Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism 0714842443

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Real Spaces

DAVID SUMMERS

World Art History and the Rise of Western modernism Yow know that poiesis is more than a single thing. For of anything whatever that passes from not being into being the whole cause is composing or poetry; so that the productions of all arts are kinds of poetry, and their craftsmen are all poets ... But... they are not called poets: they have other names, while a single section disparted from the whole of poetry - merely the business of music and metres is entitled with the name of the whole. Plato, Symposium, 205B-C I. POST-FORMALIST ART HISTORY

However the discipline of the history of art may have changed over the last few decades of theoretical and critical examination, it has continued to be an archival field, concerned with setting its objects in spatial and temporal order, and with relating them to appropriate documents and archaeological evidence. Much of this work has been accomplished; there are more or less firmly established bodies of works in most fields, and it is to be expected that professional attention might turn elsewhere. To be sure, connoisseurship and documentation have continued to authenticate artifacts in order to establish their market value, that is, for more than simply historical purposes; but the same archival and archaeological work also remains fundamental to the discipline of art history as a kind of history, and the ‘provenances’ of artifacts for sale do in fact place them in groups and series. If that is so, what implications are to be drawn from the fact that artifacts lend themselves to such spatiotemporal arrangement? What is the significance of the certainty with which a vessel from Teotihuacan found in a Maya burial may be at once identified as an import rather than the independent invention of some eccentric Maya potter? When human artifacts were assumed to be essentially form, the answer to this question was fairly simple. Artifacts belonged to styles, continuities characteristic of the imaginations of individuals and groups, from the expressions of which certain conclusions might be drawn about individuals and groups themselves. With the decline of formalism in art history, professional interest in such issues has passed from theoretical to practical in the sense that, while artifacts continue to be sorted, grouped and seriated, the interpretative dimensions of these basic activities have been set aside in favour of methodologies from other fields. Art has long been prone to reduction to problems in the psychology of visual perception, which is an obvious extension of the Western assumption that art taken altogether is about visual perception. The theories underlying more recent approaches to the interpretation of art, as I shall discuss presently, derive in one way or another from structural linguistics, and their emphasis is synchronic to the exclusion of the diachronic. The chapters of this book, however, proceed from a different starting point. What if historians of

PH Al DON

CONTENTS: PREFACE AND

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION IFACTURE

2. PLACES 3 THE APPROPRIATION OF THE CENTRE

4 IMAGES

5 PLANARITY 6 VIRTUALITY

7 THE CONDITIONS OF MODERNISM

EPILOGUE NOTES

GLOSSARY

INDEX ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Real Spaces World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism

DAVID SUMMERS

E3

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Contents PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

i 2

Post-formalist Art History...................................................................... Form, Pictorial Imagination and Formalism........................................

15 28

3 4

Real Spaces, Conditions and Cardinality.............................................. The‘Visual Arts’and the Spatial Arts...................................................

36 41

5 6

Real Space and Virtual Space................................................................ An Image in Real Space: the Aztec Coatlicue.......................................

43 45

7 8

Virtual Space and the Primacy of Real Space...................................... Given Nature and Second Nature..........................................................

50 53

9

Real Space and Art-Historical Interpretation......................................

55

10

Art History and Aesthetics ....

58

CHAPTER I

FACTURE

1.1

Conditions of Presentation...................................................................

61

1.2

Configuration: Functions and Purposes............................................

62

1.3 1.4

Arbitrariness........................................................................................... The Principle of Definition and Series.................................................

63 64

1.5 1.6

Authority and Series............... Technology, Medium, Technique and Style.......................................

65 66

1.7

Diachronic and Synchronic..................................................................

72

1.8 1.9

Facture.................................................................................................... Facture and Materials...........................................................................

74 77

Facture and Value............................................................................... Refinement and Distinction................................................................

84 86

1.10 1.11 1.12

Ornament 1

98

1.13 1.14

Play Notionality

101 107

1.15

Models.................................................................................................... 114 CHAPTER 2

PLACES

2.1 2.2

Introduction.............................................................................................. 117 Place, Relation and Hierarchy................................................................123

2.3 2.4

The Navajo Hogan.................................................................................. 125 Real Space, Gender and Ritual............................................................... 127

2.5

Centres...................................................................................................... 130

2.6

A Traditional African Social Space....................................................... 137

2.7 2.8

Shrines....................................................................................................... 139 Jerusalem.................................................................................................. 140

2.9

Boundaries and Precincts........................................................................ 152

2.10 2.11 2.12

Paths..................................................................................................... 157 Elevation.............................................................................................. 159 Difficulty of Approach....................................................................... 163

2.13

Centres and Verticality

2.14

Ascent................................................................................................... 178

2.15

Alignment and Orientation..............................................................

2.16

North, South, East, West................................................................... 184

166 180

2.17

Tumuli and Domes................................................................................ 186

2.18

Peripheries.............................................................................................. 194

2.19

Land and Division......................................... ;...................................... 197 CHAPTER 3

3.1

THE APPROPRIATION OF THE CENTRE

Orientation, Kingship and Empire.........................................................201

3.2

The Sumerians......................................................................................... 203

3.3

Temple and Palace.................................................................................... 204

3.4

Kingship in Egypt.................................................................................... 205

3.5

The Pyramids at Giza.............................................................................. 214

3.6

The Lord of the Four Quarters............................................................ 220

3.7

Augustus................................................................................................... 224

3.8

Angkor

228

3.9 Chinese Imperial Cities........................................................................... 231 3.10 Beijing..................................................................................................... 237

3.11

Versailles................................................................................................ 241

3.12

Revolution............................................................................................. 245 CHAPTER

4.1

4

IMAGES

The Origins of Images.............................................................................251

4.2

Realities of Images.................................................................................. 252

4.3

Images and Cultural Difference............................................................. 254

4.4

Traces, Images of Traces, Sight and Abstraction................................ 255

4.5

Real Metaphor......................................................................................... 257

4.6

Real Metaphor and Recognition........................................................... 259

4.7

Contour and Comprehension............................................................... 260

4.8

Lepinski Vir..............................................................................................263

4.9

Shiva..........................................................................................................264

4.10

Upright Stones and Aniconic Images.................................................. 266

4.11

Maya Stelae: 18 Rabbit at Copan........................................................ 271

4-i2 Manipulation.......................................................................................... 274 4.13

Votive Images...................................................................................... 279

4.14

Icons..................................................................................................... 284

4.15

Magnified Anthropomorphism......................................................... 287

4.16 4.17

Effigies and Images with the Value of Effigies....................... 288 Effigies and Size.................................................................................. 294

4.18 4.19

Icons and Iconoclasm......................................................................... 294 Masks................................................................................................... 300

4.20 4.21

Greek Drama...................................................................................... 307 Theatre and Politics............................................................................ 309

4.22

Character and Comedy

4.23

Fooling the Gods: On the Beginnings of Metric

310

and Optical Naturalism.................................................................. 312

4.24

Abstraction, Vision and Drawing..................................................... 316

4.25

Mental Images..................................................................................... 319

4.26

Icons and Imagination....................................................................... 326

4.27

Automata............................................................................................ 326

4.28 4.29

Some Italian Renaissance Portraits................................................... 329 Images on Surfaces: Effigy, Surface and‘Field of Vision’ 331

4.30

Surficiality and Planarity................................................................... 336

4.31

Sur-face..............................................................................................

4.32 4.33

Double Distance................................................................................. 338 Surfaces, Recognition and Relation.................................................. 339

337

4.34

Virtuality, Completion and Double Metaphor............................... 339

4.35

Succession, Narrative and Fiction..................................................... 341

5 PLANARITY Introduction............................................................................................ 343

CHAPTER

5.2 5.3

Palaeolithic Women............................................................................. 346 Ex-planation.......................................................................................... 349

5.4 5.5 5.6

Planes and Places.................................................................................. 350 Independence and Dependence........................................................... 350 Images and Places as Vertical and Horizontal Planes 355

5.7

Recognition and Planarity, Contour andDefinition

5.8

Order and Proportion.......................................................................... 358

356

5.9 Ambivalences of Measure.................................................................... 360 5.10 Planar Images, Redundancy and AbsoluteColour 360

5.11

Definition, Division and Format....................................................... 361

5.12 5.13

Rotation and Translation.................................................................. 363 Planar Arrangement and Hierarchy 368

5.14

Planar Oppositions............................................................................. 369

5.15 5.16 5.17

Pharaoh and Centre.............................................................................. 381 Ashurnasirpal’s Throne Room............................................................ 383 A Benin Royal Plaque........................................................................... 385

5.18

A Chinese Emperor Portrait................................................................ 388

5.19

Identity and Opposition.................

390

5.20

Full-face, Profile and Virtuality

394

5.21 5.22

Ornament 2 .. . 395 Ornament, Sacred Texts and Places................................................... 398

5.23

Measure and Ratio................................................................................403

5.24

Ratio, Proportion and Harmony

5.25

Grids....................................................................................................... 410

405

5.26

Grids and Cardinality

5.27

Scale and Format.................................................................................. 414

5.28 5.29

Planes, Grids and Social Space.................... ;..................................... 415 Grids, Measure and Agriculture......................................................... 416

5.30 5.31

Colonies................................................................................................. 417 Maps.............................................................. 42.1 CHAPTER

6

414

VIRTUALITY

6.1 6.2

Introduction............................................................................................. 431 Surfaces and Virtuality 433

6.3

Surface as Potential Random Order...................................................... 434

6.4

Framing.................................................................................................... 438

6.5

Groundlines and Surfaces; Stage Space and Viewer Space

6.6

The Virtual Co-ordinate Plane.............................................................. 445

6.7 6.8

Relief Space.............................................................................................. 448 Overlapping , Foreshortening, Oblique Lines, Diminution 450

6.9

The Optical Plane and Stage Space....................................................... 454

439

6.10

Optical Planar Order.............

457

6.11

Viewer Space: Framing and Detail in Chinese Painting

458

6.12 6.13

Light as a Theme................................................................................... 467 Modelling, Depicted Shadows and Reflection................................... 477

6.14

The Optical Plane and the Visual Angle............................................ 486

6.15

Classical Skenographia......................................................................... 487

6.16

The Optical Plane in Greek and Roman Painting

6.17

The Ambiguity of the Optical Plane...................................................492

6.18

The Optical Plane in the European Middle Ages............................. 493

6.19 6.20

The Optical Cube...................................... 497 Skene, Hierarchy and Theatre............................................................. 503

6.21

Alhazen’s Theory of Vision..................................................................508

6.22

Brunelleschi’s First Perspective Demonstration................................ 511

489

6.23

Renaissance Painters’ Perspective........................................................517

6.24 6.25

Isometry and the Ambiguity of Perspective........................................ 526 Composition, Rhetoric and Allegory 527

6.26 6.27

Quadratura.............................................................................................534 Perspective, Modelling and Chiaroscuro........................... 544 CHAPTER 7

7.1

THE CONDITIONS OF MODERNISM

Introduction..............................................................................................549

7.2

Metaopticality.......................................................................................... 555

7.3

Force.......................................................................................................... 564

7.4

Force and Counterforce...............................................................

7.5

Force and Representation....................................................................... 573

7.6

The Ends of Art, Nature and Man........................................................ 579

7.7 7.8

Perspectives.............................................................................................. 580 Sublimity............. .................................................................................... 582

567

7.9 Two German Romantic Landscapes..................................................... 586 7.10 Impression.............................................................................................. 588

7.11 7.12

Caricature............................................................................................... 592 Naturalism and Photography.............................................................. 601

7.13

From Realism to Construction.............................................................621

7.14

The Rothko Chapel....................................................................... 643 epilogue................................................................................................... 653

NOTES.................................................................................................................................................... 665

GLOSSARY

683

INDEX.................................................................................................................................................... 688

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

704

FOR NANCY

This book began many years ago as a series of short texts written for introduc­ tory graduate seminars at the University of Pittsburgh. The aim of the seminars was to devise ways of describing works of art compatible with then-emerging contextual art history. During the same years I also occasionally taught courses in Precolumbian art, which I felt able to do because, in addition to my work in the Italian Renaissance, I had taken a series of graduate seminars with George Kubler. As I taught these courses it became increasingly clear that the categories for addressing and explaining Precolumbian art were hardly adequate, and as I began to question them, 1 also began to wonder whether the categories for address­ ing Western art were really much more useful for the developing tasks of art history. By degrees my two projects began to merge, and I focused more closely on fashioning a conceptual basis for a history of art able to serve a much broader intercultural conversation. When I first took them up, these problems seemed merely theoretical and ‘academic’, at the same time that what emerged as ‘theory’ in the history of art developed in directions quite different from those I had taken. The problems I addressed, however, have become more urgent and pressing by the day. In the years I have spent on this project the idea of culture itself has come increasingly under what might be called semantic stress. But, whether, as histori­ ans of art in a ‘post-Cold War’ world, we prefer to regard cultures as ‘ideolo­ gies* on the one hand, or as consumeristic ‘lifestyles’ on the other, the prospect of the long-term solutions offered by these reductive, totalizing Western alterna­ tives continue to encounter the massive resistance of cultures themselves. In the meantime, if some now find it appropriate to speak of a ‘clash of civilizations’, these civilizations might at least know something about one another, about the fabric of one another’s histories, lives and values. This is a task to which the history of art, scattered now in its ‘specialties’, has much to contribute. For a time, the project was shorthanded as ‘World Art’. While writing The Judgment of Sense, I came across the phrase that served for several years as the title, ‘the defect of distance*, in the Counter Reformation Discourse on Images of Gabriele Paleotti. People make images, Paleotti wrote, because it is the predica­ ment of human life that what we desire most to see and address is absent in space and time. The gods are in the heavens, loved ones are far away, the dead are in another world, the sacred stories happened long ago. For a twenty-first-century reader the desire to place the placeless or absent involves many more issues than Paleotti could acknowledge; still, the complexities of these issues only enrich the principle, and a different history of art began to emerge in my mind as I consid­ ered the conditions of substitution, placement and their many cultural variants and patterns. Because The Defect of Distance seemed inscrutable to prospective editors, the manuscript was first submitted for publication with the title Principles of a World Art History, referring to Heinrich Wolfflin’s Principles of Art History, his Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, published in 1915. This was the first art history book I was required to read, some forty years ago in my first year at Brown University. I was much impressed by the scope and descriptive precision of Wolfflin’s arguments, but, even as a youth in my first encounter with cultural history, I noted his admitted inability to account for the history of European art

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

12

after the Baroque period, and sensed that his premises were off base. I referred to Wblfflin’s title in my own partly to contrast my project to his, and by insertion of the word ‘world’ I meant to signal a fundamental change from Wblfflin’s focus, and from the preponderant European focus of the history of art in general, even in its most contemporary expressions. As time passed, however, and the twenti­ eth century drew to a close, the notion of principles began to strike people as overbearing. I returned to The Defect of Distance, and Haul Barolsky suggested the subtitle, World Art History and the.Rise of Western Modernism. Bernard Dod at Phaidon Press suggested the title Real Spaces as more nearly self-explana­ tory and closer to the central arguments of the book, and we settled on the title Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. The plural in the main title stresses the specificity of what I shall define as real spaces. The ‘World Art History’ of the subtitle is not a global history (which I think is both undesirable and impossible), but the discipline of art history itself, now faced with the task of providing the means to address as many histories as possible nearly enough in their own terms to permit new intercultural discussions. I have been unable to think of a way of avoiding the term ‘Western’, since the alterna­ tive, ‘European’, makes it difficult to describe the many interactions consequent to European expansion. I mean the phrase ‘Western modernism’ to acknowl­ edge other modernisms. My first teachers in art history set questions to which I may perhaps never stop trying to find answers. George Kubler’s The Shape of Time, as I shall discuss in the Introduction, has been fundamental for this project. Charles Seymour, Jr. had little patience with the history of ideas, but he introduced me to such books as Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity by A.O. Lovejoy and George Boas, and E.R. Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, at the same time that he always insisted on the importance of what he called ‘programme’, the whole ensemble of which any work of art was originally part. As a teaching assistant, I paid close attention for several years to Vincent Scully’s lectures on architectural siting and alignment. From the start, I was guided by theory, history and criticism, and I regard this book as a sustained theoretical, historical and critical essay. By the time I began it, I had learned very much from the criticism of Michael Fried. I have been asked repeatedly over the years about the ‘politics’ of this project, the ‘agenda’ of which is perhaps not as clear as it is in some cases. The studies leading to this book began before questions of intellectual ‘imperialism’ had become current. Strangely, the ideological work being done by the categories in terms of which art outside the classical European tradition was approached excited little professional art-historical interest, mostly, I think, because contem­ porary critical disputes have stubbornly remained intramural Western disputes. I am not indifferent to the problems raised by imposing presumptive categories of art, culture and history itself on the lives and accomplishments of others. But, such misgivings aside, the scheme I am presenting permits the address of a great array of specific cultural choices, patterns and traditions, which, as I will argue, is not possible with the analytic and interpretative tools presently available. At the same time, the scheme is also based on the principle that art is about the great many ways in which the possibilities afforded by the world we find ourselves

sharing in common have been shaped and changed. The scope of the book is obviously very broad, but I must still apologize for many omissions; again, I have not tried to be comprehensive, but rather to provide examples and concepts to facilitate further discussion. My intention has not been to write theory that tells people what they really think, or to speak for them; I have rather meant to make it possible for traditions of art (and art history) to address one another in new ways. Whether or not my scheme proves as useful as I hope it will be, the history of art as it stands is more and more obviously a very skewed, partial and inadequate world art history until these questions have been adequately acknowledged. Although it is a premise of the book that there is no ‘absolute’, universal arthistorical chronology, and that traditions of art constitute independent (or interac­ tive) ‘shapes of time’, it is still necessary to have a consistent and familiar chrono­ logical framework. Dates in the Common Era are usually not specified; dates before the Common Era are specified as bc. The book’s last chapter is followed by notes keyed to chapter sections. Since I have been concerned with the development of an overarching argument, I have not referred to general publications in the detailed way I have in earlier books, nor has it been practicable to review questions in the accustomed way. I have acknowledged, with gratitude to the authors, the specialized studies upon which the argument at many points depends. I have also supplied a glossary of terms, keyed to fuller discussions in the text. I am grateful to the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia and to the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust for support of my work over the years. I am especially grateful to Raymond Nelson and Melvyn Leffler, succes­ sive Deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, for both intellectual and material support. Salvatore Settis, Tom Reese and Michael S. Roth made it possible for me to complete the final draft of this long labour as a Getty Scholar in Richard Meier’s splendid new Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, looking out over the blue Pacific Ocean. I am grateful as always to Irving Lavin for his longstanding personal and institu­ tional encouragement, and I hope what I have done will contribute to his ‘art of art history’. Michael Peglau and I began to talk about some of the issues that grew into this book over thirty years ago at Bryn Mawr College. Paul Barolsky has read and commented shrewdly on chapters in several versions. Keith Moxey argued forcefully but not persuasively against the project, obliging me to refine many arguments. Over the years, many graduate students have listened to these ideas in one form or another, and have contributed more than I can acknowledge to their clarification. I wish especially to thank Dominique Surh and my assistant Abigail Christensen for their devoted and thorough work on the manuscript and illustrations. I am also indebted to their equally devoted and thorough succes­ sors, Robin O’Bryan, and, at the Getty Research Institute, Sarah Stifler. Dwight Shurko generously took time out from his Federico Zuccaro studies to assist me in the final stages of preparation of the book. I wish to thank Whitney Davis, a reader of the manuscript in its editorial wanderings, for his clear, detailed, and generous criticisms of the much longer, untamed manuscript with which he was presented. His remarks helped me very

13

much in the final revisions, as I have profited over the years from his fine, farranging scholarship and critical writing. I also wish to thank Bernard Dod at Phaidon for his scrupulous editing and many useful suggestions. The reader owes him a substantial debt. My wife Nancy could not know she was marrying this project when she married me. Not only has her patience thus been double, she has risen to the task, as a partner and companion, but also as a most clear-headed and careful critic of the ongoing work. Our three children, Ben, Tim, and Mary, grew up and left home with what must be the vivid memory of their father hunched year in and year out over his books, legal pads and keyboard, rushing off from time to time to see exhibitions of Olmec sculpture, Chinese archaeology or Persian painting. I can only hope it was partly this example that has helped to bend those twigs in the right ways, and I thank them as the adults they have become for their precocious co-operation and understanding. A trip to Mexico in the summer of 1966 (funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation) as one of the participants in a graduate seminar given by George Kubler on the iconography of the art of Teotihuacan planted the questions in my mind around which this undertaking has grown. One day on that trip, away from the museums and archaeological zones, I decided to pick cactus fruit of a kind I had seen in village markets for myself and my friends. We stopped the car, I walked into a thick forest of tall cactus and began to gather the leathery red globes, immediately to find all ten fingers carpeted with tiny spines. As I stood trying to figure out what to do, a woman about forty-five years old, whose ancestors might have built and used the monuments I had come to see, stepped from among the cactus, chuckling, amused to see someone who did not know enough to avoid my predicament. We could say very little to one another; but she took my hands, took chicle from her mouth, and with it began painstakingly and even tenderly to clean my fingers, laughing softly. After some minutes of this she gave my hands to me and sent me on my way, as if certain I would know better in the future. This woman would be old now, and I hope this book contributes to a better world, if not for her, then for her children and grandchildren.

14

Introduction You know that poiesis is more than a single thing. For of anything whatever that passes from not being into being the whole cause is composing or poetry; so that the productions of all arts are kinds of poetry, and their craftsmen are all poets ... But... they are not called poets: they have other names, while a single section disparted from the whole of poetry - merely the business of music and metres is entitled with the name of the whole. Plato, Symposium, 205B-C I.

POST-FORMALIST ART HISTORY

However the discipline of the history of art may have changed over the last few decades of theoretical and critical examination, it has continued to be an archival field, concerned with setting its objects in spatial and temporal order, and with relating them to appropriate documents and archaeological evidence. Much of this work has been accomplished; there are more or less firmly established bodies of works in most fields, and it is to be expected that professional attention might turn elsewhere. To be sure, connoisseurship and documentation have continued to authenticate artifacts in order to establish their market value, that is, for more than simply historical purposes; but the same archival and archaeological work also remains fundamental to the discipline of art history as a kind of history, and the ‘provenances’ of artifacts for sale do in fact place them in groups and series. If that is so, what implications are to be drawn from the fact that artifacts lend themselves to such spatiotemporal arrangement? What is the significance of the certainty with which a vessel from Teotihuacan found in a Maya burial may be at once identified as an import rather than the independent invention of some eccentric Maya potter? When human artifacts were assumed to be essentially form, the answer to this question was fairly simple. Artifacts belonged to styles, continuities characteristic of the imaginations of individuals and groups, from the expressions of which certain conclusions might be drawn about individuals and groups themselves. With the decline of formalism in art history, professional interest in such issues has passed from theoretical to practical in the sense that, while artifacts continue to be sorted, grouped and seriated, the interpretative dimensions of these basic activities have been set aside in favour of methodolo­ gies from other fields. Art has long been prone to reduction to problems in the psychology of visual perception, which is an obvious extension of the Western assumption that art taken altogether is about visual perception. The theories underlying more recent approaches to the interpretation of art, as I shall discuss presently, derive in one way or another from structural linguistics, and their emphasis is synchronic to the exclusion of the diachronic. The chapters of this book, however, proceed from a different starting point. What if historians of art, rather than setting out from one or another borrowed principle, were to reconsider the implications of the continuities and patterns demonstrated in generations of art-historical practice and research? The history of art might in fact turn out to be deeply significant for the very fields from which it has borrow-

15

introduction

16

ed, thus to contribute in new ways to broader historical and cultural understand­ ing. The study of what we have come to call art, and its many histories, studied in analogy to nothing else, might tell us more about ourselves than it has yet been allowed to do. It should be clear that in proposing a post-formalist art history I do not mean to suggest a rupture with all that has gone before. Quite to the contrary, I have meant to provide new frameworks, derived from works of art themselves, within which many kinds of scholarship may be incorporated and synthesized in the direction of present interests. The categories I propose are able to engage most art-historical literature and should at the same time open art history to the inter­ est and concerns of students in archaeology, anthropology, history, literature, psychology and the social sciences. It should also make art history interesting to artists in new ways, as in fact post-Abstract Expressionist painting and sculpture and their accompanying criticism have contributed at many points to the issues I shall be treating. Post-formalist art history will allow many more kinds of art to be meaningfully approached, and will at the same time help to ground under­ standing in the truly foundational universal heritage of the art and architecture that peoples of the world have made for so many different purposes. It is important to bear in mind that the title of Hans Belting’s book The End of the History of Art? ends, not with a period, but with a question mark. After reviewing and criticizing the problems of the progressive narrative tradition stem­ ming from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, Belting finishes the book’s essays with the statement that ‘we have arrived at the threshold of an anthropologi­ cally grounded conception of artistic production as a paradigm of human activity, a possibility which was most recently explored, in a general theory of the historic­ ity of art and its products, by George Kubler.’ The core conception of Kubler’s Shape of Time, stated in the book’s wonderful title, is that there is no single ‘development’ in which all art may be placed, and that there may be many histories of art made up of open numbers of more or less local interactions of what he called ‘series’. In Kubler’s terms there can be no absolute chronology, and arthistorical time, the shapes of time, can only be constituted in each case by these interactions. Kubler’s Shape of Time was published in 1962, and his version of ‘the history of things’ was shaped in its turn by opposition to the growing dominance of iconography in art-historical study. Erwin Panofsky’s Meaning in the Visual Arts had been published in 1955, immediately becoming required art-historical reading, as well as an important model for art-historical scholarship. Kubler’s reactive insistence upon the importance of form as opposed to content still raised the fundamental problems formalism had always raised. How are the shapes of time to be related to iconographic traditions? I will argue that Kubler’s histori­ cally localized traditions can be usefully modified, and brought into a continu­ ous relation to iconography, by a reconsideration of the uses and purposes of works of art. When he wrote Art and Illusion, first published in i960, E. H. Gombrich expressly identified his project with the kind of progressive history Belting argued has become exhausted. Gombrich offered a theoretical account of the cumulative history of technical skills as a latterday version of Vasari and Pliny the Elder.

As had been the case with his ancient and Renaissance forebears, Gombrich’s narrative moved toward the limit of the ‘matching’ of appearances, to which he add­ ed ‘the beholder’s share’, the skill of the artist in making the observer imag­ inatively complete images. Unfortunately, the foundation of Gombrich’s argument in the psychology of perception had the effect of naturalizing and universaliz­ ing what could also be seen (and I think should be seen) as a culturally specific goal, namely the imitation of appearances. But if that is so, then it means there might be other traditions with other culturally specific goals, expressed in other definitions of skill, and in other understandings of the purposes of works of art. If this adjustment is made, any number of histories of art may be written that preserve the integrity of traditions while (as I will argue) making all traditions variations upon what are in principle common possibilities. The naturalistic episodes in Western art simply become ‘shapes of time’. This general scheme has the advantage of providing a better means by which discontinuities and inter­ actions within and among traditions may be described and explained. Ends, disruptions and combinations within and among series become as important as beginnings and continuities. Gombrich tirelessly criticized the overarching, providential historicist sche­ mes he traced to the ‘Romantic historiography’ of Hegel. These schemes in their idealist and materialist versions have been formative for political thought and practice for the past two hundred years, and theories of progress and inevitable end in history served to justify and magnify collective violence to characteristi­ cally modern proportions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gombrich traced these necessitarian schemes ultimately to Aristotle’s idea of final cause, the principle internal to a thing making it develop toward its defining state, an explanation rejected with the rise of scientific method, and thus a relic of premod­ ern Western philosophy preserved in the amber of metahistorical speculation. However that may be, as Gombrich also insisted, there is all the difference between universal purpose and local purpose, or purposes. It does not follow, because history (and histories) cannot be presumed to be analogous to the self-realiza­ tion of an organism, that there are no human purposes. Rather it is again necessary to investigate evident local continuities (and discontinuities, since purposes may change, and some things about artifacts may continue, while others do not) from the standpoint of the assumption that many purposes are possible. When that is done, it is possible to offer the prospect of cogent histories of all traditions and subtraditions of art without the assumption or implication of a universal scheme of artistic progress. Shapes of time become what Kubler himself called ‘linked solutions’, which may, however, be related to broader purposes stated in other ways. In these terms, iconographic questions should not be stated in the form ‘What did this mean, and how do the forms in which it was realized express that meaning?’ but rather ‘Why did people continue (or not continue) to make images of the Virgin Mary or Quetzalcoatl, or even unidentifiable personages, in the ways they did?’ In the following chapters I will not be centrally concerned with iconography, although I will necessarily use the results of decades of iconographic research. Iconography is now taken for granted either as a standard method of reconst­ ructive art-historical interpretation, or as the available body of results of such

I. POST-FORMALIST ART HISTORY

17

INTRODUCTION

18

reconstruction in fields far from the beginnings of the method in the art history of the European Renaissance, and we may now, for example, read about the iconography of the royalty of Benin. Iconography, however, was also an important break with what had been a predominantly formalist art history, and an important early mode of contextualization. Iconographic themes are culturally specific, characteristic of cultures at large - we do not find images of the Virgin Mary in ancient American art before historical contact - but they are also more or less local. Within the broad culture in which her images were made, the cult of the Virgin took different forms and had different emphases and interpretations in one place or another - and so may bind works of art to immediate context in ways quite different from formal styles (which, I will argue, may themselves be better described contextually in terms of given formats and essentially arbitrary differences in local craft traditions). Too much that is obvious about works of art is left unexplained by either form or iconography. It is impossible to explain the historical appearance of a format - the altarpiece or canvas, for example - in formal terms, and it is equally impossi­ ble to explain the same thing iconographically, regardless of the degree of detail in which the iconography of any altarpiece or canvas may be explained. What must be omitted - or assumed - in either kind of explanation is the historical significance of format itself. Formats are culturally specific, and they come into existence, and persist, change, disappear, or are revived for equally specific reasons. At the same time, they are necessarily linked to what I shall introduce shortly as social space, that is, to culturally specific spaces and patterns of be­ haviour, a fairly straightforward definition of context. The rise of contextualism (including the rise of iconography) presented a deep disciplinary dilemma for the history of art. If art has been regarded as essen­ tially ‘form’, how do art historians address the objects of their concern once they have given up this idea? This dilemma, however, is also an opportunity to reconsider the idea of form itself, and the explanatory power of the real spatial contextual alternative I will offer suggests that art raises issues substantially different from those raised by the old definition. According to the arguments I will present, ‘forms’ are simply - and importantly - what people have shaped in one way or another, and for one purpose or another. (Again, ‘format’, from the past participle of the Latin formare, may serve as an example.) As I shall consider in detail in the next section, this definition of form differs radically from the defi­ nition corollary to what I shall call pictorial imagination, the aesthetic-expres­ sive definition descending principally from Immanuel Kant, which, as I shall argue in themext section, has continued to dominate the discussion of art. This definition of form, however, is itself part of an episode in European intellectual history, and, if this book were compressed into a few questions, one of them would be the following: How did it become possible to think about art as the modern European tradition came to think about it, and what were and are the alternatives to thinking about it in those ways? In general, the phenomenological principle of ‘being-in-the-world’ stands in the early ancestry of the ideas of ‘real space’ and ‘context’ I will develop. To an extent this simply reveals the point at which I entered the stream of twentieth­ century intellectual discussion; but I think it is really more accurate to say that

I have never been failed by the thesis that art records the many ways in which the world at hand has been acknowledged in being shaped by us human be­ ings; the thesis has simply never been falsified. Although Martin Heidegger’s essay on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, written in 1935-6, is mystified, primitivizing, and suspiciously Indo-Eurocentric, it may be usefully adjusted to provide alternative ways of thinking about how social space has been artifactually shaped, thus further to provide a pattern for the beginnings of traditions of artifact- and place-making I shall treat in Chapters 1 and 2. The principle of arbitrariness, which I shall define in Section 3 of Chapter 1, presupposes the acknowledgement of what is at hand, but also its poten­ tial to take any number of forms; and the principle of facture, the subject of Chapter 1, in addition to providing a new basis for the treatment of art as histor­ ical evidence, entails the human scale of all art, and thus connection to the parame­ ters of human physical existence, and to the cardinality I shall discuss shortly in Section 3. According to the arguments I will make, we are not simply ‘beingthere’, we are being-there in determinate embodied ways, in spaces and times shared with others. As I shall presently discuss in more detail, Heidegger’s un­ relieved world-historical gloom falls within the kind of late-Hegelian totaliza­ tion I have tried to avoid on principle, and, dangerous as the modern world has been and remains, and acute as Heidegger’s critique of it has been, it still offers positive choices we must learn to make in terms of the values rooted in a revised being-in-the-world. As I have said, I began this project along two fairly distinct tracks. One was the attempt to formulate a contextual method of description of works of art. The second was an attempt to provide a theoretical basis for a more intercultural art history. The second part of the project began to form in my mind during a trip to Mexico in the summer of 1966, the finale to one of George Ku bier’s seminars on the iconography of the art of Teotihuacan. We had gone to gather images from the fragments of what must have been the ubiquitous murals at that now stark and stupendous site. In the course of this visit I realized two things with great force. First, although I had studied Precolumbian art and architecture before actually seeing it, nothing I had learned or thought about it, or about art in general, had prepared me to experience this art, or to understand why it had been made. The second realization was broader. In those days there was great scholarly interest in periodization, that is, in the ways in which the periods of European art - now solidly institutionalized in art historians’ fields of special­ ization - are essentially different from one another. The second realization, from which all of my art-historical work has grown, was that, whatever differences there may be, the essentialization of these differences conceals the ways in which, like the traditions of ancient America, the European and broader Western tradition has been deeply continuous. The imitation of nature, the rhetorical tradition and attitudes toward images and illusion, for example, whatever changes they may undergo, remain remarkably similar and characteristic. Since my primary concern was with addressing art that lay outside the tradition with which I was familiar, I turned to the ways in which such art was in fact addressed by art historians, and I quickly found myself involved with the ‘concep­ tual image’, closely related both to memory and to language, formed as a general

i. post-formalist art history

19

introduction

20

definition of something in the mind. Conceptual images (which I shall redefine as hierarchical planar images in Chapter 5; Figure 166 may be taken as an example of what is meant by a conceptual image) are frontal and two-dimensional. The idea of conceptual images, although very little analysed, is encountered fairly often in art-historical writing. Perhaps its boldest statement is to be found in Gombrich’s ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse’, where the art of the world is charac­ terized as two islands of naturalism (classical and neoclassical Western art and Chinese painting) in a ‘vast ocean of conceptual images’. Clearly, this idea, adap­ ted from the late nineteenth-century psychology of perception, is of the deepest political and ideological significance, and around the turn of the twentieth century provided a schema for progressive art history, according to which representa­ tion advances from conceptual to perceptual, so that ‘conceptual’ is early or ‘primitive’, and perceptual or naturalistic is later. This schema still underlies Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, in which ‘making’ precedes ‘matching’. Again, it should be insisted that this is only true when ‘matching’ is the goal of art, and provides the standard for artistic skill. Although the conceptual image survives in the chapter of Art and Illusion entitled ‘Pygmalion’s Power’, Gombrich abandoned any attempt to make distinctions within the ‘vast ocean’ of nonnaturalistic art. In order to approach the problem of the ‘conceptual image’, I suspended Gombrich’s assumption that ‘the scientific study of art will be psychology.’ No one would deny that all human works are discussable in terms of psychology, but in this case the categories are disenabling and reductive, and, if art must ulti­ mately be explained psychologically, it will be psychology of a very different kind from the psychology of perception. This conclusion is suggested in Gom­ brich’s own ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse’, when he states that all images are substitutive, which in the context of his argument means that simple nonresemblant images, like a hobby horse, are comparable to all other images in being substitutive. How does that square with the psychology of perception? How is a simple substitute like a conceptual image? These questions are not easily answered, and examination of the Freudian roots of Gombrich’s claim yields quite a different explanation of the conditions both for substitution and for ‘conceptual images’. In order to be a substitute, an object must be manageable, and it will serve as what it represents in a correlative space and time. This is the principle of real metaphor, which I will treat in Chapter 4. A real metaphor is something at hand that is changed from one context to another in order to be treated as if it were something else. This is the core art-historical idea from which the idea of real space began to develop. The making of a real metaphor, I will argue, is irreducible, and more specifically, is not reducible to language, or to the kinds of substitution words and language effect. When Gombrich wrote his ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse’ his example was a boy playing a game, and Freud’s example was the more anxiety-determined case of a boy who had invented a game, replacing his absent mother with a substi­ tute that could be tossed away and then retrieved. But the space of substitution need not be supposed to be so solitary; it may also be a space of consensus and literal convention, in which case both real metaphors and their correlative spaces also have more or less shared social and historical meanings. Some spatiotem-

poral context is inseparable from the kinds of meaning proper to simple images, but also to all works of art. It was at this point that the two paths of my project converged, that is, that a revised contextual description dovetailed with the search for categories to address art not easily addressed. As we shall see, the real spatiotemporal correlative to substitution may be effected in any number of ways, and so falls under the category of the arbitrary, which I shall discuss in Chapter i. A real metaphor is thus as evident as any other object, and so may its correlative space be; but the meaning of a real metaphor, like the exact spatiotemporal situation with which this meaning is integral, can only be culturally specific. Identification of spatial precincts with cultural specificity immediately involves the idea of what I shall call real space in a much broader twentieth-century debate. Since one of the texts from which I began was Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form, published in 192.4,1 first expanded the idea of real metaphor and correlative real space in terms of Ernst Cassirer’s ‘psychophysiological’ space, which Panofsky contrasted to the universal metric space of modern Western physics and technology, the space I shall define as metaoptical in my final chapter. This contrast, however, is by no means unique to Cassirer and Panofsky. At least since Henri Bergson, co-ordinate space has been charac­ terized as static, opposed to a deeper, living temporal principle, in terms of which a more authentic intuition of local, non-universalizable spatiotemporality is possible. The principal features of modern Western co-ordinate space are homogeneity, divisibility and infinity, relative to which more primordial spaces are qualitative, continuous and unified, and, as wholes, heterogeneous with respect to one another. They are places (the title of Chapter 2) as opposed to mere locations, that is, points in a universal metric space. This general distinc­ tion has been essential to powerful - and contradictory - definitions of modernity. Metric space is the precondition for the technology in terms of which progress has been measured in the West since the seventeenth century; but the same metric space is also the symbol of Descartes’s mechanical nature, the ‘objective’ world for living ‘subjects’. It would take another large book to sort out the disputed critical history of the idea of space in the twentieth century, an especially difficult project because of the many intersections with the history of science. Still, it is clear what some of the major themes of such a history would be. The critical and ideological problem of space is nested in still broader issues, going back to the ‘quarrel of the ancients and moderns’, which turned around questions of aesthetics and technology. Friedrich Schiller was a crucial figure in shaping this debate, in ways now so familiar as to seem axiomatic. Schiller’s Naive and Sentimental Poetry and Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man appeared in 1795, five years after Kant’s Critique ofJudgement; he amended Kant in treat­ ing art, not just as the free play of mental faculties, but as free, fully human action around which (at least in principle) free political institutions could be built. Schiller emphatically juxtaposed the realm of such freedom to the rationalized, now disenchanted, modern world. The ancient Greek poet, Schiller maintained, knew nothing of the mechanistic explanation of nature, but rather faced nature ‘naively’, as if just born; the modern poet, by contrast, could only reflect upon personal experience. Schiller does not deny that the moderns have surpassed the

I. POST-FORMALIST ART HISTORY

INTRODUCTION

22

ancients in providing conveniences for the run of mankind, but, he asks, ‘what individual Modern could.. .engage, man against man, with an individual Athenian for the prize of humanity?’ The difference is stark: the Greek took his forms from ‘all-unifying Nature’, the Modern from the ‘all-dividing intellect’. Schiller expanded what might be thought a manifesto for poets into institutional critique. The State has become ‘an ingenious clockwork’ where mediocre individuals pursue small tasks of specialized labour and thought. Innumerable ‘lifeless parts’ add up to‘a mechanical kind of collective life’. Schiller deplored the modern separation of Church and state, complaining that labour had become joyless, that means and ends, effort and reward are sundered. ‘Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being.’ This is the modern alienation to which Schiller thought art a remedy. Max Weber followed Schiller closely when he wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published to a scholarly audience in 1904-5 and revised and published again in 19 20-1. This short book continued the project of a larger comparative sociology of religion, and part of its purpose was to compare the West to other world cultures. Weber (who launched the phrase ‘disenchantment of the world’ in an essay of 1918) characterized the West as relentlessly rationalizing. Musical harmony, book-keeping, and, of art-histor­ ical interest, the systematization of vaulted architecture and one-point perspec­ tive, are some of the many symptoms of the Western will to rational order. The greatest rationalization of all, however, was capitalism, as defined by Karl Marx. In Weber’s argument, ‘America’ comes to exemplify rationalization, technology and, at the deepest level, capitalism itself. Calvinism in its various historical forms provided the ideological base, but Benjamin Franklin is the paradigmatic cultural product. The Schiller/Weber dichotomy has persisted in cultural criticism to the present. In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno identified ‘disenchantment’ with ‘enlightenment’, in turn associated (citing Edmund Husserl) with the ‘Galilean mathematization of the world’. Georg Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, published in 1923, fused Weber’s rationalization with Bergson’s ‘spatialization’ to yield what Lukacs call­ ed ‘reification’, the transformation of life into dead objects. Wars come and go, Lukacs had written, but who will save us from Western civilization? Much the same totalizing geistegeschichtlich scheme could be turned to other purposes. Oswald Spengler’s enormously popular Decline of the West, for example, first published in 1918, defined cultures in spatial terms, and specifically defined the characteristic space of Western civilization as ‘Faustian’, as infinitely expansive, reducing everything in its path to its own terms. Again, it would take a separate study to locate Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form precisely in a much broader debate. In high philosophical literature, Martin Heidegger pondered the theme I am tracing through much of his long career, perhaps most pointedly in his ‘Age of the World Picture’, written in 193 8. For Heidegger, the modern Western assump­ tion of a mathematically ‘objective’ (and technologically exploitable) nature existing as potential experience for ‘subjects’ was a ruinous metaphysics, prevent-

ing any authentic relation to ‘being’. The founder of existentialism thus added (for political reasons very different from those of the other writers) ontological inauthenticity to the alienation and reification following from capitalist produc­ tion, thus providing another basis for the ongoing critique of Western moderni­ ty, and, more specifically, of capitalism. In these terms, the world of metric space is a fungible, culturally homogeneous world of the flow of capital and power, of ‘spectacle’ and panoptical surveillance. In more narrowly art-historical terms, such ideas have deeply shaped analyses of perspective (a harbinger of rational­ ization), visuality (the social construction of vision), and urban planning from the beginnings of European modernity. Space has become part of Weber’s ‘iron cage’. Within this general discussion, Henri Lefebvre gave currency to the term ‘social space’. I will presently use this term quite differently as the definition of architecture in general. While Lefebvre’s rejection of the isomorphism of lan­ guage and space is, in my judgement, on the mark, his ‘social space’ is histori­ cally more specific than the definition I will offer. The ‘production of space’ of which he writes accompanies the emergence of the bourgeoisie in the early modern period according to the pattern I have just outlined. For Lefebvre, the ‘space’ underlying this characteristically modern Western order has the transparency of the deepest ideology, and more particularly determines the assumed spatiotemporality of daily life. Insofar as this is a general principle, it is unexceptionable, and is compatible with the relation between social space and what I shall discuss in a later section of the Introduction, not as ideology, but, more neutrally, as second nature. Lukacs used the term ‘second nature’ to refer to the ‘reified’ world of modern capitalism, and in these terms Western ‘social space’ is once again both disenchan­ ted and ideological, the naturalized arena of an alienated consciousness. In this book, social space will have a broader meaning. Social space is a condition of human existence - we find outselves among others - and we always do so in culturally specific circumstances. In these terms, social space is second nature in the sense of engrained habit, but, as I shall argue, there is also a sense in which second nature simply is ‘nature’, since given nature is never encountered in itself, but rather from within a culture. In addition, as we shall see, there is a close connection and interplay between social (and political) spatial order and the presumed order of the world at large. Western modernism continues these patterns in some ways, but not in others. There is a close connection between modern Western natural and social order - a three-dimensional grid is determinative in both cases - but this natural order (which I shall define as metaoptical in Chapter 7) is inherently centreless and infinitely expansive, and in these respects radically different from its predecessors. The solution I shall offer to the cultural tensions resulting from this difference is not couched in terms of essentialist historical ‘spirits’ inevitably set against one another, but rather of historical traditions in various kinds of contact, in which case problems are those of negotiation and mutual accommodation. In fact, many such accommodations have been found, and are being found. There are a number of reasons for such a position. From the deeply habitu­ ated assumptions of what has become Western common sense about space and

I. POST-FORMALIST ART HISTORY

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introduction

24

time (whether one considers these assumptions the results of scientific progress, or is critical of them as ideology), it is impossible to understand places in trad­ itional cultures. As we shall see, for example, sacred spaces are fairly consistent in their basic articulations from one culture to another. It is not necessary to prefer one of these articulations or another to see that traditional centres and precincts continue to figure prominently in contemporary world affairs. As I write this, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is occupied and under siege, hundreds are dead in riots after the destruction of a centuries-old mosque built over a Hindu sacred site, colossal Buddhas have recently crumbled before modem artillery for reasons that might have been given a thousand years ago, and the mere mention of the city of Jerusalem calls to mind an ongoing history of bloody strife. At the same time, of course, these same places anchor the peaceful observances of millions of people, and this behaviour must also be understood. It should not be supposed that the impulse to reserve the space of extra­ ordinary human events, and to orient subsequent life with respect to them, is simply premodern. To take a near example, the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York City immediately assumed the name ‘Ground Zero’, the term for the point of atomic detonation. This set the destruction in a very specific succes­ sion of modern cataclysms - Hiroshima and Nagasaki - to which Americans themselves have a vexed, contested relationship. Such events ‘take place’ and are unable to be forgotten as places. Even if there is disagreement about how they should be marked, a kind of decorum comes immediately into play. Memorials at these sites have irreducibly different meanings than those away from them, and if the name and design of the World Trade Center announced it as a symbol of economic power and efficiency, it would be entirely inappropriate to reconstruct it as no more than office space on valuable real estate. As we shall see in Chapters 2 and 3, it is often difficult, or not even useful, to distinguish between what we regard as sacred and political spaces, and this pat­ tern persists into modern times, however much definitions of the sacred and political may have changed. As we shall also see in Chapter 2, divisions of social spaces, from early examples to the present day, very frequently fall along lines compatible with the grammatical distinction of gender, and so contribute in the most basic ways to social definitions of sexuality in concrete, real spatial terms of access, inclusion and exclusion. I will also argue at the end of Chapter 7 that Western modernism itself has undergone internal transformations. The metaoptical grid, the Newtonian space of classical physics, has been not so much superseded as localized, to become the space of technological and institutional prediction and control rather than the space of nature. Something similar happened in the art of the twentieth century, which became increasingly fundamentally concerned with issues of place. This clearly resonates with institutional criticisms of many kinds, and with such important twentieth-century movements as environmentalism; but it also means that Western art at the beginning of the twenty-first century stands in a very different relation to the art of all other traditions, past and present. In sum, the increasing rationalization of world and life has generated deep nostalgia for more human-scaled places and times; the arguments I have outlined have become issues of ‘globalization’, and point to a deep sense of threat in ins-

titutions, groups and cultures whose ways of life are more closely founded on principles of place. This book might be described as an essay toward the nego­ tiation, not only of differences between the modern West and other cultures, but between the modern West and its own foundational institutions, as well as its own historical consequences. However such accommodations might be achieved, a simple return to the premodern is not an option. The world in fact is smaller, literally for better or for worse, and return to a heterogeneous world of absolute regional differences can only be the prelude to repetition on a global scale of the incalculably vast twentieth-century tragedies of Western history. Places as I have defined them are compatible with Kubler’s ‘shapes of time’ in ways that universal metric space (and time) are not. In addition to categories of social space, the discussion of places will assume dimensions of personal space and cardinality, of schematic reference to the standing human body. In formulat­ ing these last two categories, I have followed the hints in Meyer Schapiro’s cautious essay in semiotics, which also provided the important suggestion that planar surfaces are an achievement of human art, an achievement which I will argue has been conditional for vast, pervasive and multilayered institutions of the presentation of images and information, as well as social spatial order and practice, to the present. The co-ordinate grid of metaoptical space is itself a dev­ elopment of planarity; it is not simply an abstract framework, but a matrix for places of all kinds, some desirable, some not. As I suggested earlier, the constitutive interdependence of real metaphors and their real spatial conditions had a second important consequence for the project as a whole: it diverged early on from the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, which, as I will argue again presently, still, insofar as it bears on art, belongs to the modern Western tradition of pictorial imagination, and so remains fatally ethnocentric. Pictorial imagination has its own history (which I shall outline in the next sect­ ion), intimately related to the long history of Western representationalism, that is, to the assumption that the mind represents the world to itself. The incorpo­ ration of metaphors of pictorial representation into broader psychological representationalism is characteristic of the Western discussion of art and mind from the beginnings of Western philosophy, and, guided partly by the arguments of W. J. T. Mitchell, I have reversed the usual pattern in considering not so much how mind has made art, but how in fundamental respects art has shaped the understanding of mind. This ‘representation’, and the mental processes associ­ ated with it - reflection and abstraction, for example, even imagination itself, which is a capacity to make mental images - are in fact closely related to Western pictorial representation, and to the characteristic development in Western art of what I shall call virtual space. According to Leo Steinberg, Pablo Picasso tried in his drawing to achieve an impossible completeness of presence by twisting the surfaces of virtual forms occluded in vision (and in traditional drawing) back into the surface of the drawing. Both the impossibility of such ‘possession’ and Picasso’s transforma­ tive solution to the problem it presents are rooted in the conditions of twodimensional representation itself. The issue is clear at once in Figure i, the first illustration in Steinberg’s essay; we can see the back of the sculpture and the sculptor’s face, but we cannot see the front of the sculpture as the sculptor does.

I. POST-FORMALIST ART HISTORY

INTRODUCTION

i Pablo Picasso, The Sculptor, 4 August 1931. Ink on paper, 31.8 x 25.4 cm (ii’/z x 10 in). Seattle Art Museum, Leroy M. Backus Collection

z6

If images on surfaces cannot have full substitutive value, however, the attempt to give them those values is itself of great art-historical interest, and virtual space, the space we seem to see in surfaces, offers its own vast potentials, as we shall see in detail in Chapter 6. Steinberg’s arguments pointedly raised in my mind the issue of the relation between substitution and representation in two dimensions, and thus between real and virtual space. As these two categories gained analytic and explanatory usefulness, I began to treat semiotics warily. I am persuaded by Umberto Eco’s argument that, in the world outside literature, the ‘final interpreta.nt’ is an action, when we treat the world as if it were one way or another, with a consequent break in the chain of semiosis, and also with real consequences. The wide world of what we call art begins to come into view through those chinks. In the history of art semiotics has often operated from the assumption that works of art are ‘texts’, which,

however this metaphor might be understood, I have rejected as reductive and ethnocentric. I have argued in a series of essays that, however interestingly and even necessarily the principles of recent theory may fit into the history of Western representationalism, the universalization of the linguistic sign presupposed by structuralism and post-structuralism is by no means beyond question, and in fact makes it impossible to address the issues of real and virtual space around which art is constituted. The linguistic turn, in its various forms, is of course part of the historical fabric of post-modernism, and has shaped the discourses in turn shaping contemporary negotiations of new relations and exchanges among cultures. This situation must not be confused, however, with the historical problems of defining cultures historically (and art-historically) in such a way as to ground them more adequately in present transactions. When the assumptions of Western representationalism in any of its phases - including its latest phase are brought to traditions of art making to which they have no historical connec­ tions, the result can only be fundamental cultural incomprehension. If this project is stated in the terms of semiotics, however, stress falls upon what Charles Sanders Peirce called the index. Peirce called signs referring by resemblance icons (a term I will give quite a different definition in Chapter 5), and arbitrary signs referring by convention (like most verbal signs) he called symbols. An index refers by existential relation; a footprint implies the former presence of a foot, and a skilled tracker can draw accurate and useful informa­ tion from a footprint about the foot’s owner and the owner’s activity. In these terms, my primary concern will be with indexical inference, not with symbolic interpretation. In formulating the fundamental principle of facture set out in Chapter 1, that every artifact - considered indexically - is a record of its own having been made, I have followed the lead of Michael Baxandall, and the princi­ ple of facture may be understood as Baxandall’s ‘inferential criticism’ set out in the most general terms. The usefulness of indexical (or factural) inferences may be seen by returning to the example of real metaphor. Rather than describing, say, a large stone in the centre of a ring of small stones, then trying to figure out what it might mean, we may infer that someone, or some group of people, moved these stones and set them out in this way, then ask how and why that might have been done, and why it is like other things those or other people have done. To take a modern example, a photograph of the Eagle Nebula taken from an orbiting telescope (Figure 32.6) does not simply take its place in the millennial series of images, it demands historical explanation in terms of what conditions had to exist in order for it to have been made, and for its making to be repeated. Historical questions about images in general, including what David Freedberg calls ‘the power of images’, the new iconology proposed by W. J. T. Mitchell as the fundamental project of a galvanized art history, or the work of the ‘imagists’ proposed by Barbara Stafford, should be approached first of all in terms of the ways images are made and used. One of my purposes in writing this book has been to insist that art has, and should be acknowledged to have, its own irreducible meanings. I do not, however, wish therefore to suggest that art should become the paradigm for all interpre­ tation (as language has become), but rather that art’s meanings should take their places among others. When indexical inference is taken seriously, fundamental

I. POST-FORMALIST ART HISTORY

introduction

issues begin to arise that must be ignored altogether when the paradigm of language is overgeneralized. The denial of any semiotic universalization prov­ ides better access to particularity of all kinds. Most inferences from facture are as basic as they are simple. Artifacts imply agents, styles imply traditions of craft and skill, large works imply concerted effort, all integral with the purposes of some group or subgroup. More broadly, formats - to return to that fundamental example - allow the same inferences, but also imply installation, fit to one or another social space of use. Considered aesthetically or formally, formats are relatively neutral, most attention being given to relationships inside their limits. But formats are culturally specific, and their comparison and contextualization provides access to basic real spatial cultural differences. Formal relations within the limits of a format may of course be of interest in their own right, but considered as material for history, they always risk dissolution into the subjectivity with which the aesthetic is associ­ ated. Formats themselves by contrast are relatively objective, more or less precisely locatable culturally and historically, and define the equally specific and literal context within which other culturally specific changes occur. Again, construc­ tions of virtual space are the results of choices and specific historical affiliations and operations before they are more or less accurate representations of vision itself. In these terms, Erwin Panofsky wrote his Perspective as Symbolic Form (and devised the method of iconography) as a contextualizing corrective to Alois Riegl’s too internal, and therefore too intuitive, analyses of works of art. That is, in the case of perspective, the framework of representation itself could be richly and suggestively contextualized. E. H. Gombrich’s essays on allegory in European art and light in European painting are investigations along similar lines. In principle, guided by the link to spaces of use provided by format, similar investigations might be carried out for the characteristics of the art of any tradition. As a final example, the sympathetic understanding of ornament, as we shall see at several points, has been one of the major casualties of Western criticism from Greek antiquity to modernism, and such a study as Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s essay on ornament suggests ways in which this important subject might begin to get the many local explications it awaits. 2.

