Noli me tangere: Building Michelangelo's Façade for San Lorenzo, Florence

I am deeply torn by this news: the mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, has proposed that the city erect Michelangelo's design for the main façade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, completing it in 2015, 500 years exactly after Pope Leo X's initial, stillborn commission.

On the one hand I say, "Go for it!" San Lorenzo's missing façade is the ugliest and longest-enduring urban blot of all time. For over five centuries, the bare brick wall has disfigured a uniquely important church that holds Michelangelo's Laurentian Library and Medici Chapel—among the greatest interiors ever created. (Below, the tomb of Lorenzo di Medici in the Medici Chapel, 1531.)

It is better not to put into words the feelings Florence engenders, viewing its masterpieces and experiencing its unique atmosphere for the first time. It is quite heady stuff and left an indelible mark, and I must admit that I was so bowled over after visiting San Lorenzo that I went to lay a rose on Michelangelo's tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce (a church which unfortunately he had no hand in designing).

Upon first encountering San Lorenzo, I was shocked by this hoary wound and infuriated, centuries later, by the pope's monumental pettiness in rejecting Michelangelo's scheme due to cost. I admit, I wanted it built, quite adamantly. But today I hesitate to endorse this plan and actually lean against the project.

Why? First and foremost, because Michelangelo is quite obviously not here to oversee the work. The plans he left are developmental and incomplete. The famous wooden model appears impressive and extremely detailed to the layman but, having studied the surviving elements with an eye to rendering the elevation, I must say I find it daunting to well neigh impossible to faithfully interpret the design. True, the grand lines are there; the design is coherent and legible. But it is schematic and we know for a certainty (from period practice in general and from Michelangelo's working methods in particular) that had it been executed it would have changed markedly, but in ways we can only hazard to guess at.

Fools rush in and I will hazard a guess myself. The fundamental flaw of Michelangelo's design (yes, this can happen, even with Michelangelo) is how he laid out the façade horizontally, layering an upper story of Corinthian pilasters upon a base ordered by engaged Composite columns, and using a vertically stretched infill band between them to absorb the leftover space thus generated (the area is indicated by red brackets on the photo of the wooden model above). This band shares the height and position of the first setback of the nave from the aisles (seen in the photo below), but in fact Michelangelo's rectangular façade would have entirely obscured this area from view and so there is no reason why it should have played such a crucial role in ordering its architecture. And truth be told, the entire façade, as depicted by the model, is stretched vertically—uncomfortably, even awkwardly so.

The basic (and intractable) problem confronting Michelangelo was that he was attempting to fit a two-story, classically ordered façade onto a structure whose proportions demanded an extra half-story or more, and for which the level of the ground-floor cornice was pre-ordained by the existing built fabric. That meant that all the vertical fudging and stretching had to occur in the upper zone, though the simplest move would have been to enlarge the scale of the ground-floor order and so raise its cornice—a move denied him.

A glance at this early sketch for the façade reveals that initially things were even worse and that the zone in question was a sort of three-tiered transitional ziggurat that had no independent aesthetic value or positive purpose. It was a necessary evil, serving simply to absorb leftover space. Moreover, it sat smack in the middle of the façade and was nearly as tall as the main stories themselves and so had taken on a life of its own as a design element, essentially dividing the façade into three bands, though this was clearly not Michelangelo's intention.

In fact, you are forced to conclude that for once in his life the great master had drawn a blank. The model shows that Michelangelo stretched the upper story to its aesthetic limits to reduce this intermediate band (and developed the lower story to harmonize with the upper), but still the result is top-heavy and the fundamental obviousness of the distortion and the awkward moments it caused have not been resolved, and in no way can the result be excused as one of the master's inspired Mannerist flourishes. Indeed, his one Mannerist gesture, those enormous bull's-eyes, were a clever way to accentuate the importance of the upper story—and draw the eye away from the unfortunate no-man's-land below.

Some 60 years later, Palladio, himself no architectural slouch, faced much the same problem with the façade of Il Redentore in Venice. His celebrated solution was a series of justly proportioned but overlapping flat "façades" all applied to the same plane: a tour-de-force of composition, compression and suggestion. Michelangelo, in contrast, was clearly struggling and had not yet achieved a comparable breakthrough; he was still trapped by the prison of the church's existing, infelicitous proportions.

So the scheme recorded in the presentation model is an intractable proportional muddle, clearly unresolved, that I highly doubt Michelangelo himself was satisfied with, and that certainly would have further evolved—perhaps drastically so—if the Pope had gone forward with the project. I suspect that, rather than trying to make it go away to awkward results, Michelangelo instead would have eventually acknowledged the reality of this intermediate half-story and would have developed it in a positive fashion—essentially making lemonade from lemons.

And just as importantly, even if you believe the above analysis is wrong: What of the details, those that define the quality (in all senses of that word) of the structure? Leaving aside entirely the question of the figural sculpture that was integral to the scheme, what about the profiles of the moldings, the detailing of the orders, the inevitable—and uniquely personal and deeply idiosyncratic—Mannerist flourishes that are the hallmarks of Michelangelo's architecture? We have none of that, and no one, today or even half a millennium ago, is or was capable of divining Michelangelo's unique genius but the master himself.

