Emblems and Architecture: Kiel Conference, July 2014 Michael Bath Writing as an architectural historian in 1996 Judi Loach wrote -­‐ in an article on “Architecture and Emblematics” -­‐ about the tendency of emblem scholars to study buildings as though they were books. Books, she reminds us, are not buildings and buildings are not books. (Emblems and Art History, Glasgow Emblem Studies, vol.1, ed. A. Adams). There have of course been many studies of emblems in architecture. In 1994 Peter Daly organized a memorable conference on “Architecture and the Emblem” in Montreal, under the aegis of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The Proceedings were published as the second of Brepols’s Imago Figurata volumes in 1999. And more recently, earlier this year, Verlag Ludwig, here in Kiel, published Ingrid Höpel’s wonderful collection of essays, Architektur als Ort für Embleme, on some of the many programmes of applied emblems that have been identified in mostly northern German buildings, including two of those we shall be visiting tomorrow on our conference excursion. Ingrid’s book includes a useful bibliography of the scholarly literature on these. However the number of books and articles devoted to sourcing and interpreting emblems used in or on historical buildings is huge and ever increasing. Maybe the time has come for us to take stock. I certainly think it could be useful to pay a bit more attention to the similarities and differences between various local or national traditions of architecture in the way they use emblems. The connection between emblems and architecture has always been rather close. Before he produced his Emblematum liber in 1531, Alciato had been collecting – in his youthful Monumentum veterumque inscriptionum Mediolani – the ancient inscriptions from buildings in Milan. It was Pierre Laurens and Florence Vuilleumier, in 1993, who showed us what role this collection of antique inscriptions played in the invention or – to use their word – in the archéologie – of the emblem. In copying not only inscriptions which he found on ancient Milanese stelae but also their symbolic reliefs, the young Alciato drew, we are told, on his knowledge of the Hieroglyphica. The relationship between books and buildings was always going to be close once the connection between emblematica and the hieroglyphica was accepted, for the Egyptian hieroglyphs were an ancient and ideographic sign system used, primarily, for writing on buildings. It is therefore not surprising that all the earliest statements of the availability of emblems for use in the applied arts go back, as P. Laurens noted (Alciato, Les Emblèmes, ed. Laurens, Paris: Klincksieck, 1997, p.20, n.33), to Fasanini’s introduction to his influential Latin translation of Horapollo. From this… work many will be able to borrow short sayings or signs which they can inscribe on swords, rings, hairnets, belts, a cithara, on beds, couches, ceiling panels, carpets, doors, in the study, on a table, on mirrors, in the bedroom, on earthenware and silver vases. Indeed they could, with these signs both painted and carved, wrap their secret thoughts in veils and put them all over the walls of their houses. (Fasanini, cit. Drysdall 2013: 18) It’s a remarkably inclusive and copious listing of the variety of media for which “applied emblems” or “angewandte Emblematik” were thought to be available. This morning all I want to do is look at two or three historical buildings which make notable use of emblems, in order to identify at least some of the issues which arise for our understanding of the relationship between books and buildings. They are all found “on the walls of houses” (parietes domesticos). And I want to start by looking very briefly at one we shall be visiting on our excursion tomorrow, the so-­‐called Bunte Kammer in the Ludwigsburg Herrenhaus. Hartmut Freytag will be telling us more about this this afternoon. Perhaps the first thing to say about the Bunte Kammer in Ludwigsburg is that the present building is later than the house that it was originally designed for. The present building dates from 1730, and it changed its name from Kohöved to Ludwigsburg 30 or so years later. Hence, as so often with such decorative schemes, there are issues of location and dating that need to be resolved before we can even begin to address the question of architectural function. Architectural historians usually need our help primarily with issues of iconography and interpretation. But one of the benefits which emblem studies also has for historians is that it can sometimes help with problems of dating. It was Michael Schilling’s identification of one of the emblem books used as sources for the decoration in the bunte Kammer that first established 1671 as a terminus post quem, and this was finally confirmed when the actual date 1673 was identified on one of the actual emblems (Gesprächskultur, p.12). That date not only clarifies the wider historical – which means the political, doctrinal and cultural – context of the original building and its emblems, but also allows us – in this case – to identify the owner and patron who commissioned them. Friedrich Christian Kielmann von Kielmannseck acquired the house in 1672 and made it his principal dwelling. He had travelled widely in Germany and Italy, where he became well read in politics, jurisprudence and history, before returning to play an important role at the court of Herzog Christian-­‐Albrecht at Gottorf. In their authoritative book, Freytag, Harms, and Schiller have shown in some detail just how closely, as one decodes the moral and political, content of these