28

FORM, PICTORIAL IMAGINATION AND FORMALISM

Before it was linked to historicist ideas of evolution and development (which, as we have seen, incorporated the ‘conceptual image’), the idea of form, at least in principle, promised access to all kinds of art. The idea of form, however, also arose together with Western modernism, and for all its admirable reach, has proved to be an unreliable means of engaging the art of cultures outside the European tradition and its tributaries. This failure has become all the more unfortunate as the ever-increasing contact and interaction of cultures has made the need for their sympathetic mutual engagement more urgent. Even in the art of the European tradition itself, the reduction of images to form favours only certain features, obscuring, distorting or passing over others as art-historically irrelevant. The idea that art is essentialy ‘formal’ emerged only in the late eighteenth century, together with a more radical representationalism, according to which

mind (as I shall discuss in Chapter 7) came to be conceived as a determinate, interactive counterforce to the newly mathematically objective space and force of the natural world. This ‘representation’ entailed a new pictorial definition of imagination. In Western psychology before the early modern period, imagina­ tion - as the word itself still implies - was the capacity to bring to mind images, the ‘forms’ of traces of more or less implicitly visual sensations retained from the past in the ‘thesaurus’ of memory. In ways intimately related to the transfor­ mations I shall describe in Chapter 7, this conception of imagination underwent a fundamental shift. Classical discussions of the activities of imagination were typically framed in terms of individual forms, and when imagination recollected forms from memory, it provided the indispensable basis for the higher activities of rational analysis, generalization and classification. Imagination since anti­ quity had also been the power to manipulate remembered forms, to associate and project them in perception (as when we see camels in the clouds), as well as to dis-member and re-member them to make new images, such as centaurs, sirens and hippogryphs. If imagination in the service of memory further served reason, the associative, projective and recombinatory powers of imagination were identified with irrationality, with pathology, but also with the licence of poets and painters. For the most part, fantastic images in European art respected a similar division, remaining marginal with respect to authoritative texts and structures. The modern Western pictorialization of imagination took shape together with the rise of optical naturalism, the subject of the final sections of Chapter 6. Landscape (see, for example, Figure 6), in which many forms are summarized and united, is the paradigm of this pictorialization. In ancient Greek painting, what we call landscapes were a kind of parergon, an ancillary display of painterly brilliance, and so remained close to the roots of the word fantasy, phantasia, which first meant that which appears in the light. Early modern Western optical naturalism depended upon the analysis of vision into elements of light, dark and colour in a field of vision. In the art of painting, this analysis involves one or another system of modelling, and one or another ‘perspective’ completed the system by at once characterizing the visual field as a whole as light and offering a schematic framework based on the geometric regularity of the activity of light in relation to the organ of sight. The change from form to optical field is vividly exemplified by two of the major ancient and modern metaphors for sensation. Aristotle compared sensation to the impress of a seal; John Locke compared the mind to a camera obscura. The tabula rasa awaiting sensation is common to both, and both metaphorical images are indexical, the result of an impression made from outside. But again, there is a crucial difference. Aristotle’s ring leaves a thinkable form without matter, a first level of abstraction in sensation; Locke’s camera obscura image, certainly based on the post-Keplerian understanding of the eye and the retina, is a relatively fleeting array of many forms in light, all of whose facing surfaces, selected by a single point, register on a surface. By the time Locke used this metaphor, he was not only appealing to what had come to be the understanding of vision, he was also appealing to what had long since come to be the understanding of painting. How did this pictorial field of vision become imagination? At the same time

2.

form, pictorial imagination

and formalism

29

introduction

30

that oil painting and perspective made possible new levels of the transcription of the optical experience of a subject located in space and light, individual artist­ ic ‘visions’ also began to proliferate. Jan van Eyck (Figures 28 and 145) was soon followed by Hieronymus Bosch (Figure 33), among the first to effect the pictorialization of imagination. Bosch’s forms are fantastic, not just in the sense that they combine parts of natural things in impossible ways, but in the deeper sense that these impossible new forms appear as if in natural light; they are as optically credible as Jan van Eyck’s forms, but also have a horizon of the world to themselves. Similarly, in fifteenth-century Italy, the development of geometric perspective soon arrived at anamorphosis (Figure 316), the arbitrary transformation of the grid of rationalized vision. With the pictorialization of imagination, it became more difficult to distin­ guish the rational from the fantastic by appeal to nature, and the borders between the mental faculties dependent on image metaphors - sensation, memory and imagination - became harder to draw, simply because all had the same optical basis. But however important traditional ambivalences of reality and illusion may have continued to be, there was, as I shall discuss in Chapter 7, the further modern complication of what I shall call indirectness, the new assumption that we do not perceive things as they are, but rather that they act upon us and that we apprehend them only in the ways we do. To take a simple and recurrent early modern example, we should not simply infer that something in the apple we call red corresponds to our subjective experience of redness. Indirectness presupposes the fundamental and now utterly familiar opposi­ tion between the ‘objective’ world of mechanical, mathematically describable nature (including our own mediating bodies) and the ‘subjective’ experience of individuals, and it was in this context that it began to be argued that the sense we make of the world in which we find ourselves must be attributed to the structure of the subject, or of subjectivity itself, and in these terms, imagination became the first principle of synthesis for the subject. We may consider the vastly influent­ ial ‘Copernican Revolution’ of Immanuel Kant. Whatever may have been the fate of the assumptions and conclusions of his critical philosophy, the basic princi­ ple that the mind substantially constitutes its world, and does so by an initial act of imagination, has persisted in many variants to the present, and has been deeply formative for our understanding of art. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, the opening section, called the ‘transcendental aesthetic’, gave an account of the constituting categories, space and time, in terms of which the mind’s first intuition of the world and of itself is synthesized. Kant defined this synthesis as ‘the mere result of the power of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul’, bridging the gap between the ‘manifold of intuition’ (sensation apprehended as spatiotemporal), and the necessary unity of apperception, that is, of self, and of the world as existing for a self. This imagination accomplishes precisely by making an image. Kant expressly rejected the meaning given to the word ‘aesthetic’ by Alexander Baumgarten in 1750, calling ‘futile’ the attempt ‘to bring the critical treatment of the beautiful under rational principles’. By the time he published his third and last Critique ofJudgement, however, Kant found much greater complexity and significance in the judgement of taste. The activity of the pictorial imagination,

which he first treated as if reflective (or refractive) in the way light behaves pre­ dictably in accordance with the surface it strikes or the medium through which it passes, became significant in ways made accessible by aesthetic judgement, critical examination of which reveals the all-important play of imagination both in itself and in its relation to other faculties. In these terms, the ‘genius’ is able to make art, our judgement of which, experienced as aesthetic pleasure, may make us aware of this free play. Kant defined the aesthetic, immediate to sensation and integral with intuit­ ion, as preconceptual and prepurposeful. Concept and purpose were insepara­ ble in the classical teleological understanding of form Kant wished to reject; he did not simply discard purpose, however, but instead tried to establish a ground for it in subjectivity itself. In aesthetic experience we take pleasure in what might be called pre-purpose, a ‘purposefulness without purpose’, a free but cogent order, counterposed to mechanical, natural necessity. The newly defined field of the aesthetic emerged together with the idea of the ‘fine arts’, that is arts such as poetry, music and painting. Before the late eighteenth century the arts were regarded in Europe as generally useful human pursuits, adult skills with more or less complex procedures and standards, which could be taught, refined and contributed to by successive practitioners and, in higher cases, reduced to theoretical principles. This premodern definition of the arts included the ‘mechanical arts’, useful crafts, and also what we would now call ‘technology’. The opposition of the freedom from purpose of the fine arts to the predictable necessity of the physical world augmented the intellectual freedom of the traditional liberal arts, so named in the ancient Western world because they were purely mental occupations, neither material nor manual, pursued in the leisure time of free men, as opposed to the labour of slaves and craftspeople, who were either forced to work for others or had to work to make a living, and in any case were concerned with the exigencies of everyday life. In the historical circumstances of their emergence, the fine arts were opposed to the ‘mechanical’ in much broader terms, to the regularity of the great machine of the world posited by modern physics, and to the new machines and factories whose control over power and resources was rapidly and forever transforming the economic, social and natural worlds. Kant’s free play of the formative faculties of the mind might thus be seen as opposed both to physical law and to the constraints of the regimen­ tation and repetition of industrial labour. The tremendous expansion of mechan­ ical invention and production during the Industrial Revolution must have made both more vivid and commonplace than ever before the differences between machines, artifacts whose unity of appearance was more or less strictly determin­ ed by function (often compared to the forms of a mechanistically conceived nature), and works of art - poems, music, paintings - whose unity arose from some indeterminate and unique internal necessity. The contrast between the moderns, who were conceded to be technologically superior, and the ancients, whose works were aesthetically normative (no one had ever been a better poet than Homer), identified the aesthetically normative with activities like the ‘liberal arts’, which became, like their ancient forerun­ ners, the pursuits of those with the time and leisure to cultivate and refine their tastes. At the same time, Kant argued that critical isolation of the judgement of

2. FORM, PICTORIAL IMAGINATION AND FORMALISM

31

INTRODUCTION

32

taste may lead to awareness of a public, common sense once we realize that in principle everyone has the capacity to make and communicate aesthetic judge­ ments (even if we cannot reason about them and may not come to agree about them). We achieve this realization by abstracting from immediate sensation, charm and emotion, and instead ‘confining attention to the formal peculiarities of our representation or general state of representative activity’. This turn to form is crucial, and, as distinct from matter, or from whatKant called the ‘materi­ ality’ of sensation, form provided the t>asis not only for the explanation of art itself, it also came to explain cultural differences in styles of art. Kant’s transcen­ dental definition of imagination made aesthetic experience universal (and universalist); but imagination was also a near-corporeal faculty, closely related to sensation, and to individual constitution, or ‘temperament’. As this might suggest, the ‘forms’ of art in the new aesthetic sense of the word do not simply synthe­ size what is intuited or ‘felt’, they also express that intuition or feeling, making it evident, available, and experienceable by a ‘viewer’,, that is, by one also assumed to possess a pictorial imagination. Form is presumed to be an adequate ‘medium’, conveying both personal and collective intuitions through ‘style’, and would thus seem to provide a clear path for interpersonal and intercultural communication, if not understanding, since everyone may see (or be taught to see) the expressive forms of everyone else’s art. The matter, however, is by no means so simple, and the reduction of everything we call ‘art’ to pre-practical imaginative synthesis, while it embraces artifacts made according to all other understandings, is as culturally specific as any of the understandings it embraces. Although more than a century separates Kant from Heinrich Wolfflin’s Principles of Art History, a century during which many changes occurred in the psychology and philosophy of art and perception and therefore in the under­ stood nature of subjectivity, Wolfflin offers a fully mature and influential ex­ ample of the relation between form, pictorial imagination and formalist history of art. Four painters set out to paint exactly the same landscape just as they saw it, but came up with four quite different pictures. Wolfflin’s point is that art historians must learn to discern, analyse and draw inferences precisely from such differences. If theme is constant and therefore neutral, telling variations are to be seen in comparing the character of the synthesis of the formal means of represen­ tation. Again, individual ‘style’, evident in idiosyncratic treatments of line, shape, and colour, is rooted in the painters’ individual temperaments and imaginations, that is, in the formative principles that literally make images of the same but differently intuited world. Properly parsed out, formal differences also indicate supra-individual national and period style, providing a principle of continuity and development linking series of evidently comparable artifacts through biogra­ phies and collective histories. Whether its metaphysical context was idealist or materialist, pictorial imagination could easily be vastly expanded by contem­ poraneous ideas of culture, historicism and evolution to explain collective temperaments, spirits, visions, intuitions, aesthetics, styles, worldviews, or senses of form. Such language, it may be noted, is by no means limited to technical arthistorical discourse of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and, on the contrary, has become part of everyday language. We now speak freely of the ‘lifestyles’ and ‘worldviews’ of individuals and groups.

Works of art, especially those preselected as aesthetically interesting by display in museums, may provide unique and interesting experiences, or even stimulate insights to be gained in no other way; it does not follow from the possibility of such experiences, however, that there must be a symmetry between our feelings in the face of a work of art and the significance it might have had for its makers and users. To make this supposition is to project the assumption of the activity of pictorial imagination as essential to art, and to reduce to form all the elements of the appearance of an artifact, thus in effect to make those elements equiva­ lent. To take a simple example, there are sound reasons for a cup to have the con­ figuration it has, however aesthetically pleasing its realization may be. Elements coming to hand for realization, however, are inevitably social and historical, and, as we shall see at length, are not merely formal in the first instance, even if they provide the opportunity for formal synthesis. It is primarily at the level of the many opportunities for aesthetic synthesis presented by the artifacts of many groups that historical interpretation should proceed. The later eighteenth-century emergence of the understanding of art as ‘fine’, aesthetic, expressive form was more than an affirmation of the pleasures of imagination, new patterns of consumption, or a scheme for the education of the passions by taste; it was also a prelude to the emergence of a deeper pre-representational pictorial imagination, closely paralleling artistic concerns with relations of pure form - colours, lines, shapes - as primary carriers of meaning. Painting might be compared to music in these terms, paving the way for the twentieth­ century innovations of abstraction and expression. To take another example, the importance of essentially non-representational ‘decoration’ and ‘ornament’ in the separation of formal means of representation from subject-matter in the late nineteenth century points again to the close relation of a fully assimilated pre-representational pictorial imagination and the historical appearance of abstraction. Finally, the modernist fascination with ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ art, regarded as the art of historical and cultural origins, may be seen as an attempt to find and express more immediate intuition and representation of the world, thus to make a kind of art that is superior to academic art based on rule and reason, even surpassing the nature and tradition upon which such rule and reason were based. In some respects form was deeply and simply revolutionary; ‘art’ is to be seen everywhere, in all cultures, and, as ‘form’, its best manifestations are of equal value. According to this view, whether individual ‘geniuses’ or collective ‘spirits’ are at work, art makes evident the first impulses in which the world is ‘formed’ and made into a characteristic unity. In these general terms the new discipline of the history of art was a major means by which the implications of the idea of form were worked out and institutionalized. Once isolated, form could be seen to be systematic - some formal features occurred with others - and to exhibit consistent continuities. The emerging discourse of style defined the familiar ‘periods’ of European art history, and terms like Gothic, Mannerist, Baroque, and Rococo - all of which had historically been ‘decadent’ deviations from the classical norm - joined the ‘development’ of European art as equal participants. But if form provided a principle of inclusion for art - and so for periods and cultures - that had been excluded by classical European critical standards, so

2.

form, pictorial imagination

and formalism

33

INTRODUCTION

34

that all European art could take a place in a universal scheme of art and history, this inclusiveness was by no means unproblematical. In the first place, supra­ individual ‘style’ and ‘sense of form’ could and often did provide an essentialist basis for nationalism and racism, so that what might have been a principle of unity - the human disposition to order the world in one way or another, and to enjoy the awareness of the practice and exercise of that disposition - could become a principle of radical difference. As often as not, however, form was connected to cultural evolutionary schemes, thus to provide a deep ideological basis for the domination of the ‘earlier’ by the ‘later’, of the ‘primitive’ by the ‘civilized’. (But this was not a simple situation either, since, as I have just noted, the idea of form gave a powerful priority to the ‘primitive’.) And whatever the case, formalism demanded that all art be addressed and understood in the ways European philos­ ophy and criticism had come to think art should be addressed and understood. Thus, while the idea that ‘art’ is made by people everywhere has had the positive consequence of broadening awareness of the productions of all cultures, it has had the less positive implication that when all is said and done everyone makes ‘art’ just as we have come to believe we do. But as we shall see, the modern Western view is deeply rooted in its own traditions, and even if we attribute to all cultures (and craft traditions) their own ‘aesthetics’ because some traits of artifacts are consistently regarded as more desirable or praiseworthy than others, it cannot be supposed that these traits explain the appearances of artifacts taken altogether, nor can it be presumed that what we see as formal characteristics have the significance we might give to them. The deepest theme of this section has been pictorial imagination. Kant regarded the ‘play’ of imagination as both free and unifying, but, as the new terrain of the aesthetic was charted, uniformities emerged in the kinds of synthesis (or composi­ tion) affording aesthetic pleasure, or in the relations of formal elements found expressive, both of which could be seen to provide keys to human perception and sense-making taken altogether. This in turn contributed to the idea of a uniquely ‘visual language’, to be discerned (and taught) through the formal analysis of works of art of quality, and applied (and taught) through principles of design. Accordingly, the rejection of formalist for contextual art history in the last thirty years has meant the rejection of the idea of quality, of the principles of design (which continue, however, to shape commercial art and architecture), and of ‘internal’ formalist art history, based on the assumption that form itself undergoes ‘development’ or ‘evolution’. As this change has taken place, the idea of pictorial imagination persists in the assumption that art - whether or not it is regarded aesthetically - exists in and as relations. The assumption that forms and their relations are transparently expressive, however, has collapsed, and these changes have effected a transition to a more literal analogy of art and language. On this view, elements in synthetic relations, rather than being imaginative and expressive forms, are conventional signs, as most words are, in which case these relations may be seen to be analogous to grammar and syntax. Works of art, or styles of works of art, become cultur­ ally specialized systems of conventional signs. This paradigm, which holds for both structuralism and post-structuralism, raises issues of translation in an acute form. Having been undercut at the outset by the definition of form itself, the

primacy of iconicity (in less general semiotic terms, the traditional Western aim of the imitation of appearances) is replaced by a new kind of representation pointing interpretation in quite different directions. Structuralism offers the prospect of significant pattern at the level of synchronic relation itself, and post­ structuralism, more concerned with the paradoxes of representation, offers the possibility of significant pattern at the level of the felt demand for reference in representation. Post-structuralism thus raises questions in many respects closely related to the question of substitution which I shall consider in Chapter 4, on images, although not in the same terms. Neither structuralism nor post-structuralism depart from the postulate of the pictorial imagination underlying formal­ ism, however, and, especially in post-structuralism, point of view is in fact given new psychoanalytic depth; and both, like formalism, continue to deny the possib­ ility of addressing the values and meanings of the conditions of presentation of works of art. The virtual space of pictorial imagination is separated from actual size, and may in fact be actualized at any practicable size. Pictorial imagination is treated in terms of relations in a field, analogous to a field of vision. Our retinas - the ‘little nets’ at the back of our eyes - gather patterns of light, dark and colour, relations among which allow us to make inferences, and to connect these patterns to earlier patterns and inferences. The modelling of inner vision on the conditions of the receptivity of the organ of sight has two fundamentally important implica­ tions. First, that form, as the indication of the activity of imagination itself, is always apparent in relations of forms, which in themselves have no determinate size; and second, that these relations are determined by point of view. To take a simple example, a painting by Kandinsky (Figure 2) displays a non-referential field of formal or ‘visual’ elements in free, aesthetically determined relations; the organizing imagination at work (or play) is presumed to be Kandinsky’s, his ‘point of view’ in a higher sense. We may look at Kandinsky’s painting in the flesh and talk in formal terms about it as an expression of his imagination, but we may also talk about the same internal relations using smaller or larger reproductions. The separation - or abstraction - of formal relations from size of course does not wholly separate this representation of imaginative vision from real spatial values. Our retinas are normally vertical surfaces, and we interpret our inverted retinal images with respect to our own uprightness. We might assume or suppose that what we imagine is also upright, and the rectangular field of Kandinsky’s painting so to speak supports and confirms that supposition. As I have just said, the rectangular field of the painting may be viewed abstractly as a quasi-visual field for imagined forms; but, regarded more concretely, it is a ‘canvas’, a cultur­ ally specific format some four hundred years old when Kandinsky took it up. It states a ‘right’ relation to a physically present observer, at the same time that it states a right relation to wall, floor and ceiling. If this more concrete description of circumstances of viewing is extended, it becomes an account of the social spatial or institutional circumstances of a culturally specific observer, one shaped by the expectation that the art of painting, and art in general, be ‘visual’. Thus the actual canvas upon which Kandinsky painted may be of limited interest, but, like all formats for painting - and all art in general - is involved (and always has

z. form, pictorial imagination and formalism

35

been involved) in a system of external relations and connections, in this case, for example, to institutional circumstances of commerce and display. Having said that, however, it must immediately also be said that these connections are not simply historical, nor are they altogether defined by culturally specific social spaces. Any^ manifestation of cultural difference is finally rooted in real spatial conditions, in terms of which what we call art is meaningful as nothing else is or can be. And all of these conditions in their turn take their irreducible importance from the conditions of human embodiment.

z Wassily Kandinsky, Blue Segment, 1921. Oil on canvas, 119x138 cm (471/2 X 551/8 in). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

3.

36

REAL SPACE, CONDITIONS AND CARDINALITY

Real space is ultimately defined by the human body, more specifically by the body’s finite spatiotemporality, its typical structure, capacities and relations. These are what I shall call conditions of real space. We are finite in being of one or another extent and in being mortal, and these two finitudes are joined in the

succession of our growth, maturation and decline. Our temporality is inseparable from capacities for sensation and movement, and we have determinate grasps, reaches and strides. What I shall call the cardinal structure of the human body - its normative uprightness, symmetry (including the asymmetry of handedness) and facing - is reiterated in much of the basic and assumed meaning we take as given in the world around us. Things ‘stand’ (or do not stand) in relation to our standing, ‘face’ in being faced by us, just as they are large in relation to our size, heavy or immovable in relation to our strength, resistant, blunt or sharp in relation to our touch and vulnerability. The permanence of stone may be significant at once in contrast to individual mortality, and as analogous to the relative immortal­ ity of the groups to which individuals belong. The word ‘condition’ itself seems first to have been a legal term, or to have referred to the kinds of transactions regularized by law. It incorporates a form of the Latin word dicere, to speak; condicere meant to speak with, and condicio means agreement, contract, terms. The core metaphor of dicere is to show, indicate, or point, and by extension, to show, indicate, or point by means of language. (Dicere is related to a cluster of Greek words referring to showing or pointing out, thus to other words like ‘index’ and ‘indicate’.) In these etymolog­ ical terms, the word ‘condition’ harbours what I shall call a real spatial metaphor, and might be taken to mean something like ‘to have spoken with in such a way as to indicate’; what is indicated, however, is not so much the process as the result of conversation, an agreement or pact, and, more specifically, a stipulation making agreement possible. I will do this on the condition you will do that. (Again by extension, we might be said to agree ‘by convention’ - another legal metaphor - that a word refers to something when we both understand a language, and may both act as if this reference is so.) In much more general terms, conditions are states of affairs which must exist in order for something else to occur. So philoso­ phers speak of necessary conditions, circumstances in the absence of which something further cannot happen. The apple falls from the tree in a predictable way given that - oh the condition that - there is a field - or ‘law’ - of gravity. I will use the term conditions in something like that general sense, but to refer to the given parameters of a human life. So understood, conditions, rather than being mere limitations, are the positive limits within which a human life is possible, that is, within which an actual human life may be led. To be possible is from the Latin potere, to be able, and feasible is from the Latin facere, to do or make. Both ‘possibility’ and ‘feasibility’ refer to capacities to bring things about, to effect things, in the space we actually share with them. The conditional basis of human activities is for all intents and purposes common and universal, and at all times we live and act within these limits. Individuals vary in these terms - some cannot stand at all, for example, while others move with extraordinary strength and ease. But conditions are deeper than individual differences; and the specific circumstances of any human existence can finally only add to the definition of the possibilities for human existence taken altogether. Art Works both with and against conditions. The skills of dancers and athletes, for example, at once acknowledge, exploit and test the conditions of usual activity and movement, defying gravity, moving with extraor­ dinary, or even seemingly impossible, facility, economy and grace.

3.

real space, conditions

and cardinality

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INTRODUCTION

38

The conditions of our own real spatiality entail the broader conditions of our finding ourselves in the world. We do not simply face, but face other people, and things come to ‘face’ us as we move, but also as they are objects of attention, intention or concern. There is a peculiar, deep, and seemingly absolute certainty about the understandings that take shape around conditions, even though conditions must always be experienced in terms of what I shall discuss in a later section as ‘second nature’. This certainty is different both from what we know by logical inference, or from what we know intuitively. Matters at hand are also true in the sense that we may trust them to be much as we find them and have found them, so that we are able to act as if they are what we treat them as being. By far the greater part of our lives is conducted on the basis of such trust, which is in no way abstract, but is continually deepened, solidified and amended by the experience of our own changing bodies and capabilities. The certainties arising from our having walked (and not just talked) among things and people, of having moved ourselves and things, of finding ourselves to have such-and-such capaci­ ties in relation to people and things, to be like and unlike them, all these experi­ ential certainties and more, although ‘thoughtless’ in the normal conduct of our affairs, are the foundations for the most basic meanings we give to space (and inseparable time). The absolute importance of this conditional level of certainty may be quickly grasped by recalling any of the circumstances in which such usually unremarkable actions as rising, standing or walking cannot be taken for granted. We count such circumstances among threats to life itself, the consequences of decline, of misfortune and disaster, accident and cruelty, of disease and famine, punishment and war. At the same time, awareness of conditional deficiencies has an absolute ethical dimension, since it implies a definition of human worth precisely in terms of a full and complete conditionality. This definition is acknow­ ledged in the finest human projects, from simply helping the fallen to their feet, to the prevention and correction of the many possibilities for human limitation and suffering conditionality also entails. Just as we must more or less tacitly and unconsciously acknowledge the uni­ versal conditions of real spatiality throughout our lives, human social spaces and artifacts - the arts taken as a whole - must also acknowledge and respect these same conditions. Because of this fit, all art has a certain universality, even if it is also a principle of difference and division. To be sure, social spaces and artifacts are always formed in specific ways, developing some conditional possibilities more than others, or rather than others, in response to different social purposes. Social spaces and artifacts are also formed in specific ways that distinguish groups from one another, and make distinctions within groups themselves. I shall be concerned in detail with how these differentiations are made. But it is still always necessary to bear in mind their more basic conditionality, the stalk from which these myriad differences grow, and the foundation for the scheme of interpre­ tation I shall be advancing. The world has its primordial everyday life in conditional relations even if it must come to hand in culturally specific forms. The ‘anthro­ pomorphism’ of the conditions and values of real space provides the irreducible basis for the meanings given to the world in which we must find ourselves in any cultural circumstance, and for our self-understanding through that world. It is precisely because we, like any of those who made (and make) places and artifacts

with which we are unfamiliar, in the first instance stand, face, grow, move and die, that we may begin to understand social spaces and their associated practices and values as alternative to our own. As I have remarked, the conditions of human physical existence, although separable and analysable in themselves, entail external relations, which in turn present their own conditions. Relations to things out of which other things may be made - out of which art may be made - present conditions with which I will be concerned through most of this book. To take a simple example, a boulder might be used as part of the boundary of a social space, thus to articulate both a place and relations among members of a group (as I shall discuss in Chapter 2). The same boulder, however, might also provide what I shall call conditions of presentation (which I shall discuss in detail in the first section of Chapter 1). It might be fractured in order to make tools or weapons; and it might also be used to make images, either as a substitute, a real metaphor, or as a surface for an image of quite a different kind, an engraving, or a drawing with virtual space and time (both of which I shall discuss in Chapter 4). However much circum­ stances may vary from place to place, and whatever materials might come to hand, conditions of presentation always come to hand. That is, in one way or another, it is always possible to make, not only social spaces, but substitutes and images on surfaces. To be sure, local exigencies may delimit conditions of presen­ tation in any given case, and images must be made and used in different ways if, for example, only pebbles or bits of bone or wood are available for fashioning. Such necessity, however, simply means once again that external conditions interlock in one way or another with the conditions of human physicality. At the same time, realizations in terms of specific available conditions point not only to the limitations of those conditions, but to distinctly human motivations, needs and desires, and the various histories of art might be seen as fields of accommodation between these drives and the conditions of human life. This continues to be true as conditions of presentation change from the simple examples of given objects and surfaces'! have been discussing to much more elaborate and culturally specific formats; the canvases of European painting, like Chinese screens, however differently shaped to social spaces and practices each may be, still respect the cardinality and general conditionality of their observers. Do conditions have histories? If objects are always present to be used substitutively, and always present surfaces, once used in one way or another they tend to develop in ways compatible with their first uses, as I shall discuss in Chapter 1. At the same time, the other option is always open, and changes from one use to another may also be seen to involve very different relations to observers. Some conditional values are lost as others are gained, and such changes may be desirable or undesirable. For most of human history, the fundamental conditions of presen­ tation have remained much the same, the great exception to this being planar surfaces, which, as I will 'also argue in Chapter I, are themselves products of human making. Planarity provides the conditions of presentation for hierarchi­ cal relations and operations involving measure and ratio, as we shall see at length in Chapter 5; it also makes human cardinality and its relations to the world articulatable in new terms. More generally, technology has modified some of the millennial terms of human conditionality, making possible, for example, the

3.

real space, conditions

and cardinality

39

introduction

40

actual experience of weightlessness, of high speed, of instantaneity and simultane­ ity, or of illumination, animation, and automation, in turn making possible new conditions of presentation. Less positively, technology has also made the human body the potential subject of forces of utterly unprecedented magnitude, and of violation and disintegration of previously unimaginable kinds. As I have stated in the Introduction, real space is to be distinguished from the co-ordinate, mathematical space of classical moderp physics, the metaoptical space of Chapter 7. This has become the space of modern - now more than Western - technology, commerce and communication; it is fundamental to the prediction and control of forces defining the development of the distinctively modern world, and it has become the space of modern Western common sense. In this space, presumed to be a pre-existent isometric, isotropic container of infinite extent, we may plot the position and movement of any object (or point) in relation to any other. Although any real space may be described relative to this co-ordinate system, the specific origin and configuration of real spaces cannot be understood through such description. It is possible, for example, to measure our position relative to the surface of a painting hanging on the wall of a museum gallery (or anywhere else), to measure the gallery itself, and precisely to plot its location on a map, but these positions in metric space have nothing to do with the historically and culturally determined values of the institutional space in which this encounter takes place. In fact, the description of institutional spaces in metric, technological terms implies the equivalence of real spaces and thus tends positively to conceal their historically and culturally determined values. Co-ordinate space is not simply a passive container for the marking of relations established in other ways; on the contrary, it is the framework for the channelling and control of modern resources, natural, economic and human. The transfor­ mation of the given world effected literally by means of this framework is a continual self-generation of the framework itself, and is anything but abstract in its consequences. The skyline of any modern city, with its glass and steel towers, might be regarded as an image of this matrix for an ideal efficiency, determined in one way or another by available land and the structural capacities of materi­ als, but also inherently limitless and scaleless. And if modern Western co-ordinate space is fundamentally at odds with the values of real space and place (as I will argue at several points that it is), the transformations it makes possible also yield their own intentional and unintentional real spaces, and raise their own issues of place. Finally, a word should be said about the relations between economic conditions and conditions as I have just defined them. Connections must be close because of the high generality of ‘art’ as I shall be using the term, and because the word ‘economy’ applies to everything from subsistence to corporate capitalism. Both art and economy are always there in human groups, and if art is the fashioning of distinctive human social spaces and artifacts, there is generally a correlation between the complexity of the differentiation of these places and artifacts and socio-economic complexity. Art in fact provides the basic indications of social spatial complexity, and, again in general, this complexity is hierarchical. Hierarchy in turn entails differential access to resources and their uses, and therefore further entails relations of power. But in the chapters to follow, art will be seen to be

structural (as opposed to superstructural) in the actual institutionalizations of social relations as social spaces. It would run counter to the rejection of collec­ tive ‘aesthetics’ argued for in the last section to suppose that works of art in them­ selves ‘express’ either idealist or materialist ‘worldviews’; rather social spaces themselves display inclusions and exclusions, and particular formations of conditions within these divisions. As for the economic conditions for the rise of Western modernism, the closely entwined developments of technology and capital­ ism cannot be presumed to be one reducible to the other, and modernist art is deeply linked to both. If technology produces wealth, and wealth more and better technology, both tending toward expansion and responding to a logic of efficiency, it cannot be assumed that the possibilities presented by technology for new conditions and conditions of presentation may be defined as expressions of deeper economic circumstances. 4.

4. THE ‘VISUAL ARTS’

AND THE SPATIAL ARTS

THE ‘VISUAL ARTS’ AND THE SPATIAL ARTS

If formalism is rejected must we also reject the general concept of art it provid­ ed? I do not believe so, and the arguments of the last section may be extended and expanded by replacing the lingering formalist notion of the ‘visual arts’ by what I call the spatial arts. This change will retain at least the breadth of the general concept, while denying art’s exclusive and reductive association with sight and vision, thus shifting the base of art’s universality from the presumed constitution of the world by human imagination to the conditions of human corporeality and spatial existence, and to actual world building. The first section of this chapter might be summarized by saying that when we call the arts ‘visual’, we do not simply mean that they are about what we see, or, more truistically still, that they are visible. The ‘vision’ at issue is the inner imaginative and formative vision I have called pictorial imagination. According to the alternative offered by the spatial arts, works of art are achieved not just in imagination but among real forms involving and shaping human uses; as the immediate results of the more or less specialized activities of makers, works of art are integral both to traditional, habitual activities and to new circumstances. To be sure, forms articulating human space and time may be combined in ways that have the additional significance of being more or less pleasing and satisfy­ ing to the eye. The crucial point, however, is that the genesis and meaning of works cannot be explained, nor can the rules of their combination be explained, merely by reference to the character of a visual or formal synthesis. The demand for explanation posed by works of art is more complex and multilayered, and at base all art must acknowledge in making and in use the real spatial conditions of human existence. The abandonment of the ‘visual arts’ in favour of the ‘spatial arts’ involves a corresponding rise in the importance of the other sensory modes by which spaces and times were (and are) both defined and experienced. The ancient past, surviving in skeletal fragments demanding completion and reconstruction, encourages the abstract visual in our mind’s eye. Having outlasted their makers, builders and users, the forms of the past persist utterly without their living sur­ roundings and associations of sound, touch, taste and smell. Even colour is lost or changed. But sound is as essential to the definition and use of spaces as the

41

INTRODUCTION

42

walls that enclose them - acoustics, for example, has its own absolute personal and social spatial limits and values - and the burning of incense and sacrifices may be as indispensable to distinguish a temple precinct as the less fugitive images or boundaries with which I shall necessarily be mostly concerned. The rejection of the ‘visual’ as the presumed basis of the address to all art not only separates art from the sense of sight in general, it more specifically separates it from optical naturalism - the traditional European iitritation of appearances - and from the more general psychology of visual perception (which might be called abstract vision). As we have seen, identification of art with any of these eliminates at the outset fundamental categories of meaning and factors of histor­ ical continuity and change. No less important, the reduction of art to the modelling of perception eliminates the possibility of considering the psychological tradition itself, as well as the relations of this tradition to artmaking, as themselves histor­ ical. Most art has been made outside the assumptions of Western representationalist psychology altogether, just as the assumptions of this psychology, and the intellectual and critical principles rooted in it, have exerted continual pressure on Western art from its ancient beginnings as a distinct tradition to the present. As I shall discuss in later chapters, the perennial Western aim of imitation is actually fractured into critical disputes about what kinds of mental images sensations, concepts, fantasies or ideas, for example - are able to be, or should be, imitated. The visual arts implied ‘viewers’ who are sensitive to formal relations and expressions. To be sure, some works of art were (and are) meant primarily to be viewed, and many more may be seen with interest or pleasure. In the chapters to follow, however, I will use the word ‘observer’ to refer to those who stand in one or another social spatial relation to works of art. ‘Observe’, unlike the more purely visual terms ‘view’ or ‘behold’, possesses a useful ambivalence; we may use the word as a synonym for ‘see’, or to mean ‘to look closely’ (which is more like its root meanings); but we may also ‘observe’ a rule, a holiday or a custom, meaning that we behave in appropriate ways. ‘Observers’ do not simply see the work but rather know and observe the decorum of the work and its setting. This is as true of New York gallery- and museum-goers as it was of those who used Magdalenian cave paintings in whatever ways they did. Such observances have their own social spatial histories, and it tells us, for example, very much about the modern world to explain how we have come to look in the ways we think appropriate at altarpieces or mandalas in national museums. When we look at European art (around which the discipline of the history of art was fourided), even if we do not know much about it, and have not been taught to ‘look’ at it, we bring a more or less focused background to the experi­ ence. We may recognize certain works, themes or styles, but much more than that, we bring familiarity with formats, circumstances and conventions of display as well as expectations about the presentation and use of visual information, and attitudes (positive or negative) about the meaning, importance and value of art and its social purposes in general. It is precisely at this level of habit and expectation that some of the most crucial differences (and similarities) in traditions of images and artifacts are to be located and addressed; this is also where we must look to understand why in basic respects works of art were made to appear

to us as they do. This is true in a double sense; because other real spatial habits and expectations than ours determined the fit of works of art from other times and places to their first spaces of use, just as specific institutional histories led to the circumstances in which we encounter these works in the present. 5. real space and virtual space Real space is the space we find ourselves sharing with other people and things; virtual space is space represented on a surface, space we ‘seem to see’. In fact, space can only be represented visually as virtual, but at the same time we always encounter a virtual space in a real space. Sculpture and architecture are the principal arts of real space. Within the general category of real space, sculpture is the art of personal space and architec­ ture is the art of social space. Personal space is articulated by relations of artifacts to the real spatial cond­ itions of our embodied existences, that is, our sizes, uprightness, facing, handed­ ness, vulnerability, temporal finitude, capacities for movement, strengths, reaches and grasps. A marble colossus is fundamentally significant in these terms, but so is a clay figurine or an amulet. Tangibility, manipulability, portability, pos­ sessability, and their opposites are also characteristics meaningful in terms of fundamental personal spatial categories. As I shall discuss at length, the formats of painting share some of these values, but in very different terms, and within distinct limitations. Architecture is the art of social space because it both encloses and includes institutions; it is the means by which human groups are set in their actual arrange­ ments. This definition embraces suburban American houses as well as Maya ritual centres or Chinese imperial capital cities. More specifically, architecture is the shaping and relative distinction of places (the subject of Chapter 2). As social space, architecture embraces the specifically articulated personal space of sculpture as well as the formats necessary for virtual spaces, and the conditional categories of personal space are embraced by those of social space, much as individuals belong to groups. Social spaces entail correlative social times, even if the images or texts that also shaped collective and personal conduct in one way or another often survive only in part, if they survive at all. These correla­ tive times - rituals and festivals, for example - if more reconstructable in some cases than in others, can often be only dimly imagined. Painting and the graphic arts are principal arts of virtual space. We may look at a frescoed wall, at painted stone or brick, at a scroll or a sheet of paper or can­ vas, and seem to look ‘into* its surface; we may see an apparent three-dimens­ ional reality, a vast panorama, a furious battle, a table with dishes and fruit, or a person in an armchair. A virtual space is always an image on a surface (as opposed to a substitute, the primary values of which are real spatial). Virtual spaces are always representations of space, and we can see any number of specific representations as spatial. Whatever the differences between them, we immedi­ ately see both a Mesolithic rock painting and an Italian Renaissance perspective construction as spatial (and spatiotemporal). In these, and in all cases, virtual spaces have something of the ‘virtue’, or force, of spaces and things we actually experience.

5. real space

43

and virtual space

INTRODUCTION

3 Map of Tenochtitlan (detail), from H. Cortez, Praeclara de Nova Maris Oceani Hyspania Narratio, Nuremberg, 1524. Woodcut, 31 x 46.5 cm (1 zVa x 18% in). Newberry Library, Chicago

44

Virtual spaces may be made to describe and record actual places and times, or they may simply seem to do so, projecting and elaborating imaginary ones. In all cases the space itself is credible, occupiable and traversable only in imagina­ tion; it can also never adequately represent a real space, or correspond to one. Nor can the ‘forms’ in virtual space ever be complete; on the contrary, they de­ mand what I shall call completion on the part of an observer. Whatever illusionistic force they may have, virtual spaces show what is always at an unbridgeable remove, at a distance in space or time, another present, a past or future. Again, however, this is not a limitation. The same conditions under which virtual spaces cannot fully represent what they show mean that they may be specifically bounded and qualified apparent regions of space and time for an observer, within which things seem to exist in certain ways. That is, virtual spaces are always positively not real spaces, even though they seem to refer to spaces that are real, or might be real. The encounter of an observer with a virtual space, before it is an encounter with a vast panorama or a furious battle, takes place before a culturally specific format - a screen, polyptych or book, for example - in personal and social space, as I shall discuss in Chapter 4. The interactions of these real spaces and virtual spaces are in principle endlessly variable adaptations to any number of histori­

cal situations. To return to an earlier example, ‘canvas’ is a term we use almost as a synonym for painting, and we think of landscapes and still lifes, for example, as more or less indifferent to their surroundings. It is institutionally significant, however, that most canvases were meant from very early on to be bought and used in whatever way a buyer might wish; furthermore, a fairly strict decorum prevails within the bounds of this latitude. We assume that landscapes and still lifes are appropriately destined only for certain spaces - private, gallery or museum spaces - in which certain uses and certain reactions to them are appropriate. This cultural arrangement, however, is itself an example of interaction of virtual space, format and social space.

6. AN IMAGE IN REAL SPACE: THE AZTEC COATLICUE In this section I will consider an image predominantly significant in terms of real spatial values, the colossal Aztec Coatlicue, or Serpent Skirt, which first stood in the central precinct of Tenochtitlan (Figure 3), and is now in the Museo Antropologico in Mexico City. I have chosen it, and have chosen to discuss it first, because it is a rich example of the articulation of the values of real space, but also because the experience of this extraordinary sculpture helped set me on the path that led to this book. The Coatlicue (Figures 4 and 5) is one of the principal survivors of the destruc­ tion in 1521 of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (now under Mexico City) by the small army of Hernando Cortez and the allies he had gathered on his march to central Mexico. The sculpture was buried, then unearthed in 1790 when the Zocalo in Mexico City was repaved. At that point the Coatlicue began to play an important role in the formation of Mexican national and cultural conscious­ ness. Interesting as these questions of modern use may be (and also explainable in real spatial terms as they may be), I will concentrate on explaining why the sculpture might have been made as it was for its first space of use. The great mass of volcanic stone necessary to establish the substitutive presence of this terrible deity in the place of Aztec origin also made it possible for her pow­ ers to be ritually addressed and supplicated. Such stones are often columnar, but this one has been quarried, that is, cut squared from live rock, in this case with wood and stone tools, and transported to the temple precinct without wheels or draught animals, neither of which the Aztecs used. The Coatlicue is thus one with the stones of the earth and like the stones of the structures in its precinct. Not only is the material identity of image, mountain and sacred structures possibly significant, but the working and transportation of the great stone - like the working and transportation of all the stones used in building the precinct - display the power to command and organize labour on behalf of the people and the gods. The squaring of the stone is also all-important because it provides the conditions for the planar presentation of the image, and for its integration with the planar directional order of the sacred place in which it stood. The shaft of volcanic stone from which Coatlicue was carved is about 2.5 metres (8 feet 6 inches) high. This shaft is irregularly shaped, although from the front it looks like a stable rectangle of sturdy proportions, about 8:5 counting the arms in the width. When viewed from the side, the block tilts slightly forward and looms over anyone standing before it, so that the simplest personal spatial

6.

an image in real space:

the aztec coatlicue

45

INTRODUCTION

4 Coatlicue (‘Serpent Skirt’), c. 1487-1500, from Tenochtitlan. Andesite, height 3.45m (11 ft 4 in), Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City Opposite 5 Coatlicue, back

6.

AN IMAGE IN REAL SPACE:

THE AZTEC COATLICUE

47

INTRODUCTION

48

address to the image is filled with threat and portent. The back of the shaft (Fig­ ure 5) slopes even more sharply toward the front, rising like the stairway of an impossibly steep temple platform from the broad foundation of the outsized clawed feet in a truncated wedge to the mask at the top. Coatlicue, identified by her skirt of living snakes, combines the powers of several deities, and is thus what I shall define in Chapter 4 as an icon. Coatlicue was the mythic mother of Huitzilopochtli (‘Hummingbird Left’ or ‘South’; the south is to the left of one facing west, perhaps like the rising sun), the patron war, fire and sun god of the Aztecs. Like all Aztec deities (including Huitzilopochtli), Coatlicue could have many aspects. Here she is associated with earth, water and fertility, but also clearly with sacrifice and the death necessary to life. Four roads along the cardinal directions led into the great square of the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan, centre both of the city and of the Aztec empire (Figure 3). Through substitution (Chapter 4) and the planar arrangement (Chapter 5) of iconic elements, Coatlicue’s powers were located as fully as possible in this centre, established by Huitzilopochtli himself, and the various sacred platforms in its great square all respected the cardinal alignment. The dominant direction was east and west, an axis defined by the rising of the sun on the vernal equinox, the beginning of spring, marked by a great festival. Coatlicue’s image must have stood in some association with its main temple platforms, twin sacred mountains coupling the rites of Huitzilopochtli and those of the much older and more properly indigenous mountain, storm, rain and water god Tlaloc. In Figure 3 this twin temple is shown at the top, the disk of the rising sun just visible between its two halves. The temple of Huitzilopochtli is to our right. The double structure is identified in the Cortez map as ‘the temple where they sacrifice’ and the tzompantli, or skull rack, is shown on the lower, western side of the precinct. According to the mythical account, Huitzilopochtli had no father. While Coatlicue was tending the shrine in a state of penance on the sacred mountain of Coatepec (Serpent Mountain), a ball of feathers fell on her breast and she became pregnant. Her many children, sometimes identified with the stars, thinking she had been dishonoured, took arms against her and decapitated her. That is how she is shown in the sculpture, with large coral snakes coiling up out of the neck from which her head has been severed. As if to join the necessary polari­ ties of cosmic life and death, Huitzilopochtli was born fully armed at the moment of this grisly matricide. He killed his siblings, his sister Coyolxauqui chief among them. (A large round relief showing in profile the dismembered Coyolxauqui was found at the foot of the temple platform of Huitizilopochtli, just as Huitzilo­ pochtli is described as having thrown her body down from Coatepec.) The story of the birth of Huitzilopochtli has been explained as giving mythic form to the originative rising from the earth of the sun, powerful enough to banish the stars and hide or vitiate the waxing and waning moon; but at a more properly cosmogo­ nic level it might mean that when one god became the sun, and gave orientation to the earth from his centre, the other gods died or were banished; or at a more political level it might mean that the principal Aztec deity not only defined the world from his centre, but that, in becoming central, he asserted dominion over all local deities, at once absorbing their powers and demanding tribute. For the Aztecs, the rising of the sun could not be taken for granted. The ages

of time were called‘suns’, and the completion of a cycle of solar and ritual years was the occasion of great anxiety. Human sacrifice continually nourished the sun. Coatlicue is shown as having herself been sacrificed so that the sun might be born (and so that the sun, and perhaps the rulers who identified with the sun, might be strong and powerful). The sculpture allows this titanic generative force to be faced, addressed, and sacrificed to, thus to be sustained or increased. Coatlicue is not slain, but rather lives in her having been slain; the blood-serpents coiling from the ribbed wound of her neck turn to confront each other, forming a new full-face mask out of their profiles, a single horrible countenance with double fangs and bifid tongue. These confronted profiles obey an anthropo­ morphic symmetry that governs the whole frontal view of the sculpture, a schematic symmetry that makes her apparent as human, a ‘great woman’, and states her attributes with maximum fullness. Coatlicue’s clavicle and slack breasts are set out with vivid descriptiveness, but the nourishing nipples of her breasts are concealed by a necklace of hearts and hands, from which hangs a skull, frontal and central, its arc echoing the shape of her breasts, its compass-circular eyes like those of the confronted heads of the snakes above. Behind this skull two more serpents are knotted, forming a belt supporting the skirt that gives the deity her name. Coatlicue’s arms are flexed upwards, and from her cuffed wrists, perhaps because her hands have also been severed, coiled serpents arise, like those forming the head, but smaller, as if to strike. They face us on either side, above paper strips rendered in stone beneath the cuffs covering her forearms. Her joints, elbows, and shoulders, cruxes of movement and life, are emblazoned and protected by ‘demon face’ masks, much like the ones on sacrificial knives and at the joints of the earth monster, Tlahltecuhtli (‘Earth Lord’), with whom Coatlicue shares attributes (and whose image is on her under side). If the snakes replacing head and hands above are gushing blood, then perhaps the snake between her taloned feet is menses, or the power of menses, once again the blood of the mother sacrificed to the birth of the Aztec patron deity. The subsidiary side views of the image are identical to one another, although rotated, symmetrical relative to the same axis governing the major front surface. Because the two snakes whose profiles form her face are complete, Coatlicue also has an identical face to the rear (Figure 5). The necklace of hearts and hands is tied between her square, coiled-snake shoulders, and there is a large skull at the waist. The angle of the block as a whole, a pair of superimposed feather apr­ ons, and the shape of the great taloned feet principally distinguish the front and back faces as respectively major and minor. Coatlicue is thus whole in a literally supernatural way, possible because a freestanding planar surface has a back and a front. Not only is one face of her image set out with the same clarity and unifor­ mity as the other, but Coatlicue literally faces in both directions, and if one face is relatively more empowered (with hands, breasts, talons), the same image still ‘sees’ before and behind, to the east and to the west, along lines defined by the planar surfaces of the block of stone itself. The anthropomorphic symmetry of Coatlicue’s presentation involves her in a larger social spatial order of interpenetrating cosmic, mythic and political significance, set out according to interlocking planar principles of alignment, division and bounding. We do not know exactly where in the sacred precinct

6.

an image in real space:

the aztec coatlicue

49

6 Rembrandt, Landscape with a Farmstead ('Winter Landscape’), c. 1648-50. Pen, ink and wash on paper, 6.6 x 15.8 cm (2% x 6% in). Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Coatlicue stood, although she must have been associated in some way with the Great Temple. In any case, a version of the significant spatial order of which she and her rituals were certainly a part was repeated on the bottom of her image. There, where it could never have been seen while the sculpture stood in place, is the image of the earth monster Tlahltecuhtli. Visible or not, this image completed the powers of the larger image, placing it in contact not just with the earth but with the central, oriented and bounded earth of the sacred precinct. The under­ sides of other images from the temple precinct bear similar images. Tlahltecuhtli is shown with attributes of Tlaloc. This potent deity of rain and storm, to whom half of the Great Temple was dedicated, mingled, like Coatlicue herself, powers of life and death. Tlahltecuhtli-Tlaloc has skulls at its joints and extremities, but is also in a birth posture, bearing a glyph meaning ‘earth’ and ‘creation’. As if to mark the core of the planar and axial image of Coatlicue, whose location on the face of the earth Tlahltecuhtli’s image both states and sanctifies, a feathered shield with a quincunx over the torso of the hidden image shows the four direct­ ions and the centre. The head of this deity is to the minor ‘back’ side of Coatlicue, and the act of birth is toward her front, perhaps because she was in the east, facing west, as Huitzilopochtli rose from the earth in the east each day to begin his westward daily course across the heavens, along the path of the unblinking, living death-gaze of his mutilated but ever-regenerative mother. Thus the image of Coatlicue embodies, substitutively and in powerful attributes set out in a planar order integral with a larger ritual, social, political and finally cosmic planar order, the paradoxical forces of the earth, which is the womb of life and the abode of death both for humankind and for the sun. Coatlicue was associated with the west she faced, in its turn associated both with life and death, but gives birth from the east. 7.

50

VIRTUAL SPACE AND THE PRIMACY OF REAL SPACE

As I have stated, and as we shall see in detail in Chapter 6, possibilities for the development of virtual space arise whenever an image is put on a surface, and

these possibilities are especially highly developed in certain traditions. The pen drawing by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt (Figure 6) belongs to one of these traditions. When we see this drawing we do not just see a tiny bit of paper with a few marks on it (much less do we see the reproduction of a tiny bit of paper and a few marks on the larger page of a printed book). Instead we see the contrast of ink and paper as an optical contrast of light and dark surfaces. ‘In’ or ‘through’ this bit of paper and by means of these few marks we might say that we see a cold, still winter landscape, a quiet, icy-silver sky, and snow-covered ground, against whose blank brightness objects stand in dark, dormant contrast. Rembrandt has most skilfully exploited our capacity to see three dimensions in two; that is, he has created a virtual space out of the surface of the paper, a space at once evidently descriptive but perhaps imaginary, into which our eyes may seem to enter, as if through the frame of the little rectangle of paper. He has also transformed the qualities of the simple materials he used into qualities of the prospect he has shown us. Other words might occur to other viewers to describe the sky I called ‘quiet’ and ‘icy-silver’, or to describe the snow I called ‘blank’ and ‘bright’, but it is most important that we feel such characterization to be legitimate and necessary, and that Rembrandt has made us see these qualities of places and things in nothing more than the off-white of a piece of paper. The contrast between the actual size of Rembrandt’s drawing and the great expanse of Dutch sky and countryside it seems to show us may illustrate both the meaning of virtual space as a category and the strength of our inclination to see spaces in surfaces. But however much the illusion of the virtual space Rembrandt has made may seem to have transformed and even to have denied the bit of paper supporting it, that bit of paper still exists in real space; that is, it exists in the space we share with it and has meanings and values - and a history of meanings and values - in that space (or in those spaces). As we address the drawing now, its real spatial values, and, more specifically, its personal spatial values qualify the character of the virtual space at the deepest level. It is in relation to the size of our bodies and hands that the drawing is small, portable and possessable; it is in relation to our facing that it faces, has a back and front, a top and bottom, a left and right, and it is in relation to our verticality that the horizontality of the landscape is meaningful, and that the rectangle of paper has been cropped. All these simple features establish the evidently ‘right’ way of looking at the drawing. Again, Rembrandt evidently made the drawing as one might write, on an upward-facing surface, so that the ink has puddled and dried in certain ways. When hung vertically for modern museum display the marks therefore seem suspended, free from gravity, which helps to make the landscape seem hovering, distant, available only to sight. The drawing is cursive and autographic, like the signature of a letter, and in the abbreviated indications of the objects and shadows in the landscape we may sense the actual movements of Rembrandt’s eye and hand in making them. At the same time that it is distant, this view was also evidently made by a right-handed person, and the evident hand and handedness of Rembrandt give the drawing ‘personality’ and intimacy, qualities enhanced by the fragility, even the ephemerality, of the paper itself. The intimate scale of the marks complements the close viewing distance demanded by the small size; and for all its dazzling virtuoso illusionism, which seems at

7.

virtual space and the

primacy of real space

51

INTRODUCTION

52

once to seize the eye, the drawing must be closely examined, like a signature so often repeated that it is not at once legible. Not only does Rembrandt’s drawing have the basic, personal spatial values I have just listed, and not only is it the evident consequence of highly developed skill in exploiting virtuality, but the paper itself, in addition to being the support of the drawing, is also an artifact, if not a work of art as we usually think of one. It (along with the ink used to make the drawing) is apreduct, with a history in its own right. Although the word ‘paper’ itself looks back to ancient Egyptian papyrus through Greek and Latin, modern paper came to the West from China, where it was invented, by way of the Arab world, and had only been in use in Europe since the late Middle Ages, replacing parchment. In each episode of its historical life papermaking was (and is) the result of the gathering and prepara­ tion of materials, the application of specific technologies, and more or less local and personal processes and techniques. It was also in each case adapted to cultur­ ally specific purposes, which it helped to shape and change. Rembrandt no doubt bought the paper, which might have been used for a number of purposes (and which must of course be genuine in order for the drawing upon it to be a ‘Rembrandt’). The drawing may thus be placed in a number of economic- and technological-historical contexts through inferences from its most basic fea­ tures that could not be drawn just by thinking about the character of the illus­ ion, that is, of virtual space as I have described it. At another level of real spatial significance, Rembrandt’s drawing was made in and for certain social and institutional circumstances, which have themselves changed. The drawing was made with the understanding that its virtues might be appreciated by a certain audience, and that, more or less directly, it might have value in a certain market. Such a sketch or study, its relation to some larger, more finished work notwithstanding, was made in circumstances in which drawings were prized and collected, displayed for small groups of connoisseurs, and whatever Rembrandt’s own purposes might have been, the drawing and its qualities had value in those circumstances. The simple characteristics of the drawing I have just reviewed also suit it to a history of private ownership finally leading to our viewing it today in a modern public collection. The history of Rembrandt’s drawing in real spaces - and, more specifically, its history in social spaces, its movement from owner to owner, and from institution to institution - thus determines both the circumstances for which the drawing was made and the circumstances in which we see it now. When we look ‘into’ the virtual space of Rembrandt’s drawing, framed and hung on the wall of a museum, its presen­ tation has already placed us in a specific construction of real space, in what is understood to be the optimal relation to the drawing, which is at ‘normal’ height and distance, straight with respect to the floor and ceiling and with respect to our presumed uprightness. The circumstances in which we face and view it, however, are not simply those of an ideal ‘viewer’ because the museum itself is a social space, to which certain kinds of behaviour are appropriate. Contempor­ ary artists make works with gallery and museum spaces expressly in mind, but this is highly unusual historically, and for the most part we do not see works in museums in anything like the real spaces to which they originally belonged. At the same time, part of the historical interest of any work is determined by the

series of real spaces through which it has passed. Much significant history is missed if these elements are overlooked or ignored. The preceding arguments lead to conclusions that will guide the arguments to follow. First, real space is prior to virtual space because virtual spaces always presuppose determinate real surfaces - formats - to support them. Again, an oil painting presupposes a canvas, the canvas is of a certain shape and size, meant for a more or less definite location and a more or less definite use. These locations and uses, these immediate contexts, are always culturally specific. The word ‘format’ is from the Latin meaning ‘formed’, and, although some artists might invent new formats, this happens very rarely. Instead, formats are typically al­ ready at hand, already shaped by larger social purposes. To return to the example of canvas, the word ‘canvas’ (from the Latin cannabis, hemp, from which such fabric was sometimes woven) became synonymous with ‘painting’ together with emerging modern patterns of patronage, when painters began to paint specula­ tively, not for the definite places and occasions of religious and civic patronage, but for private patrons who appreciated new, distinct subject-matter and also appreciated unique displays of individual style and imagination, which were as personally possessable for buyers as they were personal expressions for painters. Oil painting and the format of the canvas admirably lent themselves to these emergent modern purposes. This brief history could be much expanded; the important point is that such a history can always be written, and that the represen­ tation of virtual space - in addition to being culturally specific in its own right is always united with a format and therefore with a construction of real space, which is thus prior to any representation. Both the making and the specific history of works of art are inseparable from the specific historical circumstances, or, in the terms I am using, the real spatial circumstances, in which they were made and used, and much about these circumstances may be inferred from the most basic facture of the works themselves. 8. given nature and second nature Although they are universal, real spatial conditions never exist in themselves and are always culturally shaped. But because the everyday behaviour set in real spatial conditions simply is the fabric and substance of our lives, the substratum of our conscious purposes and actions (as well as our unconscious motivations), the conviction arises that this certainty is rooted in nature, that the things we do with such a degree of thoughtless certainty are natural. To be sure, these certain­ ties are grounded in the conditions of our physical existences and in the limits and possibilities of these conditions; but they must just as surely be grounded in the ‘second nature’ we learn as members of one culture rather than another. Real space, in always being concrete and lived, is thus both natural and conventional; that is, it belongs both to nature and to second nature. We learn to walk, talk and gesture, but we must also learn these things as members of cultures, and so learn to do so in specific ways, to which certain values and meanings are attached. We may all face, but as members of cultures we habitually ‘face’ certain tasks and are directed in specific ways to specific goals. Even if these tasks and goals are merely normative, in that there are countless compromises with them and deviations from them, this behaviour is still defined negatively with respect to

8. given nature and second nature

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introduction

54

them. In general the given conditions of human physical existence are shaped in any number of ways as culture, and, more specifically, as art. Imitation is not only mimicry or mirroring, as we might think of painting as ‘imitating nature’, and when Aristotle wrote we are pleased by imitation in painting because we are the most imitative animals he meant that imitation is the primary means of our socialization. In these more general terms, imitation means following examples. We learn to walk as we become able to imitate those who walk, to talk as we become able to imitate those who talk. Imitation involves the deepest and simplest teaching and learning, and is thus a primary means for the transmission and preservation of cultural practices and values and therefore a primary means for the transmission and preservation of cultures themselves. By the time we learn to speak a language we already possess a deep reservoir of culturally shaped real spatial experience and certainties, more or less implicit goals and values that thoroughly inform our notions of the realities named by nouns and verbs and the grammar and syntax that organize them. Moreover, we learn a language not only by imitating sounds, but by learning the actions and attitudes that accompany sounds, at the same time that we also learn manual skills, manners and mores, thus to become fully communicating and participat­ ing members of the ‘world’ of people to which we belong. When the term ‘world’ is used in this way it once again combines given nature and second nature, real spatial conditions and the cultural shaping to which these conditions are always actually subject. In a ‘world’ - and we all live for the most part in one ‘world’ or another - the natural and the cultural merge as what can be taken as given, and treated as real, by a group. As we become participants in one or another world we are learning specialized activities and skills, doing work, eating, playing games, performing rites and making music or art. It is fundamentally important to stress that as we learn to perform these activities we also learn, once again by imitation, the decorum, the equally specialized habits and skills of responding competently and appropriately to their performance. This decorum, of course, involves more than competency; we also learn our ‘places’, where we can and cannot go, what we can and cannot do, the privileges and prohibitions that also define members of a society. Works of art shape things at hand for the sake of social purposes, and demand appropriate behaviour; but the activities of making and the development and specialization of skills are also themselves articulations of real space. In making and use, art is embraced by shared spaces and purposes and by the values associ­ ated with these spaces and purposes. At the same time, artistic skills have their own conditions and proportions, determined by the size of the hand, the possible dexterity of the fingers, the limits of the visible and doable, and by the materi­ als, instruments and tools the hands manipulate. And like all real spatial conditions, the open and multiform possibilities of the hand must take culturally specific forms, and individual hands, and the eyes and mind they lead or follow, must work within these second natures. We may review the preceding arguments about real space - and also provide a very schematic outline for what is to come - by considering the words ‘habit’ and ‘inhabit’. ‘Habit’ is from the Latin habeo, habere, which does not simply mean ‘to have’ in some general sense, but, more concretely, to hold or grasp or

wield, to handle, use, manage or control. ‘Habits’ are things we do as a matter of course, but not simply by nature. Habits, in short, belong to second nature. We ‘have’ habits because they are given to us in the culturally specific circum­ stances in which we find ourselves. We learn them, not just from experience but from experience in and of a group. Similarly, habits enable us not simply to ‘go about our lives’, but to behave (a closely related word) appropriately and eff­ ectively as a member of a group. When we say we ‘inhabit’ a place, then, we may not simply mean that we live there, but rather that we do what people do there. We possess and perform learned activities there, are members of a group there. We live our social lives there. ‘To inhabit’, in short, is to live in a social space both formative of and fitted to our second nature. In the present argument, cultures may be defined as systems of real spatial usages as well as the values and beliefs that are associated with these usages. In these terms, cultures tend to have a high degree of momentum and continuity. But if cultures are enacted, and in important respects defined, by real spatial usages - second nature and habit - then in principle any of us might belong to any other culture; that is, we might have learned any system of real spatial usages and associated values. Once again, this is so because all cultures are variations on the conditions of human real spatiality, and quite independently of one another, cultures may share closely similar real spatial patterns. This does not mean, of course, that all cultures are essentially the same, or that they are even compati­ ble. Quite to the contrary, because of the felt absoluteness of second nature, and because of the sanctions corroborating it, the enactment of other second natures may seem meaningless, deviant or perverse, giving rise to the most violent consequences. 9.

