Books by Dirk De Meyer
Ghent, Belgium, A&S/books, 2017; 128 pp., 2017
Eighteenth-century Neapolitan staircases present a shift from the traditional, monumental Baroque... more Eighteenth-century Neapolitan staircases present a shift from the traditional, monumental Baroque palace stairs towards the staircase that is serving four, five or more levels of apartments of different social standing. While prefiguring stairs in modern apartment buildings, they solve issues of aristocratic etiquette as well as practical plan arrangements. They are showpiece and utility in one. At times grand and imposing, at times cramped in tapered courtyards, these staircases are numerous and disparate in form. This book documents seven of them, by Neapolitan architects such as Ferdinando Sanfelice. It is the outcome of a master seminar in Architectural History at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of Ghent University. 128 pp., Swiss bind. Texts, drawings, and colour and B/W photographs.
Eds. Dirk De Meyer, Bart Verschaffel, and Pieter-Jan Cierkens. Ghent, A&S/books, Feb 2015
This is a preview of some pages of the book. — Contents :
Dirk De Meyer, “They despise my n... more This is a preview of some pages of the book. — Contents :
Dirk De Meyer, “They despise my novelty and humble birth, I their cowardly conservatism”: Architecture and Politics in the Plates of Piranesi’s 'Parere su l’architettura' /
Maarten Delbeke, Piranesi’s 'Parere' and the Beauty of Architecture /
Sigrid De Jong, Piranesi and Primitivism:
Origin as Invention /
Caroline Van Eck, Architectural History without Words:
Piranesi’s Representations of Rome, Anachronism and Historical Experience /
Bart Verschaffel, Rome Pictured as a World:
On the Function and Meaning of the Staffage in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedute /
Steven Jacobs, Eisenstein’s Piranesi and Cinematic Space /
Bart Verschaffel, Unknown Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Charles-Louis Clérisseau and Lieven Cruyl in the “Album Goetghebuer” /
Piranesi, The Print Collection of Ghent University: A Portfolio of the Exhibition
Amsterdam, Roma Publications, 2012
At first glance Jan Kempenaers’ photographs may not reflect the traditional ideas we have about a... more At first glance Jan Kempenaers’ photographs may not reflect the traditional ideas we have about an everyday picturesqueness. To better understand the relationship between his compositions and the aesthetic category of the picturesque, we need to look more closely at some of the original eighteenth-century aspects of the picturesque. When we leave aside this popular genre’s legacy – which has been significant though not highly prized, for at one point the picturesque even became synonymous with conventionally beautiful scenery – we will be able to discover its astounding modernity and topicality. The picturesque conceived as such, I will argue, fits perfectly with our contemporary way of looking at and appreciating natural and urban environments, and is also firmly entrenched in contemporary practices of representation. Viewed from this perspective, Kempenaers’ photographs can be understood as an exploration of the continuing relevance of the picturesque in the contemporary visualization of our environment.
Exhibition catalogue, edited by Maarten Delbeke, Dirk De Meyer, Bas Rogiers, Bart Verschaffel / ... more Exhibition catalogue, edited by Maarten Delbeke, Dirk De Meyer, Bas Rogiers, Bart Verschaffel /
Exhibition: Museum voor Schone Kunsten (MSK, Museum of Fine Arts), Ghent, 20 Sept 2008 – 18 Jan 2009 /
Book chapters: Dirk De Meyer, Archeologie en inventie: Piranesi kunstenaar, archeoloog, ingenieur, polemist, architect, handelaar / Maarten Delbeke, Roma antica, moderna e sacra: Piranesi en de vedute-traditie / Bart Verschaffel, Piranesi's Carceri: een postscriptum / ...
Dirk De Meyer, Mieken Osselaer, and Thomas Roelandts, eds. Gent: DLK & Vakgroep Architectuur en Stedenbouw, 2011
Book Series 'Bouwstenen', no. 43., 1998
Articles and book chapters by Dirk De Meyer
STUDI E RICERCHE DI STORIA DELL'ARCHITETTURA, 2017
This article deals with the political agenda of late nineteenth and early twentieth century histo... more This article deals with the political agenda of late nineteenth and early twentieth century historiography of Bohemian and Moravian baroque architecture. Suppressed by the huge Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire, the Czech provinces understood themselves as nations through their cultural identity only. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was national culture, national tradition, and national character that created the backbone of a national existence. Music, literature, painting, sculpture, and even architecture created the images of a mythical past and commemorated the great events of the history of the nation. The Czech artist or architect was laden with heavy burdens unfamiliar to his Western colleagues. He had to represent his oppressed nation’s cause in a political situation where the mere use of the national language or a national idiom in art was a bold gesture signalling the re-claiming of nationhood. On both sides of this struggle, the writing of architectural history as...
