The Perrault Brothers and the Fate of Classicism

During the polemical ferment of France in the 1660s, Louis XIV's minister-factotum Colbert and the Perrault brothers, Charles and Claude, laid the intellectual foundations undergirding France’s political and cultural ascendancy. The Perraults played a central role in the adoption of classicism as the French state's de facto official architecture, and in turn classicism's transplantation from Italy to France had a decisive effect on the evolution of Western architecture, as a newly unhobbled France—with a population of over 20 million (greater than that of the rest of Europe combined) and an administration of rare ambition and matching competence—overtook Italy to finally claim its proper place as the first power of Europe.

Architecture had long been understood as the most tangible manifestation of the power and taste of princes, and so it is no surprise that it became intimately integrated with politics in a court where everything was considered to have political utility and a propagandistic dimension. However, the profession—long-neglected due to decades of civil unrest and the dearth of commissions during Louis XIV's long regency—had fallen into a state of disarray which demanded urgent, remedial attention.

This crisis was quickly redressed; in fact, it lasted less than a decade, and by the mid-1670s the negative impact of several initial architectural missteps (most notably Versailles itself) was effectively erased by the extraordinary efficacy and reach of the propaganda machine installed by Colbert and the cultural élite functioning under his direction, with Charles Perrault (above), also author of the Mother Goose nursery rhymes, acting as his chief architectural assitant. Architecture became so thoroughly enmeshed with the fabrication of the glory of the Sun King, and he in turn with the glory of France, that even today a halo of magnificence serves to protect this closed circle of eternal verities by its blinding influence.

One of the main elements of this hermetic structure is the doctor and architect Claude Perrault’s myth of a French classical tradition stretching back to the late fifteenth century, elaborated in the introduction to his translation of Vitruvius. Perrault's work was on the most basic level an attempt to appropriate Vitruvius—the personification of the Roman roots of the classical tradition—for France, as well as a means to create a classical pre-history to legitimize the adoption of Italian classicism as France's official state architecture.

Scouring France’s architectural history for native classicists and constructing an architectural Pantheon from them became a preoccupation of the Académie, as its members attempted to build a stair—however fragile—between French vernacular architecture and the state-sponsored classicism of the reign of Louis XIV. Tellingly, Perrault (below) whined in his introduction to Vitruvius that generations of Italian architects had conspiratorially hoarded their knowledge of classicism, and as proof he cited the dearth of Italian architectural treatises (frankly one has to laugh at his shamelessness).

All this was simply a desperate attempt to backfill an irreducible historical void, for there is a sharp break in French architecture between the hybrid classical/vernacular as practiced at mid-seventeenth century and the state-sponsored classicism that resulted from Bernini’s voyage to Paris in 1665. Indigenous French architecture, which Colbert took for granted as the most tangible symbol of royal power and authority save for exploits of war, could not be implicated as being unworthy of the role the royal administration had defined for it, and thus history had to be manipulated to bring the past into alignment with the needs of the present.

Classicism, that noble enterprise reborn with the Italian Renaissance, was adopted wholesale by France in the wake of Bernini’s passage. (The great Roman sculptor and architect had remarked while viewing Paris from the heights of Meudon that the city was like a carding comb: a forest of chimney pots unrelieved by any monument worthy of notice, ancient or modern, excepting its great gothic churches.) The cultural bureaucracy under Colbert's direction—which may as well be called the Perrault brothers' cabal—undertook a two-pronged effort to first efface Bernini's influence, primarily by vicious slanders directed by Charles, and secondly to erase any trace that France had ever known a time before classicism at all by Claude's fabrication of a made-to-order classical pre-history, anchored by a false legitimacy based on patently ridiculous claims to France’s inheritance of the legacy of Imperial Rome. It thus comes as no surprise that early in his reign, Louis XIV was more often represented as Caesar Augustus, Rome's great emperor, than he was as Apollo, god of illumination and the arts.

Perrault’s classical canon was simply pure propaganda (even the Spanish Habsburg's Escorial somehow got on the list) and served to obscure the Italian parentage of French classicism and thus held an important political dimension at the onset of an era of aggressive French adventurism in Europe. With the appropriation of Renaissance classicism by the cultural bureaucracy, absolutism supplanted humanism as the ideology underpinning architectural expression, and architecture became inextricably enmeshed with state policy and the manipulation of history to promote Louis XIV’s gloire—that is, the myth of the young, untried king’s power and omniscience, his generative force and semi-divine status.

Claude Perrault's Vitruvian project was instrumental in defining the theoretical boundaries and concerns ruling French classicism, but he also played a crucial role in facilitating its adoption by architects by devising a system for the practical application of classical principles, which he published as The Ordinance of the Five Columnar Orders According to the Methods of the Ancients in 1683. The work was an extraordinarily important manifesto couched as a practical “how-to“ guide to architectural composition, and its widespread adoption and numerous translations had a profound impact upon the course of classical architecture.