Consider these remarkable details from the Laurentian Library in the photo above (click on the image to enlarge it in a new browser window): at the lower left, the sides of the blind windows are detailed as Doric pilasters whose capitals are overlain by Doric consoles supporting the cornice above (A). Consider also the wildly unorthodox treatment of the pilaster/frames seen in the upper half of the photo (B): bare at the top, then finely fluted in the middle, then even more finely reverse-grooved at bottom, and supported beneath by triglyph-consoles that turn the design screw yet again with triglyphs that become a series of finely grooved, positive, projecting ribs applied to a bare, cubic mass (C). It is a dizzyingly bravura performance of entirely unexpected and idiosyncratic inventiveness. One architectural element transforms into another, figure becomes ground, and ornament is abstracted and juxtaposed, deconstructed and reconceived with effortless elegance. Simply spectacular.

And we haven't even begun to consider the outlandish spatial games being played with the inset-and-engaged Doric columns and the shared corner pilaster between them (D), turning a corner with an unparalleled brilliance that surely Mies van der Rohe must have envied—he who spent his entire career pondering the question of turning the corner. Note the lower cornice band as well, and how the two projecting cornices crowning the framed niches nearly meet at the corner, creating a cubic void of great visual power (E). And finally, consider also the voluptuous sinuosity of the great volute consoles that support the Doric columns: the virtuosity of their sculpted bandwork and the off-handed way they touch (F).

No one can recreate such genius, certainly not today with the classical tradition itself dead for a century, and we had better not even try.

We have examples of remarkable modern restorations—the exemplary reconstruction of Pavlovsk and the czarist palaces after WWII come first to mind, as well as the Frauenkirche in Dresden and the promise of the Berliner Stadtschloss. But all these buildings existed into modern times and a wealth of documentary and photographic details were used to guide their reconstruction.

In this case we should heed a cautionary example from Versailles in the mid 1980s. In the late 18th century, Louis XV's fist architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, had designed a monumental stair hall to give access to the enfilade of parade rooms on the first floor, replacing the Ambassadors' Staircase which the king had ordered destroyed. The scheme went unrealized some two centuries and the château seemed none the worse for it, until Versailles' architectes-fonctionnaires attempted to channel the spirit of Gabriel with CAD-drawn stereotomy, and built the design from computer-guided, precision-cut limestone blocks. Traditionally, the architect worked in concert with a team of master masons and sculptors to design and execute the program of ornamental detailing that would enliven the bare stonework, but in this case both architect and stonecarvers were deemed obsolete. The result is an aesthetic catastrophe—a schematic, clumsily detailed, awkwardly ornamented and entirely unconvincing volume—and now, a generation later, Versailles' custodians, gênés, are at a loss what to do with it. (Don't be wowed or cowed by all those columns and all that cut limestone; click to enlarge and examine carefully the deep ceiling cove, then trace the tragic, leaden descent of the farther balustrade and its ignominious, lumpen end as it collides into the inner stairwell.)

Imagine then, the banality of the disaster (or the disaster of the banality—sadly, Hanna Arendt is no longer with us to offer guidance) that awaits Florence; at least the stair hall at Versailles is an interior space and so can simply be locked off. I wish it would be otherwise, but wishes are not ponies and the world is not what we wished it would be in our youth, and so I can confidently predict that building an unfinished design by Michelangelo in the 21st century will end badly, at least judged in aesthetic terms, though in commercial and propagandistic terms it may well be an enormous success.

All this brings to mind another saying, this one from Ancient Rome: Quod licit Jovis non licit bovis. The feats of Jove should not be attempted by bovines.

Architectural Symbolism 101: Geometry

Classical architecture has a rich and intricate symbolic repertoire reaching back to earliest recorded history that today can be compared to ancient Latin: a language once in common currency but today understood only by a few adepts. Well into the 19th century, the educated viewer could read a building as one reads a book, but today the language of classicism is largely mute to us, much of its meaning lost and eroded by time and the relentless evolution of human societies.

The first step in deciphering the meaning of the built world is to understand a structure's geometry—both its two-dimensional plan and in three dimensions. The origins of geometry—literally, "the measure of the earth"—are as obscure as the origins of civilization, and much that was "discovered" by the likes of Pythagoras was actually obtained from the priestly caste of ancient Egypt—their own knowledge so lost in the mists of time that it was attributed to Toth, god of language and knowledge—and was simply openly disseminated by the Greeks for the first time.

Pi, for example, often attributed to Archimedes, is clearly encoded in the measures of the Great Pyramid of Giza (and was also known in ancient China, the Indus Valley and in Sumer). Likewise, the symbolic meaning of geometry and number can be traced through the Greeks and the other ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean basin to Egypt and Sumer, and when we continue farther in time we encounter the evidence of monolithic civilizations destroyed by the last ice age, about which so much has been projected and too little known. The point here is to identify the origin of the symbolic meaning of geometric figures: Egypt, transmitted to us via the Greeks and their neighbors.