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2018
The companions to the history of architecture (General Ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave), Volume 1 : Renaissance and Baroque architecture (Ed. Alina Payne), 2017
Dirk De Meyer, Bart Verschaffel, Pieter-Jan Cierkens (eds.), Aspects of Piranesi: Essays on History, Criticism and Invention. Ghent, A&S/books on Architecture and Arts, 2015; pp.10-53. , 2015
(This is a preview containing the first pages of this book chapter) — A well-known matter of cont... more (This is a preview containing the first pages of this book chapter) — A well-known matter of contention in architectural history is the dispute between Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pierre-Jean Mariette, as it was most scornfully expressed in Piranesi’s twin publications 'Parere sull’architettura' and 'Osservazioni… sopra la lettre de M. Mariette' (1765).
To the Parere dialogue Piranesi later added a series of five plates, three of them prominently bearing classical quotes. These citations have never been read otherwise than as a mere contribution to this dispute on architecture, the role of invention and the tyranny of aesthetical theories. However, an investigation into the larger context of the classical texts from which they originate, and the significance of these quotes for a mid-eighteenth-century reader, may offer an additional layer of meaning.
Following eighteenth-century changes in the role of classical erudition, Piranesi is revising his use of classical quotations: with the Parere quotations their purpose seems to shift, from delivering the basis of historical truth to a rhetorical device for criticizing present conditions and believes. With these quotations Piranesi, as I will argue, is not only defending himself against harsh, particularly French, criticism in architectural matters, but also firmly raising his profile in a much larger, political controversy.
Concentrating on the Terence, Ovid and Sallust quotes in the plates of the Parere, this paper demonstrates how behind the aesthetic and theoretical agenda of the plates, and their quotes, emerges an implicit political one that is no less antagonistic. For Piranesi, the Roman Republic offers not only an architectural but also an ideological model. Its heroic and magnificent past provides models and elements for a new architecture as well as for a new, republican, society.
Dirk De Meyer, Bart Verschaffel, Pieter-Jan Cierkens (eds.), Aspects of Piranesi: Essays on History, Criticism and Invention. Ghent, A&S/books on Architecture and Arts, 2015; pp. 176-189., 2015
The exhibition 'Piranesi: The Print Collection of Ghent University' was held at the Museum of Fin... more The exhibition 'Piranesi: The Print Collection of Ghent University' was held at the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) of Ghent, Belgium, from Sept 20 2008 until Jan 18 2009. For the first time it showed the rich Piranesi holdings of the Ghent University Library, which counts over 950 etchings (on a total production of 1028), for the greater part in their original eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century bindings. A full exhibition catalogue was published, in Dutch: 'Piranesi: De prentencollectie van de Universiteit Gent', MSK and A&S/books, 2008.
In the show the more than 200 works by Piranesi where contextualized by an equal amount of engravings, etchings, medals and books by other authors, ranging from the 16th through early 19th century. They were also drawn from the comprehensive rare book, print and coin collections of the Ghent University Library, alongside graphic work on loan from the Royal Library in Brussels and the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library in Antwerp.
Subject and material of the exhibition were Piranesi’s print work and his monumental books. It was presented in three parts, curated by Dirk De Meyer, Maarten Delbeke and Bart Verschaffel. The exhibition architects were Guy Châtel & Kris Coremans, ssaxx-architects, with graphic design by Bas Rogiers.
This chapter describes and documents the exhibition.
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of the European Architectural History Network Ed. Heynen Hilde & Gosseye Janina. Brussels, Belgium: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten , 2012
By the late 17th and early 18th centuries the techniques of re-Catholicisation in Bohemia and Mor... more By the late 17th and early 18th centuries the techniques of re-Catholicisation in Bohemia and Moravia turned more subtle, after the often harsh and mostly foreign, Jesuit-led Counter-Reformation. Cistercian and Benedictine monasteries, with their century-old autochthonous establishment in the region, would be at the heart of the new approach. The abbots’ prestigious publications and building campaigns complemented refined methods for promoting the resurgence of Catholicism rooted in local traditions, both liturgical and architectural.
With his hybrid architectural fusions and spatial compositions, which combine Italianate Baroque with Bohemian late-Gothic references and regional traditions, the Prague architect Johann Santini Aichel could become a principal actor of their campaigns.