emblems, they illustrates the values and principles of its late-­‐seventeenth century owner, Friedrich Christian Kielmann. This is what the house in Ludwigsburg that we shall be visiting tomorrow looks like now. But the best impression of what the house looked like when the Bunte Kammer was actually painted in it, we have to identify one of the emblem panels which shows it. This is the house for which the bunte Kammer was designed, in 1673, when it was known under the name ‘Kohöved’. What interests me more, perhaps, than the moral or meaning of this emblem – whose motto SEMPER PRIMA, NUMQUAM ULTIMA means “Always first – never last” – is its pictura illustrating the very building of which it is a part. This, clearly, is not an image that its patron, or his designer, could possibly have cribbed from any pre-­‐existing emblem book. Moreover, such a representation of the actual building not only signals the purely “architectural” interest of this emblematic decoration, but has to be seen as a type of recursive art: this is a building which, in this emblem at least, is talking about itself. Whatever these emblems mean, those meanings are telling us something about the building which contains them. And it is that reflexivity, that recursive self-­‐reference that characterises one of the other emblems that we shall see tomorrow at Ludwigsburg, for here under the very familiar motto NON OMNIA POSSUMUS OMNES we see a picture of the very room in which we, or at least in which the orginal viewers, would be standing. The iconography of this emblem and the significance of the hand holding a bunch of keys over an open chest have been well explicated as keys to the whole emblem programme and the building that contains it by Freytag, Harms and Schilling in their book (see esp. pp. 24-­‐25), and I’m not going to summarise them here. It is the fact that occupants and visitors to the bunte Kammer would inevitably be challenged to make sense of the 175 emblems surrounding them in this remarkable chamber, that persuaded Freytag, Harms and Schilling to entitle their book Gesprächskultur des Barock. Gesprächskultur is not a word for which I can find any good translation in English, since it implies something more precise than what, in English, we call ‘oral’ culture, or ‘oral’ literature, to include the idea of ‘conversation’ (Gespräch). I am not sure if we have any good, historical records of how people actual lived, socialised or responded to the learned decoration of such a chamber as this, but I do think we are right to assume that such complex and learned schemes of interior design were often likely to have functioned as conversation pieces. Gesprächskultur, if I am not mistaken, is the German equivalent of the type of conversational exchange that also characterised a French salon. Such a social function would be at least somewhat different from the more private kind of interpretation that is characteristic of the type of room which I want to turn to next, in a chamber which was known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a closet (Ger. Kabinett; Fr. cabinet). The scheme of painted emblems from a house in Suffolk, Hardwick House, has long been familiar to emblem studies, and has been known, at least since the nineteenth century, as ‘Lady Drury’s oratory’. This painted decoration certainly resembles the Ludwigsburg painted chamber in its use of emblems from a seventeenth-­‐century secular building in England, and one that like Kohöved has also disappeared, no longer surviving in its original setting. Heather Meakins’s recent book (Ashgate, 2O13) leaves no room for doubt, however, that this decoration filled the type of room which we know, and the seventeenth century knew, not as an ‘oratory’ but as a closet. Far from being places for the entertainment of visitors and guests in conversation, closets were among the most private and intimate chambers, though they certainly had some similarities with private chapels or oratories, which were rooms used for meditation and prayer. The emblems from Lady Drury’s closet at Hawstead Hall are nearly all secular. The one thing we do know for certain is that this closet was for the use of Anne Bacon Drury, and it is this which gives Meakin both the starting point for her own work and a point of reference which validates most of her conclusions, for Anne Drury belonged to an important group of Elizabethan and Jacobean families in England about whom we know a great deal. Her daughter Elizabeth was dedicatee of two of the most extraordinary and sophisticated of ‘Metaphysical’ poems, John Donne’s Anniversaries, whilst her maiden name Bacon signals her relationship to her grandfather Sir Nicholas Bacon – Lord Keeper of the Seal to Elizabeth I, who is noted among other things for his neo-­‐
Stoic and strongly emblematic Long Gallery (imitating Montaigne’s) at Gorhambury, Hertfordshire. Her brother Nathaniel Bacon was reputedly the most accomplished amateur painter of his time in England. The most famous member of the family, Francis – philosopher, essayist and Lord Chancellor under James I – was her uncle. This family circle, and the career of her courtier and soldier husband, Sir Robert Drury, supply the context for Meakin’s interpretation of the meaning and function of these emblems in the closet of Anne, whose role in their invention, design and (possibly) execution is now, quite rightly, assumed to be central. This is a scheme in which the emblems are, and always were, grouped under Latin headers, or independent mottoes, with no associated image. The close relations between emblems and inscriptions that we witnessed in