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1 Architecture under the Knife: Viollet-le-Duc's Illustrations for the Dictionnaire Raisonné and the Anatomical Representation of Architectural Knowledge
Aron Vinegar Department of Art History McGill University, Montréal
May 1995 A thesis submitted to the Facuity of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts at McGi!l University, Montréal
(Cl
Aron Vinegar, 1995
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Abstract The numerous illustrations
- or better yet demonstrations - in Viollet-le-Duc's
Dictionnaire Raisonné of Gothic architecture were the most powerful means of implementing biological metaphors in order to transfer or situate the discourse of architecture within the realm of nineteenth century positivistic science. Viollet-le-Duc borrowed dissective strategies of representation from the field of anatomy to implement his alternate 'vision' for appropriating architectural knowledge. By inscribing anatomical metaphors within his architectural drawings, Viollet-le-Duc could filter the viewer's conception of architecture through his own appropriation of anatomy's critieal and selective methods of representation. This scientific approach to architectural drawing was in perfect harmony with Viol1et-Ie-Duc'.s textual and conceptual mission in the Dictionnaire to not only demystify architectural knowledge as practiced at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but also to critical1y reconfigure the reader's relationship to it according to his own system. Through this process, it was his intent to change the public's way of thinking and seeing architecture. Résumé Les très nombreuses illustrations - tout aussi démonstrations - de Viol1et-Ie-Duc dans son Dictionnaire Raisonné de l'architecture gothique furent sans doute les outils les plus puissants de compréhension des métaphores biologiques de discours architectural dans la contexte de la science positiviste du 1ge siècle. Dans le but de traduire sa "vision" alternative du savoir architectural, Viol1et-Ie-Duc emprunta les procédures dissectives de représentation de l'anatomie. Ainsi, en inscrivant des métaphores anatomiques dans ses dessins architecturaux, Viol1et-Ie-Duc pouvait filtrer la conception qu'avait le spectateur de l'architecture à travers sa propre appropriation des méthodes critiques et sélectives de représentation anatomiques. Cette approche scientifique du dessin architectural était en parfaite harmonie avec la mission textuel1e et conceptuel1e du Dictionnaire de Viol1et-Ie-Duc, non seulement dans la perspective de démystifier le savoir architectural tel que pratiqué à l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, mais aussi dans cel1e de reconfigurer, selon son propre système, et d'une manière critique, la relation existante entre ce savoir et le spectateur. Au travers de ce procédé se manifestait son intention de changer comment le public voyait et pensait l'architecture.
ii
Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed to this undertaking in the form of intellectual advice, encouragement, and emotional support. 1 welcome the opportunity to thank them as this thesis would have been impossible without their assistance. First, 1 want to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis advisor Dr. Hans BĂ´ker. His example of intellectual curiousity and dedication has been a constant source of inspiration. 1 would also Iike to thank Professor Solomon-Kiefer whose support and encouragement over ffi'iny years has been much appreciated. The Osier Library of the History of Medicine was kiml enough to allow me to take photographs from their rich collection, and Mr. Wayne Lebel's assistance at the Iibrary facilitated my research there. Professor Faith Wallace shared some of her expertise on medical issues in an enlightening conversation. Elspeth Cowell - a friend and colleague - read my draughts with a critical eye for c1arity, and her assistance throughout the thesis process was unfailing. Peter Hebb's friendship and editorial advice greatly contributed to the final product. During my research in Paris 1 incurred many debts of gratitude. Alain Mercier of the Conservatoire des Arts et MĂŠtiers provided his expertise on machine drawings, clarifying many questions 1 had at a critical point in my research. Patricia Kalensky - documentaliste at the Centre de Recherches sur les Monuments Historiques - went above and beyond the cali of dutY in facilitating my access to their collections. Mr. Bougier of the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs alerted me to the archivai fonds of the Ecole de Dessin at the Archives Nationales. A special thank you to EmĂŠrance Dubas for her support and intellectual companionship. My most profound debt of gratitude goes to my mother, Wendy R. London, whose support has been boundless. Her example of integrity and dedication 1 can only attempt to approximate.
iii
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
vi
Introduction
.
Chapter 1 - Viollet-Ie-Duc's Anatomical . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. Metaphor for Archill'Cture
Georges Cuvier, Anatomy, Physiology, and the Nineteenth Century: The Era of Organization and its Analytic Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..
Chapter 2 - The Anatomical Representation of Knowledge: The Dictionnaire RaisomlĂŠ and ils Visual Models
4
5
23
The Plates for Diderot and D'Alembert's EncyclopĂŠdie
23
Georges Cuvier, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Demonstration of Function: A Paradigm for Performing Scientitic History in the Nineteenth Century
30
Chapter 3 - Saper Verde: A Scientific System of Archill'Ctural Drawing
35
The Exploded View: An Emblematic Entry into the Visual Strategies of the Dictionnaire
37
A Briel' History of the Exploded View t'rom the 16th to the 19th Centuries
38
Georges Cuvier, Bourgery, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Exploded View: The Empirica1 Facticity of Invisible Function
41
The Shell Game: Viollet-le-Duc's Biological Critique of the Beaux-Arts System of 'linguistic' Theories of Composition and Omament
46
iv
Composition
48
Ornamcnt
53
Other Hybrid Drawings: Analysis and Synthesis
55
A Cross-Sectional Anatomy of Architecture
61
Ideal Construction 1 Constructed Ideal: Viollet-le-Duc's Visual Language of Architectural Restoration
64
Chapter 4 - The Present Past: Anatomizing Memory, Reconstructing Gothie Architecture
,
,. 72
Memory, Creative Imagination, and the Dialectic of Style
72
Anatomy, Analytical Memory, and its Graphic Representation
77
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
IllustratiollS
83
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
v
List of Illustrations Figure 1.
Lucotte, Armchairs, from the EnLyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert, pl. v in Terence M. Russel, Architecture in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert, 1993.
Figure 2.
Viollet-le-Duc, Interior perspective of the apse from Notre Dame at Dijon, from volA of the Dictionnaire Raissoné, 1859.
Figure 3.
Viollet-le-Duc, Exterior perspective of the apse from Notre Dame at Dijon, from volA of the Dictionnaire Raissoné, 1859.
Figure 4.
Viollet-le-Duc, Perspectival cross-section of the apse from Notre Dame at Dijon, from volA of the Dictionnaire Raissoné, 1859.
Figure 5.
Viollet-le-Duc, Exploded perspective drawing of a nave wall construction at Notre-Dame at Dijon, from volA of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1859.
Figure 6.
Georges Cuvier, Dissection drawing of the medial and lateral musculature of the forelimb of the cal. The muscles are letter-keyed to the descriptions, from MHN 608. fig.54 in William Coleman, Georges Cuvier, 1964.
Figure 7.
View of a whale in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, Paris, 19th century. fig. 15 in Anthony Vidler, "The End of Type: The Transformation of the Academie Ideal, 1750-1830," Oppositions no.8 (Spring, 1977), pp.95-1l5.
Figure 8.
View of the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, Paris, 19th century.
Figure 9.
View of the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, Paris, c.1980. Postcard in the author's possession, c.1980.
Figure 10.
Jacques de Sève, Cabinet du Roy, Jardin des Plantes, Paris, from Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, 1749. fig.171 in Barbara Stafford, Artful Science, 1994.
Figure II.
Jacques de Sève, Cabinet du Roy, Jardin des Plantes, Paris, from Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, 1749. fig. 172 in Barbara Stafford, Artful Science, 1994.
vi
Figure 12.
Viollet-le-Duc, Exploded perspective drawing of a tas-de-chargc. li'om vol. 4 or the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1859.
Figure 13.
Exploded view and oblique sectional cutaway of a chain and dippcr pump, l'rom Georgius Agricola, De re mettalica, 1556. tig.88 in Peter Booker, A History of Engineering Drawing, 1979.
Figure 14.
Leonardo da Vinci, Exploded view of vertabrae, From Windsor 19007v, c.151O.tig.75 in Bernard Schultz, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy, 1985.
Figure 15.
Leonardo da Vinci, Exploded view of a mechanism for converting reciprocating to rotary motion, l'rom fol.8v Codex Atlanticlls. tig.89 in Booker, A History of Engineering Drawing, 1979.
Figure 16.
Leonardo da Vinci, Cross-sectional anatomy of a human lower limb, l'rom Quaderni V 20r, c.1490. tig. 404 in K.B. Roberts and J.D.W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Human Body: European Tnlditions of Anatomical Illustration, 1992.
Figure 17.
Exploded view of a sIide rest l'rom an carly copying-Iathc, From Denis Diderot and Jean de la Rond d'Alembert, From the EnLYlopédie, p1.12 in W. Steeds, A History of Machine Tools, 1969.
Figure 18.
Exploded view of feet, l'rom atlas 2, pl. 23, in Georges Cuvier,
Recherches sllr les Ossemens Fossiles, 1834-1836. Figure 19.
Exploded view of a skull, l'rom the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy, Paris, 1853. p.53 in L'Archive: Traverses/36, 1985.
Figure 20.
Exploded view of vertabrca l'rom a Mastadon, l'rom atlas l, p.23, of Georges Cuvier, Recherches sllr les Ossemens Fon"iles, 1834-1836.
Figure 21.
N.H. Jacob, General anatomical-physiological summary of the sympathetic nerves, l'rom v.3 of J.B.M. Bourgery, Traité Complet de l'anatomie de l'homme. 1844. tig. 194 in Barbara Stafford, Artful Science, 1994.
Figure 22.
Bones l'rom a Rhinoceros, l'rom atlas 2. pIAO, of Georges Cuvier,
Recherches sllr les Ossemens Fossiles, 1834-1836.
vii
Figure 23.
N.H. Jacob, Disarticulated skull with three exploded cervical vertabrae, from vol. l, pUO, of J. B. M. Bourgery,
Traité Complet de l'anlOmie de l'homme, 1832. Figure 24.
Viollet-le-Duc, Tas-de-charge depicted according to the rules of descriptive geometry, from volA of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1859.
Figure 25.
Viollet-le-Duc, Escalier d'Honneur and Donjon from the Chateau at Pierrefonds, from drawing no.344 in the collection of the Centre de Recherches sur les Monuments HislOriques, Palais de Chaillot, Paris.
Figure 26.
Armengaud ainé, Basic exercises in descriptive geometry, from pl.2 of Armengaud ainé, Cours élémêntaire de dessin industriel, 1886.
Figure 27.
Front Section of Open Display Cabinet, from Christophori de Pauli Phannacopoei Camera Materialium, 1751. fig. 162 in Barbara Stafford, Artful Science, 1994.
Figure 28.
Rear Section of Open Display Cabinet, from ChrislOphori de Pauli Pham;acopoei Camera Materialium, 1751. fig. 155 in Barbara Stafford, Artful Science, 1994.
Figure 29.
VioHet-le-Duc, Springing of a Roman groin vault and a Gothic tas-de-charge, from vol.8 of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1866.
Figure 30.
J.N.L.
Comparative drawing of façades, from Précis des à l'Ecole Polytechnique, 1802-1805. pAl in Alan Colquhoun, "Composition versus the Project," Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays 1980-1987, 1994., pp.33-55. Durand,
Leçons données
Comparative table of courtyards, from Précis des u!çons données à l'Ecole Polytechnique, 1802-1805. pAO in Alan Colquhoun "Composition versus the Project, " Modernity and the Classical Tradition:Architectural Essays 1980-1987, 1994., pp. 33-55.
Figure 31.
J.N.L.
Durand,
Figure 32.
Georges Cuvier, Perspective dissection drawing of the vocal organs of the parakeet, from #614 of the collection at the Muséum d'Histoire naturel/e.p.56 in William Coleman, Georges Cuvier: ZO{llogist, 1964.
viii
Figure 33.
Viollet-le-Duc. Perspective view of column capital and vault of the axial chapel at Auxerre Cathedral, France, l'rom volA of the Dictiollllllil'l'
Raisonné, 1859. Figure 34.
N.H. Jacob, Perspective dis~ection drawing of vcsscls, nerves, and muscles of the axiIla and neck, l'rom v.6, pl. 16, of LB.M. Bourgery. Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homm/', 1839. tïg.116 in Roberts and Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body, 1992.
Figure 35.
Viollet-le-Duc, Perspectival sectional cut-away of two bays of a wall bascd on a circular plan, l'rom volA of the Dictio/1i1llire Raisonné, 1859.
Figure 36.
Viollet-le-Duc, Perspectival sectional cut-away of a covered passagcway surrounding a cloister, from volA of the Dictionnaire Raisonné. 1859.
Figure 37.
N.H. Jacob, Vertical section ofa human trunk cut on different planes. l'rom v.2, pl. 74, of 1. B.M. Bourgery, Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme .1832. Photograph by the author l'rom a copy of the Traité in the Oslcr Library of the History of Medicine, McGiIl University, Montréal.
Figure 38.
N.H. Jacob, Oblique perspective of a skull cut on three planes, l'rom v.3. p1.7, of J.B.M. Bourgery, Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme, 1844. Photograph by the author l'rom a copy of the Traité in the OsIer Library of the History of Medicine, McGilI University, Montréal.
Figure 39.
Viollet-le-Duc, Perspective view of a building demonstrating the Roman system of construction, l'rom v.l, fig. l, of Lectures on Architectul'/~, 1877.
Figure 40.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Dissection drawing of a Skull, l'rom Windsor 19057r, c.1489.fig.55 in Bernard Schultz, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy, 1985.
Figure 41.
Perspective view of a barrel vault, l'rom vol. 9 of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1868.
Fugure 42.
Oblique cut-away view of a bearing shaft, l'rom fig.5 of La Nature, 1897.
Figure 43.
Oblique sectional cut-away view of a marine building, l'rom vol.7, pl. 11 , of the Encyclopédie, . pl.478 in Charles Coulston Gillispie, A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry, 1959.
ix
Figure 44.
Viollet-le-Duc, Perspecival sectional cut-away of a tower, from v.9 of the
Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1868. Figure 45.
Viollet-le-Duc, Perspective view of the Belfry at Évreux with adjacent plans, from vo1.2 of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1854.
Figure 46.
Viollet-le-Duc, Interior perspective of Notre-Dame at Dijon, with adjacent cross-sections, from vA of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1859.
Figure 47.
N.H. Jacob, Cross-sections of vertabrae taken at different levels on the spine, from vo1.3, p1.9, of J.B.M. Bourgery, Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme, 1844. Photograph by the author from a copy of the Traité in the OsIer Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University, Montréa1.
Figure 48.
N.H. Jacob, Cross-sections through a spinal cord, from vol. 3, p1.37 bis, of J.B.M. Bourgery, Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme, 1844. Photograph by the author from a copy of the Traité in the OsIer Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University, Montréa1.
Figure 49.
Details, sections, and views of a cast iron tie rod, from L. Bécourt and J.Pillet, Le dessin technique, cours professionnel de dessin géométrique, 1893. p.20 in Yves Deforge, "Des écoles de dessin en faveur des arts et métiers," Les Cahiers d'Histoire du CNAM noA (July, 1994), pp. 11-26.
Figure 50.
Viollet-le-Duc, Bird's-eye view of an Ideal Cathedral, from vol.2 of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1854.
Figure 51a.
Viollet-le-Duc, Restoration drawing of the Cemetery Chapel of Avioth, from vol.2 of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1854. fig. lOb in Françoise Boudon, "Le réel et l'imaginaire chez Viollet-le-Duc: les figures du Dictionnaire de l'architecture," Revue de l'art 58/59 (1983), pp.95-1l4.
Figure 51 b.
Boeswillwald, Restoration drawing of the Cemetary Chape1 of Avioth, from voL 1 of the Archives de la Commission des Monuments Historiques. fig. lOa in Françoise Boudon, "Le réel et l'imaginaire chez Viollet-Ie-Duc:les figures du Dictionnaire de l'architecture,"Revue de l'art 58/59 (1983), pp.95-114.
x
Figure 52a.
Viollet-le-Duc, Plan of Notre-Dame Cathedral at Noyon restored to its original state in the XlIth century, from vol. 2 of the Dictiollnaire Raisonné, 1854. fig. lia in Françoise Boudon, "Le réel et l'imaginaire chez Viollet-le-Duc: les figures du Dictionnaire de l'architecture," Revue de l'art 58/59 (1983), pp.95114.
Figure 52b.
Plan of Notre-Dame Cathedral at Noyon showing the building campaigns, l'rom Charles Seymour, La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Noyon au XIII' siècle, 1975. fig.llb in Françoise Boudon, "Le réel et l'imaginaire chez Viollet-le-Duc: les figures du Dictionnaire de l'architecture," Revue de l'art 58/59 (! 983), pp.95114.
Figure 53.
Ideal section of strata, from William Buckland, Bridgewater Treatise ,1836. fig. 24 in Martin Rudwick, "The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science: 1760-1840" History of Science no.14 (1976), pp.149-195.
Figure 54.
Comparison of two columnar sections of secondary strata in north-eastern and south-western England, from Henry De la Beche's SectiollS and Views, 1830. fig. Il in Martin Rudwick, "The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science: 1760-1840" History of Science no.14 (1976), pp. 149-195.
Figure 55.
Section of tertiary strata from Montmorency to Paris, from atlas 2, pl. lb, of Georges Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles, 1834-1836.
Figure 56.
Reconstruction of the American Fossil Mastodon. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils, 1972.
Figure 57a.
Viollet-le-Duc, Plan of the 'primitive state' of the choir and transept of Saint-Rémi, Reims, from vol. 9 of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1868. fig. 12a in Françoise Boudon "Le réel et l'imaginaire chez Viollet-le-Duc: les figures Dictionnaire de l'architecture," Revue de l'art 58/59 (1983), pp.95114.
Figure 57b.
Plan of the transept and choir at Saint-Rémi, Reims, present and restored stales after excavations, from pl.3 of Hans Reinhardt, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, No.2, 1961. fig. 12b in Francnçoise Boudon, "Le réel el l'imaginaire chez Viollet-le-Duc: '~s figures du Dictionnaire de l'architecture," Revue de l'art 58/59 (1983), pp.95-114.
Figure 58.
Laurillard, Reconstructed skeleton of an Anopletherium Gracile, from atlas l, p1.144, of Georges Cuvier, Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles, 1834-1836.
xi
fig.
3.3 in Martin
Introduction
This thesis is concerned with two aspects of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's architectural theory: his emphasis on the importance of drawing as an epistemological act and his understanding of the practice of anatomy. To be more precise, it is about the amalgamation of these !wo aspects into a powerful visuallanguage for "appropriating and assimilating" 1 a critical vision of architecture. The most effective and coherent implementation of Violletle-Duc's graphie strategies "materialized" in the illustrations for his Dictionnaire Raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1854-1868). The numerous illustrations in the Dictionnaire Raisonné were the most powerful means of implementing biological metaphors and anatomical techniques of representation in order to transfer, or situate, the discourse of architecture within the realm of nineteenth-century positivist science. In Chapter One, 1 discuss the importance of the anatomico-physiological metaphor for VioHet-le-Duc's conception of architecture. The approach taken is to historicize VioHet-le-Duc' s appropriation of this metaphor within its nineteenth-century context. Il becomes apparent that anatomy functioned as a "cultural symbol", which Leo Marx has defined as an image that conveys "a special meaning (thought and feeling) to a large number of those who share the same culture. ,,2 Anatomy and physiology occupied a particularly important place for those involved in the 'scientist' culture of nineteeth-century France; a culture in which VioHet-le-Duc was intimately involved. The great progress anatomy and physiology had made in mapping the most mysterious of domains - the living organism - offered them as paradigms of scientific investigation. Above all, physiology and anatomy provided !wo dominant modes of
Bany Bergdoll, "The Dictionnaire Raisonné: Viollet-Ie-Duc's Encyclopedie Structure for Architecture" introduction to The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné of EugèneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (New York: Braziller, 1990), p.4. 2
This passage is quoted in The Vital Machine: A Study ofTechnology and Organic LIre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.7.
thought to nineteenth century science and culture: organization and analytical methodology. Both proved to be powerful concepts for history, sociology, politics, and technology. Viollet-le-Duc insisted that they could be, and should be, relevant to architecture if il wanted to remain an important domain of human knowledge in the age of science. Il is hardly suprising that Viollet-le-Duc was pm1icularly influenced by Georges Cuvier's comparative anatomy; it was considered by many to be the ultimate amalgamation of anatomy and physiology. Comparative anatomy offered the most systematic example of dissective methodology (analysis) applied to the study of complex organizations; an example that Viollet-le-Duc could adopt for his own investigation of architecture. Thus, Viollet-le-Duc utilized the anatomical analogy as the guiding metaphor for his Dictionnaire RaisonnĂŠ: to cut, separate, analyze, and finally synthesize the structures of Gothic architecture is the modus operandi of his most famous tex!. This is the subject of Chapter Two which explores the nature of the anatomical ordering as reflected in the illustrations. My primary concern is to show not only how Viollet-le-Duc utilized the anatomica1 metaphor to analyse and emphasize architectural structure, but also how he uses it as an organizing principle for the very discourse of that structure. The two major sources for the anatomica1 ordering of knowledge are Diderot and D'Alembert' s EncyclopĂŠdie and Georges Cuvier's comparative anatomy. The former provided the specific prototype of an encyclopedic format ordered anatomica1ly and the latter provided a complete system for the scientific and historical investigation of organic structure. 1 stress the visual nature of both enterprises, in which the technique of anatomical representation was just as important as the subject matter depicted. Their respective visual representations are explored in order to revea1 the often unspoken premises underlying their strategies of reordering knowledge. Viollet-le-Duc was greatly influenced by their representational techniques and integrated them into his own approach to visuality and representation in the Dictionnaire.
2
Chapter Three shows how Viollet-le-Duc's innovative drawing techniques - oftnoted but !ittle explored3
-
llI'e concretely related to the theory and practice of
contemporary anatomical illustration. Viollet-le-Duc borrows and transcribes the techniques of anatomical drawing into his own illustrations for epistemological, didactic, and polemical purposes. By inscribing anatomical metaphors within his architectural drawings, Viollet-le-Duc could filter the viewer's conception of architecture through his own appropriation of anatomy's critical and selective methods of representation. This scientific approach to architectural drawing was in perfect harmony with Viollet-le-Duc's textual and conceptual mission in the Dictionnaire to not only demystify architectural knowledge as practiced at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but also to critically reconfigure the reader/viewer's relationship to it according to his own system. Through this process, it was his intent to change the public's way of thinking and seeing architecture. Chapter Four situates the role of anatomical representation within Viollet-le-Duc's dialectic of style and thus integrates it into his whole philosphy of creation. Anatomical representation was the 'negative dialectic'; it cut, analysed, and disassembled in order to create anew. Il was an essential component in Viollet-le-Duc's attempt to cut into the Beaux-Arts' domination of the collective architectural memory: apowerful counter-memory that analysed the past in order to create in the present.