In 1719, he designed the pilgrimage church of Saint John of Nepomuk for the Cistercian abbey of Zd’àr (now in the Czech Republic). It expressed the abbot’s determination to reinstate the medieval importance of his monastery by preserving local traditions of devotional practice as well as building typology — while incorporating his fascination with exuberant baroque allegory. At the time of a growing demand for the canonisation of the Bohemian martyr, the building’s expressive forms and star form shape were intended to appeal to both erudite clerics and to large sections of the local populace.
The church is the result of an intense and life-long collaboration between the abbot and his architect. A number of eighteenth-century documents indicate that the abbot’s contribution extended beyond the usual drafting of an iconographic programme into the conception of the overall form of the church. Furthermore, the sermon given at the consecration of the church, with its meticulous descriptions, is an exceptional document of liturgy and emblematic Baroque thinking in Central Europe.
Based on research in libraries and archives in the Czech Republic, and supported by various written sources, including letters, the arguments for the canonisation of Nepomuk, up to remarkable memorabilia such as chronostic birthday greetings sent by the abbots, this paper will expose the multiple layers and possible keys for an understanding of this small pilgrimage church: a formal experiment that originated in local building traditions and in an abbot’s learned divertissements; that was intended to fuel a thriving Nepomuk devotion, and to captivate both erudite interest and popular imagination – for which it recycled practices taken from Counter Reformation liturgy, popular devotion and pagan traditions.
Oase, Journal for Architecture, Issue 86: Baroque / Barok, 2011
By the late 17th and early 18th centuries the techniques of re-Catholicisation in Bohemia and Mor... more By the late 17th and early 18th centuries the techniques of re-Catholicisation in Bohemia and Moravia turned more subtle, after the often harsh and mostly foreign, Jesuit-led Counter-Reformation. Cistercian and Benedictine monasteries, with their century-old autochthonous establishment in the region, would be at the heart of the new approach. The abbots’ prestigious publications and building campaigns complemented refined methods for promoting the resurgence of Catholicism rooted in local traditions, both liturgical and architectural.
With his hybrid architectural fusions and spatial compositions, which combine Italianate Baroque with Bohemian late-Gothic references and regional traditions, the Prague architect Johann Santini Aichel could become a principal actor of their campaigns.
In 1719, he designed the pilgrimage church of Saint John of Nepomuk for the Cistercian abbey of Zd’àr (now in the Czech Republic). It expressed the abbot’s determination to reinstate the medieval importance of his monastery by preserving local traditions of devotional practice as well as building typology — while incorporating his fascination with exuberant baroque allegory. At the time of a growing demand for the canonisation of the Bohemian martyr, the building’s expressive forms and star form shape were intended to appeal to both erudite clerics and to large sections of the local populace.
The church is the result of an intense and life-long collaboration between the abbot and his architect. A number of eighteenth-century documents indicate that the abbot’s contribution extended beyond the usual drafting of an iconographic programme into the conception of the overall form of the church. Furthermore, the sermon given at the consecration of the church, with its meticulous descriptions, is an exceptional document of liturgy and emblematic Baroque thinking in Central Europe.
Based on research in libraries and archives in the Czech Republic, and supported by various written sources, this article will expose the multiple layers and possible keys for an understanding of this small pilgrimage church: a formal experiment that originated in local building traditions and in an abbot’s learned divertissements; that was intended to fuel a thriving Nepomuk devotion, and to captivate both erudite interest and popular imagination – for which it recycled practices taken from Counter Reformation liturgy, popular devotion and pagan traditions.
Tickle your catastrophe! : imagining catastrophe in art, architecture and philosophy (conference proceedings); Series Title: Studies in Performing Arts & Media 9. Ghent, Academia Press, 2011; pp. 13-31., 2011
While ruins are the disquieting vegetation of the mental forest of the eighteenth century, and wh... more While ruins are the disquieting vegetation of the mental forest of the eighteenth century, and while destruction is an essential, inherent component of modern art — at least since the late nineteenth century’s definition of the artist as a genius destined to transgression of aesthetic and social rules —, the eerie fascination for terryfing catastrophes is of another category.
Focusing on some natural and man-made historic catastrophes that struck major cities, from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, over the Paris Commune to the air raids of the Second World War, the lecture will discuss the represention of catastrophe. It will show how catastrophes tickled men — artists and philosophers — to change philosophical insights and aesthetic theory, and eventually develop early post-apocalyptic thinking; how it stimulated the development of new art forms and altered their scale of enterprise, how its representation borrowed from older art forms and eventually developed new iconographies.