We will use a very simple example to illustrate geometry's symbolic power: the Bosquet of the Three Fountains in the gardens of Versailles (depicted in the watercolor reproduced at the top of the post). This elaborate garden-within-a-garden was built in the early 1700s by order of Louis XIV, and tradition holds that the king acted as his own architect and directed the bosquet's design.

The bird's-eye-view watercolor above was commissioned by the Société des Amis de Versailles to aid in fund-raising efforts to rebuild the bosquet. As you can see, the garden is laid out on three levels: each parterre with its central fountain is linked by grass steps, ramps and low cascades to the level below. Like the other baroque bosquets in the park of Versailles designed for Louis XIV, the Three Fountains is rigidly geometric and features elaborate water displays.

Though difficult to see in this small reproduction, the highest, farthest fountain has a circular basin; the middle basin is square and the lowest is octagonal. And here we have the crux of the bosquet's symbolic meaning: the circle (and its three-dimensional counterpart the sphere) represents the arcing vault of the heavens.

The square represents the earth, literally its four "corners," or cardinal directions (as well as the four known continents of the Renaissance age: Europe, Asia, Africa and America).

Finally, the octagon is the symbol of kingship, standing halfway between earth and Heaven, the square and the circle—a perfect geometric form that perfectly incarnates the French conception of the sovereign as the essential mediator standing midway between God and the people.

The traditional method of constructing an octagon begins with a square, upon which one inscribes the arc of a circle. Constructing an octagon also generates an infinitely regressing triangle, further adding to the figure's symbolic power (in fact, Louis XIV became linked to Descartes' idea of a centered infinity—with himself as the central point from which infinity was referenced, of course).

You will also notice that Louis XIV did not place the octagon between the circle and the square, as one would expect, but rather he employed it as the summation of a progression, or an equation: Heaven (circle) and earth (square) give rise to the king (octagon). And here we have a simple but profound insight into the mind of the Sun King: unsurprisingly, he considered himself and his position as the summation of the union of Heaven and earth, rather than as the mediator between them. No one ever said Louis XIV was afflicted by self-doubt.

Finally, what we have here is a perfect symbolic expression of absolutism—no surprise really, as the bosquet was conceived by the man who literally defined the age. France, in the Age of Louis XIV, superceded Italy to claim first place among the powers of Europe in all spheres, including for the first time, culturally. Though it used the art and architecture of Italy as its template, France constructed its cultural hegemony upon the foundations of absolutism, not humanism, and Leonardo's humanist vision of man as the center and measure of all things was replaced by the idea of a single man—a king.

Garden Tents

One of the most evocative symbols of summer is the garden tent, so it's the perfect subject for July's first post.

In the late eighteenth century, Europeans considered tents the most characteristic of Oriental structures and erected them prolifically in their gardens, indiscriminately labeling them as Tartar, Turkish, Siamese or Chinese. There was a kernel of truth in this notion since nomadic tents are indeed the origin of the Chinese pagoda's characteristically concave, upturned roof—though it is highly doubtful that any European gardener of the period knew this.

As picturesque as they were inexpensive, tents became a staple of Anglo-Chinese folly gardens and a number of them, such as the Tartar Tent at the Parc Monceau in Paris (above) were even constructed of permanent materials. Sheathed in trompe l'œil tole-work (painted tin sheet-metal), this tent was actually an open-air alcove and part of a wing added to the main pavilion; dense plantings to either side hid the connecting passageways from view. Built circa 1775, it was also the first of its kind, inspiring similar tole-work tents at the Désert de Retz and at Haga and Drottningholm in Sweden.

The Parc Monceau, the Duc de Chartres' folly garden, which today is a Parisian city park, also featured this extraordinary draped canvas tent (above); nearby was a stand with turbaned lackeys offering camel rides (below).

These engraved scenes of Monceau by Carmontelle, the park's designer, are among our favorites: they carefully record the slightly mad clutter of this Ancien Régime Disneyland and are peopled by elaborately clothed and bewigged visitors, perfectly capturing the atmosphere of slightly absurd refinement that reigned in French folly gardens. Just how self-consciously aburdist or surreal Monceau actually was is in fact quite difficult to judge; consider, for example, that no structure was more characteristic of the countryside of the period than a windmill just like the folly depicted in the lower view—it would be comparable to building a suburban split-level in a landscape garden today.

Ephemeral garden tents became extremely fashionable at Versailles during the reign of Louis XVI, as their ease of construction, inherent theatricality and low cost made them the perfect foil for the numerous, equally extravagant fêtes hosted by Marie-Antoinette at Trianon. Elaborate garden parties, often spanning a week's festivities, were an ancient royal tradition and were first mounted at Versailles by Louis XIV in the late 1600s. In contrast to the baroque pomp of the Sun King, Marie-Antoinette transformed the landscape gardens of Trianon into a rustic, illuminated wonderland for her famed evening garden parties. (Below, the Belvedere during one of these "illuminations.")

Popular rumor was such that after the Parisian mob stormed Versailles in 1789, among the first demands of the deputies of the Third Estate was to examine the Queen’s garden tents, which they believed fashioned of precious fabrics encrusted with gold and silver. The reality, retrieved from the store rooms of the Menus plaisirs, was more worthy of the stage than royalty: painted canvases hung with pasteboard decorations.

