Architecture and Language: Constructing Identity in European Architecture, c. 1000-c.

1650
Burroughs, Charles
Renaissance Quarterly; Winter 2001; 54, 4; ProQuest
pg. 1642

1642 RE N A ISSA N C E Q U A R TER LY

London self-portrait of 1669 should be included to provide the balance of a more

representative, more muted, example.
I want to register two minor reservations, admittedly tangential to Bergers
main argument. The section heading 4<The Embarrassment of Poses" signals the use
of Simon Schamas 1987 study. Apart from the undeveloped reference to Heinrich
“racism” (448) t Berger avoids the role of African attendants in Dutch por­
traiture and is thus subject to the criticism Susan Buck-Morss makes against
Schama in uHegel and Haiti" in Critical Inquiry (Summer 2000). Also, Berger
underestimates the possibilities for irony in Van Dycks portraits, though his case
for Rembrandt s complexity does not require that Van Dyck be seen as a straw-man
foil.
In conclusion, I would like to point to the connection between the present
book and ^Second-World Prosthetics,HBergers contribution to Early Modern
Visual Culture (2000); the latters coda on Kenneth Clarks nude-naked distinction
makes the overlap clear. However, I want to call attention to the opening para­
graphs in which Berger describes his rejection of the second-world concept on
which his career had hitherto been based. Only in this ancillary essay is the depth of
Berger’s opposition to the Italian classical norm of “nudity” fully expressed; the
essay thus provides more substantial indication of the driving force behind the need
for the positive alternative offered by Rembrandts construction of'nakedness/1
Pe t e r E r ic k s o n
Clark Art Institute

Georgia Clarke and Paul Crossley, eds., Architecture and Language: Con­
structing Identity in European Architecture, c. 1000-c. 1650.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiii + 65 pis. + 237pp. $75.
ISBN：0-521-65078-X.
The title promises a theoretical orientation, but the editors of this useful vol­
ume of essays make clear that the emphasis is on the exploration of multifarious
ways in which architecture and language come into contact in specific historical
contexts. In their introduction the editors note the deep division, among cultural
analysts, between proponents of the idea that language is a model for symbolic sys­
tems in general, including architecture, and those who emphasize the <(generic
difFercnces.,) This volume has it both ways, dealing with architecture and language
as much as “architecture as language.”
The issue of identity flagged in the volume s title comes especially to the fore in
the essays on medieval architecture. Three are concerned with the expression or
construction of (proto-) national identity in architecture. Peter Draper contextual­
izes the emergence in England of a distinct version of Gothic in relation to the
complex adoption of vernacular language (both English and the local version of
French) for official and literary purposes. Caroline Bruzelius assigns a stronger
degree of intentionality to the Italian resistance to Gothic as a fully realized archi­
tectural system; the latter, she argues, had become associated wich the Angevin

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 REVIEWS 1643

espousal of French Gothic in the Kingdom of Naples, i.e., with a foreign, coloniz­
ing power whose projection of power in Italy had earned the resentment of the
peoples of the peninsula.
Objections readily come to mind. First, as Bruzelius herself notes, the Angev-
ins themselves soon abandoned French Gothic, while the major surviving French
Gothic structure of Angevin Naples, the choir of the Franciscan church, reflects
Franciscan rather than Angevin preferences. More seriously, the buildings cited as
prime examples of a hated foreign style are located either in remote places (by defi­
nition, as Cistercian monasteries), or in the environs of the area set aside by the
Angevins for market functions, noxious industrial activities, and executions.
Finally, it s not clear why Italians should find Gothic structure objectionable, but
not Gothic signs (i.e., traceried windows and other ornamental elements). What is
lacking here, and elsewhere in the volume, is recognition of the importance of the
receiver, or audience, in linguistic or other forms of communication.
Both Achim Timmermann and Lindy Grant discuss ekphrasis as a significant
point of contact between language and architecture. In his discussion of a famous
literary description of the temple of the Holy Grail, Timmermanns concern is
partly historiographic, reminding us that the scholarly perception of national iden­
tity in art has rarely been unaffected by the nationalism of a scholars own milieu. In
other words, the study of art and its reception — including scholarly reception —
can hardly be separated, especially when nationalist ideology is at stake. Further, in
his disassociation of the Grail Temple from large-scale Gothic constructions, like
Cologne cathedral (he posits instead a connection with filigree miniature architec­
ture, as in reliquaries), Tim m erm ann im plicitly opposes any totalizing
interpretation of a culture, as in the recourse to such familiar notions as w〇rganiza-
tion of consciousness” or “mentality•”
Many such analytical models draw on a crucial distinction in semiotic/linguis-
tic theory between langue and parole, between language as a synchronic system, and
language as diachronic utterance, devolving in time. When the editors refer to the
diachronic aspect of spoken language, it is in relation to the aesthetic theories of
Suzanne Langer, not the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers. But
the Saussurean emphasis on parole as utterance encourages us to think of language
not just as a medium of conscious communication, but as communicative event;
e.g., Frenchness might be revealed by the declarative sentence am French^ or by a
tell-tale accent. The volume implicitly raises important questions about the relation
of these contrasting forms of self-identification.
Further, all parole depends on a deep logic of some kind, even if the Saussurean
langue may seem unacceptably self-contained. Clearly, changes occur more readily
at the level of parole, eventually producing a shift at the level of langue. This seems
to be the medieval pattern; Grant, for example notes the halting efforts of medieval
writers to give verbal expression to their experience of architecture (unique in the
volume, her interesting discussion of architectural description in legal transactions
suggests the desirability of a comparative historical account of legal language about
buildings). The essays on Renaissance architecture, on the other hand, stress the