Cosidering the importance Viollet-le-Duc placed on drawing as a means for appropriating a vision of architecture suprisingly littie has been written on them. The onIy in depth accoWit is the excellent article by FI'IIIIÇOÏse Boudon, "Le réel et l'imaginaire chez Viollet·le-Duc: les figures du Dictionnaire de l'architecture" Revue de l'Art 58-59 (1983). pp.95-114. 3
Chapter One Viollet-Ie-DUI:'s Anatomical Metaphor For Architecture
Viollet-Ie-Duc's strategic use of the anatomieal metaphor in the Dictionnaire Raisonné marks both his dependance on the traditional anthropomorphie analogy in architecture and his transformation of it. The complexity of this transformation, however, cannot be explained away by mere epithets. Viollet-le-Duc does not simply cut into the Vitruvian Homo Quadratus in terms of nineteenth century analytical science: a dissected or inside out re-figuration of the classica\ body of architecture. Nor does he simply replace the old anatomica\ metaphors used in the French Rationalist tradition of interpreting Gothie architecture with the functionalist biologica\ theories of Georges Cuvier' s comparative anatomy.4 Both of these summations contain a kernel of truth but beg the central questions to be asked. Why is the anatomical analogy the guiding metaphor in the Dictionnaire Ra~nné '?
What is the relationship between the paradigm of dissective analysis and the
equaUy important concepts of synthesis, unity, function, and organization. Why not a machine metaphor in the age of industry '? These complex questions must be elucidated within the historical context of the nineteenth century: not only to put them into their historical 'perspective', but because these questions are at the very heart of the construction of the historical in the nineteenth-century.
• Robin Middlelon in bis now classic thesis on Viollet·le-Duc and the rational Gothie Tradition (Cambridge: Ph.D disEertalion, University of Cambridge, 1959), outlined the inIerpretation thel Gotbic caIhedmIs exhibited a raIionaIity and economy of slNclure thel was al the essence of their beauty and seperaled !hem from Classical architecture. Weight was pared down 10 a mininwm and opposing SINClura! fore•• were C<lUIteIbaIance in an eepIibrium through the sy.lem of vaults, piers, and buttres.... J.R. Perronet· one of lhe architects who writes about Ibis syslem· use. the anatomical analogy 10 invoke the.. concepts: "The magic of these latter buildings consists Iargely in the faet that they were buill, in somo degree, 10 imitale the slNClure of an animal: the bigh, delicate columns, the lracery with lransverse n'hs and liercerons, could he compared 10 the hunes, and the small slones and voussoirs, onIy four or live inches thick, 10 the skin of these animais. The.. buildings couId taJœ on a Iife of their own, Iilœ a sketeton, or the ribs of a boat, wbich seem 10 he consllUCled on simiIar 1IIlJde1s." This passage is quoted in Philip Sleadman's The Evolulion DesIp: BioIolIlca1 An8Joay in ArdIitecture and the Applied Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 41-42.
or
4
Georges Cuvier. Anatomy. Physiology. and the Nineteenth-Century: The Era of Organization and its Analytic Methodology
Viollet-le-Duc - Iike many other intellectuals in the nineteenth century - was selfconscious of the part he was playing within a culture that was developing a' new' concept and practice of history - in short, a scientific history. This new approach to the historical past would model itself on ihe postivistic sciences in which a postereol'i inductive reasoning - the search for 'facts' - took precedence over - but never ignored - a priori deductive conclusions. In terms of architecture this approach had both materialist and idealist connotations. Materialist in the sense that architecure could only be disscussed in terms of its specificity to time and place - "an objective and exhaustive examination of facts" based on a study of the material structures of architecture in relation to historical context. Idealistic in the sense that based on empirical historical investigations certain principals or laws cou1d he deduced \hat transcended specific forms. 5 "The ideal", as Alan Colquhoun noted, "was therefore an aim that emerged from historical experience and contingency" . 6 This historicist outlook became a potent source of critique for architects in the nineteenth-eentury who hegan to challenge the dominance of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; the French state-run school of architecture. The first sustained historicist challenge to the neoclassical doctrines of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts came from within its own ranks: initiating from a cadre of architects in the l830's now dubbed as the Romantic Pensionnaires (FĂŠlix Duban, Henri Labrouste, LĂŠon Vaudoyer, and Louis Duc). Intrinsic to their challenge was a profound emphasis on architecture's material specificity to time and place; a pointed attack on the Beaux-Arts classical conception of fixed and imutable ideals embodied in the canon of Graeco-Roman architecture. The history of the Romantic
, Alan Colquhoun, "Tbree Kinds of Historicism," Modemi1y lIIId the Classical Tradition: An:hitedurai Essays 19110-1987 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 5-6.
'!bid.,
p.s. 5
Pensionnaires has been thoroughly researched in recent years by David Van Zanten, Neil Levine, and Barry Bergdoll. 7 Viollet-le-Duc imbibed much from these architects and, like them, challenged the academic idealism inherent in the Beaux-Arts system. Viollet-le-Duc's early championing of the Gothic - later codified in his Dictionnaire Raisonné - marked his divergence from the Beaux-Arts Graeco-Roman ideal as well as from the Romantic Pensionnaires who usually favoured sorne form of Renaissance architecture. ln contrast to the Romantic Pensionnaires, however, Viollet-le-Duc consciously set himself apart from the Beaux-Arts at an early age, refusing to enter the state architectural system. Although Viollet-le-Duc' s conception of historicism differed from the Romantic Pensionnaires - a divergence wbich extended beyond preferences for different architectual systems and which will be elucidated in the following chapters - he drew upon many of the same sources that contributed to their understanding of scientific history. Both the Romantic Pensionnaires and Viollet-le-Duc moved within Saint-Simonian and Positivist circles wbich emphasised scientific enquiry as the motor for historical progress as well as the primary means of unveiling the very processes of that historical movement. An important aspect of Positivist and Saint-Simonian conceptions of scientific history was the use of organic analogies. In an important article on historicism, Alan Colquhoun bas briefly, but persuasively, outlined the connection between concepts of the organic, the individuai, and the formulation of a scientific approach to history: In this view, society and its institutions were analgous to the individual. The individuai can be defined only in terms unique to himself. Though he may be motivated by what he and bis society see as objective norms of belief and conduct, his own essence cannot be reduced to these norms; it is constituted by the contingent factors of his birth and is subject to a unique development. The value of bis life cannot he defined in a way that excludes his individuality. It is the same
, ln particular Bee David Van Zanlen, Tbe Ardùtedural Polycbromy or the 1830's (New York: Oarland Ph.D dissertation, 1975), ..... Desiguing Paris: Tbe An:hitedure or Duban, Labrousle, Duc, lUId Vaudoyer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); Neil Levme, Architectural ReasoDing in the Age or PosiIivism: Henri Labrouste and the Néo-Grec ldea or the BIb~ue Saint·Genevihe (Yale Univenily: Ph.D dissertation, 1975): and Barry BergdoU, Uon VlIUdoyer: Bistoricism in the Age or Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: The ArchitecbJral HiBtory Foundation and the MIT Pr..s, 1994). 6
with societies, cultures, and states: they develop according to organic laws which have internalized in their structures. In them, truth cannot be separated from destiny.8 Thus, the individual biological organism became an important model for the historicist endeavour to emphasize the particularities of development within specifie contexts against a priori or "objective norms" that transcended historical time. Viollet-leDuc's Dictionnaire Raisonné contains numerous examples of the organic analogy applied to Gothie architecture. Undoubtedly, many of these derived from the Saint-Simonian interpretation of historical development as consisting of both organic and critical periods. Short organic periods existed when every element of society was in harmony followed by longer critical periods which were marked by a lack of harmony. Art and Architecture prospered in organic periods reflecting and internalizing the unified outlook of society. Thirteenth century France was one of the great organic periods, and the mature Gothie cathedral was its harmonious architectural expression. The language employed in the Dictionnïare, however, indicates that Viollet-le-Duc was not just applying analogies derived from organicized Saint-Simonian thought. He was also implementing organic metaphors derived directly from the science of biology which was just beginning to define itself as an institutional field of study in the nineteenth century. Viollet-le-Duc inscribes 11 biological metaphor in the preface to the Dictionnaire as a general model for his investigation of gothic architecture: "...the moment has come 10 study medievaI art as one studies the development and the life of an animate being who proceeds from childhood to old age via a series of aImost imperceptible transformations, such that it is impossible to pinpoint the day when childhood ended and old age began. "9 Although, this biologi",ù metaphor sets the general tone for Viollet-le·Duc's investigation of architecture, he had a much more specifie scientific model for his
• Colquhoun, "Tbree Kinds of Historicism", p.S.
, This quote is ciled in Barly Bergdoll, "The DictiomJaire Raisonné: Viollet-le-Duc's Encyclopedic Structure for Architecture," Introduction to The Foundallons of Arcbitedure: Selections from the Dictiotuuùre Itaisollll& oftugeoe-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (New York: George Braziller, 1990), p.1S.
7
preservation and restoration of France' s architectural patrimony. The Monuments Historiques became the crucibel for his understanding of Gothie architecture and, henceforth, the theoretical and practical foundation of his Dictionnaire Raisonné. Viollet-le-Duc entered the agency in the late 1830's; then under the tutelage of Prosper Mérimée (1835-1848) who become Viollet-Ie-Duc's Iife-Iong mentor and friend. The Monuments Historiques provided the outlet for Viollet-Ie-Duc's creative and intellectual abilities that could not be satisfied within the traditional career path of an academically-trained architect. Viollet-le-Duc exploited the agency to full advantage, formulating an alternative vision of understanding and appropriating architecture that was diametrically opposed, in many ways, to the academic system. 13 Aceording to Viollet-le-Duc, the Monuments Historiques instigated a new era in the archaeological study and restoration of Gothie architecture in France. Ludovic Vitet (the first Director, 1830-1834) had set the standard early on, injecting the service with a "...critical and analytical spirit, which fust of al! ensured that sorne Iight would henceforth finally penetrate into the history of our ancient monuments. ,,14 Both the 'positive' romantic interpretations of French Gothie architecture - predicated on sentimental religous and nationalist interpretations - and its 'negative' evaluations - based on tradition and ignorance -were eshewed for a scientific probing of its laws and material structures. Following Cuvier' s example of comparative anatomy, restoration and classification would henceforth be predicated on internal structures and functions rather than by a "taxonomy of external and historical forms. ,,15 Viollet-le-Duc specifically indicates that " BergdoU. "The Dictionnaire raisonné", pp. 5-6. 14
Tbe FoundalioDS of Architecture (Restoration), p.202. The italic empbasis is mine.
" Alan Colquhoun, "Rationalism: A Pbilosol'bical Concept in Arcbitecture, "Modernity and the CI&iœl Traditioo: Architectural Essays 1980-1987 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p.65. Also seo Jean-Micbel Leniaud, Viollet·le-Duc ou les d~1ires du syst~me (paris: Éditions Mengès, 1994), pp.41-42 aDd p.59. Tbe influence ofbiologicaJ approacbes to classification appear to bave been in place at Ibe Monuments Hi&torilpJes froID ils ÏIIceJÛlI1. Jean-Micbel Leniaud suggests!bat Ludovic Vitot was influenced by Ibo biologist Félix Vic d'azyr's coocepIion of classification. Vic d'azyr formulated bis own version of comparative anatomy Ibo! - as lDIIIt)' acbolars lave noted - bad a profound influence 00 Cuvier's formulation of comparative RD8tomy. Fwtbermote, Prosper Mérim6e - Ibo fuIure director of Ibo Molllll!lOllls Historiques (1835-1848)- was a frequent vistor ta Cuvier's sa10n beld al bis bome on Ibo grounds of Ibo Muséum d'Histoire DatureUe. Seo Edmond Pilon, 9
although the architect responsible for restoration must be familiar with the style and form of the building he is restoring, more importantly he must know "the structure, anatomy, and temperament of the building. ,,16 Viollet-Ie-Duc's understanding of the history of architecture as a continuous technological development challenged the academic belief in the relevance of copying and repeating the "perfect" forms dmwn from antiquity. 17 For both Cuvier and Viollet-le-Duc, the primary means of revealing the interior structure of the biological or architectural organism was dissection. Viollet-le-Duc inscribes the metaphor of dissective analysis as his guiding model of scientific investigation in the preface to the fust volume of the Dictionnaire. He explains to the reader that in order to understand the complex nature of Gothie architecture and its numerous parts one must, ".. .les disséquer séparément, tout en décrivant les fonctions et les transformations de ces diverses parties. ,,18 The above-mentioned quote identifies one important aspect of his interpretation of anatomy: dissection as a methodology of research. In our modern definition, anatomy is the science of the structure of the human body. However, the word anatomy, as originally derived from the Greek language, simply meant dissection - to eut through - and it signified a "method of research rather than a body of knowledge". 19 In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this methodological conception of anatomy became a primary trope for man's rationality and power of scientific analysis: an artificial marker of his abstract intelligence and intellectual domination over nature. Thus for Viollet-le-Duc - and before
"Le Salon de Cuvier au Jardin des Plantes" Revue des Deux-Mondes vol. JO (1932), pp.382-394. "The Foundalions of Arcbitecture (Restoration), p.216. I7
Ibid., p.65.
\1
Viollet-le-Duc, DidioIlllllÎl'e Rai'lonM, preface, p. VI.
19 Bernard Schultz, Art lUId ADatomy in RenAissance ltaly (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985), p.35.
JO
him, Georges Cuvier - dissection was a means not an ends. 20 The purpose of dissective analysis in both their works was to reveal the function of structures: functions being the prime measuring units of physiological investigation the study of life. Viollet-le-Duc makes this purpose quite clear in the passage from the preface where dissection is undertaken in order to describe the function of each part of the Gothic monument. Furthermore, Viollet-le-Duc continually invokes the words unity, harmony, synthesis, and organisation throughout the Dictionnaire; the fundamental terminology employed in contemporary physiology where the idea of life was inseperable from organization. And according ta Auguste Comte - and many others - organziation was, in essence, a concensus of functions. 21 In physiology, dissection was an artifical - yet necessary - intervention that violated the unity of life for purposes of pedagogical clarity. This conception of dissection is clearly articulated by Auguste Comte: "every organism is by ils very nature an indivisible whole, which we divide into component parts by mere intellectual artifice only in order to leam more about it and always with the intention of subsequently reconstituting the whole. ,,22 Il must be stressed, however, that Viollet-Ie-Ducs particular amalgamation of dissective methodology, anatomy, and physiological explanation is directly influenced by Cuvier's comparative anatomy. Cuvier was essentially a functional anatomist, and as William Coleman has noted, a functional anatomist " ...examines the parts of the body as an anatomist but understands those parts as a physiologist" .23 Dissective experimentation only transcended the realm of description when the purpose of the anatomical part (its
" Dissection as a method of researcb was the dominant interpretation of analomy in the nineleenth centul)' and was the opinion of many, not just Cuvier and Viollet-le-Duc. 21 Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist: 5e1ected Writinp from Georges Canguilbem 00. François Delaporte (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p.83.
22
ibid., p.240.
23 William Coleman, BiolollY in the NineteeDtb CeDtury: Problems "f Form, FUDdioo and 1'nIĹ&#x201C;fol'llllltioo (New York: John Wiley & Sons, lnc., 1971), p.18.
11
function) was specified. 24 In the Dictionnaire e?ch component of the Gothic structure is dissected in order to elucidate its particular function. 2s This one-to-one equation of organ and function is distinctly Cuverian, as post-Cuverian physiologists would later criticize his localisation of functions in individual organs as the primacy of anatomy over physiology. For Viollet-leDuc, however, the Cuverian approach was suited to his needs precisely because it emphasised structure as weil a~ function. Cuvier' s emphasis on the empirical investigation of bone structures - acknowledging the modern notion of anatomy as the structure of the human body - was a highly effective strategy for grounding his studies in the factual realm, thus providing a materialist springing point to counter any opposing idealist or a priori conceptions of anatomy or physiology. 26 Cuvier' s exagerrated empiricist stance was adopted by Viollet-le-Duc for exactly the same reasons: it accounted for function - the marker of any vital, coherent organization - but grounded it in architectural structure - the fundamental basis of his materialist critique of the Beaux-Arts system of architecture. Butjust as important to Viollet-le-Duc were the fundamental principles of Cuvier's comparative anatomy that raised il above the mere exploration of raw data to the level of scientific principle. These simple laws provided a coherent program for studying an organism as a self contained system that operated according to its own internaI laws. The first step in the system of comparative anatomy was the generalization of raw empirical data (usually bones) by comparison. The second step involved interpretation based on Cuvier' s teleological principals. Cuvier's most basic principal was the 'conditions of existence'. This premise assumed that the organism was provided at the outset with ail the necessary functions for
"Ibid., p.18.
"1be FO\IIIdaIioœ of Architecture (RôStoration), pp.224., "In the construction of the Middle Ag•• , each part of a structure fu1fill. a specific function and exerts a specific type of action. " " One of the most consistent tbemes in Cuvier's writings is bis constant polemic agairult a priori theorizing. Many contemporaries categori2ed him as a 'fact-mongerer', and contemporary English biologi.1ll considered him an owright 'materia1ist'. Not many contemporaries seemed to pick up on the many a priori'. lurlcing behind Cuvier's exagerated empiricist stance. 12
its existence. Thus no organ was superfluous, each played a specific role in the functional adaption of the creature to its enviroment. Concomitant with this axiomatic principle was the 'correlation of parts'. According to Cuvier, "Every organized being forms a whole, a unique and closed system, whose parts mutually correspond and concur to the same definite action by a reciprocal reaction. None of ils parts can change without the others also changing; and consequently each of them taken separately, indicates and determines al1 the others. ,,77 The 'correlation of parts' was intrinsic to Cuvier' s palaeolontological reconstructions, because if every part was a microcosm of the whole organism one could confidently deduce all the other parts from a single element. This was epitomized in Cuvier' s provocative claim that he could reconstruct an entire animal from a fragment of a single bone. 28 This near-magical ability to ressurect the past and its extinct life forms from fossils ensured his fame not only among fellow scientists, but also with the informed public. 29 Viollet-le-Duc makes implicit references to Cuvier's theories throughout the Dictionnaire and more explicit ones in the sections on 'Restoration' and 'Style'. Both the 'conditions of existence' and 'correlation of parts' were an attractive explanatory system
%7 Toby Appel, The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: Frend! BiolollY in the Decades before Darwin (New Yorle: Oxford University Pre••, 1987), p.78. To cile a favorile example of Cuvier'., a Carnivorous animal- if il W8S ID survive - re<pired sharp leeth and ciaws 10 calch ils prey, and and a slomach and inteslines capable of digesling meal, and so 00, with each orgao inexlricably related 10 the nexlaccording 10 ils funcliooal needs.
" Philip Sleadman, The Evolution of Design: Biologic:al AnaIollY in Architecture and lbe Applied Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), p.40. This passage - quoled in Sleadman's book - is taken from Cuvier'. Recberdles sur les Ossemens Fossiles and is worth quoting in full: "In short the shape and slruclure of the leeth reguiale the forms of the condyle, of the shoulder blade, and of the ciaws, in the same maoner as the equalion of a curve reguiales ail ils other properties; and, as in regard 10 aoy particular eurve, ail ils properties may he ascertained by assuming eacb separale property as the foundation of a partieular equation; in the same manner, a claw a sboulder-blade, a condyle, 8 leg or arm bone, or any other boue, separalely considered eoables us 10 discover the description of leeth 10 which they have helonged, and sa also nociprocaly we may ddennine the forms of the other bones from the leeth. Thus, comm.mcing our invesligation by a careful survey of aoy one bone by ilself, a person who is 50fficiently masler of the laws of organic slructure, may as il were, recODSlrucl the whole animal 10 which !hal bone had helonged. " " Toby Appel, The Cuvier·Geoffroy Dehate., Toby Appel devotes ao entire chapter (7) 10 the wide raoge of wrilers and theorisls !hal were influenced by Cuvier, 50ch as Honore de Balzac and Georges Sand. She does DOl extend her argumenllo include architects.
13
as they emphasised the internal functional integrity of the organism - a self-referential system explained according to its own laws - and the organism's relationship to a specific historical enviroment. Viollet-le-Duc often makes reference to the 'conditions of existence' to crilique sylistic ecclecticism or academic formalism: the practice of borrowing architectural forms from different historical eras and transposing them - juxtaposing many different forms in the case of ecclecticism - onto contemporary bui1dings. Significantly enough Cuvier makes the comparison belWeen a living organism and architecture to make his point: " Let us take a higl첫y organized being, a living animal; if we change its habits and surroundings, il can lose the natura! harmonic quality of its style....The same is true of a column on a monument; by itself it is nothing but raw form. Is il likely that, if you removed il and put it somewhere else, seperated from the causes that brought it into being in the particular proportions it has, it would retain the style and daim that characterize it as part of the ensemble for which it was built 7" This blatant disregard for the structural integrity of individual architectural systems did not even merlt a direct response from Viollet-le-Duc. 311 Viollet-le-Duc makes a direct reference to the 'correlation of parts' in the section on restoration: "the constructions of the Middle Ages were calculated with scientific precision; these buildings rea1ly are delicate organisms. There is nothing excessive or superfluous about them, any more than there are any features that serve no purpose. ,,31 And in the section on Style: "..just as in viewing a single leaf it is possible to reconstruct the entire plant, and in viewing an animal bone, the animal itself, it is also possible 10 deduce the members of an architecture from the view of architectural profile...Similarlly, the nature of the finished construction can be derived from an architectural member... 32 The last statement is an obvious allusion to Cuvier's ability to reconstruct an extinct animal from the remains of a single bone based on the 'correlation of parts'. Central to this
.. Tbe FoundalioDS of Architecture (Style), p.245.