9.

REAL SPACE AND ART-HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION

Works of art, if always made in and for certain institutional circumstances, do not remain in those circumstances, and, if they survive at all, which relatively few of them do - only the Pyramids survive from the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - they inevitably take their places in new patterns of use and meaning. A fourteenth-century polyptych made for an Italian town cathedral, originally the object of religious veneration - and shaped to the spaces, occasions and usages of religious veneration - might be added to or subtracted from as liturgy changed, then disassembled and sold as piety itself flagged or as churches and convents were secularized, finally to be displayed as fragments in various museums, existing as a whole only as two or three conjectural reconstructions in art-historical monographs. Each of these episodes in the life of this imaginary altarpiece - its transformation from liturgical artifact to ‘work of art’ - is marked by an alteration of the work itself; it is at least as important, however, that each episode is also marked by a change in the appropriate correlative behaviour of those who use it. Sometimes the institutional circumstances of the work may change, as, for example, when our altarpiece was moved from church to museum; but even if it had remained in its church and chapel, and even if those who come to see it come to see a ‘great work of art’ rather than to worship, the work - if it is not altogether forgotten, neglected and lost - will continue to be the occasion for what are considered to be appropriate kinds of behaviour by its new obser-

real space and art-

historical interpretation

55

introduction

56

vants. But again, however interesting such historical changes may be, I shall be mostly concerned in this book with the first uses of works of art, and, more specifically, with the fit between works and their first spaces of use. We must often reconstruct intervening uses and practices in order to understand changes in the presentation of works of art. But first uses are prior if we are to understand in basic terms why works of art were made as they were, and therefore why they appear to us as they do now. The history itself of subsequent uses of works of art implies a first state, a time when it was sufficiently finished; and, by the same token, it must always be assumed that works of art were made for spaces - and thus for purposes - different from those in which we encounter them. The observance of decorum by users (as opposed to the ‘viewing’ of presum­ edly ‘visual’ works of art) always implies inclusions and exclusions correspond­ ing to social divisions and hierarchies. ‘Viewing’ works of ‘visual art’ is, at least in principle, democratic in the modern manner, more or less corresponding to the transformation of aristocratic, plutocratic and royal collections into national and public collections. Leaving aside the question of who among modern viewers might know how to ‘look at art’ appropriately and why, we may be certain that the art at which we are looking was once fitted to a certain audience and decorum, and that knowing this decorum was a matter both of ‘knowing what to do’ and of ‘knowing one’s place’ in the society in which the art was made. To take a simple example, no ‘average’ ancient Egyptian would have expected to see the image of the god in its own house, the farthest sanctuary of the temple. Usually the image would only have been seen as it was ministered to by a small number of priests, and would have been seen by the great majority of people only in festivals, when carried out of its own precinct in the midst of ritual and jubila­ tion befitting such an occasion. To take a more familiar example, Botticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus were hardly intended for the hundreds of people who might now file by or scrutinize them in a single day. Their patronage, orig­ inal locations and iconographic difficulty all identify them as works made for a highly exclusive audience. We shall see many instances of the controlled access to places, images and the meanings of images; control of access has in fact been a major mode of the construction of social spaces. In general, the making of human places has always involved inclusion and exclusion, differentiation and distinction, and first spaces of use are thus always integral with such broader patterns. When we walk up the so-called Street of the Dead at Teotihuacan (Figure 7) we can know little or nothing of the habitual behaviour shaped in generation after generation to these spaces. We can be certain, however, that such shaping took place, and that it was foundational for the lives of those who built and used these spaces; moreover, the simple fact and structure of our own physical experi­ ence provides some access to ‘ways’ that are not our own. We are guided to some degree by Teotihuacan itself; the great shell of these once living spaces still sur­ vives, and its order and arrangement suggest general uses. We will never know when and in what ceremonies the great temple platforms of Teotihuacan were ascended, only that there were such occasions, that ascensions took place, and that any significance must have been fitted to climbing and pausing, rising from level to level, finally to reach a summit. We may repeat these movements ourselves,

with the most minimal sense, however, of the occasions for which this might have been done by the first builders and users of the site. When I begin to realize the disparity between my customary behaviour and the demands implied by the space of the monument I am visiting, that is, when I realize that both of them are merely possible articulations of real space and its values, then I have begun to think historically in a way that only the history of art allows me to do. To suppose that the alignment of a building (I shall discuss alignment at length in Chapter z) in which I am standing either has no relation to my own cardinality, or always has the same relation in any building, is not only to eliminate at the outset the many possible significant variations of align­ ment, it is at the same time to eliminate altogether basic possibilities for histor­ ical and cultural understanding. It is to presume that alignments - and the real spatial conditions for which the example of alignment stands - to which we are used and that seem natural to us are natural, which is not to think historically at all. On such a view, artifacts from other times and places are simply things we happen to find in the space of our own time rather than potential guides to other worlds, to other human choices and possibilities. Whether we find a construction of conditions to be familiar or alien, we find it to be in actual relation to our own presence; and we find it at the same time to be an actual and specific historical formation. In the most general terms, as it

7 Teotihuacan, view from the Pyramid of the Moon southward along the Street of the Dead; the Pyramid of the Sun is to our left, rst century BC -3rd century AD

introduction

becomes possible for me to think of my own real spatial habits and expectations as culturally specific, it also becomes possible for me to think of the conditions of my embodied existence and of the space in which I find myself as analytic categories - and as theoretical categories - over and above their particular histor­ ical forms. Comparison yields a third term - a universally shared third term relative to which any number of further particular judgements may be made. IO.

58

ART HISTORY AND AESTHETICS

Aesthetic experience is often characterized as ‘disinterested’, following a certain thread in Kant’s wide-ranging examination of human art and teleology in the Critique ofJudgement. As we have seen, according to Kant, aesthetic judgements may be sorted out from general perception by reflection upon the pleasures occasioned in us by certain sensations relative to the formative act of imagina­ tion itself. As a dimension of the act of imagination, the aesthetic is preconceptual and prepurposeful, a reaction preceding involvement in the complexities of human meanings, motivations, aims and affairs. If we wish to suspend or challenge the assumption of the disinterestedness of art, is it necessary to make the leap from pure reflective unengagement to the immediate conversion of objects of perception into means to ends? Before making this leap, it will be useful to reconsider the idea of interest itself. Art may embody certain ‘interests’ in a more originary sense of that word. Interesse meant ‘to stand or lie between’, either spatially or temporally; it meant to ‘stand in the way’, and, by extension, to make a difference, to ‘matter’. To be interested is to have to acknowledge in the sense of having actually to deal with. Interest is the inevitable accommodation with what presents itself, with what comes to hand. In this fundamental sense ‘interest’ does not negate ‘disinterest’, rather it precedes it in that disinterest is a possible consequence of the ongoing activity of interest. That is, human acknowledge­ ment of what comes to hand may be considered in itself, apart from the exigen­ cies determining one or another accommodation. The change from visual to spatial arts means that artifacts, rather than being essentially formal or pictorial syntheses, are articulations and constructions of real spaces, and thus of meanings only statable in real spaces. Works of art are achieved not just in imagination but among real forms made integral with human uses; they are the immediate results of the more or less specialized activities of makers of art and at the same time they are inseparable from the habitual activi­ ties of the human societies of which art making and using are always in some way or another part. Works of art, as they may be explained historically, are thus possibly-secondarily aesthetic, possibly aesthetic literally after the fact. It is of course true that the actual forms defining spaces are visible, and they may be put together in particular ways that are more or less pleasing to the eye. The crucial point, however, is that the genesis and significance of these visible forms cannot be explained, and the rules of their combination cannot be explained, merely with reference to the formal and expressive character of imaginative, pictorial synthesis. The synthesis, and the demand for explanation posed for artifacts, is much more complex and stratified, an adaptation of the real spatial conditions of human life to human use, together with accommodation to past articulations of these conditions. It is this complexity and stratification - this

irreducibility to the ‘visual’ - that makes the study of art not only interesting and gratifying but essential to humane understanding. As we study the art of any culture we come to understand the traditions of use and meaning to which these forms were fitted, and the visual qualities that may have attracted our interest in the first place become preliminary to our understanding of the practices to which the forms were shaped, so that our understanding is progressively an understanding of those practices, of their significance to those whose lives were shaped by them, and of their broader significance as human possibilities. As I shall present it, then, the history of art cannot be understood as a history of ‘great works’, or as a chain of works of the ‘highest visual quality’. It should not there­ fore be concluded, however, just because aesthetic quality is not primary for historical explanation, that quality is not a historical issue, or, even worse, that there are no great works of art at all. If the best artists often gather around wealth and power, and their works tend (not always for reasons of quality) to serve as examples for others, that is simply one of a number of historical patterns. To deny quality has the effect of nullifying the many accomplishments of all traditions and denies the validity of the immediate interest taken in the art of one tradition by members of another, interest that may have the most important consequences. If, for example, as is often said, it was the ‘formal’ characteristics of ‘primi­ tive’ art that fascinated European artists of the early twentieth century, that initial fascination opened paths of artistic invention that are still being followed; at the same time, this initial aesthetic - that is, formal and expressive - fascina­ tion also contributed to the desire to understand other art in its own terms, to locate it in its own cultural and historical spaces, and to gain understandings not simply inferrable from quality and expressive character. This last example points to a cluster of important conclusions. Aesthetic experience and art history meet in the particularity of works of art; each, however, has a different relation to that particularity. Aesthetic experience necessarily takes place both in the present and in the presence of works of art themselves; it takes place in those times when works themselves seem to be most present, or optimally present. It is always as if works of art were made for this experience, which is irreducibly positive, and the opportunity, or demand, for aesthetic response is one of the few institutional occasions in which we are expected to address things in their particularity. (Again, the address is in principle prior to any assimilation to our own purposes, but it is not therefore equivalent to Kantian ‘disinterestedness’ in the way this seems usually to be understood.) Works of art, however, were not made for our aesthetic experience, not at least until it was possible to frame the intention of making ‘aesthetic’ works of art, a very recent development. Most works of art look the way they do in basic respects be­ cause of conditional choices very different from those to which we are accustomed, and very distant from our institutional purposes in addressing them. In order to begin to understand their specific configurations and qualities - the basis for their further aesthetic particularity - we must grant them the spatiotemporal particularity of the specific past from which they have come to us. When I see Egyptian glass phials and amulets in a museum display case, I may be unforget­ tably struck by certain colours, shapes and proportions, and by a certain consis­ tent delicacy and gentleness of scale. On another day I might walk by them, or

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even be struck again by the difference between my present experience of them and the memory of my earlier experience, which may still remain ‘unforgettable’. If, however, I wish to understand how these objects came to be just as I see them, different from all other kinds of objects people have made - as in fact all kinds of art are different from one another -1 must grant them the occasions of their making. These occasions were partly predictable in the culturally specific condition­ al choices and sequences of purpose and activity to which they belonged, but they were also partly unpredictable, the consequences of invention, accident and individual judgement within the bounds of those sequences of purpose and activity. If I do grant these objects their occasions, then I also grant them original real spatial circumstances very different from their present circumstances, and very different from my own habits and expectations. When I do this, I have also granted them the possibility of the history they certainly possess, and I have begun to grasp the variant of human conditionality they represent. I may pause to admire the meticulous carving and polishing of a small serpentine scarab, and my admiration is only deepened, and my scrutiny of it only made more careful, as it is restored in imagination to its place, wrapped in linen strips over the heart of the dead, among the amulets protecting the soul in its journey to the afterlife, to the Coming Forth by Day.

racture

CH

1.1. CONDITIONS OF PRESENTATION

In Section 3 of the Introduction, I briefly introduced the idea of external conditions of presentation. We find ourselves in a world among others, and also among objects, which stand in certain relations to our own conditionality. I used the simple example of a boulder, which provides an external conditional alterna­ tive: it might serve as a substitute, a real metaphor; or it might provide the surface for an image of a very different kind. In either case, the presence of the boulder affords the possibility of making something else present, but in very different ways; and, as presentation proceeds in one way or another it necessarily acknow­ ledges, specifies and modifies these given conditions. The word ‘present’ comes to us from the Latin praesens, a prefix meaning ‘before’ plus a form of the verb ‘to be’. It meant ‘in sight of’, ‘at hand’, here, now. It might also mean something that is ‘before’ in the sense of being prior to, or more important than. In these terms, the ‘present’ is not just what happens to be there when we are, it is also what we take note of, what interests us, the object of our attention, as we may say that things or circumstances ‘present themselves’ to us. Whatever aesthetic interest they might have, artifacts make human purposes present to us. For those who first fashion them, artifacts make purposes present in the sense that they make these purposes realizable by themselves and others. The stone axe makes tasks involving chopping possible, the shrine makes the rites of worship possible. For those of us who come later, the work is still present, but the shaping purpose is often no longer evident together with it. To one degree or another, the work has become the husk or index of a purpose. A contempo­ rary person, even one who recognizes a stone tool as a handaxe, certainly wields it much less deftly or usefully than a Palaeolithic person did, and most of us would have no idea what to do at an Aztec shrine. In such cases, when the artifact has been separated by time from the activities to which it was shaped, we recognize only general purpose - that we are confronted with an implement or a shrine and in some cases we might only be able to tell that an artifact had some purpose or other. Only its bare purposiveness is still evident to us, and in order to understand even its general purpose we must speculate, or do history, or both. The same holds true for images. If we are accustomed to thinking of images as imitations of the appearances of things, then all images do the same thing, but either well or poorly. From this standpoint, the Coatlicue (Figures 4 and 5) is a poor, non-resemblant image, the Arnolfini Wedding (Figure 145) a good one. Both images, however, made different realities available by different means for different purposes, and the historical task is to distinguish those purposes and their requisite conditions. In short, we must explain both implements and images - and indeed all artifacts - first by examining their conditions of presentation. As I have mentioned and will discuss at several points, the plane was a uniquely ‘new’ condition of presentation. As we shall see, human (and hominid) fashion­ ing was indispensable for the definition, isolation, and development of planarity, and ultimately of what I shall discuss as notionality in Section 14 of this chapter.

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Briefly, the notional is the domain of thought and actions in terms of pure re­ lations, irrespective of size. When the bilateral symmetry of a tool is understood as symmetry, as something like a set of points equal with respect to a central axis, then any number of things at any practicable size may be made symmetri­ cal. In general, the ability to think in terms of pure relations has provided the bases for innumerable new operations. Seen in these broadest terms, the beginnings of art are of positively evolution­ ary importance,^ transformation of the world that has continually made poss­ ible the further transformation of the world. The plane was a millennial collec­ tive invention, occurring in many places, arising as a consequence of the making of places and artifacts. In these terms, there is a much longer prelude to what we call the history of art, which usually begins with image-making in the Upper Palaeolithic. The long, broad traditions of artifactual experience, the shared stone technology that in one variant or another accompanied the population of the continents of the world, created a high universal threshold of common significance and value from which the characteristic forms of civilization arose, and back into which these forms could be mixed. Once abstracted from operations and continually developed as a pure set of possible relations, providing the basis for new operations and new kinds of order, the plane became the condition for what we regard as civilized order and activity, a new basis for activities from weaving to painting, and for characteristic modes of the presentation of images, but also for writing, tabulation and mathematics, for the planning of buildings and cities, and for mapping. The groups of people who crossed from Siberia to the Americas toward the end of the Ice Age, completing the aeonic northward and eastward movement from Africa to the Western Atlantic, brought variants of late stone technology with them. Over a period of some fifteen thousand years the American continents were populated, agriculture developed, and, by the second millennium bc, ritual centres and cities began to be built as both economies and political units became larger and more complex. These new ritual centres and cities were based upon planar order at a new scale, and in Mesoamerica planarity also provided the basis for the development of writing and tabulation, as it had in the ancient Near East and Egypt, from which ancient America had however been isolated. There were characteristic differences among these developments, but there were also deep general similarities in real spatial order and in the character and use of images and artifacts (which are inseparable from larger social and political orders). According to the arguments I shall present, these parallel developments are parallel partly because a very ancient common artifactual heritage offered the possibility for development in all cases. r.z configuration: functions and purposes We might imagine that a simple tool, like a hammer, simply by virtue of its size and configuration, evidently ‘falls to hand’ and in effect announces its function. But whether or not this is so, it is important to distinguish between evidence of having been made for a purpose as the self-proclamation of that purpose in the object itself and evidence of having been made for a purpose as the more general indication that it was made for some purpose, that like all artifacts it was made

‘for some reason’ and that its purpose is recoverable at least in principle by historical means. In fact, one of the deepest and simplest projections into unfamiliar art we can make is the assumption that we understand its purpose, and as a matter of basic historical procedure, it should be assumed that we do not im­ mediately understand purpose, and that any understanding we might think we have because of the analogy of familiar to unfamiliar is merely hypothetical and provisional. A configuration is the evident disposition of an artifact to an end for which it was made. Some configurations are defined by function, others by purpose, terms I shall use in a special sense. Functional configurations, like arrowheads and hammers, are closely related to common activities and may be made in any number of local ways as long as configuration itself is preserved. Configurations such as lidded tripod vessels or polyptychs, on the other hand, are culturally specific and state culturally specific purposes. In fact, both embody a number of purposes, purposes that, rather than simply giving shape to function, assume their configurations as articulations of many more conditions. Configurations are general rather than particular. We see that an arrowhead is an arrowhead, or that a polyptych is a polyptych, before we see how either is what it is, before we see what specific characteristics that kind of thing has in that instance. Even though configurations always occur in specific examples, there are no configurations by themselves, just as there are no conditions by themselves. 1.3 ARBITRARINESS When we see through the immediate particular character of an artifact to its function or purpose (by which we identify it - that is a projectile point, or a polyptych) we see the artifact as having been shaped in order that it have such and such a configuration and therefore ‘fit’ its function or purpose. When we do that, however, we have in effect nullified the actual realization of the configuration, making it no more than incidental, the necessary but insignificant vehicle for its existence. This artifactual surplus over and above functional configuration, however, will begin to lead us to some of our next major themes. Since pure configurations do not occur in themselves, but only in specific instances, even the simplest artifacts may have particular characters simply as a result of having been made. When a projectile point is made it must be made of certain materials by certain procedures of someone using specific tools in some time or place and it must finally be that shape, that texture, that colour when it is done. The projectile point that must be pointed or symmetrical in order to be a projectile point at all must also in each instance be pointed or symmetrical in just the way it is, simply because it was made the way it was. If we view a stone tool (Figure 8, for example) in terms of the particular character of that realiza­ tion, which is something quite apart from function, then we are on the verge of viewing it aesthetically, as graceful, say, or, in other examples, ugly. The differences between functional configurations made by one group and those made by another (Figures 8 and 9) are not the consequence of mere par­ ticularity; they follow from the principle of what I shall call arbitrariness. This principle will provide a centrally important model for the subsequent discussion

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arbitrariness

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8 Solutrean point, c. 16,000 BC. Museum of Natural History, New York

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of both innovation and continuity. Differences in realization are arbitrary precise­ ly in relation to configuration. The word ‘arbitrary’ is usually taken to mean contingent, without a discernible relation to circumstances, random and even capricious; but it actually descends from a word meaning ‘to intervene’, and an arbiter is one who comes between, who changes a given situation by effecting a judgement. Following these leads, three factors bear upon arbitrariness. The first is the separation, or relative isolation, of groups realiziftg shared configurations; the second is the intervention and judgement of a maker or makers; and the third are changes that occur by dint of repetition of the form. Two projectile points, to keep to that simple example, made independently in different places, over and above having been adapted to some specialized purpose, and over and above having been fashioned from one or another material, may be made - or, more exactly, must be made - in different ways, the necessity for these differences arising not so much from differences in various factors surrounding their making as from simple differences in circumstances as such, that is, from the simple fact that the artifacts were made in different places by different people. There is simply no reason that they should have been made in exactly the same way. The Solutrean point in Figure 8 and the Clovis point in Figure 9 represent high points in lithic art. The first was made in Western Europe, the second in North America, and they might be separated by some 6,500 years. But both are symmetrical and pointed, and they belong to a common technology and to traditions of use and craft that were very old and highly developed by the time each was made. Within the same general configuration, the differences between them are arbitrary in the sense I mean, as are the profiles, each arcing to its point in a characteristically different way. According to the argument I am making, such differences are to be accounted for by the simple condition that, in the first instance, the fashioning of similar configurations took place independently, and, in these circumstances their making must also have involved unpredictable intervention and judgement. At another level, the unusual size and refinement of some Solutrean and Clovis points might indicate the emergence of distinc­ tions in uses and users, in which case social developments would have been a stimulus to the extension and sophistication of skills, and to unpredictable interventions of new kinds. To assume that the ‘reason’ for every artifact’s appearance is its function is to assume that the artifact is identical with the configuration according to which it is classified, and further to assume that differences in individual series of artifacts are insignificant. As simple as it may seem, however, arbitrariness is a funda­ mentally important principle. It means that ‘stylistic’ differences may arise in significant part from the separation and inevitably local realizations of functional configurations. Arbitrariness also begins to provide access to art insofar as it is evidence of individual hand, play, invention and elaboration.

1.4 THE PRINCIPLE OF DEFINITION AND SERIES The arbitrary dimension of artifacts is not governed by the kind of necessity governing configuration, and, in principle, configuration being given, the first making of any kind of artifact is open to any number of possibilities. (It is of course difficult, and usually impossible, to find the first artifact in a series. Stone

scrapers and handaxes were made long before the specialized form of the arrowhead, but even if the emergence of a configuration is gradual, and even if a specific functional form has precedents, the same principle applies.) Once an artifact has been made in one way or another the situation for future artifacts of the same kind may change radically, because the specific version of the configuration made arbitrarily tends to become the local definition of the configuration itself. That is, to keep to the same example, the local form of an arrowhead becomes identi­ cal with the general configuration. A first intervention will therefore tend to define a series of artifacts subsequent to it, or, to put matters in terms of the example we have been following, a projectile point of a certain kind might be repeated indefinitely by artisans of a certain group, and its peculiar ‘stylistic’ characteristics probably will not undergo abrupt change. This means that the flaking and profile of the two projectile points in Figures 8 and 9 - the arbitrary features discussed in the last section - would have tended to be indefinitely repeated in the series to which they belonged. There are at least two reasons for this. As it is identified with its configuration, the first artifact may also in effect become a pattern (ultimately from pater, ‘father’, to give some notion of the possible metaphorical resonance of such imitation). The finished tool should look a certain way, like those that have been made before. But the tool is also the result of more or less complex procedures, specific actions that may be imitated, taught and learned. The transfer from generation to generation of skill - and of the values and meanings associated with it - is as much a part of the larger histor­ ical continuity of a group as the actual products of the skill. These explanations might account for continuous replication, but they also raise more complex issues, as I shall discuss in the next section on authority. Whatever the case, members of series of objects are not arbitrary in the way that the first member is, and the principle of definition helps account for the fact that objects of the same kind in the same region tend to share arbitrary characteristics as well as the functional configurations.they share with artifacts of the same kind from other times and places.

1.5 AUTHORITY AND SERIES Taken by themselves, and strictly according to the principle of definition, arbitrary characteristics have no reason to change in replication; but at the same time they have no reason not to change, and their historical life at any point is thus precar­ ious. Forms of the same kind tend not to be reinvented, but they are nevertheless constantly liable to change, because adaptation to uses stimulates modification of existing forms, because new techniques might replace those first used, because variation and innovation are always possible, or because the intrusion of objects of the same kind made in other ways in other places affects the pattern. There are, however, other powerful conservative factors in addition to the principle of definition itself. Artifacts also tend to have what I shall call authority. Their evident having been made, what I shall call their facture, tends to be understood as the result not just of a process but of ‘the way things are done’, so that both the arbitrarily defined artifact and its making assume places and values as part of larger social patterns. In this way specific realizations of general configurations become part of a second nature. The appearance of artifacts has a basis in the

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9 Clovis point, c.9,500 BC. University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia

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habits and skills of artisans, just as finished artifacts are deeply involved in the activities of other members of groups, thus becoming involved in various kinds and levels of decorum, assuming the authority of the mores of the group itself. Artifacts tend to become identified with groups much as the manners and modes of behaviour to which artifacts are integral might be. Artifacts also come to be more or less closely associated with what I shall discuss in Chapter z as ‘central’ values of collective identity and continuity. The word ‘authority’ (like ‘author’) descends from the Latin augere, to grow, originate or increase, and is thus deeply associated with such central values. As they become part of the ways things are done, artifacts may be understood to have been ‘authored’, thus pointing not simply to their authority but to their own origin, to the origins of the prevailing second nature, and thus to the origins of the forms and usages of collective life. Given such values, the essentially arbitrary characteristics of artifacts may finally serve to distinguish groups from one another. In general, configurations and formats, determined by function and social purpose, do not change at the same rate as other features of works of art. Greek potter-painters, for example, painted black- and red-figure paintings on much the same shapes; and altarpieces have persisted through many styles, as have canvases, which, from their beginnings in the Renaissance, survived even the ‘revolutionary’ changes to Western modernism and post-modernism. This means that configurations (and formats) have their own historical connections, and must be explained in their own terms. Definition and authority may help explain the continuity of the appearance of series of artifacts, but they may also help explain resistance, opposition and discontinuity. The immediate involvement of artifacts in larger patterns of use and order inevitably involves them in issues of social distinctions and political power. Succession of rule might be signalled by continuation of the same regalia, but breaks might be accompanied by new forms, or usurpers might validate their rule by returning to authoritative traditional forms. In the modern Western world, social and political change are justified in terms of revolution or progress, both of which necessarily minimize, ignore or expressly deny the authority of the forms of the past. Correspondingly, the ‘creation’ of incessant novelty (and the corresponding demand for incessant novelty on the part of ‘consumers’) in commercial products (of which ‘art’ is only a miniscule part) is encouraged for its own sake as essential both to individual realization and fulfilment, and to national economic ‘growth’ and ‘health’, thus maintain­ ing a tie to central values, but in modern economic democratic terms. Amidst such constant change, including new configurations (automobiles, airplanes), novelty of style, design and fashion (terms whose meanings tend to overlap) is important at an altogether new social spatial scale. Still, there are local and regional differences, and novel artifacts are replicated, refined and varied, so that modern objects may be seriated much as older ones may be, if according to differ­ ent patterns, and with different systematic meanings. 1.6

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The word ‘technology’ comes to us from the Greek techne, often translated as ‘art’, but closer in meaning to ‘skill’. The first translation is especially mislead-

ing because techne included both what we call ‘art’ and what we call ‘technol­ ogy’, which, since the modern emergence of the aesthetic and the ‘fine arts’, have become so separated as almost to be opposites. Techne was originally related to words having to do with building, like the building of walls. The Latin ars, from which our ‘art’ more immediately descends, is related to ‘arm’, perhaps associ­ ating skill especially with the making of weapons (‘firearms’, ‘armour’) and tools, but also with the shoulder (armus), the arm of the body and, more specifically, with the skilful or ‘dextrous’ arm (and hand), activity as it were using the stronger right hand, or perhaps most generally activity increasing the power to act effectively. When it began its historical life, then, ‘art’ had meanings rather like that preserved in the kinship of our word ‘craft’ and the German Kraft, ‘power’ (even though ‘crafts’ are now for us ‘minor arts’, another casualty of the historical emergence of the ‘fine arts’). In antiquity, the terms now translated by the word ‘art’ referred to useful adult human pursuits running the full range from perfumery and bee­ keeping to geometry and astronomy. The arts were regarded as teachable and cumulative, skills to which some practitioners made new contributions as the generations passed. Teachability implied codification and principles, and those arts with theoretical principles came to be regarded as higher than those without them, so that, to keep to our examples, geometry was higher than beekeeping, even though it was necessary to be taught to be a beekeeper and even though it is possible to be a good beekeeper or a poor one. In Western antiquity, the hierarchy of intellectual and manual established a deep social distinction between the ‘liberal arts’, that is, arts worthy of liberi, free men, and the ‘servile’, ‘sordid’, or ‘mechanical’ arts pursued by the lower social orders, who worked materials (the Greek ‘banausic’ arts referred to those who used fire, such as smiths and potters), and used mental capacities lower than pure reason. Accordingly, the leisure of the upper classes could be justified as the opportunity to follow pure intellectual pursuits. Something very like the social distinction between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘servile’ still survives in the modern split between fine art and technology. Although ancient painters and sculptors might become famous and wealthy, and their works might be highly prized, they continued to be associated with manual activity, and never had the status of the modern ‘genius’. Genius is especially associated with the fine arts (and also with ‘pure’ science, as opposed to applied technology) and is supported theoretically by the idea of form discussed in Section 2 of the Introduction. In early modern times, in the Italian Renaissance, the ‘arts of design’, although dominated by what were to become the ‘fine arts’ of painting, sculpture and architecture, were still ‘mechanical arts’. Insistence on the liberality of the arts of design notwith­ standing, it was only the foundation of academies of art in the second half of the sixteenth century that institutionalized the arts as intellectual, and began to separate artists from the older guild system. Our position in the history of what art has been thought to be makes it difficult to appreciate the importance of technology for art, since we are predisposed to believe that to the degree that artifacts are technological they are not art at all. In broader terms, however, technology is always the more or less immediate back­ ground for everything we call art, and from a historical point of view the link between techne and art cannot be broken. We eliminate fundamentally signifi-

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CHAPTER I

FACTURE

io Chopper from Level i at Olduvai Gorge, c.2.5 million years BC. From M. Leakey, Olduvai Gorge

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cant avenues of historical understanding when we separate and oppose them. Through millennia on millennia, hominids and then modern humans made stone tools by striking one stone with another, and the technological horizon within which stone toolmakers worked is as evident in the objects they made as it is in the more complex patterns left by later makers. Pattern, in fact, seems evident in the earliest stone tools only in that successive blows have been struck side by side to multiply the length of the cutting edge (Figure 10). Real configura­ tions came later, accompanied by more sophisticated means of flaking using bone and wood as well as stone. Like configuration, the properly technological defin­ ition of stone tools is general - all are the results of transforming the same material by similar means - and, although technology thus bears closely and essentially on the appearance of these tools, it should be distinguished from technique, which parallels arbitrariness in that it follows from the local adaptation of the overall technology in one craft tradition or another. Later stone tools (Figure 11) have much more patterned and specialized configurations, and are also much more developed technically, the obvious results of many more motions and kinds of motions. In general, technology might be defined as the whole available range of means of transformation, and tools themselves are both the results and the means of transformation. In these terms, a hierarchy of materials might have emerged. It might be supposed, for example, that early makers of stone tools also used wood or bone as tools, and also shaped tools of wood or bone, as later Palaeolithic toolmakers did. These do not survive, but since stone is harder than wood or bone, stone tools would have been primary in the sense that tools of wood or bone could not have been made without stone tools. But stone technology might then be said to embrace more than one medium, that is, more than one means by which similar ends are achieved (even if one medium or another might have advantages over the others, or might demand technical adjustments to achieve a comparable end). To illustrate the reach of the idea of medium by taking another example much closer in time, most painters in Europe were oil painters by the sixteenth century, but they might also work in the technically highly developed medium of tempera, or they might combine the two media. But within the general consensus that pigments mixed in oil best achieved desired results, different ‘schools’ of painting - that is, different craft traditions of painting - developed techniques around possibilities in the medium of oil painting - the transparent glazes of the Flemish, the impasto of the Venetians, the thinner linearity of the Florentines. In this example, pigments prepared and mixed in one or another vehicle represent available technology, which is general. The choice to mix pigments in oil or egg is a choice of medium. The more or less local development of the possibilities of medium is the specific development of technique. This brings us back to the category of style, and to the simple but essential point that artifacts, although they always belong to longer or shorter traditions of technology, medium and technique, are just as they are as a consequence of arbitrariness and author­ ity within the limits set by technology, medium and technique. I will use the word ‘style’ sparingly in the following chapters, and I will use the word mostly to refer to personal rather than period style. Since, however,

the history of art makes considerable use of classifications by period based on style it will be difficult to avoid them altogether and, when I use them, it should be clear that they are being used for the sake of convenience. I have been argu­ ing that there are better ways to explain evident similarities and resemblances among artifacts than uniting them by style, which suggests that style itself is some overarching entity in which all artifacts participate. People always have the option of making more kinds of art than they in fact make, or, to look at the matter in another way, people are always doing more than the idea of a unified collective ‘style’ lets us see them to be doing, at the same time that there are many continu­ ities among their activities. By and large, objects made by groups look more or less alike because, in order to articulate certain purposes, some persons are taught or trained in similar techniques to make similar objects, much as some are taught or trained in traditions of poetry or music to make certain kinds of poetry or music. The word ‘style’ itself is from the Latin stilus, a writing implement, as we might refer to the ‘pen’ of a writer as a characteristic way of writing. The origin of the term thus points to personal style, and when art historians speak of the ‘Roman Baroque style of the seventeenth century’ (or, more popularly, when we speak of the ‘style of the ’60s’), personal style is being expanded metaphorically, as if times and places themselves had marked those who lived in them, or the objects made in them, and did so in distinct ways that can be recognized and imitated. An author’s ‘style’, or characteristic way of writing, might refer to a general ‘touch’, but also to an individual preference for themes and ways of treating themes. But however much we may value the manuscripts of poems or novels, we do not expect to find any close relation between an author’s handwriting and literary style. In art, on the other hand - and especially in painting, the example that has dominated discussions of style - we are inclined to think of autographic style as inseparable from presentation taken altogether. In formal­ ist terms, the autographic character of works of art constitutes much of their ‘expressive’ character, recording and conveying the artist’s ‘vision’, so that we might learn to distinguish the work of Jan van Eyck from Rogier van der Weyden among the Flemish painters or Titian from Sebastiano del Piombo among the Venetians. As we make these distinctions, we also isolate and reflect upon artistic ‘personalities’. As is often pointed out, Western art history attaches important values to individual style. The matter of style, however, is not so simple, and the very fact that deep values of selfhood and authenticity have been attached to it should suggest that it may also be valued differently, that attitudes toward style are historically and culturally variable. An adjustment in our notion of style is necessary to describe European art itself if personal style is always developed within technological limits and is always based upon choices of medium and technique on the part of artists and those who have preceded them. Having been trained to do so, and being expected to do so, a Venetian painter might paint on canvas in oil with heavy impasto, but might also paint over a ground of one or another colour, favour one or another palette from the pigments available, and use one or another mixture of oil and varnish, with results that - although characteristically ‘Venetian’ - are

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ii Achei/lean handaxe, 1.5 million-150,000 years BC. Museum of Natural History, New York

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as individual as the ‘touch’ or ‘hand’ evident in the paintings themselves. To nest personal style in this way is not to deny that personal style exists; it is rather to say that the specific synthesis of the conditions of presentation of which autographic style is part can only be explained as it stands by considering other more impersonal factors as well. The ability to discern characteristic differences among the artifacts of a culture is largely a matter of familiarity. If we know European painting well, then we might readily distinguish the styles of two Venetian painters; on the other hand, we might only recognize less familiar Chinese landscape paintings as ‘Chinese’ - even though they are evidently and expressly autographic - and it requires years of study to distinguish one painter from another, to understand the meanings of the autographic itself, and to appreciate the various adaptations made by one or another painter to the technical possibilities of the medium of brush and ink in coming to an autographic style. To return to my simpler, earlier examples, it is not unlikely that one arrowhead maker in a group might have been able to recognize arrowheads made by others in the same group even though we might never be able to make such a discrimination, that is, never be able to make judgements beyond the level of common technique. But, however difficult it may be to make such discriminations, it is important to recognize and preserve this range of possible judgement, both because such judgements ultimately involve the particular character of works of art and because the universality of this dimension of particularity means that it is always present in one way or degree in any cultural example. Because the history of European art is so deeply shaped around the discrim­ ination of individual, autographic styles, it might seem only appropriate to at­ tempt to ‘isolate hands’ in the art of other traditions. In many cases this is appropri­ ate, but not to the point of excluding the possibility of more collective styles, in which individual ‘hands’ are subordinated to prescribed technique and to the authority of prior artifacts, and in which this subordination is understood to have positive value. Styles might also be calligraphic, not simply in being associ­ ated with writing (which I shall discuss presently) but in being primarily concerned with using line, colour and arrangement to enhance or elaborate in ways appropri­ ate to image, subject, use or users. Styles may also be collaborative. It might be that in time we will be able to distinguish ‘hands’ in the painted tripod vessels of Teotihuacan; but it is also possible that the uniformity of the images on so many of these vessels was positively desirable and actively sought. Western art since the early modern Renaissance has become more and more identified with manner and individual ‘expression’ - that is, with a high degree of evidence of personal vision and style; and, as I shall describe in Chapter 7, later modern art has also been concerned with characteristic selection and arrange­ ment of things already at hand, a significant variant of the same idea. The situ­ ation in Western art, however, is also much more complex than this statement suggests. There are many examples from the fourteenth century to the twenti­ eth of artists working in shops in the style of a ‘master’, so that one personal style is subordinated to another, or the master’s style is actually executed by others. To take another example, Expressionist artists, however distinguishable their works may be, do not make their own canvases, pigments or

brushes, and sculptors welding sheets of steel do not make the steel or the welding equipment. Technological differences have provided a criterion for the classification of periods of human history altogether - the Old and New Stone Ages, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Atomic Age - but the history of art, while it stands in the closest possible relation to the history of technology, is not simply defined by technology, and there are many possible relations between the two. The history of human making, and, perhaps most strikingly, its early history, consistently displays a struggle against the limitations imposed by technology, a refusal simply to come to accommodation with what technology makes possible, in the pursuit of purposes evidently considered more pressing than practical limitations. This is partly the result of play, and art may work with and against the limitations of technology, technique and medium much as dancers work with and against human conditionality. There are other considerations. The Olmecs who brought volcanic boulders weighing many tons over scores of miles of difficult terrain without wheels or draft animals in order to carve them into the colossal ruler portrait-guardian heads of their ritual centres (Figure 27) were doing what was apparently impossible, a value in addition to any intrinsic significance of the material. These colossal heads would have empowered the precinct they bound­ ed, and at the same time marked the organization of work for the purpose of sanctioning and animating sacred places. No more simply determined by technology were those who carved these colossal images with stone tools, or those who set about to destroy them by patiently grinding away their features or devising ways of dropping stones to fracture them. Although it is important to solve the problems posed by such feats of transportation and manufacture, thus to see how existing technology was adapted, it is also necessary to understand how it came to be regarded as imperative to put those images at that size made of a certain specific stone in that place. Then it might be possible to under­ stand why existing technology was stretched far beyond its ordinary limits, or why the making of certain images or structures might even have spurred techno­ logical invention. There are many examples of macrolithic art - we need only remember the erection and subsequent movement to Rome and much later Western capitals of Egyptian obelisks, or the transportation for the World’s Fair of 1964 of one of the colossal Olmec heads to Seagram’s Plaza in New York City to stand beneath soaring steel structures, themselves visibly defying the limits of traditional construc­ tion in stone. Colossal works perennially fascinate because they are apparent overcomings of the limitations of technology and technique, a victory that induces wonder long after any association with religious and political power has been forgotten. Again, the display of virtuosity in many traditions has consisted precisely in denying the limits of both technology and technique, as I shall discuss in the sections to come on facture. Whether they are accommodated or challenged, the technological conditions of a work of art are in One way or another essential to its understanding. For example, a late twentieth-century stainless steel sculpture by David Smith, a per­ sonal variant of Cubism, its surfaces marked by a kind of autographic grinding, is also in important respects an extrapersonal work, the appearance of which is

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determined by technology and techniques other than those used by Smith him­ self. It is not simply that modern materials have been exploited aesthetically, it is rather that modern metallurgy, chemistry, industry and transportation have made available already transformed materials with definite characteristics (and associations) as well as definite techniques for working with them. These things, as much as period or personal style, stamp the sculpture as ‘modern’. The cutting and joining of the steel, the grinding of the gestural textures of the surfaces, as well as the characteristic theme and arrangement of forms, make the sculpture a ‘David Smith’; but these autographic characteristics are complementary to ma­ terials and processes that came to hand, and all together permit something to stand in the light in the modern world as nothing has stood before. 1.7

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DIACHRONIC AND SYNCHRONIC

Continuity and change are both diachronic, that is, ‘through time’, and as such they are opposed to the synchronic, that which coexists, is simply contempora­ neous. Art-historical explanation - and, to my mind, all historical explanation - must be both diachronic and synchronic. We cannot explain a state of affairs as simply having arisen from an immediately previous state (diachronically) any more than we can explain it without reference to a previous state, or only in terms of its circumstances or context (synchronically). The distinction became current following the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined language as a synchronic system of differences, as opposed to a diachronic system of changing forms. In the structuralist semiotics deriving from Saussure’s linguis­ tics, structures are systems of differentiation within which arbitrary signs have their meanings, and they are also rules within which transformations occur in the ongoing use of any language. Transformations are of course diachronic, but always within the embrace of synchronic structure. In practice, structuralism entails concepts like ‘rupture’ and ‘paradigm shift’, abrupt changes from one synchronic structure to another. Such explanation may acknowledge deep change, but not deep continuities. As we have seen in Section 2 of the Introduction, formalist art history typically explained change in terms of internal, quasi-organic ‘development’, or ‘evolution’, both of which are diachronic. In etymological terms, development is a metaphor of unwrapping or unveiling, and implies something like Aristotle’s formal or final cause; the acorn, in becoming the oak, is realized at the same time that its end or purpose is fully revealed. Organic integrity is maintained throughout this process of realization (after which the organism begins its disintegration). An evolution is an unrolling, and implies continuity in change without implying an end; the reptile evolves into a bird, which may, however, evolve into something else. Evolution occurs in response to an internal process of mutation, but also (and ultimately) in response to circumstances (some mutations may not be adapta­ tions). Once again, at every point organic integrity is maintained. The metaphors of development and evolution involve different relations to external factors, that is to factors that, in any given instance of change, are synchronic. The growing tree may be stunted, damaged or killed, but, despite accidents resulting in individual variations, the species survives unaltered. Changes in circumstances bear differently on evolution; the organism responds to them,

so that synchronic factors are causal in more or less complexly mediated ways. The common thread through development and evolution (representing ancient and modern biology respectively) is organic unity, which in turn provides the basis for the comparison to works of art. Kant’s ‘purposefulness without purpose’ is a unity like the unity of things shaped to an end, but prior to them in that the end is anticipated in the act of judgement itself. From this fundamental analogy of the aesthetic unity of works of art to the unity of organisms, the assumption (stated as an argument) might run as follows: if works of art on the level of defining internal order are like natural forms, then their replications in series might be supposed to display ‘development’ or ‘evolution’ in the way natural forms do, so that simple forms ‘turn into’ complex ones, or the classic ‘turns into’ the baroque. These metaphors - especially at the level of generality at which they have been employed - should be suspended in favour of a much more multi­ layered, or multi-stranded model of historical explanation, in which diachronicity and synchronicity are much more relative terms. The aesthetic experience of works of art is literally ‘after the fact’, after certain assumptions have been enacted, after certain choices and judgements have been made, and a certain complex synthesis realized. We approach the work as an achieved unity, and project that unity into the immediate past as something like the work’s ‘intention’ or final cause. But the situation before the fact is not that simply unified. I argued in the last section of the Introduction that the particu­ larity of an artifact is also rooted in the particularity of the occasion of its making, a principle I now wish to extend. Works of art, rather than being essentially pictorial imaginative unities, are more or less complex syntheses of variously significant elements. Works themselves divide into two very different historical states, a prior state in which a set of elements, each belonging to its own series, with its own historical affiliations, are available; and a posterior state in which these elements have been brought into relations we are able to regard aestheti­ cally. But if such viewing, such consumption of the work becomes possible, it should be obvious that we cannot understand why the work looks the way it looks (and therefore why we are having just the aesthetic experience we are having) without understanding the prior meanings of the elements involved, and the relations among them that were realized. Although all distinguishable series exist together in a work before historical analysis, some series presuppose others or are background for them in the course of historical explication. Stated differently, some series are synchronic relative to the diachronicity of others. If, for example, I am describing changes in a series of handaxes, configuration becomes synchronic relative to that diachronic descrip­ tion. By and large this relation is not reversible, and change at the level of the arbitrary does not affect embracing synchronic circumstances, although at the level of this example, such a thing is possible. That is, elaboration might yield a new configuration. The polyptych again offers a more complex example of the principle that any work of art belongs to many series, in this case, for example, of format, framing, ornament, material, technique, iconography, hagiography, treatment of virtual space - all of which are adjusted to one another in the case at hand, but all of which may also be considered separately. The altarpiece marked an important

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change in Western worship and liturgy, surrounded by changes in the theology of images and in patterns of patronage, demanding new technical solutions and innovations, and opening up possibilities for many kinds of pictorial invention. All of these adaptations, solutions and inventions are not to be found in one altarpiece or another, nor do all altarpieces simply develop; rather their series constitutes unique variants of culturally related practices. All series are historical, but some are short, or intermittent, while others are of great length. Planar surfaces began to be made at a certain point in time, and have vastly proliferated in innumerable adaptations to the present. They are in effect synchronic, but historically so, not universally. As we shall see in Chapter 2, alignments of social spaces within traditions provide examples of series that are long and synchronic relative to many other changes taking place over the millennial armatures they provide. Every Chinese imperial city aligned north and south, or every Christian church with its altar to the east continues a series; and if structures belonging in other respects to these series are not aligned in the usual way, it must be explained why there was a deviation in that instance. To treat alignment as an insignificant feature of a series is not only to ignore a deep diachronic feature and its explanations, it is to neglect the equally deep possible significance of departure from the series. It is also to suppose that repetition of the same alignment is reinvented in each new member of a series. I will use the words implicit and its counterpart explicit, which in their etymological turn mean something like ‘folded in’ and ‘unfolded’. Implicit and explicit are thus related at the level of metaphor to development and evolution, and are diachronic metaphors. To be implicit means to have the potential to unfold in a certain way. Such potentials may be taken up or not, and they may be accepted or rejected when tried. Once taken up, they may have further more or less determinate implications. The boulder discussed in an earlier section may be a substitute or present a surface for virtual forms and space, and very differ­ ent consequences follow from one choice or the other, or both for different purposes. Planes - to return to that important example - raise possibilities of certain conceivable options and practical operations that, even if not ‘unfolded’, are in principle always available. Two of these options, writing and calculation, are operations presupposing and explicitly developing the condition of planarity. Everything implicit does not become explicit, or become explicit at once, and must rather be developed intermittently and locally, and in systematic adjust­ ment to other signficant elements. 1.8

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FACTURE

The word ‘artifact’ couples art with the idea of making, or of having been made. ‘Facture’ is from the past participle of the Latin facio, facere, to make or do; it thus has the same derivation as ‘fact’, which might be defined as something evidently done. Understood in this way, ‘fact’ and ‘facture’ are closely related; to consider an artifact in terms of its facture is to consider it as a record of its own having been made. As I have discussed in the Introduction, facture is indexical in semiotic terms, that is, it implies immediate relation to a prior cause, as a footprint implies the former immediate presence of a foot. Facture is of fundamental art-historical importance on several levels. Having

recognized that the projectile points in Figures 8 and 9 are configurations of the same kind, we may further infer from them that their materials were gathered and selected (if in different circumstances), much as we may infer the related but different processes of their making, that the blows struck by their makers were few in kind, required a small number of tools, and were highly skilled. And we may infer, if not with the same precision, that these human activities belonged to worlds, ‘second natures’, social spaces and times of which these skills were a part. We may consider the importance of facture to art-historical interpretation in the much more complex example of the diorite statue of the Old Kingdom Egyptian pharaoh Chephren, builder of the second of the great pyramids at Giza (Figure 12). We do not see this image as the result of the quarrying, moving over long distances, measuring, difficult cutting with stone and copper tools and endless abrasion and polishing that it is, rather we see it first as that of which the stone has come to be an image by means of these procedures. We might be struck by the aesthetic qualities consequent to facture, by the particular character of volumes and contours or of incised lines and polished surfaces, but that does not mean that these characteristics are merely ‘visual’. The word ‘quarrying’ itself is from quadratus, ‘squared’, trenched around, then cut or split from natural rock, and the cubic block that determines so much of the sculpture’s appearance is a product of the fact of this prior shaping, which is incorporated and still manifest in the work. Technology and technique, the craft specialization of sculptors, but also of quarriers, as well as the social and political organization of skill and labour, must all be considered in order to explain the cubic presen­ tation of the image and thus to understand that presentation in its historical context. So we might proceed through all the characteristics I have listed above, drawing similar inferences. In this way the sculpture comes into view not as an ‘expression of the Egyptian spirit’ but as a more straightforwardly collective work in which the resources and political institutions of a land and people supported the specialization and marshalling of labour and skill necessary to bring such an image into existence. It is when we see the image of Chephren as the focus of these activities that it becomes, not simply a likeness or an eternal substitute for the sacred presence of the king, but a statement of power, which it was certainly meant to be, even though - or precisely because - it was an image to which access was almost totally limited. It is in these inferrable circumstances that the sculpture is also a work of great aesthetic force. It is important to stress, however, that the two paths of inference, from facture or from aesthetic charac­ ter, lead in very different directions, even if they may finally be complementary in our understanding of the work. We are perhaps most accustomed to thinking of facture in relation to auto­ graphic style, and to associating it with personal expression, as in the famous example of the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, where brushwork is typically urgent and very evident. Such painting is certainly an index of its making, and it is easy to feel the viscosity of the paint, the resistance of the canvas, the quick push of the loaded brush. But however these features may strike us, and however important and central they may be to the experience of the work - and even to the intended experience of the work - they do not by any means exhaust the

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12 The Pharaoh Chephren, c.2500 BC. Diorite, height 165 cm (66 in). Egyptian Museum, Cairo

question of the painting’s facture. Van Gogh began with canvas of a certain weave on wooden stretchers of a certain size, prepared, distributed and marketed in certain ways; he used colours in a certain state of preparation, certain brushes and knives, and his use of materials, and the techniques he employed, all belonged to traditions of making and its significance. The personal style evident in the emphatic and impulsive gestures recorded in Van Gogh’s painting is significant within the specific traditions of easel painting, an acknowledged arena of ima­ ginative performance with its associated issues and values, including the question of the significance of pictorial facture itself. It is relative to these traditions that both the continuities and departures of Van Gogh’s style are to be seen and understood historically. Also, in and beneath the final image are to be seen the many anonymous factural affiliations of the painting as a ‘product of its age’.