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 1644 R E N A IS S A N C E Q U ARTERLY

emergence, prior to practice, of formalized discourse and explicit protocols of

design. Crucial in this process was the study of ancient buildings and technical
writing, certainly, but also the diffusion of ancient rhetorical theory. Here \angue
precedes and determines parole.
The result of this divergence is an unacknowledged mobilization of the tradi­
tional periodization — so often challenged in recent scholarship — of medieval and
Renaissance culture in terms of the self-consciousness attributed to the latter. The
exception is Deborah Howard s sophisticated essay on Scottish architecture, fore­
grounding the theme of national identity. Indeed, Howard evokes a cultural
substrate that remains relatively constant in spite of changes of architectural lan­
guage, or at least idiom. Architecture provides a system of signification for the
expression of a 1text/7but it is not that text. In fact, Howard stresses non-architec­
tural (e.g.， literally textual) elements that allow a building to be “read，” as well as
formal elements that carried particular associations at certain times to certain
audiences.
This important observation recalls a further distinction of langue and parole:
the former is sui generis; but parole is inevitably mixed, involving, e.g., gesture and
tone. Even — or especially — in the Renaissance, even with its passion for norma­
tive protocols, buildings acommunicatedMtypically through combinations of
diverse elements, including such fashionable items as inscriptions and emblems.
This is hardly apparent from the other essays on Renaissance architectural design
and discourse. Cammy Brothers discusses the imitation of ancient architecture in
early sixteenth-century Rome, tracing the emergence of an explicitly formulated
rule or grammar (Serlio is crucial, in her view). Paul Davies and David Hemsoll dis­
cuss che transfer of the new Roman style to Northern Italy in relation to debates
about the use of vernacular language and its elevation into a literary language. They
track the emergence of an uidea of eloquence'1 as a model for a theoretically
informed architecture, even in the work of an architect (Sanmicheli) who did not
himself articulate a theory, at least verbally.
For Brothers and Davies/Hemsoll the relation between architectural discourse
— notably the evolving classical norms — and practice is relatively unproblematic.
This is not the case in the essays of Payne and Pauwels. Payne demonstrates the
close ties between the new genre of architectural writing and other literary produc­
tion, insisting that the former can be fully understood only within a context of
evolving theory in various cultural domains. This emphasis on a <ttext-chainn sug­
gests that, for all the impact of theorizing on Renaissance practice, distinct
historical trajectories were in play; as in Timmermanns essay, the emphasis is on
cultural tendencies rather than a uniform cultural moment. Payne also refers to the
ideological aspect of architectural prescriptivism, especially in the nascent acade­
mies. Her stress on the place of architectural discourse within the cultural politics of
the emerging early modern state, with its ^diplomacy of taste/* is shared, to a
degree, by Ghristy Anderson’s account of the triumph’ albeit short-lived, of the
courtly classicism of Inigo Jones in seventeenth-century England — i.e, of a univer-

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 REVIEWS 1645

salizing， theoretically informed architecture contrasting with a prior “flexible”

design practice.
Such flexibility is related to the decomposition of classicism, as a coherent sys­
tem, traced by Yves Pauwels. Especially in France, the recepcion of ancient
architecture was centrally a matter of a rationalizing “reduction” of a complex and
allusive legacy, making it available for appropriation and, as Pauwels stresses, cre­
ative adaptation. He relates architectural practice and even writing not to high-
flown literary and theoretical culture, but to the application of ^common places,Ha
part of ancient rhetoric given new prominence in the Renaissance. Such recombina­
tion of elements draws attention, again, to the issue of the relationship between
langue and parole\ thus in English architecture before Jones, as Anderson shows,
classicism remained largely a matter of superficial ornamentation. Nothing could
be further from an integrative approach to architecture, e.g., that of Alberti, for
whom, as stressed by Caroline Van Eyck, architecture was a form of communica­
tion and deserved to be treated with the seriousness given by the ancients to oratory
and moral discourse.
A final observation. Apart from Howard, none of the essays reveal familiarity
with modem semiotic theory, though some, especially Payne, have a sophisticated
grasp of the intellectual culture of the period studied. Some awareness, at least in
the introduction, not only of key distinctions made by de Saussure, but also of the
multiple factors involved in verbal communication, as in the classic analysis by
Roman Jakobson, would have helped clarify matters. For all the indisputable inter­
est and quality of the volume, these absences draw attention to the unfortunate
persistence in the study of past architecture(s) of hermetic boundaries between cir­
cumscribed approaches and methodologies.
C harles Bu r r o u g h s
State University of New York, Binghamton

Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History,
1380-1589.
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. x + 274 pp. n.p. ISBN: 0-226­
78013-9.
By focusing an historical lens on the concept of the early English woman writer
as ulost,MJennifer Summit is able to argue, strikingly, that the consignment of the
female literary presence to the periphery of English literary tradition was in fact
integral to the development of that very tradition. Whereas much recent scholar­
ship assumes that pre-modern women were denied recognition as writers in order
“to protect an institution that was already fully in place and fully masculinized” (5)，
Summit takes a more complicated approach to this issue. Her thesis encapsulates a
paradox: that for centuries male authors deliberately exploited the status of the
female writer as outside the literary mainstream so as to ensure a masculine geneal­
ogy for English vernacular literature. Thus what Summits book would explore is
the development of a male-dominated literary tradition in which the Figure of the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.