" FoundalioDS of An:bitedure (Resloralion), p.224. >2
Tbe FoUDdalioDS of An:bitecture (Style), p.242. 14
principal is that every element in the organism is a microcosm of the entire structure; or in the language of metaphor, a synecdochic structure, with the part standing for the whole. The 'correlation of parts' is the Iynchpin of Cuvier's comparative anatomy, and it plays an equally important role in the structuring of Viollet-le-Duc' s Dictionnaire Raisonné. Thus to reinterpret Hubert Damisch's synchronie structuralist reading of the Dictionnaire in terms of Cuvier's 'correlation of parts', it makes little difference at what point the reader makes his entry into the Dictionnaire - visually or textually - because one is constantly led back to the underlying principals of a functionally integrated organism. 33 Synthesis, as Hubert Damisch has pointed out, "..is only meaningful at the moment when the anIytical mind sees the whole within the parts". 34 The reader and observer of :he text and images follows the same anatomical process; analysing and synthesizing, synthesizing and analyzing, based on the a priori principal of the functional relationship of the part's structural relationship to the whole. Il was exactly the predictive - one could almost say deterrninistic - nature of Cuvier's system of comparative anatomy that Viollet-le-Duc found so attractive. Behind Cuvier's exagerrated empircist stance were the teleological principles of the 'conditions of existence' and the 'correlation of parts' that raised anatomy to the level of a scientific principle. Cuvier's rigorous methodology provided the law-like statements that gave Viollet-Ie Duc the confidence - at a later date interpreted as overconfidence - to proceed with a degree of certainty in his restoration and classification of Gothic monuments - and their resultant codification in the Dictionnaire Raisonné. 35
" Hubert Damiscb, "The Space Between: A Slrocturalisl Approacb 10 the Dicliooary," ArdJiteduraI DesigD Profile ed. Robin Middlelon (London, 1979). " Ibid.. p.86.
" Sleadmao, The Evolution of DesiJlll, pp.61-62. Philip Sleadman correctly notes !hal il would he wroog 10 imply !hal VioUet-le-Duc posiled a complete determioism in the way the style of buildings reflected
chaogeo in m,'ÎroIIIlD, in fuoctioo, or in slnJClUra1 methods. Ooly art tempered by reasOD could bring about Ibis uoity of form 10 purpose. However, he fails 10 aCCOUDl for the facl that il is Cuvier's system il8elf that Î8 determioisIic: an artificial ~ tbol projected ils bermt>.. dicaUy 'closed' system according la predetermined goals and slrategies. TIms il is the determioism inhereot in Cuvier's syslem !hal VioUet-le-Duc found so compeUing; ils power lo legislate the functiooa1 froID the irrelevant.
15
The metaphor of organization and ils analytical methodology - particularly Cuvier' s system of comparative anatomy - became a powerful model for many disciplines other than architecture, many of which Viollet-le-Duc was familiar. Cuvier's comparative anatomy - and the work of the anatomists and physiologist who followed him - provided the systematic means of understanding the most complex of organizations; the human body. Therefore, the anatomical or physiological model of organization became a paradigm for those who wanted to elucidate - and create - equally complex self-sustained and self-regulating systems. Both the Saint-Simonians and Positivists utilized the meta!,hor of organization and ils analytical methodology in their philosphy, politics, and sociology. In fact, Viollet-leDuc was probably exposed to Cuvier's theories at an early age through the indirect aegis of the Saint-Simonians. Excerpls from bis courses at the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle were frequently reproduced in The Globe - the Saint-Simonian dominated journal - of which many of its writers were frequent visitors at the salon of Viollet-Ie-Duc's uncle, Étienne Delécluze, in the 1830's. It was Auguste Comte and his disciples, however, that made physiology the lynchpin of their Positivist philospophy. Viollet-le-Duc was probably familiar with Comte's work either directly or through its wide dissemination in the 1840s by his most prorninent disciples, Émile Littré and Ernest Renan. Although this paper is not the forum for an in depth discussion on Comte's Positivism, his emphasis on physiology must be addressed as it further clarifies VioHet-le-Duc's reasons for adopting a physiologicalanatomical model for his investigation of architecture. Fundamental to Comte's postitivist philosophy - codified in his Cours de philosophie positive (1830-1842) - was the 'law of three stages' and his 'classification of sciences'. According to Comte, all domains of human enquiry would pass through three stages: the theologica1, metaphysica1, and positivist. The ultimate goal was the positivistic stage: essentialy the reign of the scientific method. Comte's account of the progress of the human mind was applied to his ranking of sciences w.\th those closest to man - the organic sciences - being the mast complex and the 16
last to become positivist. Thus the most recent field to become scientific was biology, and for Comte this essentialy meant physiology. Physiology, in turn, would become the departure point for Comte's ultimate aim: a postivist science of society (still in ils theological-metaphysical stage). Viollet-le-Duc makes a specifie reference to Comte's heirarchy of sciences and its emphasis on physiology in his thirteenth Entretien: In the sciences the experimental method has definilively superseeded hypothesis. Philosophy is tending more and more to base itself on physiology - the rigorous observation of nature. Pure Metaphysics are in their dotage, and even religious systems where intelligence is not overborne by credulity, are subjected, no less than philosophical systems, the succesive phases of human thought and the chief phenomena of history, to the sifting of criticism and reason. 36 The physiological model provided two essential factors for Comte's social physics: First, the most complex of organizations - the human body - had become scientific and therefore offered itself as the preeminent model for a science of society. Second, in physiology order and progress were inseperable thus providing the perfect analogy for his conception of a dynamic, progressive, organic society open to scientific study and, in essence, subject to predictive and deterministic laws. Viollet-le-Duc transfers much of the language and concepts that Comte equated between biology and society to architecture in the Dictionnaire RaisonnĂŠ. Viollet-le-Duc also equates order and progress with the natura! world and appplies it as a model for architecture. Gothie architecture is emphasised because it is the example par excellence of organization and unity tllat bas developed and progressed hl the same formative way that nature progressed "namely, by departing from a simple principle, which then becomes modified, perfected, and made more complex without ever damaging or destroying its original essence. "37
l6 &geĹ&#x201C;-I'mmm"'\ VioUel-le-Duc, Lectures on An:hItecture V.l translation of the Entretiens sur l'lII'dIitedure by Benjamin BucknaU in 1877 (vol.l) BD<! 1881 (vol.2) (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1987), pp.lI2-l13.
" The Foundalions of Architecture (Style), p.2S!I. 17
knowledge outside the parameters of historical progress. According to Viollet-le-Duc, style had quit the domain of architecture to reside in industrial pursuits: .. But it might be restored to the arts if we would introduce into our study and 路appreciation of them a little of that good sense which we apply to the practical affairs of life. Il would seem, however, that the more rationally we act with respect to the industrial arts, the further we go astray from reason when the fine arts are in question. We who in the construction of our machines give each of their component parts the requisite strength and shape, introducing nothing superfluous or which does not indicate a necessary function,- in our architecture accumulate irrationally forms gathered from all quarters - the result of contradictory principles - and cali this Art ! 1 often hear architects lamenting that our great industrial development tends to stifle Art, and that the special schools of applied science encroach on the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. But whose fault is that? Let architects learn to reason on what they are commissioned ta do - let them apply analytical methods to their designs; .. - and they will saon regain for art the ground it is daily losing. 40 Considering the importance Viollet-le-Duc placed on the machine industry as an exemplar of rational design, one might ask why not a machine metaphor as the guiding principle in the DictiollJlllire Raisonn茅 rather !han an anatomical-physiological one? After all, Viollet-le-Duc was thoroughly immersed in the machine industry: He taught a course in the composition of omament at the Ecole Gratuites de Dessin (1834-1850) - a school dedicated to honing the drawing skills of students destined for the commercial and industrial sectors - and he wrote on the machine industry in numerous joumals (primarily about their drawing techniques) A close look at the machine industry in nineteenth century France, however, reveals that it also adopted the powerful metaphor and methodology of anatomy and physiology. This reversai of the traditional flow of mechanical metaphors into the practice of anatomy can be accounted for due to the widespread belief that the life sciences had reached such an advanced stage that the most complex of organizations - the living organism - could he scientifically mapped. Anatomy and physiology provided a powerful
.. VioUet-le-Duc, Lectures OD ArdUtecture V.l, p.187.
19
guiding tool and metaphor for explaining. creating. and imagining. complex self sustained machines. Furthermore. the stress on hand-eye coordination in the machine industry found an idea\ paradigm in anatomy for the amalgamation of the haptic and optic. For instance. Charles Dupin - a professor at the Petite École (a drawing school for the machine industry) in the Conservatoire des arts et métiers - insisted on the importance of comparative anatomy for the machine industry in one of his course books written in 1825.41 J.A. Borgnis - another professor at the Petite École - makes numerous connections to dissective methodology in his Traité Complet de Mécanique Appliquée aux Arts. ln his preface, Borgnis indicates that the elementary parts of the machine must be isolated. stripped (dépouillées), and reduced to their simplest expression so that the arlist can understand them clearly. 42 Jean N. Hachette - a teacher at the Ecole Polytechnique - appears to have been influenced by Cuvier' s system of classification: the small schematic drawings of mechanical devices in his Traité elémentaire des machines (Paris. 1811) are classified according to their different functions. 43 Another technical school - the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures - hired the distinguished zoologist Henri Milne-Edward - Cuvier's principle disciple - to teach a course on Histoire Naturelle Applied to Industry (ca. 1839). 44 John Hubbel Weiss has noted that his biology course was considered the "Iynchpin of the curriculum" .45
" Charles Dupin, Grom~trie et Mkbanique des Arts et M~tiers et des Beaux Arts. cours DOnnai 3 vols. (paris: Bach.lier. 1825). v.l. p.379. 42
J.A. Borgnis. Trait~ Complet de Mécanique Appliquk aux Arts (Paris: Bacheli.r. 1818),
prefac.,v. " Eug.ne S. F.rguson. Engineering and the Mmd'. Eye (Cambridg•• Ma••. : MIT Pr•••• 1992), p.120. Ferguson nol.s the classification by function but does Dol mak. the conoection with Cuvi.r. .. Jolm Hubhel Weiss. The Making of TecImological Man: The Social Orillia~ of French Engineering Education (Cambridg•• Mass.: MIT Press. 1982). pp.133.• 143.• and 152. " Ibid•• p.152. Charles d. Comberouss. made the following conunent on the .ignificanc. of natu...1 history al the Ecol. Central. in a speech on ils 50th anniv.rsary (1879): "It was an .rninently philosophical thought which guided the found.rs of the schooI when they made a place for the natu...1 science. in their program. The introckJction ofthe subject brok. down. 50 tu .peak, the aridity of the mathematical. mechanical. 20
Anatomy was also an important aspect of Horace Lecoq-de-Boisbaudran's Education de la Memoire Pittoresque. This book was the codification of his course in drawing after memory that he introduced at the Ecole Gratuites de Dessin during the 1840's while Viollet-le-Duc was still teaching his course on composition d'omament. A report on his course found in the Archives Nationales in Paris indicates that he made particular use of l'osteologie requiring his students to draw different parts of the skeleton from memory. 46 Lecoq-de Boisbaudran explicitly states in an early draft for his book that anatomy is "une sorte de syntaxe des arts du dessin. ,,47 Lecoq-de-Boisbaudran's methods received wide support from a11 sectors of science, technology, and art. Both the Academie des Beaux-Arts and the Societe d'Encouragement pour l'industrie approved of his methods. In the 1862 edition of his book he personnaly thanks Prosper Mérimée, François Arago (scientist), Eugène Delacroix (painter), Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire (zoologist), and Viollet-leduc, among others, for their encouragement and approval. 48 Viollet-le-Duc was a close friend of Lecoq-de-Boisbaudran and actively supported his drawing methodology as an alternative to academic dessin pedagogy.
Viollet-le-Duc would have agreed with Lecoq-de-Boisbaudran's statement that anatomy is "une sorte de syntaxe des arts du dessin". It was not enought to absorb the physiologocal-anatomical precepts conceptually or textually, they also had to be imbibed visually. Physiology and anatomy were about spatial relationships lItat were best conveyed by visual means. Both Auguste Comte and Georges Cuvier argued against any type of mechanical or mathematical reductionism that would reduce the study of life to an lIIId tecboical scieDces: il reaIized thet conception of unity thet bad so much inspired our Maltres from the very fint, lIIId thet chsracterized their creation, and which must he developed and not diminisbed.· A1though this ~h .... JDMIe in 1879, Hubbel Weiss makes it quile clesr thet this was not an uncommon attitude during the previ0U8 fifty years 81 the Ecole Centrale. .. Archives Nationales, AJ53 100 (1849) "Horace Lecoq.<Je-Boisbaudran, tducation de la Mémoire Pittoresque (Paris, 1848), p.11. .. Honce l.ecoq.<Je-lloisbuIran, ta........ de la Mâaoire Pittoresque (paris: Bance éditeur, 1862),
p.22. 21
Chapter Two The Anatomical Representation of Knowledge: the Dictionnaire Raisonné and its Visual Models The Plates fQr Diderot and D'Alembert' s EncyclQpédie In The Order of Things, Michel FQucault suggests that observation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was predominantly "perceptible knowledge" leaving "sight with an almost exclusive privilege". 50 Following his argument to its logical conclusion, he insists that anatomy lQst the leading role it played during the Renaissance, because "the fundamental arrangement of the visible and the expressible no longer passed through the thickness of the body". 51 According to Foucault, anatQmy WQuld Qnly reoccupy its place Qf preeminence in the 'episteme' Qf QrganisatiQn initiated by BarQn Cuvier in the nineteenth century. 52 Although there is SQme truth tQ this statement, particularly in regards tQ natural histQry, it is an over simplificatiQn that ignQres the cQmplex nature Qf Enlightenment-era epistemQIQgy. First, the sensatiQnalist philosophy expounded by the philQsophes valued the tactile as much as the visual; and secQnd, empirical, Qr 'sensatiQnalist', perceptiQn was always regulated by a Cartesian skepticism inherently mistrustful Qf knQwledge derived from purely sensory data. 53 These dichQtQmies - or rather dualities - are at the essence Qf
1O
Micbel Foucault, The Order of TJüDw; (New York:Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 132-133.
" Ibid., p.137. " Ibid., p.137. " This reevaluation of Foucault's interpretation of vision in the 17tb and 18tb centuries is nlised in JOIIlIlban Crary's Tedmiques of the Observer (C..mridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), p.57., and in Msrtin Jay, DoWlll3t Eye;: 1be DeDigraIion of Vision in 1'weaIietb-Century Frencb Tbougbt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp.394-395., and 404-406. Tbe interplay between the empirical-perceptual and cognitive-rationaltraditions in the 18tb century is clearly articu1ated in llaJbara Stafford's Body Crïticism, p.220.: "The laIsion between an aggregate of information predicated on an optic-based epistemology pennilling surface comoctions ID he made lICJUIlS many fields, and deep systems analysis became acute. " Sbe tben gues on to discoss bow Ibis was played out in Diderot and d'Alembert's EocydopEdie, witb d'Alembert cbampioning a "cartesian subject-oriented skepticism" in the face of "polymatby'g.materia1ism", and Diderut still sbaring mucb of the polymatb's inIerests. 23
that quintessentially 'rational' enlightenment project, the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts, et des Metiers of Diderot and d'Alembert where, in fact, anatomy was the guiding principle for organizing knowledge. 54 The anatomical organization of knowledge found its most powerful expression in the approximately 3000 plates in eleven volumes that accompanied the 16 volumes of lellerpress articles. ss Graphic dissection was the visual representation of the Encyclopédie' s mission to demystify knowledge by foregrounding its underlying principles. Anatomical dissection, and its graphic representation, is by ils very definition critical and selective: cutting, separating, and exposing certain organs for display al lhe expense of others. It is an active critical process, selectively exposing the rules of its object' s composition, mirroring in conception the Encyclopédie's mission to nol only demystify knowledge but also to critically reconfigure the reader' s relationship to it and, in the process, change the publics way of thinking and seeing. The dissective strategies in the plates reconciled the philosophes belief lhat knowledge was derived from sensory perception with their Cartesian mistrust of purely sensory data: a harmonious representation of reason and the senses in the production of knowledge. Thus, the reconciliation of theory and praxis through the validation of manual labour and lechnical culture in the Encyclopédie - part of its general attempt to contest the
" Terence M. Russell, An:hitedure in tbe EncyclopHie of Diderot and d'Alembert: The Letterpress Articles and Selected Engravinp (Aldershol, Englaod: Scolar Press, 1993). The analomical _ of the Encydoptdie is hardIy surprisiDg considering the background of some of ils major coolribulors. Diderot had co11aboraled wiIh Marc·Amou.. Eidoos and François-Vinceot Toussaint on the translalion of Robert James' A Medica1 Didionary, which WSB published in France &8 the DictioJUlllire UniversaJ de M~ine. Furthermore, Chevalier Louis de Jaucort, the most prolific cooln'butor to the Encyclo~ • wriling almasl 500 letterpress articles on architecture and 17, ()()() articles overall (one quarter of ail articles) • bad a doctorate in medicÏDe from the University of Leyden. " Stephen Werner, Blueprint: A Study of Diderot and tbe EncyclopHie Plates (Binninghsm, Alabama: Summa Publicalions, lnc., 1993), p.7. Diderot himself stressed the importance of lhe plates in the prospectus which proceeded the fust volume in 1751: "Un coup d'oeil sur l'objet ou sur sa repre8enlation en dit plus qu'un page de discours.'
24
authority and legitimacy of idea1ist explanatory systems56 - is also represented in the very technique of encyclopedic representation. As Daniel Brewer has noted, "This encyclopedic gaze both visually and conceptually disassembles the body, machine or building, dividing it into its parts and ordering them in a series, whose logic leads from the part to the whole". 57 In the depiction of machines, for example, the viewer is typically given an overview of the installation, followed by a longitudinal section and cross-section, the building housing the machinery is then dissecteĂ by cut-away views to the assemblies, exposed either in place or isolation, and finally down to the individuai parts.
58
This dissective principle holds true for all of
the subject matter in the EncyclopĂŠdie, from the plates on furniture (fig.l) to those on architecture, where the articles and plates emphasise lectonic construction - the skeletal metaphor - over surface quaiities. As might be deduced, the reader/viewer played an active part in this dissective process. It was 'the encyclopedic gaze' that guaranteed the reader/viewer's share in the production of knowledge. The incessant anatomical dissection of all objects trained the viewers' criticai facuities encouraging them to actively probe beneath surface to revea1 the inner workings- or underlying principles - of knowledge in order to appropriate them, rather than be manipulated by them. An essential element in locating the production of knowledge in the active and criticai act of viewing/reading was the system of "renvois" or cross-references. Although the alphabeticai ordering of the articles provided a simple mnemonic device for presenting a wide range of material, it lacked the systematic means of drawing the information together in an active and criticai fashion. By following the cross-references suggested by the editors in the letterpress articles " Daniel Brewer, ne DiscIIurse of EnligldeomeDt in EigldeeDlh CeDtury FI'lIDCe: Diderot lIIId the Art or PbiIosopbiziDg (Cambridge: Cambridge UniverBity Press, 1993), p.15.
'" Ibid., p.28. .. Cbules Cou\aton Gillespie, 00. A Diderot Pictoria1 Encyclopedia or Trades lIIId IDdtRry (New York: Dover PubliClllious Inc., 1959), preface XXIII.
25
- and as is often forgotten, in the introductory essays or explications atlached to the
plates~'
- insightful, creative, and often subversive meanings could be produced. The 'renvois' synthesised in a meaningful way, that which had been analyzed by dissection; not just a simple putting back together, but an anatomical re-construction based on the Encyclopedist's conception of a complete body of critical knowledge. Diderot and D'alembert's work had such a profound impact on Viollet-le-Duc that he inscribed a portion of its tiUe in his own encyclopedic endeavour, calling it 'The Dictionnaire Raisonné de l'architecture francaise du XI au XVIe siècle'. Their example of a "Dictionnaire Raisonné" ordered on an analytic-dissective model provided the basic prototype for Viollet-le-Duc's more limited endeavour to critically reorder the reader/viewer's relationship to architectural knowledge. 60 Viollet-le-Duc makes a specific connection between dictionary form and dissective analysis in his preface to the first volume of the Dictionnaire Raisonné suggesting that. he understood the intimate connection between the two in the Encylopédie: 61 Cette forme [Dictionnare], en facilitant les recherches au lecteur, nous permet de présenter une masse considérable de renseignements et d'examples qui n'eussent pu trouver leur place dans un histoire, sans rendre le discours confus et presque inintelligible. Elle nous a paru, précisément à cause de la multiplicité des exarnples donnés, devoir être plus favorables aux études, mieux faire reconnaître les diverses parties compliquées, mais rigoureusement déduites, des élélements qui entrent dans la composition de nos monuments du moyen âge, puisqu'elle nous oblige, pour ainsi dire, à les disséquer séparément, tout en decrivant les fonctions et les transformations de ces diverses parties. 62 " Stephen Werner, Blueprint: A Study or Diderot and tbe EDcylo~ Plates (Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, Inc., t993), pp.S9-91. '" Devoted to one topic or discipline and written by a single author, Viollet-Ie-Duc's DidiollllllÏre i. suggestive in fonn of the Encyclo~ Ml!lbodique, the successor to the Encylo~ of Diderot and d'Alembert. These small scale encyclopedias, however, did not empIIasise the visual in the appropriation of knowledge as did the Encylo~. As Î8 weil known, Quatremere de Quincy wrote a volume on architecture for the EDcyIopl!die Ml!tbodlque, of which Viollet-le-Duc'. DidIoIlllllÏre i. in many way. a rebuttal. T1ùs will he discus8ed in the next chapter. " Bergdoll. "Introduction". p.IS. Barry Bergdoll noted the connection helween the fonn of the dictionary and dÎ8l1eC1ive lIDa1ysÎ8. 62
Viollot-Ie-Duc, DictioIlllllÏre RaiwIUll!. preface.