Another Small Jewel

Buildings such as this are the reason we chose to dedicate our work to garden architecture: their garden settings allow their architects a license to dream, creating—in the best of circumstances—small, virtually unknown masterpieces that are nonetheless unforgettable once you have encountered them.

This miniature neo-Palladian pantheon, the Temple of Friendship at Pringy, distills one of architecture's most potent archetypes and limns it with one of architecture's most haunting styles. All the more remarkable as the architect himself is quite obscure—Soufflot the Younger, nephew to the great French mid-18th century architect, Jacques-Germain Soufflot—author of another, much grander and world-famous Pantheon in Paris.

As is often the case with garden follies—though in this case the building has more powerful a presence than what those words might conjure—the Temple of Friendship has a charming back-story: commissioned by the friends of the Duchess of Gontaut-Biron and erected on her estate of Pringy, located near Melun to the south of Paris, during her extended absence in 1785. Today, it is difficult to imagine the generosity and complexity of such an extravagant gesture, so characteristic of the aristocracy of the Ancien Régime.

And the building itself is simply and forcefully detailed with a severe, stripped-down and abstracted classicism that is clearly Palladian but also offers intimations of the Revolutionary-era architecture of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. The cream-white stucco work plays masterfully against the reddish rubble walls, and those walls as well as the stuccoed wall of the temple front are battered, or angled slightly outward, giving the building its remarkable sense of presence.

Finally, a shameless plug: if you haven't done so, please do visit the new page on our main site, Latest Work, where we present a number of our most recent watercolors (this one among them).

The Architectural Alphabet

In their May issue, our friends at Architectural Digest featured our Architectural Alphabet note cards, bringing a mass influx to our website, for which we're extremely grateful, and we thought it would be a good thing to explain the project here for these visitors.

Our previous exhibitions and books have investigated both the lighter and serious sides of architectural history, from chinoiserie garden pavilions to the château of Versailles, and in 2008 it seemed the perfect juncture, after nearly two decades documenting the rich and varied patrimony of European and American architecture and gardens, for a bit of play—for our own five-fingered exercise.

Our touchstones for the abecedarium, which is also a limited-edition book prefaced by the interior designer Charlotte Moss, were the Ancien Régime and the Grand Tour—the de rigueur Italian sojourn of the European aristocracy and its architects. The English, the most adventurous voyagers, flocked to Florence, Rome and Naples in the 18th century to discover for themselves antiquity and its Renaissance interpretations, and the wealth of Italian painting, sculpture and decorative objects that embellish the interiors of Britain’s great country houses—and occasionally the architecture of the houses themselves—testify to the passion, enthusiasm and acquisitiveness of these peripatetic lords. French nobles, spellbound by Versailles and terrified by the prospect of absenting themselves from its eternal tedium only to face the prospect of lost position and favor upon their return, were far more reluctant to cross the Alps and instead sent their abbés and architects. German princes followed the English example and gladly abandoned their tiny principalities for months and even years at a time for the charms of Italy.

Among the most fascinating byways of architectural history are fantasy projects, designs drawn exclusively for the joy of composition, and one should also include the enduring passion for composing decorative vases, drawn by architects and designers such as Michelangelo and Charles Le Brun, to cite but two artists fascinated by their forms and decorative vocabulary. Whether doodled in the margins of drawings or published as engraved portfolios, the creative impulse, even for such an ostensibly minor subject as a garden vase, required no commissioner to justify itself.

Quite often in garden architecture, fantasy projects differed from built work only in degree, and occasionally not at all, as designers took the idea of the garden as an alternate universe to unparalleled extremes, peopling it with structures and scenes of marvelous strangeness. Festival architecture, transient papier-maché fantasies erected for court amusements, regularly transmuted to carved stone, and stone itself was supplanted by lathe and wood in the last, turbulent decades of the Ancien Régime, as transience itself became a rage.

To pay homage to this remarkably fecund period, we freely combine the architectural and the decorative, much as rococo interiors often featured painted boiserie panels of fantastic scenes, such as the famed Grande Singerie at the château of Chantilly by Christophe Huet. And there are numerous allusions to the work of other French artists, such as Watteau, Boucher, Pillement, Desportes, Hubert Robert, Lancret, and Oudry, who together have shaped much of posterity’s visual perception of the eighteenth century.

So in the end, this alphabet is a play upon the vocabulary of the architecture and decorative arts of the Ancien Régime and the Grand Tour, intended for children of all ages. The vignettes evoke the fantasy and exoticism that inspired the architects and garden designers of the period, reference its themes and its symbolic repertoire, for the period was also the end of a great age of allegory and allusion, which the Enlightenment would soon extinguish.

A key to the letters: Acanthus, Balustrade, Chinoiserie, Vase, Kiosk, Ruin.

Russian Follies and Pavilions

One of the great cultural revelations to occur in the aftermath the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago was the West's rediscovery of St. Petersburg and its great imperial estates.