Journal of Architecture, special issue: ‘Mannerism, Baroque, Avant-garde, Modern’., 2010
Criticized for its artifice and stylization, and loaded with negative connotations as manieroso, ... more Criticized for its artifice and stylization, and loaded with negative connotations as manieroso, the art of the sixteenth century became nevertheless a distinct historical and stylistic periodization and an intensely studied subject in the 1920’s. That construction of Mannerism, and its broad reception, occurred in a close relationship with radical new developments in art and architecture, and in the sciences.
Both an art historian as Burckhardt and a modernist architect as Le Corbusier identify Michelangelo as the prototypical modern artist, because, so they both argue, in Michelangelo creation had become individual expression. The anti-classicism of Michelangelo’s architecture and of early Mannerist painting came close to their own twentieth century fights against academism.
Parallel to this, due to recent and in circles of art historians closely followed Viennese developments, psychology could replace Zeitgeist as a key tool to understand artistic production. For Gombrich, who was well-versed in psychology and psychanalysis, this context openend a new approach to the Mannerist architecture of Giulio Romano. Gradually the ‘expressionist’ approach will be replaced by the view that describes Mannerism as the result of inner tensions, anxieties, neuroses and alienation, the Angst mannerism as James Mirollo would later coin it.
Finally, when modernist architecure was coming under fire because of the failure of its “misguided missionary vocation”, it was Mannerist architecture that was steered to the rescue of modernism by the architectural critic Colin Rowe.
CASABELLA, 2008
This article discusses art nouveau architect Victor Horta’s project for a kindergarten in the cen... more This article discusses art nouveau architect Victor Horta’s project for a kindergarten in the centre of Brussels (1895-99). Although not widely known and published, it is a crucial work to understand the early Horta — Borsi even considered it one of his top projects.
The article advances an interpretation within the context of advanced, even considered revolutionary, 19th-century pedagogical ideas, such as Fröbel’s, and focuses in particular on the importance for the project of the very liberal policy on public education of the city of Brussels in the late 19th century.
Piranesi. De Prentencollectie van de Universiteit Gent, 2008
De publicatie, in 1756, van de vier volumes van de Antichità Romane overtrof in monumentaliteit e... more De publicatie, in 1756, van de vier volumes van de Antichità Romane overtrof in monumentaliteit elke eerdere publicatie in het domein en vestigde Piranesi's naam, in heel Europa, als een van de grootste kenners van het oude Rome. Zijn studies van Romeinse infrastructuurwerken behoren tot de meest fascinerende technische illustraties van de achttiende eeuw. Maar parallel met een overwegende aandacht voor de kunstenaar en de zonderling, eerder dan voor de onderzoeker en de denker, is dat 'archeologische' oeuvre van Piranesi minder gepubliceerd en bij het publiek minder bekend dan de Vedute di Roma en de Carceri.
Piranesi. De Prentencollectie van de Universiteit Gent, 2008
Nation, Style, Modernism. München, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte and Warsaw, International Cultural centre, 2006
As part of the awakening national identity of the Czechs before and after the fall of the Austro-... more As part of the awakening national identity of the Czechs before and after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czech artists and architects were charged with the heavy burden of creating a national identity for their young republic. Recent studies have dealt with this issue. Less well documented is that, in addition, the writing of the art and architectural history, assumed a specific, operative role in the project of Czechoslovak nation building, as well as in its filo-German counterforces.
In the construct of the nation — as in Czech modern architectural practice — architectural history gave palpable reality to an otherwise imaginery community. Similarly, the notion of architecture as a creative act was the quintessential Masarykian metaphor for the building of a modern nation.
My paper focuses on discussions of national identity and language, and on the rediscovery of national architectural heritage as a collectivizing power for the young Czechoslovak Republic. It will deal with the question of “The Czechness of our art” (Jiránek), and with how local tradition was understood probably less as national, than as a necessary tool to open up the possibility of an own modern architecture. It will show the forces acting in the field of the architectural historiography, especially of the Baroque period, on both the Czech and the German sides — from writings with Czech nationalist leanings to German Anschlußfähige publications. The paper will also draw attention to changes in terminology and styles of writing art history and in the nature of the readership and publishing culture.
The period and political context taken into consideration extends from the moment of the coming of age of modern art history — parallel to nationalism — in the 1880’s, till the creation of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.