26
Thus the form of the dictionary was a dissective tool that divided the Gothie monument into discrete elements for investigation. The very act of reading the Dictionnaire initiated the analysis and synthesis as the system of renvois was also taken over from the Encyclopédie. However, the Cuvierian structuring of the DictionnaÜ"e and its unitary subject matter gave it a tighter 'organic' unity than that achieved in the Encylopédie. The dictionary form dovetailed perfectly with the principle of the 'correlation of parts': each functional element of the Gothie monument receivOO its own entry and - as was previously notl
- it made little difference where one entered the
Dictionnaire as the reader/viewer was 100 back to the underlying unity of a functionally integrated structure. Viollet-Ie-Duc's
strategy of investigating architecture also echoes the
Encyclopédie's emphasis on the critieal-dissective eye that mOOiates between reason and the senses in the production of knowlOOge: .. we must dissect the OOifice, as it were, and verify the more or less complete relations !hat exist between !hat apparent result which first engages our attention and the hidden methods and reasons !hat have determinOO its form ... 63 Viollet-Ie-Duc- like the OOitors of the Encylopédie - believOO that all men could learn anything, if they were taught properly; that is if objects were presentOO to their sensations properly.64 And lilre the encylopédistes, Viollet-Ie-Duc's programme to inculcate critical vision achieveà its most powerful expression through the dissective strategies in his over 3,000 illustrations to the Dictionnaire Raisonné. Each part of the Gothie structure is subjectOO to a probing analysis down to the smallest element. This method of investigation is exemplifiOO in his discussion and representation of Notre Darne at Dijon in the entry on 'Rational Building' in volume four of the Dictionnaire: the apse is depicted in an interior (fig.2) and exterior perspective (fig.3), followed by a perspectival cross-section of the apse (fig.4) which is accompaniOO
" Viollet-te-Duc, Lectures On Arcldtecture vol. 1, p.460. .. O'IIkuilert. Jœn le Rond, Preliminary Discourse to tbe EncyclopHie of Diderot introduction by Ricbanl N. Sch...ab (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., 1963), introductio!l, p.17.
27
by an explicit textua1 reference to his dissective strategies: "Now let us take away from this structure everything not essential to it, let us take its skeleton and this is what we shaH find".65 Dissective analysis is pursued to its logical conclusion in the exploded perspective view of the nave wall which delineates each masonry sub-component in graphie detail (fig.5). The "spectator' s vision" foHows the dissective logic of the Dictionnaire illustrations marking what Roland Barthes called "le cheminement de la raison" in his discussion of the viewer's relation to the plates in Diderot's EncylopĂŠdie. 66 The viewer is exposed to an object coming into being: a passage from part to whole, from matter to object; an exploration of the rules of composition rather than a hermetic representation of a complete entity eut off from the probing eye of the viewer. Dissective representation is, at ils essence, the antithesis of composition; separation as the coming into being of an object as opposed to composition which deals with a complete entity outside the flux of the world. 67 Thus the dissective strategies in the Dictionnaire were - on one level- a powerful critique of the Beaux-Arts system of composition: ultimately manifested in the academic set of plan, elevation, and section. Viollet-le-Duc's dissective representation offered an alternate program for appropriating architectural knowledge that challenged what he saw as the Iwo major flaws (ultimately related) in the Beaux-Arts system of design: first, its a priori idealism that valued theory over praxis, preconceived rules over purposeful design
regulated by the materials of construction; second, its mystification of the design process: an exc1usionary elitism at best, at worst, a classical example of charlatanism that duped
" M.F. Heam ed., Tbe ArclIitecturai 1beory or Viollet-le-Duc: (Cambridge, MBlis.: MIT Press, 1990), p.96.
ReadiDl!-~
lIIIlI CommeDlary
.. Daniel Brewer, "The Wode of tbe Image: The Plaies of the EncyclopĂŠdie," Stanford Frencb Reriew vm 2-3 (Fall, 1984),p.237. " Helmut K1assen, MiclIelangelo: ArclIitecture lIIIlI tbe Vi<;ion or Anatomy (M.A. !besis, McGiII University, 1990), p.47.
28
the public by concea1ing ils "conning stratagems". 68 Viollet-Ie-Duc's dissective representation emphasised the relation between praxis and material structure thereby foregrounding design as man' s practîcal transformation of matter into architectural structure. In the process he revea\ed the rules of composition - the coming into being of the object - for the scrutiny, edification, and - ultimately appropriation of the viewer. To paraphrase Daniel Brewer's comments on the plates of the Encyclopédie, Viollet-Ie-Duc's "utilitarian epistemology" of architecture in the Dictionnaire Raisonné institutes a subject !hat "rationalizes and justifies" a new relationship between man and the world, between subject (viewer, architect) and object (architecture).69 However, Daniel Brewer goes on to explain that, "Knowledge [in the Encylopédie]is not simply useful, it is a means of appropriating and mastering a world that has been made into a set of represented objects. ,,70 Thus the images in the Dictionnaire are never merely a reflection of a historical entity called Gothie architecture, but rather a critical element in the construction of that history. 71
.. 8arllara Maria Slaffonl, Artful Science: EoIigbtenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual
rm......ioo (Chicago: MIT Pres', 1994), p.74. Stafford puIS the critiqu. of cbarlatanism into ils wid.r culmral conlext.
.. Drew.r, "11Je WorIc of the lmag•... ", p.233, ,. Ibid., p.233. 71
Ibid.. p.238. This i. the basic thesis of Drewer's articl. on the plates in the Encyclopédie.
29
Georges Cuvier. Viollet-le-Duc and the Demonstration of Function: A Paradigm for Performing Scientific History in the 19th Century
A1though the Encyclopédie provided an important prototype for an encyc10pedic endeavour rich in plates and ordered on an anatomical basis, it lacked certain important criteria for Viollet-le-Duc. Primarily, the encyc10pedists never developed a sense of historical-mindedness - a reliance upon knowledge of the past to ilIuminate the future - as did the nineteenth century.72 Viollet-le-Duc - firmly situated in nineteenth century historicist culture - was searching for a dynamic visual model - structured anatomically that was a1so profoundly historical at its foundations. As was outlined in the previous chapter, Viollet-le-Duc tumed to the example of Cuvier, from which he imbibed his ideas visually as weil as textually. The Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle with its vast collections and public forum, provided the basis for the formulation and dissemination of Cuvier' s comparative anatomy. From his chair at the popular museum, Cuvier expounded his views to varied and appreciative audience. His series of public courses were widely attended, and formed the basis of his multi-volume publication, Leçons d'Anatomie Comparée, of which Violletle-Duc ownerJ a copy. 73 The unity of his teaching extended to the displays of animal and human skeletons in the Galleries of Comparative Anatomy which were organized on the sarne principles as his books and lectures. The Galleries of Comparative Anatomy proved to be extremely popular and were open to the public from 1806. Dorinda Outram has made the highly astute observation that Cuvier' s style of exposition was dictated by the size and make up of his audience. In response to the large erowds at his galleries and lectures, ranging in composition from recreational naturalists to savants, he adopted a histrionic display with an emphasis on visual demonstration.
" Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot <New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. " The conIeDIs of Viollol-Ie-Duc's Iibrary are fowxl in, ClIIaJoIue des livres composaDl la de leu M. Viollet·le-Duc. Viollol·le-Duc owned a copy of the Leçons bue<! on a I118jor republication uodertaken in the 1830's. The tirst edition was publisbed in the early 19tb century.
bibliotb~ue
30
Outram even suggests !hat Cuvier's 'stage presence' was modelled on the great tragic actor Talma. 74 Outram's observation is convincing, however, the nature and importance placed on Cuvier's visuai presentation of comparative anatomy is more complex than she suggests. His visual demonstration of function involved epistemological, didactic, and polemical components!hat were at the very heart of what Foucault recognized as Cuvier's profound break with previous classification systems: his "creation" of biological history. To a great extent his biological history was just as much about the present as it was about the past. As Dorinda Outram has perceptively noted, " The naturalist [read Cuvier] himself is dominant: it is he who creates this new world of the past. Ideas, however distant, of a providential order placed there to be discovered have been rejected in favour of a rhetoric which places a total emphasis on the human process of discovery, almost of creation... ,,75 Thus Cuvier's endeavour is in many ways more indicative of the relationship between his science and the object rather than between the object and nature or historical time. 76 To a great extent, this scientific history was forged within the laboratory and the Galleries of Comparative Anatomy at the MusĂŠum d' Histoire Naturelle. Cuvier specifically avoided the whole idea of fieldwork - the ideology of natural history - conveniently sidestepping the 'real' temporal intrusions of nature for the controlled atmosphere of the laboratory experiment. Edward Said - in a simi\ar discussion of scientific control, the museum exhibition, and the construction of History - noted that, "The tone and tense of the exhibition are cast almost uniformly in the contemporary present, sc that one is given an impression of a pedagogical demonstration during which the scholar-scientist stands before us on a lecture-
" Outram, Geol'Kes Cuvier, p.IS!. "Outram, Geol'Kes Cuvier, p.152. "Edward W. Said, OrieDl&lĂ?'lm, (New York: Vinlage Books, 1979),p.142.
31
laboratory platform, creating, confining, and judging the material he discusses. "n The skeletal structures in Cuvier' s Galleries - and the plates accompanying his numerous publications - were intrinsic to his scientific demonstrations. They were the most powerful means of confirming his ability to order the natura! world: a mass of material facts that subsumed their theory-laden content under the persuasive guise of an exaggerated scientific empiricism. 1 would argue that Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire Raisonné operated in a similar manner to Cuvier's Galleries: a laboratory' or exhibition case in whieh a highly controlled and scientific history of Gothie architecture was demonstrated and constructed' on an eminently visual basis. 7R Thus, the historicity that Viollet-le-Duc admired in Cuvier's work was to a great extent an a-historical historicity, and this duality is inscribed in the Dictionnaire Raisonné. Although Viollet-le-Duc had to take into account historicotemporal intrusions in his restorations of Gothie monuments - undertaken during extensive 'fieldwork'- the circumscribed space of the Dictionnaire allowed for a more "controlled" and scientific approach to representation (Viollet-le-Duc's graphie restorations in the Dictionnaire will be discussed in detail in the next chapter). For example, Viollet-le-Duc integrates text and image in a way that is more suggestive of a scientific demonstration than an architectural treatise. 79 The relationship
77 Ibid., p.142. In the grealer Rcheme ofthings, museums in nioeteenlh cenhuy France· and other counlries - operated as spaces of collective reapproprialion thal inilialed the rec1amation of the birthrighl of posterity. TIIJs the issue of the Museum cannot he divorced from larger cultural, colonial, and political issues. For a geoeral discussion of the museum in nioeteen!h cenlury France refer to Chanlal Georgel, "The Museum as Metaphor in Nineleenth Cenlury France," Museum Culture eds. Daniel J. Sherman and lril Rogoff (Minneapolis: Minnesota Univeraity Press. 1994), pp.113-122.
"Ibid., p.113. TIIJs, in many ways the DidioImaire W8S a "prinled museum"; aterm which couW also apply 10 Diderot and d'A1embert's EncylopEdie. " Françoise Boudon, "Le réel el l'imaginaire chez Viollel-Ie-Duc: les figures du DictiolUlBire de l'architecture" Revue de l'art 58/59 (1983), p.95., and fus. 9 and 10. The juxtaposition of numerous high quality images within the text - rather than relegated tu the end or included in a seperated allas - was an innovation in an:hitectural publication. A1though wood engravings within the texl had been uoo in a few other nineteenIh-century architectural publications, they had either been ponrly exeeuted or few in nomber. Bondon provides & brief Iist of other contemporary architectural publications that used engravings wilhin lhe text. They had tu he wood engravings as steel engravings couW DOl he prinIed with the lellerpress. Wood engravings were also much cbt;.'per than steel engravings, presumably a considerable faclor in a large publication sncb as the
32
•
takes on the character of an anatornical demonstration in the present rather than a historical account of architecture. In fact this type of juxtaposition - the text keyed to the image; often on the same page - seems to have been favoured by functional anatomists such as Leonardo Da Vinci and Georges Cuvier (fig.6) The complexity of the human body - or Medieval architecture - required numerous drawings with letter-keyed descriptions to avoid confusion in the reader/viewer. Not only does Viollet-le-Duc juxtapose the text and image in an objective manner, he also chose the seemingly objective fonn of the Dictionnaire as the perfect form for his Cuvierian structuring of the contents. As was previously notOO, this transformed the Dictionnaire into a scientific instrument for analysing architecture requiring the participatory dissective gaze of the reader/viewer. The viewer's dissective gaze was an essential component of Cuvier' s Galleries of Comparative Anatomy (figs.7,8, and 9) which had replaced the previous Cabinet d'Histoire naturelle in the early nineteenth-century (figs.l0 and Il). Despite Daubenton's attempts 10 reorder the old Cabinet (he was appointed chief curator in 1745), it remained - at least in Cuvier's eyes - a typical 'Wunderkammer' or 'Cabinet of Curiosity' predicated on a polymathic mind set that juxtaposed and arranged objects according to "superficial" aesthetic criteria. 8D Cuvier's Gallery was a visual overthrowing of the Cabinet and its underlying epistemology. The episteme of organization initiated by Cuvier still stressed the visual, but it was in the sense of an "invisible visibility". 81 This is what Focault termed the "archéologie du regard médical": the increasîngly penetrating gaze of nineteenth century science. 82 The empirica1 description and recording of bone structure, domînated the Galleries. Individual
II) a.m.ra Maria Stafford, Artful Science: EDliRbteameDt EDtertainment and the Edipse of Visual Education (Chicago: MIT Press, 1994), p.263.
•
Il
Martin Jay. Downcast Eyes, p.394.
IZ
Ibid•• p.392. 33
bones were placed throughout the halls for investigation: three-dimensional and interior,
in contrast to the fiat world of the previous Cabinet d'Histoire naturel1e where the viewer was confronted with a polymathic tableaux of the natura! world. This volumetric approach to representation reinforced Cuvier' s functional anatomy, emphasising the physiological coordination of organs rather than their geometric juxtaposition. Visitors to the gallery were encouraged to circulate around and look into the various skeletal structures and appreciate their complexity from different perspectives (fig.7). The reader/viewer of the Dictionnaire is f:1gaged in the same process by the very act of reading the text and looking 'into' the images. Viollet-le-Duc's emphasis on perspective over two-dimensional geometric representation (in the form of elevation, plan, and section), coupled with the dissective analysis of each component of the Gothic monument, encourages the spectator to engage in a probing analysis of a complex functional organism. Furthermore, since the Dictionnaire was structured following the 'correlation of parts', the viewer was constantly reminded of the whole within the part and the part within the whole. Like Cuvier's galleries - also ordered according to the 'correlation of parts' Viollet-le-Duc's images are dominated by individual architectura! elements (a gargoyle, a tas-de-charge) occasionally interspersed by complete architectural structures. These organic wholes were the visual reminders - just like the entire skeletons in the centra!
spaces of Cuvier's galleries (figs.7-9) - !hat the analytica\ methodology of dissection was a means to explain a larger complex organization: the graphic equivalent to the larger synthetic articles on 'Construction' or 'Architecture' to which the reader was constantly referred back to by the renvois in the tex!. However, Viollet-le-Duc, like his predecessor, preferred that the reader/viewer saw the synthesis in the analysis, the whole within the part, as it reinforced the analytical mentality he was trying to emphasise as the most effective means for studying architecture.
34
Chapter Three 'Saper Verde': A Scîentific System of Architectural Drawing
Viollet-ie-Duc's belief in the inherent power of drawing to develop critical knowledge suggested that it was not just what you represented that was important, but how you represented it. If architectural drawing was to have any epistemological grounding it would have to embody both theory and praxis in a similar fashion to the plates in Diderot and
D'aiemlY~rt's
Encyclopédie or Baron Cuvier's visnal demonstration of function. This
involved reconciling the rational-cognitive tradition with the increasingly empiricoperceptual scientific methodology of the 19th century. The a posteriori inductive methodology derived from perceptual empirical facts had to be checked against the a priori reasoning and platonic mistrust of the senses inherent in the rational-cognitive tradition and vice versa. A posteriori reasoning from the 'facts' without reference to the cognitive concepts it was intended to describe would merely result in a superficial morass of details, while a priori theory without reference to the facts to which il refers was just abstract reasoning. This methodology could very easily become a closed system where the facts were chosen to fix the a priori ideas and the a priori ideas formulated to fit the facts - as we saw with Cuvier's system of comparative anatomy, and as is operative in Viollet-ie-Duc's textual and visnal representation of architecture. As Jean-Michel Leniaud has noted, "Viollet-le-Duc fournit des dessins à l'appui de ses thèses et des thèses a l'appui de ses dessins. 83 Like Cuvier' s system of comparative anatomy, it was often not an even 'give and take'. In Viollet-le-Dœ's architectural system, a priori reasoning is usually guided by an exaggerated empiricist stance. This is hardly surprising in a positivist era which valued the scientific spirit as a prime mover in history and the ultimate form of certitude.
.. Jean-Micbel Leuiaud, Viollet·le-Duc ou Les Dl!1ires du SysQme (paris: Éditions Mengès, 1994), p.82.
35
Furthennore, because the Dictionnaire Raisonné was a "scientific instrument"'" for investigating Medieval architecture, as Viollet-le-Duc implies in his preface, the drawings had to correspond with this analytic model of investigation. If style was the perfect harmony between the result and the means employed to obtain it, the drawings in the Dictionnaire would ipso facto have to he a 'scientific' probing of architectural knowledge. Viollet-le-Duc turned to anatomical illusration where, according to him, it was a fonn of knowledge, which played an epistemological role mediating between the maker and the object. A dissected body required a profound understanding of how its internai function related to its outer form in order to make it "sense"-ible and this understanding was mediated by the very act of drawing. The primary aim of anatomical drawing is to clarify the complex functional operations of i15 subject matter. Virtuoso dispiays of artistic technique are always tempered by pedagogical ends dictated by the material object. Like all pedagogical models derived from a piatonic basis, this approach to design required that the artist/educator not only had to possess a sound knowledge of the subject matter, but also critically select and order that body of knowledge for specifie didactic purposes. This is particularly true of anatomy and its graphie representation, which by its very definition is an active critical process: cutting, separating, and exposing certain organs for dispiay at the expense of others. Us dialectic between diagram - the 'screening' out of unneœssary information - and illustration - the inclusive representation of 'realistic' details - perfectly bridged the gap between cognition and perception, theory and praxis, science and art. This model of scientific drawing dominated Viollet-le-Duc's representation of architecture in the Dictionnaire. It not only demonstrated his understanding of Medieval architecture as the organic functional interrelationship of structural elements, it also
.. Barry BergdoU, "The Dictionnaire RaiSOllllé: VioUet-le-Duc'. Encyclopedie Slmcture for Arcbitecture, " IDtroductioD to The Folllldatioos of Arcbilecture, selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné by VioUet-le-Duc, translated by Keooetb D. Whitehead (New York: George BraziUer, 1990), P. 18 36
"determined the viewers gaze and hence knowledge of the object presented... ,,85 By inscribing the anatomical metaphor within his architectural drawings, Violletle-Duc could filter the viewer's conception of architecture through his own appropriation of anatomy's critical and selective methods of representation. This seientific approach to architectural drawing served not only to demystify architectural knowledge as practised at the Ă&#x2030;cole des Beaux-Arts, but also to critically reconfigure the reader' s relationship to it according to his own system and, in the process, change the publics way of thinking and seeing architecture. The technique of representation in the Dictionnaire, like the plates in Diderot and d'Alembert's EncyclopĂŠdie, or Cuvier's demonstration of function in his gallery of comparative anatomy, was just as important as the subject matter depicted. This chapter will explore how Viollet-le-Duc borrows and transcribes the techniques of anatomical and machine drawings into his own illustrations in the Dictionnaire for epistemological, didactic, and polemical purposes. For reasons of clarity 1 have divided this chapter according to Viollet-Ie-Duc's types of drawing that cali on different, but not unrelated, approaches to the methodology of anatomical drawing: the exploded view, other hybrid drawings, multiple-Ievel cross-sections and plans, and Viollet-Ie-Duc's visuallanguage of architectural restoration. The Exploded View: An Emblematic Entry into the Visual Strategies of the Dictionnaire The IWO large-seale exploded views of a tas-de-charge (springing of a vault) and a portion of a wall nave from Notre Dame at Dijon (figs.12 and 5) are the MOSt obvious examples of Viollet-Ie-Duc's novel drawing techniques, and they provide a convenient entry point into his visual strategies enacted throughout the Dictionnaire. The power of their emblematic status resonates to the present day where, in a doubling of Viollet-IeDuc's own approach, modem seholars employ the exploded views in a synecdochic
"Daniel Brewer, The Diioourse or Enligbtenment in Eighteenth-century France: Diderot and the Art of Phllosophizing (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.28. 37
manner to illustrate the analytical-dissective ordering of the Dictionnaire. 86 A Brief HistOlY of the Exploded View from the 16th to 19th Centuries There is no precedent for the exploded view in the tradition of academic architectural drawing. However, it has a long, if not sporadic, tradition in anatomical and machine drawings dating back to the sixteenth century. The complexity of their respective subject matter required a type of drawing that would c\early convey the functional relationship between the different parts that were generally obscured by a protective skin or covering. The parts are shown separated from each other (exploded, disarticulated, démonté) so that the structure and relationship of the parts to the whole can be clearly seen. Hs clarity is derived from the diagrammatic nature of its representation which o
screens 0 out any peripheral information that interferes with the essential message to be
conveyed. It aided the specialist in clarifying his own thoughts on complicated subject matter and, more importantly, acted as a pedagogical device to convey that complexity in a c\ear and concise manner to the non-specialist. The exploded view is a type of technical illustration which had its origins in the medieval period. The most representative example of its medieval precursor is Agricola's
De Re Metallica. 87 A significant portion of its 269 illustrations of machines are represented in oblique view showing "imaginary conditions with parts eut away or
.. See Barry Bergdoll's introduction to The Foundations of Architecture Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné, (New York: George Braziller, 1990),pp.21-22. where he specifically chooses the exploded view of the tas-de-charge as emblematic of Viollet-Ie-Duc's novel drawing techniques. Philippe Boudon ilIustrates the exploded view of the wall nave 'at Notre-Dame de Dijon in his article, "Deux Modeles du "Modele", CoIllquiom 65 2eme série (June, 1985), pp.44-49. in order to make bis point conceming the ambiguity of the "cathédrale idéale" in relation to the anatomical model in the Dictionnaire. ., Georgius Agricola, De Re MetalliaI, translated form the original Latin edition of 1556 inlo French by Albert France-Lanord who also contributes an introduction.(Paris: Gérard K10pp Éditeur, 1992), p.xxix. Both France-Lenord and Booker(History of Engineering Drawing) indicated that an earlier book by Vannoccio Biringuccio, De La Pirotedtnia, contained similar types of drawings but they were not as detailed or numerous as those of Agricola. 38
dismantled for identification" (fig. 13).88 The exploded parts in the foreground are a repetition of the parts in the mechanism and operate as a type of medieval "graphie parts list".89 Agricola's book, however, is essentially part of the Théâtre des Machines tradition, which was more concerned with showing the complex and 'astonishing' aspects of technicity rather than aiding the viewer to understand and, henceforth, appropriate their constructive and functional aspects. 90 Leonardo Da Vinci marks the introduction of the exploded view in terrns of our modem definition of technical illustration. His notebook drawings, many ordered for ultirnate publication, consist of several examples of exploded views of machine parts and, in keeping with his quasi iatro-mechanical approach to the human body, they are also used in his anatomical drawings. In the exploded view of vertebrae (fig.14) and of a mechanism for converting reciprocating to rotary motion (fig. 15)91, the parts are exploded, not haphazardly as in Agricola's drawings, but along their natural axes of construction/structure!2 The complex interaction of each adjacent part is further clarified by either allowing a slight overlapping of forms to suggest the organic connection as in the mechanism (fig. 15), and/or by force lines that draw the separated parts together as in the illustration of the vertebrae (fig. 14). Leonardo Da Vinci's interest in understanding and conveying the complex human anatnmy was an impetus to develop new types of anatomical illustration. His cross-section of a human lower limb (fig. 16) combines sections with external projections to accurately explore and convey its organic three-dimensional interior and exterior. This type of
Il Peter Booker, The History of Engineering Drawing, 2nd ed. (London: Northgate Publisbing Co Ud., 1979), p.214. Booker devotes an entire chapter to tecbnica1 illustration.