First and oldest is Peterhof, the residence of the city's founder and namesake, Peter the Great, built on the shores of the Neva Bay of the Gulf of Finland, Russia's maritime corridor to Europe and the raison d'être of St. Petersburg itself.

Below, the cascades at Peterhof.

To the southeast are Tarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk: the former the Russian Versailles, magisterial and imprinted with the remarkable personality of Catherine (II) the Great, and later the bourgeois taste of her grandson, Alexander I; the latter the exquisite neo-Palladian estate of her ill-fated son, Paul I, and his widowed Empress, Maria Feodorovna.

At top, the Caprice or Krestovy Bridge at Tarskoye Selo and below, the Pavilion of the Three Graces by Cameron at Pavlovsk.

Oranienbaum, the baroque hunting estate of Catherine II—originally built for Duke Aleksandr Menshikov, boon companion to Peter the Great and de facto czar during the reign of Catherine I—is to the west near the Neva Bay. Though built on a monumental scale that is typically Russian, Oranienbaum is nonetheless the most intimate and rustic of all the imperial estates and that most in harmony with nature.

Below, the Peterhof Gate at Oranienbaum.

Finally, there is the outlying estate of Gatchina, the vast neoclassical palace Catherine II ordered built for her lover, Count Orlov, and which she graciously repurchased from his heirs for her son Paul upon Orlov's death. Gatchina is as far again to the south of Tarskoye Selo as it in turn is from St. Petersburg, its relative isolation (with that of Oranienbaum) causing it to suffer from a chronic lack of funds for its complete restoration.

Below, the monumental ruins of the Aviary at Gatchina.

Peterhof, Tarskoye Selo and Gatchina are palaces conceived on a scale rivaling Versailles and Fontainebleau, but were used solely as residences; there was no precedent in Russia for the court living in attendance on the czar. And all five of these estates feature formal gardens and landscape parks scattered with an unparalleled variety of pavilions, garden follies and monuments in Easter-egg colors, the work of a host of foreign architects—predominately Italian, later British—who brought to Russia the architectural knowledge it so sorely lacked. The Italians—Rastrelli, Rinaldi and Rossi—designed palaces and pavilions of such baroque exuberance that they have few counterparts even in Italy, and later the Scottish architect Cameron and the Italian Quarenghi designed a host of serenely proportioned neoclassical structures for Catherine the Great and Paul I at Tarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk.

Below, Rastrelli's spectacular Hermitage Pavilion in the Catherine Park of Tarskoye Selo.

Whether baroque or neoclassical, these imperial estates are all follies in the broadest sense; there is little or no contrast, as in France, between the sober palace and its garden buildings, but rather the palaces themselves are often more gilded, more colorful, more ornate, more plastic—in short, more exuberant—than the follies in their parks. Consider below, the chapel at Peterhof:

Andrea Palladio

Andrea Palladio is the most famous architect of the modern world, and here we define modern in opposition to the ancient world (the architects of the great pyramids, as well as their entire history, are lost to time), and he has been so for over four centuries, essentially since he published his Four Books of Architecture in Venice in 1570.

His influence is such that his name has come to define a very clear, seemingly eternal architectural aesthetic, and moreover he is only one of a handful of human beings whose name has become an adjective; beside Palladianism itself, we have Palladian bridges and windows and villas, each invention an aspect of his monumental talent. So, after nearly four and a half centuries, what exactly is Palladianism, this architect's potent legacy, and what is the crux of his enduring fame?

First there is the Four Books, doubtless the most popular architectural book ever published. In it, Palladio presents the entire scope of architecture as then defined, from the proper use of the five classical columnar orders to civil engineering, from reconstitutions of ancient Roman monuments to his own architectural designs. More important, though, is his built work—particularly the poetic corpus of villas in the Veneto, the fertile plain between Venice's Adriatic coast and the foothills of the Dolomites. Built for wealthy land-owners, Palladio's villas are a theme-and-variations comparable to Bach's fugues or Mozart's late symphonies: they are the expression of fecund, deliberate intention in search of Beauty.

And Palladio's essential innovation—the idea of such power that it would endure five centuries—is what, in essence? In the end it is quite simple and quite profound: Palladio was the first to apply the Greco-Roman temple front—the triangular pediment and columns—to a private residence. In doing so, he elevated his patrons to the realm of the gods. His villas are, for the most part, simple, square-planned buildings whose essential form is more ancient than Rome itself, and he grafts onto these four-square volumes (the square being the symbol of the earth, literally its four corners) the symbol of divinity, the pedimented colonnade of the Greco-Roman temple. Crossing the threshold, the resident entered a temple; man lived in the abode of the gods.

What is so remarkable, after all these centuries, is the profound dichotomy between the stolid cubic volume of the ancient Roman farmhouse, ennobled by the delicate appendage of the columned temple front. Perfect examples are the villas Badoer (top) and Chiericati (below); the famed Villa Rotonda (above) is Palladio's ultimate distillation of this simple but revolutionary idea.

We have become so accustomed to this remarkable juxtaposition that, for centuries now, we no longer even see the incredible clash of the humble and the exalted, the human and the divine—the stolid mass of the peasant and the delicate filigree of the gods.

