Читать книгу Antiquity in Gotham - Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis - Страница 9

Drawing upon the new theoretical framework of the “Neo-Antique,” which I developed with Katharine von Stackelberg,⁹ this book presents an original analysis of the reception of ancient architecture in New York City from the mid–eighteenth century through the early twenty-first century. Since the 1970s, reception studies has emerged as a major subfield of classical studies that critically examines the appropriation and reinterpretation—what scholars call the reception—of ancient literature, drama, art, and architecture in postantique periods.¹⁰ This study marks the first comprehensive study of the reception of ancient architecture in New York City.¹¹

Breaking with the convention of classifying neoclassical (and Greek Revival), Egyptianizing, and Near Eastern–inspired architecture as distinct categories, the Neo-Antique framework brings together these diverse sources of inspiration into focus in a single continuum. As different as these ancient models are, the choice to draw upon one or more of them participates in a common set of impulses and strategies. When we look at the repurposing of antiquity as a single broader phenomenon, we can understand the strategy more clearly and better define the intellectual, conceptual, and chronological divergences that mark the reception of different ancient architectural traditions.

The Neo-Antique also functions as a framework like the “Medieval Revival,”¹² an umbrella term that describes the diverse engagements with medieval art and architecture that started in the mid–eighteenth century. While the Gothic and Romanesque revivals are undoubtedly different, they are clearly connected. The same is true of the reinterpretation of Greek, Egyptian, Roman, and ancient Near Eastern architectural forms in New York City—they are distinct but also intrinsically linked.

Furthermore, by thinking of the Neo-Antique almost as an ancient revival style of its own, we can discuss, analyze, compare, and contrast the use of Egyptianizing or Neo-Egyptian architecture¹³ to those reinterpretations of Greco-Roman architecture and to that of the ancient Near East in New York City, rather than seeing them as separate phenomena.¹⁴ Using the more flexible and inclusive framework of the Neo-Antique, I explore why models from different ancient civilizations were used for certain types of buildings in New York City. Although there is a tendency in the existing scholarship to emphasize the use of classical forms for civic and banking architecture, ancient architectural forms can be found in everything from restaurants to reservoirs. For example, both classical and Egyptian architectural forms were used for grand mausolea in Green-Wood and Woodlawn cemeteries. Roman, Egyptian, and “Babylonian” motifs were pressed into service in garish new restaurants in the first decade of the twentieth century. The appropriation of architecture from the ancient Near East in New York City’s buildings was relatively rare, and with too few examples for a book-length study, scholars often ignored them.¹⁵ Their inclusion in this project brings them the scholarly attention they deserve and allows us to explore why these forms were not as popular as borrowings from the classical world and ancient Egypt.

Architects and patrons were often making specific, informed choices about the ancient forms they repurposed. Many of these individuals combined different ancient styles together in new and original ways, especially after 1870.¹⁶ Therefore, calling some of these buildings (or interiors) Neo-Antique means that these different elements (whether Greek, Roman, or Egyptian) can all be given their due rather than subsumed in the generic “neoclassical,” where anything not Greek or Roman is typically subservient to the classical. Likewise, the inclusion of nonancient elements deployed in conjunction with ancient forms can also be included in the discussion. Where two styles are used together in the same building or site, often creating a visual, cultural, and intellectual stacking of forms and eras, the frame of the Neo-Antique allows us to explore why these forms were combined.

Ancient art, especially sculpture and painting, and ancient mythology are also part of these dialogues. Personifications—human figures who symbolized an idea, ideal, or value—are a hallmark of classical art. Personifications, like Victory, are highly recognizable, infinitely mutable, and immediately convey authority. They routinely appeared on many of these Neo-Antique buildings, and American sculptors created new personifications for their structures. Likewise, classical gods, especially Mercury, the god of travel and commerce, made regular appearances on these monuments. Thus, sculpture and decoration are an important part of the Neo-Antique conversation.

Furthermore, because many contemporary sources are silent regarding the choice of Greek temple architecture for a bank or custom house, I bring my training as a classical archaeologist to bear in order to assess how well the creators of these buildings (as well as those who engaged with them on a daily basis) understood the ancient motifs, models, and histories they mined and how these reinterpreted forms acquired quite different connotations in the course of their appropriation. Using firsthand observations and formal analysis, I can identify ancient architectural forms accurately and decipher how modern interpretations of such architecture either replicate or diverge from ancient examples. These observations are then considered in their historical and social context—to understand “the why” behind such forms. Likewise, in many cases, the sculpture of these buildings and monuments are considered in order to understand how American sculptors also looked to antiquity for inspiration.

