SUPERSIZE VITRUVIUS Johnny Rodger
Was Vitruvian Man really standing up?
Or did he just have a stauner?
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‘Likewise in sacred dwellings, the symmetry of the members ought to correspond completely, in every detail and with perfect fitness, to the entire magnitude of the whole. By the same token, the natural centre of the body is the navel, for if a man were placed on his back with his hands and feet outspread and the point of a compass put on his navel, both his fingers and his toes would be touched by the line of the circle going around him. You could also find a squared layout in the body in the same way as you made it produce the circular shape. For if you measured from the bottom of his feet to the top of his head and compared that measurement to his outspread hands, you would find the breadth the same as the height, just as in areas that have been squared with a set square.’ De Architectura, Vitruvius Pollio
Augustus Caesar might have been the world’s most famous ever rent boy, but when it comes to Consensus and Revision, or revision with consensus, he was certainly the man who pulled it off. He was the guy that managed to persuade the Senatus Populusque both that his first john’s (the late Julius’s) project was a whopper, but in a lifelong, consummately meretricious display of submissiveness, also succeeded in convincing the world that he, Augustus, was in fact not going to be pushed around. As the cynical Suetonius says of him (in The Twelve Caesars),
greeted the publishing of his book, then despite its reputation and putative influential status – especially in the Renaissance – it did not lack its critics and detractors down through the ages. In the 15th century the architectural theorist Alberti was already criticising Vitruvius’s writing style; by the Age of Enlightenment he was being dismissed as inaccurate and out of date – his measurements were proved wrong and no actual contemporary Roman buildings were found to fit his descriptions – ; and he has regularly been mocked and dismissed for being pompous, old-fashioned and conservative.
‘When the people would have forced a dictatorship on him he fell on his knee and, throwing back his gown to expose his naked breast, implored their silence.’
On the face of it then, from a purely architectural sense, there is very little pertaining to either consensus or revision in Vitruvius’s chef-d’oeuvre. And if personal charm is, as it has recently been defined , all about availability, then unlike his boss Augustus, who obviously spread himself about a bit, a wizened, impotent old Vitruvius didn’t have much of that to offer us either. We might therefore ask whence comes the resonance and reputation which his book has enjoyed amongst the canon of architectural works across the centuries?
It seems indeed, that like all the most consummate professionals, Augustus wanted his body to be everywhere and everything: to be all things to all men. Perhaps he even featured a whole chapter in Suetonius’s other tome The Lives of Famous Whores – but alas as that book is lost to us in all but its egregious title we shall never know. It is however, and not surprisingly, a somewhat less titillating approach that classical scholar Indra Kagis McEwen takes to Augustan corporeal ubiquity in her new book Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture. Vituvius’s De Architectura is the only major work on architecture to survive (a near perfect copy was found in St Gall’s monastery in the 15th century) from classical antiquity, and it was dedicated to Augustus just as he ‘found Rome built of sun-dried bricks’ and planned to ‘leave her clothed in marble.’ An aging military man when he wrote the book, Vitruvius himself failed as an architect, and lamented that ‘little celebrity comes my way’, and ‘old age has spoiled my appearance, bad health has sapped my strength.’ If it is doubtful how much consensus
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In a most thoroughly researched and cogently argued thesis in response to this question McEwen makes a special pleading for a more than usually generalist reading of Vitruvius’s work. It seems that De Architectura is neither just a brickie’s manual on how to balance one stone safely atop another, nor simply a layman’s guide to the names that the Greeks gave to their columns and other edificial appurtenances. It is thus, as McEwen terms it, neither a Fachbuch nor a Sachbuch: for wasn’t it Vitruvius, after all, who was the first to set out the difference between architecture and building? If his positioning of building as a mere component of an architecture which latter also comprehended, or at least understood, or in his own words ‘demonstrates everything other arts achieve’, was what would earn Vitruvius the criticism garrulous or pompous from his most practically-minded readers,