1.9 FACTURE AND MATERIALS The materials out of which works of art are made are not homogeneous passive ‘matter’ upon which ‘forms’ are impressed by imagination. Materials are gathered, selected, traded and made in their own right, and differences among them easily state other distinctions. It makes sense to us that bronze, silver and gold medals are awarded respectively for third, second and first place in competitions, just as it makes sense that anniversaries and jubilees ascend from silver to gold to diamond. However conventional such rankings may be on reflection, it would seem wrong to change them because we feel there is a proportion between the levels of events and accomplishments and the values of the materials awarded in recognition of them. Even if the metals were rearranged, and silver made ‘higher’ than gold, metals would still state relative distinction By the time artifacts of interest to art historians were made at all, materials must have come to hand with their own powers, values and relative values, thus lending themselves to formation of the social distinctions that have been part of civilized life from the beginning. We are still very much inclined to associate precious materials, not just with wealth, but with hierarchy, with persons and events of extraordinary significance. These associations may cut two ways, of course; both innovation and reaction may reject hierarchy precisely by rejecting material distinction. Early Christian writers juxtaposed the humility of Christ to the elaborate trappings of the Roman emperor, the Buddha and Saint Francis renounced their wealth, and the visual rhetoric of modern states, liberal democra­ cies and totalitarian ‘people’s republics’ alike, is defined by the denial of the ‘finery’ of royal and imperial rule. Modern leaders are little distinguished from followers, and what modern royals there are don their paraphernalia only on occasions sanctioned by long tradition, like coronations. Tools are to be found throughout the strata of occupation at Olduvai Gorge (in present Tanzania); some stones were brought over long distances to the places they were found, and some were cached in places they might be used, so that our ancestors of some two million years ago displayed behaviour of kinds separat­ ing them from other primates. Stones fracture differently, making more or less suitably sharp and durable edges, and preferences for some stones must have developed together with techniques of tool-making. The search for stones and sources of stones associated with the formation of the most basic technology

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must also have resulted in the discovery of useful stones, but also of rare, unusual, and unworkably hard ones (as well as ores), and, as societies became more complex, differences in materials became indispensable for the articulation of social and economic structures. The first materials used in this way were natural ones, ivory and shell, personal ornaments of which are found in late Palaeolithic burials. More than personal embellishments, these ornaments must have served the purpose of distinguishing and empowering their owners in this life and the afterlife. Transportation over long distances, if not trade, may have been encour­ aged by values and meanings associated with exotic objects such as shells, and it may be supposed that Palaeolithic artifacts of ivory and bone were understood to be informed by the power of the animals from which they came, powers enhanced by facture and magnified by the addition of images. Inorganic materi­ als, stones and minerals, soon followed shell and bone, first amber (fossilized resin, with its preserved insects and magnetic properties; the modem word ‘electric’ descends from the Greek and Latin for amber), then jade, lapis lazuli, copper and gold, as the search for materials was turned to new purposes with the rise of city cultures. By the beginning of the fourth millennium bc there was trade in luxury materials between Europe and Asia, and lapis lazuli (blue stone), probably all from a single source in Afghanistan, is to be found in predynastic Egyptian burials and in the royal burials at Ur in present Iraq, the former over 2,000 miles from the stone’s origin. The materials most prized varied from culture to culture and period to period, and the reasons for prizing them no doubt constantly changed, but, once established, the basic patterns might have very long durations. Thousands of years after the trade in lapis lazuli began, Italian Renaissance contracts carefully specified the purity of the ultramarine pigment ground from lapis lazuli and used to paint the robes of the Virgin Mary. Lapis lazuli was rare, expensive and exotic - ‘ultrama­ rine’ is from the late Latin combination of ultra and mare, beyond the sea, from the East, both exotic and sacred. It was therefore, in addition to the symbolism of its heavenly colour, appropriate garb for the Queen of Heaven and interces­ sor of souls, in itself a votive offering to her. And, together with such religious purposes, its offering and splendid display might at once indicate the wealth and status of the patron and family who paid for the image, and contribute to the collective expression of piety. Materials are often understood to possess various virtues, associated not only with their places of origin, and with their intrinsic qualities, but also with any number of culturally specific circumstances and associations. In sub-Saharan Africa, the trees from which woodcarvers take their wood may be male or female, possess certain powers, or be inhabited by spirits that make them appropriate for one or another purpose; clay from termite hills may be associated with fertility, like termites themselves, and thus be appropriate for the making of certain figures; clay from rivers may also be potent with spiritual energy. In such circumstances, the virtues of materials themselves - and there are often sever­ al of them in a single mask or figure - may be at least as fully a part of the power of the image as what it represents. The hard black diorite from which the statue of Chephren was carved (Figure 12) stood at the top of a hierarchy of materials and was uniquely appropriate to

his royal image. To have one’s image made at all in Old Kingdom Egypt was the prerogative of a very few, and the image of a lesser person might be made in a correspondingly lesser stone, or in copper or wood. Hierarchies of materials are also to be seen in many examples in architecture. The Egyptians reserved building in stone for tombs and temples. In early manuals of Hindu building it is specified that ‘it is a hundred times more meritorious to build a temple in brick than to build one in wood’ and ‘ten thousand times more meritorious to build a temple in stone than in brick’. (It may be noted that temples continued to be built of lesser materials - mud, for example - and that these distinctions could be gendered, stone and brick being male, brick and wood female, a mixture androgynous.) Similarly, at Angkor in Cambodia (Figures 98-101) buildings of stone and brick were dedicated to the gods, and the palaces of the kings who built these great complexes were made of wood, which had its own positive values. From pre-Dynastic times through to Roman antiquity, Egypt was the source of prized coloured stones such as diorite and porphyry, and Egyptian artisans early on mastered techniques of working these extremely hard stones. In Roman times, marbles and coloured stones were reserved for imperial use. Julius Caesar was commemorated by a column made of the royal marble of Numidia, which he had conquered; and when he in his turn had conquered Egypt, Augustus brought to Rome an ancient obelisk of red Aswan granite, identified with the pharoahs and with the cult of the sun for more than two thousand years. Not only did the possession of exotic worked stones state dominion over other lands and rulers, but columns of coloured marbles - that is, exotic materials worked by the marshalling of labour and skill that was a uniquely imperial prerogative - served as imperial gifts and signs of favour. The remaking of Rome itself in marble was worthy of its status as metropolis of a great empire. By the same token, the adoption of valuable stones for the use of Roman aristocrats meant not only the increase in overall wealth but the assumption of a sign of imperial status. In late classical antiquity, porphyry stone (that is, purple stone) from the desert of Egypt was part of the cult of the emperor and served as the material both for images and for the spaces that shaped the ritual of the emperor’s life. The Byzantine emperor was born in a porphyry chamber, offered his devotions and received ambassadors on porphyry. Constantine and his mother Helena were buried in porphyry sarcophagi. Purple ink was reserved for the emperor’s use and was kept by a special chamberlain. With the decline of the Roman Empire the Egyptian quarries were closed and the techniques of working the intractable stones forgotten in Europe, to be revived in the Italian Renaissance. When, in the late sixteenth century, a porphyry statue of Justice was erected by Cosimo I de’ Medici on a column in a square in Florence, it had the significance of placing the image in the succession of Roman imperial art - and of placing Cosimo’s rule in the tradition of Roman imperial rule - not least because of the stone of which it was made, and the skill of the patron’s artists who had carved it. Extremely ancient traditions of the significance of rare materials are to be seen in the cults of jade and other green stones in China and ancient Mesoamerica (Figure 13). Jade is found in only a few places in the world, and its diffusion attests to its exchange and travel. From Neolithic times the Chinese worked jade

I.9 FACTURE AND MATERIALS

13 Olmec celt, c.900 BC. Diopside-jadeite, 28.3 xjcm (n'/zx 37b in). Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC

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14 Burial mask of Lord Pacal from his tomb in the Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque, Late Classic Maya, 684 AD. Jadite, shell and obsidian, height 24 cm (9% in). Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City

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brought from sources in central Asia some 2,000 miles away, establishing its symbolism in religion and legend as well as making it foundational (as bronze would become) for the rituals of rule, and for the exchanges and presentations of centralized power. Jade is extremely hard, and, like gold, is incorruptible; its various colours are enhanced by polishing, and it is musical, sounding tones when struck. It must be worked with still harder stones, requiring both special­ ized skills and long, meticulous labour. Its possessionccuild associate the owner with the properties of the material itself, and once again announced the status necessary to command the products of such labour. In China highly worked jade artifacts are common in elite burials from Neo­ lithic times. Jade was believed for millennia to promote longevity, and perhaps no more vivid testimony to faith in its life-giving properties can be imagined than early Han dynasty burials like that of Liu Sheng and his wife Dou Wan, who were entirely encased in armour-like suits made of some 2,000 small jade plates tied together with wire of precious metal. All of the openings of the body were stopped by pieces of jade, as if to block the influx of evil spirits, and thus prevent corruption of the body. To be buried in such a fashion was a uniquely imperial privilege, and only about forty such burials have been found. Appropriately, another hierarchy of materials was observed, and depending on status, the small jade plates were tied together with wire of gold, silver or bronze. The word ‘jade’ itself comes from the Spanish piedra de ihada, which means something like ‘flank stone’. Although the conquistadors were baffled by the preference of the Aztecs for jade to the gold they sought, they were more open to the medicinal claims made for the stone, said to be an antidote for kidney inflammation. (This is preserved in the word ‘nephrite’, a variety of jade, from the Greek nephros, kidney.) In Mesoamerica the cult of jade had been part of elite centre culture from the mid-second millennium bc, that is, for 3,000 years by the time of the Spanish conquest. The high polish of the Olmec jade hand axe in Figure 13 accentuates the colour of the stone, and exploits its extreme hardness as the capacity to take on a uniform, near-reflective surface. As an indication of some of the possible powers associated with jade (and of the association of jade with the powerful), we may consider Figure 14. This Jade mosaic mask covered the face of the late seventh-century Maya Lord Pacal, ruler of Palenque (now in southern Mexico), and, perhaps like the gold masks of Egyptian pharaohs, prepared him to face the gods. Lord Pacal also had jade ear-spools, and many jade necklaces and rings. Worked jade had been placed in his mouth, certainly to prepare him for the afterlife, as pieces of jade were also placed in the mouths of the dead by the Aztecs. Metals raise a number of new issues. Unlike frangible (and fragile) stone, metals are malleable and ductile, and their working usually involves fire (and ceramics, moulds and ovens, which also involve fire). Gold is an impractical metal, not useful for making tools (as copper proved to be), and the develop­ ment of the sophisticated techniques for working gold in ancient Central and South American cultures, for example, seems to have been driven entirely by the need to make elite and ritual artifacts. Gold for the Inca and their predecessors had values comparable to those of jade for the Mesoamericans (who eventually imported gold from their southern neighbours, but did not work it themselves

until the centuries preceding the Spanish conquest; the Maya did not work it). When Pizarro arrived at Cuzco, the Inca capital, in 1532, he found its principal temple, the centre of the Inca empire which the Spaniards called the Temple of the Sun, sheathed in gold. In Europe, of course, gold was used to mint money, and thus for exchange, as well as to make visible distinctions among people, places, images and occasions. The conquistadors removed the gold, which was melted down and sent to Europe as part of the enormous flow of the precious metal from the Americas that began in the sixteenth century. In fact the importance of wrought gold in visibly stating hierarchy in the social spaces of life and death in ancient South America has meant a still unending history of the looting and destruction of the remains of Andean cultures, as gold artifacts have been melted down or collected to mark the status of new owners in utterly different contexts. Copper, a soft but more useful metal, was worked as early as the eighth millen­ nium bc. Copper was mixed with various materials to harden it, and these alloys, the most common with tin, are loosely referred to as ‘bronze’. (Tin was also rare and even exotic.) Wherever bronze became available it replaced the technology of stone. Bronze itself is a truly new, artificial material, and, like iron and metals generally, its making involves high temperatures in processes that change the nature and state of ingredient metals and result in lustrous tools and weapons of a more-than-lithic hardness. The techniques used in fashioning metals are more complex and specialized than those used for fashioning wood and stone, and a mythical aura of power and mystery often surrounds workers in metal. It is not hard to imagine a connection between the superiority of bronze weapons and the understood force and strength of the material itself. The bronze head of an Akkadian king (Figure 15), cast around 2300 bc in what was then this fairly new material (first made in the Near East around 3000 bc), must have seemed alive with that force and strength. Unlike stone or wood, bronze, once alloyed, has no shape of its own, and the forms it is to assume must be determined either by beating or by pouring into moulds of predetermined shape made of another material. Most simply, a copper or bronze axe may be made by pouring molten metal into an impression carved in stone. This, however, moulds only one side of the axe, which must be hammered and polished into final form and finish. Two such moulds may be fixed face to face and metal poured into the space between them. More complex shapes small figures, for example - required different techniques involving ceramic moulds, and it might be supposed that more complex techniques of bronze casting were devised to make images rather than weapons. To make a figure, the form to be cast in bronze is first modelled in wax, and clay packed around the wax model. The clay mould is then fired and the wax melted out (or ‘lost’), finally to be replaced by molten bronze. This works only for small, solid images, and larger, more complex ones, like the Ife heads (Figure 16), required an earthen core upon which a skin of wax was spread and modelled with final surfaces and details. Clay was placed around the wax surface, the skin of wax melted out and molten bronze poured in. When the cast is cool, the mould is removed, the core extracted from the bronze shell, and final polishing completed. Perhaps because of the status of bronze itself, the complexity of the process of manufacture, and the masterliness of the results, the Nigerian techniques of bronze casting were said

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15 Head of an Akkadian king, from Nineveh, c.2300 BC. Copper alloy, height 3 6 cm (12.% in). Iraq Museum, Baghdad

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16 Portrait mask, called Obalufon II, nth-nth century. Copper, height 29 cm (11% in). Museum of Ife Antiquites, Ife

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to have been invented by Obalufon II, the deified third king of Ife. Iron and the working of iron also has a long West African tradition, which followed the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas and still continues. In general, copper and alloys of copper (brass and bronze) were much preferred to gold in African cultures before European contact. Arab, Indian and finally European traders recorded as much surprise at this preference as the Spanish registered in response to the Aztec esteem for jade. Fortheir part, Africans only gradually added gold to their status materials, as they became involved in trade with people for whom gold had a kind of absolute value. Rarer copper alloys continued to be used in making status artifacts of all kinds, and such practices were concentrated at the highest levels, in the royal courts. In the West African kingdom of Benin, one tusk from any elephant killed went to the king, who maintained a workshop of carvers; the king also maintained workers in copper alloys, which were exclusively royal materials (See Figures 177 and 178). Copper alloy heads with carved tusks are part of the altars through which past kings of Benin were (and are) ritually addressed. The altars of chieftains have only carved wooden heads, and the special status of queen mothers (who have the rank of chieftains) is made evident in the copper alloy images of their altars. In ancient China, bronze was used for weapons and ritual objects, rarely for tools. There was, moreover, a decorum surrounding the ritual vessels made from bronze (as there also was for jade) according to which their exchange consti­ tuted indispensable signs of relative status and thus of political and social order. The earliest of these vessels, the jue (Figure 17), for the ritual drinking of wine, with its elegant legs and lips, seems to have been distinguished for a special purpose from the beginning. Wine continued to be central to the offerings to ancestors in which such vessels were used, and, presumably as these rituals be­ came more elaborate and complex, vessels for food and cooking were not only transferred into prestigious bronze, but were further distinguished by ornamen­ tation and figuration. The lost-wax method used in making these vessels quickly achieved a degree of sophistication altogether comparable to the elaboration and refinement of the vessels themselves. Possession of such vessels defined status in both life and death, in both of which it was essential to maintain appropriate contact with ancestral spirits. According to early accounts, the presence of nine tripods was associated with the capital and with dynastic continuity; and in any case, contact with royal central spirits was most important, and royal vessels were correspondingly large, numerous and elaborate. In Greek and Roman antiquity, bronze was highly prized and appreciation of the qualities of various alloys was part of the Roman connoisseurship of sculpture. Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History that Corinthian bronze was more prized than silver or gold. Bronze is more easily recycled than replaced, and it is no doubt precisely because it continued to be honorific that most classi­ cal bronze sculptures have long since disappeared, melted down for new images or for the more utilitarian - usually military - purposes to which bronze also lends itself. In the Italian Renaissance, bronze sculpture was considered to be higher than marble, and in Renaissance Florence only the major guilds could erect statues of their patron saints in bronze. All materials have qualities that encourage certain meanings. The green of

1.9 FACTURE AND MATERIALS

17 Drinking vessel (fu ding jue), Chinese, Shang, xjth-izth century BC. Bronze, 21 x 18 x 9.1 cm (8% x 7‘/8 x 3% in). Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

jade might have seemed like the seeds of life itself in the earth, closely linked in both colour and origin to water, and it is perhaps for the same reason that the Aztecs venerated it, or the Southwest American Indians and their Mesoamerican trading partners valued turquoise. Gold, because it is brightly reflective and untarnishable, is often associated with the sun and with light, and has come to command a rich region of religious and political symbolism. Such meanings, even if justifiable in terms of the character of the material, are always culturally specific, and changeable even within cultures, and their content must always be demonstrated, at the same time that some more or less specific meaning may be anticipated. These meanings also inevitably have more than one dimension. The colossal chryselephantine (gold and ivory) statue of Zeus at Olympia (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) by the sculptor Pheidias and his workshop obeyed religious decorum by showing the appearance of the god in radiant, royal materials; but the sheer value of the materials also made a simple and powerful statement about the wealth of the shrine of Zeus at Olympia, the centre of the

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Greek world, where the beginning of athletic games in honour of the god mark­ ed the beginning of the Greek calendar. The colossal chryselephantine statue of Athena in the Parthenon at Athens, also by Pheidias and his shop, was, like the temple in which she stood, both a splendid votive offering to the patron goddess of Athens and a display of Athenian political centrality, hegemony and wealth. Again, as a great symbol and protector of the Buddhist empire he had encour­ aged by his patronage of monasteries and temples?th.e mid-eighth-century Japanese emperor Shomu commissioned a colossal gilt copper Vairocana Buddha in the Todai-ji at Nara. To do this, he requisitioned all the copper in Japan. The material was appropriate to the sacredness of the image, but was also a farreaching assertion of political control, not only forcing the tributary donation to a political centre of all of a material marking status, but also ensuring that no competing images of the same rank could be made afterward. The self-conscious separation of modern European artists from the past often took the form of the rejection of the traditional neoclassical materials of marble and bronze, or of oil painting, in favour of the materials, media and techniques of modern technology and industry. (An equally modernist alternative was the ‘primitivizing’ attempt to recover the untransformed essence of materials, as in the sculpture of Brancusi.) At a more popular and industrial level, plastics were introduced in the early twentieth century as revolutionary in their own right, capable both of replacing traditional materials and of lending themselves to the shaping of the new world. ‘Plastic’ is from the Greek plasma, referring to what is moulded in clay or wax, an image or figure, and corresponding to the Latin fingere (from which ‘fiction’ and ‘feign’ derive). As this suggests, plasma might also refer to what is copied, to forgeries. Plastics had a deep and ambivalent ideological dimension in the twentieth century. On the one hand, they were praised, not only as modern, but as democratic. Just as the petroleum from which plastics are made is the lowliest of materials, so the masses would be raised up by the transformation of petroleum into the bright and convenient consumer products that modern science and industry had made possible. On the other hand, plastics came to epitomize the Americanization of the world so often dreaded by modern Europeans, and mixed feelings about plastic is still a fairly firm article of ‘good’ taste. Plastics became basic to industrial design in the 1930s and have remained so, but always also retaining their connotations of inauthen­ ticity, together with those of the ephemeral, the ‘cheap’, the ‘mass-produced’, the ‘vulgar’, with the naked and deceptive allure of consumer goods, with the ‘shaping of taste’ and the ‘moulding of public opinion’. In these ways, plastics and the values surrounding them have continued to be deeply modern, if not, however, in just the ways imagined by their inventors and first promoters. I.IO FACTURE AND VALUE

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Materials, and the artifacts made from them, may be further distinguished by working them to heighten the qualities of the materials themselves, by polish­ ing, for example. But artifacts may also be distinguished by further elaboration, by ornamentation and figuration, and by metaphorical ‘brilliance’, that is, by the display of ingenuity and skill. In the art of the European Middle Ages - to take that example - a decorous

I.IO FACTURE AND VALUE

18 Reliquary of Sainte Foy, 9th century, with Gothic additions. Wooden core with gilded silver, copper, enamel, rock crystal, precious stones and cameo, height 83.7 cm (33V2 in). Treasury, Abbey of Ste-Foy, Conques ( 19 Virgin of Queen Jeanne d’Evreux, 1339. Silver gilt, height 68.7 cm (27% in). Louvre, Paris

proportion is generally observed between the value of the use to which an arti­ fact is put, or the value of a relic or image, and the value of the materials of which artifacts and images are made. (It must be stressed again that such decorums have persisted into the modern world, if less so in the ‘fine arts’.) The late ninth-century reliquary of Sainte Foy at Conques in southern France (Figure 18) may serve as an example. The image contains a relic, and its outward form states the sacredness of its Content. Sainte Foy is fashioned of repousse sheet gold, set with uncut precious stones (techniques for cutting stones were developed later in the Middle Ages). There are also cameos, carved stones interspersed with filigree gold. It would be wrong to say that Sainte Foy’s image displays no skill, but it would not be wrong to say that, in comparison to a later Gothic image (Figure 19), it is the display of materials in themselves that most distinguishes her image. In the Gothic reliquary, on the other hand, all contours are elaborated and refined, all surfaces polished as well as gilded, and these elaborations and refinements have literally taken the place of the precious stones and filigree. The image belongs to much the same tradition of ritual use, and gold is still a funda-

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mental way of stating its value and the value of its sacred relic. But now this envaluation is achieved to a much greater degree by refinement, that is to say, by the evidence of skilled facture. Even the elegant proportions and delicate naturalism of the later Virgin and Child may be seen as displays of virtuosity. In the Italian Renaissance it was insisted that the value of works of art does not reside in their materials at all, but rather in the skill with which materials are worked. According to Leon Battista Alberti, the value of gold itself is much enhanced by skill, and a weight of lead is worth more than a comparable weight of silver if the lead has been worked by a great artist; the painter who is most worthy of praise, rather than actually fixing a disc of gold to the surface of a painting, takes the colours of earth, yellow ochre, raw sienna and lead white, and transmutes them into what appears to be a gold halo. This distinction between the value of material and the value of facture was repeated by other Renaissance artists, even though there clearly remained a demand for paintings and sculpt­ ures in which materials both displayed their expense and metaphorically stated the value of sacred images and themes. Refinement may appropriately heighten artifacts and images, at least potent­ ially ‘idealizing’ them - that is, giving them an apparently higher, perfected reality - at the same time that it also justifies the greater exercise of individual invention and manner. But Florentine Renaissance artists insisted upon the value of skilled facture rather than materials partly because the distinction separated their art from the ‘mechanical’ art of the guilds to which they were assigned according to the materials in which they worked. Florentine sculptors belonged to the same guild as stonemasons, and painters belonged to the same guild as the druggists from whom they bought their pigments. The definition of skill as the basis of value located the principle of art more nearly in the individual artist, and, since skill was related to knowledge of the rules of art, and was also hard to distin­ guish from invention, this change helped to establish painting and sculpture as ‘liberal’ arts, as primarily intellectual and imaginative rather than manual. This in turn was to provide one of the pillars supporting the emergence of the modern European artist, which began together with new patterns of devotional and secular aristocratic and middle-class patronage. In such historical circumstances the distinction of work by material was not eliminated, rather material was relatively suppressed in favour of values associated with autographic facture. This modern idea of the artist, however, is again only one variant on the theme of the meanings of material and facture, and may properly serve as an introduc­ tion to the broader question of the significance of artistic skill itself. I.II REFINEMENT AND DISTINCTION

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At the Olmec site of La Venta in Veracruz on the eastern coast of Mexico there are large burials of hundreds of slabs of green stone, brought from the Pacific coast, smoothed on their upper and lower faces, and stacked course upon course in alignment with the north-south axis governing the rigorous overall sym­ metry of plazas, platforms and sculptures (Figure 60). Forming the heart of the ritual centre as they do, it is likely that the great labour of gathering, transport­ ing and working these stones - a labour that once completed would not have been visible until uncovered by twentieth-century archaeologists - is an early and

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2,0 Inca stonework, eastern wall of the Coricancha (‘Temple of the Sun’), Cuzco, Peru, late 15th century

monumental instance of the cult of green stone among the Olmec and through­ out Mesoamerica. (As I write this, the source of Olmec jade, long a mystery, has been found in Guatemala.) The roughly rectangular slabs of stone were buried in two unmortared cubic masses; their upper and lower surfaces were finished with the precision generally typical of Olmec lapidary art, which allowed them to be packed with near-perfect density. There are no images on the stones, and the exact reasons for their laborious preparation will never be known. They may, however, still be used to develop the issues I have raised. The Olmec worked green stone in many forms, and these massive concentrations of it were perhaps meant to animate the place with the power of the stone, whatever that power might have been thought to be. It was not sufficient, however, simply that the stones be there; rather their value was not complete, or was not fully articulated, until they had been distinguished by facture. The distinction was effected in part by the more or less uniform shaping of the stones (partly related to the necessi­ ties of quarrying and transportation) and by careful smoothing on two sides. Even as it allowed the stones to be packed and fitted, and thus to be multiplied into great blocks or cores of powerful material, and even as it made the charac­ teristic greenness of the stone more evident, and therefore perhaps enhanced its power, this smoothing envalued and distinguished the stones, just as, at the broadest level, shaping, smoothing and ordering absolutely distinguished the site they Centred. This evident facture in itself gave them an enhanced value complementary to the intrinsic value of the stone, and at the same time related them to the aligned, also evidently planar order of the ritual centre as a whole. Jade or marble are most themselves when polished, and tooling magnifies the sheen of gold, but refinement is separable from the material worked and itself manifests value. We may consider the meticulous working of the great stones of

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21 Late Neolithic arrowheads: (a) ‘Long ogival’, honey-coloured flint, length 4.2 cm (1% in), from Creach’h Horvan, Saint-Thegonnec, Finistere; Laboratoire d’Anthropologie, Universite de Rennes (b) Honey-coloured flint, length 3.7 cm (1.5 in), from Breach Farm, Llambeddian, Glamorgan, Wales; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

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the principal Inca buildings at Cuzco (Figure 20). Only the most important buildings were so elaborately finished and fitted, and, as I have mentioned, the most important building was sheathed and banded with gold. Material in this case is obviously an issue, but here, as in general, refinement and skilled facture, before the artifact is recognized in terms of purpose or image, are significant in their evident envaluation of the artifact. For all the differences in the cultures for which they were made, and the means by which this basic end was achieved, the same might be said of a Gothic cathedral, a Hindu temple or a great mosque. Artifacts are made distinctive through the display of refinement, and I wish now to examine the various aspects of this important dimension of facture. In general, distinction is a characteristic of artifacts subsequent to their con­ figuration and is thus related to arbitrariness, that is, to characteristics determined by the judgements of past and present makers. To return to one of my earlier examples, an arrowhead, that is, a piece of stone given the functional configurat­ ion of an arrowhead, may show skill, the sure exercise of craft and technique, but it may also show refinement; its qualities, rather than simply being defined by the skilled realization of configuration, may in addition be the result of effort superfluous to function. The Western European Neolithic arrowheads in Figure 21 are both made of flint. The shape of 21a, from Brittany, might be supposed to have been devised to accommodate hafting, but the barbs are extended to the point of fragility and removal from use. Again, the sharpness of the tip and the near-transparent thinness of the honey-coloured flint might be supposed to make this simply a ‘better’ arrowhead of its kind; but these features, like the precisely symmetrical ogival shape, and the edges worked beyond serration to state the simple rise of the arc itself, are examples of what I mean by refinement. The arrowhead in Figure 21b, from Wales, repeats a similar configuration and pursues a similar thinness and precision to a similar level of virtuosity. Here, however, the ogival arc is split, inverted, and reversed to widen at the base, and the serrations, rather than being smoothed away, are treated as repetitive pattern, like ornament. Assuming that both are part of the same craft tradition, the inversion and reversal of the arc, rather than being explained by a difference in function, or as a more or less conscious regional variant, might also be explained - without necessar­ ily rejecting the other two explanations - as an arbitrary modification of the configuration that is part of the overall distinction and refinement. The intention was to make the artifact extraordinary and thus visibly reserved for special use. In fact, such arrowheads are found in elite burials, with other objects distin­ guished both by material and by refined facture. Adequate skill is necessary to realize a configuration, and refinement, as evidence of superior skill, might be supposed to contribute to a better, more useful artifact. Refinement, however, can also do more than that, and the distinc­ tion between skill and refinement will point efforts to understand artifacts in quite different directions. Refinement, like materials, is a fundamental way in which hierarchical distinctions are made - and made evident - among activites, individuals, groups and institutions in a society. ‘To refine’ is ‘to finish again’, ‘to bring to an end again’, and thus implies superfluous facture, more than is necessary simply to ‘finish’ a configuration. In these terms, the walls at Cuzco in Figure 20 have been worked and reworked;

the stones have not only been smoothed, they have been smoothed and fitted precisely in certain essentially arbitrary ways. The faces of the stone are convex toward very sharp edges and the profile of the wall as a whole is worked in a curve that swells slightly as if in adjustment to its own weight, then straightens and accelerates as it rises, in a manner comparable to entasis, the slight but regular curvature of stylobate and columns in the Doric order of Greek architecture. Such specific refinements, having been realized in a first example, may become part of the authority of that initial work, thus to be progressively realized - that is, more refined - in a series of works. Entasis is much more subtle in later Greek Doric temples than in earlier ones. Similarly, artifacts that have been evidently reworked toward the thin, smooth and straight may become thinner, smoother and straighter in subsequent versions. In this way the evident goals or limits governing refinement may guide the development of the skills - and the teaching of the skills - of groups and successive groups of artistans. Often (but not always) refined facture coincides with the use of valuable materials, so that there is what might be called a double envaluation. The ritual axe in Figure 22, from the late Neolithic Chinese Longshan culture, translates a simple functional form into jade (nephrite) worked to the finest smoothness and thinness. Both the material and the high level of finish rendered the configuration useless, but still recognizable. This double envaluation by material and facture is continuous and complementary, since material and refinement together effect a similar heightening of the artifact. Both material and refinement make a hierar­ chical distinction between the artifact and the relatively ordinary ones it replicates, and this distinction by refinement can be developed to any feasible degree of elaboration. Since refinement may be of evident value in itself, and is continuous with other kinds of elaboration, refinement may encourage arbitrary invention and innovation at many levels. The arcs of the Neolithic arrowheads in Figure 21 are arbitrary in that any number of different arcs might have been found. To be sure, the arcs might have been subject to the principle of authority, and might have been learned as craft and replicated innumerable times. But in a series of intentionally elaborated artifacts, in which elaboration is meant precisely to distinguish from the usual, innovation might be justified at any point in the series. While polishing (as in Figure 13) makes the colour of jade fully evident as a quality of whatever is made of jade, it also achieves a positive quality of surface - a certain specific smoothness and shininess, dependent upon the hardness or structure of the material worked. This smooth surface may be further envalued by further elaboration, by inscription, figuration (see Figure 23), or by the add­ ition of other materials (including pigments). Refinement tends to make relations explicit. Arrowheads, in order to be arrowheads at all, must have a triangular, axial and symmetrical configuration, but they may also be more particularly or exactly triangular or symmetrical, again like the arrowheads in Figure 21. Their makers evidently gave close attention to the equivalence of points at the edges relative to a central axis. Taken altogether, refined, usually regular surfaces, and evident attention to relation as such, raise the issue of what in Section 14 I shall call nationality, the abstraction from smoothness to the limit of planarity, or from instances of symmetry to symmetry

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12 Ritual axe (fu), Longshan culture, China, Late Neolithic, 3rd millennium BC. Nephrite, 34.9 x 17.6 x 0.6 cm (14 x 7 x % in). Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

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23 ‘Leiden plaque’, Maya, Early Classic Period, 320 AD. Jade, 21.7 x r x 8.6 cm (8l/2 x % x 33/s in). Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden

24 Eccentric flint, Maya, Late Classic Period, c.600-900. Flint, 34.5 x 19.2 cm (13% x 7% in). Cleveland Museum of Art 25 Eben sword, Edo, Benin, Nigeria, 19th century. Iron, hide and ivory, 103.2 x 21.2 x 15.5 cm (41% x 8l/z x 6lA in). Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (Purchase: the George H. and Elizabeth O. Davis Fund)

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as such, from specific to general relations, and thus to possible relations apart from specific instances. There are a number of reasons for refining artifacts. We may be inclined to think that the better tool is simply the superior configuration of function; but, to return to one of my major themes, refinement also articulates social purpose over and above bare function. More specifically, refinement makes distinctions evident and typically indicates hierarchy, the ‘higher’ status of an artifact or its use, or of its user or possessor, or, perhaps most usually, of all these things together. Refinement may thus be exactly comparable to the use of valuable materials, although it is obviously much more variable and adaptable. If our admiration for the Acheulean handaxe in Figure 11 means that it was intention­ ally refined, this might in turn mean, not just that an ‘aesthetic sense’ was developing in its makers, but that some uses - ceremonial uses - and (or) users were already being distinguished relative to others. Much later outsized Clovis points found in North America might also suggest distinction of use or user, both their material and their size distancing them from simple function. In fact, refinement for the purpose of stating hierarchial social distinction, together with unusual material and size, often contradicts refinement in search of superior function. The king’s ceremonial sword is not the sharpest, but rather the most elaborate and therefore the most representative of power; the goal of its making is not efficiency relative to a function but efficacy in relation to a special, higher purpose. The king or queen is like a warrior in bearing a sword, but the power ‘wielded’ is extraordinary, the unique power of rule, evident in the sword’s elaboration. The general principle is that refinement may both envalue and empower an artifact. Specialized makers of artifacts tend to arise and cluster around centres of power, and the fashioning and distribution of refined artifacts

is correspondingly subject to a more or less rigid decorum. At the same time, of course, refinement, as a prime indicator of status, also becomes more broadly desirable. In Maya eccentric flints (Figure 24), functional configuration is expressly denied in order to raise them to the level of distinct social purpose, a distinction to which the uniqueness consequent to the display of extraordinary skill is again essential. Although worked like tools or weapons (in the embrace of Neolithic technology), eccentric flints were quite obviously to be used in activities posing no threat to their elegant fragility. Like weapons, they may have been hafted, but perhaps as sceptres, signs of authority. The Maya associated flint and obsidian with lightning strikes, and the material may have had meanings appropriate to multiple images of royal ancestors; but these flints were also made of the same materials, and in the same way, as weapons, and a sceptre (like the mace of an early Egyptian king, and like the symbolic weapons of many rulers and officials to modern times) visibly retains its connection to military strength and prowess. But on this configurational base, so to speak, power of a suprapersonal kind is made evident. The eccentric flint is a product either of the leisure necessary to cultivate highly developed skills (if the elite bearer made this for personal use), or of the rank and power to command the specialized skills of others. One way or another, it announces the status of its bearer as unambiguously as any of the other trappings and accoutrements of rule. The same may be said of innumer­ able works of art. A culturally unrelated but parallel example is provided by Benin ceremonial swords such as that in Figure 25. Swords like this were part of the paraphernalia marking the highest status, as we may see in Figure 177. The ‘weapon’, made of the royal material of bronze, has been rendered conspicu­ ously useless. The ‘blade’ of the sword is finely shaped and perforated, and this removal from simple function raised the power of the sword to that of power emanating from the oba, or king. It follows that the making and dispensation of refined artifacts has often been carefully regulated, precisely so that their posses­ sion might be a sign of dependency upon central authority. By the same token, refined artifacts are also appropriately exchanged as gifts among individuals of the same status. And for all of these reasons, the right to make distinguishing artifacts may be usurped, and they may be forged or counterfeited. In addition to marking status, refinement and elaboration are also displays of more complex skills, or of the overcoming of technical difficulty. Maya eccentric flints are truly extraordinary displays of lapidary virtuosity. And, more than departures from the configurations defined by simple function, they are also, like Figure 23, examples of figuration, of elaboration in terms of resemblance. In Figure 24 there are four head-dressed faces in profile. The largest wears feathers culminating in a backward-looking profile, his ‘arm’ ends in another, as does the protuberance below. There are many examples - peopled scrolls, the margins of Western medieval painted manuscripts, or the grotteschi of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, for example - in which playful variation takes the form of continual transformation from one recognizable thing to another. Since it involves recognition, figuration raises the issue of skills of descrip­ tion and reference, and it is sometimes difficult to separate figuration as a distin­ guishing display of ingenuity, invention and virtuosity from the more iconic sig-

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2.6 Scythian milking a ewe, detail of a gold pectoral from Ordzhonikidze, Russia, 4th century BC. Gold, diameter of whole 30.6 cm (12 in). Historical Museum, Kiev

nificance of placing images of things on artifacts, or parts of things (eagles’ eyes or talons, for example) on them in order to empower them. In general, though, it is important to maintain the distinction between a composite image, which is a brilliant display of ingenuity and fantasy, and literally supernatural iconic assemblages'of powers like the Coatlicue discussed in the Introduction (Figures 4 and 5), even if the border between these two kinds of images may in some cases be unclear. Again, the same hybrid creature - a griffin, for example - that is clearly apotropaic in a real spatial context may be ‘fabulous’ in a virtual space, which at least implicitly involves it in time, place and narrative, thus in different kinds of invention and variation. Descriptive figuration duplicates natural forms and appearances, usually on a small scale. Figure 26 is a detail from a gold pectoral designed by a Greek artisan in the fourth century bc and found in a Scythian royal tumulus. The pectoral is very finely worked, as may be seen in the borders, with a complex and delicate

three-dimensional floral scroll and a wonderfully interlaced frieze running from griffins attacking horses at the centre to dogs chasing rabbits and confronted grasshoppers at the ends. It is in the context of this kind and degree of invention and finish that this small genre scene should be seen. It shows a Scythian milking a ewe, and its elaboration is in the direction not only of figuration, but of descrip­ tion. Not only is this an ‘everyday’ scene (whatever other meanings it might have in the whole scheme) but the proportions of the figure, the folds of garments, the fall of hair and pull of cloth over the shoulders, the concentrated gesture and intensity of facial expression, the differentiation of textures, all invite attention and comparison to the actually seen or remembered. That such attention is demanded in precious metal at miniature scale is the measure of the maker’s virtuosity. The wrought gold throughout has been made doubly brilliant, here by skilled and persuasive description. Such description, at least as an ideal of craftly skill, goes back to the very beginnings of Greek art. In Book 18 of the Iliad, Homer described the shield of Achilles, made for his mother Thetis by the smith-god Hephaestus, as covered with episodes rendered in impossibly vivid detail. ‘The maidens were clad in fine linen, while the youths wore well-woven tunics faintly glistening with oil.’ And so the account proceeds. At a certain point, Homer describes a field that ‘grew black behind and seemed verily as it had been ploughed, for all that it was of gold; herein was the great marvel of the work.’ Whatever else it is about, the description of the shield of Achilles is about the world wrought by art in minia­ ture, for which it states impossible standards, as if to show that poetry is equal to the work of the smith-god as no human craft could ever be. Homer calls such surpassing cleverness ‘daedalic’, and the word translated as ‘marvel’ is thauma. Marvel, or wonder, is induced by art when we cannot believe what we see, or cannot understand how it was brought about, when, looking at a surface of brilliant metal, we are made to see instead a ploughed field, or youths faintly glistening with oil. Greek art developed over many generations as much toward this material-suspending marvellousness achieved by skill as toward a simple ‘realism’. Although photography and television must have substantially dulled our appreciation of descriptive elaboration, we may still be fascinated by trompe l’oeil painting, which seems to make us see the painted as if it is really before our eyes, at least for a moment, and despite ourselves. We may still speak of such paintings as ‘feats’ of illusionism (the word ‘feat’ again descending, like ‘facture’, from facio, facere). We might also speak of great buildings or bridges as ‘feats of engineering’, and we mean in both cases, even though the scale is so different, that human art has done more than can be grasped, what surpasses our compre­ hension. Both of these reactions taart slip through the net of the ‘aesthetic’. The identification of imitation with optical naturalism in Western art has made the problem of elaboration by description especially complex. Because the project of optical naturalism - the definition of virtual space in terms of a synoptic geometry of light and vision - was a long one, with interruptions and recurr­ ences through the history of European art, we are accustomed to thinking of imitative art as the result of long historical developments. But it is not necessary to unite a whole ‘field of vision’ in order to describe in the sense I mean, and the

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27 San Lorenzo Monument 1, called ‘El Rey’, 1100-900 BC. Basalt boulder, height 2.85 m (9 ft 6 in). Museo de Antropologia, Jalapa, Veracruz

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acquisition of skills necessary to mimic appearances is more closely related to the existence of social and specific cultural purposes for making such images. Olmec lapidaries, all of whose works are typically of the highest level of refinement, might make very schematic images and then, again without apparent precedent, carve the fully descriptive mouths, cheeks, chins and scowls of their colossal heads (Figure 27). This suggests that, at least in highly developed traditions of skill, schematism and description should be regarded as simultaneous options rather than as earlier and later stages in a sequential development. If description is elaboration and refinement, then the uniform clear and sparkling brilliance of virtual surfaces in the early oil painting of Jan van Eyck (Figure 28) is, as a display of skill, heightening and sacralizing in ways analogous to the direction of refinement of the reliquary of the Virgin in Figure 19. In fact, the appropriateness of trompe I’oeil ‘realism’ as a distinguishing embellishment

must have provided an important motive and justification for the development of descriptive painting in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. In Jan van Eyck’s painting such dazzling and elevating embellishment merges with sacred drama and with the synoptic space and light of optical naturalism. The relation between facture, value and description has consequences that also bear upon familiar modern attitudes toward art. Modernist artists typically rejected traditional skills of imitation in favour of what came to be regarded as more essential formal or expressive aims. Correspondingly, modernist art has had to contend with the popular critical insistence upon ‘realism’, certainly partly rooted in the conviction that correspondence to appearance is a guarantee of artistic skill, and that ‘anyone could make’ objects to which this standard cannot be applied. Artifacts are given evident value through refinement and expenditure of skill, and these envaluations do not stop with the artifact itself, but rather pass to the user and owner of the artifact. Shamans, to take a basic example, might elaborate their instruments in order to maximize or magnify their powers, but in most cases artisans work for others, and the appearance of numbers of refined artifacts parallels the development of specialization in larger, more complex societies in which more and more distinctions must be made, and made visible. The importance of the self-evidence of value in skilled facture cannot be overstressed, and the visible distinction of artifacts, persons and places provides a semantic basis for much of the art of the world, one of the dominant modes of the practical, real spatial articulation of social distinction. The king and the institution of the king were made known by the unique appearance of the royal person, which is, regard­ less of individual identity, a distinguished artifact. Temple or palace are typically distinguished not just by type from other buildings but by material and facture. In this irreducible sense, art has made societies. Fashion, another facture word, leads by another route to the question of the texture of life in one or another culture. If clothing and personal ornament in general make social distinctions, members of elites might be expected as a rule to have been most ‘distinguished’. Fashion assumed entirely new dimensions in modern times with manufacturing and design to serve the various tastes of vast new markets, but, however different the modern world may be in these respects, modern fashion still conforms to the general rule that art has made (and makes) societies. The salt-cellar of Francis I of France by the sixteenth-century goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (Figure 29) is representative of the art of the courtly culture of late Renaissance Europe; it states the high rank of its royal user, and flatters any other users it might have, not only by the gold of which it is fashioned, but by its supernumerary artifice and invention. The invention is figural and iconographic; the origin of salt and pepper is told in an aggrandized mythic and allegorical manner, but also in miniature. Miniaturized Michelangelesque figures of reclin­ ing ancient deities represent the sea and land from which seasonings come, but surely also over which the king is sovereign, or hopes to be sovereign. Once again, functional configuration is transformed by artifice, and the salt-cellar takes its place in a decorum of hierarchy in which simple function is raised to the level of political symbol and ritual.

I.II REFINEMENT AND DISTINCTION

28 Jan van Eyck, The Crowned Madonna in a Church, 1437-8. Oil on wood, 30.6 x 13.8 cm (12^ x 5’Z> in). Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

CHAPTER I FACTURE

29 Benvenuto Cellini, Salt-Cellar of Francis I, 1539-43. Gold with enamel, 26 x 33.3 cm (10V4 x 13% in). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

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If refinement makes social, political and religious distinctions visible, it is therefore also essential to the conducts and decorums of stratified groups. Among the Inca, everyone was expected to weave, men making rope and cord, women making textiles. The fineness of textiles and the value and rarity of materials used in making them were proportional to rank. By the same token, textiles were dispensed - and the right to wear certain textiles was given - for state service. Nor is this a distant, ‘anthropological’ state of affairs. Figures 30 and 31 are details from two landscapes illustrating the months of March and April from a book of hours painted for Jean, Due de Berry in the early fifteenth century. The horizons of the landscapes are dominated by careful descriptions of two of the duke’s chateaux, above which ultramarine spheres of heaven with signs of the zodiac turn to measure the eternal cycles of time. The place of the old peasant who ploughs the earth in March has been taken in April by a group of nobles. Both paintings are images of fecundity; the peasant turns over the earth for planting, the nobles exchange rings in a ceremony of betrothal. The nobles are literally refined, not only in their sumptuous clothing, with its brilliant or deli­ cate colours and added gold, but in their extreme attenuation and elegance; all is in sharp contrast to the drab, tattered clothing and stocky proportions of the peasant. The nobles are not only made to look different by refinement, they are shown as themselves refined, different beings in the social order, which in both cases is justified and naturalized in being concentric with the divinely created order of the universe itself. Such social distinctions, rooted in such simple visible distinctions (which are, however, always understood in a larger justifying order) have shaped the worlds of many cultures, much as the splendid refinement and elaboration of the Book of Hours from which these details were taken distinguished the religious devotions of the patron for whom it was made.

I.II REFINEMENT AND DISTINCTION

30 Jean and Paul Limbourg, March, fol. 3V from the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, 1413-16, each sheet 29 x 21 cm (11% x 8% in). Musee Conde, Chantilly

31 Jean and Paul Limbourg, April, fol. 4V from the Tres Riches Heures

Artifacts have been refined for both political and religious purposes. It is in fact sometimes hard to distinguish ruler and priest, and the sanctions of politi­ cal institutions are often shared with, or complemented by, those of religious institutions. It may be appropriate that a sacred image be expensively wrought and presented as a votive, but if the queen pays to have an especially elaborate image made, she becomes the benefactor of the people at the same time that her patronage serves to reinforce her power. The always elaborate Gothic style of the late Western Middle Ages began as a royal style in 1140 with the church of St-Denis outside Paris. The church contained the relics of the patron saint of France at its high altar, making it a centre for national pilgrimage. It was also the dynastic pantheon for the French kings. Abbot Suger, the clerical patron for the shrine in the new style, formulated the ideas of divine, centralized kingship that supported French monarchy until the French Revolution, when the church of St-Denis, precisely for the reasons just listed, was violated and smashed. Suger was himself regent of France while the king was in the Holy Land on the Second Crusade. If the light metaphysics of the Neoplatonic writer called Dionysius the Areopagite, identified by Suger with Saint Denis, helped set the architectural goals and problems solved by the new high-vaulted, large-windowed style, the same ideas justified brilliance in general, not only of the jewels and gold Suger praised, but of the enshrining structure itself. Both kinds of brilliance, of materi­ al and artifice, like the progressive reduction of walls to sheets of brilliantly coloured glass in successive Gothic churches, could be explained as carrying the mind heavenward, to the source of all light. At the same time this spiritual dimension was based in a degree of elaboration appropriate to the centre of French monarchy. St-Denis was the house of the Lord, but also the Temple of

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Solomon, and the interchangeability of royal and sacred made the new style appropriate to a great number of circumstances throughout Europe. It would be too simple to say that refined forms have always been made only for the immediate purposes of articulating the relative value of places, occasions or persons; even if sheer distinction is the stated purpose of elaboration, inven­ tions and realizations must exceed any single goal, and might have unforeseen consequences. But it is perhaps not too simple to say thatrefined art does always articulate status, whether or not that was the original or only intent, or the only result. Even if there are other ends in view, there are decorums determining what is an appropriate artistic performance and what is not, and these bounds are seldom transgressed. The values of facture and distinction I have indicated are absolutely integral with the real spatial fabric of societies, including our own. What we consider ‘art’ - a minute fraction of our actual artifactual environment, which is overwhelmingly determined by technology, by the regularity of con­ trolled energy and machine manufacture - has mostly been separated from its ancient religious and political purposes. But the ownership of ‘fine art’ is still a sign of high socio-economic standing, and, if collections tend to become public, the cultivation of the appreciation of ‘fine art’ still has similar associations. For its part, the history of art has been mostly concerned with highly refined, courtly traditions, concerned precisely with the differentiation of hierarchy. Hierar­ chy is relative within any society, however, and if it is taken for granted, and art defining elites is assumed to ‘express’ the culture as a whole, then deep continu­ ities and discontinuities within cultures, as well as deep similarities and dissim­ ilarities among them, must be overlooked. At a fundamental level, refinement involves hierarchy, and it has usually been in such circumstances that art and its makers have made their ways. 1.12 ORNAMENT I

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Ornament is one of the major forms of elaboration, and is of such importance that I shall discuss it twice (‘Ornament 2’ is Section 19 of Chapter 4). With the introduction of this subject we enter vast regions of world art. Like refinement in general, ornament serves the purpose of envaluation, adding to the force of artifacts by distinguishing and heightening them. Kind and degree of ornamen­ tation typically make social hierarchy clear, in costumes and furnishings, and in the social spaces in which all these distinctions are evident as part of the enactment of relations of status and power. Much of the art of the world - and much of the most splendid artof the world - is ornamental. At the same time, in the critical language to which we are accustomed, terms such as ‘ornamental’ or ‘decorative’ are almost entirely negative. Our attitudes toward ornament are deeply rooted in the critical tradition stemming from Greek and Roman rhetoric, and more deeply in Western representationalism, which I shall discuss in Chapters 4 and 6. In classical rhetoric, the art of persuasion, a distinction was made between subject-matter and style, res et verba., thing and words. Since words are not things, it is necessary, so the argument went for some two thousand years, to use language so vividly and pleasingly that subject-matter is set irresistibly before the mind’s eye. The ‘ornaments’ and ‘colours’ of rhetoric, the ‘figures’ and ‘tropes’ (that is, the ‘shapes’

and ‘turns’) of language, were artfully manipulated in order to sway the hearer by appeal to sight (as these visual metaphors make clear), or to a kind of remem­ bered or imagined sight. The distrust of persuasion (related to suavis, ‘sweet’) by the successful appeal to the pleasure of sense rather than to reason, and of the artifice through which such persuasion is accomplished, has been one of the deep themes in Western attitudes toward art since Plato, whose philosophy was in large part a response to a problem raised by the art of rhetoric, that the false may be made to seem true, thus leading thought astray, but also spurring to thoughtless action. In rejecting rhetoric, it may be noted, Plato also rejected the vivid imitation of appearances praised and practised by Homer. The ‘ornaments’ and ‘colours’ of rhetoric, like colours in general, were perenni­ ally associated with surfaces and with the ‘superficial’, therefore not only with sense and feeling rather than reason, but with seeming rather than being, and with those people led by sense, passion and emotion rather than by reason. (Ornament is often more or less explicitly gendered as feminine.) The rhetorical tradition always offered a range of critical alternatives. It was debated in the Middle Ages, for example, whether metaphorical language was ever appropri­ ate to theological argument, but it could also be argued against such a purist position that figured language - which was to be found in abundance in the Bible - was appropriate for teaching, since it appealed immediately to sense, as long as the appearances it conjured were informed by the truths of faith. The criticisms of rhetoric most important in the formation of modem Western attitudes came when a simple, unornamented style began to be advocated for scientific writing. Scientific exposition should not persuade but rather demons­ trate by fact, logic, mathematical proof, experiment and duplicability; in such circumstances figured language increasingly found its place in poetry and fict­ ion, and in the emergent ‘fine arts’. The idea of ‘plain’, ‘unadorned’ or ‘unvarnished’ truth, rooted in the vastly efficacious and transformative attitude toward the world of modern science and technology, has a deeply important political corol­ lary in the new priority it gave to experience, ‘common sense’, and accurate ‘information’. In modernist architecture, ornament has often been rejected entirely in the pursuit of an essential truth based upon material and function, and, to the degree that ornament was admitted at all to modernist art, it was admitted as purely aesthetic, abstract and formal, thus paralleling more general modernist iconoclasm. In separating it from art and architecture, the modernist suspicion of ornament has had the effect of distancing the West from other traditions, including the pre-modern Western tradition. In fact, classical rhetoric, and pre­ modernist uses of ornament in Western art and architecture, were variants of more nearly universal attitudes. The classical art of rhetoric recorded and codified the many successful devices of eloquence; but it was also, both in theory and practice, governed by the princi­ ple of decorum, by rules about what kind of language, and what kind and degree of ornamentation of language, are appropriate to various themes and occasions. Decorum is an essentially social criterion, having to do with how things should appear, not in order to be true so much as to be right and appropriate to circum­ stances. The speaker addressed the senses of an audience in order to persuade

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its members, but, perhaps even more fundamentally, assumed - and had to respect - a sense of decorum. One kind and degree of ornament was appropriate in a court of law, another at the celebration of a wedding or in a funeral oration. By analogy, one kind and degree of architectural ornament was appropriate to a house, another to a palace, yet another to a temple. The connection between ‘decorum’ and ‘decorate’ is thus not hard to see. ‘To decorate’ means not simply to elaborate or embellish something, but to give it thedaboration and embell­ ishment appropriate to it, so that its presentation is ‘decorous’, or even ‘decent’. When we ‘decorate’ a hero we do more than just add an embellishment; rather we visually distinguish the person in such a way as to acknowledge status and achievement. The Greek word kosmos, from which we take our word for the universe as a whole, originally meant order, and its metaphorical use implied that the universe is the universe by virtue of its possession of a seemly order. The verb kosmeo means ‘to arrange or put in order’, ‘to rule or govern’, ‘to embellish’ or ‘to honour’, and ‘cosmos’ is thus directly related to the much less grand ‘cosmetic’, the two words being linked in terms of artifice and arrangement. The Romans translated kosmos as mundus, which as an adjective means ‘fine’, ‘neat’ or ‘elegant’, and, as a noun, refers to a woman’s toilet articles, then to the world as a whole (the French monde and the Italian mondo descend from this second meaning, as does the English ‘mundane’). Kosmos was also translated into Latin as ornamentum, from ornare, which means to outfit or appoint, as a horse or soldier might be outfitted or appointed. A soldier, it may be noted, is not simply given an appropri­ ate appearance by being given arms and armour but is completed as an actual fighter, at the same time that the uniform permits assignment to rank and to the order defining and governing a military unit. There are thus once again fundamental social connotations surrounding this cluster of terms. In general, to ornament or decorate is to set in appropriate order, appropriateness being defined not only internally, in terms of the arrangement of the work itself, but also, and more fundamentally, externally, in relation to circumstances. In the present terms, ornament serves the purpose of stating relations in real space and, more specifically, in social space. We still speak of the ‘orders’ of classical architecture. In Latin, ordo means ‘order’, but it also means rank and class, and has a hierarchical dimension. A Greek temple was distinguished by these structurally more or less extraneous elaborations because such elaboration was appropriate to the house of the god and at the same time made the status of the temple as temple manifest. One order or another also came to be regarded as appropriate to one or another deity; according to the Roman architect Vitruvius, for example, the ‘masculine’ Doric order, with its sturdy proportions and ornamental restraint, was appropriate to temples of Mars or Hercules, or to a goddess with masculine attributes, like Minerva, whereas the slenderer proportions and more elaborate ornament of the ‘feminine’ Corinthian order were appropriate for temples of deities such as Venus or Flora. (Although Vitruvius condemned the mixing of the orders as con­ trary to usage, he also advised that temples to deities middling in gender terms, like Juno, Diana or Bacchus, should be Ionic, combining the two extremes, the severity of Doric and the delicacy of Corinthian.) Decoration, like materials and

refinement in general, made status evident, but as this example also shows, it could be inappropriate in kind and degree; it could be mdecorous, or even indecent. Usually ornament is used in a direct proportion to the hierarchical status of what is ornamented, and ornamentation in the service of the articulation of status is permitted a high degree of redundancy. It is possible, however, to be ornamen­ tal to the point of ‘unseemliness’, and, again in the Western classical tradition, the critical language surrounding ornament is often highly moralistic, linking simplicity with probity, uprightness, and the straight path; or complexity with sin and decadence, the errant and crooked, the fantastic, the effeminate, serpen­ tine and labyrinthine. (At the same time, the excessive and indirect may also both present and conceal truth in mystery and hence be appropriate to the sacred, and to its revelation only to initiates, in a manner analogous to what I shall discuss as difficulty of approach in the next chapter.) Classical rhetorical writers often associated excessive ornament with the ‘eastern’ and ‘Asiatic’, and this critical posture shaped the Western classical tradition in basic ways. Since rhetoric persuaded by appeal to imagination, bombast and hyperbole - to the degree they were not regarded simply as display­ ing bad, ‘barbarian’ taste - it risked political disaster. Classical fear of the fantas­ tic and overwrought merged with the Judaeo-Christian fear of idolatry and thus reinforced the iconoclasm I shall discuss in Chapter 4. The Renaissance neoclas­ sical tradition understood the ‘Gothic’ art of the Middle Ages, from which it wished to separate itself, in very much the same critical terms it brought to the art of the cultures the Europeans were about to confront. ‘Gothic’ is now a neutral term for the culture of the late Middle Ages; but originally it was a pejorative term, associating fantasy and ornamental excess (among other vices) with the barbarians who had destroyed the culture the writers and artists of the Italian Renaissance understood themselves to be resurrecting. Whatever kind of decorum may govern its use in one or another place and time - and this of course is a historical variable, which must be described for each culture - the general principle that ornament, like materials and refinement, articulates hierarchical distinctions, will be illustrated in many examples in what follows. Archbishops are distinguished from bishops by kind and degree of ornamentation; generals are distinguished from sergeants, kings from chieftains. Those who reject the ‘trappings of power’, do so in precise contradistinction to the force and authority of such display. These principles apply not only to persons but to buildings and places, the importance of which - the vicinity to power and the sacredness of which - may be articulated by ornamentation. In buildings as culturally different as a Gothic cathedral and a Hindu temple, evident elabora­ tion provides the background against which iconographic themes assume their meaning. The very fabric out of which figuration and the illustration of themes arises states the importance of figure and theme and their relation to the central meaning and value of an edifice as a whole. 1.13

i. 13 play

PLAY

Ornament, like rare materials and refinement, serves necessary purposes of making it evident and clear what people, things, places and structures ‘are’ in the social worlds to which they belong. If ornament is socially determined in

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32 Middle Jomon vessel, Japan, 2500-1500 BC. Clay, height 30.8 cm (izVs in). Niigata Prefectural Museum of History

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being deep and integral to the social fabric, however, this only defines ornament in general, not its assumption of one of another form or its development in one or another way. Over and above its involvement in social decorums, ornament also has its own historical characteristics. It is peculiarly subject to the principle of authority discussed in Section 4, and, once established, ornamental motifs such as lotus, papyrus and acanthus have persisted through millennia, connect­ ing the very beginnings of monumental culture to the present day. Ornament in itself, as I shall discuss in Chapter 5, characteristically develops within the rules of planar order; at the same time, however, it is also peculiarly subject to the play of arbitrary invention. In principle, it does not matter what motifs make distinctions as long as distinctions are made, and planar order permits any number of specific elaborations. The most ancient motifs have provided and continue to provide themes for endless combination and variation. Ornaments may thus also be what the Greeks called parerga. In one sense, these were embellishments, marginal additions subsidiary to the main work; but these ‘brilliant’ asides could also be free displays of wit and skill, sometimes apparently inappropriate to the main work itself, as for example, in the marginal paintings of European medieval manuscripts. The relation between ornament and invention may be taken to exemplify the more general relation of art to its social circumstances. If ornament - and skilled facture in general - have the kinds of significance I have indicated, then art is never ‘pure’, never free from precedent social purposes and values. If that is so, however, art is also always realized in specific combinations and adjustments of significant elements, and from these specific circumstances arise the arbitrary transformations of existing configurations, motifs and techniques, as well as inventions of new ones. It is out of this web of involvement in circumstances that all innovations come, and it is back into a web more or less altered by its own innovation that every artifact immediately passes. Someone rolling and pressing clay into figurines for votive purposes might also shape them differently to ‘while away the time’, or to ‘see what happens’. The resulting forms might be insignificant, but they might also change the series of artifacts to which they belong, or begin new ones. Such arbitrary making might be taken as a simple example of play, but even here play is shaped by specific tasks and materials. In general, any actual situation of making is specified by given configurations and formats, and by skill. As it was made and elaborated, the Japanese Middle Jomon vessel in Figure 32 was made not only distinctive and ornate but delicate and fragile. This elaboration may include schematic images - symmetrical volutes, for example, might suggest a mask - or other standard elements. But what we see is essentially free invention, play within the possibility of a given configuration, motifs, materials and techniques, as fillets of clay rise to heights at the very limit of their ability to support themselves, As this example suggests, play not only involves the application to given materials of existing skills, it also involves their extension and development. It thus explores the absolutely possible, that is, what is able to be done given the means at hand. Refinement and the development of skill produce facility. The word ‘facile’, from the Latin facilis, ‘easy’, is - again, like facture itself - related to facere, ‘to

do’. To be facile, or to have facility, means to do something with ease. This ease may be partly natural predisposition, but it also always requires the ‘second nature’ of habit. When we describe work as skilled, we mean at least that it is evidently worked with facility in the sense of technical mastery, that it has been done without evident impediment. Facility is, however, only the beginning of the significant development of skill. The word ‘difficult’ is a negative form of ‘facile’, and at the simplest level the difficult is what resists skill. It is not to be confused with problems encountered before skill has been attained. Instead, the value of the difficult lies in what is difficult precisely for the skilled worker. We admire the Maya eccentric flint in Figure 2.4 because it seems that skill has surpassed what is possible in the working of stone, and such display pf skill would no doubt have been even more admired by those who actually worked stone and could thus appreciate the difficulty. In general, virtuosity may induce wonder in a broad audience, but its proper recept­ ion may also depend upon more exclusive or courtly circumstances, in which tours de force are evident to those very familiar with an art and its peculiar challenges and problems. The critical language of ‘virtuosity’ appeared in the Italian Renaissance, when the highest displays of artistic skill were called ‘difficulties’, meaning that they were the hardest things to do and, when praiseworthy, had been done with apparent ease. The ‘virtuoso’ artist was one who performed these feats with surpassing skill, as if naturally, without effort. More generally, the specific and local development of traditions of art might be defined as taking place within emerging definitions of the facile and the difficult. To be facile in the first instance means to do what is already understood to be desirable, and those who make art in one tradition or another might be selected on the basis of their propensity to perform certain tasks and take on certain skills. As their instruction is com­ pleted, however, they might be expected to be ranked among themselves not just in terms of facility, or competence, but in terms of their facility as measured against the difficult, that is, as measured against those things hard to perform in terms of the tradition itself. In the late Middle Ages an artisan presented a ‘master­ piece’ (this is the origin of our use of that term) as a demonstration of accomplished skill for admission to a guild as a master of his art. These masterpieces were not demonstrations of ordinary competence but extraordinary displays of invention and execution, worthy of admiration and even wonder on the part of others, especially other artisans, those who understood what had been done. Virtuosity is closely related etymologically to virtuality. Both descend directly from the Latin ‘virtus\ ‘strength’, ‘virtue’ in the sense of a capacity to act. More specifically, virtus is from vir, ‘man’, and the metaphorical root of the strength involved is manliness. A ‘virtuoso’ performance is one in which the seemingly impossible is accomplished with ease (although virtuoso also came to refer to someone capable of appreciating and judging such performances). Virtuality, the subject of Chapter 6, is the appearance of three dimensions in two, of what has something of the force of the real; it has been made by art to seem to be as it appears, which requires a certain virtuosity. There are many examples of virtuoso illusionism, related in turn to new kinds of invention and fantasy. The naturalism that developed with oil painting in the European late Middle Ages

