VIGÉE LE BRUN painted her first portrait of Marie-Antoinette in 1778, Marie-Antoinette “en robe à paniers”. This
is a full-length, formal representation of the queen in court regalia,
wearing a splendidly decorated white satin hoopskirt. While the portrait
brilliantly demonstrates Vigée Le Brun’s virtuosity as a court painter,
it reveals little of its subject. But it was eminently in keeping with a
tradition of formal portraiture of the spouse of a monarch. The portrait
was executed for the queen’s brother, Emperor Joseph II, and Marie-
Antoinette was so pleased with it that she ordered two copies: one for
Catherine II, Empress of all Russias, and the other for her own apartments
at Versailles.
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Archive for January, 2010
Fernando Fuga and the Albergo dei Poveri
While Vanvitelli developed the worldly Caserta, to Ferdinando Fuga
fell a more mundane but no less instrumental element of Bourbon
rule: the Albergo dei Poveri in Naples. Born a Florentine, Fuga came
to Rome to study at the Accademia di San Luca. He had proposed a
project for the Lateran facade as early as 1722 and participated in the
Trevi competition as well. His fortunes brightened when the
Florentine pope Clement XII made him architect of the papal
palaces.
The first church on the site, of basilical form, was built near the Milion, that is, in the neighborhood of the Great Palace and Hippodrome, by Constantius II (not Constantine as often stated) and inaugurated in 360. It was known as the Great Church (Megale Ekklesia)—the name Hagia Sophia is first attested ca.430—and had the episcopal palace attached to its south side. Burned down by the supporters of John Chrysostom in 404, it was rebuilt, once again as a basilica, by Theodosios II and completed in 415. The only extant part of the Theodosian basilica is a colonnaded porch, probably the façade of the atrium rather than of the church itself .
28
Jan
Egyptian temples
Egyptian temples existed from the middle of the fourth millennium bce at the latest. According to tradition, the earliest were in the shape of reed huts. The last Egyptian temple built was a complex of buildings on Philae which ceased to be used in the mid-sixth century ce. After this, the existing structures were used as residences, vandalized or destroyed as pagan reminders, or exploited as quarries. However, the razing of temples for the last reason was already common in pharaonic times—to make room for a new building, to remodel a temple facility, or merely to reuse the materials on another site. Thus, out of the thousands of temples that once existed, only a fraction have been preserved for us.
The learned societies of Renaissance Europe adopted the term ‘academy’ in imitation of the Academy established by Plato, whose school was named after Academus, the mythical hero who was sacred to the grove on the outskirts of Athens where Plato taught. The first Renaissance academies were established in Florence and Naples.
Nicola Salvi and the Trevi Fountain
Alongside serious official architectural works on major ecclesiastical
sites, eighteenth-century Rome also sustained a flourishing activity in
more lighthearted but no less meaningful works.The Trevi Fountain
ranks perhaps as the most joyous site in Rome. Built from 1732 to
1762 under the patronage of popes Clement XII, Benedict XIV, and
Clement XIII, the great scenographic water display is often described
as the glorious capstone of the baroque era.This is indeed where
most architectural histories (and tourist itineraries) of Italian
architecture end. It is one of those places, like the Pantheon, where
the entire sweep of Rome’s culture can be read.
The pantheon revisited
The Pantheon is one of the most celebrated and most carefully
studied buildings of Western architecture. In the modern age, as it
had been in the Renaissance, the Pantheon is a crucible of critical
thinking. Preservation of the Pantheon had been undertaken in the
seventeenth century and continued in the eighteenth during the
pontificate of Clement XI.
The public buildings in a Roman city were the most prominent features that would have been noted by a visitor to the city. For example, when Pausanias described Panopeus, he did not wish to describe the settlement as a polls, because it lacked public buildings. Therefore, public buildings were considered to be important: more than that, they created an identity for the inhabitants. Above all, they reflected the needs of the population with respect to the gods. Most public buildings were associated with a religious aspect, whether they were temples, theatres, amphitheatres, basilicas or macella (markets). However, there is also a secular dimension to these buildings. Their construction by an individual enhanced that person’s prestige and position in society. Their name was clearly displayed upon the structure. The public buildings, as monuments, offered each inhabitant of Pompeii an image of their position in relationship to the power of others, the state and the gods . For example, a temple would have exalted a god and the builder of the temple, and emphasised the social distance and divisions of the community. This makes monuments very different from domestic structures.
23
Jan
Portraits of rulers
To the ruling elite, portraiture has always had an important function.
These indiv
iduals were fallible human beings with bodies that aged and
died like any others. But they also held highly visible public roles, and,
according to ancient ideas of rule, the physical body of the ruler was
symbolically overwhelmed by the powerful nature of the office that they
assumed. The division between the frail human body and the ideal
symbolic body of the monarch is what the historian Ernst Kantorowicz
has called ‘the king’s two bodies’. Portraitists had to engage with the
co-existence of both physical and ideal in the body of the monarch; representations of the visages and forms of people who held power needed
to signal their authority.
The brilliance of gold, its intrinsic value and connotations of immortality,
made gold, and to a certain extent silver a treasured material for
portraiture. Literary sources inform us that different emperors rejected
the erection of their images in gold because it implied divine honours.
In his Res Gestae Augustus records that he had 80 statues of himself in
silver melted down for better purposes. These examples demonstrate that
gold and silver were materials which had connotations of immortality
and extravagance and which the emperor used or accepted only cautiously.
Some of the images in gold representing the emperor were
certainly life-size or even colossal but most may have been of small scale or in the bust format.
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