NUOVA RIVISTA ITALIANA DI PRAGA = NOVY ITALSKY CASOPIS V PRAZE, 2003
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Books by Dirk De Meyer
Dirk De Meyer, “They despise my novelty and humble birth, I their cowardly conservatism”: Architecture and Politics in the Plates of Piranesi’s 'Parere su l’architettura' /
Maarten Delbeke, Piranesi’s 'Parere' and the Beauty of Architecture /
Sigrid De Jong, Piranesi and Primitivism:
Origin as Invention /
Caroline Van Eck, Architectural History without Words:
Piranesi’s Representations of Rome, Anachronism and Historical Experience /
Bart Verschaffel, Rome Pictured as a World:
On the Function and Meaning of the Staffage in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedute /
Steven Jacobs, Eisenstein’s Piranesi and Cinematic Space /
Bart Verschaffel, Unknown Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Charles-Louis Clérisseau and Lieven Cruyl in the “Album Goetghebuer” /
Piranesi, The Print Collection of Ghent University: A Portfolio of the Exhibition
Exhibition: Museum voor Schone Kunsten (MSK, Museum of Fine Arts), Ghent, 20 Sept 2008 – 18 Jan 2009 /
Book chapters: Dirk De Meyer, Archeologie en inventie: Piranesi kunstenaar, archeoloog, ingenieur, polemist, architect, handelaar / Maarten Delbeke, Roma antica, moderna e sacra: Piranesi en de vedute-traditie / Bart Verschaffel, Piranesi's Carceri: een postscriptum / ...
Articles and book chapters by Dirk De Meyer
To the Parere dialogue Piranesi later added a series of five plates, three of them prominently bearing classical quotes. These citations have never been read otherwise than as a mere contribution to this dispute on architecture, the role of invention and the tyranny of aesthetical theories. However, an investigation into the larger context of the classical texts from which they originate, and the significance of these quotes for a mid-eighteenth-century reader, may offer an additional layer of meaning.
Following eighteenth-century changes in the role of classical erudition, Piranesi is revising his use of classical quotations: with the Parere quotations their purpose seems to shift, from delivering the basis of historical truth to a rhetorical device for criticizing present conditions and believes. With these quotations Piranesi, as I will argue, is not only defending himself against harsh, particularly French, criticism in architectural matters, but also firmly raising his profile in a much larger, political controversy.
Concentrating on the Terence, Ovid and Sallust quotes in the plates of the Parere, this paper demonstrates how behind the aesthetic and theoretical agenda of the plates, and their quotes, emerges an implicit political one that is no less antagonistic. For Piranesi, the Roman Republic offers not only an architectural but also an ideological model. Its heroic and magnificent past provides models and elements for a new architecture as well as for a new, republican, society.
In the show the more than 200 works by Piranesi where contextualized by an equal amount of engravings, etchings, medals and books by other authors, ranging from the 16th through early 19th century. They were also drawn from the comprehensive rare book, print and coin collections of the Ghent University Library, alongside graphic work on loan from the Royal Library in Brussels and the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library in Antwerp.
Subject and material of the exhibition were Piranesi’s print work and his monumental books. It was presented in three parts, curated by Dirk De Meyer, Maarten Delbeke and Bart Verschaffel. The exhibition architects were Guy Châtel & Kris Coremans, ssaxx-architects, with graphic design by Bas Rogiers.
This chapter describes and documents the exhibition.
With his hybrid architectural fusions and spatial compositions, which combine Italianate Baroque with Bohemian late-Gothic references and regional traditions, the Prague architect Johann Santini Aichel could become a principal actor of their campaigns.
In 1719, he designed the pilgrimage church of Saint John of Nepomuk for the Cistercian abbey of Zd’àr (now in the Czech Republic). It expressed the abbot’s determination to reinstate the medieval importance of his monastery by preserving local traditions of devotional practice as well as building typology — while incorporating his fascination with exuberant baroque allegory. At the time of a growing demand for the canonisation of the Bohemian martyr, the building’s expressive forms and star form shape were intended to appeal to both erudite clerics and to large sections of the local populace.
The church is the result of an intense and life-long collaboration between the abbot and his architect. A number of eighteenth-century documents indicate that the abbot’s contribution extended beyond the usual drafting of an iconographic programme into the conception of the overall form of the church. Furthermore, the sermon given at the consecration of the church, with its meticulous descriptions, is an exceptional document of liturgy and emblematic Baroque thinking in Central Europe.
