison intended to caution his reader about the accuracy of the biographies and subsequent histories of Bernini’s oeuvre, it also recognized the common ground between the Lives and contemporary texts drawn from other genres, and indicated how the norms and conventions proper to

each of these genres are, in themselves, historical artefacts worthy of historiographical consideration. This observation can be extended to other practises at the origin of the academic architectural historiography of the early modern period, such as antiquarianism. There, the world of ideas is literally collapsed into the collection, representation and study of artefacts, however not in order to claim some form of epistemological innocence but rather to foreground the ideological or programmatic potential of such an operation. This observation is also valid for different antiquarian traditions, ranging from ‘secular’ antiquarianism, always haunted by some idea of the greatness of Ancient Rome, over the antiquarian study of rituals and customs, imbued with notions of regional or national identity, to Christian archaeology, brandished as a weapon in the confessional struggles from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. It is certainly true that the modern historiography of early modern architecture has, at times, tended to neutralize or even naturalize these sources, and to assimilate them with information gleaned from archival records or other empirical material. But at the same time, the very complexity of the fabric of these sources induces what could be termed a permanent revisionism that has certainly grown in intensity over the last two decades, at least in part under the influence of the first historiological register we’ve discussed. Both of these registers, we argue, ultimately speak to twentieth-century disciplinary legacies and to an increasingly demonstrable capacity to consciously attend to the interplay of architecture and history—across history, for a range of disciplinary audiences. In this, history itself, in all its guises, functions as an artefact while its historian confront the complications of contemporaneity. But it does so in a way that brings the modernist insistence upon the contemporary increasingly into play for those scholars writing on the historiography of, say, the early modern era in order to force a deeper historical context for the architectural history of the long twentieth century. And as the rigours of the art historical tradition have in turn been visited upon modern and contemporary subjects, the historiography (and history of the historiography) of the twentieth century has (have) in turn borrowed with greater and greater frequency from the art historical tradition. In this sense, the current spectrum of methods, subjects and motivations for writing architectural history—and indeed its currency as a discipline—owes a debt to this disciplinary exchange. Maarten Delbeke & Andrew Leach