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33 Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, detail of central panel, c.1510-15. Oil on wood, whole panel 216x191cm (86% x 76% in). Prado, Madrid

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made possible characteristic kinds of play and imagination. Jan van Eyck painted the Virgin and Child (Figure 28) using the same transparent glazes and opaque lead white highlights Hieronymus Bosch used some seventy years later to show the fantasies of his Garden of Earthly Delights (Figure 33). Jan van Eyck’s painting is of course itself a ‘vision’, and its appeal may have as much to do with the irre­ sistible vividness of its illusion as with its apparent descriptive credibility. Both paintings, however, share a base in skills of creating seeming and illusion. In a major strain of the Western critical tradition, stemming principally from Plato, illusionistic skill has provoked reactions very much like the deep distrust of rhetorical ornament discussed in the last section. We may be filled with admira­ tion when we are ‘taken in’ by art, but we may also sense duplicity, that art has made the false, meretricious or non-existent seem true. Virtuosity in virtuality is thus double-edged; it may be positively ‘dazzling’, and even ‘sublime’, but it may also be merely ‘empty’. In general, the specific facilities and difficulties defined by material, configur­ ation and craft give shape to the arbitrary in all circumstances, generating specific modes of play and difficulty. These modes, and the values they have in their specific historical situations, play an essential normative role within craft tradit­ ions. In classical Western painting the goal of the imitation of natural appear­ ances generated the virtuosity of both meticulous description (early Rembrandt) and abbreviation (late Rembrandt). The pursuit of grace and difficulty in late Central Italian Renaissance painting yielded the virtuosities of Mannerism, and, in Venetian painting, yielded an insistence upon a ‘painterly’ facture both abbrevi-

1.13 PLAY

34 Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1508-12. Fresco, 13.7 x 39m (45 x 128 ft). Vatican, Rome

ated and autographic. Entirely new realms of experience may be opened up by virtuosity, which is, however, always a special case of refinement. And yet virtuos­ ity, in magnifying the arbitrary, always offers the opportunity of inventing more than is warranted by the occasion for its display. Sometimes elaboration is merely the multiplication of elements, an additive complexity, but such multiplication also creates the possibility for higher levels of invention and synthesis. A simple spinal armature of axis and symmetry governs the arrangement of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling (Figure 34), schematically interlac­ ing Genesis and the genealogy of Christ, Hebrew and pagan prophecy; the grandeur of the whole, however, is achieved through the overwhelming display

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of invention and execution set within this framework. It is the overall effect of the seemingly endless profusion of difficult figures that suitably envalues the sublime Judaeo-Christian narratives of the beginning of the world and the In­ carnation. The principles of play and virtuosity are of course much broader than any single tradition. A pagoda might be built to such a height as to surpass any explicit purpose or programme, creating new meaning not by illustrating the number of heavens, but by making them apparently numberless, causing worship­ pers to marvel, at once adding a new dimension of sublimity to religious experi­ ence and thereby perhaps reshaping subsequent religious meaning in real spatial terms (not to mention the association of the marvellous with the display of wealth and the intercessory piety of a patron). One of the paradigms of elaboration is the labyrinth, in which art surpasses the powers of sense, giving rise to wonder, and even to terror. As I have mentioned with regard to oil painting, virtuosity often takes the form of abbreviation, skill evident in having done the most with the least means, making, for example, a figure or scene with the least number of brushmarks (Figure 153). Another kind of virtuosity - and of refinement - is attenuation. In many ceramic traditions the fabric becomes progressively thinner, or a distinc­ tion is to be seen between ‘fine’ ware and utilitarian. Bronze casts also become thinner, not just because valuable metal is conserved but because of the techni­ cal elegance of such economy. Components of architecture also often become thinner and thinner. The perennial popular fascination of the colossal and its opposite the miniature are also examples of virtuosity. We are not simply impressed by large and small things, rather we wonder how something could have been made so large or small. Colossi in Roman antiquity were called audaciae, audacities, meaning that the art of sculpture had been perfected and that therefore sculptors were free to go beyond mastery, boldly realizing the prodigious, the apparently impossible. Play is both within and against first and second nature, and is thus the contin­ ual extension of the possible. The dancer’s body is the vehicle of the dance, but the dancer seems also to defy her body’s own limits and limitations. Play is permutational in the sense that it tends to realize all possibilities, and it is liminal in the sense that it seeks the limits of possibilities. Play precedes innovation. The Indo-Europeans, in the part of the world where horses had survived the Ice Age, may have invented the spoked wheel and chariot not for the warfare to which they were to be turned with such deadly and epoch-making consequences, but for games arid contests (which is not to say that the warfare and contest are unrelated). The Athenians used the same tackle to raise and lower the sails of their ships that they used for stage effects in their dramas. In general, we are very inclined as modern people to think of invention in terms of the analysis of problems and the devising of technological solutions, and we are inclined to imagine that all people everywhere may be expected, if not to have proceeded in the same way, at least to have followed the path of least resistance in avoiding the difficult. The opposite is perhaps more often the case, even in the modern world; people - individuals and groups - continually push at the boundaries of what is possible. In sports, records are limits to be surpassed,

and with materials at hand far surpassing the strength and durability of traditional materials, modern architects began to test the limits of these new materials, build­ ing higher and higher buildings, greater and greater spans. At a certain level of refinement, Gothic vaults collapsed of their own weight, and suspension bridges at a certain level of elegance became impractical. The impulse to such failures of art - and to innumerable successes as well - is deeper than the practical, and embraces the practical. 1.14

1.14 NOTIONALITY

NOTIONALITY

When we smooth or level a surface we refine it. As we have seen, refinement is temporal and progressive, and our successive actions may be taken to imply a limit of perfect smoothness. This limit cannot be reached, but it is fundamen­ tally important that it emerges as thinkable, as notional, together with refined facture. The notional limit of smoothing is a plane surface, one in which all points are in exactly the same relation to one another. This unrealizable plane, as notional, is abstractable from the artifactual circumstances in which it arises; it can literally be ‘drawn from’ those circumstances and considered as such. When this is done, the properties and possibilities of planarity may come to light; con­ sidered in itself, for example, a plane might be of any extent, and the shape of whatever was smoothed becomes one case of any number of relations in the plane, which, as we shall see at length in Chapter 5, also provides the conditions for the clearest presentation of any possible shape. In its dictionary definition, the word ‘notion’ (from the Latin nosco, noscere, to begin to know, get knowledge of, become acquainted with, to learn) means ‘an inclusive general concept’, that by which we recognize the second apple we see to be neither the same apple we saw before, nor something entirely different, but rather something of the same kind, to which the same word applies. The adjective ‘notional’ is synonymous with ‘speculative’ and ‘theoretical’, thus stress­ ing the reflective, what is ‘seen in the mind’s eye’, the positive activity of mind in the formation of a general concept. It is also defined as ‘existing in the mind only, imaginary’. In this book, notional refers, not to conceptualized things, but to abstracted and generalized dimensional relations. I will argue in this section that, although we human beings have the capacity to think them, the notional came to practical awareness as a consequence of facture, as the imaginable or thinkable limit of certain operations. The language of facture is filled with what might be called notional metaphors. ‘To true’ is to straighten, square, or fit, as if to an ideal standard. As an adjective, ‘plumb’ (from the Latin word for the lead used as a weight) means exactly vertical, and ‘off plumb’ or ‘out of plumb’ may mean out of vertical or out of true. ‘Square’ (four ‘right’ angles) has similiar connotations, and can mean well made or exact. The word ‘perfect’ itself is closely related to facture, and means something like ‘made through and through’. When we call a surface ‘perfectly smooth’, a line ‘perfectly straight’, or an edge ‘perfectly true’, it suggests that a notional limit has in fact been reached; at the same time, however, we also associate the perfect with the ‘ideal’, again with what cannot possibly be attained. ‘Possible’ itself has a similar ambivalence. To this point I have used the word in its more etymolog­ ical sense of feasible or doable, but when we say something is merely possible

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we may mean that it only exists in thought, only as notional. In all cases, the notional emerges together with the spatiotemporal direction of operations toward a ‘finish’, and retains its close bond to the artifactual. The crucial abstraction from the artifactual is from size. As pure, thinkable relation, the notional is to the actual size of one artifact or another as ratio and proportion are to measure. (As I will discuss at length in Chapter 5, given a scheme of ratios or proportions, we might make a similar figure of any size, from miniature to colossal.) In still more general terms, notional relations may be described as dimensional, as opposed to spatial. Space is simply the size it is, and is significant in relation to the conditionality of our given sizes; but space may also be thought - and planned - dimensionally, without regard to size, simply in terms of two- and three-dimensional relations. The notional is thus what may be thought in terms of pure dimensional relation, relation being understood as things of the same kind set side-by-side. A pure, ideal, geometric, or notional plane may again serve as an example. If such a plane is a surface in which a straight line (the path of a point) connecting any two points lies wholly in the surface itself, then pure points represent things of the same kind most abstractly conceived, and the plane is the condition for the representation of their equivalence; given that condition, any number of specific relations may be imagined, and the same relations may be plotted or imagined at any size. The same may be done in three dimensions, that is in those relations made possible when two planes intersect at right angles. The emergence of the notional, that is, the emergence of conceivable dimensional relations apart from actual spatial relations, raises fundamentally important possibilities. The first is categorization in terms of relations themselves, as linear, for example, or equal, or bilaterally symmetrical (an example I will consider at the beginning of Chapter 5). A second is the development of the notional itself in geometry and mathematics; if geometry was first the measurement of the earth, it was abstracted and developed in both two and three dimensions on a notional level far beyond such concrete applications. Third, notionality as the descrip­ tion or development of relations may be channelled back into making. Given notional line and plane, any number of two-dimensional shapes and threedimensional forms may be conceived, only some of which, however, are realiz­ able. To take another simple example, it is possible to plan and build pyramids of any practicable size. And of course making and play may always yield new relations on the level of the notional itself. Symmetries, based on the possibili­ ties of planarity, are highly developed in ornament, and two-dimensional arches may become three-dimensional vaults and domes with or without a geometry. The notional is thus not the ‘ideal case’ of what has come to be at hand, rather it requires the abstraction and application of relations in any number of other cases. Notionality has three important corollaries, to which I will return from time to time in the following chapters. First, in its abstraction from size, the notional is analogous to sight, simply because we are able to recognize shapes as the same regardless of apparent size. Notionality is also related to the princi­ ple that the size of images is determined by use. Finally, notionality provides a framework for the understanding of the natural world and its relations as artifactual, as having been made ‘in the beginning’, as I shall discuss in the next

section on models. In the remainder of this section, I will briefly and specula­ tively trace the emergence of the notional from the earliest artifactual record. Making textiles - tying and weaving, the twisting and plaiting of fibres (and hair) - raises issues of regularity, and therefore of notionality, but, although such skills are probably much older than we know, the survival of textiles is poor. Still, we should imagine the development of notionality as having taken place more broadly than in the making of stone tools. Whether stones were first fractured instinctively, intentionally or acciden­ tally, it must have been recognized that sharp edges were useful, and that fracture produced them. If fracturing stones was instinctual, then all hominids would have done it and continued to do it. If, however, accidentally fractured stones were found to be useful for some purposes, or stones began to be broken expressly for these purposes, then it would have been necessary in some way to transmit both knowledge and skills (if only by example and therefore by imitat­ ion), otherwise knowledge and skills would have been lost. And, since the tools changed, there must have been more than instinct at work. Greater sharpness, or more sharpness, must have been seen to be desirable, and it must further have been realized that such more desirable sharpness was, and therefore could be, the result of fashioning. Over very long periods, longer and thinner cutting edges were made, which in turn involved the fracturing of stones in more methodical ways. If the use of stone tools was instinctive to the genus Homo, the making of more effective tools might have made some groups more adaptable than others, in which case the evolution of tools would have been integral to hominid evolut­ ion. However that might be, the nearly historyless replications of tool-making passed from Homo habilis to Homo erectus and beyond; and what is centrally important is that the emergence of configurations clearly also stated relations resulting from agency. These relations proved to be more important than the practical configurations through which they were realized; because they provided a common factural and artifactual basis, which also implied an equally com­ mon notional basis, from which all that came after was to depend. Tools not only allowed adaptation, they created the expectation of further adaptation. They multiplied agency simply by enabling activities, but also established the general principle that adaptation would be possible, that it would be able to be done. The Oldowan ‘industry’ (Figure io), associated with Homo habilis, ‘handy human’, named for the use of tools, lasted about a million years, from around 2.5 to 1.5 million years ago, when Homo erectus (upright human) succeeds Homo habilis in the archaeological record. Homo erectus began the population of the world, perhaps following wild herds and their predators northward and eastward out of Africa, adapting to many environments. Homo erectus may have first controlled fire (also struck from flint, a favoured stone for tool-making). Fire of course would also have greatly facilitated adaptation, increasing the degree of possible environmental intervention and further multi­ plying the possibilities for invention and the modification of materials. The characteristic artifact of the Acheulean ‘industry’ associated with Homo erectus, found in Africa, Europe and Asia, was the hand-axe (Figure n). This extended the development of cutting edges with a very important additional

1.14 NOTIONALITY

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CHAPTER T

FACTURE

3 5 Flint flake struck from a prepared core, Mesolithic, Fannerup, Jutland, Denmark, c.8000 BC. Length z6 cm (10% in). After J. Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times, fig. 83

IIO

element: these tools became clearly axial and bilaterally symmetrical with respect to their axes. A cutting edge exerts its greatest force at the tip, and cuts or penetrates best if the impulse from the tip continues evenly and symmetrically to either side. A tool is also strongest and penetrates best when it is used in such a way that force is exerted along its axis of symmetry. (Acheulean handaxes like that in Figure 11 typically have slightly rounded tips, as if to facilitate chopping rather than piercing.) As a general configuration, the acute isosceles triangular shape has defined the appearance of innumerable tools and weapons, from handaxes to daggers and bullets. The Acheulean industry lasted until about 100,000 years ago, and thus overlaps the emergence of Homo sapiens, modern human beings. In Europe, where the sequence has been most fully studied, identifiable industries arose and disappeared in the seventy millennia between the decline of the Acheulean and the appear­ ance of images and personal adornment, around 30,000 bc. From the first records of characteristically hominid traces to the beginning of the history of art as we usually understand it, in the Upper Palaeolithic, techniques of stone working developed within the limits of the geometry of stone fracture and functional configuration. These techniques, although scattered in space over unimaginably long periods of time, were remarkably uniform. Various specialized ways of striking or pressing stone with wood or bone as well as other stones were also devised, and the transmission of these skills, like the uses to which tools were put, must surely by this time have become part of the cohesiveness and continu­ ity of groups, as well as an early stimulus to specialization within groups. If the extreme conservatism of early stone industries is striking, at certain points there must have been first, basic examples of the principle of authority discussed in Section 5. Specialized configurations and arbitrary differences in these configurat­ ions both multiplied very late in the series of stone tools, when it might be supposed that many groups began to articulate differences from one another and within themselves. Conversely, the absence of such features in earlier artifacts suggests that such distinctions may not have been well defined in the lives of those who made them. The rate of change in these later industries, although incomparably slow by the standards of historical time, was much accelerated relative to what had gone before. In this long period techniques were developed for punching whole tools from prepared cores. These techniques yielded blades (for example, Figure 35) with more or less parallel sharp edges that could be worked to specialized configurations such as knives and gravers, tools lending themselves to the working of animal skin and bone, in turn permitting adaptation to Ice Age cold and the invention of new bone tools and weapons, from needles to harpoons. These tools also permitted the engraving of marks and images. The ‘more or less’ parallel edges of the blade in Figure 3 5 raise the question of the notional in an important variant; these blades were made not so much by shaping stone as by knowing what shapes stone would take when struck. These tools were fashioned thousands of generations into the human artifactual record, and notional relations may be supposed to have been well understood by the time they were made. In that case, skill might further be supposed, not simply to fashion near-notional relations such as parallel edges, but to expose the potential

1.14 NOTIONALITY

3 6 Carved handle lamp or censer from Lascaux. Late Palaeolithic, c.15,500 bc. Stone, length 21.9 cm (8% in). Musee des Antiquites Nationales, St-Germain-en-Laye

existence of such relations in stone itself. Things are inherently like what can be conceived and made, or, through skill, things may be made to yield their forms for human uses. As tools became more and more specialized, and were thus made in more and more configurations, the age-old configuration of the symmetrical, isosceles triangular cutting edge, typified by the Acheulean hand-axe in Figure 11, became more and more precise and refined in weapon points, as in the very late Neolithic examples in Figure 21. What more and more clearly emerged were not simply better tools (as I have already argued) or tools adapted to new purposes (projec­ tile points) or more refined tools, but habits, closely associated with craft and skill, of realizing certain kinds of planar relations - like bilateral symmetry, or straightness and repetition - as possible relations within the broader dimension of the notional. The emergence of these notional relations in themselves but also together with mental and manual operations (including the arrangement of places) is fundamental for what followed. The close relation between refinement and the notional may be considered again in the example of the late Palaeolithic lamp in Figure 36. The use and control of fire is one of the acknowledged turning points in human prehistory, ranking with language and the making of tools themselves. Fire not only made adaptation to new circumstances possible, by denying darkness it established an absolute difference between human and animal places. It is hard to imagine that the extreme importance of fire was lost upon groups whose lives had in essential ways come to depend upon it. Not only did fire interrupt night, it also permit­ ted penetration into the dark recesses of the earth. The lamp in Figure 36 was found at Lascaux together with many others at the bottom of a shaft, the walls of which are painted with what has been argued to be one of the earliest narratives in Palaeolithic art, showing a hunter or (more probably) a shaman and a disembow­ elled bison. Many Palaeolithic animal paintings, which are deep in caves and far from any natural light, must have been painted and ritually used or visited by lamplight. Most Palaeolithic lamps are crude and lumpish, lopsided stones gouged on one side to hold animal fat and wick. Some, however, like this one, are much more refined. It is red sandstone, carefully formed by abrasion. The dominant

in

CHAPTER I FACTURE

37 Woman from Laussel, holding striated horn, c. 19,000 BC. Stone, height 18 cm (7% in). Musee de 1’Homme, Paris

shape is that of the bowl for fat and oil, cut and polished into a near-circle, drawn, and perhaps made, by rotary movement, many millennia before the wheel or lathe. A circle is of course planar, and rotary movement maintains a 1:1 ratio between centre and circumference. That this notional purity of shape and relat­ ion was meant to distinguish the lamp is.suggested by its other features. The lip of the bowl is worked to a thin, delicate edge echoing the near-circle of the bowl, which is joined to the handle by slow, continuous, symmetrical arcs, and there are engravings on the handle similar to patterns painted on the walls. In retros­ pect, indications of rotary motion seem unexceptional, since we are altogether accustomed to the precision of turned forms in the vast intervening artifactual tradition. In relation to the very much longer traditions of Palaeolithic art, however, it is extraordinary, and it may be supposed that it was worked with such exactness because of its extraordinary purpose. If so, then the lamp might be an example of specifically ritual ware, distinguished by refinement. If refinement makes the lamp singular, the carefully worked circle might also have had a number of more complex values. It might also have been, for example, an image of the disc of the sun, the great source of light and heat, or of the full moon, or, when the lamp was in use, it might have been both together. But whether any of this is so or not, the uniform contour of the near-circle, so different from the living, ever shifting contours of Palaeolithic animal painting and engraving, implies a notional circle, part of the notional system of line and plane. Refinement might be supposed not only to have made the notional imaginable, but also to have suggested the way - rotary motion - in which such precision might be realized. If that is so, then refinement, and the ritual and social purposes underlying refinement, would have been the means to fundamental conception and invention. As I have mentioned, a notional circle, which this lamp suggests as a limit, possesses a ratio of 1:1 between the point of its centre and any point on the circumference. It might also imply the plane in which its contour lies. Figure 36 makes it possible to think that relation as such by indicating the notional limit of circularity, which is separable from any specific dimensions. All perfectly circular shapes will possess the same relations. And so, if we imagine again that the circle in Figure 3 6 might have been meant to represent the sun, this might have meant that the sun was perfectly made, or even that it is in fact the notional circle, the one case in which the visible corresponds to the thinkable. It can never be known, of course, whether the near-circle in Figure 3 6 displays a level of refinement making relations thinkable, or whether it was explicitly made to possess these relations. There are other examples of such significant ambivalence in Palaeolithic artifacts. The marks on the horn held by the so-called Venus of Laussel (Figure 37) may be a tabulation of a lunar cycle. This inference might be made from the number of marks in the series, but is not clearly supported by the presentation of the marks themselves. They are neither identical nor at equal intervals, and so predict not just systems of tabulation but the definition of the very conditions for such systems. We are entirely accustomed to the planar regularity of calendars, which in itself tells us that days are equivalent, sequen­ tial, numerable; we are accustomed, in other words, to the planar presentation of time, or perhaps better, to the idea that time can be presented in the same way as a great number of other things. If Figure 37 is in fact an early example of the

recording of time, the planar and notional conditions for recording are being worked out simultaneously. There are other examples in Palaeolithic artifacts of emergent planar order, and, as I shall argue in Chapter 5, images like Figure 37 (see also Figures 147 and 148) demonstrate the separation from tools of the planar relation of bilateral symmetry for the purpose of describing the-relations of the parts of the human body. Just as the notional arises from operations, and is, so to speak, evident in the results of operations, it also makes many more operations imaginable and doable, and these new operations in their turn develop what may be regarded as pure relations. Once, for example, bilateral symmetry is understood as a notional relation of points rotated with respect to an axis, this definition itself may be manipulated. Axes might be multiplied to yield rotational symmetry (which I will examine in Chapter 5), creating at once the possibility of any number of new patterns and the demand for new skills. In this way, play occurs at the level of the notional, as may be seen in traditions of highly developed ornament. Again, once the notional limit of planarity has been separated from smoothing, a plane of any extent may be imagined as the prelude to the construction of more extensive planar social spatial order; or, once planarity is understood in terms of pure relation, or ratio, two- or three-dimensional order according to any specific measure may be envisioned and realized at any practicable extent. The notional thus creates new sets of options or alternatives, which may or may not be taken up, some of which prove to be useful, and others of which do not. The straight­ ness of an edge and the smoothness and precise border of a clearing might only be connected as notional if it becomes desirable to build villages and divide fields. But the alternative or option created by elemental making always exists. The absolute, originative importance of the notional is concealed for us now precisely by the ubiquity of highly developed and constructed notional relations, not only in the characteristic real spatial environments of the modern techno­ logical world that everywhere sqrrounds us, but in the conceptual infrastructure of this world, in the co-ordinate, metric spatiotemporal relations we assume as the constant precondition for prediction and control. We are inclined to identify these modern assumptions about the world in which we live with common sense, with the structures of consciousness and perception themselves. I have argued, however, that the notional, the conceivable world ofgeneral relations, has emerged in the closest association with making, and with the actual realizations of these conceivable relations. The human capacity revealed in this emergence, the thread running continuously through it, is the capacity, not just to see relations as such, but to see the notional implications of relations that have been made, then to develop further making and relations on the basis of those implications. The notional becomes clearly evident in the artifactual record as surfaces began to be treated as if linear or planar, or as if in relation to a line or plane. Measure accompanied or followed. The monumental result of this long, globally scattered labour was the epiergence of artificial planar order in the Neolithic, which occurred independently in the Old World and in ancient America. This new planar order established new conditions for social relations, and new formats for the presentation of images and for the representation of the world that have persisted and developed into modern times.

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notionality

CHAPTER I

FACTURE

114

1.15

MODELS

When Plato argued {Philebus 51C) that the plane, straight line and circle, and the solid figures formed from them by such artisanal means as lathe, ruler and square, are absolutely pleasing and beautiful, he stood at one of the apexes of the long development I have outlined in'the last section. The skilful realization of the exactly - that is, near-notionally - circular and cylindrical, straight or perpendicular pleases us, and assumes the value of the beautiful, because of its apparent absoluteness. Moreover - still according to Plato - what I have called the notionality of artifacts, their essential comprehensibility in terms of pure relations, makes them mindlike, and the notional revealed in the artifactual is pleasing and beautiful because it is like the principle of life in us. It is in terms of the world as perfect artifact, as notional artifact, that our soul is similar to the world in which it finds itself. In the Timaeus (z8Bff.), Plato used the metaphor of an artisan to establish the cosmogony and cosmology that, together with the account of creation in the book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible, would dominate Western speculation on the nature of the world and its origin until modern times. When, Plato wrote, an artisan’s gaze remains fixed on a uniform model (as opposed to something that has come into existence, and is therefore changeable) the product must be as beautiful as the mental model itself. Plato’s word corresponding to ‘artisan’ in this summary is demiourgos, and he must have had in mind someone practising a utilitarian craft. The word translated as ‘model’ is paradeigma, our ‘paradigm’, a model, example, pattern or proof, that which can be pointed out, shown or displayed. And the result of the artisan’s activity is a kosmos, an artificial order. The ‘harmony’ in terms of which the order of the cosmos is characterized contin­ ues the artisanly metaphor. Harmonia in its first meaning was a fitting together, a join, as in the building of furniture, wooden chariots or ships. Plato wrote as the heir to Egyptian geometry and stereotomy, to Middle Eastern alphabets, to the Indo-European cultures of horse and wheels, and to the fruits of the millennial observation of the skies and seasons. He took up Pythagoras’s definition of the ‘harmony’ of the world in terms of relations of whole integers pleasing to both sense and mind that had begun to set Ionian speculation on the nature of the physical world on mathematical foundations. But the more basic pattern of regarding the world as a kosmos, by analogy with human art, or perfect human art (that is, superhuman art), was a local version of invention at the level of notionality. This brings us to the present subject of models. Rather than supposing that the cultural worlds people have made - the specific real spatial Worlds - ‘express’ collective ‘views’ of the world as a whole, I am arguing that members of groups of people (and I am assuming that people emerged as groups, not just as individuals) made artifacts and social spaces, or ‘places’; these were in all cases responses to circumstances, but, given such exigencies, they were also the results of human presence and of arbitrary choices and invent­ ions, subject to refinement, differentiation and stratification. Simply because they embody relations, artifacts and places inevitably raise potential issues of notion­ ality, and of association of artifacts and places with higher, perfect facture. This perfection might in turn be associated with the power to command such works to be done, but also, as we have seen, the notional opens complex ranges of the

possible, both in the sense of what differs from the actual and in the sense of the doable. At the level of the notional, places are elaboratable in new terms, and their elaborations may become the basis for new constructions, which also have the sanction of the notional, of the highest imaginable facture. And if there is earth, sky, centre and boundaries, there may be any other boundaries, any number of heavens, any number of underworlds, any number of ‘planes’ of existence, all of which may corroborate and elaborate a cultural choice, but all of which may also compete and conflict with one another as more ‘real’ than their real spatial beginnings. To return to the example of Plato, his world-artisan worked with perfect forms - circles and spheres - in simple and clear relations to frame the cosmos. In imitation of the world itself considered as a well-made artifact, models of these forms and relations - armillary spheres, but also buildings - could be made stating them in miniature - that is, in terms of ratios - and these forms and relations might in turn provide the pattern for social spaces. Movement is from real spatial to notional (again, an alternative made available by making itself), abstraction from size to ratio as notional, possible elaboration at the level of the notional, and back to social space. A stupa may be a large, embellished mound (Figures 65 and 66) or a small reliquary, and may be significantly elaborated at either size. The two are similar in a geometric sense, and their similarity presupposes notionality, in turn implying the separation of ratio from measure, of actual sizes from their relations. We may imagine the world at large as a notional version of the place we build, or the place we build as a smaller version of the world at large, or we may construct actual models of the world, like the armillary sphere, and we may think of each of these in terms of the other. The word ‘model’ itself is from modulus, via such familiar terms as modello. Modulus is a diminutive of modus, ‘measure’, or ‘manner’, as in modus operandi or a la mode. When we say ‘this is modelled after that’, we may mean that this is like that in ‘taking its measure’, which might be taken to imply that a model is the same size. But it is crucially important that ‘models’ are separable from size. A model is like its model (as the language permits us to say) in terms of ratio and proportion. Something may be made ‘in the same way’ if its ratios and propor­ tions are the same. The first abstraction is abstraction from size. The Western Mexican model of a ball game in Figure 3 8 reduces a familiar but significant event literally to manageable proportions. The model is about 16 centimetres (6V2 inches) high. The little figures are not descriptive (in the manner of ancient American figurines - see Figure 124 and the small figures in the lower register of Figure 166), but their actions are descriptive and even engaging all the same. Some just watch, others rush or even strain to see. Models like this, which vary in subject matter, were tomb furniture, buried with the dead in characteristic shaft tombs. Their use is not certain. They might show the occupation (there were professional ball players) or favourite activities of the dead, or they might be offerings. The ball game was a ‘sport’, but it was also a ritual, and perhaps individuals sponsored ball games, in which case the occupant of the tomb might have passed into the afterlife as the perpetual offerer of the event. However that may be, representa­ tion sets the matter out in terms of de facto relations and ratios, which might

1.15 models

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CHAPTER I FACTURE

3 8 Ball Court Scene, Nayarit, znd century BC-znd century AD. Clay with red and white slip, height 16.3 cm (6/2 in). Worcester Art Museum, Mass.

39 Ritual disk (bi), Chinese, Neolithic, c.2500 bc. Jade, 17.5 x 16.7X 1.2 cm (7 x 6% x Vz in). Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

remain quasi-descriptive and concrete, or become abstract, part of the relations and alignments of the ball courts of great ritual centres. The ball game was certainly older than those monumental versions, and yet the two, and the interplay of the two, are absolutely linked. At the other, more notional extreme, we may consider the Chinese bi (Figure 39), made from Neolithic times to the present. The bi itself is near-notional, a circle within a circle; it is often made of jade, worked to a fine thinness, and seems to have been associated with the sky. Perhaps it modelled the tangency of earth and sky, the latter turning around a centre, in which case it might be suitable for divination. If something like that was so, then the world itself was made manipulable in rare, symbolic material, and in terms of almost perfectly abstract relations. And what is most important in both of these examples is not only the separation from size, but sufficiency and efficacy apart from size. Models are deeper than images. Something may be like something else, and have the values of likeness by virtue of relation alone. At the same time, making things in variable sizes is closely related to the visual. As I shall discuss at length in Chapter 4, sight shows at once that recognition may be separated from size. We can only touch things at the size they are, but we can ‘grasp’ them by sight over any distance at which they are recognizable. Through sight, likeness is separa­ ble from given spatial conditions, and, when likeness is separated it necessarily enters the space of human use. In order to be recognizable, then, things must preserve relation and ratio (or proportion), but not size. I will argue in Chapter 4 that images are in general treated as if comprehending the essence of what they show, but that their size, like the size of all models, is ultimately determined by the real spatial use for which they are made.

Places

CHAPTER 2

2.1 INTRODUCTION

At Olduvai Gorge, again at the bedrock of our ancestral record, there are not only simple tools, there are also ‘living floors’ of unworked stone. These fragile, irregularly circular areas have been subject to erosion and to deeper geological changes through two thousand millennia, but they are still discernible and have been found in several examples. They may have been bases for shelters, in which case they might be explained as the remains of a primordial utilitarian architec­ ture. But however that might be, these living floors are the remnants of places^ definite areas distinguished from their surroundings by hominid construction. They are enclosures in the broad sense in which I have defined architecture as social space; and, whether or not they were actually used as shelters, these living floors bounded space and might have included those within them as small groups. For that reason, these areas, even if they survive only to the degree that the most general inferences are to be drawn from them, are as fundamental as the making of tools. These first modifications of the earth’s surface for what we may see as human purposes created a vast open field of future possibilities. They display some of the conditions of all social space, the nucleus for the establishment of an endless number of culturally specific orders and relations. Even such rudimen­ tary places - of which there must have been many replications, with the kind of near-instinctual continuity and uniformity also to be seen in the first tools - unite groups as groups. And however groups might have been constituted, the articu­ lation of their places distinguished the real spatial ‘world’ of their members from the larger world around them, at once contributing to the definition of one or another ‘second nature’. If places unite groups, they exclude as well as include, and are therefore also fundamental to the institutionalization of differences among groups. Places are made, and the values of material, facture and refinement fully apply to them. Places are also subject to the principles of arbitrariness and authority; in general, places may be of any shape and size, but any actual place is necessarily of some shape and size, which, once chosen, tends to be replicated. Places may also be relatively distinguished, just as members of societies are relatively distinguished, by materials and refined facture. As places state relations to the external world, they also make internal relations articulatable by division, so that, by the assignment of the parts resulting from this division, specific real spatial relations and social relations arise together. The floor of the simplest dwelling may thus provide a basis both for a specific social organization and for the specific collective relation of that organization to the larger ‘house’ of the world. To be sure, the divisions and alignments of places may have precisely opposite values for one or another group, but in all cases they shape social organization and behaviour in relation to the larger world. Once established, the second-natural construction of the activities of the lives of its members has the deep authority of the ‘ways’ of a people, and divisions and align­ ments tend to have historical lives of indefinite length. Still, as arbitrary, all

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CHAPTER 2 PLACES

40 Nonakado Circle, Oyu Stone Circles, Japan, Late Jomon, 1500-300 BC

118

arrangements are in principle subject to change. In all cases, however, the connec­ tion between groups and places is reciprocal; as social relations change, their real spatial arrangements must also change, and as social groups subdivide or diff­ erentiate or multiply or join, social spaces accommodate these changes. The culturally specific characteristics of artifacts and images are meaningful in ways that determined their appearance in places, or divisions of places, in the social spaces, or ‘world’ for which they were made and in which they were used. To put this differently, it is in places that behaviour appropriate to artifacts and images has its greatest relevance and most exact fit. At the same time, the making of a place is not simply the preparation of an area for some use or another. The modern Western understanding of the earth’s surface as metric, and therefore liable to treatment as if made up of essentially interchangeable ‘points’, is itself a culturally specific attitude, with its own history, which I will outline in Chapters 5, 6 and 7. This understanding has had the most pervasive consequences for the world we are making for ourselves (and others) insofar as we are modern Western people, and is reinforced by the assumption that places were (and are) chosen simply for practical reasons, for commerce or the transportation of goods, for defence or even for aesthetic reasons. As we are about to see, this projection of our own primary motivations must leave many fundamental cultural-historical questions unanswered and even unaskable. Places are thus not metric or merely positional, corresponding to abstract points marked on a grid map, rather they are real geophysical areas, with specific characteristics and qualities, more or less explicitly bounded, centred and divided. Places may make themselves, so to speak, by virtue of their extraordinary qualities, or by extraordinary powers manifested in them, but such places are usually also more or less explicitly bounded and distinguished by facture. The Japanese

2.1 INTRODUCTION

41 Boulder shrine carved with plazas, houses, animals and divination channels, Inca, Saihuite, Peru, late 15th century. Diameter 3-4.1 m (10-13 ft), height, 2.6 m (8 ft 6 in)

Shinto iwakura is a site regarded as the dwelling place of a (usually benevolent) spirit, or kami, which may be of greater or lesser power. The sites are self-proclaim­ ing, but they are also articulated by bounding, to preserve and contain their power, but also to distinguish them, and to ensure and shape ritual access to them. They may be further distinguished by more elaborate shrines and more specifically associated with ancestors and deities. The extra-ordinary is thus at once marked off as literally outside the ordinary and made addressable as the extraordinary. In the simplest examples, places, however chosen, are typically distinguished by facture, by erecting or arranging stones, by bounding and shaping or by smoothing and levelling. We may consider another Japanese example, the Late Jomon stone circles, after the middle of the second millennium bc. These circles were near villages, but distinct from them, and seem to have been for burial and associated ritual. The circle in Figure 40 is just off-centre with respect to two much larger concentric stone circles, and has been set off, perhaps to mark an important burial within a communal area; a central upright stone is surround­ ed by radiating smaller stones, with similar loaf-like stones laid end-to-end defining the circumference. A place within a place has thus been distinguished by uniform material and facture, just as the larger and smaller circles of the pre­ cinct as a whole may have marked differences in rank among observants, differ­ ences in stages of ritual, or both. An ocean away, in terms of utterly different cultural practices, we find a similar pattern of centring and articulation by facture. Inca shrines, or huacas, often caves or rocks associated with water (Figure 41), were places of spiritual presence, communication and divination, and therefore centres of popular worship and pilgrimage. There are numerous examples of such outcroppings of

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rock embellished by carving, in this case with stairs, changes of level, houses, animals and channels for divination. It is a model of a place marking a place. Sometimes stones were gilded. They are carved in the unmistakable imperial Inca style, explicitly identifying the sacred and the political; but they are also differ­ entiated, each as if in response to the peculiar character of its site. In other cases, the slow arcs and surfaces suggest shapes, or were worked toward the likeness of birds, snakes or pumas. . Facture might mark or elaborate an extraordinary place, but an extraordi­ nary place might also be made by facture. A rock outcropping might be made into a shrine by carving. Or, as we have just seen, a boundary might be laid out to reserve an area, to ‘set it aside’ for special purposes. Not just shrines, but buildings and towns were and are begun with divination and ritual offerings, establish­ ing a right relation between a site, its definition for human use and some collec­ tively acknowledged sanctioning order, that of the gods, spirits or ancestors. New buildings are still ceremonially ‘dedicated’, a word that originally meant to be set aside for a deity, and places are often associated with ancestors, progen­ itors, heroes and founders. Once established, a place may have a deep persistence and resistance to change. Such persistences and resistances have continued to play major parts in human history. Sacred structures often have multiple stratigraphies and were built over existing shrines (see Figure 82); the ziggurats and palaces of the ancient Near East, the temple platforms and palaces of ancient America, and many Christian churches, to take those examples, superimpose structures of greater and greater size and complexity over earlier smaller structures, while continuing to acknow­ ledge the same centres and alignments through the sequence of constructions. (On the other hand, it may be for the same reasons they are maintained that places are desecrated or destroyed by hostile or indifferent groups.) Sometimes superimpositions explicitly counter or even nullify the earlier meanings of places, pointedly stating the framework for new rituals. Many Christian churches were built over pagan shrines and temples, and not just because there was a pre-existing foundation. The Coricancha (or ‘Temple of the Sun’ as it came to be called) in Cuzco, the symbolic heart of the Inca empire (Figure 20), became the founda­ tions of a Christian church; the Cathedral in Mexico City was built in the ceremo­ nial centre of Tenochtitlan (Figure 3), its unusual north-south alignment in contrast to the east-west orientation of the Great Temple it replaced. At issue in these basic matters of superimposition and realignment was not just symbol­ ism but cultural triumph and the desire to change the real spatial foundations of collective behaviour. Nor have these infrapolitical issues been settled; modern nations have asserted their independence and legitimacy partly in terms of their indigenous cultures, and when the church and convent of Santo Domingo, after having stood on the walls of the Coricancha for 300 years, was badly damaged by an earthquake in 1950, much of the earlier structure was restored at the expense of the later one as a reassertion of the native pre-Christian culture. Most major places are more or less complex accumulations and accommo­ dations of layered and interlocking usages and meanings. The Acropolis at Athens (Figure 42), to take an example from the beginnings of the classical tradition of Western art, had long and persistent histories of meaning before reaching the

2.1 INTRODUCTION

42 Acropolis, Athens, aerial view from southwest with the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in the foreground. The Theatre of Dionysus is to the upper right

form in which we see it, and these earlier meanings and the usages that went with them had very much to do with the final monuments, those erected at the peak of Athenian power after the middle of the fifth century bc. Shrines were built from Neolithic times on the Acropolis, the Athenian ‘heights’, which intermit­ tently served as a fortress in the city’s violence-pocked history. On the Acropolis were said to be traces of the contest for Athens between Poseidon (the god of the sea) and Athena (who won), as well as the archaic olivewood statue of Athena, more revered than the colossal gold and ivory statue of Athena made by Pheidias for the Parthenon. Here were the ancient sacred springs and caves devoted to gods of fertility and vegetation, and the tomb of the first king of Athens, the legendary half-snake Cecrops; and that of Erechtheus, born from seed intended for Athena herself by the overhasty forge-god Hephaestus, but spilled instead on the sacred Athenian mother earth, from which union the legendary king was said to have sprung. It was in such a place, and within the festivals, rituals and processions shaped to its meaning and history, that the culminating work of the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the temple of Athena Parthenos, the virgin Athena, was finally built in the middle of the fifth century bc, after the destruction and desecration by the Persians, and during a period of imperial power and wealth. Whatever pride may have been taken in the refinement of the splendid and costly new structures built on the Acropolis, and whatever the importance of their example may have been for the tradition that followed them, old shrines, found­ ations and alignments continued to be respected, which is to say that the places defined by the mythical origins of the Athenians continued to be maintained and accommodated to one another. It is this respect for the various shrines and for the usages appropriate to them that stands behind the apparent scattering of buildings on the Acropolis, a random order eventually demanding aesthetic resolution and unification. A similar story might be written about ancient Rome, which we are perhaps most accustomed to thinking of in its imperial marble form; the Capitoline or the Palatine or the Forum, however, already had centuries of accumulated history

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before this aggrandizement was begun. Not only were these places made more splendid, and adapted to new purposes, but the new structures embodying new purposes were associated with the ancient shrines and monuments, which were carefully preserved. By this means the new was physically and ritually linked with the old, literally built upon the old; and in this way the authority of the place, essential to the foundations of the traditions and institutions of the Roman people, was retained and successively elaborated. By continuing to honour these originary landmarks, the ‘ancient ways’ of the Roman people were maintained, at the same time that new ways were justified by contiguity and continuity with those of the ancestors. The cumulative histories of places have other important dimensions. In a typical example of what I shall discuss in the next chapter as the ‘appropriation of the centre’, Octavian, before he became the emperor Augustus, built his house on the Palatine, to which he joined a large votive temple to Apollo. This choice identified his rule with the place of the legendary foundation of Rome, and also established the pattern that has given us the word ‘palace’, which we apply indifferently to royal residences the world around. One of the primary aims of this book is to provide a general history of social space, the institutional, architectural space in which we find ourselves belong­ ing to one or another group, second nature or culture. Social space, in which the conditions of our own existences assume specific meanings, has its own condit­ ions, which, as I will argue in Chapter 7, underwent fundamental change with the rise of Western modernism. I will discuss the conditions of premodern space mostly in terms of place, and more specifically in terms of centres, boundaries, paths and alignments. As I shall argue throughout the book, places stand in opposition to the metric, undifferentiated space in terms of which they may also be described. Although the conception - and, in principle, the possibility for the realiza­ tion - of a world of undifferentiated metric space appears late in the general history I will outline, it would be wrong to suppose that the later has simply supplanted the earlier, or that it should or must supplant the earlier. To be sure, the metaoptical space I will define in Chapter 7 makes the later modern world of global transaction possible. But as we shall see, cultural definition in terms of place powerfully persists in this world of transaction, and, as I have remarked in the Introduction, modern events, usually disasters, evoke social spatial respon­ ses very much like those upon which traditional cultures, including Western cultures, have been based. Like all conditions, centres, boundaries, paths and alignments may assume any number of culturally specific forms, any number of interdependent combina­ tions and variations. A boundary must be approached, which entails a path, approach and entry. A boundary may also acknowledge a centre or alignment, just as a centre may demand boundaries; and a centre demands approach, a path, part of which may be bounded. As we shall see, culturally specific choices with respect to the conditions of social space form the basis for long traditions of monumental construction. At the same time, these conditional choices also raise characteristic problems and possibilities for both development and conflict. Where are boundaries, and how are they established? What are the relations between those inside and those outside

them? How many centres are there? How are centres to be articulated or replicated ? Where does the reach of a centre end ? How is one path to be preferred to another, and how is that preference to be stated? Such questions could easily be multiplied, and have been as fundamental to human social behaviour as they may seem simple.

2.2

2.2 PLACE, RELATION AND HIERARCHY

The making of places always entails the shaping of social relations. Place is the conditional basis for all the culturally specific situations in which groups and individuals ‘know their places’ within a social order, most usually a stratified order in which some individuals, groups and activities are regarded as higher than others. Distinction by the division of places occurs in some way or another in all cultures, including modern democratic cultures. Because we inevitably become human beings in situations determined by choices that may be very distant in the past, and usages that may have equally ancient beginnings, the realization of places as the conditional basis of social relations means that such divisions and segregations are in any instance inseparable from some second nature, and that they will be taken up as if always the pattern of the social fabric. Every culture assigns divisions of places to different activities, sexes, ages and classes, and even when there is in principle free access to places, there are deep traditions of learnt and imitated behaviour perpetuating such differences in their culturally specific form. At the same time, these divisions are radically arbitrary in that they might have been otherwise, and might have been articulated otherwise. The verb ‘to differ’ is based upon a real spatial analogy that may be used to introduce the conditional significance of the division of places. ‘Differ’ descends from the Greek diapherein, and is thus related to ‘metaphor’, and to the fundamen­ tal real spatial values of images I shall discuss in Chapter 4. Diapherein means ‘to set or carry apart or away’, ‘to tear apart or disperse’, but also ‘to complete’, as we say ‘to carry through to completion’. The Latin cognate differo, differre meant ‘to carry in different Ways’, ‘to scatter’, then, metaphorically, ‘to disturb or distract’, ‘to publish or to defame’, ‘to delay’, ‘put off’, ‘defer’ (both in the sense of putting off and of yielding to another, to be ‘deferent’) and, finally, ‘to be different’. The connotative range of both words proceeds from the actual spatial setting apart of things. ‘Different’ or ‘difference’ imply having already been set apart, or a continuing state of being apart. We say that things differ when they are set apart, or are able to be set apart, or should be set apart, because they are not the same. Places, as social real spaces, provide the possibility for the actual statement of relations of difference. The northern and southern halves of the traditional Navajo hogan (which I shall discuss in the next section) are respectively female and male. In the Sioux tipi it is exactly the reverse. These opposite meanings do not simply cancel one another out, however, because in both cases association with direction grounds a specific arrangement of social space - that is, direction provides a framework Within which meaning may be defined - and further grounds gender and activities in a certain model of the world. One term - gender - complements the other - the directions - each giving the other the value of a larger order. It is obvious that these oppositions create the possibility of a com-

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plex - and again, culturally specific - interplay between gender, direction, weather, seasons, appropriate activities and the world at large. We may pursue these issues with another example, this time from Africa. The traditional Central African Fang village consists of a long clearing surrounded by adjacent garden plots with the forest beyond. The limits of the Fang village in themselves constitute a strong boundary, and the village stands in qualitative contradistinction to the surrounding forest. The village'm^y be characterized as ‘warm’, the forest as ‘cool’. The clearing is an extended approximate rectangle, whose alignment has the primary significance of ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’. This alignment is a variation on what will become the familiar sanctioning themes of ancestors and collective continuity, since the Fang move their villages downstream, and ‘upstream’ has the authority of the old. Dwellings in long parallel rows face one another across the clearing, and there is a plaza at either end; here, more or less on the axis of the clearing as a whole, are men’s ceremo­ nial houses. Again, as this last part of the description of the village suggests, the preparation of the site does more than simply provide the basis for the conduct of life of the villagers; it also establishes the possibility of the definition of social divisions - and differences - as real spatial relations, in this case between men and women. The long traditions established in ancient China provide another example of the relation between the arrangement of social space, social order and the modelling of the larger world. From Neolithic times, the primary determinant of social space seems to have been the daily passage of the sun. The house, its window and door, face to the south, so that the ridge-pole (the character for which combines elements of ‘east’ and ‘wood’) runs east and west. The sun moves from east to west through the southern sky, low to the horizon in winter, high overhead in the summer, so that the eaves of the roof admit the sun when heat and light are needed, and shade the house when its inhabitants must be protected from them. This fundamental definition with respect to the sun establishes the deepest and most basic credibility for equally basic assumptions about the world, since it involves the irreducible rhythms of time and life itself. The north came to be associated with darkness, with the female principle, yin, and northerly sites were considered suitable for tombs (which would have had to do with the continuity of life, not simply with death). The male principle, yang, on the other hand, is associated with the south and with sun and light and with habitation. Alignment is thus part of a whole complex of related symbolisms, anchoring social spatial second nature in the larger given world. Like all other such alignments, this one models the larger world in one of the many ways it may be modelled. It is important to note that, even when climate may be seen in retrospect to have urged or favoured and sustained certain solutions, choices must inevitably be made, which then tend to become authoritative. When this armature is expanded as a compound around a courtyard, the expansion establishes further symmetries, oppositions and distinctions within the family, as social relations are both shaped and preserved. Other external factors also bear on the location and disposition of traditional Chinese dwellings; there should be a mountain to the north, water to the south. These conditions cannot always be met, and it is necessary to find by geomancy

(called feng shui, now enjoying popularity in the West) the right balance between yin and yang in the features and spirit (chi) of a place. There are offerings to the directions, and good fortune is ensured by astrology, charms and images. This general scheme was determinative not only for houses but for palaces and, as we shall see in Chapter 3, the great imperial cities. The same model, in other words, was authoritative through all levels of social order. 2.3 THE NAVAJO HOGAN Native American architecture presents an array of examples of the relation between real spatial arrangement and social organization. The Navajo hogan (Figure 43) provides the basis for the organization of social relations, but also for the organization and ritual use of images, the traditional Navajo ‘sand paintings’. In the twentieth century, with the rise of abstraction and ‘primitivism’ in European art, Navajo ‘sand paintings’ came to be much admired, and, in response to demand from collectors and museums, have been made on permanent backings in order to hang on walls in the way easel paintings are hung. This adaptation of a traditional art form to new, very different cultural circumstances - which has not been made without considerable resistance - has its own histor­ ical interest and importance. But the removal of sand paintings from their immedi­ ate real spatial context, and the difference in the understanding of art that makes the removal possible, provides as clear an example as could be desired of the differences between modern Western and alternative possible uses and meanings of art. A brief account of these ‘paintings’ (which can no longer be appropriately reproduced) in the space of their making and use will provide a fine example of the fit between the planar order of images I will examine in Chapter 5 and the modelling and division of social space. ‘Hogan’ is a transliteration of a Navajo word meaning ‘dwelling place’. The Navajo live in small kinship groups, the members of which are scattered in hogans interspersed with storage structures and animal enclosures. In marked contrast to this apparent randomness, arising from adaptation to local circumstances and resources, the hogan itself, the place of actual human dwelling, establishes a clear, simple order, to which alignment is basic. The hogan is usually a round conical or domical structure made of freshly cut wood, built by a male head of household and his kinsmen. The site is prepared by smoothing or by shallow excavation. When complete, the hogan is on the earth or in the earth, and in both cases is covered with earth. The hearth is slightly to the east of centre, toward the entrance. The entrance itself normally faces eastward, its orientation determin­ ed by sunrise on the one day in which - ideally at least - the hogan is built. Like the tipi, the hogan receives the strength and blessing of the first sun in facing east. The building of hogans was taught to the Navajo by First Man, and their construction distinguishes the Navajo as a people. They are shelters, but they are also sacred and social spaces, and these levels of use and meaning inter­ mingle. Even when modern Navajo choose not to live in them, they still build hogans because of the fit between their spaces and the traditional activities that take place within them. The hogan establishes a sacred geometry which provides the significant real spatial basis for primary social relations as well as a framework for ritual. The major axis of the hogan runs from the eastern entrance through

2.3

THE NAVAJO HOGAN

N

43 Navajo hogan, plan. 1. Entry. 2. Hearth. 3. Seat of honour. Arrows indicate sunwise path. After P. Nabokov and R. Easton, Native American Architecture, p. 327

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hearth and centre to the western pole, where a seat of honour is occupied by the head of the household. This division, which is not an actual partition, is the basis for the separation of male and female, the south (generally more positive) side being the male hemisphere, the north the female. The women’s looms for weaving are on the north side. This arrangement, established in the simple microcosmic arrangement of the hogan itself, implies a deep simple decorum; movement is around the fire. When entering the hogan men go to theleft, sunwise. Women go right, to the north, in the opposite direction to the sun. The hogan is a model of (or for) the world, which the Navajo believe is governed by six sacred mountains, four of them anchoring the cardinal direct­ ions. The hogan is supported by five timbers, the two flanking the eastern entrance, the gifts of Earth Woman, being addressed as one. In ritual, thanks are given for the gifts of the posts at the four directions, again proceeding sunwise from east to south. The whole cycle gives thanks for the materials of the hogan, for water and for maize; in short, it gives thanks for the ways-of the Navajo. When First Man built the first hogan, he made the supports of precious mat­ erials, white shell, turquoise, abalone and jet, associating directions, mountains, materials and colours with the structure. First Man was also given a mountain­ soil bundle which enabled him to represent the inner lives of things as human forms. This is the precedent for the coloured materials used in the ritual perfor­ mances of ‘sand paintings’, which are taken from the earth, from stones, wood, flower petals and pollen, for example, all of which have their own powers and virtues. Pollen is especially important, and this fine golden powder from the ears of maize is considered beautiful, an appropriate food and an appropriate pathway for the spirits. The technique of ‘sand painting’ may be of great antiquity, but, since its results are impermanent, there is no way to trace its history. The Navajo seem to have taken it over from the Pueblos and developed it to a uniquely high level. The potent materials and precise skill and deliberation of image-making are accompanied by the equally exact singing of traditional invocatory chants. There is a repertory of at least 400 different images of the deeds of mythical heroes and of the Holy Ones. The rituals of which the images become part are shamanic interventions intended to bring about a harmony of spiritual forces, thus to over­ come illness or witchcraft, assure good fortune or negotiate rites of passage. The ‘painting’ itself is made by clearing the floor of the hogan (which involves moving the central fire), spreading it with river sand and smoothing it with the batten of a loom. The painting is sometimes referred to as a kind of sewing, and both pattern and figures have the rectilinearity of figures in textiles. Weaving is an equally highly developed women’s art, and it will be recalled that the loom is kept on the north side of the hogan. The size of the image is determined by its purpose and by the size of the hogan; most are about a metre and a half (about five feet) square. It takes three to six men about four hours to complete the image, which is made from the centre outward, again in a sunwise fashion, east to south to west to north. Proportions and alignments are determined by cords. Carefully separated pigments are sprinkled from between thumb and forefinger to make lines and areas of colour. If the image is not done properly it will not be efficacious, and mistakes are smoothed away and corrected. By the same token, ‘sand paintings’

made for sale are left incomplete in important ways so that, although they may still have aesthetic interest for collectors, they will be without spiritual power. In such a painting, Blue Earth Mother and Father Sky, each with a guardian figure above, might be the same shape and size, symmetrical relative to the east-west axis of the hogan, wearing the same mask and headdress, with arms and legs interlaced. Each right hand might hold a maize plant. The reproductive organs might be of the same shape and size, each the colour of the other’s body, and covered by inverted rainbows, joined by a third rainbow, the two figures’ mouths linked by a strip of pollen. The border around the whole image, also a rainbow, might open to the east, the entrance of the hogan. In this arrangement, Blue Earth Mother is on the northern, female side of the image, and therefore of the hogan. The whole image is one of the union of opposites and generation. The ‘navel’ of Blue Earth Mother is the place of emergence from which the Navajo came. It is the mythical centre, and around it, echoing the four directions once again, might be the four sacred plants that sustain the Navajo, corn (to the east), beans, squash and tobacco. When successfully completed, images like this are regarded as intensely powerful, so that even proximity to them may be beneficial. When they are used for healing, the sick person, after ritual sweating, sits within the boundary of the image, facing east. Sand from the ‘painting’, filled with the energy of the spirits attracted to it by like and pleasing materials, and irresistibly drawn by the contain­ ing boundaries of their own skilfully and rightly made images, is sprinkled over the person. At the end of the ceremony the whole thing is destroyed, counter­ sunwise in opposition to the way it was made, and the still powerful sand placed in a mound to the north, thus to ward off bad influences from that direction. Rituals often go on for several days, in which case a new image is made each day. 2.4