Connected to this, a knowledge of ancient buildings and what was actually known about them at various points in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is critical. For example, Knossos, a site that has captured the imagination of scholars and the public, was not excavated until the end of the nineteenth century; Howard Carter would not discover Tutankhamun’s tomb until 1922. Thus, the history of archaeological excavations allows us to understand which models were available and why certain well-documented and reproduced buildings, like the still-standing Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, were so often referenced by American architects. This culture of architectural quotation also meant that savvy, cultured viewers could go on a Grand Tour without having to leave New York. The architecture of other monuments, for example the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Tower of Babel, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, do not really survive at all, giving New York’s architects and patrons a blank sheet for creative and useful reinterpretations of antiquity for their own purposes.

Recent scholarship, especially highly technical UV studies, has also demonstrated that ancient architecture and sculpture existed in Technicolor; it was a world of polychromy.¹⁷ Indeed, for much of classical architectural sculpture to be legible from the ground, it would have needed to have been painted. However, the engagement with this fact, which was known but often challenged or ignored by leading scholars, architects, and sculptors before the late twentieth century, means that understanding the reception and use of the polychromy of ancient architecture in New York City is complex. While many Beaux-Arts buildings were constructed using white or gray-white marbles, seeking to go back to the supposed “purity” of classical, especially Greek, architecture and sculpture, Roman architecture used brick and colored marble, and the surviving remains from Pompeii demonstrate that color was a major part of the vocabulary of Roman architecture and interiors. While the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art eschewed color, Edward Robinson, its director, embraced color for his Pompeian court, where classical art was to be shown in a realistic setting to convey how ancient art was actually displayed; the design was, in Robinson’s words, intended “to illustrate the important part that color played in classical architecture.”¹⁸ In other Neo-Antique buildings’ exteriors and interiors in New York, color would play a surprisingly important part. The exteriors and interiors of the Gould Memorial Library and the Madison Square Presbyterian Church used color, as did the interiors of Grand Central Terminal and Columbia’s Low Library. While it was not necessarily standard, it was not uncommon. Painters such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Frederic Leighton, and others embraced and integrated color into their paintings of ancient subjects, as well as in their interiors. The reception of both ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern art and architecture embraced polychromy, as is clear at the Pythian Temple, the Fred French Building, and, to a lesser extent, 130 West Thirtieth Street.¹⁹ Color was one way for buildings to stand out in the competitive real estate market of New York.

Key movements in American architectural history are also integrated into this analysis. The political ideas behind the Greek Revival are vital to understanding the widespread adaption of classical architecture in the early nineteenth century. Likewise, the influence of the Beaux-Arts tradition—which emphasized Roman and Renaissance architecture and design principles—and the City Beautiful movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are inextricably entangled in the history of New York City’s architecture and in the appropriation of ancient, especially Roman imperial, architectural forms. These architectural movements were distinct, and the architects who worked in these styles were clearly appropriating antiquity in different and informed ways to suit their ends. However, the strategy that they used—purposefully evoking and interpreting a specific moment in antiquity, be that the world of ancient Persia, democratic Athens, Ptolemaic Egypt, or imperial Rome—was the same, though deployed differently to convey the appropriate meaning of gravitas, culture, luxury, security, or whatever might be appropriate in that context. While some architects and patrons were very thoughtful in their selection of a Roman arch or Greek column, others missed these important differences. By using a Neo-Antique framework, we can bring these various movements and styles together—rather than seeing them as unconnected—to understand the evolution in the appropriation of ancient forms and the various attitudes that architects, patrons, and critics held toward such forms to gain new insights into New York’s architectural history.

New York did not exist in a vacuum. Throughout this book, New York’s Neo-Antique architecture is contextualized within larger American architectural trends. The well-known columnar architecture and domes of Philadelphia and Washington immediately come to mind,²⁰ but Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, Cleveland, and countless other American cities had individual buildings or groups of buildings—civic centers, museums, and libraries—that were classical in concept and design.²¹ State capitol buildings from Indiana to Minnesota featured white columns and towering domes, while the Roman temple façade became the defining architectural idiom for America’s court architecture.²²

European architecture, especially Britain’s great houses (and their Pompeian interiors), temple-like banks, and exchanges, were important influences on American architects. Classical architecture was not only considered the source of European architecture, but neoclassicism was a major force in the creation of European art and architecture from the Renaissance onward. For Americans, Europe provided cultural and artistic inspiration, and European interpretations of ancient forms were important—and sometimes as important—as the ancient models themselves. Therefore, New York’s architecture is compared to its European precursors and contemporaries; Neo-Antique buildings were an important part of New York’s process of becoming a world-class, cosmopolitan metropolis.