.. lbid.,p.214. '" Bnmo Jacomy, Une bistoire des tedmiques, (paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990), p.236.
" The drawings of the vertebrae are found in Windsor 19007v and the mecbanism in Codex AIIanIialo;. Further examp1es of explnded views C8D he found in folio 19013v and 19001r Windsor (exp1nded
IWSCles froID the deep dissection of a sboulder) and folio 372 rb Codex At1anticus (anotber gear mecbanism).
" Booker, Ibid., p.217. 39
drawing is precocious, foreshadowing nineteenth century developments in cross-sectional anatomy.93 The exploded view seems to have disappeared from anatomical illustration in the eighteenth century but reappears in Diderot and d' Alembert's Encyclopédie in the form of technical illustrations (fig.17) - hardly surprising considering the Encyclopédie's anatomical structuring of knowledge coupled with its largely technical subject matter. The exploded view and other dissective strategies of representations were an integral part of ils 'mission' to critique and reorder knowledge based on the reader/viewer's understanding ano. appropriation of the underiying rules that constructed knowledge. Like Leonardo's drawings, which Gillespie has linked in spirit and intent to the plates in the Encyclopédie
94,
the exploded views presuppose that the artist/scientist has
supplemented what he has seen with what he has learned about the shape and function of the object depicted. 95 As Rudolf Arnheim has commented in terms of anatomical illustration: "Such knowledge transforms the purely visual appearance into an organic mechanism of interacting agencies. The illustrator makes a drawing understandable to the viewer by understanding what is being depicted.,
,96\
This platonic mistrust of sophistic pedagogical techniques is concretely addressed by D'Alembert in the Encyclopédie's Discours Préliminaire. He explains to the potential subscriber that they visited ateliers, edited 'memoires' from the best available
expert~,
constructed maquettes of machines, consulted existing technical literature, and most pertinent to our discussion, were involved in the 'démontage' and 'rémontage' of certain
" Cross-secliooa! analomy came into increasing use in the nineteenth century due 10 Ihe development of effective fixation techniques. .. Charles Coulstoo Gi11ispie, ed. A Diderot Pidorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Indu.o;try 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications Ioc., 1959), introduction, p.xxüi.
"Rudolf Amheim, "Perception, Cognition, am Visua1ization," Journal of 8iocommunication 18110.2 (l99t), pA. 96
"Ibid" 0' pA. 40
-
machines. 97 This 'hands on' acquisition ofknowledge was a guarantce to the public of the truth value of the information contained within its pages. ln response to the burgeoning Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, machine drawing became more specialized and developed its own increasingly codified graphie standards. Orthographie projections became the norm in technical drawing - largely as a result of Gaspard Monge's development of descriptive geometry - and exploded views became increasingly scarce only appearing occasionally in popular science periodicals. 98 The exploded view, however, reappeared with renewed vigour in nineteenth century anatomical illustration due, in no small part, to Cuvier' s abundant use of it to demonstrate his system of classification based on function.
Geor~e
Cuvier.
Bour~e!y.
Viollet-le-Duc and the Exploded
View; The Empirical Facticity of Invisible Function
Dorinda Outrarn' s pertinent observation that "Cuvier's galleries were full of objects to he looked not at, but intO"99 (figs.7,8, and 9) probably refers to the striking number of
skeletal parts displayed "démontées" anü "séparées". As of 1822, one of the larger 'salles' contained "300 Pièces formant une collection de pieds et de mains, montrant séparément les os qui les composent" and two smaller rooms annexed to it displayed "590 Pièces formant une collection d'os séparés, classes par espèce d'os", including vertebras and large
'fi
Bnmo Jacomy, Une bistoire des teclmiques (paris: &litions du Seuil, 1990), p.229.
.. Alain Mercier, "Les déOOIs de la "petite école, " in Les Cahiers d'lINoire du CNAM 00.4 (Juillet, 1994), p.sa.: "Au détrimed de l'image en peisptdive, on préconise la projection orthogonale, dont l'usage dans les dessins de illlCbioeo eol déjà bien fixé au milieu du xvme siècle. L'avèDemenl de la géométrie descriptive. dont on fait grand cas, entriine la multiplication des vues en projection d'un même objet. La formule la plus l'réIfICde de l'épure ou du lavis est le "deux-plans": sur un même feuille, la macbine se trouve répresentée en élévation et en plan additimmel (généralement lIIIll vue de dessus ou vue plongeanJe)"• 1 would like 10 tbaok Alain Mercier for bis suggeolioo 10 100Ic for """"-" century representalions of tecbnica1 illustration in French papolar science periodica1s. A1tbough 1found numerous examples of multiple-view drawings in perspective, lbere were few exploded views.
" DoriŒIa OuIram, GeorJI5 Cuvier: VOOIIioa, scieaœ lIIId Autborily in Post·RevolutioDlllY Fraote (M8IICbester: MlIllCbesler University Press, 1984), pp. 175-176.
41
bones, and "300 Têtes osseuses démontées, et faisant voir séparément les os qui les composent" 100 The visual demonstrations in the gallery were in perfeet harmony with his textuaI explication of comparative anatomy. They encouraged the visitor to compare, contrast, and look into the differences and resemblances between species according to the functiona! properties of each bone, and the functionaI interrelationship of each bone within individual specimens. Exploded and cross-sectionaI views of skulls, hands, and feet were laid out on mats (fig. 18), and exploded skulls (fig. 19) or vertebrae (fig.20) were pried apart, each bone separated from the next by metal rods. In a striking display of Cuvier' s artifice, the demonstration of function reveaIed what was normally conceaIed. However, the artificiality of Ibis demonstration was in a constant struggle to be seen as an empirical facl of nature. The externalization of the internai 5iceletal structure presents the threedimensionaI solidity of the numerous bone fragffit~nts as so many palpable historical facts displayed within the artificial setting of the museum. Cuvier' s displays were exactly the type of empirical anatomical practice that Barbara Stafford links with "...the positivist historiographers of the nineteenth century engaged in the anatomization of ever more finely dissected parts"IOI or what Jonathan Crary, noted in relation to physiology as, "the division and fragmentation of the physical subjeet into increasingly specifie organic and meehanical systems"l02 Both Stafford and Crary illustrate their arguments, figuratively, with an anatomical illustration taken from Marc-Jean Bourgery's Traité compb' de J'anatomie de J'homme
100 J.P.F. Deleuze, Imtoire et Description du MIRUID d'Imtoire Nature\le 2 vols.(paris: 1823), pp.670-672. This is Ibo official bislory of Ibo Muslum written by Ibo librarian after the additions and renovations in 1822. From bis description of contents, it is sometimes difficult to ..certain wbicb of the specimens were 'déoJodées'. Il appears lbat, aside froID Ibo sku1ls, he UDleleotimated or subsumed the numerous exploded views of skeleta1 forms laid out on mats and the numerous exploded vertebrae wbicb were part of enlire animal skeletons. The.. types of exploded views are still in evidence today in the GaUery of Comparative Anatomy.
101 llaIboua Maria Stafford, ArtfnI Science: En1igbtenment Entertainment and the EcUp;e of VlsuaJ Educalion (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1994), p.301.
102
Jonathan Crary, Tedmiques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the NineteeDtb
CentUl)' (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1994), p.SI. 42
(published in six volumes belWeen 1831 and 1854). The materiality of the finely dissected
parts (fig.21) - illustrated by Nicolas Henri Jacob's lithographs "d'apres nature"I03 - were characterized by Étienne Delécluze, Viollet-le-Duc's uncle, as "vérités palpables" in his lengthy review of his friend Bourgery's treatise in the Revue de Paris (1840).104 Not surprisingly, Bourgery solicited Cuvier's approval before embarking on his monumental work, and the Traité contains numerous references to Cuvier's theories of comparative anatomy. In retum, Cuvier's sea\ of approval for Bourgery and Jacob's 'positivistic anatomy' is inscribed on the frontispiece of each atlas of plates in the form of an extract from his report on the Traité to the Academy of Sciences: "On peut dire que sans l'art du dessin, l'histoire naturelle et l'anatomie, telles qu'elles existent aujourd'hui, auraient été impossibles". lOS N.H. Jacob's lithographs for the Traité are clearly inspired by the "vérités palpables" of Cuvier's own three dimensional approach to demonstrating function in his Gallery of Comparative Anatomy and in the illustrations to his numerous publications (fig.22)1l16. Furthermore, Jacob' s striking lithograph of a disarticulated skull with three exploded cervical vertebrae (fig.23), is directly inspired by Cuvier's exploded views
UB
la mfdidDe
The complete titleofBourgery's work is, TraiIl! complet de l'anatomie de l'homme, mmprenant o~ratoire, par M. le Dr. J.M. Bourgery, avec pIanclIes IitbollJ'llPbiées d'apres oature, par
N.B. Jatob 8 vol. (paris:C.A.Oelaunay, 1831-1854)
'04 Élieoœ-J.... Delécluze, "Des travaux anatomiques de M.le Oocteur Bourgery," in Revue de Paris (3.ser) 17 (Mai 184Oa),p.21O. For a discussion of Oelécluze, Bourgery, Jacob, BIId the lithographie plates for the TraitA! tefer 10 Reinbard HildebrBlld's, "Anatomie UIId Revolution des Meoscbeubildes," Sudboffs ArdUv, 76, no.1 (1992), pp.I-6. This passage is meutioned on pA. of HildebrBlld's article BIId also in Barbara Maria Staftùnl'. ArtfuI SdeDœ, p.309. Robert Baschet indicates tbat Delécluze met Bourgery at Fontenay-aux-Rose. BIId tbey iJJllJlllC\ialely became close friends. Baschet, E.-J. Delkluze: T~moiD de Son Temps, 1781-1863 (Paris: Boivin el Cie, Éditeurs, 1942), pp.213-214. lOS
Ibid.,
00
ail the atIases of plates
106 For a comprebeosive account of Cuvier'. book illustrations including the nsmes of illustrators, enpavers, BIId litbograpJers tefer 10, Claus Niasen, Die Zoologbcbe BudùIIllvatioo: Ibre Bibliograpbie und GcsclIidIte Zwei Band (SbJttgart: Anton Hienenwm, 196911111! 1978), Baod I. pp.I06-I08.
43
(figs.19 and 20).107 Viollet-le-Duc was intimately familiar with Cuvier's anatomical theories, as was discussed in the previous chapter, and it is highly probable that he, like many other Parisians, frequented the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle. He also owned three of Bourgery's anatomica1 treatises, inc1uding bis Traité complét de l'anatomie de l'homme. 'OK, in which N.H. Jacob had successfully translated Cuvier's exploded views into two dimensional form without any loss to their three-dimensional palpability. Furthermore, Viollet-le-Duc undoubted1y read bis uncle's two enthusiastic reviews of Bourgery' s Traité in the Journal des Débats (1834) and the Revue de Paris (1840.)109 Delécluze's praise centred on N.H. Jacob lithographs, which he considered as modern day equivalents to Clacar's wood-cuts for the first edition of Vesalius' De Fabrica. l1o He was particularly impressed by the harmonious integration of science and art in
the lithographs, which rendered them not only informative, but also pleasing to the
eye. Delécluze singled out Jacob's lithograph of the disarticulated skull for his highest praise: ...il en est un qui sons le point de vue scientifique et commme objet d'art, mérite
une mention toute particulière: c'est celui qui représente une tête de squelette dont les os, d'abord désarticulés, ont ensuite été rapprochés à la distance de deux lignes environ...elle devient dans l'ouvrage...un résumé excellent de toutes les 107 Two books on the bistory of anatomy .oom to confinn !hat Bourgery'. exploded view. were taken directly from Cuvier'. Gallery. They iodicate tbat Jacob'. plate is one of the first illustrations of an exploded .kuII. As W8S previously 1IlJIec1, Cuvier'. gaUery coŒaiœd 300 disarticulated .kuUs as of 1822 (Deleuze,p.671.). Refer 10: J.L. BiDet, Dessiœ et TraiIts d'ADatomie (pari.: Sté NUe de. Éditions du Chêne, 1980), p.239. aod K.B. Roberts aod J.D.W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body: European Traditions of AnaIomÏCll1 Illustration (Oxford: Clareodon Pre••, 1992), p.S44. lœ CalaIogue des livres composant la blbJicllMque de feu M. Viollet-le-Duc. The other two books by Bourgery Iisted in the catalogue are (1131) ElqIOSl! pb1Iosopbique du syst~me nerveux (pari., 1844) aod (1133) Anatomie microscopique de la rate daIl'Il'bomme et les mammimres (pari., 1843)
109 Étienne.Jean Delécluze, 'Traité complet de l'analomie de l'bomme, comprenanl la Médicine opératoire, par M. le docteur Bourgery, avec plancbes litbograpbiées d'après nature, N.H. Jacob' FeuiUetoD du Journal des D6IaIs (lS Noverobre 1834), op.
"'Ir
110 Delécluze, 'Des Travaux Anatomique de M. le Docteur Bourgery, ' p.222. lt is DOW thougbt that thedrawiDgs farDe FlIbrica sbouId he alIributed 10 artists from Titian'. studio, rather than Clacar. N.H. Jacob, like Delécluze, bad studied under the neo-clas.ical painter Jacques.Loois David.
44
descriptions et de toutes les planches précédentes... 111 The fact that Viollet-le-Duc's exploded views (figs.5 and 12) are derived from either Cuvier or Bourgery's anatomical drawings, rather than nineteenth century technical drawing, is not only confirmed by their rather obvious resemblance to vertebrae, but also from his visual and textual explication of the tas-de-eharge in the section on 'Construction' in the Dictionnaire. The tas-de-charge is introduced with a drawing of its complex masonry derived from the graphic rules of descriptive geometry as codified by Gaspard Monge (fig.24). However, Viollet-le-Duc immediately follows this image with the exploded view (fig. 12), as he indicates in the adjacent text, ..pour faire comprendre, même aux personnes qui ne sont pas familières avec la geometrie descriptive, l'operation que nous venons tracer, nous supposons les trois sommiers de la figure précedenté vus les uns au-dessus des autres en perspective et moulurés. 1I2 Viollet-le-Duc had great regard for descriptive geometry, explicitly insisting on its importance for architeetsll3, but he also recognized ils limitations. Descriptive geometry's methodology for transforming three-dimensional form to the two-dimensional plane of the drawing surface was eminently suited for lransmitting exact measurements within the production processes of the machine industry (which its drawing methods came to dominate) but it was too abstract and complicated for the general public to understand. Although Viollet-le-Duc used descriptive geometry in his own architectural practice - compare Viollet-Ie-Duc's drawillg of the 'Escalier d'honneur et Donjon' from the
111
Deléc1uze, "Traité complet de l'Anatomie•. ", op.
112
Viollet-le-Duc, Didiollllllire RaïsooM, vol.4., p.92.
Eugène-Emmonuel Viollet.le-Duc, Lectures oa Arcbitecture, trans1atioa of the Eatretiem sur l'an:hifedure by lleI1iamin Buckoall in 1877 (vol. \.) aod 1881 (vol.2.) (New York; Dover Publications, lnc., 1987), vol.l. Lecture IX, p.388.:"The arcbitect ought not oaly possess a lllrge aC'l".intaoce with descriptive geometry. but also te be sufficieotly familiar with perspective to be able te draw a design or parts of a design in every aspect". Viollet-le-Duc respected the fact that not oaly was it based on geometry. it required a sound knowledge of the abject depicted. Many people believed that descriptive geometry bad raised machine dr~wing to a 'science', but VioUet-le-Duc bad trouble with ils abstract metbod of presentation. 113
45
Château at Pierrefonds'l4 (fig.25) with a plate taken from an elementary treatise on technical drawing (fig.26)115 - it was not, by itself, a suitable means for clearly communicating his anatomical interpretation of structure in three-dimensional form. By inscribing the exploded view directly into his architecturai representation. Viollet-le-Duc cornes very close to erasing the semantic space necessary for the technique of metaphor. The thin and flexible vertebrae becomes the material 'backbone' of his Gothic structure and the reader/viewer is encouraged to scientifically analyse this "organic" structure by the instructions in the text : "Dissequons cette construction piece a piece." (fig.5)"6 The 'SheH Game': Viollet-le-Duc's Biolo~ica! Critique of the Beaux-Arts System of 'Lin~uistic' Theories of Composition and Omament Like Cuvier, Viollet-le-Duc used the exploded view for epistemological. didactic, and polemical purposes against any abstract systems which displayed a lack of understanding for the deep material 'structures' of history. To a great extent this type of representation was the graphic counterpart of his endeavour to counter the linguistic interpretations of composition and omament that dominated the academic system. Viollet-le-Duc's polemic was often directed against the theories of Quatremère de Quincy, the ancien secretaire perpetuel of the Academy of Fine Arts, and virtual arbitrator of the 'classicallanguage' of architecture within the École des Beaux-Arts system. In many ways VioHet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire Raisonné can be seen as a refutation of Quatremère
114 Drawing 110.344 BI !he CenIn!
de Recherches Monuments Historiques, Palai. de Chaillot, Paris.
115 Ann<mgmxl aiDé, Cours tI&neataire de Dessin 1ndu;IrieI, lellle et Allas (pan.: E. Bernard et Cie, t886), pl.n. Although Ibis engraving i. a Iater example, the basic principle. of de.criptive geometry remained !he same througOOut !he ninet_1l and twontieth centurie•. For lUI explicBIioD of the Iayout in bolh Anneogaud and Viollet-le-Duc'. drawing••ee Booker, A History 01 Engineering DraWÙlll, p.161.: •Ali drawing (read lechnical) on the Contineol W8S based on Monge'. descriptive geometry, and bis method of projection onto plane. produced tbat type of arrangement in which the plan of lUI object W8S drawn beneath the object'. front elevation ...•
116
Viollet-le-Duc, DictioIlllllÎl'e Rai.<>lnœ, VolA., p.l40.
46
de Quincy's theories as codified in his highly influential Dictionnaire Méthodique de l'architecture, which, by the 1830's, had become a 'quasi-official' reference work for the idealist conception of architecture as an imitative process. 117 In the tradition of Diderot and D'Alembert, the purportedly neutra! zone of the dictionary-encyclopedia became a highly charged site where differing ideologies were deployed in an increasing polemical fashion. In his Dictionnaire Méthodique, Quatremère de Quincy contrasted the completely
ordered and coherent c\assicallanguage of architecture with the disordered and incoherenl character of Gothic architecture. Viollet-le-Duc countered this charge most directly in his section on 'Style' in the Dictionnaire Raisonné. He replaces Quatremère de Quincy's abstract linguistic model with a biological/anatomical system derived from Cuvier's conception of comparative anatomy. Style was now synonymous with the laws of nature rather than arbitrary linguistic convention. ll8 Like Cuvier who contrasted his functional system based on the laws of nature to previous systems of superficial classification, Viollet-le-Duc conflates his criticisms of the Beaux-Arts system into one overarching negative metaphor - the shell or envelope: "for many people style in architecture is nothing but a kind of outer decorative shell or envelope. ,,119 Or: it would be impossible ever to expect artists who think architecture is sorne kind of an exterior shell or cover, devoid of any ideas, meaning, or logical cohesion, and having no necessary relationship to its object, to understand and appreciate the work of medieval masters whenever laid down a stone or a piece of wood or traced out a profile without being able to give a reason for what they were doing. 120 Viollet-Ie-Duc's reference to the shell or envelope drew on the visual and textual 117 BergdoU,
"The Dictioouaire Raisonné: VioUet-le-Duc's Encyclopedic Stmcture for Architecture",
p.13.
'" This is oot Co say thol Viollet-le-Duc did oot believe tbere could be a cohereet language of architectural composition. In fact a coberent 1aoguage of visual comownication was what VioUet-Ie-Duc was seeking to impIemed. However, tbe Iaoguage was thol of organic JIIinciplœ oot of linguistic stmctures. Thus VioUet-le-Duc was offering an organic or scientific language of design ratber than a 'linguistic' language of design. 119
Tbe FoundalloΠ01 Architecture, (Style), p.2S7.
120
Ibid., (Style), p.2S2.
47
strategies Cuvier used to differentiate his 'scientific' comparative anatomy. based on interior function, from earlier classification methods based on extemal characteristics. Cuvier ridiculed the purveyors of previous 'superficial' arrangements. often stressing their connection to the seventeenth and eighteenth century cabinet of curiosities (figs.27 and 28): the quintessential example of a polymathic mind set that juxtaposed and arranged objects - often shells and pieces of coral - based on purely visual criteria. ﾃｼbjects to be loolﾅ電 at rather !han into. Cuvier' s gallery with its numerous specimens to be looked nol "at", but "into" - like the exploded views - was a visual overthrowing of the old-time cabinet and its underlying epistemology (fig.8). Whether it was Cuvier denigrating his predecessors superficial approach to taxonomy, or Viollet-Ie-Duc's diatribe against the Beaux-Art's surface understanding of architecture, the same fundamental binary concepts underlined their respective polemics: horizontal skimming versus vertical probing, passive versus active knowledge, inorganic versus organic, artifice versus nature, rhetoric versus truth, and purely empirical perception versus perceptual cognition. And for both Viollet-le-Duc and Cuvier, the exploded view was an essential aspect of their polemic focusing their critiques in one powerful image. Composition Composition was the primary tool of design in the Beaux-Arts system of architecture. 121 Its primary concem was the relationship between usage and syntax which resulted in predetermined rules for manipulating certain type-forms to satisfy programmatic needs. The nineteenth century ramifications of this architectural language of composition - presumably developed in response to an emerging historicism - was a set of increasingly codified trans-historical rules independent of styles. 122 In whalever form
121
Demelrius Porpbyrios, "The 'End' of Styles," OppositiollS 8 (Spriog, 1977), p.123.