2.4 REAL SPACE, GENDER AND RITUAL

REAL SPACE, GENDER AND RITUAL

The ubiquitous modem word ‘sex’ may descend from the Latin secare, ‘to cut’, a metaphorical beginning like that of temenos, the Greek term for a sacred precinct, which has a similar origin. The temenos is the god’s ‘cut’, set apart for special use. Seen in these terms, sex is not so much biological difference, but rather the basis on which social spaces are divided within a group. ‘Sex’ is thus related to words like ‘seclusion’, ‘separation’ and ‘segregation’, all of which raise the issue of the construction of social spaces. (‘Segregation’ in the United States, like its equivalent ‘apartheid’ in South Africa, referred not just to practices or attitudes in general, but to actual social spatial arrangements and exclusions.) In the West, as elsewhere, we may find long traditions of social spatial distinc­ tions on the basis of sex of the kind indicated by the etymology I have outlined. The classical Greek private house was divided into a men’s and a women’s part, to each of which certain activities were appropriate. The famous Greek symposion, for example, ‘drinking together’, was the prerogative of men (and of women from outside the bounds of proper society). If ‘sex’ has this real spatial lineage, its original meanings have long been for­ gotten as the word proceeded from one language to another to the present. But these forgotten meanings may indicate an important aspect of the possible significance of places, so to contribute to simple and basic intercultural mispri-

I27

CHAPTER 2. PLACES

44 The Emperor Justinian and his Retinue, c.547 ad. Mosaic, San Vitale, Ravenna 45 The Empress Theodora and her Retinue, c.547 ad. Mosaic, San Vitale, Ravenna

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sions. In English, the word ‘harem’, for example, refers to women’s quarters and, more usually, to the group of women who occupy them. In Arabic, however, the word may refer to the inner rooms of a house, but is also related to the most fundamental notions regarding the character and power of sacred places, cor­ responding in their ambivalence to terms like ‘sanctuary’ and ‘sanction’ in English. A ‘sanctuary’ is a sacred place, but a place into which one may flee as if into another, higher jurisdiction; ‘to sanction’ may mean ta validate, but ‘sanct­ ions’ are the punitive application of rules deriving from the same authority. The sacred (to which ‘sanctuary’ and ‘sanction’ are of course related) establishes the law and is the continuing power of the law, so that reverence and taboo, consecra­ tion and interdiction are closely associated. Harim refers to something forbid­ den, and haram refers to a holy site. The precinct of the Ka’ba in Mecca itself and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem are called haram. Pilgrims to Mecca describe their ritual consecration in terms from the same root, meaning that their prepara­ tion has made them sufficiently like the sacred placebo be worthy to approach it. We may consider the church of San Vitale in Ravenna as a further example of the integration of social spatial differentation by gender into a splendidly distinguished sacred space, and of the decorum of the hierarchical planar order (see Chapter 5) governing its plan, elevation and imagery. The arrangement of the major interior spaces of San Vitale is unusual. The narthex, or porch, faces west, but then the interior of the church itself is skewed, so that the chancel (and thus the altar) is not perpendicular to the narthex. Instead, the major proces­ sional axis of the building is turned somewhat to the south. Practical consider­ ations of site might have determined this deviation, but might also have presented the opportunity to construct the space of the church around the hierarchical decorum of ritual in a situation in which that decorum may be supposed to have been all-important. The skewed narthex provides two entrances into the octagon of the church itself, one of which faces chancel and altar. This arrangement makes sense both in terms of the spatial organization of the church and in terms of the real spatial decorum underlying its programme of images, if the central entrance was intended for the emperor, and the less central entrance was meant for the empress. Christ’s sacrifice (repeated in the martyrdom of Saint Vitalis) is the central mystery of the Christian faith and is re-enacted in the ritual of the Eucharist at the altar at the eastern end of the major axis. All images and symbols of Christ in San Vitale are placed on this axis at one level or another. In the apse at the end of the chancel Christ is shown haloed and in majesty, seated on the globe of the world, the four rivers of Paradise flowing from beneath his feet. As is often the case in Christian art (and, as we shall see in Chapter 5, in West­ ern art generally), hierarchical relations are stated in terms of left and right, which are established by the proper left and right of the central image of Christ, who is thus treated as if present. Christ’s left and right are essential to the disposition of the most famous images in San Vitale, those of the Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodora (Figures 44 and 45). Justinian and Theodora never actually came to the church they had donated, but their images are tantamount to their presences. Images of Roman emperors were sent with solemn ceremony and public adoration to all parts of the Roman Empire, and the mosaics at Ravenna

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may be supposed to have been part of such traditions, which long predate Christianity. But to return to our theme of hierarchical relation, Justinian and his retinue are shown on Christ’s right, Theodora and her retinue on Christ’s left. Both are shown in Active spaces. Justinian is shown in a room with a gold floor, gold walls and pilasters at the four corners. There is a beamed ceiling above him, the orthogonals of which diverge (rather than converge) above his head. Justinian, like Christ in the apse mosaic, is shown frontaHy and centrally, distin­ guished by costume and a nimbus. There is a suitable differentiation of rank by overlapping. Maximianus seems to be ahead of the emperor, judging by the position of his feet on the plane, but he is not allowed to overlap Justinian. Theodora is shown frontally, framed by a niche, with splendid regalia and a nimbus, but she is not central to the image. She stands near the head of a proces­ sion of figures about to move to her right, a relatively more narrative treatment. Women were not allowed to enter the sanctuary, and, whereas the emperor is on a stage of space immediate to the chancel, in a splendid extension of its space to Christ’s right side, Theodora is removed from immediate relation of the sanc­ tuary by locating the event in which she is the principal actor outside the church. She is in the atrium that once stood in front of the narthex to the west, as the fountain indicates. Theodora is just proceeding toward the space upon which the emperor already faces in majesty. 2.5

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Modern centres are inherently movable, changing and shifting in response to economic and demographic factors, such as the availability of natural and human resources, or suitability to trade and transportation. When we say, for example, that New York, London and Hong Kong are financial centres, this might change and new centres might emerge. This is not to say that centres in older cultures did not decline when rivers changed their courses or trade routes were abandon­ ed, but the monumental history of the world is filled with examples of centres, which, as nuclei of social space, were characterized in very different terms. Modern Western people may identify with a city or region or nation, but we also see each day a world more and more pervasively transformed and unified by the technol­ ogy of transportation and communication dependent on the realization of the modern assumption of the contingency of centres and equivalency of places. If all of that is so, however, the world in which we now live cannot be thought about at all without taking centres and their histories into account. When we read that every Navajo hogan is the centre of the world, that every Hindu house and temple are the same, that every altar at which the Mass is celebrated is the axis of the world, as is every Buddhist stupa, and that Baghdad, Cuzco, Delhi, Delphi, Jerusalem, Rome and Tiahuanaco (and many others) were all the ‘navel’ of the world, we are perhaps inclined to reject such claims as meaningless. But many accounts of origin repeat the theme, if not of a navel, of a single sustain­ ing point of collective beginning. According to the Yoruba, a creature descended over the water and spread earth to make a cone of land, and the name of the sacred centre of tie Ife means ‘home spread’. No doubt some of these formula­ tions are fulfilments of our own categories and anthropological expectations; and the connotative range of the actual terms used by one group or another to

name ‘centres’ and the behaviours associated with them of course varies. But the frequency of such claims should perhaps more properly suggest to us that these metaphors are deeply rooted in the conditions of basic social spatial values. Centres, in the sense I mean, continue to have contemporary meanings, and are still associated with collective origin and identity. A ‘diaspora r is a scatter­ ing from a centre, to which it implies possible return. The word first described the exile of the Jews after Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Babylonian Captivity. The Jews (whose modern history of persecution has also contributed ‘ghetto’, ‘genocide’ and ‘holocaust’ to the modern real spatial vocabulary for the proscription and attempted annihilation of peoples) returned to rebuild the Temple, then to be scattered and return once again. But the word ‘diaspora’ has come to refer in general to forceful migrations of large groups of people, and also still implies return to an originary centre. The very term ‘Afro­ centrism’, for example, presupposes a diaspora, and characterizes the Atlantic slave trade as a biblical scattering to which some form of return is a remedy. These observations suggest that centres are deep principles for unity and identity among members of a group, and we shall see examples of central values as ethnic, religious, linguistic, national, cultural or (most usually) some combina­ tion of these. But centres just as surely provide deep principles for differences between groups, which tend to be exclusive of other groups, who in turn identify with their own centres and central values, so that exclusions are reciprocal. Centres also provide a basis for distinctions within groups themselves, typic­ ally in terms of proximity to the centre. In these real spatial terms, group identi­ ties are thus always potentially conflictual, and very often actually are conflictual, thus entailing both fundamental security and insecurity, and demanding con­ tinual negotiation. When the Spanish came to the Valley of Mexico, they found not only the great capital of Tenochtitlan and the metropolitan sculptures in its ceremonial centre, they also found a great many other more modest images and centres. The Aztecs, we are told, customarily placed images at the cardinal points around trees and springs. In an utterly different cultural tradition, a Hindu Brahmin in India may fashion a linga, the real metaphorical presence of the god Shiva (as we shall see in Chapter 4), simply by cupping sand between his hands to form a mound, which becomes the core of a sacred place. With this mound as a centre, the four directions may be drawn to establish a schematic model of the world and a rudimentary temple. These two culturally unrelated examples share the conditional third terms with which I will be concerned in this section. In both cases, the centre around which the directions were drawn, and a model of the world made, was not random but instead had some external warrant. The location of a linga might be self-determined, thus implying agency on the part of the deity, or it might be defined by making, geomancy and divination, as in the last example. In both cases, and in general, centres are defined by the inter­ section of the ordinary by the extraordinary. An epiphany or omen, a miracle, sign, dream, birth, death, calamity or prodigy may call for the articulation of a centre. Centres may be respected in a variety of ways. The spirit of a tree or spring, for example, might be treated as if actually and continuously present, or as if only intermittently present, requiring invocation and offering. Or the singular

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event might be past, leaving only a trace, for example the mark in the stone left on the Athenian acropolis by Poseidon’s trident. A singular manifestation is forgotten if its place is not marked. Facture, which commemorates by re-placing things in relation to the extraordinary, also marks and elaborates the extraordinary at the same time that it is made permanent and approachable. The erection of a stone may mark an event, and distinguish its place, which may be further distinguished and elaborated to any degree. Once given social spatial definition, these commemorations, as places of continual access to the extraordinary, may also assume the value of places of collective origin, identity and continuity for smaller or larger groups of observants, becom­ ing integral and irreducible parts of the formation of second nature. In most general terms, centres establish values by relative vicinity or proxim­ ity, approaching the limit of inclusion or contact. Actual contact with extraor­ dinary objects or places means communication with more powerful levels of reality, the levels from which life comes, or to which it goes, and in which those realities exist that affect individual human lives and the welfare of groups. Distance from the centre is negative, with the limits of exclusion and centrelessness. Centres may be associated not only with extraordinary events but with persons who lead extraordinary lives, whose powers seem to mediate in some way between this world and another. Such mediary individuals may in effect be treated as living centres, with access to the world of spirit. I shall discuss shamanism in this regard in a later section of this chapter, but the pattern is much broader. The deeds of such persons may create new centres by contact, and their bodies, having been immediate to their spirits, may be believed to continue to possess this power after death. They have been ‘touched’, and strength may be transferred to others who come into contact with them, or even proximity to them. The relics - that which has been left behind - of sanctified persons and the tombs and reliquar­ ies that contain their bodies, or things they have touched or said or written, often serve to establish centres. The same may be true of the remains of rulers, who have often claimed descent or authority from divinity, or divinity itself. An appropriately grand tomb - a pyramid, for example - at least in principle serves as an everlasting point of ritual contact between ruler, people, successors and the forces that sanction rule. The centres and precincts of many past cultures survive only in skeletal remains and it is hard to imagine them alive with crowds at festivals, or cluttered with votive offerings, alive with games and business, conversation and song, or with the smoke and smell of incense and sacrifice. But one of the meanings of the Latin incub o, incubare, from which our ‘incubate’ comes, was to lie in a temple to be healed or visited by the god. In general, the places of the presence of the extraor­ dinary were also the places of countless human crises, not just of worship, but of hope of cure or deliverance from suffering or injustice. At the least, approach to a sacred precinct might shape immediate fortunes, by giving thanks or pleasing the deity, or ensuring the good treatment or good will of the dead in the afterlife. The powers approached in centres may be ambivalent. The saint who protects against the plague might be supposed to be weak or malevolent if a plague breaks out. The more frequent reaction, that victims of misfortune are somehow them­ selves responsible, or that observances and offerings have not been properly

z.5 CENTRES

46 Birth of the Buddha, detail of a drum slab from the stupa at Amaravati, c.200 AD. White marble, whole 160 x 97.8 cm (63 x 3 8l/z in). British Museum, London

made, is perhaps so common because it at least offers the prospect of control of divine power by change in behaviour. These changes in behaviour, of course, also involve the centre, the place of access to higher power. Once sanctioned by the extraordinary, a centre may resist the further incursion of the extraordinary, in turn identified with the alien and strange. That is, once the ordinary of second nature has been established by the extraordinary, the new extraordinary may be seen to challenge what has become the basis of second nature, occasioning fear and anxiety at the same time that it also justifies sanctions against these breaches. The rituals of hospitality, which are of great antiquity, are perhaps based not so much on creature feeling or sympathy as on the fear of the ambivalence of the extraordinary. The same may be said of rituals surround­ ing the dead, who are somehow ‘outside’ the order to which they had belonged, and to which the living still belong. Fear of the alien is thus closely related to values of the centre, and with the decorum of second nature, with what ought to be done by members of a group. The cultic spaces of early Buddhism provide many examples of the establish­ ment and magnification of centres. The practices associated with these spaces reach far back into the past shared by Buddhism in India with Hinduism and Jainism. In a second-century relief from the stupa at Amaravati showing the birth of the Buddha (Figure 46), Queen Maya, his mother, is shown as a yakshi, a

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female tree spirit connected to the riches of the earth and to prosperity. In our upper right-hand corner she dreams of the birth of her son, and the meaning of her dream is interpreted in the scene to our left. In the register below, the narrative also moves from our right to left, and is bracketed by two trees. Queen Maya gave birth to the Buddha in a sacred grove by taking hold of the branch of a flow­ ering tree, the infant then emerging painlessly from her right side. He is shown aniconically, as a long cloth marked with footprints. In the next scene, the cloth, sheltered by a royal parasol, is taken to another tree, that is, to a centre, which is set off by a square vedtka, the railing of a sacred precinct. Offerings have been set before this railing, and the spirit of the place rises up with his hands coupled in adoration, a central deity thus acknowledging the divinity and higher central­ ity of the Buddha. Thus the beneficent generative forces of the earth give birth to a higher reality, which these forces themselves acknowledge and to which they submit themselves. In another version, the newborn took seven steps, faced the four directions, and pointed to the sky with his right hand and to the earth with his left, saying, ‘I alone am Prince of that above and below the heavens’. He pronounced himself the centre, in other words, and the architectural tradition that formed through the centuries around the Buddha continued to repeat and elaborate the transformation of old forms into new effected by his birth. These core central values developed in the real spatial institutions of Buddhism ex­ panding from ritual observance and pilgrimage to empire, as we shall see in the next chapter. The place where the historical Siddharta Gautama became Buddha, ‘enlightened’, a place and an event associated with a tree, the Bodhi Tree, or ‘tree of wisdom’, may first have been venerated itself and elaborated by simple shrines. But over the centuries it became the site for the construction of more and more elaborate shrines and temples; and at the same time it also became a centre of pilgrimage and one of the centres of origin of shared ways of life (see below, Figure 67). The articulation of a centre by simple placement is significant in itself and also constitutes a nucleus for further development and for further distinction by elaboration. A stone placed upright to show where an extraordinary event took place might be anointed, polished, carved or coloured, or it might be isolated by putting a ring of stones or fence around it, further shaping the paths of those approaching it. The stone might also be rare or exotic; or it might be magni­ fied, made large to become a pillar or column, or multiplied to become a cairn. All of these are simple examples of distinction by facture, which at some point must involve group effort. The word ‘centre’ itself is from the mark made by the point of a pair of compasses, and the examples I have been using are trees, springs and upright stones. Considered notionally, however, that is, as a pure geometric centre, it is a point, and its implicit boundary, whatever the actual shape of a precinct, is a circumference. In these terms, the centre is the only point that stands in the same relation to all points on the circumference (and is also the point from which they are generated), and the uniqueness of this relation is analogous to the unique­ ness of the actual intersection with the ordinary the centre marks. Still consid­ ered notionally, both centre and circumference lie in a horizontal plane, and the centre may be seen either as a point, or as the point marked by the intersection

of a vertical line. This vertical line might be thought of as simply representing the tree, spring or upright stone, but again, considered notionally, the same line may be an axis of any length, of any height or depth, a scheme for representing the relation of any centre whatever to heaven or the underworld, and of both to the world and the ordinary. In Asian and ancient American cultures the vertical axis is acknowledged as a direction in the frame of the world itself. There are not four horizontal directions to locate any point but rather five, six or even seven. (In this last case, the centre itself has three values; the central point itself, then the distinction between above and below on the axis through the centre.) The centre may thus establish not only a point on a notional, ‘perfect’ surface, but also relations above and below that surface, becoming the point of contact between heavens, earth and under­ world. In general, centres may always entail verticality, and, insofar as they are vertical, centres relate to our own cardinal uprightness. Precisely because that is so, however, they obviously and literally surpass us, and, as notional, immeas­ urably surpass us. If centres are abstracted in the way I have just described, then any centre necessarily stands in a number of both specific and notional relations. The notional centre, the vertical axis, provides an armature for culturally specific elaborations of heavens and underworld. But a centre considered as a notional point may also be the intersection of any number of diameters. So, for example, a centre might serve to define the axes of the four cardinal directions; but these, as I will discuss in Section 16, must themselves be defined, and centres also raise the issue of princi­ pal, appropriate or right alignments. The alignment of a place is defined by a centre in relation to something external - that is, outside the boundary commanded by the centre. The purpose of alignment is to put the centre in the most direct possible contact - in sightlike contact - with the external thing - a star, a mountain, another centre. Through this contact a right relation is established between the centre and the world at large. Alignment is ‘facing’ out from a centre toward something; it may mean no more than being directed toward, as we say that a wall ‘faces’ south, or a tomb ‘faces’ fertile fields, or a village ‘faces’ a river. But the metaphor of ‘facing’, in addition to its significance in relation to human cardinality, also involves the near-notionality of contact over distance by lines of sight. In good weather, lines of sight are ‘perfectly’ economical, comparable to the notional straight line that emerges as a limit in the course of the truing of an edge. A line of sight thus affords most direct and immediate contact. We hit the target when the stone goes where the eye sees; the eye itself does not miss, as it were continually providing a notional limit for the behaviour it directs. If centres may be regarded as notional points, the economy of sight itself might imply that the centre is the indispensable notional point from which any sighting is made, thus to establish and characterize the definition of the larger world in relation to a centre. Centres and places may be put in contact with distant points, mountains, for example, or points on the horizon where the heavens ‘touch’ the earth, the apparent ‘rising’ or ‘setting’ of the sun, moon or stars at some feature along the horizon, marking the end or beginning of some significant span of time, some anniversary or turn of the seasons. If alignment establishes contact by facing

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and by the most direct path of sight, it is also from the fixed point of a centre that the regular movements of the sky may be observed, both astronomically and ritually. It is in relation to the centre regarded as a point that the rising of the sun at solstice or equinox may be defined by a straight line, a connection which may establish a place by contact and provide the basis for the fixing of the place in relation to an embracing model of the world. Since alignment is fundamentally justified by contact,"it is closely related to paths, and to pilgrimage, the object of which is approach to centres, and ritual contact with them. In general, alignment may make ritual right not only with respect to sacred places themselves, but also with respect to the larger order defined from them, and, in many cases, through them. Because centres are one of the defining conditions of places, there is both a high degree of similarity, and a high degree of similarity of value, underlying differences among culturally specific examples. Mountains, real and artificial, are some of the earliest, most important centres and loom large in the myth, cosmology and architecture of many cultures. In ancient India, or in the broader Asian cosmology that formed in ancient India, Mount Meru was the cosmic mountain, the pillar between earth and heaven, around which the sun, moon and stars revolve, like the metaphorical pole of the Pole Star. The Garden of Eden was said to be on a mountain; at its centre was the tree of life, from which ran the four rivers of the world. Mesopotamian ziggurats and Mesoamerican temple platforms were called mountains, set by different alignments in the cosmos as a whole. Mountains have been widely revered in China from ancient to modern times, and were objects of both imperial and popular pilgrimage and devotion. Five sacred mountains, one for each of the four directions and one for the centre, were regarded as the source of the fitness of the emperor to rule. As we have seen, centres are endlessly extendable as notional vertical axes, reaching high into the heavens, deep into the underworld, outstripping our spatial (and temporal) finitude. They are ‘higher’, ‘greater’ and ‘deeper’ than we, and this schematic conditional comparison may give characteristic dimension to the extrapersonal, the political and religious values of social space. The magnifications of centres, as we shall see, figures importantly in the construction of religious and political meaning over thousands of years. Just as the larger world can be defined from a centre, so the heavens and the underworld can be defined and thus approached through a centre, and verticality may unite the meaning of springs and caves, which have their origins in the earth, and mountains and trees, which rise from earth to sky, from dark to light. The notional centre may state and connect central opposites simultaneously. When the Chinese emperor visited the most revered of the five sacred mountains, Mount Tai in the east, in order to give thanks for the successful beginning of his rule, he performed a ritual called fengchan. The feng ritual, performed at the mountain’s top, was a sacrifice to heaven; the chan ritual, performed at the mountain’s foot, was offered to the earth. Such oppositions may be treated in a number of ways; they may be regarded as higher and lower, but also as equal opposites, and are always axial with respect to the crossing of the directions. Centres, as essential to the sanctioning and development of core social spaces, tend to be linked to group generation and continuity. If places define social

groups, or individuals as members of social groups, centres tend to be sites of group origin. The centre may be a hole of emergence or a pole standing in such a hole; it may be male or female, or both, or a ‘union’ of the two. The articula­ tion of a centre may be metaphorically phallic or vaginal or both. An upright stone does not merely stand on the earth, but, in order to stand at all, is treelike, partly in the earth. The phallic linga of Shiva rises into a ‘womb chamber’, and in some traditional African villages male and female mounds are placed side by side. As the point of collective origin, the centre is especially associated with the ancestors, the progenitors, those whose bones have been laid in the ground, whose bodies have been reduced by fire to earthen ash and heaven-seeking flame and smoke, or whose bones have been left clean of flesh by the birds of the air, or whose bodies have been preserved for ritual reanimation, those, in short, who dwell in the realms of the extraordinary, where we cannot go in our lives, in the heavens and the underworld. The spirits of the ancestors - again, ‘spirit’ originally meant ‘breath’ or ‘life’ - are approachable through the centre. As we have seen, centres are often referred to by the term omphalos, or umbili­ cus, that is, as navels. This is once again a deep metaphor of generation, as if it were recognized that the founding mark of the centre had healed around the wound of first and final separation from the mother, and as if this very separa­ tion had brought the customary world of a people’s ‘life’ and ‘way of life’ into existence. The omphalos of the world according to the Greeks was the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. The first omphalos, replicated in shrines to Apollo, was a rounded stone guarded by a great snake, the Python, sacred to Gaia, the earth, daughter of Chaos, mother and wife of the heavens. Both cult and shrine were pre-Greek and represent broader pre-Greek traditions. Apollo, god of sun and light, a late deity from farther to the east, killed the Python and established the Pythian oracle, a priestess whose visionary pronouncements had great author­ ity throughout the classical world. Zeus was said to have sent eagles from east and west - that is, along the. path of the zenith sun - to find the centre of the world at their meeting place, which turned out to be the omphalos at Delphi. This is a kind of variant, by reversal, of the definition of the world from a centre, and states the dominion of new gods of the sky (Zeus and Apollo) over the earlier cult of Gaia. 2.6

Z.6 A TRADITIONAL AFRICAN

SOCIAL SPACE

A TRADITIONAL AFRICAN SOCIAL SPACE

The great chief’s house (kibulu) of the Eastern Pende of Zaire may be taken as a paradigm of the centre and of the ways social spatial values may develop around it. The kibulu is built in one day on a square plan about three metres (ten feet) on each side around a central hardwood pole, also about three metres high. This pole is selected and cut by the chief’s first minister, the keeper of the most powerful masks and regalia, whose access to the sacred surpasses that of the chief himself. A pit of agricultural offerings, called the ‘stomach’, provides the base upon which the pole is erected early in the morning by the chief and a few helpers, after which everyone contributes materials or labour. The chief addresses the central pole as the people of the village, their fields and forests, in short as the concentration of their ‘world’, all of the spaces of use sustaining the group and its characteris­ tic life. The pole is asked to grip the earth as sprouting seeds take root in the

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moist and fertile ground of the fields. So may the women of the village be fruitful, and so may game abound together with the food to give strength to hunters. The ancestors are also addressed in the central pole, which is thus a princi­ ple of temporal as well as spatial unity. The pole states the presence of the ancestors and thus also states collective continuity. It is fundamentally significant not simply that the central pole has these multivalent, mutually reinforcing meanings, but that these meanings have absolute real spatial status, amhthat these meanings are therefore integral with appropriate behaviour. It is also fundamentally significant that these meanings are associated with the leader, the great chief, by whom they are appropriated in the sense of being made ‘proper’ to him, identified with his person. As we shall see in Chapter 3, the appropriation of the values of the centre to the ruler (or by the ruler) is one of the foundations of the ideology of rule - and of the real spaces of rule - whether the rulers in question are chieftains, kings or emperors. The kibulu - and therefore the central pole - is often crowned with a wooden image. This distinguishes the kibulu from its surroundings, but also has other important meanings. These sculptures are put up at the death of a female relative. Since the Pende are matrilineal, the death of a sister cuts off a line of descent, and perhaps for this reason the figures are shown as mothers with children, that is, as substitutively embodying descent. These figures are also associated with sorcery and therefore with the most terrible powers of the chief. Perhaps the powers of sorcery attributed to women, which at Benin, for example, made it desirable to separate king and queen mother lest they have too much power between them, are here coupled with the great chief, part of whose own powers arise from his control of the peculiar powers of dynastic women. These figures may perhaps be seen as guardians of the centre, or as an assertion of the chief’s unique guardianship of the centre, and therefore of his unique guardianship of the ‘world’ of the village. The kibulu, square in plan, is roofed with a four-part dome, the top of which coincides with the central pole. This distinguishes the interior commanded by the pole, much as in many instances a baldachin or umbrella distinguishes whatever (or whoever) it is placed above. The building of walls below the dome serves the purpose of concealing the centre from view and simply forms a barrier to direct access or contiguity. Access is controlled as part of the construction of hierar­ chy of the society itself, and the walls are the means by which fundamental social patterns of separation and exclusion (or ritual inclusion) are effected. In this case, exclusion is also the fundamental means by which the great chief appropri­ ates the values of the centre because only the great chief, his first wife and children, may enter the kibulu, thus to be most immediate to the central pole. The kibulu is sometimes called the house of the ancestors, or the granary, or the pen from which animals come, and this place of power and mystery is thus associated with the continuation and sustenance of group life. The concealment of the centre by walls is only the beginning of the literal construction of social relations by exclusion and control of access.’ The kibulu is preceded by a courtyard with a tight palisade of green wood, which, if the ancestors are pleased, will sprout and grow. This courtyard is entered obliquely. Entrance is by invitation, and invitation is appropriate to rank. The kibulu proper

has an arched porch, sometimes flanked by guardian figures. Carved doors marking the passage into the interior space - another barrier to passage - are considered especially powerful and again associated with sorcery. The interior itself is more exclusive still, as we have seen, and is divided into two parts; the furthest, final room, containing the chief’s coffin, his most important masks and protective medicines, can be entered only by the first minister, not by the chief himself. Once the precinct is entered, a sequence of ever more exclusive spaces thus establishes a decorum of passage leading by stages to the afterworld, to the world of the ancestors, to which the final room of the kibulu is by implication contiguous. The literal contiguity of chief and ancestors again corroborates his rule and empowers him to govern and to serve his people. Next to the kibulu a dancing space is cleared and everyone dances there, including the ancestors, present as masks. Thus the social and political spaces generated by the centre become the means by which the collective values of the centre embodied in the chief and his ritual house become collective festival and participation. 2.7 SHRINES Shrines are closely related to centres and central values. A shrine may actually house a centre defining a whole culture, or it might mimic that defining shrine, or house objects, texts or artifacts related to the centre and derivative from it. Like centres in general, the primary values of shrines are rooted in vicinity and proximity, perhaps most often defined by lines of sight, as if seeing were a kind of touch, or as if seeing were the greatest directness short of actual touch. Offerings are often placed at shrines, as if within their sight, as if to be seen by the centre itself. The verb ‘to offer’ again conceals a real spatial metaphor; it is from obferre, ‘to carry toward’, or, perhaps better, ‘to carry so as to stand before, or be opposite to’, that is, to be placed toward, ‘to face’. Offering is an extremely wide­ spread and fundamental form of religious behaviour. It is not simply giving, but rather placing before, in order to be looked upon favourably. Offering thus implies direction and actual relation to the sacred object. A shrine is a place in which a sacred presence is visible, or possibly visible - there even if concealed. Shrines are places of immediate and reciprocal contact by sight; they are mediary or transactional. Approach to a shrine may involve self-decoration in order to respect a place and time or to be pleasing and appropriate to extraordinary presence. Approach may also involve acts of ‘deference’, of ‘taking away’, of making oneself appro­ priately less in relation to what is approached. It might be inappropriate, for example, to stand or to wear shoes, either to wear a hat or to go bareheaded in the place of a shrine. By the same token, it might be necessary to undergo ablution or purification, both to shed pollution (the need to be washed) and contamina­ tion (the having been touched) of the non-sacred, in order to become more like the sacred (or less unlike the sacred) and therefore more suitable to approach. The word ‘shrine’ is from the Latin scrivium, a cupboard or box for books or papers. This derivation stresses housing, preserving or keeping. The taberna­ cle containing an image of the Madonna and Child on a Florentine street corner is part of a civic space, and was felt to be effective in a civic space, but it is also a place to itself, a model habitation that cannot be entered. Insofar as it is a ‘little

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house’, that is, insofar as it is not able to be entered, such a shrine reserves the space of the image, and sets it apart in the larger civic space in which it stands. Correspondingly, it is elevated, not just to keep it out of harm’s way, but because elevation, like decoration, is appropriate to the presence and its place; because of their elevation in their tabernacle, the Madonna and Child are more visible, and visible as higher. By virtue of the same elevation, they also look down from above on whoever sees them. Shrines may be small or large. A Buddhist stupa might be a text enclosed in a small shrine, a manipulable and portable model of a larger form, or it might be a monumental mound (Figure 65) modelling the universe itself conceived from the centre it marks. In each case, the shrine demands real spatial behaviour of related but different kinds. A shrine may simply be distinguished by its contents, but typically shrines are highly embellished. A reliquary shrine is often of more or less precious materi­ als and is also appropriately elaborated. In concealing its contents, a shrine may protect them, but it also makes their display possible only on certain occasions, thus to distinguish both space and time. It is the value of what is enshrined that is typically made manifest in the embellished forms and materials of the shrine itself. The place of a sacred relic, text or image is very often distinguished by elaborate miniature architecture, by aediculae (a little aedes, ‘a house’, but espec­ ially a consecrated space, as a chapel is smaller than a church), niches, taberna­ cles (also a ‘little house’; a tabernaculum was a tent set up outside the city, from which auspices were taken). And, more than simply roofed, these might be surmounted by an honorific form, a parasol, an arch, pediment, dome, baldac­ hin or canopy, forms, as we shall see in Section 17, with complex traditions of both political and religious meaning. The word ‘shrine’ has passed into secular usage, and, although such use is metaphorical, places we call shrines still demand approach and are associated with foundational or normative values. ‘National shrines’ are associated with founders, or with crucial historical events and memorials. At the level of popular culture, such institutions as ‘halls of fame’ contain tangible memorabilia of heroes and ‘stars’ whose lives are exemplary for ‘fans’, a word which probably also descends from the language of religious participation. A ‘fanatic’ is one given to enthusiasm in the fanum, Latin for a sacred precinct. 2.8

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The city of Jerusalem is perhaps the most densely and complexly layered example in the world of what I mean by a centre. Its holy places have been respected for thousands of years, and the events that distinguished these places have been recorded in the sacred scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These, and oral traditions besides, have been subject to centuries of elaboration and com­ mentary, at the same time that they have given rise to legend and to the usages of faith, usages in their turn given monumental form as sacred centres were embellished, then transformed or destroyed and rebuilt, or overbuilt. The politi­ cal and military histories of millennia are also interwoven with this complex religious history. Jerusalem and the places in it - the Temple of Solomon, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Dome of the Rock - have had an absolute

value for countless worshippers over thouands of years, during which the city has been the object of continual prayer and pilgrimage, as well as the recurrent scene of dreadful conflict and of the greatest suffering. Judaism, through all the centuries of diaspora, has continued in one way or another to centre upon Jerusalem. Jerusalem lay at the centre of medieval Christian maps of the world, and, although there are many Christian centres, the Holy Land (a term used by early Christian writers to refer to the land promised by God to the Israelites, but also to refer to the land that had witnessed the life of Christ) was the greatest destination of pilgrimage. Muhammad prayed toward Jerusalem before finally establishing the practice of praying toward Mecca, which has continued to be the centre for the world of Islam while Jerusalem has also remained a sacred city, and Herod’s Temple Mount, the Islamic Haram al-Sharif, a sacred precinct. The portentous and violent history of Jerusalem, a history unbroken in our own time, and still revolving around many of the same issues, provides a vivid illustration at once of the unconscious importance of centres, of their magnification, and of the deep and broad persistence of their meanings. Jewish and Christian fundamentalists - for quite different reasons - await the building of a third Temple on the site of the first, and Palestinian bombers are commemorated as martyrs against the background of the Dome of the Rock, presumably because Jerusalem is the disputed capital of Israel or of a Palestinian state, and because the Dome of the Rock enshrines the place from which Muhammad himself is believed to have ascended to the throne of God. The absoluteness of Jerusalem as a centre is undoubtedly rooted in its asso­ ciation with monotheistic religions; for each of the religions looking to Jerusalem there is one true God. The centre itself therefore does not admit multiple definit­ ions, just as the centre’s reach and boundary are indefinite. Any other deity encountered is a false deity, any incompatible centre a false centre. Jerusalem first appears in the historical record in the early years of the second millennium bc as Urusalimum, ‘the city founded by the god Shalem’. Since ancient Near Eastern cities were said to be founded by deities, and since these founda­ tions were closely associated with rule, its name means it is likely that a shrine to Shalem was part of the city from the time of these first records. The name appears in Egyptian ‘execration texts’, made up of places and rulers inscribed on vessels that were to be cursed and broken. Urusalimum was under nominal Egyptian dominion, but evidently beyond Egypt’s ability actually to control, so that it was necessary to resort to such manipulation at a distance. Jerusalem has been subject to the ebb and flow of empires from Egypt to the present. The exodus of the Jews from Egypt took place in the thirteenth century bc; their covenant with Yahweh formed around the commandments given to Moses on a cloud-enshrouded mountain in the southern desert of the Sinai peninsula. The tablets of the law, first inscribed by God himself, became the portable centre of the wandering tribes of Israel; they were carried in an ark over which a splendid tabernacle, built according to detailed divine instructions, was set up at each encampment. The tabernacle of the ark faced the four cardinal directions and the encampment formed a larger square precinct. After they had entered Canaan, the tribes established centres at Shechem, then at Shiloh, north of Jerusalem. Shiloh was overrun and the ark carried off by the Philistines. Finding themselves

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at a disadvantage against their enemies because of their disunity, the Israelites submitted to a king, Saul. After Saul’s death, David became king of united Judah and Israel, moving his capital to the newly conquered city-state of Jerusalem. In order to bring his refractory people together, David, not without difficulty, moved the ark of the covenant (which had been returned by the Philistines because of its malevolent activities while in their possession) to Jerusalem, where Yahweh asked that it be placed in a splendid permanent temple. King, capital and sacred centre were now combined, and the city was named the City of David. It is likely that, as the population of the city changed over the centuries, the identity of its patron deity also changed; now it had become the city of Yahweh. Because he had become angered at the Israelites, Yahweh sent a great plague. But when the plague reached Jerusalem, and the angel stretched out his hand to destroy the city, Yahweh repented of his anger. The angel, newly merciful, appeared on the heights of the city, called the ‘threshing floor’ of Araunah, the defeated Jebusite king. David built an altar and made sacrifices. This was to be the site of the Temple. According to the account in i Chronicles (22:2), David set foreign residents to work quarrying and preparing stone, and began to gather materials for the great temple to be built according to plans Yahweh had given him. This temple was built by David’s son, Solomon, in the middle of the tenth century bc. In building the Temple, Solomon had the substantial help of his political ally, the Phoenician king Hiram of Tyre, who supplied timber, masons and masters in the casting of bronze. Solomon’s Temple was part of a royal complex, includ­ ing a palace for ‘Pharaoh’s daughter’, his Egyptian queen. The coupling of temple and palace on what was in effect the acropolis of the City of David stated the king’s intercessory power, and also his sole legitimacy to rule. The Temple was a splendid construction of appropriately precious materials (cedar, bronze and gold), all further distinguished by facture; the wood was carved, the bronze shaped with marvellous skill, and the biblical text stresses that the great ashlar blocks were worked before being brought to the site. The construction of the Temple, which took seven years, required a vast expenditure of both wealth and labour. Solomon, we are told, ‘raised a levy out of all Israel; and the levy was thirty thousand men’ (I Kings 5:13). Construction thus entailed both economic and political subordination to a common religious and political centre. New levels of wealth, organization and taxation made the Temple possible, but also contributed to the pressures that brought Solomon’s kingdom to an end after his death. When he dedicated the first Temple, Solomon wondered how it might be possible for Yahweh to dwell on earth, when heaven and the heaven of heavens were not sufficient to contain him. He asked that Yahweh’s eyes might ‘be open toward this house night and day, even toward the place of which thou hast said, My name shall be there: that thou mayest harken unto the prayer which thy servant shall make toward this place’ (I Kings 8:29). Solomon asked that the Temple might provide access to God, and to the forgiveness of sin. The Temple of Solomon is utterly lost, but has been reconstructed many times from its descriptions. It stood in an oriented precinct, facing to the east. Considered most schematically (Figure 47), it included three successively more sacred

and exclusive spaces, the Ulam, or forecourt; the Hekhal, where sacrifices were performed; and, farthest to the west, the Dvir, the Holy of Holies, which contained the Ark of the Covenant, in turn containing the tablets of the law. As in an Egyptian temple, progress toward the more sacred was marked by increas­ ing darkness. In the Holy of Holies, Solomon remarked, it Was as the Lord said: ‘he would dwell in thick darkness’. The bronze fittings for the Temple were made by an artisan from Tyre called Hiram, like his king. Two elaborate bronze pillars called Jachin and Boaz stood at the entrance. These may have been bronze versions of Canaanite massebot or standing stones, which marked many sacred places. The names of the pillars mean ‘to establish’ and ‘in strength’, which were perhaps the names by which the Temple itself was to be addressed. These ‘pillars’, of fairly squat proportions, had vegetal ornament, and may have been associated with the king as the interces­ sory source of renewal and prosperity. The Temple was significant as the garden of Yahweh, Eden, the beginning of the four rivers of the world. In the first court­ yard was a great ‘sea’, a bronze basin containing ‘two thousand baths’, sup­ ported by twelve bronze oxen facing the cardinal directions in four groups of three. Wondrous as these and other bronze fittings might have been (we are even told where and how they were cast, ‘in the clay ground between Succoth and Zarthan’), the evidently more precious gold furnishings were attributed to Solomon himself, the actual artisans again being the agents of their royal patrons. In order to build the Temple, Solomon’s architects must have incorporated the ‘threshing floor’ of Araunah and David, making it part of a larger oriented precinct, the platform to be expanded at intervals to the time of Herod. If the older precinct and altar were enshrined for commemoration rather than simply covered over, then they might have become part of the Hekhal, where sacrifices were performed before the Holy of Holies. During the dedication of the Temple, Solomon (I Kings 8:63-4) is said to have ‘hallowed the centre of the court’ before the Holy of Holies because the bronze altar was inadequate to the scale of the offerings. This suggests that he turned to an earlier altar, the altar of his father. Perhaps the outcropping that has been enshrined for the last 1,300 years in the Dome of the Rock came to be identified with this sacred place. The blurring of history, legend and myth is itself a major indication of central values, and the Temple gathered all kinds of originary meanings. Jewish tradition identified the Temple with the omphalos, the navel of the world, where Adam, the first man, was both created and buried. I have already mentioned its associ­ ation with Eden. The idea of a ‘stone of foundation’, a central seed from which the world grew, was also closely associated with the Temple. This suggests the Egyptian benben stone, which emerged from the primordial waters at creation; but it also came to be identified with the stone that served Jacob as a pillow on the night of his prophetic dream of a ladder reaching up to heaven. Jacob established the place of his dream as a centre by setting the stone up as a massebah, thus marking it and indicating the ‘dreadful’ event that had taken place where it stood; he anointed it with oil and called it Beth-El, ‘God’s house’. In a later encounter with an angel, Jacob was renamed ‘Israel’. He was promised in his dream that he would father a great nation, which would spread through all the world, to east, west, north and south. About forty years before the destruction of the first

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47 Temple of Solomon, schematic reconstruction, c.974-963 BC. 1. Dvir (Holy of Holies. 2. Hechal (holy place). 3 Ulam (vestibule). After J. Comay, The Temple ofJerusalem, p. 57

48 Herod’s enlarged Second Temple, with expanded Temple Mount; begun 20 BC, completed 26 AD. 1. Dvir. 2. Hechal. 3. Ulam. 4. Court of Priests. 5. Court of Israelites. 6. Court of Women. 7. Court of Gentiles. 8. Porticoes. 9. Gates. After J. Comay, The Temple of Jerusalem, p. 166 49 Jerusalem, Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), the Herodian Temple Mount after the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem in 638 AD (see below, p. 150). 1. The Rock. 2. Dome enshrining the Rock. 3. Dome of the Chain. 4. Al Aksa Mosque. 5. Golden Gate (sealed). After J. Comay, The Temple ofJerusalem, p. 215

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Temple, King Josiah obliterated and descecrated the shrine at Beth-El so that God’s house would only be in Jerusalem. If standing stones might origin­ ally have marked the extraordinary in many places, one god could only truly dwell in one place. Thus the origin of Israel came to central Jerusalem. Jacob was the son of Isaac, who was the son of Abraham, called by God ‘the father of many nations’ (Genesis 17:4). Abraham was promised the land of Canaan, and the covenant of circumcision was established with him. The Bible connects Abraham by a long lineage to Shem (from whose name the modern word ‘Semite’ descends), one of the sons of Noah. Abraham had obeyed God in taking Isaac, the miraculous and beloved son of his old age, to the ‘land of Moriah’ for sacrifice. Mount Moriah and the Temple were thus associated with the place of Isaac’s deliverance, and thus both with post-diluvian ancestry and with divine interven­ tion. The barren Sarah bore Isaac; Isaac was spared, and therefore Israel was able to live. This last association is one of the most fateful of all, because both Jews and Muslims trace their descent from Abraham, the Muslims, however, from Ishmael, the son by Abraham of Sarah’s Egyptian servant Hagar. Hagar was driven into the wilderness, but she too was favoured by God, and promised that her seed would be innumerable. Hagar and Ishmael are closely associated with the central Islamic shrine, the Ka’ba at Mecca. During the years of the first Temple, what might be called the idea of Jerusalem assumed clear and powerful form. This was a vision of spiritual dominion, animated by the moral rejection of material inequality among the people of Israel and by a corresponding rejection of mere observance as adequate religious action. In the late eighth century bc the prophet Isaiah imagined Yahweh’s temple as the centre of the world, embracing all people in a restoration of Edenic peace and resolution of conflict, into which they would be led by a Messiah. This has

been an echoing vision of peace, but also the cause of endless discord. However that may be, a spiritual or New Jerusalem became one of the normative ideas of Judaism and the traditions springing from it. The temple built by Solomon stood for some four hundred years, until Jerusa­ lem was destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 bc. The destruction of the temple of an ancient Near Eastern city was in effect the banish­ ment, humiliation or destruction of its tutelary deity, and it was in such circum­ stances that the Jews began their first diaspora, their city and the house of their deity devastated and burned. Babylon, however, fell in its turn to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, and, about fifty years after its destruction, the Temple began to be rebuilt on the same site under his patronage. According to the Book of Ezra, Cyrus proclaimed that the ‘Lord of Heaven’, having given the Persian ruler all the kingdoms of the earth, had also charged Cyrus with the responsi­ bility of building him a house in Jerusalem. The important issue of the separation of deity and place was raised by the Babylonian Captivity, and Yahweh spoke to his prophets far from his temple. Ezekiel was visited in Babylon by the glory of Yahweh, who promised the restora­ tion of Jerusalem as a paradise called ‘Yahweh is there’. In the centre was the new Temple, without a royal palace and girded by two precincts, so that the Holy of Holies was more distant, and more difficult to approach. Ezekiel’s vision, which initiated its own tradition of interpretation and commentary, shaped the second, rebuilt Temple, its meanings and observances. Ezekiel was instructed by a man who ‘shone like copper’ holding a cord of linen and a measuring rod. Because the presence of the Lord had entered the precinct of the Temple through the gate facing east, that gate was to be sealed until there should come a ‘prince’. A ‘Golden Gate’, as it came to be called, is still part of the Herodian Temple Mount. It is sealed. Christ was thought to have entered Jerusalem through this gate, and medieval Christians took many relics from it. Jews, Christians and Muslims await the arrival from the east and through this gate of the great prince or Messiah of Ezekiel. In the centuries of Greek rule following the conquest of the Persians by Alexander the Great, the Temple was defiled and rededicated to Zeus by Antio­ chus IV, who set about to establish Greek institutions. Toward this end, he forebade the practices of Judaism, made the Temple into a sacred grove, and, among many other sacrileges, sent the curtain from the sanctuary of the Temple to adorn the chryselephantine image of Zeus at Olympia. This sculpture was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, located in the major temple at one of the centres of the Greek world. The Temple in Jerusalem was finally restored and rededicated in 164 bc, in the time of the Maccabees. The Hasmonean dynasty (as the Maccabees are called) began splendidly but ended in bitter factional dispute, and about a century later the Roman triumvir Pompey took Jerusalem, beginning a long and violent period of Roman rule. Pompey once again defiled the Temple by walking into the Holy of Holies. The Ark of the Covenant had vanished with the first Temple, and the Roman conqueror found the sanctuary utterly empty, without image or symbol. Pompey levelled the walls of Jerusalem, but left the Temple standing. King Herod, who was a Jew but in close league with the Romans, undertook

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50 Spoils from the Temple in Jerusalem, c.8r ad, detail from the Arch of Titus, Forum, Rome. Marble, height 235 cm (93 in)

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the massive construction of the present Temple Mount (Figure 48) and the splen­ did refurbishment of the Temple in 22 bc. Since the plan of the Temple was ordained by Yahweh, it could presumably not be changed very much. However that might be, its ritual spaces seem to have been more emphatically demarcated both by isolation (as in the vision of Ezekiel) and elevation, while still respect­ ing the hierarchical sequence of the original plan. The highest space was the Dvir, entered only once a year on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, by the high priest. A stairway led up to the Dvir from the Hekhal, the court of sacrifices, used by priests and (male) Israelites. Another stairway led down to the women’s court. All of these distinctions were ‘inner’ relative to a strictly enforced outer court for gentiles. Herod’s temple, or Herod’s reconstruction and magnification of the rebuilt Temple of Solomon, played a central role in the life of Jesus. Jesus taught there as a boy. He drove the money-changers and sacrificial animals from its precinct (John 2:13-16), thus challenging millennial ritual practice and the authority of the priests who conducted it. Jesus predicted the destruction of the Temple (Mark 13:2), but he also called it his father’s house, and compared his own body to it. ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ In his trial before Caiaphas (Matthew 26:61) Jesus was accused of claiming to be able to destroy the Temple, then to build it again in three days. After his death and resurrection, his disciples came to understand Jesus’s words to be a prophecy that had been fulfilled. The Christians saw the actual destruction of the Temple, which took place about forty years after Jesus’s death, as a further fulfilment, a terrible but unmistak­ able sign of the beginning of the new age under grace. Herod’s third and final Temple (called the ‘second’ because sacrifice was never interrupted) was long in building, but was to stand complete for only a few years. After an insurrection and brief period of independence, the Roman province of Judea was subjugated by Titus, and the Temple, the last refuge and line of defence, was destroyed in flames in the summer of 70.We are told that the Temple’s defenders respected the hierarchical distinctions among its spaces to the death. A triumphal arch with a panel showing Roman soldiers bearing the ritual implements of the Temple as spoils of war was built - and still stands - at yet another centre, the Roman Forum (Figure 50).

After 113, the emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem in the closest approxima­ tion to the standard Roman grid plan its topography would permit, renaming it Aelia Capitolina. Herod’s-Temple platform, the largest such construction built in the ancient world, remained as a colossal boundary to the east. Hadrian’s project was interrupted by a bloody rebellion, after which the Jews were banished from Jerusalem, and their observances again forbidden. The Romans thought better of building a temple of Jupiter on the Temple Mount, but an equestrian statue of Hadrian was placed there, to be followed by another of Antoninus Pius. Utterly ruined as it must have been, the ancient centre was still considered sac­ red by Jews, who continued to observe its location, to mourn its destruction, and to elaborate its meanings. The western wall of Herod’s enlarged Temple Mount, on the opposite side from the entrance to the Temple, and therefore closest to what had been the Holy of Holies, became a sacred place to Jews, the so-called Wailing Wall. If the house of an invisible and uncircumscribable deity is paradoxical, this paradox was multiplied over and over by the destructions of this divine house and the successive diasporas of the Jews. Then again, the same paradox could also dissociate Yahweh from any single place, and, once set in ritual, centres may in effect be replicated through the repetition of these rituals, which as it were acknowledge the same centre in new sacred spaces, or repeat the same sacred time in new sacred spaces. It might thus be argued that the ‘Temple’ was simply whatever place Jewish law and ritual were observed, or even that it was the persons by whom Jewish law was observed, or, more generally, as the Hellenized Philo Judaeus argued, that the Temple is the mind of the wise person leading a just life. By such arguments the Jewish religion, partly out of necessity but partly not, has been affirmed in many places through the observance of law and ritual, and by the practice of virtue, rather than by attachment to an originative place. And yet the Temple in Jerusalem has continued to hold sway for the Jews, scat­ tered and rescattered as they have been. Prayer was directed toward Jerusalem from Babylon, and early synagogues were aligned with this common centre. The mid-third-century synagogue at Dura-Europos, on the Euphrates River in what is now Syria, provides a clear and eloquent example of the continuing force of Jerusalem and the Temple as a centre. Dura, a crossroads in which eastern and western cultures coexisted and intermingled, began its own violent history as a fortress city built by Alexander the Great. It was laid out as a grid of rectan­ gular blocks parallel to its straight western wall, which actually faced somewhat south of west, more or less in the direction of Jerusalem. The synagogue was built up against this wall, so that the western wall of its House of Assembly, in the middle of which the Torah shrine (Figure 51) was set, determined that the congregation should also face Jerusalem. The synagogue at Dura-Europos is unusual in that it is elaborately frescoed at a time when traditions of monumen­ tal Christian painting had not yet been formed. The frescoes on the western wall show the Exodus, the Ark of the Covenant, and the building of the Temple. The paintings were done in two stages, of which the Torah shrine represents the first. The earlier paintings were symbolic and essentially aniconic, more nearly respect­ ing the prohibition against images; the later paintings are narratives, mixing classical illusionism with planar, hierarchical order. The upper part of the shrine

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51 Torah shrine from the synagogue at Dura-Europos, c.250 AD. National Museum, Damascus

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displays, against a ground of celestial blue, the Temple, echoing the shape of the shrine itself, flanked by a menorah to the Torah’s right and the Sacrifice of Isaac to its left. Abraham, perhaps in accordance with the commandment against images, is shown incompletely, from behind, and the limp little figure of Isaac atop the altar, just saved by the hand of God from above, also turns away. Both participants in this story of submission to divine will face what is usually taken to be a tent; but Abraham and Isaac, like the congregation in the synagogue, also face Jerusalem and perhaps Mount Moriah, identified with the altar of the Temple. The fulfilment of the longing expressed in this alignment is to be seen in the later central frescoes. In the panel above the shrine grows the tree that will bear fruit with the coming of the Messiah, and, above that, King David, the exemplar of the Messiah, is shown ruling over all Israel. The life of Jesus generated a new cluster of centres in Jerusalem. Not only was the old Temple Mount neglected in Christian times, but some of its most powerful meanings were transferred to new sites. For the Christians, the major centre of the Holy Land was the site of the anastasis, the resurrection, the tomb in which Jesus was buried, but from which he rose. After 312, the Roman Emperor Constantine deeply transformed the character of Christianity, setting out with great energy in the last twenty-five years of his life to mark the centres of the new faith with appropriately magnificent structures, giving Christianity monu­ mental public form worthy of imperial status. To this end, he built churches in the Holy Land, among them the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and, in Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, respectively enshrining the places of the birth and resurrection of Jesus. Jerusalem was thus made the principal centre for Christian pilgrimage, but its great shrines were pointedly contrasted to the Temple, as the New Testament had fulfilled and transcended the Old. The Constantinian buildings were compared to the New Jerusalem of Revelations, and some commentators argued that the Church of the Anastasis (Resurrection) was appropriately placed at the centre of the centre of the universe, Jerusalem. So the site of the victory over death by the lord of the New Jerusalem was commem­ orated and domed, much as Ptolemy I had placed the tumulus of Alexander the Great in the centre of Alexandria. Perhaps in order to suppress budding Christianity, which must have seemed a sect among the Jews, who had proven so difficult to govern, the Romans were said to have built a temple of Aphrodite over what would be identified as the tomb of Jesus. This was near the main forum of Aelia Capitolina, and close to the stone of Golgotha, the place of Jesus’s crucifixion. The location of the tomb was said to have been revealed by Helena, the mother of Constantine. Following this discovery, the temple of Aphrodite was duly dismantled, with vilifications that can easily be imagined, and the tomb was cut free from its rock, thus to become freestanding. However great the sense of triumph over pagan antiquity may be in this story, insistence upon the transcendence of Judaism was even greater, and comparison to the Temple is again crucial. Constantine also constructed basilicas in Rome, adapting a traditional Rom­ an form to the needs of Christanity, with its large congregations and large numbers of pilgrims. The basilica (which was also part of the complex of the Holy Sepulchre) is often characterized as a utilitarian structure shaped primar-

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52 Plan of Old St Peter’s, Rome, first half of the 4th century AD

ily by these needs, and this would make it consistent with the modest character of the monuments of earlier Christian art. But the word basilica also means ‘royal house’, and it must be supposed that Constantine’s foundations were intended to state emphatically and splendidly the stature of the mystery they housed. Imperial majesty was certainly meant to be evident in the two great basilicas Constantine built in Rome itself, the Lateran and St Peter’s. Jesus himself punned upon the name of Peter when he said: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock [petra in both Greek and Latin] I will build my church’ (Matthew 16:18). Perhaps he meant by this that his new temple would be founded on Peter and not on the legendary sacred stone that lay within the precinct of Herod’s temple when he spoke. Whether or not that is what Jesus meant, the burial place of Saint Peter became a major centre for Christians, which it has continued to be to this day. Although the Lateran basilica is the cathedral of Rome, St Peter’s has always been overwhelmingly the more popular. Long before the Constantinian basilica was built, the burial place of Saint Peter had been marked and was the object of pilgrimage and veneration. The great new basilica fixed this centre as one of the points from which a Christian cosmos could be drawn, and Christian paths and rituals set right in that cosmos. The western end of the basilica was sanctified by the tomb of Saint Peter; but this centre acknowl­ edged a more important one, and the eastward orientation of the church was defined by the far away, miraculously empty tomb of Jesus himself. Both the Lateran basilica (first dedicated to Christ the Saviour) and St Peter’s were built facing east (Figure 52). (The usual pattern for Christian churches - a pattern still being established when these two basilicas were built - is to face west, so that the altar and the performance of the ritual of the mass are in the east.) Constantine’s Roman basilicas might be thought merely to conform to the common orienta­ tion of classical temples - that is, facing the sunrise - or, with its precise eastward orientation, St Peter’s might be thought to acknowledge the sun as the source of light and justice, in which case the orientation might have as much to do with Constantine as with Christ. However that might be, St Peter’s acknowledges two great Christian centres, the tomb of Saint Peter and the tomb of Jesus, the Church

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53 Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, c.690 AD

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of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which Constantine not only built, but wished to make the most splendid building in the world. Some 600 years after the death of Jesus, some 300 years after Christianity had established itself in the Roman empire, and about 100 years after the comple­ tion of the great domed church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, Jerusalem became central for a third great religious tradition, Islam. The Caliph Omar took Jerusalem in 638, only six years after the death of Muhammad. Omar is said to have rebuked the Byzantine patriarch for allowing the desecration of the Temple Mount, which had suffered centuries of Christian contempt and neglect. He cleared Herod’s great foundation and established a large temporary mosque on what was now called the Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) (Figure 49). In 692 the Caliph Abd al-Malik completed the Dome of the Rock (Figures 53 and 54)The construction of the Dome of the Rock focused and transformed the ancient meanings of its site. As we have seen, the Temple was associated with originary religious figures from Adam onward. But the building of sacred struc­ tures was also a fundamental prerogative and obligation of rule, and Solomon, like Alexander the Great or Augustus after him, was a prototype of the great ruler. Through the millennia of the traditions in which the precedent of Solomon played a fundamental role, many Christian rulers would ‘rebuild’ his Temple. (The Sistine Chapel, for example, was built to the proportions of Solomon’s Temple.) In real spatial terms, the construction of the Dome of the Rock was thus more than the incorporation of a powerful ancient centre, and the simple fact of superimposition of the first splendid structure of the new faith over the foundations of the older again stated fulfilment and triumph in simple, irreduc­ ible terms. The centrally planned Dome of the Rock, with its richly ornamented exterior

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54 Dome of the Rock, interior showing enshrined stone

and interior surfaces and gilded dome, and its four entrances facing in the cardinal directions, rivalled Constantine’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There may also have been political reasons for the construction of the Dome of the Rock. At the time of its building, Mecca was in the hands of a rival caliph, and Abd al-Malik may have wished to establish an alternative to the Ka’ba in Mecca (Ka’ba means ‘cube’, which may refer to the simple, stable shape of the shrine, although the Latin cubare - whatever the relation between Latin and Arabic might be in this case - means ‘to lie’, and, as we have seen, incubare means ‘to await healing or divine communication’^ and specifically refers to sacred places.) The Ka’ba incorporates a second sacred stone, also associated with Abraham and enshrined in a structure suitable for circumambulation as the culmination of pilgrimage. If the Dome of the Rock was built in the octagonal domed form of a Christian martyrium, it was also just as pointedly not a martyrium. Muhammad rejected

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Period II

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room ! 300ft 1 55 Stonehenge, plans of successive modifications, C.2400-C.1250

the Christian cult of saints, martyrs and relics as idolatry, and the Dome of the Rock, like the Holy of Holies of the Jewish Temple, enshrined a place of the greatest sanctity, now literally made Islamic. This transformed centre continued to gather Islamic meaning. It is claimed, in the inscriptions of the Dome itself, that the rock came from Paradise, and that all the world’s fresh water springs from it (like the Four Rivers of Paradise, which have played such an important part in the symbolism of Islamic art and architecture); Most importantly, accord­ ing to the Koran, Muhammad was miraculously transported from Mecca to what came to be understood as Jerusalem, and from the rock was said to have made his journey, together with the angel Gabriel, through the spheres of heaven to the presence of Allah. Thus the centre continued to be at once a source of life and of ascent and access to God. At the end of the eleventh century, Christian crusaders, partly spurred on by stories of the desecration of the holy centres (the Sultan Hakim had ordered the complete destruction of the Constantinian Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009), captured Jerusalem, with great cruelty and bloodshed. The Dome of the Rock became the Templum Domini, the ‘Temple of the Lord’; its ornaments and calligraphic inscriptions were covered and the crescent atop the Dome was replaced with a cross. Fanciful versions of the Dome of the Rock became the Temple of Solomon or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the iconography of European medieval art. When Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, he entered the city on the day Muhammad was supposed to have had the dream of his ascension. The Dome of the Rock was purified and re-established, the crescent replacing the cross over this millennial centre.