This fundamentally interdisciplinary project draws upon all available evidence and archival materials—such as the letters and memos of architects and their patrons and commentary in contemporary newspapers and magazines—to provide a lively, multidimensional analysis that examines not only the city’s ancient buildings and rooms but also how New Yorkers envisaged them, lived in them, talked about them, and reacted to them.

One key type of evidence is the books on antiquities that were first published in the mid–eighteenth century in Europe. Before the mid–nineteenth century, very few Americans traveled abroad. If they did travel, it was typically to Western Europe, particularly to Britain and France. However, books, such as Recueil d’antiquités, by the Comte de Caylus (1753–1767); Julien-David Le Roy’s Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (1758); James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s four-volume The Antiquities of Athens (1762–1816); Johann Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764); Dominique-Vivant Denon’s Voyage dans le Basse et Haute Égypte (1802); the twenty-two-volume Description of Egypt (1809–1822); and others brought ancient architecture to a much wider cross-section of the population. These books were expensive; for example, the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens was being sold by Thomas Arrowsmith in London around 1800 for seven pounds and three shillings,²³ or a cost over 590 British pounds in 2019. In 1854, a complete set was selling for 24 pounds,²⁴ which is equivalent to over 3,070 pounds in 2019.²⁵ That said, by the 1810s, public and private libraries would make these books accessible to a wider audience. The architectural books in Thomas Jefferson’s library are probably the most important early collection of their kind in the United States.²⁶ As early as 1760–1762, he bought at least one or possibly two copies of James Leoni’s The Architecture of A. Palladio (1715–1720 or the 1742 edition); he also purchased James Gibbs’s Rules for Drawing the Several Parts of Architecture (1732) and other practical guides to building.²⁷ His library also included works by the Italian architect Vincenzo Scamozzi, who worked with Palladio, and Vitruvius’s De architectura, as well as editions of Robert Woods’s 1757 Ruins of Balbac [sic], Le Roy’s 1759 Ruins of Athens (the English translation of his 1758 work), Castell’s 1728 Villas of the Ancients, the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens, and works by Giovanni Battista Piranesi. In 1815, he sold his library of 6,000 books, including these works, to the Library of Congress,²⁸ making them accessible to future generations of architects, designers, and patrons.

Ithiel Town, the important early American architect and engineer, had over 11,000 volumes in his library, which he opened to other architects.²⁹ These expensive works were also digested by successful British architects who had emigrated, like John Haviland, the architect of the Tombs, who owned a copy of the Description of Egypt, and American architects, like Minard Lafever, who wrote guides for builders, such as the widely used The Modern Builder’s Guide (1833), where classical architecture was central, thus spreading the classical idiom further afield. Classical and Near Eastern art was also experienced through an important intermediary: casts. These replicas were held in many American museum collections and were considered to be the most accurate way to understand ancient art until the emergence of photography.³⁰

The first wave of professional interior designers, like the Herter Brothers, had a central role in popularizing ancient interiors in the late nineteenth century. Coming from Europe, they brought their knowledge of the designs of the old and ancient world, which could confer a cosmopolitan sophistication on their patrons. Likewise, the interiors of the rich and famous also started to appear in the popular press, as we will see in Chapter 5, bringing Pompeian and other ancient-inspired interiors to a wider audience, which then emulated their richer peers.

By the mid–nineteenth century and especially after the Civil War, American architects, such as Charles McKim and Stanford White, and artists started to train in Europe and gain firsthand exposure to the art and architecture of antiquity, which they readily incorporated into the American tradition. Paralleling these developments, Americans started to travel abroad. Not only could the wealthy spend the winter season in Paris, but increasingly the upper ranks of the newly enriched middle class could afford to travel to Europe; there were now tourists in the modern sense. One need only think of Edith Wharton, who spent much of her childhood in Europe, or of the affluent friends of the March sisters, including their beloved neighbor Laurie, in Little Women (1868), who spent time in France and Italy. Mark Twain’s humorous Innocents Abroad (1869) chronicled his travels with a group of Americans to France, Rome, Odessa, and, of course, the Holy Land. The culmination of Twain’s trip to the Holy Land also signaled the wider horizons of American travelers, who also started to venture to Egypt, especially in the late nineteenth century. Americans now had firsthand access to many of the ruins that previous generations had only seen on the printed page. Patrons who saw interesting architecture on their travels could purchase postcards, stereographs, and photographs, which became popular in the 1860s,³¹ to document their trips or the trips they aspired to take one day, thereby replacing the drawings in expensive archaeological publications with affordable likenesses. By the 1880s commercial photography was a major business, and publications such as National Geographic, founded in 1811, would become increasingly photograph dependent, thereby bringing archaeological sites to a wider audience. Likewise, design magazines popularized ancient designs as well as the interiors of the well-to-do, as Architectural Digest does today.