Alciato’s collection of inscriptiones Milanesi would thus seem to be continuing. This kind of inscription recalls classical epigraphy on buildings. The Latin motto which heads one group of panels, “NVNQVAM MINVS SOLA QVAM CVM SOLA” (“Never less alone than when alone”) is drawn from Cicero’s comment on “the tranquil solitude to be enjoyed on one’s country estate with one’s library for company”. The motto, in this case, is clearly referring to the very room itself, and to the fact that, as I have suggested, the closet was a room to which one retired from company to be alone. You cannot have much conversation in a closet. Cicero’s self-­‐referring comment nevertheless sums up the neo-­‐Stoic spirit in which ancient domestic buildings so often appealed to their owners: renaissance architects, and their Humanist clients, loved to put such inscriptions on their buildings. So, rather like those two emblems which at Ludwigsburg show images of the house itself, and the actual room, this is a motto which the reader who has read his (or in this case certainly ‘her’) Cicero would recognise as similarly recursive and self-­‐referring. Architectural historians need our help to identify sources and analogues in emblem books. But one of the most important things we can do once we have found a source is to identify any changes which an application makes to its original. What is perhaps most interesting about this motto at Hawstead is the way it changes the gender, for Cicero wrote “Nunquam minus solus, quam cum solus.” The adjective “solus” refers to the house’s owner, and Anne Drury’s alteration – “solus” to “sola” (masculine to feminine gender) – is compelling evidence that this chamber is for her use and noone else’s. As Meakin puts it, “her adaptation is, as it were, a kind of self-­‐authorization: never less alone than when a woman alone.” (p. 107) I don’t think I need to alert you to the gender issues which are raised by this seemingly trivial change to the grammar: they are fully explored in Meakin’s book. However, when I read Meakin’s comment on this, I was reminded of something I myself had noted on another building which I have written about, and indeed discussed at previous meeting of the Society for Emblem Studies. I think there is one parallel which, unnoticed by Meakin, supports and validates her conclusions about this inflexion change, for in his neo-­‐Stoic long gallery at Pinkie House, Musselburgh, Alexander Seton, Chancellor of Scotland, adapts an emblem from Otto Vaenius’s Emblemata Horatiana showing the prudent man who quenches his thirst at a fountain rather than drinking excessively from the nearby river. Seton’s adaptation of Vaenius’s pictura to show the prudent neo-­‐Stoic as a portrait of himself is not only, as I argue in my book Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland, a remarkably rare instance of a patron portrait in any British decorative scheme, but Vaenius’s motto “nihil amplius optat” (“he chooses nothing more”) is changed to read, in the scroll above Seton’s portrait, “NIHIL AMPLIVS OPTO” (“I choose nothing more”) (Bath 2003: 82). This change of inflexion in a Latin motto, in order to identify the house’s owner more closely in both cases with the classical values which it embodies or expresses architecturally, seems to me such a remarkable coincidence that it deserves wider recognition. I do not think that Anne Drury would have had any knowledge of Seton’s house at Pinkie (or vice-­‐versa), but the coincidence surely testifies to the spirit in which householders appropriated and deployed their Latin inscriptions in buildings of this period in Britain. It certainly supports and validates Meakin’s conclusions on the significance of the Hawstead motto. And having arrived back in Scotland, at one of my own favourite historical buildings, we can see why so many of those issues of provenance, dating and sourcing that we have already seen as clarifying the function of the emblem programmes at Ludwigsburg and in Lady Drury’s closet in Suffolk are repeated at Pinkie in Scotland. Seton’s remarkable painted emblems are not decorating a private closet but rather a neo-­‐Stoic painted long gallery, a type of chamber whose design, architectural function, and use have been well studied by architectural historians. Long galleries, unlike private closets, were social spaces, designed for indoor perambulation, conversation, they were, we might say, Gesprächszimmern. My own claim that this gallery, with its trompe l’oeil fictive arcading, was designed as a neoclassical recreation of the painted gallery or stoa poikile in which Stoicism had its roots, and from which it derived its name, was confirmed by that wonderful moment during our last Emblem Studies conference in Glasgow, where, you may remember, we visited Pinkie House on our excursion, and it was Anne and Stephen Rolet who identified the print source for one of the hitherto unidentified emblems. 1 2 3 Blaise de Vigenère’s 1614 illustrated translation of Philostratus not only explained what was going on in this emblem showing how bees dropped honey on the lips of the infant poet Pindar in his cradle, but also allowed me to recognise Vigenère’s 1614 title page as another representation of the antique stoa. 4 Notice the arcaded gallery, with its perambulating viewers who are all shown as couples engaged in earnest conversation. This is not only an example of classical Gesprächskultur, but also, surely, a represention of the Athenian stoa poikile in which philosopher Zeno did his teaching. If you look at the bottom of the page you can see two place names – lower right we read “Paris”, but on the left “Athenes”. 5 This painted gallery, then is a French reconstruction (de Vigenère translated Greek Philostratus into French) of an Athenian stoa poikile. And to find another relocation of the Greek stoa to seventeenth-­‐century France, all we have to do is look at another title-­‐page, for de Gomberville’s title-­‐page to his plagiarised and unacknowledged translations of Vaenius’s Emblemata Horatiana shows the young French king, Louis XIV, perambulating a very similar gallery to learn the neo-­‐Stoic lessons that were embodied in these very emblems. 6 Seton’s emblems at Pinkie House are all hung on illusory trompe l’oeil hooks, which I had previously suggested were meant to suggest their status as the neo-­‐