2.9 BOUNDARIES AND PRECINCTS The area expressly associated with a centre may be distinguished by very simple measures. The vedika surrounding an early Indian tree shrine (see again Figure 46) was named after the sweet-smelling grass with which the precinct was swept and with which it was scattered. Clearing, smoothing and shaping may also serve to define places. Even simple boundaries effect a demarcation from surround­ ings, making it evident that in passing from without to within a change has occurred, and that different behaviour is appropriate. The more or less implicit boundaries made by simple clearing and smoothing - and by designation, nam­ ing - may be further specified by outlines or actual barriers. The word ‘precinct’ originally meant something like ‘to be girded before’, ‘to be surrounded’ or ‘faced with’, and such literal definition may be complemented by changes in level or elevation (a podium or platform); or by recession (a crypt or kiva, for example). As a place becomes a more definite precinct, access may also be defined by gates, courtyards and stairways, which complicate and elaborate approach while reinforcing the contrast between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. The origin of our word ‘temple’ points to the importance of simple bounding. ‘Temple’ is from temenos, the precinct within which a Greek temple stood. As we have seen, temenos is directly from a word meaning to cut, and the precinct by implication is severed from its surroundings and reserved for sacrifice to the gods. Among the early Romans the templum was simply bounded by a wall of wood or cloth, and was a sacred space from which a divinatory priest called an

augur (also called an auspex, a ‘watcher of birds’, hence our ‘auspicious’) could contemplate the skies (‘contemplate’ is con-, ‘with’, plus templum) in order to interpret signs and descry the future. Templum could also refer to the skies, suggesting that the templum of the augur was an image, or microcosm, of the larger templum of the world. A templum had an altar for sacrifices, and if it had a house for the deity at all it was called an aedes. This most simply meant ‘hearth’, and is related to Greek aithos, ‘fiery’, perhaps suggesting a connection to heavenly fires, the daytime sun and the stars of night. It was only later that the aedes came to dominate, having been distinguished as sacred by material, size and facture. These patterns for setting aside a sacred space lived on in Mediterranean architecture. Roman temple buildings were sometimes surrounded by fences of latticed sticks, or cancelli, and screens descending from these fences were used to demarcate the most sacred parts of Jewish synagogues and early Christian churches. Long after any specific reference to the Roman forms had disappeared, the sanctuary and choir of a Christian church continued to be called the chancel, preserving the ancient cancelli and the memory of an ancient boundary of a sacred precinct. The English megalithic site of Stonehenge, like many other ritual places, was built and rebuilt over a long period of time, in three phases over about 1,200 years, between the second half of the third millennium bc and the end of the second. The plain around Stonehenge is covered with mounds and barrows, and some relation to these burials, and to ancestors, must be assumed. The site began (Figure 55) as a great circle some 90 metres (300 feet) in diameter, surrounded by a continuous ditch and outer mound. This boundary established the pre­ cinct, which was always respected. Just within this boundary is a ring of 56 pits, some of which contain human ashes and artifacts. From the beginning, Stonehenge was a ritual centre and the beginning or culmination of a path, with an opening in its ring to the northeast. This centre was a point from which the movements of the heavens could be traced on the face of the earth, and even though the centre was not itself articulated in the first phase, stones were erected to mark significant risings of the sun and moon. If the lines of these sightings sanctioned and empow­ ered the centre and its bounded ritual area, then it might be supposed that the erection of more stones fixing the great cyclical uniformities of the skies on the earth would have increased its sacredness. This would have made Stonehenge an ‘observatory’ in modern terms, but observations would certainly also have been observances. The centre of the site was positively articulated in the second stage of construc­ tion. Parallel mounds were extended from the opening to the northeast, toward the River Avon, and a semicircle of blue stones was constructed in the centre. These blue stones, at once more- exactly defining the centre and echoing the boundary, were evidently of importance and were gathered and selected for this purpose. The path to the northeast also coincided with the summer solstice, when the sun stands at its northernmost point before beginning its movement southward, and with standstills, of the moon. Perhaps the sacred precinct was animated at summer solstice by the powers of all the life-giving principles of water, sun and moon, so that powers of fruition and renewal could be invoked, controlled and co-ordinated in the ritual honouring of forebears.

2.9 BOUNDARIES AND PRECINCTS

Period Illa

Period Illb

Period IIIc

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'T-i,o;t 450ft

N >■ |

1

56 Plan of Timgad, Algeria, late 2nd century BC

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In the final phases, the blue stones were rearranged in circles around a new ring of megalithic uprights supporting horizontal stones. These megaliths, weigh­ ing many tons, were brought from a distance of some 40 kilometres (25 miles). A kind of apse was built, open toward the now ancient path, with an altar of green sandstone. Over the many centuries of its elaboration, Stonehenge may have seen changes in ritual as well as the modifications I have described. The fi­ nal phase indicates a new level of social organization^bhe'in which co-operation among groups could be arranged, or manpower otherwise marshalled, for the quarrying and moving of great stones, and a new level of technology, the means for hoisting and placing these stones. Throughout all of these changes, however, the place and its boundaries, its precinct, were respected. The walls of cities provide an instructive example of boundaries. Walls may keep others out, but they also define the extent of the protection of a god, or of the jurisdiction of a ruler. The walls of institutions as different as ancient Near Eastern cities and traditional African settlements and cities were understood in this way. This being so, the defence of a city is more than self-preservation. The walled city is not only secure but sacred, a precinct within which protection is afforded by tutelary deities, who must in their turn be respected and defended. City gates may also have a double value; they are typically fortified, but they are also conspicuous and distinguished, and mark passage from one kind of space to another. A dramatic example of the significance of walls is provided by the legend of the foundation of the city of Rome by Romulus, the semi-divine son of Mars. Romulus killed his brother Remus for leaping over the walls of the city, which was evidently an act of desecration. The same story shows once again the interde­ pendence of the elements of places. The foundation of Rome was said to have taken place on 21 February, 753 bc on the Palatine Hill. Auspices were taken from the southern crest of the Palatine, the so-called Roma quadrata, and over the cave called the Lupercal, where the she-wolf was said to have nourished the infants Romulus and Remus. A pit was then dug, called mundus, ‘world’, cor­ responding to the Greek kosmos, in which an offering of first fruits was buried. This centre linked heaven and underworld, and provided the point through which the four directions could be traced. The resulting microcosm was bounded by a furrow ploughed by a cow and bull yoked together. This bounding coincided with the walls and was amplified by another sacred boundary, the pomerium, the area immediately inside and outside the walls in which no structures could be built. The story of the foundations of Rome, whatever its historical accuracy, also describes the ceremonial foundation of a Roman colony, which again suggests that Roman cities, which usually followed the same pattern, a square plan bisected by two cross axes (Figure 56), were meant to be images of Rome (itself an image of the world) and this foundation a re-enactment of the foundation of the metro­ polis, the mother city. This raises the general question of the boundaries of places as images, of natural forms, of the world, and of other places. In order to treat this question it will be necessary to anticipate some of the arguments I shall make in the Chapter 4, on images. In general, resemblant shapes are often treated as if they contained or enclosed the life or power of what they

2..9 BOUNDARIES AND PRECINCTS

57 Nasca lines, southwestern Peru, 200-600 AD

resemble. A boundary may thus make a place the container and enclosure of specific powers. Most of the Nasca lines of Peru (Figures 57 and 58) are ritual paths the rightness of which is determined by the most direct route between two points, or centres, as I shall discuss in more detail in the next section. The tracing of this route on the surface of the earth, and the subsequent movement of those who act according to it, are not just determined but are animated and validated by immediate relation to the two centres and by immediate contiguity to the simplest lines connecting them. Some of the Nasca lines, however, are huge images of monkeys, spiders and hummingbirds, for example Figure 58. Like the lines, these images also animate and validate a path; but, in addition, they bound an area, presumably enclosing something of the power of the source of the image (as I will argue in Chapter 4) and making that power present as one or another

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58 Nasca lines, southwestern Peru, 200-600 AD, humming­ bird. Wingspan 60 m (200 ft), length 135 m (450 ft)

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kind of social space, one or another kind of usage and observance. (It is another matter, of course, to explain how any particular image might have come about; monkeys, spiders and hummingbirds certainly were thought to possess certain powers by the people who made these images, but the image might, for example, be that of a named constellation traced on the ground, or that of a clan animal displayed to the skies, or something entirely different. And again, the images might have been made for different reasons at different times.) In any case, there are many examples of such shaping, especially throughout the Americas. It has been argued that the Inca capital of Cuzco is shaped like a puma, the Olmec site of San Lorenzo seems to have been shaped as an animal - perhaps a jaguar - and the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio is a monumental example in North America. In all cases these site-images might have been meant to bring the potency of an image to the human world at the scale of the offering of collective labour and subsequent collective ritual. In the Mediterranean, on the island of Malta, construction of tomb-temples

on plans like that in Figure 59 paralleled the rise of monumental architecture in dressed stone in Egypt, if on very different principles. These structures were associated with sculptures of fat women, some of monumental size, of a type perhaps 20,000 years old by the time the Maltese variants were carved (see Figures 147 and 148). This series of figures persisted from the Palaeolithic into the Neolithic, and must have assumed new significance with the rise of agriculture. As we shall see at the beginning of Chapter 5, parts of representations of the female body attained separate, ideographic status very early, and these plans may have been developments of such meanings on a social spatial scale. Ritual and festival would then have taken place, as the dead would have been buried inside forms instinct with life and regeneration.

2.10 paths

2.10 PATHS

Paths acknowledge places and centres, for which they provide means of approach and departure. Paths have direction with respect to a goal; they may be accommo­ dated to accidents of surfaces; or they may be notional and straightforward, moving with rectitude and economy; or they may be circuitous, difficult and labyrinthine. Paths include pilgrimage routes, the means of travel to sacred centres and places that has been fundamental to religious life in many cultures through all levels of social organization. I shall continue to discuss the so-called Nasca lines in the mountains of Peru and Ecuador, then turn to the Inca capital of Cuzco in Peru, to illustrate the basic characteristics of paths and their relations to centres. The Nasca lines (Figures 57 and 58), are a vast palimpsest made over a long period, from the first millen­ nium bc through to the first millennium AD. As we have just seen, most are rect­ ilinear, and many converge upon (or radiate from) centres, either natural mountains or cairns. Others may have significant astronomical alignments. All of these princi­ ples of arrangement are compatible and even complementary. The constellat­ ions rise and set on the horizon in various conjunctions with the sun, the Milky Way, the moon and planets, marking the cyclical time of the growing year. The line of sight between a centre and an appearance on the horizon, if traced on the surface of the earth, might provide a path and a monumental calendar at the same time, making ritual temporally integral with labour, the fruits of which nourished life. The ‘lines’ were made by removing several inches of gravel, laying bare the earth beneath, so that they demanded organization and work in concert. Some are simply ‘drawn’ on the ground, some have been broadened into long rectan­ gles or trapezoids, others have been elaborated into shapes. Some paths form spirals, combining approach and circumambulation, sometimes as parts of images, as in the case of a great monkey with a spiral tail. The images, which occasion­ ally repeat motifs found in pottery, are often not visible as a whole from the ground, and presumably their making would have demanded operations based on principles of ratio and proportion. Straightness - which makes any point closest to both origin and destination, and therefore closest to contact with both - must be the result of sighting over long distances. If the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, then it is a literal deviation to turn from the most direct route. The straight is both most direct and ‘right’. The Inca, who controlled the largest empire in ancient America - and perhaps

59 Plan of the Hagar Qim Temple, southeast coast of Malta, end of the 4th millennium bc

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the largest empire in the world - at the time of their conquest by the Spanish in 1532, united the elements we have just considered in the Nasca lines into a scheme for the justification of their dominion, and for an administrative structure effect­ ing the political consolidation of a difficult terrain and very diverse cultures. The Inca took their authority to rule from the sky, of which their capital and empire were images. For the Inca the most important feature of the sky was the Milky Way, which they called a river. According to understandings no doubt very ancient among their agricultural predecessors, they believed the Milky Way gathered water from the sea and delivered it as rain to the land. In the course of the year the Milky Way moves in the heavens, describing a great X. This divides the heavens into four quarters, and the Inca called their empire Tahuantinsuyu, ‘Land of the Four Quarters’. They plotted other astronomical phenomena against this pattern, just as in other cultures they might be plotted against the cardinal directions. The axes of this division were intercardinal rather than cardinal, running northwest to southeast and northeast to southwest. The night sky provided a framework of the world, but did not provide a terres­ trial centre at which the framework could be established and ritually addressed. This centre was provided by Cuzco, the Inca capital, the ‘navel of the world’. Cuzco was built at the confluence of two rivers, as if schematically marking on the face of the world the passage of the year in the skies above. The mythical founding of Cuzco is like many others. The progenitor of the Inca royal line, Manco Capac, emerged from Lake Titicaca (or from a cave). Accompanied by his wife, Mama Oqlyo, he searched for a region with fertile soil. Finally, at the site of Cuzco, he thrust his golden staff into the yielding soil and established his centre at the location of the building called the Coricancha, which remained the centre of Cuzco itself. Just as the Inca themselves were a fairly small number of people - about 40,000 - ruling a large number of people - about 10,000,000 - so Cuzco was not a city proper but rather a sacred city, a ritual centre, inhabited by the Inca elite, who were themselves divided into upper and lower classes, those who were related to the line of succession and those who were not. And to return to the theme of centres and paths, the development of rulership at Cuzco is a fine example of the appropriation and magnification of the values of the centre. The founder, Manco Capac, did not die, but rather turned into a stone, a huaca, which the Inca greatly venerated, as they venerated all their royal ancestors. Cuzco was changed from a small settlement with a myth of origin like many others to a seat of empire by a ruler who took the name of Pachacuti, ‘Earthshaker’. Not only did Pachacuti devise the necessary imperial institutions, he rebuilt Cuzco as an appropriate ritual centre. The first building, the Coricancha, was rebuilt in much more splendid form. Here the mummies of former rulers were kept, to mediate at the centre between the people and the world of spirits, to be present in festivals and available in ritual. This enhanced ancestral centre provided the fixed point from which significant events could be plotted on the horizon and alignments incorporated in the buildings themselves, so that the very fabric of the city was set in right order. Newly important in this imperial scheme was the sun, to the god of which, Enti, Pachacuti was particularly devoted, and from whom he claimed to have received instruction. Highways from the four quarters of the empire

converged on this one centre. In the central plaza was a pillar used for sighting the heavens, which was also the throne of the Great Inca. He was the ‘son of the sun’, and before him was the ‘gullet of the sun’ into which offertory libations were poured. The tallest structure was a tower that cast no shadow when the sun was at its zenith. At that moment, the point of the centre marked a perfect vertical axis, the means by which the Inca became the image of the sun, and the sun became the divine father of the ruler, to whose great heavenly spirit he had unique and direct access. The service to the gods of the ritualized lives of the Inca in their sacred centre was a justification of their rule, and from this centre emanated both the ritual organization of the surrounding area and the political order of the empire. The Coricancha was the centre for the organization of huacas around Cuzco. These shrines, which might be springs, stones, mineral deposits, burials or markers of important astronomical events, were no doubt in many cases of great antiquity, and their organization and subordination into one system was at once religious and political (see Figure 41). From the Coricancha, the huacas were organized into ceques, or ritual paths. These paths had calendrical significance and were related to the round of the year. They were also allotted to groups in the complex social hierarchy of the Inca, and these groups had the responsibility of maintain­ ing the shrines and paths, and of performing the rituals that connected these subordinate centres to the one ruling solar centre from which all paths and ritual radiated.

2.11

2.II ELEVATION

Elevation is a fundamental way of qualifying and distinguishing places. A path upward may be moving symbolically as well as physically higher, and the dist­ inctions made by elevation are almost always hierarchical. In general, elevation states difference by simple real spatial relation. Some persons, for example, are ‘elevated’ or ‘raised up’ or ‘exalted’ by being placed on a podium or dais or throne, but only a few persons are so distinguished. Some high places, like thrones, are exclusive, and can only be occupied by one person at a time, a ‘monarch’. Sacrifices and offerings are reserved from the ordinary by being placed upon altars, which is from the Latin alius, meaning ‘high’. The principle of real spatial decorum at work in thrones and altars has been so widely respected as to seem self-evident, but for this very reason it again points to the conditional basis of all such arrangements. At the social spatial scale of architecture, the levelling course of a Greek temple might be regarded not only practically as providing a regular foundation for construction, but also as part of the distinction and elevation of the house of a god. The plinth of a Hindu temple might also be seen to state the most sacred part of its precinct. The Maya not only elevated their temples and palaces on more or less steep and lofty platforms, they similarly distinguished and elevated the whole ritual ‘city’ of which these temples and palaces were parts, following practices reaching back to the Olmecs and to the beginnings of Mesoamerican ritual centre construction. Differences in level may articulate ritual movement along a path within a place, and differentiation of level, or transition from level to level, is one of the

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6o La Venta, Veracruz, Mexico, 900-400 BC. 1. Main Temple Platform (eroded). 2. Ceremonial plaza with platforms, tombs and buried offerings. 3. Stirling Acropolis

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major ways of articulating approach to a centre. The temple platforms of Meso­ america and Mesopotamian ziggurats are dramatic examples of elevation. Others are less obvious. The priest in an Egyptian hypostyle temple passed through two spaces before reaching the sanctuary itself. Each of the three spaces was smaller than the one before. Each was also more elevated than the one before, so that the highest was associated with the most sacred. At Angkor Wat (see Figures 98-101 below), the central shrine was not simpfyapproached, rather it was approached by ascent through a series of ever higher and smaller rectilin­ ear courtyards. The pilgrim at Borobudur (Figure 74) climbs toward a centre through levels that parallel the attainment of higher and higher levels of spirit­ ual purity and enlightenment. In Christian architecture change in height from entrance to altar is not so pronounced, but we are still only at one remove from the same meaning, since the principal altar is the ‘high’ altar and approach to it is thus a symbolic ascent. And the characteristic towers, steeples (from ‘steep’) and high vaults of Christian architecture, seen in conditional terms, associate the height of the marvellous body of the church with the notional height of the centre, which can be seen but not attained or occupied. The climb to the top of a Mesopotamian ziggurat, as a ritual path, was elaborated, interrupted by distinct stages or levels. Such stages are often identified with heavens or with ‘levels of reality’, and the conception of the earth itself as a notional plane extending from a centre enables the further conception of other such planes, heavens above us, or hells below us. This has immediate implica­ tions for architecture. Beyond a certain point, elevation is hard to achieve, and if we think of architecture as the various skills by which the social spaces of groups are actually built, then the demand for elevation may create the demand for the creation of new skills. The attainment of height and the multiplication of levels may have simple cosmographic meaning, but by the same token struct­ ural innovation may also provide new models of the cosmos. The wondrous effects of the apparently impossible, indicating both power and transcendence, is evident in structures as culturally different from one another as the roofcombs of Maya temples and Gothic churches. Such brilliance fits easily into the rhetoric of refinement, elaboration and superfluity, a rhetoric integral to many traditions of architecture, especially, but not exclusively, of religious architecture. Near Gandhara, King Kanishka was said to have built an elaborate wooden stupa on a square base that rose to a height of some 210 metres (700 feet) in thirteen storeys, topped by an iron yasti with thirteen copper parasols, which, unfortu­ nately, attracted the lightning that brought the structure down. We will never know if this description was exaggerated, but the exaggeration itself is a signifi­ cant record of aspiration and possible stimulus to technical innovation. ‘Skyscrapers’ do not scrape the sky, but they become higher and higher, each surpassing the last by doing so, as if the mythic feat of touching the sky might actually be accomplished. Such enterprises are of course double-edged, and the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.4) is the great biblical example of the sin of human pride and the folly of human art. The ritual centres built by the people called the Olmec in Veracruz and Tabasco on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, began traditions of architecture in ancient Meso­ america in which space was articulated primarily in terms of changes of level.

The Olmec site called La Venta was laid out around the beginning of the first millennium bc on an axis 8 degrees west of north (Figure 60). This alignment, once set, was rigorously respected, and the surviving platforms in the excavated northern part of La Venta are all either on this axis or symmetrical in relation to it. (The massive offerings of green stone discussed in the last chapter, as well as elite burials, colossal masks, and models of ceremonies in jade all lay beneath these plazas as part of the same order.) La Venta has lost all of the temporary structures that would have crested its platforms, but it is clear that the temples atop the large platforms facing one another north to south would have been the culmination of movements first defined by the levelling and shaping of the site as a whole. Platforms were raised above the already distinguished floor of the site, and the two larger mounds, central and axial, are also highest, culminations of the space at either end. The larger and clearly most important mound (i in Figure 60) has been explained as an eroded rectangular temple platform (or ‘pyramid’), but also as a model or image of a volcanic mountain, and its ascent might have meant association or identification with the great forces figured in this imitative shape. The greatest centre built on these principles, Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico (Figure 61), was much more than a ritual centre, and expanded the order of its governing rectilinear grid far into the surrounding area. The first great structure erected at Teotihuacan, in the first century, was the colossal Pyramid of the Sun, some 225 metres (750 feet) wide on each side at its base. This enormous collective work of course upon course of clay brick, which again testifies to the existence of an elite (or elites) able to justify and organize the necessary labour, was raised over a grotto, to which access is still possible from the western face of the pyramid. Judging from the magnitude of the structure erected over it, this grotto must have been an especially sacred centre. The name Teotihuacan itself, as well as the names of the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon and the Street of the Dead, were given by the Aztecs, who came to the Valley of Mexico some 600 years after the destruction of Teotihuacan in the middle of the eighth century. Teotihuacan means ‘the place where the gods are created’ (which might mean the place where our first ancestors came forth), and even if the Aztecs projected their own mythology over the great forms of the monumental city, they may have preserved the core idea that Teotihuacan was a place of primal origins. The Aztecs believed they lived in the fifth ‘sun’, or age, of the world, and that this fifth age began at Teotihuacan when, the creator gods of the four directions having refused to do so, two others sacrificed themselves in order to begin the cosmic rebirth. They became the sun and the moon, and they also became the critical centre, the vertical direction, the union of heaven and earth. The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon are the great anchors of the site, both respecting the same grid, but with co-ordinate major axes. The smaller Pyramid of the Moon stands at the northern end of the Street of the Dead, the principal axis of the city, which is generally north-south, like La Venta, but it is turned some 15 degrees east of north (or west of south). This has been plausibly explained as an alignment upon the heliacal rising of the constellation we call the Pleiades, but perhaps Teotihuacan was also aligned with features of the landscape. In any

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61 Plan of Teotihuacan, Valley of Mexico, r st to mid-yth century AD. The Plaza and Pyramid of the Moon (r) are at the northern end of the Street of the Dead; to the southeast is the Pyramid of the Sun (z), and farther south and east is the Citadel (3), with the Temple of Quetzalcoatl

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case, the ‘right’ order resulting from the intersection of axes was rigorously ob­ served. Even the course of the San Juan River, a major source of water for the city, was canalized in order to conform to it. At its peak, from the fifth to the seventh centuries, Teotihuacan supported a population of about 85,000 people with an intricate system of irrigation and water conduits. The so-called Street of the Dead (see Figure 7) rises gradually northward to­ ward the two great temple platforms, finally to the plaza of the Pyramid of the Moon. The temple structures atop the culminating platforms of the Sun and Moon are gone; had they survived, as they have in the stone versions of Maya architecture, they would be supremely elevated spaces enshrining unique activi­ ties in relation to the paths and precincts they faced.

2.12 DIFFICULTY OF APPROACH

2.12 DIFFICULTY OF APPROACH

A great temple platform, an artificial mountain, not only distinguished and exalt­ ed the structure it supported, literally placing it nearer the heavens and subordi­ nating the lower to it, it also simply made access to the temple more difficult and more exclusive. In more general terms, difficulty of approach or of access to a centre is a principle at work in many ceremonial spaces, religious and political. At the very beginnings of the history of painting in Europe, and long before the beginnings of the history of monumental architecture, images were made in nearly inaccessible parts of caves (descent rather than ascent, or descent followed by ascent), as if there were a direct relation between power and hiddenness. The limitation of access to centres and precincts is control of access to divine power and a major assertion of rule, and by the same token, ritual approach might be a unique privilege of rule. The Egyptian temple provides an excellent example of such royal privilege. Egyptian gods were local, heroic progenitors of a remote antiquity, often worshipped in families of three members. These local gods sometimes became more than local as the places with which they were associated grew in power and influence, or as they assumed theological or politi­ cal importance. The places of Egyptian temples were typically very ancient, and the houses of the gods marking local centres reach back into pre-Dynastic times. Actual examples of Egyptian temples are much later, and some of the best-preserved were built at the very end of ancient Egyptian history, in the centuries of Greek and Roman domination. Inscriptions in these late temples claim, however, that they were built according to much earlier rules established when the temple of Ptah (after whom Egypt is named) was built in the new royal capital at Memphis. This event signalled the unification of Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium bc. Rules were also attributed to Imhotep, the architect of the Third Dynasty king Zoser, whom I will discuss in the next chapter. The ancient temple was incorporated into a common myth of origin, according to which the benben stone arose from the immemorial watery chaos, to be perched upon by the falcon Horus, the sun and king, thus to become the centre from which the world could be ordered. The ancient gods were associated with that creation, and thus with the king, who replicated the order of the world in building the temple. I will argue in the next chapter that stone columns, which the Egyptians were the first to use, were not merely structural supports, but were instead forms connoting central values of fertility and continuity. The first courtyard of the Temple of Horus at Edfu is lined with columns, and one passes through a screen of columns into a sequence of progressively smaller columned spaces. As the sanctuary is approached, spaces, thick with great columns topped by lotus and papyrus capitals, are progressively higher, darker and smaller. The carefully graduated access, beginning with the wall of the temple precinct itself, and dramat­ ically marked at each juncture, ends in the small, originary sanctuary, the god’s house, entered only by the king and priests, where the light of day is extinguished and new life begins. (Characteristically, Akhenaten reversed this sequence, creating an approach leading to an open courtyard with numerous altars to the sun, as in Figure 251.) The organization of the Egyptian temple preserves its primordial beginnings

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in structures of reed or wood and at the same time states the royal appropria­ tion and transformation of the powerful centres marked by these simple structures. The sanctuary is small, but construction in the royal material of stone at once magnified local shrines and, by establishing a uniform plan, subjected them to a common, national order at the scale of stupendous and wholly unprecedented collective facture. This transformation was at once a great royal offering to local deities and a construction of access to those deities, but only through royal forms. The king as ruler, and as sole intermediary between heaven and earth, was alone able to lay out the temple, to establish the right alignment, measurements, and relations between the temple and the eternal order of the heavens. The king also enlarged and enriched the temple, thus to benefit the people, by offerings after military conquests. In addition, the king fed the deities, providing appropri­ ate daily fare. No king, of course, could feed all the deities of Egypt every day, and these duties were delegated. Images of the king might take his place, or priests, who stood at the top of a hierarchy administering both the temple itself and the surrounding countryside, of which the temple was the economic centre. Large numbers of people were employed by the temple. In principle, only the king could enter the sanctuary of a temple, and priests did so in his name. The temple structure itself was an elaborate (and elaborated) approach to the sanctuary, culminating in this royal degree of exclusivity. The precinct of the temple was bounded by a brick wall and contained such features as the sacred lake necessary for ritual purification. The great stone house of the god was entered through a pylon, a monumental gateway typically carved with reliefs of the gods and of the pharaoh as embodiment and executor of the gods. Entry through this great gateway was entry into a sacred space, and such importance was attached to this passage that, at the temple of Amun-Re at Karnak, one New Kingdom pharaoh after another constructed votive pylons, each extending and complicating the approach eastward to the sanctuary, as if to do so were to in­ crease the power of the culminating centre (Figure 62). Pylons were rigorously symmetrical, and so were the spaces of the sacred int­ erior they introduced, ending in the more or less distant sanctuary. The courtyard immediately inside the pylon was the only part of the complex to which there was general access. Permission might be given to donors to place votive images in this courtyard, so that the donor might in effect witness sacred ceremony and drama in perpetuity (or be seen by participants in divine re-enactments in perpetu­ ity). Cults grew up around these images as intercessors that, through the king, had access to the god’s favour. The great majority of the people saw the image of the god only on festival days (the number of which increased through Egyptian history) when it was placed in a boat-litter and carried, again by priests, out of the sanctuary and around the precinct. Here, it may be noted, access was again indirect and priestly intervention was necessary. Questions were dictated to priests, who wrote them down, and answers to these questions were then constr­ ued from the movements of the image of the god as it was borne along. The labyrinth built by the fabulous Greek craftsman Daedalus is usually understood to have been at Knossos on the island of Crete; this fabulous struc­ ture quickly became synonymous with the highest ingenuity and artifice, and has continued to live in Western art and literature to the present. Daedalus,

however, did not build the first labyrinth, and ancient writers considered his construction only to be an echo of the one built by the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Amenemhet III, who ruled for nearly fifty years in the middle of the nineteenth century bc, that is, at around the same time that palace construction began on Crete. Amenemhet fulfilled his office as builder by transforming the Fayum from a swamp into rich farmland, dredging a great lake to control the flow of the Nile, a colossal work considered in antiquity to surpass even the pyramids at Giza. The building the Greeks called the ‘labyrinth’ was the mortuary temple of Amen­ emhet at Hawara, now reduced to rubble, an example of a work whose loss conceals the beginnings of a great and deep imaginative tradition. It was described as a vast, bewildering sequence of interiors, courtyards and colonnades, culminat­ ing in a large pyramid. Whatever else it was, the Egyptian labyrinth was a sacred precinct, the compli­ cation of which protected and distanced its most sacred parts, not the least of which would have been the pharaoh’s tomb chamber. The mysteries of the sacred were thus made difficult to approach ritually in proportion to their sacredness; at the same time they were made just plain difficult to approach, so that intrud­ ers might be confounded and the precinct more easily defended. Such a structure thus reflected both the sanctity of the pharaoh’s physical person and his anxiety as to the actual length of the eternal repose of his person and its accoutrements. Many other examples might be given of elaborated approaches to sacred centres; the ‘theatrical’ upward approaches to Hellenistic Greek sanctuaries like Cos and Lindos, the ever more exclusive levels of Herod’s rebuilding of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. But the same principles could also be applied in much more recent and nearly secular circumstances. The palaces of seventeenth-century Roman cardinals were constructed around an elaborate decorum of approach, the culmination of which was the audience chamber of the cardinal himself. Typically, a visitor climbed stairs, then proceeded through a series of halls and antechambers, a series that was longer according to the cardinal’s rank or preten­ sions. Along this series of spaces, a finely modulated protocol was shaped. The

62 Temple of Amun-Re, Karnak, Egypt, principally New Kingdom (1550-1070 bc) over earlier structures. The wall ending in Pylon IV, built by Thutmosis I, c.1500 bc, encloses the original precinct and additions by Thutmosis III (1479-1425 bc); Pylon III was built by Amenhotep III (c.1391-13 53 bc); the hypostyle hall was begun by Ramesse^ I (1295-1294), Pylon II by Ramesses II (1279-1213 bc), and Pylon I was left unfinished in the 25th Dynasty, after 715 bc

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cardinal, for example, rose to greet visitors farther and farther from his own audience chamber, according to their ranks. He never descended the staircase. Papal apartments provided the pattern for these suites of ceremonial rooms, with a difference that again stated the relative rank of pope and cardinal in real spatial terms. Unlike the cardinal, the pope did not advance through the rooms to greet visitors regardless of rank. In ceremony the person of the pope was in effect the centre.

2.13 CENTRES AND VERTICALITY As we saw briefly in Section 5 (and Figure 46), accounts of the birth of the Buddha describe the events in terms richly compacted of ideas of the centre, and the Buddhist and Hindu architecture of India and its many tributaries to the east have maintained and continually developed the conditional potential of the verticality of the centre. The life and death of Siddharta Gautama (c.5 63-483 bc) who became Buddha, ‘enlightened’, created a large new network of centres and subcentres that multiplied and grew with the religion he founded. Sakyamuni, as he is also often called, meaning ‘sage of the Sakyas’ (the princely family into which he was born in northern India, near the Nepalese border), rejected the elaborate ceremony of earlier religion and taught that release from the pain of life and its endless reincarnation could be attained by moral discipline rather than by acts of propitiation and sacrifice. Much as the institutional form of early Christianity was fatefully changed by the patronage of the Roman emperor Constantine, so the historical character of Buddhism was deeply determined by rulers of the Maurya dynasty, the first to unite India, who came to power in 322 bc, just over a century and a half after Sakyamuni’s death. The rulers of the Maurya dynasty took their notions of divine kingship from the ancient Near East, specifically from the more nearly contem­ porary Persian rulers conquered by Alexander the Great only some ten years before their rule began. The Maurya capital, Pataliputra, mirrored Persepolis, the Persian capital. The Maurya emperor crucial for the history of Buddhism was Asoka, who ruled from 272 to 23 2 bc. Sickened by the vast carnage of one of his own military victories, Asoka resolved to unite his empire under the principles of Buddhism, rather than by military conquest, and it was to this end that he set up inscribed proclamations and great freestanding stone columns (Figure 63). These columns, made of highly polished sandstone from quarries near Sarnath, the site of the Buddha’s first teaching, and crowned by symbolic capitals (Figure 64), at once established the reach of Asoka’s empire and marked centres, thus defining new systems of shrines and pilgrimage routes (and redefining old ones). When he marked his new centres, Asoka adapted an ancient cult of wooden columns to his uses, equating the Buddha with the pole and pillar of the world by doing so. The simple change from traditional wood to stone is also significant, making the natural and the supernatural at once both Buddhist and imperial. An upright stone might have indicated sacredness, but stones of this size, material and refinement of facture would have identified sacredness with the dynastic power necessary to gather and transport such materials, and to erect such monuments, merging royal votive beneficence and magnificence with the statement of politi-

2.I3 CENTRES AND VERTICALITY

63 Lion column, Lauriya Nandangarh, India, erected 243 bc 64 Lion capital from Sarnath, India, 3rd century bc. Polished limestone, height 215 cm (85 in). Sarnath Museum

cal hegemony. Moreover, by replicating centres in the same material and style, Asoka defined the extent and stated the unity of his hoped-for empire. Within some fifty years of Asoka’s reign, the Maurya dynasty was overthrown, leaving behind it, however, a new realization of political order. In order to advance what he understood as a universal religion, Asoka not only dispatched envoys to the far reaches of Asia, he also continued to consoli­ date his own realm by erecting monuments, according to one legend raising (with the help of spirits) 84,000 reliquary stupas in a single night. The ashes of Sakyamuni provided relics founding new principal holy centres, of which there were first four, then eight, then many more. These centres continued to proliferate, together with the elaboration of the divine personage of the Buddha (eventually includ­ ing images), as the religion grew. Before considering the commemorative stupa, the second major monumen­ tal form of Asoka’s campaign of construction, I wish to linger a moment longer upon the Asokan columns, both in order to provide a transition to the meanings of the stupa form itself, and to show the fusion of ideas of political and spiritual empire as an amplification of the powers of the centre. The introduction of the new spiritual force into the world of the teaching of the Buddha was called the setting in motion of the Wheel of the Law. The capital shown in Figure 64 was supported by the column at Sarnath, where this event took place. It is an inverted lotus with four lions set back to back supporting a great disk. The addorsed animals again echo the royal art of Persia. The column

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65 Plan of the Great Stupa, Sanchi, India, 1st century ad

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was, however, turned to entirely new purposes; rather than supporting a lintel, the column simply marked a centre, reaching out from the earth to the heavens, making its place the hub of the world, a universal centre, the pillar that rises to enthrone the sun at noon, the highest point in the sun’s daily course, when it is at its full power. The disk of the sun supported by the four lions, and surmount­ ing the column, is gone, but the general meaning of the capital is nonetheless clear. The sun is the lord of heaven, enthroned in its height at the centre of the world upon the-backs of lions, who, like the small sun disks below them, face in the four directions. The sun is identified with the Wheel of the Law and thus with the Buddha. (In early Buddhism, images of the Buddha were not made, and wheels were one of the symbols often used to refer to him.) Thus the Buddha became the Lord of the Four Quarters (a formula I shall consider in Chapter 3); more precisely, the enlightenment of the Buddha became the sun that extends its rays throughout the world, and the teaching of the Buddha is a universal centre, the lofty point from which light, order and justice emanate. The Buddhist stupa is a form of tumulus, a large mound placed over an elite burial. These mounds first enshrined the ashes of Siddharta Gautama himself, then the relics of other religious figures and sacred texts. The stupa also incorpo­ rated the meanings of the columns just discussed, and the centres they mark have been destinations of pilgrimage for countless worshippers, and merit has always been earned by approaching them. One of the earliest to survive - as a part of a much larger religious complex - is the Great Stupa at Sanchi (Figures 65 and 66). This was an Asokan foundation, but was given its present form in the first century ad. The stupa itself is a great hemispheric mound, or anda, sloping downward from the square harmika at top centre, a replication of the railing around sacred trees (as in Figure 46). The harmika encloses the peak of the world mountain, which reaches, through the sanctifying relic, from the darkness of the primal, subterranean waters to support the dome of the sky (that is, the mound itself), finally to be surmounted by a central mast, or yasti, reaching to the heavens of the gods, stated by the royal forms of chattras, or parasols crowning the whole. This is a scheme which is basic to much Asian religious architecture. In this case, it is based entirely upon the notional forms of square, circle and central axis. The centre, reaching from earth to heaven, and anchored by the sacred relic, is once again the point from which the cosmos may be drawn, and the stupa is cardinally aligned. At Sanchi, the whole precinct of the stupa is bounded by a railing, imitating the wooden railings bounding earlier shrines, but in stone and at monumental scale. (The general term for ‘shrine’ is chaitya, from a word for mound or cairn, a marked sacred place. From early on, there were also elaborated monumental Buddhist chaitya halls, cut into live rock, columned and honorifically arched interiors within which a carved stupa might be approached and circum­ ambulated.) The precinct of the Great Stupa at Sanchi has four carved stone gates, or toranas (Figure 66), facing the cardinal points. These imitate wooden city gates and, in their size, elaboration and figuration, state entry into (and exit from) a qualitatively different place. Like the stupa as a whole, these gates incorpo­ rate older religious practices and meanings. Voluptuous yakshis (the benevolent female tree spirits after which Queen Maya is modelled in Figure 46) greet the worshipper at each gateway to this source of collective spiritual life and fortune.

2.13 CENTRES AND VERTICALLY

66 The eastern stone gate (torana), Great Stupa, Sanchi

There are also symbols of the Buddha (still not represented figurally), narratives from his life and dynastic symbols. The precinct is entered from the south and circumambulated so that the centre is always to one’s right. The stupa form multiplied and magnified the meanings of the column, in turn specifying and elaborating the meanings of centre and verticality. The central mast extending the column, the yasti, modelling the heaven of heavens, underwent numberless extensions and variations, sometimes to enormous - even marvel­ lous - scale. The bodhi tree at Bodhgaya, under the branches of which the Buddha attained enlightenment, must first have been set off in the manner of other tree

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67 Mahabodhi Temple, Bodhgaya, India, marking the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment, extensively repaired, but perhaps in comparable form as early as the znd or 3rd century ad

68 Great Goose pagoda, Xi’ China, c.700 ad

shrines, again as in Figure 46. By the late second or early third century, however, this shrine had been magnified to the proportions of the towering Mahabodhi temple (Figure 67), which rises to some 50 metres (165 feet). As it stands, the brick and stucco structure has undergone numerous modifications and recon­ structions (it is now a Hindu temple), but if its present appearance is at all like the original - and such superstructures seem to have been built by the second and third centuries - it must have been a wonder to behold. It must also have been fundamental for later traditions of Indian architecture. The central structure rises in front of (to the east of) a descendant of the bodhi tree and a stone slab upon which the Buddha sat meditating when he overcame his last foe, Mara, personifying death and desire. A great superstructure, called a sikhara, or ‘crown’, rises from a square sanctuary. It is made up of diminish­ ing storeys of chaitya arches and royal palace forms crowned by amalaka fruits at the corners. The storeys of the sikhara conform to a steep straight edge rising from the sanctuary toward the neck of an emergent column, in its turn crowned by a cornice, a great full-round amalaka, surmounted by a stupa surmounted by its yasti. The world mountain is a sublimely multiplied divine palace, reaching to the heavens. Sanctuary and sikhara stand in a precinct distinguished by double elevation. Smaller sikharas at the corners of these platforms intercardinally echo the major central one, which is the culmination of ritual movement. Entry from precinct to sanctuary is made through a large central portal, which is repeated upward through the storeys of the sikhara on all four sides.

2.13 CENTRES AND VERTICALITY

69 Great Goose pagoda, engraved lintel with Buddha and boddhisattvas. From D. Tokiwa and T. Sekino, Buddhist Monuments in China, vol. 1

The development of the verticality of the centre exemplified by the stupa and its crowning forms led to the definition and further elaboration of one of the characteristic forms of Asian architecture, the pagoda, which continued to be used in innumerable variations for shrines, temples and tombs. (The term ‘pagoda’ itself, it should be noted, was coined in India by the Portuguese, who also gave us the word ‘fetish’; unlike the latter term, ‘pagoda’ has perhaps taken its place as a more nearly neutral classification.) Buddhism spread from northern India to Central Asia, thus to the caravan routes, and to the Silk Road linking much of the known world. Buddhism had taken firm root in China by the end of the sixth century. The stupa assumed characteristically different forms, always, however, stressing verticality. Stupas carved in the late fifth century in Chinese caves (in the manner of earlier Indian chaitya halls) were square, storeyed structures with images in niches (comparable to chaitya arches) and brackets supporting pronounced eaves in place of cornices. The early Tang dynasty (eighth-century) Great Goose pagoda (Figure 68) adopts such a scheme, in which, however, the masonry walls are articulated by pilasters, and the storeys by forms combining roof and cornice. This pagoda is part of the monastery from which an early seventh-century pilgrim named Xuanzang travelled to describe, among other things, the Mahabodhi at Bodhgaya. A stone engraving, also from the early eighth century, on one of the lintels of the Great Goose pagoda (Figure 69) shows a Buddhist shrine in Chinese form. Slender columns rest on delicate lotus bases, smaller versions of the lotuses on which the figures are seated. In a fine example of what I will call ‘aulic symmetry’ in Chapter 5, these columns part slightly to frame the central, larger, frontal, and elevated figure of the Buddha. What is of special interest is the tile roof supported by elaborate wooden brackets; these transfer weight to the columns, but they also permit an extraordinary degree of elaboration, which, like the

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chaitya arch, distinguishes the space it covers. These brackets were to become a major theme of Chinese and Japanese architecture, providing endless opportu­ nity for technical invention, variation, experimentation and refinement, and for hierarchical ornamentation, sheer virtuosity and ritual artisanship of the very highest order. The pagoda in China and Japan was shaped by these possibilities, purposes and ideals. When Buddhism was suppressed in China in the ninth century, delicate and flammable structures like thatin Figiire 69 were destroyed in great numbers. Fine variants, however, survive in Japan. The late seventh­ century Japanese pagoda of the Horyu-ji (Figure 70) is a square, cardinally alig­ ned, with its mast still visible at the top. Its registers are drawn out as if floating, poised far in extension from their vertical supports. Buddhist architecture and the beginnings of Hindu architecture are closely intermingled, and the great crowning sikhara began its growth early in these forming traditions, as we have seen in the case of the Mahabodhi at Bodhgaya (Figure 67). As the same example may also show, the development of verticality is again a constant. The amalaka capital surmounting the sikhara makes it appear that an axial column connects sanctuary and heaven, and this scheme became basic to the Hindu temple, which may serve as a compendium and review of the categories of sacred places I have treated in this chapter. The fundamental real spatial elements of the Hindu temple are the presence of the deity in the sanctuary and the approach to this presence. The temple’s precinct does not simply reserve a space for the sanctuary, however; it is rather the place of the manifestation, and of the greater or lesser vicinity of the deity, thus a place of culminating contact. The image of the deity is central to the sanc­ tuary, where presence is maintained by priestly ministration and worship. The centrality of the sanctuary itself is stated by cardinal and intercardinal alignment and by its square plan, so that the verticality of the centre, the extension of the point of contact of heaven and underworld, intersects the plane of the eight directions of the world (Figure 72). It is crucially important that the sanctuary not only marks a centre but houses an image, by proximity and relation to which other images are arranged. The sikhara (Figure 71) rises directly over the sanctuary. The square sanctuary is based on the much older Vedic altar, itself a centre and precinct, cardinally aligned and used for sacrificial offerings. The square sanctuary is also a mandala, a model of the cosmos (see Figure 73) made up of circles (the word itself means ‘circle’ in Sanskrit) and squares directing meditation to a common centre, where the image or mantra of a deity is to be found. At the social spatial scale of the temple, the cosmos is modelled as a cardinal square emanating from a point, its extent defined by the flayed skin of the sacrificial primal being, who is at once regener­ ated by sacrifice on the altar and controlled by divine forces. The planar sanctu­ ary, divided into three units on each side to form nine smaller squares, further states the ritual preparation of the site, by which evil spirits are driven away and the earth consecrated to its task of bearing the weight of the structure. To approach the centre of a mandala is also to be elevated. The central square of this mandala - and thus the simple centre of the plan, from which the column at the top of the sikhara seems to rise - is the ‘place of brahman’, that is, the place of prayer and of the dwelling and concentration of absolute sanctity. In being placed at the

2.13 CENTRES AND VERTICALITY

N

centre of the mandala of the plan, thus at once defining and reflecting the world by cardinal alignment, the god in effect becomes the foundation of the world column, or mountain, rooted in the earth, bodying forth into a sanctified precinct of human space in a continuous epiphany of cosmic generation. The top of the column protrudes from the top of the structure, and preserves its reference to a column in its amalaka seed finial. Sanctuary and finial are connected by the characteristic superstructure of the temple, which rises in slow, symmetrical curves from the square defined by the zXt&r-mandala base to just below the neck of the column, where the dimensions of the siter-mandala are repeated. The superstructure is again made up of storeyed palace facades, and thus combines the meanings of the mountain and royal palace to state the sacred. In the creation story of the churning of the sea of milk, Mount Meru, the navel of the world, is also the pestle used by the gods in the great curdling of the world into existence, and the Hindu temple concentrates the forces of generation and regeneration. At the foundation of the world column-mountain-palace, in the sanctuary, called the ‘cave’ or ‘womb’, the worshipper, having passed through the welcoming and sheltering portico, encounters these forces in the central image of the god. The god is central within the mandala of the sanctuary, but is also the culmina­ tion of the aligned order of the precinct. The cosmically righted east-west axis of the precinct (along which the image of the deity may be taken out in a chariot on festivals) might be said to belong to the deity, and the approach to the sanctu­ ary is not direct, but is rather performed in observances, ablutions, for example, and circumambulations of subsidiary shrines, and finally of the sanctuary. The end of worship is darshan, eye contact with the image of the deity, and prasad, contact with offerings sanctified by contact with the image. The last paragraph brings us back to the question of the elaboration of ritual paths. The precinct of the stupa at Sanchi (Figure 65) is not entered directly. Each

pagoda, Nara prefecture, Japan, 7th century

71 The ‘crown’ (sikhara) of the Svarga Brahma Temple, Alampur, Andhra Pradesh, India, 7t|i century 72 Plan of the Svarga Brahma Temple

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■■ XdwC'

«gl M'

V.

torana stands just to the proper left of its directional axis, and, having passed through one of them, the observant turns to the left, then to the right, and thus onto a path defined by a directional axis. Stepping into the precinct itself, a turn to the left places the body and centre of the stupa on the observant’s right, a relation maintained through circumambulation. The principal entrance is to the south, so that once into the precinct movement is to the west, then north, turning around to the east and back again, in imitation of the circuit of the sun. At about the time the stupa at Sanchi was built a new school of Buddhism arose in southern India. Its adherents called it Mahayana, the Greater Vehicle to Nirvana, which they compared favourably to the Lesser Vehicle (Hinayana). The Mahayana Buddhists dismissed the older ascetic, contemplative and monastic ideal as selfish, and advocated the imitation of the Buddha not so much in simply achieving nirvana as in becoming a bodhisattva, one who, like the Buddha in his previous lives, had attained enlightenment but remained in the world out of compassion, to aid in the spiritual growth of others. Mahayana Buddhism stressed the transcendence of the Buddha and argued for infinite worlds, in which each person might eventually become a buddha. The Mahayana thus provided a transcendent deity, fostered the ideal of compassionate participation in the affairs of the world, and held out the poss­ ibility of universal enlightenment. The distance of this possibility, however, perhaps made more direct solutions attractive. These were offered by later esot­ eric Buddhism, the Vajrayana, or ‘Thunderbolt vehicle’, in which mantras, ‘sac­ red names or syllables’, mudras (spiritually significant gestures), and mandalas contributed to kinds of meditation or inner concentration that very consider­ ably accelerated enlightenment, making it possible in a relatively small number of lifetimes, or even in one. The elaborated mandala (Figure 73) became one of the characteristic forms of Vajrayana. As we have just seen, mandalas are both cosmograms and schematizations of the whole cluster of ideas surrounding the centre. A Vajrayana mandala is typically painted in saturated colours, and its making itself is an act of devotion. In a mandala, the deity to be invoked, and to be approached in meditation, is shown in the centre of a system of simple notional forms, surrounded by the appropriate emanations, companions, aspects, guardians and narratives. These squares and circles are arranged like the plan of a cardinally aligned precinct or building, with gates at each of the four directions, the same geometry that governs a stupa. Figure 73 is a mandala made in Tibet in the seventeenth century. In the central circle, surrounded by eight female deities in petals, is Kalachakra, the ‘Wheel of Time’, dancing in transfigured, ecstatic embrace with his consort, the mother of all. This image is the literal origin of the mandala in the ritual of its making, during which the centre is always faced, and is the goal and summit of meditation. To go out from the centre is to descend, to buddhas and bodhisattvas, through the cardinally aligned gates of palaces of mind, speech and body, the last enclosing solar animal^s with deities of the days. Outside the main circle, with its 88 charnel ground deities, are four subsidiary mandalas. At top centre is Tsong Khapa, the reformer of Tibetan Buddhism, with Kalachakra images beside and above his head, flanked by monks. Below are supporting deities, among whom, to our right of centre bottom, are the patron and his family. The goal of medita-

2.13 CENTRES AND VERTICALITY

73 Mandala of Kalachakra (‘Wheel of Time’), Central Tibet, c.iSth-iyth century. Ink and opaque watercolours on cotton, 120.4 x 78-4 cm (47% x 30% in). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

CHAPTER 2 PLACES

74 Borobudur, Java, Indonesia, c.760-830 ad, aerial view

75 ‘Exemplary Story of the Virtuous Sibi King, who Offered an Equal Weight of his own Flesh in place of that of a Dove being Eaten by a Falcon, both Birds being Gods in Disguise.’ Relief carving, Borobudur, early 9th century

tion in this embellished, notional space is approach to the centre, the source and origin of the sacred reality through which one has passed in thought. Only adepts at a stage near enlightenment may apprehend the central image. Mandala-like order, central and cardinal, but at monumental scale, linking the approach to the centre with real spatial values of pilgrimage, circumambulation, ascent and spiritual instruction and passage, is to be seen at one of the great monuments of Buddhist art and architecture, Borobudur on the island of Java, in present Indonesia (Figure 74). Indonesia is now largely Muslim, but there are also major Hindu monuments, and Buddhism flourished there for about a century, between 750 and 850. It was during this period that Borobudur was built. The fortunes of Buddhism on Java were linked to those of a royal family called the Sailendra, who supplanted the Hindu Sanjaya dynasty around 780, which is when Borobudur may be supposed to have been begun. It is built over the beginnings of an earlier structure (and probably on an ancient sacred site), which, given its magnitude, might have been a royal ancestral shrine. However that may be, it is certain that the building of Borobudur was a royal project, although it does not seem to be associated with any palace ruins. Borobudur stands on a hill in a fertile plain, and was built of more than a million unmortared stones, brought from a nearby riverbed and carved into blocks. The hill was originally terraced, and this preparation of the site, which must also have been a colossal collective labour, distinguishes the structure from its surroundings. At Borobudur movement toward the centre is also a movement upward, physical and spiritual ascent being identified in the passage from lower levels of reality to higher. This ritual ascent was an elaboration by multiplication of the clockwise circumambulation of a stupa, with the centre always to one’s right. Like a mandala, Borobudur was laid out on a square, cardinally aligned plan with entries at the four directions and stairways leading to the central stupa at the summit. It is perhaps significant that the only true circles are stupas and the platform supporting the large central stupas-, the lower ‘circles’ are slightly squared. Although all four sides are similar, it is from the eastern side that the narrative reliefs begin. These harmoniously composed episodes (Figure 75), with delicately scaled yet ample figures in what seems an unbroken atmosphere of calm and clemency, move all the way around to the same point, where a stairway is taken to the next gallery; here the reliefs continue, and so through the first four levels. There are frequent corners in these processional pathways, and the galleries are deep, with continuous cornices over the reliefs forming a near-corbel, through the top of which only the sky - and no other level of the monument - is visible. The effect must have been labyrinthine and highly focused on the sequence of narratives. In order to see the four bands of relief in sequence on the first level it is necessary to walk the gallery four times, and it is necessary to walk each of the next three galleries twice, so that all the narratives are seen in ten circumambulations before passing to the level of the rounded terraces. There are altogether some five kilometres (three miles) of reliefs. Above the cornices crowning the galleries 432 buddhas were seated in niches, as if always at the level the pilgrim was about to attain. Those on each side are shown with a different mudra (or gesture); those on the east show the appeal to the witness of the earth; those on the south, charity; those on the west, medita-

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tion; on the north, overcoming fear. Those on the highest level show, on all four sides, the mudra of preaching, and those are on the level at which the pilgrim (or initiate) passed through an elaborate gateway on to the level of the rounded terraces. Here (Figure 76) there are 72 more Buddhas, 56 on the lower rounded terraces, 16 on the round terrace supporting the great central stupa. These concen­ tric buddhas are shown in the mudra of the first preaching, the ‘turning of the wheel of the law’. All face outward from the centre, so tlid-t the plain over which they gaze becomes the world over which their universal doctrine also radiates. At the same time, these buddhas were shielded from view by the latticed stupas covering them; or more precisely, they may be seen close at hand only by those who have completed the instruction of their ascent. Borobudur was a major pilgrimage centre, and there are great numbers of small votive stupikas to be found there. Again, it must be supposed that the central stupa marked a relic which was able to demand and justify this monumen­ tal emanation in stone. In general, the stupa form meant the death of the Buddha, which, however, was not simply extinction but the attainment of nirvana, the release from karma, the ‘work’ of repeated existences, and the veil of Maya, the illusions of the phenomenal world. Whatever the iconography of Borobudur may prove to be, it is clear that the way up is the path to the centre of spiritual unity and origin, and that the way down again is the path of teaching this enlight­ enment, spreading it through the world, thus bringing the world in conformity with enlightenment. 2.14

76 Vairocana Buddha, Borobudur, upper level

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There are persons who, so to speak, specialize in the verticality of the centre, in ascent and descent, in communion both with the social reality of the centre and with the powers it embodies. Shamans are one such group. Shamanism is especially associated with eastern Asia and the Americas, which may point to a common origin in practices much older than migrations across the present Bering Strait into the Americas in the late Ice Age. The earliest images that might be identified as shamans, from the Western European Upper Palaeolithic (Figure 78), are composite creatures - like the images I shall define as icons in Chapter 4 - with the legs and sex of men, and parts of animals - bison, horse, bird or bear - in a generally anthropomorphic ensemble, shown in what must be ritual movement, perhaps the imitation of animal movement. Shamans enter the realm of spirits, often in the disguise - the skin or mask - of an animal. This entry is gained by possession, facilitated not only by transformation, but by fasting, song and mind­ altering agents, by implements, materials and by animal companions. Thus empowered, the shaman intercedes in the realm of spirits, determining how individual or group have transgressed to bring about sickness, misfortune or famine, and what steps must be taken to bring things back into proper balance. The shaman is literally a medium, the means by which the world of spirits may be dealt with, addressed, even tricked and outwitted. Shamans are essential for the commerce of the present group with the larger community of the past, the dead, those who have another life, whose names are still heard and who appear in dreams. The shaman not only intervenes in times of stress, and at crucial times for the life of the group, but at ‘rites of passage’, when individuals change from

2.14 ASCENT

77 Ziggurat of the moon god, Ur, Iraq, c.2100 bc

one status to another, through such biological and spiritual changes as that from adolescence to adulthood, or from life to death. It is extremely important that (as in Figure 78) ritual transformations, in which the shaman achieved identity with spirits, or with powerful combinations of spirits, were realizable only in costumes and images, that is, in art, which was thus an indispensable means of access to the spiritual and at the same time made a fundamental distinction within a group. The ‘internal’ transformation by mask and costume is entirely compatible with the states of ecstasy in which the shaman makes contact with the spirit world. In these states, shamans are ‘beside themselves’; they have ‘left’ their bodies and are ‘dead to the world’, just as they are made ‘not themselves’ through disguise. Shamans are subject to ‘seizure’ and ‘posses­ sion’, to raptures, transports and trances - in short, to being ‘carried away’, as all these words mean - and their journeys are characteristically described in terms of ascent and descent, to heaven or the underworld. Shamans thus locate the spiritual world as ‘above’ and ‘below’, and, at the centre and in their own person, link the spirit worlds with the horizontal level of human life in activities of in­ vocation, preparation and manipulation. If the shaman is rightly called a specialist, this specialization is underscored by the uniqueness entailed by the general idea of a centre. In fact, the perform­ ing shaman might be regarded as the embodiment of the centre in social circum­ stances without a fixed venue or a set precinct. The ascent of the shaman was often described as climbing or flying, and often associated with trees or mountains, both of which provided shelter and sustenance as well as actual means of physical ascent. Early kings, often in close association with priests (and with shamans, as for example in early China) continued to play the role of supernatural intercessors for the people. As an example of verticality and ascent turned to the collective purposes of a more differentiated agricultural society, we may consider the ex­ ample of Mesopotamian ziggurats (Figure 77), which provided the means for ritual ascent. The understood need to make such ascents - not only to the skies, and to proximity to the gods, but to a centre appropriately distinguished by elevation - was sufficient to justify the enormous collective labours these artificial mountains demanded. The Sumerian ziggurat was called a ‘holy mountain’, which was, however, not simply a place of ascent (and of ritual approach to an exclusive space) but a place of descent for the deity, the house ‘descending from heaven’. Kingship was imagined in similar terms, as coming ‘down from heaven’ to initiate the genealogy of kings, the ‘big men’ who established hegemony over

78 Drawing after the painting of an antlered animal impersonator, Trois Freres, Ariege, France, c. 14,000 bc. Height 75 cm (30 in)

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the rulers of many cities. Victorious kings brought the central artifacts of those they had defeated to Nippur, the central shrine of Enlil, King of all Countries, by whom kingship was granted. The ruler presumably ascended to enact the role of the spouse of the goddess Innana in the hieros gamos, the ritual sexual intercourse ‘to care for the life of all countries’, part of the celebration of the new year. In this case, the king was literally identified with the fecund powers of the centre and with their renewal. In general and with many cultural variations, the priestly and kingly approach to altars and exclusive sanctuaries - often by means of literal ascent - became an integral part of religious and political ceremony, as we shall see in the next chapter.