This was Andrea Palladio's great innovation—recognizing the divinity in each of us, and translating that idea into our built world—and for that he has gained true and enduring fame.

II. The Central Park Obelisk

At 71 feet tall and weighing 244 tons, the Central Park obelisk, commonly known as Cleopatra's Needle, was one of a pair carved from pink Aswan granite and originally erected before the temple of the sun in the sacred city of Heliopsis (the city of the sun, known as On to ancient Egyptians), for Pharaoh Thutmosis III in 1443 B.C. Some two centuries later Ramesses II ordered its flanks carved with hieroglyphs commemorating his military victories. With the collapse of dynastic Egypt and the abandonment of Heliopsis, the obelisks, long toppled, were re-erected by the Romans at Alexandria before the Caesarium during the reign of the Emperor Augustus in 12 B.C. Already worn by time, the obelisk's base was stabilized by bronze rods, dissimulated by sculptures of crabs at each corner and engraved with the date of the obelisk's erection and the name of the Roman engineer who supervised the work.

With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, a group of influential New Yorkers led by William H. Hurlbert, editor of the New York World, and backed by the rail magnate William H. Vanderbilt, openly began to militate that the United States be offered the "gift" of an Egyptian obelisk. Their case of European obelisk-envy only intensified in 1877, when the English engineer John Dixon undertook the removal of the fallen Alexandrian obelisk—a gift to England dating from 1819 to commemorate Lord Nelson's victory in the Battle of the Nile. (After a near-disastrous sea voyage, the fallen obelisk was erected at Victoria Embankment, London in 1878.) Dixon, sensing profit to be made from the New York clique, informed Hurlbert that he could demount and ship the remaining obelisk from Alexandria to New York for the sum of £15,000.

Vanderbilt quickly agreed to the sum but the deal soon hit a fatal snag when the Khedive Ismail Pasha indicated that the obelisk in question was not Dixon's to sell and that any negotiations were to be undertaken by the government of the United States and not private parties. Nonplussed, Hurlbert contacted William Evarts, the US Secretary of State, and Henry G. Stebbins, former Congressman, President of the New York Stock Exchange and the then Parks Commissioner for the City of New York, and arranged with them to begin negotiations with the Khedive through the offices of the State Department. The negotiations, headed by Judge Elbert Farman, US Counsel General to Egypt, dragged on through the winter but the Khedive eventually relented to the removal of the Alexandrian obelisk in May 1878.

After a year's planning, the obelisk's arduous year-long transport was supervised by Lieutenant Commander Henry Gorringe, a U.S. Navy engineer. Gorringe began the delicate task of lowering the obelisk in early August of 1879 but suspended the operation for two months due to local protests and legal challenges—no doubt in large part incited by the large American flag that had been raised atop the crated monolith—which required Consular intervention to quell. Once lowered by fulcrum—with an uncontrolled drop that thankfully did no damage—the obelisk was slid into the hold of the drydocked steamer Dessoug through an opening in its hull. The ship set sail June 12, 1880, arriving in New York July 20th. Another seven months were required to transport the obelisk across Manhattan to Graywacke Knoll behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art where, with great pomp, ceremony and speechifying, it was re-erected upon its original base on January 22, 1881 in the presence of Secretary of State Evarts and a crowd of 10,000 extremely chilled spectators.

The obelisk's saga created a press frenzy in New York, and as noted in an earlier post, over 9,000 freemasons paraded up Fifth Avenue in a celebration simply to mark the laying of the cornerstone of the obelisk's foundation by the Grand Master of Masons of the State of New York. However, before any heated editorializing about the relative merits of Madison, Union or Herald Squares, Columbus Circle or elsewhere could be mounted, the self-appointed site selection committee—Hurlbert, Gorringe and the artist Frederick Church, who was enlisted in an effort to paper over the fait accompli rubberstamping Vanderbilt's wishes—announced its decision to little joy but that expressed by the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to which the Vanderbilt family were major donors. Vanderbilt, owner of the New York Central Railroad (with its notoriously murderous Manhattan tunnel) and the world's richest man, would gain lasting infamy for saying, "The public be damned!" the following year.

The obscure site, an open greensward some yards behind the Museum, was a truly spectacular misplacement of this outstanding ancient monument and ranks as the greatest wasted opportunity for civic embellishment in the city's entire architectural history. With breathtaking hubris and offering appallingly flimsy justifications for the choice, Gorringe wrote, "In order to avoid needless discussion of the subject, it was decided to maintain the strictest secrecy as to the location determined on." He noted that the prime advantage of the Knoll was its "isolation" and that it was the best site to be found inside the park, as it was quite elevated and the foundation could be firmly anchored in bedrock, lest Manhattan suffer "some violent convulsion of nature." Indeed.

I. Objects of Awe

The Egyptian obelisk is Western society's most potent and coveted talisman and literally stands as the physical marker of civilization itself. Of the 21 ancient obelisks standing today, Egypt itself retains only four; Rome is graced by 13, all plundered by its ancient emperors, then re-erected during the Renaissance. The remainder are found in what the Victorians, who coveted them as profoundly as had the Caesars, would have called 'the great metropolises of Western civilization'—Istanbul, Florence, Paris, London and finally New York City. (The fourth Duke of Northumberland and Sir William Bankes each also pillaged an obelisk as the ultimate in Grand Tour souvenirs; today they stand in Durham University by way of Alnwick Castle and at Kingston Lacy in Dorset).