122 Of course if mies are lraDs-historica1 they can be equaUy applied 10 any historical style. one of many dichotomies inberetll in the Beaux-Arta system of composilion.
48
nu. wu
it took, Beaux-Arts composition tended to stress the 'rules of design' imposed on the building from a priori laws developed by the guardians of the Beaux-Arts system. Viollet-le-Duc vehemently disagreed with the academic interpretation of composition and was convinced !hat its artificial and contrived system could only produce architecture lacking style. "Style", according to Viollet-le-Duc, "is the consequence of a principle pursued methodically; it is a kind of emanation from the form of the work that is not conseiously sought after" .123 Style could only be found in the principles of nature which are exemplified in medieval architecture: "...we will find that the living essence of style is more marked in the works of the Middle Ages: they possess a more perfect harmony; the link between their structure and their form is more organic, as it is between their form and its decoration. ,,124 The Beaux-Arts rules of composition - such as unity, composition of masses, contras!, proportion in detail, seale, composition of plan, and relation of plan to eievation l2S
-
could not be imposed on a design; they had to emanate from within the
structure itself. The exploded view (fig. 12) was the perfect demonstration of the organic ordering of structure according to the rules of nature. Bach stone in the springing of the vault serves a purpose and relates to the next in an organic union of interacting forces following Cuvier's principle of the 'correlation of parts'. Viollet-le-Duc clearly articulates his Cuvierian critique in his comparison of the springing of a Roman groin vault - unorganic - with an early gothic tas-de-charge - organic - (fig.29): "Is there a single useless member here, a member whose function and reason for being are not immediately apparent ']" 126 As a result, Gothic architecture functioned in
123
Follllllations 01 Arcbitecture, (Style), p.2S6.
124 Ibid., (Style), p.2S4. It sbould he noted Ihst Viollet-le-Duc mesDl an imaginative creative process based on the principles of nature not a mimetic application of tbese principles.
125 1 bave laIœn tbeoe NIes of composition from Alan Colquhoun, 's ·Composition Vel'8ll8 the Project,· ModenIIty lIIId the CIlIiIiiaII TradidoD: ArdIiIectunI &says 19110-1987 Alan Colquhoun (Cambridge, Mass.,
1994), pAS. 126
The Folllldlltlons 01 An:hitecture, (Style), p.2SS. 49
"a way similar to the natural order found in the case of created things, where the part is complete and self-contained like the whole and is constituted like it" 127 (an obvious reference to Cuvier's 'correlation of parts'). The exploded view exemplifies the synecdochic structure of medieval architecture in which every element is a microcosm of the living plan: an intemally generated organic principle of composition. As Alan Colquhoun has pointed out, in such a synecdochic structure, any notion of composition would be 'absurd'. The forms of architecture, like nature, would result from the principle of structure (the visible form of function), from which the form would follow naturally without the contrived intervention of the 'composer,.12S The exploded view visually contested both the Beaux-Art system of composition where, according to Viollet-le-Duc, "architecture is a kind of game played with forms borrowed from Imperial Rome or Renaissance Italy, without any understanding of those forms"129 and the more self-referential system employed by Durand at the École
Polytechnique where composition consisted of an ars combinatorla of formai elements resulting in certain architectural types (figs.30 and 31).130 Because medieval architecture embodied the principles of nature, it became a
127
Ibid., (Styte), p.259.
12S Co~. "Composition versus the Project", p.5t. A1though Colquhoun's observation is astute, bis pbmseology implies t:bat the arcbitect is just a passive observer and nol imaginalively involved in rethinking the principles of nature in order to create a 'natural' lInmannered style. VioUet-le-Duc, of course, helieved in the latter approach. 129 Ibid., (Style), p.252. 130 11 haa been often noted that Durand was the fust arcbitect 10 formulale a system of composition predicated on a self-refereotiallanguage of arcbitecture withoul direct reference 10 ellÎsting t.....ilion. This bas often led to bis pairing with Cuvier and other purveyors of comperalive taxonomy. Although il is tNe lhat DurauI used many of the sIrIItAlgies of Cuvier, there are llOIIIe profound differences that arcbitecta Iike VioUet-leDuc and Gottfried Semper, also infIuenced by Cuvier, would have found problematic in bis approach. The mathematica1 abstraction of Durand's system, codified into a formula for manipuJating arcbitectural elemenlll into larger typologies, favoured geometrical juxtaposition rather thon organic connection. Furthenoore, thi. mecJvmistic cooception of arcbitecture coŒimed ta he expressed through bis Blrict adherence to the orthographie set - no doubt encouraged by Gaspard Monge's theories of descriptive geometry (with ils emphaoiB on lhe reduction of the threoHIimensional object ta ils planar expression in plana and elevalions). 50
veritable "architectural organism" .131 In the words of Viollet-le-Duc: We say "organism" for it is difficult to assign any other name to this architecture of the Middle Ages, which developed and made progress in the same formative way that nature herself works - namely, by departing from a simple principle, which then becomes modified, perfected, and made more complex without ever damaging or destroying its original essence. 132 The primary indicator of the organic nature of medieval architecture was the equilibrium of forces: The law of equilibrium of forces opposes structural actions with inverse actions, pressures with counter-pressures, overhangs with counterweights; it diffuses weight by spreading it out away from where it would tend to concentrate vertically; it provides each profile with a purpose related to the place that it occupies, and each stone with a function such that no stone could be removed,without compromising the entire structure. 133 The exploded view demonstrated these forces perfectly as it stressed the organic interrelation of adjacent parts where each element that carried a load maintained its own independent
function
and
could
be
freely
compressed. l34
This
state
of
"disconnectedness.. 135 , as Viollet-le-Duc put it himself, was visually demonstrated in the exploded view. With Viollet-Ie-Duc's visual and textual guidance the reader/viewer, in an act of participatory cognition, reconnected the exploded masonry and in the process reenacted how the ribs transmitted the vault stress down to the lower blocks and from this slender point, transferred to the flying buttress. 136
131
Foundatioos of Arcbitecture, (Style), p.259.
132
Ibid., p.259.
133
Ibid., pp.259-260.
134 The Foundatioos of Arcbitecture, p.179. (Constmction) 135
Ibid., (Constmction), p.179.
136
Jobo Fitcben, The Construction of Gothie Catbedrals: A study of Medieval Vault Erection
(Cbicago: The Univenity ofCbicago PrĹ&#x201C;s, 1961), pp.75-77. This system of the tas-de-charge is fullyexplained by Fitchen in the language ofViollel-Ie-Duc. Not surprisingly, he uses many ofViollet-le-Duc's illustrations
51
Viollet-Ie-Duc's exploded views of Gothie architectural elements provided the ideal contrast with the massive inert architecture of the Romans, and through guilt by association, to the Beaux-Arts system of composition, and its stress on massing rather than detailing. 137 The pedagogical effectiveness of the exploded view's capacity to reveal the complex functional interactions inherent in an organism, whether biological or architectural, is clearly articulated by Mrs.R. Lee in her commentary on Cuvier' s Gallery of Comparative Anatomy: "How surprised will the novice be to find, that the head, which he has been accustomed to consider as made of one bone, is, in mammalia, composed of several parts, and in fishes, divided to infinity." 13S There could be no better graphie demonstration that Gothie architecture, in contrast to the 'shell' architecture of the BeauxArts system, was a complex interaction of functional elements. The exploded view also directly confronted the Beaux-Art drawing technique derived from their system of composition - that manifestated itself in a planimetric conception of design expressed through the strict orthographie set of plan, elevation, and section. 139 Viollet-le-Duc was diametrically opposed to this system of design as he indicates in his section on 'Unity' in the Dictionnaire. The separation of elevation, plan, and section could only result in a dismembering of the architectural body. ft was an abstract method learned by rote, which did not ensure that the architect understood the underlying 'shape and function' of what he was drawing. Consequently, it was an inadequate pedagogical tool for teaching architects and the general public.
from the DictiollJlllire in an eloquent testimony to their clarity and original pedagogical intent. It is now generally acknowlOOgOO !hat the vault ribs are not functional. Once the vault wehhing was in place they no longer playOO a structoral role. Refer to Robert Mark, Experimeols in Gothie Structure (Cambridge, Ma." The MIT Pres" 1982), p.122. 131 David Van Zanteo, •Architectoral Composition at the École des Beaux-Arts from Charles Percier to Charles Garnier,· in The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts, 00. Arthur Orexler (New York: MUS<UIIl of Modem Art, 1977), p.185. The same id.. is operative in Cuvier's explodOO view which conll'llJlted with the visual, and thus undividOO, represenlation intrinsic to a clas.ification ha.ed on extemal characteri.tic•. 13S
R.Lee, Memoires of Baron Cuvier, (London, 1833), p.82.
This conception of Beaux-Arts drawing is essenlially true, hoever, Viollel-Ie-Duc exagerales il. dominance in order to emphasise his divergence from Beaux-Arts principles.
139
52
In contrast, the exploded view was always depicted in oblique or perspective view in order to clearly indicate the organic connection between the interior and exterior, ensuring that perception and cognition were never separated. lts three-dimensional clarity transmitted the principles and the fOTm in an immediate fashion that enabled the viewer to appropriate the operative principles for understanding and imaginative re-creation rather than slavish imitation. Since each building had its own structural logic the implication was
that the reader/viewer had to constantly search below the surface to gain a deep structural understanding of each architectural specimen in order to render it sense-ible to himself or the general public. lt was a graphic lesson in organic composition as opposed to a linguistic model of manipulating syntax.
Omament
The exploded view equally challenged Quatremère de Quincy's interpretation of omament as a language that gave character and meaning to a building. This 'rhetorical' separation between structure (res) and omarnent (verba) granted omament the autonomous role of assigning meaning in architecture. Contrary to Quatremère de Quincy's intention, this separation destroyed omament's emblematic status, and it become an 'arbitrary' linguistic convention purely dependent on individual preference. 140 In conjunction with an increasing historicism, this process often resulted in stylistic eclecticism in which different historical styles were - to paraphrase Viollet-le-Duc - wom and juxtaposed like clothing or applied as an "outer decorative shell". Viollet-Ie-Duc's organic interpretation of style, derived from Cuvier, was diametrically opposed to this "denatured imitation. ,,141 In accordance with Cuvier' s
140 Porphyrios, "The 'End' of Styles", p.123. Porphyrios discusses the repercussiODS of Quatremère de Quincy's definition of omament in a cleor and concise manner. 141 Sylvia U1YÎn, QuMremère De Quincy aDd the Invention of B Modem Laoguage of An:bïtedure (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1990), p.I07.
53
fundamental principles of the 'conditions of existence' and 'correlation of parts'. every element in medieval architecture was necessary and functional down to the smallest detai!. Ornament was not a manner of convention but naturallaw; it was intrinsic to the very internai structure (read meaning) of the building. An architectural structure could no more change or juxtapose ornamentation at will than an animal could change its muscles and skin. Because the structure was determined by its purpose ('conditions of existence') - its
functional existence in reference to a certain historicallocus and environment - its style could not simply migrate from one era to another. Any attempt to graft past forms onto present day structures would result in a complete travesty of its functional integrity: Ooes the style of an edifice crumble along with its various members ? Ooes each member possess independently a part of the style of the whole? No: when we build with bits and pieces picked up here and there - in Greece, in Italy - belonging to styles of art remote from our times and our civilization, we are rea1ly engaged in collecting body parts and members of cadavers. When we remove these members from the bodies to which they belonged, we cut them off from the source that gave them life. Out of such we cannot fashion work that lives. 142 By exposing the interior and exterior of the architectural element, the exploded view forcefully demonstrated that ornament was never applied according to individual stylistic tastes, but was intimately connected with structure. And the prime example of this harmonious integration of structure and ornament was Medieval architecture where ".. the link between their structure and their form is more organic, as it is between their form and
its decoration... 143 Viollet-le-Ouc's criticizes the springing of a Roman vault for its superfluous parts and excessive decoration that appears to assign it undue value,l44 and extols its twelfth century counterpart for its judicious and functional integration of structure and ornament (fig.29)
142
Foundatioos of Architecture, (Style), p.246.
143
Ibid., p.254.
144 Here, as in other places in the Dictionnaire, Viollol-Ie-Duc waver. between the colenninous iderpnùtion of olDlllllOd aDd stnJcture and a Bolticherian view where omarnent i. expre••ive of the functiooal lIlIIure of the UDderlying structure.
54
The explod<ld view, in contrast with the rendered elevation favoured by the École des Beaux-Arts, clarified the relationship between ornament and structure ensuring thatthe viewer immediately understood their functional relationship. Viollet-le-Duc, Iike Labrouste and Vaudoyer before him, lamented the pedagogical separation of dessin géométral and structure at the École des Beaux-Arts. According to Viollet-le-Duc, this division lead to an emphasis on purely abstract aesthetic preoccupations, such as virtuoso applications of wash, bilateral symmetry, and artificial codes of shadowing, completely divorced from the structure and ils functional existence in 'reality'. The exploded view forcefuIly insisted that anyone interested in understanding omament had to understand structure. 'True' style - and there was only one - would not be found in any traditional adherence to a historical style or hybrid juxtaposition of styles. This approach would only produce a monster - a veritable teratology of architeet:Jre and a break-down in the functionallaws of nature. The exploded view taught the viewer to actively search for style beneath the surface. Viollet-le-Duc, ever at the assistance of his reader/viewer, •exploded' the principle of structural function from its historical continuum and made it applicable to the creative search for a modem architectural style. Qther Hybrid
Drawin~s:
Analysis and Synthesis
The exploded view is but one particular type of hybrid drawing among many in the Dictionnaire Raisonné which marks VioIlet-le-Duc's divergence from traditional academic design practice. In order to avoid the abstract separation of elevation, plan,and section, that he rails against in his section on 'Unity' in the Dictionnaire, he juxtaposes and combines dessin géométral (the orthographic set) and perspective views, recalling the 'liberal' design practices of early ltalian and French Renaissance architeets. 145 Like his Early Renaissance predeœssors, Viollet-le-Duc wanted to express l'apparence ct la réalité
145 VioUet-te-Duc would bave appreciated the foct tbat the juxtaposition of dessin géométrat and perspective views was common in ltaly before the codification of ili!l orthographie sel by the 'repressive academies'
55
des chosesl 46 : the analysis and synthesis at the heart of his encyclopedic endeavour and
design methodology. Although Viollet-le-Duc was certainly influenced by the examples of earlier master draughlsmen - such as Jacques Androuet du Cerceau's combination of dessin géométral, cavalier perspective, and bird' s-eye views in his book, Les Plus Excellents Batiments de France - these drawings also reflect the powerful graphie methods used in contemporary anatomical illustration. In fact, Viollet-le-Duc's technique of combining perspective views, often from odd vantage points above or below, with various hybrid forms of the orthographie set - like perspectival sectional cut-aways - are quite common in anatomical illustration. It is hardly surprising that Viollet-le-Duc tumed to anatomical techniques of representation considering the medical-surgical analogies he was formulating during his restoration work for the Monuments Historiques. Although the restorer had to know the form, the style, and the school from which the monument came, above all he had to know ils structure - ils anatomy.147 Restoration was a delicate procedure that required a complete understanding of the architectural body before initiating any intrusive operation. Because the monument was a complex physical structure - a three-dimensional volumetric structure occupying space - the primary tool for its graphic dissection was the perspective view. The orthographic set alone was of limited use in representing any complex physical structures. Elevations and plans identified symbolic geometrical relationships rather than explaining organic connections - and flattened the object in the process. The perspective view was the only adequate graphic means for understanding the complex and multi-faceted nature of the Gothic monument. Viollet-le-Duc outlined the importance of perspective for monuments in a letter written October 9, 1871:
146 Jean Guillaume, "L'apparence & la réalité des choses," L'An:hitecture en Repn!5enllllion (exbibilion catalogue, Paria: Miniatère de la CulIwe, Direction du Patrimoine, Invelllaire général des MOIIIIJMIÙ el des Richesses Artistiques de la Fruce, 1985), pp.31-34. This is a brief but excellent article on the repreaentational teclmi'!"".oS of Renaissance arcbitects.
147 FollllCialiom; of An:hitecture (Resloralion), p.216. 56
Monuments in general and those of the Middle Ages in particular are not made to be seen straight on [en géométral] but from certain angles, and that is entirely natural: the axial point is unique, the others Infinite in number. Thus one must make buildings not in anticipation of this one point, but of course with multiple [view] points in mind. 148 Taken collectively, the muItiplicity of perspective views in the Dictionnaire provide a complete 'objective' understanding of the Gothie monument, "accessible to any individual who would step up to these various windows, assess the views, and synthesise the information. ,,149 As David Van zanten has notOO, "the observer is a disinterestOO scientist; he could be anyone." ISO Thus the Dictionnaire Raisonné was a truly 'democratic' and scientific instrument in which each viewer/reader actively participatOO in the ?nalytic dissection of the Gothie monument. The only equivalent to the exhaustive and complex perspectival strategies in the Dictionnaire are found in contemporary anatomical illustrations. ln the hands of the anatomical illustrator the perspective view became the equivalent of the dissector's scalpel; a sharp rhetorica1 tool emphasising precise information about the object depictOO. According 10 Frank Netter - a prominent twentieth century illustrator - 'point of view' is one of three essential components in planning a successful anatomical drawing. 151 The artist must consider point of view in deciding whether. the pedagogical point will best be made "from the front or back, right or left side, top or bottom, or from sorne particular angle. ,,152 This selective process requîres an excellent knowlOOge of anatomy because the
148 David Van Zanten. Building Paris: ArcbItedurallnstitutions and the Transformation of the Frencb Capital, 1830-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp.2S9-260. 149 Ricbanl A. Tumer,lnventing Leonardo (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University ofCalifomia Press, 1992), pp. 169-170.
ISO
Van Zanten, Building Paris, p.2S9.
ISI Frank Neller, "A Medical Illustralor al Work" CIBA Symposia vol.lO 00.6 (May-June, 1949),p.I09O. ln Ibis informative article, Neller provides a detailed overview of the actual process of making an anatamical i11ustration. 152
Ibid., p.I09O.
57
artist must know what structures will be seen from these viewpoints. Frank Netter's two other components, which are inseparable from point of view, are focus and plane. 153 Focus is the amount of subject to be included in the drawing. lt is the first step in graphic dissection, initiating the 'screening' and rhetorical aspects of anatomical drawing: the exclusion of extraneous information in order to emphasise a particular organ. Plane indicates the depth of dissection. The complexity of an organism often necessitates a drawing in multiple-planes. Needless to say, the illustrator must have an excellent knowledge of anatomy in order to know what structures lie at each plane. The combination of focus, point of view, and plane resulted in complex hybrid illustrations combining perspective views from different viewpoints with multi-level 'cuts'. Georges Cuvier's drawing of the vocal organs of a parakeet (fig.32) is a relatively straightforward example that illustrates Frank Netter' s three fundamental criteria. Cuvier isolates the head of the parakeet, takes a perspective view from below in order to clarify the organs as a functional unit, and dissects it at a significant depth in order to expose the various organ strands. Viollet-le-Duc uses the exact same techniques of representation in the Dictionnaire RaisonnĂŠ. His perspective view of the axial chapel at Auxerre Cathedral focuses only on the vault and column capital because these elements sufficiently explain the complexity and ingenuity of the Gothic architect's solution to a complex vaulting problem (fig.33). In order to c1arify the functional relationship of the vault with the rest of the building, he
includes enough depth to indicate its complex connection with the adjoining aisle. ln the text, he indicates a specific viewpoint taken from within the aisle looking up at the summit of column 'S' depicted in the plan. Of course anatomica\ drawings, like their architectural counterparts in the Dictionnaire, were often more complex than the examples provided above. Bourgery's superficia\ dissection of vessels, nerves, and muscles of the axilla and neck, uses numerous cuts, indicated by thin white lines, to show specific anatomica\ information at different
1S3 Ibid., p.l090. 58
depthr. (fig.34). The perspective view is at an odd angle, taken from slightly below, in order to capture the complex interaction of elements in the neck region. The whole miseen-scene is in the form of a cut-away to emphasize the organic connection between the dissected elements and the synthetic appearance of a real human body. Viollet-le-Duc' s perspectival sectional cut-away of two bays of a wall is close in technique to Jacob's lithograph of the axilla and neck (fig.35). He takes an oblique perspective view from below and uses the same type of diagonal cuts in increasing depth in the triforium area to expose the skeletal structure behind the lightweight sheathing of the Gothic monument. The detailed exposure of each layer of masonry in its texturaI detail (triforium level) is characteristic of Viollet-Ie-Duc's drawings and even more carefully delineated in his perspectival sectional cut-away of a covered passageway surrounding a cloister (fig.36). This successive revealing of structural materials is also marked in Jacob's vertical section of a human trunk (fig.37), or dissected skull (fig.38), where each different layer and texture of the perimysial sheathing, muscle, and bone are carefully rendered. The IWo anatomical drawings mentioned immediately above are also an excellent example of complex skeletal structures enclosing volumetric space - a conception of space that Viollet-le-Duc also shared. l54 The deep thoracic cavity framed by stepped diagonal cutting is similar in presentation to Viollet-Ie-Duc's perspectival sectional cut-away of the covered passage way (fig.36). Similarly, Jacob's lithograph of the dissected skull recalls Viollet-le-Duc's perspectival sectional cut-away of a building representing the Roman system of construction (fig.39). The skull is dissected using three different cuts that, in conjunction with the oblique view from above, allows the viewer to see the interior and base of the skull cavity. Viollet-le-Duc employs similar cuts and a perspective view from above to emphasize the plan, structure and large central space of the Roman building encircled by smaller spatial cavities. Significantly, Martin Kemp, in a now classic study, noticed similar connections between Leonardo's Milanese skulI studies and bis work on
154 Van Zanleo, "Architectural composition allbe Ă&#x2030;cole des Beaux-Arts", p.231.
59
centralized churches (fig.40).'SS Viollet-le-Duc was also probably influenced by the hybrid views used in technical illustration. It was noted earlier, that technical drawing shared many of the same strategies of representation as anatomical illustration. Due to the domination of descriptive geometry in the machine industry and engineering schools in nineteenth century France, technical illustration was relegated to what the french cailles revues de vulgarisation scientifique (popular science periodicals).lS6 The technical drawings in these periodicals - Iike Violletle-Duc's illustrations in the Dictionnaire - were intimately allied with the text, didactic in purpose, as weil as pleasing to the eye and imagination. Viollet-le-Duc's perspective cut-away drawing of a barrel vault (fig.4l) is similar to an oblique cut-away view of bearing shaft in La Nature (fig.42) - one of the most popular science periodicals in France. 1S7 Viollet-le-Duc also drew on the largest compendium of technical illustration - the Encyclopédie. The buildings that housed machinery were often depicted in oblique sectional cut-aways (fig.43) occupied by figures engaged in work Iike Viollet-le-Duc's architectural representations (fig.44). It must be noted, however, that the technical illustrations in the Encyclopédie (fig.43) and popular science periodicals (fig.42) often only displayed schematized representations of structural materials and lacked the complex perspectival views from different vantage points. These types of drawings were more interested in conveying the work that went on within the buildings or machines than with a minute investigation of the structure itself. The painstaking attention to every layer of structural materials - including an attempt to render
ISS Martin Kemp,
"II Concetlo Dell'Anima in Leonardo's Early Skull Studies" JolU'Dlll or WlII'bura
and Courtauld Institute 34 (1971), p.118. 1S6 'The best accounl of french pJpular science periodicals is Florence Colin's article in an exhibition catalogue on the lopic of the vulgarisari~ of science in France: Florence Colin, "Les Revu.s de vulgarisation scientifique"La Scieoce pour tO!!5: Sur la vuIprisatioD scientifIQue eD FI'lIIIU de 1850 è 1914 (exhibilion catalogue, Paris: Bibliothèque du Conservaloire National des Arts el Métiers, 1990), "".71-95. Florence Colin
provides a comprehensive lisl ofpopular french science periodicals on "".94-95. '" A1though !his drawing of a barrel vaull is from a much laler date, these types of drawing.' had nol changed much sinee the lime of the EDcylopédle plaIes.