Based on research in libraries and archives in the Czech Republic, and supported by various written sources, including letters, the arguments for the canonisation of Nepomuk, up to remarkable memorabilia such as chronostic birthday greetings sent by the abbots, this paper will expose the multiple layers and possible keys for an understanding of this small pilgrimage church: a formal experiment that originated in local building traditions and in an abbot’s learned divertissements; that was intended to fuel a thriving Nepomuk devotion, and to captivate both erudite interest and popular imagination – for which it recycled practices taken from Counter Reformation liturgy, popular devotion and pagan traditions.
With his hybrid architectural fusions and spatial compositions, which combine Italianate Baroque with Bohemian late-Gothic references and regional traditions, the Prague architect Johann Santini Aichel could become a principal actor of their campaigns.
In 1719, he designed the pilgrimage church of Saint John of Nepomuk for the Cistercian abbey of Zd’àr (now in the Czech Republic). It expressed the abbot’s determination to reinstate the medieval importance of his monastery by preserving local traditions of devotional practice as well as building typology — while incorporating his fascination with exuberant baroque allegory. At the time of a growing demand for the canonisation of the Bohemian martyr, the building’s expressive forms and star form shape were intended to appeal to both erudite clerics and to large sections of the local populace.
The church is the result of an intense and life-long collaboration between the abbot and his architect. A number of eighteenth-century documents indicate that the abbot’s contribution extended beyond the usual drafting of an iconographic programme into the conception of the overall form of the church. Furthermore, the sermon given at the consecration of the church, with its meticulous descriptions, is an exceptional document of liturgy and emblematic Baroque thinking in Central Europe.
Based on research in libraries and archives in the Czech Republic, and supported by various written sources, this article will expose the multiple layers and possible keys for an understanding of this small pilgrimage church: a formal experiment that originated in local building traditions and in an abbot’s learned divertissements; that was intended to fuel a thriving Nepomuk devotion, and to captivate both erudite interest and popular imagination – for which it recycled practices taken from Counter Reformation liturgy, popular devotion and pagan traditions.
Focusing on some natural and man-made historic catastrophes that struck major cities, from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, over the Paris Commune to the air raids of the Second World War, the lecture will discuss the represention of catastrophe. It will show how catastrophes tickled men — artists and philosophers — to change philosophical insights and aesthetic theory, and eventually develop early post-apocalyptic thinking; how it stimulated the development of new art forms and altered their scale of enterprise, how its representation borrowed from older art forms and eventually developed new iconographies.
Both an art historian as Burckhardt and a modernist architect as Le Corbusier identify Michelangelo as the prototypical modern artist, because, so they both argue, in Michelangelo creation had become individual expression. The anti-classicism of Michelangelo’s architecture and of early Mannerist painting came close to their own twentieth century fights against academism.
Parallel to this, due to recent and in circles of art historians closely followed Viennese developments, psychology could replace Zeitgeist as a key tool to understand artistic production. For Gombrich, who was well-versed in psychology and psychanalysis, this context openend a new approach to the Mannerist architecture of Giulio Romano. Gradually the ‘expressionist’ approach will be replaced by the view that describes Mannerism as the result of inner tensions, anxieties, neuroses and alienation, the Angst mannerism as James Mirollo would later coin it.
Finally, when modernist architecure was coming under fire because of the failure of its “misguided missionary vocation”, it was Mannerist architecture that was steered to the rescue of modernism by the architectural critic Colin Rowe.
The article advances an interpretation within the context of advanced, even considered revolutionary, 19th-century pedagogical ideas, such as Fröbel’s, and focuses in particular on the importance for the project of the very liberal policy on public education of the city of Brussels in the late 19th century.
In the construct of the nation — as in Czech modern architectural practice — architectural history gave palpable reality to an otherwise imaginery community. Similarly, the notion of architecture as a creative act was the quintessential Masarykian metaphor for the building of a modern nation.
My paper focuses on discussions of national identity and language, and on the rediscovery of national architectural heritage as a collectivizing power for the young Czechoslovak Republic. It will deal with the question of “The Czechness of our art” (Jiránek), and with how local tradition was understood probably less as national, than as a necessary tool to open up the possibility of an own modern architecture. It will show the forces acting in the field of the architectural historiography, especially of the Baroque period, on both the Czech and the German sides — from writings with Czech nationalist leanings to German Anschlußfähige publications. The paper will also draw attention to changes in terminology and styles of writing art history and in the nature of the readership and publishing culture.