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then it is also the analysis which gives us the key to De Architectura’s central importance in the understanding of the spatialisation of the Roman concept of ‘Empire’. McEwen is at pains to point out that De Architectura is a deliberate artifice, a fiction which carried specific and special significance in the land of the living Roman. Like any accomplished work of literature, De Architectura employed at the same time literary and rhetorical tropes of various types: not only those which the Romans would instantly recognise and understand, and others which were of novel formation, but also those that, arguably most effectively, mixed elements of the new and the traditional. Among the most obvious of the traditional figures Vitruvius employs is that of the rhetorical triplet. But Vitruvius uses it in a way which would have been clear to every Roman reader as a reference to the genealogy of the book’s imperial dedicatee. ‘Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts’ is the well-known first sentence of Augustus’s step-father’s Bellum Gallicum. That latter book’s dedicatee, Cicero, subsequently praised the writer Julius Caesar’s work, saying it was ‘nudi, recti et venusti’. It is thus significant, and would have been highly so to the citizen reader, that when Vitruvius lists the three important values of architecture, ‘firmitas, utilitas, et venustas’, he chooses that latter more anthropomorphic word for beauty, rather than what might have been the more obvious ‘pulchritudo’. Whether Augustus actually thought Julius himself was beautiful is another question, and of course the exposition of the point here in this review is given a necessarily superficial treatment, but McEwen can demonstrate variously and at length that tropes which were recognisable, significant, and usually centred around the person of Augustus (including the Virgilian identification of Augustus with Herculean virtus and humanitas) proliferate throughout the text. As for new figures, perhaps the easiest way to introduce one of Vitruvius’s most important innovations is by direct quotation from McEwen. ‘What we now call the Roman Empire, also declared to be a body, was brought into being during the reign of Augustus by architecture.’ What is meant here is that it was during Augustus’s reign – if that is the correct word – that the words Imperator and, of course, Imperium came to have their current significance. The word Imperium had in the Roman Republic been used to refer to the legally vested power of command invested in either a successful general or a magistrate. There was, that is to say, no spatial element in the concept, Imperium did not exist independently of the person who temporarily held it for the Republic, and as McEwen says, ‘a proconsul might have imperium in Asia, but Asia was the provincia of his imperium, not an imperium in itself.’ There was no preconceived idea of a fixed geographical empire, but with Augustus, the first ‘Emperor’ (it was a title he adopted officially in 29BC) all this changed. The title became exclusively and permanently his (it is the title Vitruvius uses to address him in his dedication in the mid 20s) and its power thus became located spatially in his body. Equally,
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McEwen asserts, architecture became a privileged means for spatialising imperium. The Empire was expanding and urbanising rapidly under Augustus – there were 28 new cities built in Italy alone under his rule, but why and how were they to be built? ‘Buildings are the “eminent guarantees”, the evidence and proof, of the majesty of imperium and make it spatial. They also, as Vitruvius tells it, localise the achievements of Imperator Caesar.’ When it comes to Vitruvius’s mixing of new and traditional figures in his text, we can all immediately recognise the description which spawned the drawing known as ‘Vitruvian Man’. But when Leonardo made this famous drawing some 1,500 years after Vitruvius wrote the text, he only managed to solve the problem of the man’s being able to touch both hands and feet on the circumference of a circle and a square by making him stand up and move position, and by drawing the two geometric figures as touching tangentially only at the base point. The fact is that Vitruvius probably never drew the schema out; the man is described as lying flat on the ground; he is clearly supposed to be only paper-thin, and represents, as McEwen says, ‘a metaphysical proposition, a ritual formula, and a template.’ These aspects were clearly something that Caesariano in his Cosmo Vitruvius of 1521 (p17 bottom page) did not understand, as his drawing shows an unresolved and literal draughting of the original flat man with his unfeasibly lengthy feet, hands and arms – not to mention his priaptastic penis. The most traditional part of Vitruvius’s schema – the metaphysical and ritualistic aspects – have provenance in mathematical and geometrical relationships given significance in Pythagorean philosophy, and also in beliefs to do with Stoical circular universe, and in the four quadrants of the cultic heavens. The square and the circle can also be recognised as representing respectively the gridded towns of Roman settlements, and the ritualistic circle that was ploughed around them at their establishment. McEwen goes into all these elements (and others) in some detail, but the most important innovation in this integrated schema which Vitruvius describes is its adoption as template – that a man’s body is made here to produce the beautifully proportioned geometry which can be used to symbolise the appropriate ‘symmetry’ and ‘fitness’ for the temples and important buildings of the Roman imperial project. The ‘wellshaped man’ (cf venusta) at the centre of this schema was recognisable to Roman readers (from current descriptions and from the iconography on coins, etc., which were seen everywhere) as being Augustus himself. Thus it was by virtue of this module, that Augustus’s body would be spread out palpably across the whole geographical Empire. Vitruvius was, as mentioned above, an older man than Augustus – he had already worked in Gaul with Julius Caesar. Perhaps he had learned there a thing or two, or three … In a certain way, therefore, we may say that by giving Augustus’s body up for the use (—and abuse) of the whole Empire, Vitruvius was in effect,