The treatise reflects Perrault’s dismissal of humanist principles and his promulgation of Descartian rationalism, with its view of a mechanistic universe. Perrault dismissed the quasi-mystical theoretical trappings which had enveloped the five columnar orders, but in so doing destroyed the fusion between meaning and proportion that imbued Renaissance classicism.

His underlying thesis was crucially incomplete, for Perrault concentrated solely upon codifying a single set of “perfect“ proportions for each of the five columnar orders (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite) while ignoring the larger, determinant question of the proportions of the building being ordered. Specifically, Perrault attempted to deduce a single formula for the internal relationships between the constituent elements of each of the orders, which he deduced by measuring a range of Ancient precedents and establishing a mathematical mean from them. To put it quite bluntly, Perrault invented cookie-cutter classicism, one size fits all.

In classicism, the building’s proportions were paramount and were ruled by the application of geometrical precepts derived from Greek harmonics and mathematics—namely, the Pythagorean geometrical progression of prime numbers and their relation to musical chords, elucidated in Plato’s Timaeus and encapsulated by the Harmonia mundi, the Music of the spheres (below). The proportions a classically trained architect selected to guide his design were comparable to the tonal key chosen by the composer of a musical work, and they in turn determined the choice and treatment of the columnar order that regulated and imposed hierarchy upon the composition.

The orders themselves, far from being static entities whose proportions could be scientifically deduced and quantified, were rather a kind of Platonic ideal, universal in theory but infinitely adaptable in their particulars. Thus they were a closed but elastic system that remained internally coherent, even though their constituent measures (the length of a column in relation to its diameter, for example) were logically varied in response to an architect’s intent and the proportional “key“ he employed.

Unaware or uninterested that a higher level of ordering principles was inextricably enmeshed in the humanist philosophy he dismissed, Perrault never properly addressed the question of the proportions of buildings. Though the French Académie pondered the question and several members also likened proportion to musical composition, these deliberations offered little more than vague platitudes—a feeble echo of the intellectual coherence and direct applicability of humanist principles.

The translation of classicism into a French idiom and its subsequent dissemination had far-reaching historical impact. The wide dissemination of Perrault’s treatise on the orders—which became a massive bestseller throughout Europe for over a century—was instrumental in pushing these principles into obscurity and depriving classicism of the greater part of its creative potential, an impoverishment compounded by the pedantic regimentation of the Académie. (One would be quite interested to know what these savants must have thought about Michelangelo's elongated yet massive, unfluted and volute-less Ionic/Doric columns—in pairs, no less—at the Laurentian Library in Florence, for example.)

Claude Perrault's conception was fully at odds with his subject, for classicism was an art whose fundamental aim was to transcribe Platonic ideals into stone and to express the poetry of the spheres with captured space. In essence, Perrault reduced a complex and nuanced art to the simplistic application of formula—a process of deracination that led to increasingly formulaic designs and that doubtless hastened classicism’s demise.

So shorn, apparently quite in ignorance, of its living, humanist roots, French classicism quickly devolved to the formulas employed by Jules-Hardouin-Mansart, the first and most successful student of Perrault's precepts. The compositional ease Perrault’s ideas afforded him found their ultimate fruit in the remarkable lack of scholarly interest in Hardouin-Mansart (the first monograph of his work was only published some five years ago), even though he was one of the most prolific architects in history and almost single-handedly defined (and designed) the architecture of the Age of Louis XIV. And this is because Hardouin-Mansart's designs are a simulacrum of classicism, a projection of gloire simplified and aggrandized to serve the needs of a monarch who in his maturity was less the leader of a kingdom than he was the figurehead of a vast state bureaucracy.

(Below, Hardouin-Mansart in action: the right-hand wing is the original Enveloppe of Versailles, at left his massive palace-by-the-yard northern addition; a nearly identical pendant was built to the south)

In turn, Hardouin-Mansart's stylistic hegemony and its limited repertoire would crowd out the experiments of the pioneering generations of French classicists and impose itself upon France, and Europe, for well over a century. Add to this the fundamental difference between the French and Italian conception of building—the Italian sculpts a cubic mass, while the Frenchman aligns rectilinear blocks in an accretive fashion—and the end result is Haussman’s Paris, its endless boulevards lined with uniformly handsome and nearly indistinguishable limestone apartment blocks. (Every Parisian has at least once left the Métro distracted and stood, hopelessly disoriented, wondering if he got off at the right stop.)

In the face of increasingly numbing standardization, architects abandoned the search for meaningful form and were seduced by the glittering attractions of novelty, engendering successive waves of historical pastiche in both the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (below, the Royal Pavilion at Brighton). Toward the end of both periods, committed classicists sought a corrective, reinvigorating classical vocabulary with new forms and a return to clarity and purified volumetrics.

Ultimately Perrault’s legacy is ambiguous. Turning to Italy in the seventeenth century, classicism also suffered decline as humanist culture waned, and Perrault’s principles, riding a swelling wave of French political, military and cultural influence, seem simply to have accelerated the inevitable. Perrault undoubtedly banalized classicism, but in so doing offered the key to its widespread adoption and thus played a critical role in fostering the extraordinary flowering of neoclassicism in eighteenth-century Europe.

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.