Why this all came to be is quite obvious, for obelisks are quite simply the perfect monument: they are rare in the extreme, they were conceived as sacred monuments by the semi-divine rulers of the world's greatest ancient civilization, and they are the largest, heaviest and most elegant objects ever created by man. All hyperbole aside, everything about them is truly exceptional.

All ancient obelisks are monoliths quarried from the fine pink granite found at Aswan, ancient Selene, located on the banks of the Nile in Lower Egypt. The earliest obelisks were raised at On, the sacred ceremonial city known to us today by its Greek name, Heliopsis, city of the sun, or more exactly, city of the sun god Ra. Obelisks were always erected in pairs and stood at the forecourt flanking the entrance through the pylon, the massive, chamfered wall pierced by a central portal that gave access to the inner courtyard of the temple, as seen in the photograph of Luxor, above.

In form, an obelisk is defined by a square-sectioned, tapering shaft and a pyramid-shaped cap, known logically enough as the pyramidion. Like the classical Greek columnar orders (i.e., Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns), obelisks follow certain consistent proportional rules: the height of the shaft ranges from nine to eleven times the width of the base, and the pyramidion's height equals the width of the base. The largest obelisks are—excepting the extraordinary foundation stones at Baalbek, Lebanon—also the largest monoliths known to man. One unfinished obelisk, still lying in its quarry bed at Aswan but abandoned due to natural fissures, is estimated to weigh over 1,200 tons and would have stood 42 meters high—a staggering mass that even we today would find extremely difficult to maneuver.

Like the Greeks, Egyptian masons employed entasis—an imperceptible convex bulging—to give the long, straight shaft a pleasing visual equilibrium. The pyramidion and shafts were invariably carved with dedicatory hieroglyphs composed in the name of the Pharaoh who had commissioned the obelisk; the faces of the deeply incised glyphs were highly polished while the shaft itself was left in an unpolished state. Pyramidions were, as today seen on the other obelisk from Luxor now standing in Paris at the Place de la Concorde, capped with gold ("the flesh of the gods") and many also had their shafts sheathed with polished copper sheets, and more rarely with iron or entirely in gold.

The Egyptians called obelisks tejen, a word synonymous with "protection" or "defense." Obelisk is derived more prosaically from the Greek word obeliskos, a roasting spit. The orthodox explanation of their meaning offered by nineteenth-century scholars is that obelisks are a representation and invocation of the sun's rays, and thus of the sun god Ra himself. They reach toward the sun to draw its generative power to earth as well as to capture Ra's protection, and thus they dispel storms and evil influences. This interpretation makes perfect sense, since obelisks first appeared at On (Heliopsis), the city of Ra, though later they were erected before the most important temples throughout the Upper and Lower Kingdom.

However, left unspoken by the Victorians is the obelisk's obvious phallic symbolism, which is an overt invocation of Osiris—who, with his sister and wife Isis, was the most important god of the Egyptian pantheon. First-born of the union of the earth (Geb) and the sky (Nut) and first Pharaoh of the mythical "First Time," Osiris ruled wisely and mercifully as the "Lord of love" until he was murdered by his evil brother Set, who coveted his throne and who incarnated the desert. Set hacked Osiris' corpse into 14 pieces and cast them away but Isis retrieved all his members save his penis, which Set had thrown into the Nile. Isis fashioned a replacement phallus of gold and momentarily resurrected her brother/husband to copulate with him, bearing their son Horus, "the Savior" who overthrew Set to regain the throne and so was considered the progenitor of all later Pharaohs. Osiris then became ruler of the Duat, or the realm of the afterlife, and together with Isis incarnated mercy, fecundity, rebirth, immortality and the cycle of the seasons.

Most broadly then, the obelisk embodied the Egyptian belief of "as above, so below" and linked the male to the female, the human to the divine, the earth to the cosmos, the living to the dead, and the reigning Pharaoh to Osiris, god of the afterlife and of immortality. The male form standing before the interior recesses of the temple, the tejen drew Ra's essence down from the rays of the sun and Osiris' seed up from the underworld.

The obelisk before St. Peter's basilica at the Vatican evokes this regenerative symbolism quite explicitly, standing as it does at the center of the female forms of Bernini's oval colonnade and before Michelangelo's dome; likewise, the Washington Monument faces the Capitol's dome in symbolic re-enactment of the Isis-Osiris myth.