60
their texturai qualites - in conjunction with highly complex perspectival views - was only found in anatomical illustrations (figs.37-38) A Cross-Sectional Anatomy of Architecture Many scholars have noted the plethora of sections and plans taken at different levels of the Gothie structure in Viollet-Ie-Duc's Dictionnaire. We have seen a similar emphasis on sections in other works in which analytical dissection is emphasised, such as Leonardo Da Vinci's notebook drawings and the plates for Diderot and d'Alembert's Encylopédie. Not ail Viollet-le-Duc's cross-sections and plans - which are of course two-thirds of the canonical orthographie set -are due to the influence of anatomical drawings, however, the sections and plans taken at numerous levels and placed adjacent to the corresponding structural element have a very specifie relationship to anatomical drawing (figs.45-46). Viollet-Ie-Duc's perspective view of the Belfry at Évreux with the adjacent plans at three levels (fig.45) and the interior nave view and adjacent sections from Notre-Dame at dijon (fig.46), are strikingly close in appearance to Leonardo's cross-section of a human lower limb (fig. 16). As was noted earlier, Leonardo's drawing was extremely precocious, foreshadowing the development of cross-sectional anatomy over three hundred years later. This new anatomical technique involved sawing the body at equidistant levels, thus preserving the functional relationship between organs in their 'natural' state at each level. Cross-sectional anatomy only began to flourish in the nineteenth century with the introduction of viable fixation techniques, such as freezing or solidifying agents. It quickly became an important technique in anatomical illustration and remains 50 to this day. Although it was useful to ail anatomists, it appears that it was introduced and favoured by functional anatomists. Cuvier used it in his Gallery of Comparative Anatomy and there are frequent examples of its use in Bourgery's Traité Complet de l'Anatomie. N.H. Jacob's lithographs of sections through four different vertebrae (fig.47.) and
61
numerous sections through a spinal cord (fig.48) show the same placement of the crosssection adjacent to the complete structure as in Viollet-le-Duc's plans and sections (figs.4546). The importance of cross-sections in Bourgery's treatise was notOO by Étienne Delécluze in his 1834 review in the Journal de Débats: ...M.Bourgery a préparé des pièces anatomiques coupées transversalement, en sorte que M.Jacob en a donné des coupes dessinées qui, bien que représentant une chose réelle, portent toutefois dans l'esprit une conviction abstraite comme pourrait le faire un dessin géométral. Ce mode de représentation pour coupes transversales, est assez fréquement employé dans la Traité d'anatomie de M. Bourgery, et l'exécution savante et précise de ces pièces dessinées, contribue singulièrement à faire saisir avec facilité le rapport et la connection des parties entre elles et avec le tout.. !!' As Delécluze notOO, cross-sectional anatomy gave the most exact and accurate depiction of the form and relationship of the organs to each other. It avoidOO the separation of organs, and thus offered the c10sest thing to a synthetic view that dissection could offer. As Albert Eycleshymer has notOO, "the student is shown tbo: way from
di~section
to
construction, from the analytic to the synthetic" .159 Viollet-le-Duc frequently employOO the cross-section and plan at numerous levels in the Dictionnaire for the sarne pedagogical and epistemological reasons as the functional ·anatomist. They are usually implemented at particularly complicatOO 'joints' in the Gothie structure, such as the sections taken at pier capitals and springing of the vaults in the nave of Notre-Dame at Dijon (fig.46). The juxtaposition of cross-section and perspective view assurOO that the architectural draughtsman, as weil as the viewer, c1early knew the structural principles - the reasoning - intrinsic to the church' s pleasing visuai appearance. The didactic power of cross-sectional anatomy - notOO by Delécluze and
". Delécluze, "Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme... ", n.p. "9 Albert C. Eycleshymer and Danic M. Schoema1<er, A Cross-Sedion AnaIomy (New York: Meredilh CoipoilllÏlJII, 1970), xili imo. Eycleohymer's introduction remains the hest histories! sccount of cr088' section anatomy. Tbe cros.-section is one of the few areas of anatomiesl iIIuslntion which nomains relatively UDder...xplored.
62
Eycleshymer - was quickly recognized, and adopted by the various 'cours gratuits' and 'cours à temps réduit'. As was note<! previously, Viollet-le-Duc taught at one of these schools, the École Gratuites de Dessin, where he was responsible for a course in the composition of ornament. 160 One of the most common teaching methods at the École was to have the student draw after a "modèle à copier" print. These prints - often bound together and graded according to difficulty - consisted of clear and concise technical drawings with wrilten instructions below so the student could practice on his own. A late example of tbis type of print (fig.49) shows sections taken at three levels of a cast iron tie rod with the same
mise-en-page as Bourgery and Viollet-le-Duc's cross-sections and plans. Viollet-le-Duc would have seen numerous examples of these sheets, and perhaps utilized them in bis own course. Whether it was from anatomical drawing directly, or via instructional design manuals, there is no doubt that Viollet-le-Duc made excellent use of the multi-level cross-section and plan throughout the Dictionnaire to c\early convey his profound knowledge of the functional anatomy of the Gothic monument.
160 The must importaDt information concerning the École Gratuites de Dessin, where VioUet-le-Duc lIIJgIt for sÏJlleal y....., is fOlllld in the Archives Nationales Series AJ53. Referem:e to VioUet-le-Due's career al Ibo École Gratuites de Dessin is usua11y made in pessÏDg lIIId ils importance in bis architectural thinking bas ' - ' aadly ignored by must scholara.The boat accOUlll of the politicallllld social origins of the &:ole Gntuites de Dessin in Ibo eigbteeDlh ceutury romains ArtImr Birembaut's article °Les &:oles Gratuites de Dessin,° in t.coIrs tedmlques et milliaires aux XVIOe Sik\e (Paris: Hemwm, 1986). pp.441-476. UnfortuDately, Iboir nineteeDlh ceDlUly JDaJIÎfeSIaÛ0D8 are rolegated ta IWo small concluding )l8I'IIgrapbs. This oversigbt bas heen rectified recOlllIy in Yv... Deforse's article °D... écol... de dessin en faveur d... arts et métiersO Les Cahiers d'lIàloIre du CNAM 110.4 (Juillet. 1994), pp. 11·26.
63
Ideal Construction / Constructed Ideal; Viollet-Ie-Duc's Visual Language of Architectural Resloralion
To restore an edifice means neilher to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor 10 rebuild it; it means to reestablish it in a finished state, which may in facl never have actually existed al a given time. 161 Viollet-le-Duc's highly epigrammatic - and enigmatic - summation of his views on architectural restoration (quoted above) has engendered much discussion and controversy over the years. However, Iittle ink has been spilled concerning the relationship between his theories of restoration and their graphie representation in the Dictionnaire Raisonné. One significant exception is Françoise Boudon' s ground breaking article on le réel et
l'imaginaire in the illustrations for the Dictionnaire. 162 In this section 1 would Iike merely ta summarise and extrapolate on sorne of Boudon's insightful comments, and extended her discussion ta inc1ude the striking similarities between Viollet-Ie-Duc's graphie restorations and the highly theoretical and ideal visual language of anatomical atlases, comparative anatomy, palaeontology, and geology. The ultimate visual embodiment of Viollet-le-Duc 's epigrammatic statement is the bird's eye-view of the Cathédrale idéale in volume two of the Dictionnaire Raisonné (fig.50). In a strildng visual contrast to the paradigm of graphie dissection in the Dictionnaire, Viollet-le-Duc synthesises features from numerous Gothie cathedrals "to create", as Barry Bergdoll bas noted, "an idt:fl invented composite, a perfect Gothie cathedral as such as even the Middle Ages had failed to realize in a single building"163 The steps leading up to the model of the ideal cathedral involved a similar 161 The FoUDdalioDS of Architecture (Restoration), p.195. 162 Françoise Baudon, "Le réel et l'imaginaire chez VioUet-Ie-Duc: les ligures du Dictionnaire d. Z'archilmure" Revue de l'art 58/59 (1983), pp.95-114. 163 Barry BerpU, Uon Vaudoyer: Histomm in the Age of IndlL'ltry (ClIlIIbridge, M..s: The MIT Press and The Architectura1 History FOIIIIdation, 1994), p.251.
64
idealizing process on a smaller scale. Bach monument is graphically restored to its supposed original state according to the purity of ils ideal-type, worked out by Viollet-leDuc in terms of regional schools of architecture. Any indication of the corrosive action of time is eliminated. The worn stones, muti1ated sculptures, and decrepit roofs and walls are ail restored to their original integrity. 161 In a typical example, Viollet-le-Duc restored ail
the damaged and missing sculptural elements adorning the cemetery chapel of Avioth that Émile Boeswi11wald had purposefully elected not to restore in his drawing of the same monument (fig.5 la-5 lb). Not only do the monuments negate the ravages of time, either in the form of neglect or vanda1ism, but they also erase or cut out the 'constructive' interventions which have occurred since the original ideal type monument was constructed. To take the most ubiquitous example in the Dictionnaire, many of the Gothic churches and cathedrals are shorn of the numerous chapels and shrines !hat were often added to the chevet or nave (fig.52a-52b). The chapels and shrines inconveniently contradicted Viollet-le-Duc's democratic interpretation of Gothie architecture in which the commune citizens built the structures in order ta function as meeting halls as well as sites for religious ritual. According to Violletle-Duc, the chapels and shrines were only added in a latter 'undemocratic' and repressive period when the church or cathedral became a site for solely religious practice. 165 The reader/viewer of the Dictionnaire is often unaware of Viollet-le-Duc's manipulations because unlike the common practice in archaeological publications inc1uding his own contributions to the Archives de la Commission des Monuments
Historiques - he did notjuxtapose the actual and restored state ta facilitate .::omparison. l66
161
Boudon, "Le réel et l'imaginaire" , p.l02.
165 Van Zanten, BuildiDg Paris, p.259. 166 Bcudon.Ibid.,p.103. Viollol-Ie-Duc occasionally mentions his omissions in the text, often two or lbree pages removed irom the drawing. ln contrast with the text, however, "Les représentations graphiques",
as Fnmçoise Baudon bas noted, "elles, sont sans concession."
65
Viollet-Ie-Duc's method of archaeological representation separates him from the majority of contemporary archaeologists, like Didron or Lassus, who insisted that the edifice also had to be reproduced in its actual state. Thus in many ways the Dictionnaire Raisonné is profoundly a-historical. As Françoise Boudon has perceptively noted, "Toute concession à une représentation diachronique affaiblirait la démonstration. ,,167 Viollet-Ie-Duc's highly theoretical and manipulative construction of history in the Dictionnaire is more suggestive of the laboratory practices of science rather than the more moderate field "'ork of his contemporaries or his own restoration work. 168 Like Cuvier's zoological practices at the Muséum d'Histoire naturelle, Viollet-IeDuc takes the architectural specimen out of its historical flux, extrapolates a paradigmatic example from information not directly observable in nature, analyses it, classifies it, and situates it within his theoretical discourse. And in a similar fashion to Cuvier' s museological displays, the dialogue is more revealing about the relationship between Viollet-le-Duc' s theories and the architectura! monument rather than between the architectura! monument and the vagaries of 'real' historical time. l69 The influence of Cuvier's practice of comparative anatomy on Viollet-Ie-Duc's theories of restoration have been noted by severa! architectural historians. These accounts, however, often overlook or underplay, the visual aspects of this influence on Viollet-leDuc's graphic restorations. But, in order to properly situate and make sense of Viollet-IeDuc's graphic strategies involving the ideal-type, restoration to an original state, and the
167
!!oudon, "Le réel el l'imaginaire", p.103.
168 It _ be slressec! tbat the images in the Dictionnaire are the most exlreme example of his theoryladen arcbaeologicsI restorations. A1though these apprOBches sIso coloured his actual resloralions for the
Mon!l'JMl:lXs Historiques, he was more moderate in practice and, surprisingly, in bis Restoration st'Ction of the Dictionnaire. 169 Edward Said, <>rieIIIaINn (New Yorlc: Vintage Books, 1979), p.142. My interprelation of Violletle-Duc's higbly controlled and manipulated manner of performing hîslory is mucb influenced by Said'. discussion of the relationship between Cuvier's 'construction' of comparative 8D8tomy and Renan'. arlificial formulation and presentation of the hîstory of somitic languages.
66
negation of temporal intrusions, one not only has to investigate the contemporary visllal practices of Cuvier' s comparative anatomy and palaeontology, but also those of geology and anatomical aliases. Earlier in this chapter, it was noted that Bourgery's Traité is often seen as a paradigm of positivistic anatomy. Although true in many respects, this account is incomplete. Il overlooks the underlying question of what 'nature' these facts are based on, or in other words, the extreme anatomization in the Traité tends to mask the interpretive matrix in which the dissective strategies are enmeshed. In an important article on objectivity in anatomical atlases, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have noted that: The purpose of these aliases was and is to standardize the observing subjects and observed objects of the discipline by eliminating idiosyncrasies-not only those of individual observers but also those of individual phenomena....The alias aims to make nature safe for science; to replace raw experience - the accidental, contingent experience of specifie individual objects-with digested experience. 170 As Daston and Galison explain, standardization in anatomical atlases is achieved through the ideal type. In his introduction to the Traité, Bourgery explains that in order to facilitate comparison between ail anatomical elements "nous avons dû nous créer un type idéal de la forme la plus belle et du parfait développement de l'espèce, type d'apres lequel toutes les figures seraient également représentées".171 The ideal body, of course, is a Caucasian male: "..doué des plus heureuses proportions. ,,112 However, in order to apply the comparative method to the entire life cycle, Bourgery a1so provides an ideal type infant and elderly person. In Bourgery's own words, "...c'est toujours le même individu idéal que nous decrivons tel qu'il a dû être, et tel qu'il serait par les progrès de l'âge... 173
170 Lorraine Daslon and Peler Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," Representations no.4O (FaIJ, 1992), pp.84-8S.
171
Bourgery, Traité, vo!.I, p.3.
112 Ibid., vo!.!, p.3. 173 Ibid., vo!.l, p.3.
67
As was noted in the first chapter, Viollet-le-Duc's proposes a similar biological analogy for his entire undertaking in the preface to the Dictionnaire Raisonné: "... the moment has come to study medieval art as one studies the development and the li fe of an animate being who proceeds from childhood to old age via a series of almost imperceptible transformations, such that it is impossible to pinpoint the day when childhood ended and old age began. ,,174 However, Viollet-le-Duc replaces Bourgery's three ideal types with his own ideal types for each regional school of Gothie architecture, further refining the "ideaiist morphological classifications" forwarded by French archeologists in the 1830's and 1840'S.175 The comparative method initiated by Cuvier, and adopted by Viollet-le-Duc and Bourgery among others, was a law-like procedure for eliciting the secrets held by empirical data. 176 The ultimate goal was to subsume the constant flux and variation of phenomenal datum, such as flawed individual human bodies or imperfect specimens of Burgundian Gothie architecture 177 , to law-like statements. Thus, the interpretive act involved in differentiating the ideai type - the perfect male body or the perfect example of a Burgundian Gothie cathedral - from the accidentai or variable was never seen as a submission to subjectivity, but rather as a bulwark against il. m Like Cuvier or Bourgery, Viollet-le-Duc's exhaustive anatomical exploration of each minute element of the Gothie monument is only possible through the matrix of ideal typologies. Therefore, there is no real dichotomy between the dissective and idealizing
174 BergdoU, "Introduction" to The FOIUldalions of Artbitectnre
p.IS.
175 BergdoU, Uon Vaudoyer, p.20S. 176 William Coleman, Geol'lles Cuvier Zoologist: A Study in tbe 1Œt0ry of Evolution Tbeory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p.63.
177 The Foundations of ArcbItecture (Arcbitecture), p.79. VioUet-le-Duc classitied lbe bigb gotbic cburcbes iŒo the foUowing regional scbools: n~e·France, Champagne, Picardy, Burguody, Anjou and Maine, and Normandy. 178
lbid.,p.88. 68
models in the Dictionnaire - one cannot operate without the other. ln Viollet-le-Duc's closcl system, the 'construction' of regional ideal types allows him to explore the minutiae of each structural element with law-like confidence, and the dissection of each element in the Gothie structure provides the knowledge for the construction of those ideal-types. However, despite Viollet-le-Duc's insistence that analysis cornes before synthesis, he would have agreed that although universals could only be known by the particular in all its delails, the particular could never capture the ideal. 179 The same idealizing tendencies are also evident in the visual strategies of two disciplines which quickly became paradigms for the practice of scientific history: palaeontology and geology. The most cornmon geological represenlations, transverse and columnar sections cf igneous strala, not only involved deductions from visible surface outcrops, but also "extrapolations from theory-based expeclations". lSD In an 'ideal section' from William Buckland's trealise on geology and mineralogy (1836) (fig. 53), the relative thickness of the successive strala formations are determined by, and demonstrate, his theories about the earth's time scale. Furthermore, Buckland deliberately omits the igneous intrusions, volcanic rocks, and minor faults that detract from his theory-Iaden image. Likewise, in a highly abstract represenlation of a comparison between two columnar sections of seccndary strala in England (1830) (fig.54), Henry de la Beche eliminates the structural effects of tectonic forces over lime (folding and faulting) and visually restores the strala to their 'original' horizontal position. George Cuvier also engaged in geological exploration around Paris with Alexandre Brongniart. Their engraved section of tertiary strala from Montmorency to Paris (fig.55) demonstrates the same degree of visual abstraction, elimination of temporal intrusions, and extrapolations predicated on 'theorybased expeclations' .
179
Ibid., p.91.
lSD Martin Rudwick, "Tbe Emergence of a Visua1 Languag~ for Geological Science: 1760-1840" History of Scieace vol. 14 (1976), p.I64. My inIerpretation of geologica1 represeolalion is 10 a grest exleol derived from Ibis article lIDl! Rudwick's book, The MeaDiDg of Fossils: Episodes in the lĂźitory of Pa!Ĺ&#x201C;oatology (Macdooa1d: London, 1972)
69
The ideal reconstruction to a supposed pristine original state is also a fundamental aspect of Cuvier's palaeotological work. As was noted in chapter one, Cuvier claimed he could reconstruct an entire animal from a fragment of a single bone. Like a modern day Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, he brought fossils of incomplete bone fragments to life fully restored to their original state (fig.56). And as Martin Rudwick has noted' "Each fossi! animal that Cuvier reconstructed was a monument to his principal of the coordination of parts". 181 The simi!arities between the representational strategies of the sciences outlined above and Viollet-le-Duc' s theory-laden graphie restorations in the Dictionnaire are striking. 182 In his plan of Notre-Dame Cathedral at Noyon (fig.52a) he eliminates ail 'extraneous' chapels like a geologist omitting lectonic movements over time and graphically restoring the strata to their 'original' state, or Iike a Cuvierian palaeotologist authoritatively legislating the functional from the non-functional in his reconstructions from theory-based predictions. Viollet-le-Duc transforms the heterogeneous shape of the cathedral - the result of multiple additions to the building undertaken during numerous building campaigns (fig.52b) - into a perfectly defined formai abstraction reminiscent of an ideal geological cross-section (fig.54) In the graphie restoration of the choir and tTa.'1sept of Saint-RĂŠmi at Reims (fig.57a), Viollet-le-Duc indicates - in a proper archaeological manner - the original state
in thick black ink, the reconstructed parts in grey, and the recent reconstructions in white surrounded by a thin black Iimo.!83 However, Iike Cuvier's reconstruction of an Anopletherum Gracile (fig.58) - using similar graphie markers to indicate original and
181 Rudwick,
The Meaniog oF Fossils, p.113.
182 Viollet-1&-Ouc', familiarity with Bourgety', 1'raik! aod Cuvier', conception of compuative lIJIIIomy and palaeontology have already been noted. Viollet-le-Duc was probably just as familiar wilh geologicsl repre,entations considering bis life-Iong interest in the ,ubject, culminaling in his explorations of Mont Blanc
in Switzer\aDd (1868-1879). Furthermore, plenty of exomples of highly idealized geological sections are found in Cuvier', numerous publications, sncb as the Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles. 183
Boudoo "Le r ĂŠel et l" unagmarre, . . " p. 104 . 1
70
restored areas - he brooks no interference with his theories, as no reproducticn of its posterior state is provided for comparison. Viollet-Ie-Duc's 'archaeological invention' at
Saint-Rémi turned out to be erroneous due, in part, to his mistaken plllcement of existing structures (fig.57b).IS4 Viollet-Ie-Duc's graphic restorations - like their geological and palaeotological counterparts - transgress the distinction between scientific fact and a priori theory, historical time and the present, objectivity and creative imagination. Dissective analysis and synthesis are reconciled in each regional type: a preliminary stage to the ultimate synthesis in the Cathédrale idéale. His graphic reconstructions require the viewer to step wholeheartedly into his hermeneutical circ\e. For as Thomas Kuhn has argued-, "whatever
its force, the status of the circular argument is only that of persuasion. It cannot be made logically or even probabilistically compelling for those who refuse to step into the circ\e. ,,18S
184 lbid..p.!04. Boudon points out the great differences between Viollet-Ie-Duc's reconstruction and tbat of Leblanc's ei~ Y""'" Iater, based on subslmctures he found in excavation. Baudon specifically uses the title Inv~ruion archtologiqu~ for ber reproduction ofViollet-!e·Duc's plan of Sainl-Rémi.