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Augustus’s new pimp. But that, of course, is only a rhetorical trope. Imperium Reprised and Revised ‘Stretch’, and more specifically, ‘overstretch’, have been important concepts in recent analyses of American global domination. Would it not be a Supersize too far however to imagine George Weeman Bush could fill out Augustus’s toga? In The Man Who Lost Liberty’s Balance Michael Coyne does nonetheless come within a French Fry of making that very analogy, invoking Gore Vidal’s spookily prescient prescription of the type of ‘Caesar’ who would come to be the ‘subverter of the (American) state’. Coyne argues convincingly that in Bush’s handling of the ‘war on terror’ we can recognise something of Vidal’s prescription that a neo-Emperor would necessarily be someone who would ‘oversimplify some vital but important issue.’ But perhaps the analogy can be stretched even further here. In the last issue of The Drouth (Land), Angus Calder, reviewing Niall Fergusson’s latest book Colossus, discusses how the issue of localisation of power and spatialisation of rule has been as much a problem for the modern American Republic as we found it to be (above) for the Roman Republic. Calder notes approvingly that the OED lists the medieval definition of ‘empire’ as involving power plus ‘extent’. For just as in the Roman long run the temporal investment of power in colonial administrators proved not strong enough to hold together as well as was a spatial ‘Imperium’, so Fergusson worries about the lack of willingness of American ‘imperialists’ to dig in and settle down long-term in colonial hotspots. Calder also notes Fergusson’s attempt to put these neoimperialists to shame by his multiple quotations from the Founding Fathers of the American Republic, ‘When the US republicans referred to their expanding empire, they were thinking primarily about extent.’
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precisely this type of American spatialisation that is well underway, with the world wide domination of American mores, through proliferation of American logos, and brands and by commercial and corporate domination across the globe. It all depends, of course, on whether one considers the franchise to be an adequate mode of settlement or spatialisation to counter Fergusson’s lamentations over the Americans’ lack of will ‘to stay’. At any rate, one can’t help but feel, to return to Vidal’s prescriptions, that the homely hut-on-the-corner of McDonald’s Burger Restaurant architecture (notwithstanding its veneer of faux-Augustan marble) ought to be appropriate to give body to an American Empire whose Emperor is both the ‘Supreme Commander of the armed forces and leader of the free world’ and yet at heart ‘just plain folks, a regular guy, warm and sincere’. Besides if Vitruvian Man was the very module for providing the world with Augustus’s own personally Roman proportion, what are the Golden Arches but the archetype of a great fat American arse settling down across the globe. And if Pythagorean philosophy provided the mathematical ratios underlying that Vitruvian module for the classical empire, then equally for our digital culture the demographic statistics as outlined in the film Supersize Me ought to make for the dimensions of the Golden Arse. Forty-six million McDonald meals served daily across the globe, says Morgan Spurlock, and, 60% of all American adults are obese. But Spurlock in his misogynistic vaudeville – replete with soundtrack ‘fat-bottomed girls’ … – still manages to get it all wrong. For if history teaches us anything, then in this reading it points to a very particular dietary way to a Pax Americana: If Empire there must be, and if we want peace around the globe now, then we surely need more burgers, not fewer! So come on America, Supersize Us! You know it makes democratic sense. After all, as Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds, said
For is it not the truth about the so-called ‘war on terror’ that it is largely a symptom of an American crisis in imperial administration? And if this diagnosis is valid then the bigger question for George W Bush might not be how he can hunt down and assassinate some Islamic former employees of the CIA, but where he can find his own personal Vitruvius. For as McEwen says ‘Architecture is the privileged means for spatialising imperium.’
‘Look after the customer and business will take care of itself.’
To some cynics (and also perhaps again to some readers of the last issue of The Drouth with its focus on the phenomenon of the Shopping Mall) it is
Virtruvius: Writing the body of Architecture Indra Kagis McEwan Pub. MIT 2004 £14.95
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For unlike Spurlock, Kroc believed his corporation should pander to the cravings of its worldwide clientele. But then, that’s just another rhetorical trope. Or is it?
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