Stoic panels that were thought to have hung in Zeno’s gallery. However very recently Peter Davidson has remarked on the likelihood that such picture-­‐hooks may also resemble the way Jesuit affixiones would have been hung or displayed in the exhibitions of the Jesuit colleges. Alexander Seton had been educated by the Jesuits in the German College in Rome, where he was a leading student of the new ratio studiorum, and evidently top of the class, since he was chosen to compose and deliver, at the age of only sixteen, the annual oration in front the Pope. If we are justified in this interpretation of the false architecture of Seton’s gallery full of emblems, then I think we can surely claim that the interpretation of these emblems tells us quite a lot, not just about the taste or opinions of its owner, but about the strictly architectural pretensions and functions of the building that contains them. Once again, the books tell us about the building. 7 I want to return briefly, before ending, to Anne Drury’s closet from Hardwick Hall. The governing sentence above another set of emblems, the third in Meakin’s listing, is equally self referential and definitive, “PARVA SED APTA MIHI…”. This also is an inscription which refers to the room of which it is a part. It has a much more obscure source than the motto which Lady Drury adapted from Cicero on the group we have looked at previously, for Meakin shows that it has no classical source but quotes Harington’s description, in the Life appended to his translation of Orlando Furioso, of the verses which Ariosto carved above the door to his house in Ferrara, an inscription designed to stress the modesty of his dwelling, “Parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non / Sordida …. That is to say ‘This house is small, but fit for me, but hurtful unto none.” As Meakin says, “Ariosto’s words … recall the famous anecdote of Sir Nicholas Bacon’s response to the Queen’s comment that his house (Gorhambury) was too small for him: ‘Madam, it is you who have made me too large for my house’” (209). One might conclude that such claims for the modesty of one’s building were becoming something of a neo-­‐Stoical topos in the architecture of this period, for we find something very similar elsewhere, such as the variant which William Fowler placed above the door of his house in Edinburgh, “Angusta ad usum augusta” (“A narrow gate to admit the great”) . Equally self-­‐referential and definitive is the governing sentence to the fifth group of panels at Hardwick, “AMPLIOR IN CŒLO DOMVS EST” (“A larger home is in heaven”), which has biblical echoes though no direct biblical source. All this evidence clearly supports Meakin’s decision to treat Lady Drury’s closet as primarily “a rhetorical space” – reading architecture as a branch of literature, that is to say as a species of “architext” – for this closet was, indisputably, a type of three-­‐dimensional commonplace book. To sum up. •
I have tried to show how important it is to know not only the date but also the provenance of such decorative schemes. That means not only the building but also, if possible, the type of chamber that they were designed 8 to decorate. Different parts of a building were used in different ways. The distinction between public and private apartments seems to me to be most significant. •
The characterisation by our German colleagues of some of these schemes as expressions of a “culture of conversation” (Gesprächskultur) is one that I find suggestive, if only because it recognises that emblems, by their very nature, challenge the viewer to interpret them. •
However, we might also need to bear in mind that the intrepretation of emblems could equally well be a private act of individual reflection, artificial memory, or commonplace recognition. Heather Meakin makes a good case for reading Anne Bacon Drury’s closet as a three-­‐dimensional commonplace book, a rhetorical space which was, as she puts it “architextual” as much as “architectural”, thus narrowing the distinction which Judy Loach would like us to make, between books and buildings. •
Finally, I am fascinated by the way all three of these buildings use emblems in highly self-­‐reflective ways, to comment on the status or pretensions of the building of which they are a part. Such reflexivity is, perhaps, characteristic only of more sophisticated buildings, though we might wonder whether emblems, by virtue of their heavily humanist and classical orientation, were always likely to be the prerogative of such builders or such owners. •
It is, however, with such examples that emblem scholars can surely claim to be not merely the servants of architectural historians in our source-­‐
hunting and iconological documentation, but also – at least occasionally – when we are able to identify emblems which define the very nature and function of the buildings of which they were a part.