18S Thomas Kuhn.
The Structure of ScieDlif'Ie RevolutioDS (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1962), p.93. 71
Cilapter Four The Present Past:Anatomizing Memory, Reconstrueting Gothie Architecture Memm:y. Creative Imagination. and the Dialectic of Style
The implementation of dissective strategies of representation in the Dictionnaire Raisonné was part of Viollet-Ie-Duc's ultimate aim to change the public's way of thinking and seeing architecture. Viollet-le-Duc c1early recognized that this transition could only be achieved by breaking the Beaux-Art's domination of the collective architectural memory.186 The stakes were immense. The Beaux-Arts system generated an entire architectural culture encompassing pedagogical techniques, methodology, career paths. political power, prestige, and, above ail, an incessant perpetuation of its own dominant memory through the major state commissioned monuments that its students laboured on for years and which transmitted their legacy to posterity. 187 The role of anatomy in Viollet-Ie-Duc's efforts to break the Beaux-Art domination and posit an alternative memory in its place is multi-faceted and thus not easy to pin down. Therefore it is fust necessary to understand how Viollet-le-Duc conceived memory as part of bis scientific endeavour to reformulate the premises of architectural knowledge before allempting to explicate the role of anatomy in this relationship. Frances Yates h:ls identified a significant transformation in the art of memory in the seventeenth century; a paradigm shift from a method of memorising the encyclopedi2 of knowledge to an aid for investigating the encyclopedia and the world with the object of
186 Thus the DictiolUl8ire Raïsonué can he seen as a sile of counler-memory; whal Foucault defuwd as resistance or alternative to official versions of historiea1 continuity. However t this must be qualified because the aItemalive version ofbistory that Viollet-le-Duc was altempling 10 implemenl was already dominant in many seclors outside of the École des Beaux-Arts. Thus viewed from another angle, he was urging the &ole des Beaux-Arts 10 enter into the mainslream of oineteeoth-century posilivisl cullUre. 187 Bergdoll. Vaudoyer: 1I&oric:5111 in the Age of Industry. p.3. Barry Bergdoll provides a succincl projecled academic career path which probably would have al"~lied ':0 Viollel-Ie-Duc if he had enIered the &ole des Beaux-Arts.
ac<:<JlD ofVaudoyer'r
72
discovering new knowledge. )88 With Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and Leibniz the traditional basis of the art of memory was tl'll.:ï,rorme.d into a "factor in the growth of the scientific method"189 This scientific interpretation of memory had a profound influence on many philosophers, political theorists, and movements: Vico, the encyclopedists, ideologues, Saint-Simoneans, and Positivists to name a few. Viollet-le-Duc explicitly places himself within this intellectual tradition in his most complete and lengthy explication of memory in the sixth Entretien and implicitly throughout the Dictionnaire Raisonné. In its most basic form Viollet-le-Duc seems to have relied on the interpretation of memory outlined by Diderot and DO Alembert in the EncyIopédie. Included in the Discourse preliminare to the fust volume of the Encyclopédie - and the Prospectus which proceeded it - was a genealogical tree of knowledge; the famous
Systèmefiguré des connaissances humaines. It was adopted from Francis Baconos tree of knowledge worked out a century earlier. Like Bacon°s tree, the Systéme figure was divided inlo three faculties which gave rise to three major divisions of knowledge and their tributaries: Memory which produced history, Reason which resulted in philosophy and science, and imagination from which came poetry and the fine arts. Each of these faculties - Memory, Reason, and Imagination - differ from each other according to how they process the Lockean perceptions or sensations which they respcctively receive, reflect upon, or put together. 19O In the Discours Preliminaire, DO Alembert provides a detailed gloss on the three faculties and their interaction and order of operation within the mind. 191 Viollet-le-Duc folIows D'Alembert°s commentary quite 188 FJ'IIJ)<;es A. 189
Yates, The Art Memory (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), Pr. 368-369.
Ibid., p.369.
190 Richard Scbwab, "introduction," to PreUminary Disœurse 10 the Eneyclopedia of Diderol by Jeu Le Rond D'AJemert inlro.Juction and translation by Richard Scbwab ( New York: The Bobbs·Merri11 Company, lnc., 1963), p.xxxvi.
191 Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, PreUminary Discourse 10 the Encyclopedia of Diderot, pp.50-53 and 143-155 in particular. 73
c10sely in his sixth Entretien, and applies it to architectural creation, or more precisely, to the development of style. 192 For both D'alembert and Viollet-le-Duc memory is the first faculty to be exercised since it only involves recalling sensations or ideas passively received by the mind. Viollelle-Duc and D'Alemb;;ri often use the term passive imagination for this process instead of memory. Although passive imagination alone cannot create, it is the fundamental basis of creative imagination. Thus Viollet-le-Duc insists - throughout his writings - Ihal in architecture there is no invention, "...we must have recourse to the pasl in order 10 originate in the present" 193 Active imagination is the next faculty to come into play. According to Viollel-leDuc, it "is nothing more than the application of reasoning to the passive imagination. ,,194 Active imagination, compares, chooses, and orders what the passive imagination (memory) presents in a confused mass. Active imagination is essentially the scientific memory thal was initiated by Descartes, and above ail, Francis Bacon. As part of bis reform of the arts and sciences, Bacon wanted to apply memory to useful purposes. What exactly Bacon had in mind remains unclear, however, one of it uses was to hold information in the mind for further investigation. Memory would aid in scientific enquiry by drawing particulars out of the mass of natural history and classifying them 50 !hat judgment could be more easily brought to bear upon them. 19S Viollet-le-Duc offers a similar interpretation of active imagination: "In order to originate judgment must arrange the elements gathered by the passive imagination. ,,196 Thus active imagination was the analytic step leading to synthesis or creative imagination.
192
Viollet-le-Duc, Lectures on Architecture vol. 1, pp.I72-l77
193
Ibid., p.173.
194
Ibid., p.174.
195
Yates, The Art of Memory, p.372.
196
Viollet-le-Duc, Lectures on An:bitecture vol.l, p.174. 74
ln this schema, memory (passive imagination) not only gives rise to history, but in al1iance with the faculty of reason it becomes scientific (active imagination). Not surprisingly, memory is not only one of the three main faculties heading the Système
figure, but is also listed as one of the tributaries under the heading of Reason in both Bacon' s tree of knowledge and the Encyclopédie' s Système figure. The passive and active imagination - memory (history) and reason (scientific analysis) - comprise the thesis and anti-thesis of Viollet-le-Duc's dialectic of style. The synthesis of the dialectic is creative imagination. After reason has critically intervened on memory - analysing, and classifying the recalled information - the imagination composes thereby passing from analysis - the ai;s~r.tion initiated by the active imagination - to synthesis. Viollet-le-Duc sums up the entire dialectical process in his description of an architect designing a hall: ..his memory presents in a confused mass all that it has been able to retain: at this point reason intervenes, compares, chooses here and there, rejects this or that; and then the imagination begins to compose, and presents the hall complete in the architeet's rnind. Perhaps it does not resemble any that his memory has presented to him, yet it could not have been conceived without the aid of memory. 197 According to Viollet-le-Duc's dynamic view of historical evolution, each stage of the dialectic had undergone profound changes of emphasis throughout history. Drawing on Viconian, Saint-Simonean, and Positivistic accounts of the three phases of man's intellectual evolution, he reveals the historical basis, and thus present urgency, for his program of artistic renewal. 198
197
Ibid.. pp. 173-174
198 Viollet-le-Duc could bave imbibOO tbese ideas from any II1IIIIber of intellectuals whom Ire knew persoœUy. was influeoced by in bis readings, or bad contact with in bis intellectual milieu. Viollet-le-Duc most Iilœly lIlIeoIed the dissideU SaiIt-Simooian P.J.B. Buclrez's salons in wbich he espoused bis views on the three stages ofbistory. Vico's interprtllations ofbistory were availahle in translation by Miclrelet, and the positivist disciples Ernœt Renan and &niIe LilIré espoused similar ,,'co"ots of the three stages of bistory wbich Viollet-leDuc "odonbtedly.-l. For Buchez, Michelet, and Vico seo Robin Middleton's, "The RationaIistlnlerpretations of Claasicism of Leonee Reynaud and Viollet-le-Duc" AA Files no.11 (Spring, 1986), pp.32, 42, and 46. For Renan and Littré seo D.G. Charlton's , Positivm Tbougbt iD F!'lUIœ During the So:.oond Empire 1l1S2-1870
.,,~
In primitive epochs,
01
what Renan called the syncretic stage, the passive
imagination was highly poetic and creative while the active imagination was weak and "little developed" .199 Thus creativity among 'primitive' men was in essence 'natural'. The contradictions between the idea\ and rea\ were played out in full view, and henceforth, did not require artificial invention to bring them to light. The spontaneity of primitive man endowed his passive imagination with poetic vigour that gave rise to religions, languages, and architecture that - as one modem commentator on Renan noted - "grew as plants grow, without conscious thought, products of 'celle force crĂŠatrice de la raison spontanĂŠe" .1011 The situation in 'civilized' society, according to Viollet-le-Duc, is exactly the opposite. Among highly 'civilized' men memory (passive imagination) is "clear and exact,- a sort of dry catalogue" whereas the active imagination may be "highly developed, and very poetical. "lOI In the anaIyticaI stage, the human mind becomes conscious of itself; an age of abstraction and organization. Although analysis in itself had no power to create, it was the essential element in the quest for style. With the passing of the spontaneous poetic age, artificial intervention - analyses - became a necessity. In Viollet-le-duc's own words: The more civilised and regular society becomes, the more the artist is compelled to anaIyze and dissect passions, manners, and tastes, - to revert to first principles to lay hold of and display them in naked simplicity before the world,- if he would leave a deep impression upon this extemally uniform and colourless society. Hence it is more difficultto be an artist in times like our own, than among rude, unrefined, people, who openly display their good or evil passions. In primitive epochs, style imposed itself on the arlist; now, the arlist has to acquire style. 202
(Oxfir.J: C1areodon Press, 1959) chapters four and six. Also see Martin Bressani, "Nole. on Viollel-Ie-Duc'. Phi1osophy ofHislory: Dialectics and Teclmology" Journal of the Society of Architectural HMoriaos XLVlIl 4 (December, 1989), p.339. Bressani provides a short bul informalive synopsis of Ibe "mylh of lhe Ihr.. aF,e." in oineteenth-eentury 'speculative histories'. 199 Viollet-le-Duc, Lectures On Architecture, vol. l , p.174.
202
200
Charllon, Positivist Tbougllt ln Fnmce, p.I03.
20\
Viollet.le.Duc, Lectures On Architecture vol. l , p.174.
Viollel-le-Duc, Lectures On Architecture (voU), p.l77. 76
Synthesis would fuse the poetic nature of primitive memory with the insights of analysis to allain "une unité supérieure". 200 Contemporary architectural practice, however, had not even reached the preparatory analytical stage: the criticai step before any unité supérieure ushered in with the future synthetic stage. In Viollet-Ie-Duc's eyes, most of contemporary architecture was an anomaiy operating on a type of reverse diaiectics: retrogressive and tradition bound, rather than progressive and dynamic. Architectural practice was dominated by passive memory' which only recalled 'chefs-d'oeuvre' to the mind "but", as Viollet-le-Duc emphasises, ".. we can not create with chefs-d'oeuvre, we can only admire and copy them... 2111 The École des Beaux-Art system was the prime architectural example of a passive imagination run wild, slavishly copying historicai styles without the intervention of active imagination (reason). In the section on 'Style' in the Dictionnaire, Viollet-le-Duc equates Jack of style
(read École des Beaux-Arts practices) with architectural forms produced from a memory crammed with unanaiyzed stylistic motifs. 205 The École des Beaux-Arts system suffered from too much memory: a collective case of Hypermnesia in which an overactive passive memory smothered ail reasoning faculties. The result was a past ruling over the present. Viollet-le-Duc, like the nineteenth-eentury medica\ profession, was convinced that a proper amount of criticai 'forgetting' was an essentiai factor in a hea\thy discourse between the past and present. 206
Anatomy. Analytical Memory. and its Graphic Representation
203 Charlton, Positivist Thougbt
In France, p.1OZ. This quote is taken from Ernest Rell8D.
2111 Viollet-le-Duc, Lectures on ArclIitecture, p.175. 205
206
The Foundalions of Architecture (Style), p.254. Michael S. Roth, "Remembering Forgetting: Maladies de la Mémoire in Nineteenth-Century
France" Represenlalions 00.26 (Spring, 1989), pp.57-60. This article is an excellent account of the medical preoccupation wilh memOlY in the nineteenth-eeDlury.
77
Anatomy was the perfecttrope for the active imagination (scientific memory) that analyzed and dissected the "dry catalogue" of chefs d'oeuvres recalled by the passive imagination (memory). Il activated the critieal selectivity that was essential to a healthy relationship between the past and present. Viollet-Ie-Duc's analytical-dissective memory was the exact opposite of the hypertrophie passive imagination that Viollet-le-Duc associated with academic architecture's "complete surrender to the forces of tradition. ,,201 The historica1 forrns of architecture were of interest precisely because they could yield to man's rational domination: their structurallaws could be dissected, analyzed, and distilled for creative use in the present. However, the relationship between anatomy and scientific memory was not just a metaphor. Viollet-le-Duc recognized - like many other practitioners in the medical and technieal fields - that the techniques of anatomical dissection were the most effective methods of inculcating active imagination: a necessary tool for those who wished to thrive in the positivist age of science. Thus most of the disciplinary examples that adopted the anatomical-physiological model - many of which were mentioned in the first chapter make the connection to analytical memory. For example, Dorinda Outram has provocatively c1aimed that Cuvier' s entire system was probably constructed to aid in c1arity and recall. It appears that systems, in the physiologica1 sense, traced through the zoologica1 orders was easier to grasp by an amateur audience rather than the confusing array of facts encountered by an examination of different species in succession. 208 The connection between anatomy and scientific memory was particularly strong in the machine industry. J.A. Borgnis indieates in his preface to the Traité Complet de Mécanique Appliquée aux Arts that his dissective representation of machines was undertaken 50 !hat the artist could understand them with ease and save the distinct images,
2rrT Bressani, NoIes on Viollel-Ie-Duc's Philosophy of Hislory.. ·, p.340. 208
Outram, Georges Cuvier, pp.181-182. 78
"precises et durables", in his memory. 209 Charles Dupin - who insisted on the importance of comparative anatomy for the machine industry - also emphasised that one of his goals was to develop the precious faculties of intelligence, memory, comparison, judgment, and imagination in the industrial classes. 21O As was noted earlier, the machine industry adopted the paradigm of anatomy for its ideal amalgamation of reasoned haptic and optic investigation. However, there may be an even doser connection between anatomico-physiological haptic and optic investigation and the experimental method being developed by the physiologist Claude Bernard in the mid 1850'S.2I1 His concept of control1.ed experiment was a method for accurately determining the functions of animais. J. Schiller has outiined the basic components and sequence of the experimental method - and its relationship between the experimenter and phenomenon under study - as fol1ows: (1) Observation of phenomenon (eyes see); (2) Hypothesis (brain reasons); (3) Experimental verification - vivisection, physical and chemical procedures (hand acts).212 Significantly, it is this sequence of the experimental method that Lecoq-deBoisbaudran uses to define his technique of drawing after memory that relied heavily on dissective ana\ysis and anatomy: "dessiner, l'oeil regarde l'object, la mémoire en conserve l'image, et la main reproduit".213 Furthermore, Lecoq-de-Boisbaudran consistently emphasised !hat "ma méthode loin de rendre l'absorption de intelligence par la mémoire,
209
Borgnis, Traité Complet de Mécanique Appliquée aux Arts, preface,
V ••
210 Dupin, Géométrie et MédlaDique des Arts et Métiers, V.I, p.594. 211 Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist: Setected Writings from Georges ClIIIllUilllem 00. François Delaporte, p.263....Claude Bernard aIIudOO 10 the dislinclive cbarscler of physiological experimentatioo in public for the liraI lime on December 30, 1854, in the thinllecture of a course 00 experimeolal physiology appliOO 10 medicine, which he delivered al the CoUège de France in bis lasl appearance there as Mageodie's substitute. "
J. SchiUer, 'Physiol<':;)1 's Slmggle for Indepeodeoce in the liraI half of the Nioeteeoth Ceotury' Bistory of ScleDee vol.7 (1968), p.85. 212
213
Horsce Lecoq-de-Boisbaudran, Education d<! la Mémoire Pittoresque (Paris, 1851), p.5. 79
se propose au contraire le perfectionnement simultanée de toutes deux... 214 Viollet-le-Duc must have been familiar with the details of his friend's drawing methodology as he had been teaching with him since the early 1840's at the École Gratuites de Dessin and actively promoted his drawing techniques as an alternative to academic design methodology. Viollet-le-Duc provided a similar definition of drawing that emphasised anatomical dissection and the experimental method in his Réponse à M. Vitet à propos de l'enseignement des arts du dessin; one of his most important critiques oi'
the academic system: Si l'on passe à la pratique, it n'y a de même qu'une methode: c'est de developper le sens observateur de l'élève, d'ouvrir son intel1igence au spectacle toujours nouveau de la nature, d'analyse les apparences qu'elle présente, de décomposer les ensembles qu' elle fournit, d'en faire étudier les détails séparément, mais en insistant sur leur place et sur leur valeur relatives. Faire que, par l'excercise, le dessin devienne un moyen de traduction de la pensée ou de l'impression, comme la parole ou la plume le deviennent pour l'orateur et l'homme de lettres. 21S Because academic art and architecture was still dominated by passive memory, active imagination had to be inculcated in the viewer. Viol\et-Ie-Duc recognized that the most effective way to change the collective memory and 'rewrite' architectural histor'l was through the power of representation. The appropriation of knowledge through the senses a common assumption in scientific methodology by the nineteenth century - effectively indicated that one could control and manipulate the flow of knowledge through a proper presentation of objects. Viollet-Ie-Duc's 'persuasively' inscribed analytical memory into the Dictionnaire through anatomy's critical properties of selection and emphasis. And as we have seen
214 Horace Lecoq-de-BoiBbaudran, Éducatioo de la Mémoire Pittoresque (Paris: Bance, LibraireÉdiIeur, 1862), pA. Lecoq-de-Boisbaudran was obviously trying 10 distance his work from any accusations of a reliance 00 rote memory (passive imaginalion). His adoption of the experimeotal method makes il clear why 80
maoy scieolists and induslria1ists supported his work.
215 Eugène VioUet-le-Duc, "Réponse à M. Vile\ a propos de l'Enseignement des arts du dessin," (origioally poblisbed in 1864) in DéItaIs et Polemiques a propos de l'Enseignement des Arts du Dessin: LoU; Vitet et Eugl!ne Viollet-le-Duc (Paris: ENSBA, 1984), p.47.
80
anatomical representation was linked with the scientific method: mirroring, in fact, the role of active imagination in the dialectics of style. Thus the exploded views, cross-sections, hybrid views, and images of architectural restoration were the most powerful means of guiding the viewer on the path towards analytical memory: the preliminary step to creative imagination and the production of style. The very techniques that made anatomical representation such a powerful tool for analysis - its clarity of exposition, division of information into discrete parts, orderly connection, vo!umetric qualities, and ,risual expression in an active image (image agente)were also the qualities of an effective mnemonic image: easily followed and absorbed by the viewer. This insured that the viewer inscribed Viollet-!e-Duc's vision of architecture into his thinking in the same reasoning manner il was original!y presented, ready for immediate recall in any situation that cal1ed for architectural seeing, analysis, and creation.
81
Conclusion Viollet-le-Duc's dissective memory was not about reclamation or retrieval but an act of reconfiguration; a critical analysis that distilled and transformed the laws and material structures of the past ioto new entities relevant to the present. Dissective analysis was not only a method but a1.0 a system. Although Viollet-le-Duc wanted to stress the methodology of dissective analysis as the surest way to an architecture of the future, his incessant probing of Gothie architecture also created an analytical model and system: a completely scientific and rational structure. And if memory (essentially imagistic) was the basis of his dialectic of style, it meant that future generations would depart from his rational model for further investigation and analysis. The success of Viollet-le-Duc's anatornical techniques of representation are obvious: his critical reconfiguration of Gothie architecture and his methodology of dissective analysis have become part of our collective architectural memory, coloring our approaches and interpretations of the past and present to this very day.
82
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Viollet-le-Duc, Perspecival sectional c~t-away of a tower, from v.9 of the
Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1868.
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Viollet-le-Duc, Interior perspective of Notre-Dame at Dijon, with adjacent cross-sections, from vA of the Dictionnaire Raisonné, 1859.
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N.H. Jacob, Cross-sections of vertabrae taken at different levels on the spine, from vol.3, p1.9, of J.B.M. Bourgery,
Traité complet de J'anatomie de IJhomme, 1844.
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fig. 1. Cette planche, extraite d'une collection (Becourt (L.) et Pillet (J.), 1893)1161 de 56 cahiers de 20 séries graduées est un exemple tardif mais significatif de ces collections de modèles à copier qui se répandirent dans les « Cours gratuits », les « Cours normaux » ou les « Cours à temps réduit» pendant toute la période considérée et même au-delà (Cf. note suivante). L'exercice consistait pour l'élève à recopier les pièces mécaniques proposées, parfois en changeant l'échelle, parfois en calquant. Le « discours explicatif » était une sorte de technologie de construction succincte, non dénuée d'intérêt (Cf. le texte sous cene planche), grâce à quoi, l'élève pouvait travailler seul.
Figure 49.
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géométrique, 1893.
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Figure 51b.
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Figure 55.
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Figure 57a.
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1
Bibliography Engineering and Tcchnical Drnwing
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