The period and political context taken into consideration extends from the moment of the coming of age of modern art history — parallel to nationalism — in the 1880’s, till the creation of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.
Dirk De Meyer, “They despise my novelty and humble birth, I their cowardly conservatism”: Architecture and Politics in the Plates of Piranesi’s 'Parere su l’architettura' /
Maarten Delbeke, Piranesi’s 'Parere' and the Beauty of Architecture /
Sigrid De Jong, Piranesi and Primitivism:
Origin as Invention /
Caroline Van Eck, Architectural History without Words:
Piranesi’s Representations of Rome, Anachronism and Historical Experience /
Bart Verschaffel, Rome Pictured as a World:
On the Function and Meaning of the Staffage in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Vedute /
Steven Jacobs, Eisenstein’s Piranesi and Cinematic Space /
Bart Verschaffel, Unknown Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Charles-Louis Clérisseau and Lieven Cruyl in the “Album Goetghebuer” /
Piranesi, The Print Collection of Ghent University: A Portfolio of the Exhibition
Exhibition: Museum voor Schone Kunsten (MSK, Museum of Fine Arts), Ghent, 20 Sept 2008 – 18 Jan 2009 /
Book chapters: Dirk De Meyer, Archeologie en inventie: Piranesi kunstenaar, archeoloog, ingenieur, polemist, architect, handelaar / Maarten Delbeke, Roma antica, moderna e sacra: Piranesi en de vedute-traditie / Bart Verschaffel, Piranesi's Carceri: een postscriptum / ...
To the Parere dialogue Piranesi later added a series of five plates, three of them prominently bearing classical quotes. These citations have never been read otherwise than as a mere contribution to this dispute on architecture, the role of invention and the tyranny of aesthetical theories. However, an investigation into the larger context of the classical texts from which they originate, and the significance of these quotes for a mid-eighteenth-century reader, may offer an additional layer of meaning.
Following eighteenth-century changes in the role of classical erudition, Piranesi is revising his use of classical quotations: with the Parere quotations their purpose seems to shift, from delivering the basis of historical truth to a rhetorical device for criticizing present conditions and believes. With these quotations Piranesi, as I will argue, is not only defending himself against harsh, particularly French, criticism in architectural matters, but also firmly raising his profile in a much larger, political controversy.
Concentrating on the Terence, Ovid and Sallust quotes in the plates of the Parere, this paper demonstrates how behind the aesthetic and theoretical agenda of the plates, and their quotes, emerges an implicit political one that is no less antagonistic. For Piranesi, the Roman Republic offers not only an architectural but also an ideological model. Its heroic and magnificent past provides models and elements for a new architecture as well as for a new, republican, society.
In the show the more than 200 works by Piranesi where contextualized by an equal amount of engravings, etchings, medals and books by other authors, ranging from the 16th through early 19th century. They were also drawn from the comprehensive rare book, print and coin collections of the Ghent University Library, alongside graphic work on loan from the Royal Library in Brussels and the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library in Antwerp.
Subject and material of the exhibition were Piranesi’s print work and his monumental books. It was presented in three parts, curated by Dirk De Meyer, Maarten Delbeke and Bart Verschaffel. The exhibition architects were Guy Châtel & Kris Coremans, ssaxx-architects, with graphic design by Bas Rogiers.
This chapter describes and documents the exhibition.
With his hybrid architectural fusions and spatial compositions, which combine Italianate Baroque with Bohemian late-Gothic references and regional traditions, the Prague architect Johann Santini Aichel could become a principal actor of their campaigns.
In 1719, he designed the pilgrimage church of Saint John of Nepomuk for the Cistercian abbey of Zd’àr (now in the Czech Republic). It expressed the abbot’s determination to reinstate the medieval importance of his monastery by preserving local traditions of devotional practice as well as building typology — while incorporating his fascination with exuberant baroque allegory. At the time of a growing demand for the canonisation of the Bohemian martyr, the building’s expressive forms and star form shape were intended to appeal to both erudite clerics and to large sections of the local populace.
The church is the result of an intense and life-long collaboration between the abbot and his architect. A number of eighteenth-century documents indicate that the abbot’s contribution extended beyond the usual drafting of an iconographic programme into the conception of the overall form of the church. Furthermore, the sermon given at the consecration of the church, with its meticulous descriptions, is an exceptional document of liturgy and emblematic Baroque thinking in Central Europe.