Wholly apart from these vast, monumental urban ensembles, the original schema of the obelisk has also been preserved and retransmitted, almost ad infinitum, by its transmutation into classical architecture in the form of paired columns flanking an entry portal. Ultimately, the pair of posts bracketing the lowliest front door derives from Egyptian temples, and the most famous example of this schema is of course the pair of finely worked bronze columns that stood before Solomon's Temple and which are minutely described in the Bible. These freestanding columns were so important that Hiram, the bronzeworker who King Solomon "fetched out of Tyre" to furnish the Temple, had given them names: the right pillar, Jachin and the left pillar, Boaz. Immediately thereafter, the Bible recounts that Hiram "made a molten sea, ten cubits from one brim to the other"—that is, he cast a massive bronze basin that stood in the Temple's courtyard and held "two thousand baths" of water. Biblical scholars have long speculated what function this basin served, and posit either a symbolic linkage to the "primordial waters" of the book of Genesis or its use in ritual ablutions—even though the Bible states that Hiram also fashioned ten smaller basins explicitly for this purpose. Whatever its true purpose, the circular basin doubtless also symbolized attributes of Isis: the feminine, fertility, the womb.

Of course here we have also just encountered several foundational traditions of freemasonry. The bronzeworker Hiram of Tyre is known to every mason as Hiram Abiff (linked through his own murder to Osiris); and, according to the Masonic Old Ritual, hidden inside Hiram's hollow columns were ancient records and the most valuable secrets of the Jewish people (and those they inherited from their captors, the Egyptians)—the veritable ancient secrets of the occult mystery schools. And such is the influence of freemasonry that, if you were to dig beneath almost any significant public structure erected since the nation's founding, you would likely as not discover Masonic tokens beneath its cornerstone and Masonic symbolism incorporated into its site: Over 9000 freemasons paraded up Fifth Avenue to celebrate the laying of the cornerstone for the New York obelisk on October 2nd, 1880, in a ceremony presided by the Grand Master of Masons of the State of New York.

Though in steady decline since the Depression era, freemasonry has recently received renewed attention, and with it vilification and demonization, exemplified by the enormous success of the conspiratorial fiction of Dan Brown. Masonic societies are believed to harbor a powerful Luciferian brotherhood, an elite network that is one of the pillars of the "unseen hand" guiding world events. Its occult symbols are woven into the fabric of our society and our built world. Doubtless the contemporary reality of Masonic influence is far more prosaic than this, though nonetheless the preceding sentence is entirely true: Masonic symbolism is indeed woven into the fabric of our built world—because freemasonry's symbols are derived from our common legacy as a civilization. Occult is an ancient word meaning "hidden" and has no prima facie connotation of sinister, as so many today believe. The point here is not to defend freemasonry but rather to attempt to disentangle its oft-contentious reputation from the realm of architecture and its meaning.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently sinister in obelisks, paired columns, sphinxes, pyramids, or any other ancient architectural elements adopted by the masons, nor have they become corrupted in how they have been employed or reinterpreted. To give but one example already cited: the great obelisk on the Mall in Washington, DC, was designed by masons and stands in a city whose plan was designed by a mason and is dedicated to the first president of the United States, a 33rd degree Scottish Rite freemason. Few structures on earth besides their own lodges are more Masonic than the Washington Monument, and yet it is a magnificent monument to a truly great man whose symbolism echoes through the ages, well over 4,000 years, to its roots in ancient Egypt. However, it does not follow that its meaning is the same as that the Egyptians gave to their obelisks, nor does it follow that it is some dark perversion of it; rather its meaning is the summation of all that has come before commingled with the aspirations of its builders, and with the greatest part reserved for its intended purpose, to honor the nation's founder with a form synonymous with immortality.

Hidden in Plain Sight

This small limestone pavilion, of truly exceptional beauty, was built in the mid-18th century at the entrance to the Maison royale de Saint-Louis, known simply as Saint-Cyr, the vast convent school that stood a bare stone's throw from Versailles. Louis XIV established St-Cyr in 1684 as a pension to educate impoverished aristocratic girls at the behest of Madame de Maintenon, his pious morganatic wife, and the imposing complex was the work of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the Sun King's ubiquitous First Architect.

Louis XV, true to form, held not the slightest interest in Saint-Cyr; though he was its patron and paid its bills and galloped past its gates on hunts literally hundreds of times over the decades, he never once bothered to visit the school and refused to enroll any of his daughters there. Nonetheless, he did commission the Pavillon des Archives; and though records have been lost, the pavilion's outstanding quality and distinctive style indicates that it was quite probably designed by his First Architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel—the greatest French architect of the mid-eighteenth century and author of the Petit Trianon and the Place de la Concorde.

In 1808, Napoléon, also true to form, transformed St-Cyr into a military academy. Heavily damaged in World War II, the complex was restored by order of Charles De Gaulle and still today houses a military academy. Fortunately, the Archives Pavilion survived virtually unscathed from these attacks, though its interiors suffered at the hands of ruthless, fluorescent-lit postwar functionalism.

There is profound truth in the real-estate agent's mantra of "Location, location, location." Though it is a perfect jewel—the apex of the pavillon de plaisance form and the distillation of French neoclassicism—nevertheless the pavilion remains virtually unknown and has rarely been published in the architectural literature, and even then as a footnote. Had it been erected within Versailles' walls rather than in St-Cyr's shadow, the pavilion would today be mentioned in the same breath as Gabriel's masterwork, the Petit Trianon; instead it stands overlooked and anonymous, mere yards from the main road linking the towns of St-Cyr and Versailles.