Based on research in libraries and archives in the Czech Republic, and supported by various written sources, including letters, the arguments for the canonisation of Nepomuk, up to remarkable memorabilia such as chronostic birthday greetings sent by the abbots, this paper will expose the multiple layers and possible keys for an understanding of this small pilgrimage church: a formal experiment that originated in local building traditions and in an abbot’s learned divertissements; that was intended to fuel a thriving Nepomuk devotion, and to captivate both erudite interest and popular imagination – for which it recycled practices taken from Counter Reformation liturgy, popular devotion and pagan traditions.
With his hybrid architectural fusions and spatial compositions, which combine Italianate Baroque with Bohemian late-Gothic references and regional traditions, the Prague architect Johann Santini Aichel could become a principal actor of their campaigns.
In 1719, he designed the pilgrimage church of Saint John of Nepomuk for the Cistercian abbey of Zd’àr (now in the Czech Republic). It expressed the abbot’s determination to reinstate the medieval importance of his monastery by preserving local traditions of devotional practice as well as building typology — while incorporating his fascination with exuberant baroque allegory. At the time of a growing demand for the canonisation of the Bohemian martyr, the building’s expressive forms and star form shape were intended to appeal to both erudite clerics and to large sections of the local populace.
The church is the result of an intense and life-long collaboration between the abbot and his architect. A number of eighteenth-century documents indicate that the abbot’s contribution extended beyond the usual drafting of an iconographic programme into the conception of the overall form of the church. Furthermore, the sermon given at the consecration of the church, with its meticulous descriptions, is an exceptional document of liturgy and emblematic Baroque thinking in Central Europe.
Based on research in libraries and archives in the Czech Republic, and supported by various written sources, this article will expose the multiple layers and possible keys for an understanding of this small pilgrimage church: a formal experiment that originated in local building traditions and in an abbot’s learned divertissements; that was intended to fuel a thriving Nepomuk devotion, and to captivate both erudite interest and popular imagination – for which it recycled practices taken from Counter Reformation liturgy, popular devotion and pagan traditions.
Focusing on some natural and man-made historic catastrophes that struck major cities, from the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, over the Paris Commune to the air raids of the Second World War, the lecture will discuss the represention of catastrophe. It will show how catastrophes tickled men — artists and philosophers — to change philosophical insights and aesthetic theory, and eventually develop early post-apocalyptic thinking; how it stimulated the development of new art forms and altered their scale of enterprise, how its representation borrowed from older art forms and eventually developed new iconographies.
Both an art historian as Burckhardt and a modernist architect as Le Corbusier identify Michelangelo as the prototypical modern artist, because, so they both argue, in Michelangelo creation had become individual expression. The anti-classicism of Michelangelo’s architecture and of early Mannerist painting came close to their own twentieth century fights against academism.
Parallel to this, due to recent and in circles of art historians closely followed Viennese developments, psychology could replace Zeitgeist as a key tool to understand artistic production. For Gombrich, who was well-versed in psychology and psychanalysis, this context openend a new approach to the Mannerist architecture of Giulio Romano. Gradually the ‘expressionist’ approach will be replaced by the view that describes Mannerism as the result of inner tensions, anxieties, neuroses and alienation, the Angst mannerism as James Mirollo would later coin it.
Finally, when modernist architecure was coming under fire because of the failure of its “misguided missionary vocation”, it was Mannerist architecture that was steered to the rescue of modernism by the architectural critic Colin Rowe.
The article advances an interpretation within the context of advanced, even considered revolutionary, 19th-century pedagogical ideas, such as Fröbel’s, and focuses in particular on the importance for the project of the very liberal policy on public education of the city of Brussels in the late 19th century.
In the construct of the nation — as in Czech modern architectural practice — architectural history gave palpable reality to an otherwise imaginery community. Similarly, the notion of architecture as a creative act was the quintessential Masarykian metaphor for the building of a modern nation.
My paper focuses on discussions of national identity and language, and on the rediscovery of national architectural heritage as a collectivizing power for the young Czechoslovak Republic. It will deal with the question of “The Czechness of our art” (Jiránek), and with how local tradition was understood probably less as national, than as a necessary tool to open up the possibility of an own modern architecture. It will show the forces acting in the field of the architectural historiography, especially of the Baroque period, on both the Czech and the German sides — from writings with Czech nationalist leanings to German Anschlußfähige publications. The paper will also draw attention to changes in terminology and styles of writing art history and in the nature of the readership and publishing culture.
The period and political context taken into consideration extends from the moment of the coming of age of modern art history — parallel to nationalism — in the 1880’s, till the creation of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.