2.15 ALIGNMENT AND ORIENTATION The verb ‘to orient’ is from the Latin word for ‘east’ or ‘dawn’, which in turn is from the verb meaning ‘to rise’, closely related to ‘origin’. The rising of the sun on the eastern horizon thus has the deepest associations with renewal and rebirth, still preserved, for example, in the name of the Christian celebration of Easter, which descends from similar roots. The ancient classical name for Turkey Anatolia - is from the Greek word for the rising of the sun, the east. Similarly, Levant, the term for present Syria, Lebanon and Israel on the eastern Mediterranean, is from the Latin levare, ‘to become lighter’, ‘to rise’. The ‘East’, or ‘Orient’, became broadly associated with the Holy Land, with Paradise, and, perhaps not wholly inconsistently, with the exotic and marvellous, the mysterious and forbid­ den, the culturally distant. On the other hand, in the same ‘Western’ tradition, ‘Occident’, from the Latin word for west, has correspondingly negative associa­ tions. It refers to the setting sun, but more than that derives from a word meaning to strike or cut down, related to modern English words like homicide and genocide. In many traditions west is associated with the home or land of the dead, and the cosmic calamity or crime implicit in the Latin metaphor for the west is perhaps best illustrated in Aztec mythology, discussed in the Introduction, in which the sun dies each day, suffers and bleeds grievously in the underworld, and is reborn with the decapitation and dismemberment of his sister, the moon, in an endless rite of sacrifice and renewal. It is no doubt because the direction east has had a primary significance in European classical and Christian culture that we use the word ‘orientation’ to refer to any fundamental directional sense. Medieval European maps put east rather than north at the top. The more modern preference for north, taken over from classical cartography, and ultimately from the Pole Star, was corroborated by the magnetic compass, which came from China. In traditional Chinese cartog­ raphy, however, south was at the top, and even if solar rhythms may be supposed to have been set in human biology over the aeons, in the alternation of night and day and the turn of seasons, ‘orientation’ may be established without respect to the sun. In fact, time seems first to have been kept by the phases of the moon (‘moon’ is obviously related to ‘month’, a measure of time, but is also from the same root as ‘measure’ and ‘menstruation’), then by the larger cycles of the sun, to provide the measure of our gestation and our lives, and the relation of those measures to the life of the world.

We use the word ‘orientation’ to refer to inclinations and proper spatial relations to things and other people in the world. The contemporary metaphor of ‘sexual orientation’ refers to an innate sense of attraction and consequently necessary direction of behaviour. More generally, we describe ourselves as ‘orien­ ted’ when we know where to go and what to do, and we are ‘disoriented’ when we ‘don’t know which way to turn’, or ‘don’t know left from right’. We might undergo ‘orientation* in order to find out what should become habitual, what will ‘make sense’ of new and unfamiliar circumstances. Orientation is thus fundamentally related to our own cardinality, defined in Section 3 of the Introduction in terms of our uprightness, facing, symmetry and handedness. We are upright in the light when most fully and typically active. We must face in one way or another, the parts of our bodies are symmetrical relative to the axis defined by our uprightness, and our living movements are continual departures from that axiality and symmetry. Most people are handed, and perform the business of their lives by subordinating the actions of one hand to those of the other. These terms of human cardinality, our primary ‘orientations’, and bases for our ‘sense’ of orientation, are not neutral, but entail values and polari­ ties of values, as I shall discuss at length in Chapter 5. These orientations and their values are also easily expanded macrocosmically, so that, for example, right may be equated with east or south, the ‘directions’ of the body made analogous to the world’s directions. In principle, of course, these oppositions may be otherwise; left might be superior to right if it were, for example, the ‘heart’ rather than the hand side, or if left-handedness were considered extraordinary rather than aberrant, in which case all the macrocosmic relations might change as well. The conditions of human cardinality are given, and - like all conditions - at the same time they inevitably present possibilities for cultural choice. With what should we align ourselves? What should we face? Although as modern people we associate ourselves with regions - the East coast or the West, Eastern or Western Europe, the Near East or the Far East, the Northern or Southern hemisphere - orientation in the modern world is an issue different from the one with which I will be concerned. Our bodies are of course still cardinal, but the separation of this cardinality from the presumed larger order of the world is one of the fundamental things characterizing us as modern. It was maintained in a long Western tradition that the human body, the agent and sign of the rational soul, is a microcosm of the larger world, the macrocosm; this concentric, anthropomorphic analogy of physical self and world was swept away in the emergence of the metaoptical modern world I shall define in Chapter 7, setting the stage for peculiarly modern themes of ‘disorientation’. When Niet­ zsche’s endlessly influential madman/prophet announces the death of God, he finds the earth unchained from the sun, wandering in an infinite void in which there is no direction, no up or down. The metaphorical base of these assertions is the metaoptical modern world just reaching its full institutional realization in the years in which Nietzsche wrote. The madman addresses those who do not realize the epochal implications of the historical situation to which we have brought ourselves, in which human order can never again be corroborated by embracing cosmic order in the way it had been thought to be since classical antiquity. As if heeding the madman’s advice, Nietzsche more and more devoted

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his thought to the acknowledgement of this new world-historical reality, making it possible for those ‘beyond good and evil’ to overcome ‘the spirit of gravity’, to ‘dance’ in the light of a new and absolutely human freedom. These have become familiar modern ideas. Reactions to such diagnoses of the modern age have been both negative and positive. Many lament the dawn of an age of meaninglessness and absurdity, others rush to embrace an age of unprecedented human possibility. The allure of new modern freedom was quickly combined with the allure of the new technol­ ogy, of speed and instantaneous communication. In 1913, a group of Russian Futurists, among them the soon-to-be Suprematist Kasimir Malevich, staged an opera, Victory over the Sun, in which the rupture with the old cosmos was (as the title bluntly states) aggressively celebrated. In the world of which the Futurists thought themselves prophets, there would be no gravity, no difference between horizontal and vertical. In such a context, the beginning of powered flight in 1903, spindly as the first aircraft may have been, assumed enormous symbolic importance, not just as the fulfilment of a long Daedalic dream, but as the realiza­ tion of a radically new human order, a rupture with the worlds of the past. Electricity erased the distinction between night and day once and for all, and the transmission of radio signals promised a world in which simultaneity would cancel out the conditional exigencies of space and time. In the general comparative history of traditions, the modern Western attitude toward orientation and toward places in general is only one singular if very powerful possibility, according to which centres, boundaries, paths and places are disregarded in favour of a world treated as if unresistant to human purposes and desires, its parts essentially interchangeable. The world increasingly shaped on these principles - and that shapes its inhabitants on these principles - is deeply unlike worlds previously shaped, and the very separation of personal and social spaces from larger justifying orders and orientations is at once a condition of Western modernity and an indication of its deep differences from other world cultures, including the premodern institutions and practices continued into the modern Western world itself. In this section I shall be mostly concerned with alignment as a constituting element of social space. Considered simply as an area, a place might be said to have any number of potential alignments with its surroundings. If we imagine ourselves standing in such an area, our own cardinality dovetails with those potential alignments, which are, however, also of the area itself and hence an extension beyond the limits of our physical presence. Our actual facing presup­ poses some relation to a more or less limited area, and that area has the potential to be a definite place, in some relation to the implicitly indefinite world at large. Insideness, outsideness and some right, ‘facing’ relation between the two are conditions of social space before it has been specified as one social space or another. When such specification takes place, then our facing may also become a cultur­ ally specific ‘course of action’. If a clearing has an upright stone opposite the side on which we enter, then the floor not only has an internal alignment, it also directs our attention, movement and actions. The alignment or external orienta­ tion of a place, which may further shape our facing, may be further determined by something of importance outside the place itself, a mountain, for example, or

the rising of the sun. In this way, literally by means of a social space, our align­ ment is made part of a larger embracing order, part of a cosmos. Such alignments, which both direct and justify places as social spaces, and therefore direct and justify the behaviour of those enclosed and defined by these spaces, may take any number of culturally specific forms. The deepest values may be involved in these choices, and through alignment the culturally various paths of human life have at once been given direction and fundamental meaning. Put in other terms, alignment is a fundamental means by which the terms of our physicality are set in relation to one or another second nature, or model of the world. Common individual burials are often treated as small precincts, in which the dead are placed in right relation to a larger order. In early Egyptian burials the dead were laid on their sides, facing west in a fetal position, as if to be born into the land of the dead. Early Christians were buried aligned to the east, in anticipation of the appearance of Christ, who, according to the evangelist Matthew, will come in glory from the east. One alignment may tend to predominate, as it does in these examples, but this is not necessarily so. Some of the Inuit of northern Canada lay men to rest facing the sea, women to face the land, children to face the rising sun and the source of light. Many alignments - with landmarks or burials, for example - are no doubt entirely lost to us; but the undeterminability of one or another alignment, or the open-ended possibility of alignments, should not be taken to mean that alignment is not an issue in one or another instance. In general, alignments do not fall into the kind of random distributions this conclusion implies. On the contrary, some alignments - cardinal or eastward, for example - have been used in many cultures, and within cultures themselves there are generally dominant alignments for normative structures. Even if accom­ modation must be made to circumstances and a Christian church does not follow the usual pattern in facing west, liturgy is still directed to the altar in the ‘east’. And, as always, social spatial practices are not separable from broader social spatial alignment. Early Christians also prayed to the east, just as they acknowl­ edged it in burial. As an example of both the simplicity and the complexity of the problem of alignment we may consider the advice of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who set out fairly detailed directions for the alignment of cities and temples. When laying out a city, considerations of health come first, and Vitruvius believed the long-term health of populations to be affected and determined by prevailing winds. It would be simplest if the architect were simply to ascertain the prevail­ ing winds and plan accordingly; but instead Vitruvius advocates a kind of rational­ ized augury, the examination of the livers of sacrificial animals to determine whether the site is in fact salubrious. And he analyses the winds themselves according to an underlying schema of the four cardinal directions, then works out the healthful orientation of the city in relation to that construction. The important thing for our purposes is not so much the solution finally devised, but rather the way in which it is devised. Vitruvius’s method is a practical-minded adaptation of the traditional ceremony for the foundation of a Roman town, which set it in right relation to earth and heaven. When Vitruvius (IV.v) treats the orientation of temples, other priorities come into play. In the absence of countervailing factors, he says, temples should face

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the western quarter of the sky. In this way the worshipper faces the east (as all altars should do), so that the image of the god appears to the viewer from the east, that is, from the direction toward which sacrifice is made. If there are impedi­ ments, the temple should be arranged so that it faces as much of the city as possible, presumably so that as much of the city as possible will fall under the gaze of the deity. Vitruvius’s metaphors of ‘looking’ and ‘facing’ are to be taken seriously, and if temples are along public roads, they should face the roads in full view, so that respect may be paid as it were face-to-face. The orientations of Roman temples may thus vary widely, as in fact they do; but the normative schema underlying the choice to do one thing or another is that of the cardinal directions, and more simply, and more archaically, morning solar orientation. Variation, then, rather than showing orientation to be a neutral factor, shows that it is a flexible, circumstantial, but fundamentally determina­ tive factor reaching to the very base of social spatial values. This last point may be expanded with a final example. The tents continually erected and re-erected by the women of North African nomadic groups generally have what is understood to be a westerly alignment. This sets the tents athwart prevailing winds, but this is not the only determining factor. The building of such tents is of undeterminable antiquity, but is certainly very ancient, and the tent, as a model, rather than simply stating one or another ‘cosmos’, has accumulated a number of more or less compatible meanings. ‘West’ is associated with the bank of a body of water (the end of the desert), with land features, and the system of relations may be explained in terms of the order of the heavens or the Islamic qibla, the direction of prayer toward Mecca, which from North Africa is in the opposite direction, to the southeast. But however complex such layering may become, it is immediate both to the understanding of the larger world and to the definition of social spaces and hierarchies. The tent itself is female, and within its order north is male, south female. In some cases the alignment of a tent is specifically altered for ritual purposes, as for marriage. 2.16

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Twenty-first-century Western people take the four directions for granted as categories of the organization of the world as we understand and represent it. Although north, south, east and west have all kinds of associations and connota­ tions, the directions possess no powers or virtues in themselves for us, and it is possible for us to think of them as arbitrary determinants for the description and co-ordination of all kinds of movement. The presumption of the neutral practi­ cality of the directions, however, once again is a modern Western presumption, and if we simply classify the places people have made on the basis of their location on a gridded map, we overlook from the outset some of the primary significance places were understood to have for the people who made them. We must also overlook the many historical and cultural inflections one or another alignment has had, and its many affiliations with other forms of social and cultural construc­ tion and activity. Alignment with respect to centres is unique to traditions - Islam (Mecca) is the great example - but directional alignment, which might seem no more than some relation to the points of the compass, is also culturally specific, and always

entails assumptions, operations and practices. East-west orientation has been especially important in Western architecture, southward (and therefore north-south) alignment in Chinese architecture. Within the scheme of the four directions, a number of variants and emphases are possible. Ancient Near Eastern architec­ ture is intercardinal in a long tradition - that is, the comers of rectangular buildings face the cardinal directions rather than the walls, which face the ‘four quarters’. This ancient scheme is to be seen in the Ka’ba in Mecca. Throughout ancient America, solar and cardinal alignment belong to larger patterns of astronomi­ cal alignment. The planet Venus, companion of the rising and setting sun, is especially important, and as we have seen, the Inca capital of Cuzco acknowl­ edged both sun and Milky Way. When centres were distant, alignment with them can only have been app­ roximate. In the absence of modern maps and instruments, for example, it would have been impossible to align the mihrab - the niche defining the direction for prayer towards Mecca - of a mosque in India, or to align a church in Rome with Jerusalem. An early mosque on Madagascar was aligned more and more north­ ward in successive rebuildings, presumably because advances in cartography provided a more and more exact notion of where Mecca is in relation to Madagascar. In such cases, of course, the alignment is no less significant for its imprecision, and the changes indicate a continuing desire for directness, ultimately for contiguity. Alignments defined by major astronomical events are still determinable be­ cause the events themselves are still visible. The sun still rises behind the heelstone at Stonehenge at summer solstice. The same sun might also be said to ‘touch’ the horizon, and this ‘contact’ of heaven and earth, which coincides with other events, and takes its place in other spatiotemporal patterns, is also ‘reached’ by sight established in alignment from a centre. The importance of direct celestial contact has had many other manifestations. It has also been widely believed in many cultures, including our own to the present day, that heavenly bodies ‘influence’ places, events and people, that, once again, they contact us, and that their powers bear upon our lives. Heavenly bodies change and interact among themselves in complex but predictable ways. The moon waxes and wanes, the sun not only rises and sets but moves north and south on the horizon between the solstices; the constellat­ ions (which of course can be seen as ‘representing’ things in any number of ways), although always in the same order, ceaselessly move in the night sky, revolving, disappearing and reappearing; the planets wander among the stars. The heavens of night and day are linked in the zodiac, the ‘band of animals’ in which the sun, moon and planets move through the constellations (a band that has shifted to the west since the constellations of the zodiac were named because of the preces­ sion of equinoxes, part of a great cycle of some 26,000 years). All of this change interlaces with the turn of the seasons and the stages of human life, to which it gives rhythm and to which it seems to offer embracing meaning. People have marked the units and cycles of time from the Palaeolithic, beginning the develop­ ment of the skills of tabulation and calculation, prediction and divination that have played so important a role in so many cultures. The skywatching that yielded these astronomical, astrological and calendrical systems also yielded many bases

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for the alignment of structures, and of course therefore of rituals, as well as many myths to justify one or another of these alignments. If the most common form of astronomical alignment is solar, solar alignment itself is not simple. The direction east, if simply defined by the rising or setting of the sun, might be defined by some 180 positions on the eastern horizon. Orientation with respect to the rising sun on any given day, like that of a Navajo hogan, requires only a fixed place and a vertical stake between that place and the sun. Orientation with respect to the east as one of the four cardinal directions requires other means, for example, that the sighting be made on the day of one of the equinoxes, at the zenith passage of the sun. Such orientations presuppose observation and some sort of tabulation, and might be described as calendrical as well as solar. In general, if I face south at noon (in the northern hemisphere), east is to my left, west to my right. In a place determined by augury, Roman surveyors established a vertical upright, understood as the axis mundi (the pole of the world), with a horizontal disc on the ground at its base. Points defined by shadows of the upright cast by the sun in its passage were marked on the circumference of the disc, and the resulting chord of the circle established east and west. North and south were then established by bisecting the angle formed by this chord and the centre marked by the upright. This method was used to establish the main streets of a new city, the cardo and decumanus. The cardo (from which we take the word ‘cardinal’) ran north and south, the decumanus east and west. The word cardo means ‘hinge’, perhaps suggesting that the north-south axis was the more important of the two, the fixed axis relative to which the sun turned (perhaps in analogy to the turning of the stars around the Pole Star), and relative to which the east-west axis is also defined. (Decumanus is a military term, referring to the organization of Roman legions by tens, and to the main gate of a Roman military camp.) A similiar method of establishing directional co-ordinates is used to different purposes in ceremonies to establish the cardinal alignment of a Buddhist stupa. It must have seemed revelatory, and given powerful authority to ideas of cosmos, that, for example, north and south, definable by the Pole Star, lay perpen­ dicular to east and west defined by the passage of the sun. Enactments of this great order became an appropriate royal prerogative, the power to set human life in right relation to the larger order of the world in building.

2.17 TUMULI AND DOMES In very long traditions in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, round structures have been associated with important burials. Mounds of earth or cairns of stone might be supposed first to have protected the dead, perhaps indicat­ ing that the body was thought to be the place of the spirit, even after death, and the pile of earth or stone its abode, where it lingered. If earth or stone are piled to any height they take the form of a circle, and if the body is made most secure by that means, the power of the dead is also hemmed in by a near-uniform barrier. The dead might thus be circumscribed, at the same time that the realization of this boundary reserved a space, tending to make it useless for other purposes. A mound demands acknowledgement, simple passage around, circumambulation, behaviour perhaps as ancient and widespread as burial mounds themselves.

Our word ‘tomb’, which means any burial place, descends from the Greek tymbos, the place where a body is burned, related to a verb meaning ‘to bury’, burn or entomb a corpse. Pyra (immediately from pyr, ‘fire’) meant hearth as well as pyre, sacrificial altar as well as the fire upon the altar. The Greek tymbos was equivalent to the Latin bustum, which meant pyre but also meant the pyre after burning, when it and the body had been reduced to ashes, and presumably to the approximate form of a tumulus, or ‘hili’. The word tumulus is used by modern writers to refer to round burial mounds in general, but originally it was related to tumeo, tumere, ‘to swell’, which suggests pregnancy, inner energy and life as well as death. As the earth and stone of which they are made fall into circles and cones, mounds and cairns inevitably create centres. Whatever ‘central’ importance the remains of the defunct may have in themselves, their burial creates forms tending to notional circles - the larger the burial the truer this is - together with vertical axes of any imaginable height, as well any number of horizontal axes and possible alignments. Tumuli may thus link notional form, verticality and alignment to places marked by the presence of the dead. The equestrian and semi-nomadic Kurgan people, who moved westward to Europe from the region between the Black and Caspian Seas in the fifth, fourth and third millennia bc, take their name from the Russian word for the round burial mounds of their chieftains. These mounds marked semi-subterranean timber huts (‘timber’ is related to the Greek demein, ‘to build’, thus to domus and dome) in which the dead were laid. As this shared root might suggest, tumuli were both honorific monumental forms, to be addressed from the outside, and interior spaces, houses of the dead. There were many possible solutions between these extremes. The stupa, which as we have seen descended from tumuli, was for all intents and purposes solid, although it ‘housed’ a relic. As we have also seen, the stupa is circumambulated clockwise, its most sacred centre remaining constantly but inviolably distant to the right. Tumuli record social stratification; their construction implies subordination and organization of those who actually built them, just as they contain elite burials. Differentiation by size and facture may make distinctions among tumuli themselves. Tumuli (it will be remembered that the word can also mean ‘hills’) must sometimes have been regarded as centres in their own right, and it is not hard to imagine the progressive appropriation of the divine values of mountains as the tombs of chieftains, kings and emperors grew to mountainous propor­ tions, that is, as their powers increased to the point that they could command mountains to be made. In this way they might again identify themselves with the centre and with access to both heaven and underworld, access implicit in the central and axial construction of the tumulus itself. A tumulus may be a monumental exterior form or a house of the dead, which brings us to the matter of domes. As I have mentioned, the word ‘dome’ itself is from the Latin domus and the Greek domos, again from the Greek demein. A domos is a house or Structure, but also a part of a house, or chamber. And it was also a household, those who live in a house, a metaphor of dwelling that was easily expanded. In Latin, domus meant house or building (whence ‘domicile’), but also a household, family, group or native land, a ‘homeland’. The verb domo,

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domare meant ‘to domesticate’, that is, to bring into the order of the home, but more generally it also meant to conquer or subdue. ‘Building’ is the imposition of ‘familiar’ order, and as this might suggest, domus not only implies a smaller or larger group ‘brought under one roof’, it also implies hierarchy within that group. Familia in its first meaning referred to a household as the number of slaves sustaining it. Dominus, ‘lord’, and domina, ‘lady’ (whence don, donna, madonna) obviously state such relations, as do words like ‘dominate’, ‘domain’ and ‘dominion’. All of these connotations, so strong in the histories of usage of these terms, were preserved in broad traditions of the use of what we call ‘domes’. Modern domes are regarded mostly as functional forms, as technical solutions to problems of spanning large interior spaces. These solutions may be admired as engineering feats in themselves, worthy, for example, of an Olympic stadium, but their primary purpose is not to state the distinction of the spaces or activi­ ties they cover, even if cities may pride themselves on having built the largest dome. But the history of the dome as the history of technical progress conceals the reasons for building domes to begin with, as well as many of the reasons for continuing to make them. It also conceals traditions of meaning that clearly spanned a number of disparate technical solutions in several traditions. The vaults of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul are a great culmination of Roman engineer­ ing, but they are also a culmination, achieved through these highly developed technical means, of much more ancient traditions of honorific forms. If the primary purpose of a superstructure is to distinguish a small space with a crown of great height, as in the case of the sikhara rising over the sanctuary of a Hindu temple, then corbel vault construction makes this possible. Unless it is elevated, a hemispherical dome can only become higher by spanning a larger space. The dome is primarily honorific in earlier Christian and Islamic architecture. Domes distinguish both churches and mosques, and in both traditions domes distinguish tombs, where sacred and secular purposes overlap. In Western Christianity a church might be called the Domus Dei, the house of God, or a church might be referred to as ‘the dome’, meaning that it was distinguished and sacred, whether it actually had a dome or not (an Italian cathedral is a duomo). Domes were used in this honorific way throughout the Christian world, in Europe and Byzantium, from Ethiopia to Armenia and Russia. There are also a number of important forms related to the dome in Western art - apses, niches and aediculae, as well as such ecclesiastical furniture as altarpieces, baldachins, ciboria, reliquaries and shrines, which also serve obvious honorific purposes. In Islamic art, the mihrab turns the honorific niche to the purpose of directing prayer, and empty niches are fundamental elements of ornament. Monumental domes like those of Florence Cathedral, which stands at the beginning of Renaissance architec­ ture, or St Peter’s in Rome, or the seventeenth-century Taj Mahal in Agra, whatever other meanings they might have had, and whatever technical feats were necessary to construct them, continued to be crowning honorific forms. Megalithic passage tombs from the fourth millennium bc provide early exam­ ples of vaulted interior spaces and also stand near the beginnings of Western monumental architecture. They were made by tunnelling into a natural hill, shoring up the corridor with large stones placed on end, and spanning the corridor either with large horizontal stones (lintels) or with simple corbel vaults, stones

2.17 TUMULI AND DOMES

79 Passage grave on the tie Longue in the Morbihan, southern Brittany, France, late 5th millennium bc

placed at angles against one another in an inverted V. The main chamber at the end of the passage was corbel vaulted, that is, stones were placed one atop the other, each course extending slightly beyond the one underneath toward the centre, until they came together at the top. The corbeled stones were held in place by the earth into which they were set, and the hill might be shaped into a more regular mound, the summit of which was over the top of the vault. These passage tombs often face east, their variations perhaps depending upon the movement of the sun along the horizon between solstices, thus marking ‘anniversaries’, the yearly return of days of birth, death or significant occasions. In the case of the passage-grave at Newgrange, overlooking the River Boyne in Ireland, the long passage has a precise solar orientation, so that sunlight enters it directly in the days around the winter solstice, which is the beginning of the solar year and the great moment of cosmic renewal in many cultures. At Newgrange the main chamber is cross-shaped, and thus cardinally aligned as a whole, so that the peak of vault and mound marks a cosmic centre with special reference to the sun. A comparable but smaller tomb at lie Longue in Brittany (Figure 79) has a round-and-square chamber with a more nearly conical vault, and if the general meaning of the chamber is the same, then the circle is the world diag­ ram around the centre, the verticality of which is bounded and shaped by the vault. It has been suggested on the basis of analogy to menhir statues that the image inscribed on the upright stones at the entrance to the passage at tie Longue should be associated with the Mother Goddess. This shape, with nipple- or navel­ shaped protuberances at top and sides, crowned as if with hair, is like the elevation of the vault itself, in which case the ‘hill’ is a mother, and the image might show the fructifying union of earth and sun. The passage tombs I have just examined were built by groups of people in transition between hunting and agriculture. They often contained many burials and must have been associated with groups or lineages, perhaps in turn associ­ ated with divisions of land. More than simply laying the distinguished dead to

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8o Treasury of Atreus, Mycenae, Greece, 13 th century bc

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rest in style, these burials seem also to have set them in relation to the larger order of earth and sky, in which case the centres they marked would have been associ­ ated both with group origins and with a model of the world. At some point these vaults began to be compared with the heavens. Such analogies were perhaps related to the solar orientations of entry (and exit), which, together with the idea of the tomb as a centre marking cardinal alignments, further specify it as a cosmic model. Connection with the rising of the sun - and especially with the equinoc­ tial or solstitial sun - might also imply much more, pointing to the beginnings of the association of rulers with the principle of seasonal time, and therefore with the collective welfare of agricultural people. Kinship to the sun was frequently claimed by later rulers. Solar orientation might also suggest that the people buried in these tombs - built throughout much of what is now northern and southern Europe - either were, or were closely associated with, those who watched the skies and kept the calendars, who ‘kept time’, and who could predict and there­ fore ‘control’ celestial and terrestrial events and cycles through appropriate rit­ ual. In any case, the highly visible enshrinement of the remains of members of elites, sanctioned by connection to the regular patterns of the skies, provided a real spatial principle of social cohesion, co-operation and continuity, as well as a location for ritual. The path of the sun’s light in relation to the vertical centre linked it, through the passage of the ruler’s spirit from life to death, with ter­ restrial and celestial power and order. In this way orientation and dome made the nuclei of social space, centre and place, into a space of rule, of subordina­ tion to the manifestly higher, capable of endless amplification, variation and adaptation. Tombs comparable to the passage graves at Newgrange and tie Longue were built for millennia. After 1300 bc, the so-called ‘Treasury of Atreus’ (Atreus was the cursed father of Agamemnon and Menelaus) was built at Mycenap on the Greek mainland (Figure 80). Whoever it might have been built for, it was evidently

a royal burial. It is much larger than the earlier examples and much more refined, with dressed masonry. The stones of the inside of the vault, or tholos, were trimmed and smoothed. The entrance to the tholos was marked by columns and by a monumental dromos, or passageway, which again faces east. The tomb’s contents have long since been looted, but the burials were in a rock-cut chamber off the main space to the north. The inner surfaces of the tholos seem to have been fitted with a great number of rosettes, usually understood to have been stars. If that is the case, then the identification of vault and heavens has been made explicit. The top of the vault at tie Longue is something over three metres (ten feet) from the floor, that at Newgrange about six metres, and that at Mycenae about thirteen. Not only are the vaults larger and larger, but as they become larger they extend and develop the meaning of a characteristic feature of vaulted spaces. In all three examples the top of the vault is beyond the reach of one standing under it, and this simple fact gives the centrality and verticality of these vaults an important new dimension. Those in the space - that is, the dead, and those who enter the space of the dead - are not simply enclosed and sheltered, they are also in a place where the inaccessability of the height defined by the axis rising from the centre of the floor is bounded and shaped by the vault that makes the place an interior. Although any vault - or even any ceiling, for that matter - might be metaphorically the ‘roof of heaven’ when we are beneath it, in large domed structures it becomes like heaven in being at an unattainable height, at the same time that it shapes that unattainability - that is, specifies the sky - as a curved vault. The vault also becomes like the heavens in that it is attainable only by sight, at the same time that it magnifies and characteristically transforms the significance of enclosure, height and change of level. In later traditions in which domed architecture developed in religious and state structures of the first importance, the cosmos was conceived as a ‘universe’, that is, ‘one turning’, hemispherical vaults notionally completed as spheres, concentrically arranged with the spheres of the sun, moon and planets around the earth at the centre. This vaulted universe prevailed in the Western classical world and its cultural dependencies for some 2,000 years, until modern times and the beginnings of modern science. It gave the greatest symbolic authority to the dome, which con­ tinued, however, to retain and develop other meanings as well. The history of the dome and its meanings was also shaped by the less monu­ mental traditions of nomadic tentmakers to the north and south. The traditions of the Asian nomadic peoples enter the story with the Achaemenid kings of Persia, who held audiences beneath great tents, which they called ‘heavens’. When he conquered Persia, Alexander the Great, ‘Son of Heaven’, imitated this behaviour, building a tent with a richly ornamented sky. Between them, the Achaemenids and Alexander established patterns of kingship to be followed in both East and West, their examples making the splendid baldachin part of the symbolic apparatus of divine kingship. Roman and Byzantine emperors appeared in state enthroned with this cosmic symbolism, which was also to become part of religious symbolism. With such precedents, the lavish, even fabulous, royal reception hall became a theme of rule. Such halls, or diwans, became an especially central feature of Islamic palace architecture.

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81 Pantheon, Rome, 125-8

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To return to the formation of earlier iconographic traditions bearing on the significance of the dome, however, the prophet Isaiah (40:22) described God as he ‘that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in\ The Jewish tradition persistently associated such macrocosmic ideas with the ark of the covenant. These biblical ideas would conflate with the classi­ cal meanings I have just briefly outlined with the most important consequences for the formation of Christian architectural and liturgical symbolism and practice. When Alexander the Great died in 323 bc his body was not cremated, but instead mummified so that he might be returned to Macedonia and buried there, perhaps like the Homeric heroes. He had himself gone to the tumulus of Achilles and run naked around it. But possession of the body of the great conqueror was contested, and his remains were rerouted to Egypt, to Alexandria, where he was finally buried in the Macedonian style. Alexander’s tomb is gone, but it was perhaps a great tumulus, visited in its turn by Octavian, the conqueror of Egypt,

who was soon to become the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Before he was named Augustus, which happened in 27 bc, Octavian began the construction of his own tumulus. The form of the tumulus was of course widespread in many variants, and Octavian might also have meant to recall indigenous Etruscan tumuli’, but reference to Alexander the Great seems likely and appropriate. From the beginning, the tumulus of Augustus was called a ‘mausoleum’, comparing it to the great tomb of Mausolus at Halicarnassus, built after the middle of the fourth century bc, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The tumulus of Augustus, over 60 metres (200 feet) in diameter, and facing directly south, was built in the Campus Martins, then outside the boundaries of the city of Rome. Augustus was to be buried at the very centre, at the base of the pillar supporting his image, which stood atop the monument. Around this pillar were spaces for rituals which were no doubt variants on the ancient and common practice of circumambulation. There were also spaces for additional burials, for the dynasty to descend from Augustus, the great-nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar. A temple to all the gods, or Pantheon, faced the mausoleum of Augustus across the Campus Martius. This, as the frieze on the portico of the present structure (Figure 81) still proclaims, was built for Augustus by his friend and ally Agrippa (who was buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus after his death in 12 bc). The appearance of Agrippa’s first Pantheon is not certain, although it is significant that it occupied the same place, and it was rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian in 120. The great vault of the Pantheon is all the more extraordinary for appearing so early in the history of the building of masonry domes. At just over 43 metres (145 Roman feet), the dome of Hadrian’s Pantheon is slightly larger than two domes built to rival it, the fifteenth-century dome of the Cathedral of Florence and the sixteenth-century dome of St Peter’s in Rome. The sphere completing the hemisphere of the dome touches the floor at a central point beneath the central oculus, ‘eye’, above. The interior thus contains a great notional sphere, which had taken the place of the small, exclusive cella (or sanctuary) of earlier classi­ cal temples. This colossal sphere may be regarded as an image of dominion, the gods of imperial Rome embracing, subjecting and transcending by uniting all the world. The circle of light traced by the sun through the oculus, which moved over the surfaces of coloured stones from throughout the empire, moved with exactly the regularity traced by the gnomon of the nearby Solarium Augusti (which I shall discuss in the next chapter). Over this symbolic domain gazed the oculus, the eye perhaps of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, father not just of the Roman gods, but of all the gods, who was thought to have directed Romulus to lay the foundations of Rome on the Palatine. Or perhaps the eye is the eternal sun, Apollo, protector of Augustus, the light and order of whose gaze unendingly surveys the world and the Roman empire. Whatever the case, the dome-sanctu­ ary of the Pantheon at once states imperial dominion, identifies inclusion in this dominion with inclusion within perfect, notional form, magnifies the physical unattainability of the vault to the proportions of the colossal and heavenly, and completes the visual accessibility to the dome in a circle of dazzling light. Sanct­ ification by place, material, facture, notional form, images and light all contributed

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to an experience of sacred interior space which would remain essential to Christian and Islamic sacred spaces long after the Roman empire had fallen. If the Pantheon was both religious and dynastic, and if its meaning was completed by the mausoleum of the Julio-Claudian dynasty it faced, its kinship to ancient burial structures also served to make it the best-preserved of all Roman buildings, hence to become one of the most influential buildings in the history of architecture. In 609 Pope Boniface IV reburied many Christian martyrs in it and rededicated it to the Virgin Mary and all martyrs, calling it Sancta Maria ad Martyres. The great Renaissance painter Raphael was buried in the Pantheon, as were kings of Italy in the late nineteenth century. The term ‘pantheon’ became a synonym for a place of distinguished burial (like ‘mausoleum’). The coffered dome of Michelangelo’s New Sacristy in the Medici family church of San Lorenzo in Florence refers to the Roman Pantheon; and the octagonal crypt for Hapsburg dynasty burials beneath the altar of the church of the Escorial of the Spanish king Philip II has for centuries been called the Panteon de los Reyes, ‘the pantheon of the kings’. The pointed arch is a variant of the round arch. It seems first to have appeared in pre-Islamic Sasanian architecture, as may be seen in the great arch still standing at what remains of the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon, near present Baghdad. The pointed arch was most conspicuously used for the great diwans or audience halls of Sasanian and Islamic palaces, and, like the arch and dome in general, was certainly honorific as well as simply structural. It is also another example of the continuous relation of royal to religious meaning. The pointed arch was used throughout the Islamic world from the very beginning of its architecture. In the Dome of the Rock (see again Figures 53 and 54), delicately pointed arches and a pointed wooden dome were used. The seventeenth-century Taj Mahal in Agra is a culmination of this tradtion. Moving far to the West, the pointed arch was also highly developed in Gothic architecture of the European Late Middle Ages, and is still a symbolic form in Christian architecture.

2.18 peripheries The word ‘periphery’, from the Greek periphereia, is more or less literally translated by the Latin circumferentia, from which we take our ‘circumference’. We understand a ‘circumference’ geometrically, as a precise, notional boundary, rather like ‘perimeter’, a ‘measure around’. But both circumference and periphery, like ‘metaphor’, contain words related to pberein, ‘to carry’; they mean ‘a carrying around’, or ‘bearing around’, and might be taken to refer to making actual boundaries, or even to ritual circumambulation and offering. The Greeks under­ stood the oikoumene, the world of human dwelling, to be surrounded by great and intractable Ocean (which Homer made the outer band of the shield of Achilles, which was thus a model of the world). Beyond the oikoumene was the apeiron, which is literally translated as ‘infinite’. This should be understood to mean indeterminate, what has no form, unlike the modern notion of infinity I shall discuss in Chapter 7, which is endless but mathematically determinate. I shall use the term ‘periphery’ to refer to what is beyond a boundary, and is beyond inclusion in social space, but is at the same time defined - usually negatively - with respect to a centre. Thus Delphi (or other places) might be considered the

centre of the Greek world, the origin of a common culture. Boundaries might be defined by the reach of that culture, of custom, myth, observance and language. It is important that, although ‘reach’ may seem an imprecise term, cultural bound aries are associated with jurisdictions and sanctions as well as limits of group ident­ ity and survival, much like the real spatial boundaries of precincts. Periphery is then what lies beyond that reach, the indefinite place of other laws and ways, of ‘barbarians’, those who, to continue the same example, spoke no Greek. In terms of the system in which each centre is primary, the periphery is defined as opposed to the centre, however peripheral groups may define themselves relative to centres of their own. This opposition is not simply negative in the sense that one term denies or annihilates the other; rather the terms imply one another, engage one another in some way, and may thus be seen as comple­ mentary. The peripheral extends social space to the scope of interaction among groups. The world simply does extend beyond the reach of our own cultural world, which at least raises the possibility of difference between our world and others. Why should there be any resistance to something so obvious? If given and second nature tend to be identified, and centres and boundaries are fundamental to social spaces, then the denial of the centres and boundaries of one’s group, or the threat or even the prospect of the intrusion or imposition of others, might seem to be the annihilation of natural order itself. In reality, of course, people are always like us in belonging to their own worlds, and the absolute rejection or cultural neutralization of the peripheral is rooted, not only in the conviction that second nature and given nature are the same, but perhaps more deeply, in anxiety arising from the suspicion, urged by the peripheral, that our own second nature not only is not given nature, but is in fact merely possible and cultural. If that is so, then the peripheral undermines the felt absoluteness of both centres and boundaries. Without straying too far from our immediate concerns, it might also be suggested that another real spatial idea, liminality, bears on this question. A limen is a lintel or threshold, a way of passing from inside to outside (or vice versa), and in general of effecting transition between one space (or time) and another. Groups may construct passages within their own ritual spaces and times from one state to another, to adulthood and marriage, but birth and death are transitions into and out of the group itself, as if into the real spaces of communal identity and then out of them. Birth, the first passage into the group, fulfils the meaning of the centre, and so to speak seeks the centre; in death, one passes out of the group, as if away from the centre and into the periphery, or beyond it. If the centre is the principle of collective life, then the periphery is the correspond­ ing principle of death and exclusion, or of inclusion in the indefinite place of the dead. Boundaries may expand from centres to become larger cultural or political entities, thus in effect making the peripheral more or less responsive to the centre. When this happens, other centres are inevitably enclosed within the new bound­ aries. This enclosure'changes the character of the annexed centres, which may be abandoned in favour of new subcentres or accommodated to new purposes (both of which happened, for example, in the case of the spread of Buddhism and Christianity). Both religious and political domination may also change old

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centres to more or less active centres of resistance to imposed ritual and rule. The poles of centre and periphery may be reversed. Critics of the decadence of later Greek culture, for example, complained that the centre had been lost, and the ancient virtues were to be found in peripheral peoples who might otherwise be regarded as barbarians. This ambivalence with respect to the peripheral has recurred in Western culture with deeply important Jesuits. As we shall see in Chapter 7, Jean-Jacques Rousseau shaped modern ideas of both alienation and authenticity in these terms. Even now, the term ‘primitive’ may be used either to dismiss or to praise. Western cultures, acting out of a presumption of cultural absoluteness or superiority, have swept away other cultures, or tried to sweep them away, or treated them as if they had been swept away, while at the same time the ‘primitive’ has also been powerfully attractive and regenerative, as if embodying return to an Eden, a Paradise, our own mythic origins. The relation between centre and periphery may be used to characterize social hierarchies within a culture. Capitals and provinces stand in relations of centre to periphery, and this may be expressed in terms of absolute exclusion, even though the relation is not only real, but within the reach of a single culture. That is, ‘provincials’ may be described as ‘barbarians’ (or worse). As we have seen, courts and cities are typically centres of artistic skill and invention because they are also centres of social distinction and the necessity of stating social distinc­ tions. Artists at the periphery may practise their craft to slacker demands of a social situation of generally lower status, but they may also shape quite differ­ ent demands to different purposes, finally to transform the centre with which the periphery is always coupled. It is altogether consistent with these patterns that Paul Cezanne, for example, left Paris for the South of France, proclaiming himself the ‘primitive’ of a new art, thus positively accepting definition in opposi­ tion to the centre. In these terms, Cezanne’s actions are comparable to the colon­ ialist ‘primitivizing’ of his contemporary Paul Gauguin. Trade is a powerful counter to centrality. From early times, people have traded both practical materials such as salt or obsidian, and materials like amber and lapis lazuli that serve the purpose of articulating ‘central’ hierarchical social rel­ ations in many different places. Trade must have been an early incentive to rules of hospitality. (In Greek, xenos refers both to host and guest, to the stranger, even to the barbarian, but primarily to one to whom xenia, the right of hospital­ ity, is due. There is a similar ambivalence in the English ‘host’ and the cluster of Latin words to which it is related. Modern ‘xenophobia’ is simply fear of the stranger, and is comparatively one-sided.) Traders are either foreigners (from the Latin fans, ‘outside’), or strangers (from the Latin extra, ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’), or they associate with the foreign and strange, and have ‘seen other places’. In this respect, traders are like pilgrims (from per agros, ‘through fields’), who had the right to pass through many ‘lands’, many jurisdictions. Our word ‘trade’ is related to ‘tread’, referring to the path and course of a life, but certainly also to travel in the pursuit of trade. Augustine’s Christian was a pilgrim in this life, at home in no earthly city, but only in the City of God. Traders are unlike pilgrims, however, in that they may serve many centres, and in that their aims are mat­ erial, not spiritual (which is of course not to say that one cannot be both a pilgrim and a trader). In his Politics (i327aioff.), Aristotle considered the problems

arising from the access of a city to the sea. It was, he says, considered conducive to law and order for a city to maintain a stable population, and, more especially, to exclude numbers of visitors brought up under other institutions. The alterna­ tive was population growth and the pursuit of trade, with consequent increase in wealth. In general, Aristotle did not approve of profit-taking, observing that excessive development of trade was for the benefit of the stranger, not the city itself. It is important to note, however, that Aristotle was choosing an alterna­ tive, and in many other circumstances other choices were made. In the art-critical language of late medieval and Renaissance Florence, adjectives like strano (‘strange’) and peregrino (from peregrinus, the Latin for ‘pilgrim’) were terms of high praise, likening the effect of the novel and fantastic to that of the exotic. The word ‘exotic’ itself is from the Greek word for ‘outside’, and from early on, from the first construction of social hierarchies, access to foreign materials and goods, artifacts of strange and even ‘outlandish’ facture, must have been a literally conspicuous prerogative of elite groups. Exotic goods not only have their intrin­ sic qualities, they also possess the ambivalent power of the peripheral, and in Florence, a centre of early capitalism, metaphors of the exotic were turned to the task of characterizing the modern emergence of individual imagination and style, as well as the spiritual quest (or pilgrimage) this emergence entailed. These last examples couple the question of the peripheral with the question of cities. Although there are many ‘ideal’ city plans, and many of these are strongly centralized, cities typically outgrow such arrangements, and urban culture, always under the pressure of trade, is made up of people shaped by many centres. Even if cities are governed by a single authority to which all submit, urban spaces tend to be polycentric, in effect mixtures of places. Most of the examples in this chapter are originary centres, which is consistent with the explanation of works of art in terms of their first spaces of use. The general movement of the argument of this book, however, which is toward the contemporary world, is from the relative isolation of cultures to contact and accommodation in a larger unity. In that sense, world culture has become more urban, even as most of our lives are still shaped by central values. Even though that is so, however, centre and periphery cannot have the same meanings in this larger de facto unity.

2.19 LAND AND DIVISION

2..19 LAND AND DIVISION

Places are internal in the sense that they define second nature with a boundary relative to a centre. Places, however, are typically not self-contained. As we have just seen, they depend on trade, sometimes for vitally important goods, and they are more simply dependent on their immediate surroundings. A group of hunters and gatherers might re-establish the same social spatial order at each encamp­ ment, but actually ‘make a living’ in a larger territory. Towns and cities depend upon the arable lands around them, as well as upon those who work them, to sustain their populations. What I shall call land falls in this region, controlled by the centre on the one hand, but upon which the centre is dependent on the other. Land in this sense overlaps periphery. When centres extend beyond boundaries, these extensions may be of indefinite reach. Annexed centres may or may not accommodate themselves to new rule, or pay tribute under the threat of the destruction of their ways, but, insofar as

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they are subject, their centres and boundaries are part of the land of the dominat­ ing centre. There can be no anxiety with regard to one’s central values if the same values are everywhere to be found, and the broader world as periphery is in effect denied, and its reality as land asserted. The land related to a centre may be limited in a number of practical ways, by natural barriers or by the limits of arable land, by the resources available for clear­ ing or irrigation, by the availability o£ transportation necessary for commerce and administration, or by contact (and conflict or accommodation) with groups from other centres also making claim to the same land. But there is nothing intrin­ sic to the notion of land itself to limit its possible extent from any centre. Lands may thus be regarded as notionally endless, and are closely related to empire, as I shall discuss at length in the next chapter. Lands, as ordinary language acknowledges, may be nations. The word ‘nation’ itself preserves at least implicitly central values, descending from the Latin nascor, ‘to be begotten’, ‘to be native’, ‘to arise’. ‘Nation’ is thus closely related to ‘nature’, both that with which we are born and that power by virtue of which we are born. This closely parallels the fusion of ‘second nature’ - in this case the ‘national’ and nature. That is, the common derivation of ‘nation’ and ‘nature’ points to the deep tendency - deeper than national identification - to suppose that the specific usages we learn as members of particular cultures are natural and therefore universalizable (and to our equally deep tendency to suppose that alternatives to our own usages are both unnatural and nugatory). The land within the control of a centre may lie outside a boundary, and articu­ lation of this extent requires allotment, the division of one parcel of land from another, which in turn implies a principle or agent of division, identified in some way with the centre and ultimately responsible for the maintenance of divisions and allotments. This means that the rise of agriculture, the care of fields, entailed not simply social organization but a new kind of political subordination. Even if pre-agricultural people identified themselves with territories and resources, it was with the rise of agriculture that the face of the world began to become the great collective record of successive claims to divisions of land. Agricultural populations are relatively stationary and their centres more or less permanent, and in such circumstances, chieftains and kings became responsible for the division of land, and for the appropriate subordination of others. The megalith builders of Neolithic Europe, to return to that example, constructed centres of one kind or another, or clusters of centres, and the elites they interred inhabited these centres in death and continued to be linked with collective life and sustenance, and with the land in which they were buried. It may also be supposed that these leaders allotted the land worked by others, or maintained or changed older allotments. The Egyptian pharaoh possessed the land of Egypt, which he assigned to others as a fundamental exercise of power. The pharaoh also guaranteed the boundaries of these allotments, and it has long been argued that it was in Egypt, where boundaries were hidden by the annual flooding of the Nile, that geometry - the measurement of the earth - was first invented and practised. This gives another dimension to the pharaoh as measurer and builder, as ‘stretcher ofcords’. The Egyptian pharaoh is far along in the history of the development of institu-

tions of rule, and, as we are about to see in Chapter 3, the association of rule and measure raises the general issue of surveying, and ‘rule’ is closely related to ‘supervision’. There are many cultural variants of the new conditions brought about by agriculture. Surveying is a literal and fundamental means by which rule is applied. ‘Cadas­ tral’ surveying, the establishment of boundaries, is from the Greek meaning ‘acc­ ording to a line, or series’, and perhaps refers to the sighting of landmarks to determine boundaries. Some notion of the significance of such boundaries may be gained by considering that a ‘cadaster’ may still be a register of taxable property, or that the term for tax in Renaissance Florence was catasto, the taxable having changed from land to property, the common term being ‘measure’. ‘Region’ is from regio, ‘a drawn straight line’, also related to regere, ‘to rule’, rex, ‘king’, and rectus, ‘right’. The just drawing of boundaries establishes rights to a portion of land, which are effected and guaranteed (but also taxed) by central author­ ity. Even ‘register’, as in ‘tax register’, is, etymologically, a royal list. But also important for our purposes is the association of surveying with ‘lines of sight’, which, as we have seen, are near-notional, of near-perfect economy. Surveying - the imposition of lines of sight - potentially involves the imposition of the planar order I shall treat in detail in Chapter 5; but the imposition of lines of sight on the surface of the earth is always inconsistent both with topographical details - hills, valleys, vegetation - and, at the other end of the scale, with the curvature of the earth. The earth itself does not conform to a measure, but it must be treated as if it were a notionally regular surface in order to be measured. When it is measured, as we shall also see in Chapter 5, the measure must be local and arbitary, finally justified by the centre by which rule itself is sanctioned. In Mesopotamia, as in Egypt, the measurement of fields was an especially pres­ sing issue because of periodic flooding, which often covered boundary stones, so that fields had to be resurveyed. Perhaps because the setting of boundary stones in itself is arbitrary, and certainly because there was an obvious incentive to move them, such changes were strongly forbidden in codes of law, again ultimately enforced by the ruler and by the gods. Babylonian boundary stones marking royal grants of land from the later second millennium bc are carved with symbols of celestial deities including Shamash, the sun, god of justice and patron of kings, over images of their many-horned temples. If the boundaries marked by these stones were established by sighting the appearance of heavenly bodies on the horizon, then boundaries themselves might be regarded as traces of heavenly order. Some stones invoke the gods to punish anyone who might destroy or bury them. Such a fool, in defiance of the king and of the gods, will be cursed; his family will be destroyed, his water will be taken away and dreadful sickness will dog his short life. In Mesopotamia, fields were not only divided, but, no doubt in the closest conjunction with these divisions, they were also irrigated. The construction of waterworks, so vast as to require collective effort, was the responsibility of the king. The king was thus literally the source of the life of the crops, of the wealth of those who administered the land, and of the livelihoods of those who worked it. Kings not only built irrigation projects, but could destroy them, and the threat of such devastation must have strengthened kings politically by making them

2.19 LAND AND DIVISION

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protectors as well as builders and providers of the all-important sources of water. The relation between the measurement of land and the extension of political rule (as well as the control of social status) is extremely close, and this connec­ tion has hardly loosened with the emergence of Western modernism. The borders of the nations of modern Europe show long histories of accommodation and conflict, and the complexity of the natural forms serving to define their borders is much in contrast to borders in the ‘New World*, which,Although complicated by the regional claims of colonizing powers, tend to be straight and regular, defined by the newly mapped world of the explorers. Australia, Canada and the United States, are all administratively divided less by natural boundaries such as rivers and mountains than by longitude and latitude. It is important to insist that these boundaries are jurisdictions and entail the right to rule, or to be subject to one set of rules or another. The ‘New World’, in short, was divided up accord­ ing to what was regarded as a universal, justifying metric order, without reference to any existing boundaries or claims to land. This definition of ‘land’ was not only the initial imposition of Western order, it became the basis for royal grants to colonists and for subsequent economic development and further partition. Thomas Jefferson, himself a surveyor, imagined an American democracy based upon the division of land among free citizens, and something of the political significance of that dream is visible in the longitudinal and latitudinal grid of states, and in the ongoing division and subdivision of American land and cities.

The appropriation of the centre

chapter 3

3.1 ORIENTATION, KINGSHIP AND EMPIRE

‘Divine rulers’ have governed many cultures - some not so far from the present - and in such circumstances structures stating rule characteristically serve to legitimize the exercise of sovereignty. The ruler as patron is uniquely responsi­ ble for the construction, maintenance and renovation of these structures, which typically embody the prevailing model of the world at the scale of central wealth and power. The result is the association of rule and authority with the larger frame of the world, which, by the same token, it is the sole prerogative of the ruler to imitate. As part of their justification, rulers also appropriate the centre, the point from which the world is defined, with its values of collective genera­ tion, and the combination of notional ‘cosmic’ order and vital centrality provides the basis for the construction of social order at its most inclusive definition as political order. Many rulers have identified with dominant heavenly bodies, or with the deities of these heavenly bodies, usually the sun or the Pole Star, and it cannot be overemphasized that this identification was not simply symbolic or allegorical, but was rather an assertion of authority, and of authority more or less sanctioned by the order of the world itself. In this chapter I will consider examples of the fusion of cosmic and political order. Many of these examples are historically connected - the ‘Sun kings’ from the pharaohs of Egypt to Augustus to Louis XIV (and Louis XVI), for example - but this need not be so, and ultimately what I am describing is based in the conditional possibilities of centrality and of the extension of rule to land and periphery. The beginnings of the ideologies of imperial rule with which I will be concerned are to be found together with the rise of ancient Near Eastern cities. The practices of agriculture having long been established, a cluster of innovations occurred in a relatively short time. These innovations were systematic in that all of them involved activities and skills presupposing developed notionality, and, more specifically, developed planarity, of the kinds I shall treat at length in Chapter 5. Cities, temples and palaces themselves must be planned; and the order and ratios of their parts must be worked out beforehand on regular, planar surfaces, or laid out on surfaces that may be treated as if planar, in order for their dimensions finally to be right. The invention of writing and record-keeping - that is, of putting uniformly sized signs and units in some conventional planar relation - facilitated the organization of specialized economic roles at the new scale of the city-state. Writing, tabulation and computation made taxation possible, as well as the allimportant collection' and redistribution of crops, just as measuring and survey­ ing were necessary for the parcelling out of land. That the institutions and practices I have described are now so routine as to seem self-evident only indicates that the development of planarity was absolutely

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epoch-making, the formation of the epoch in which we still live. The implications of planarity for the articulation of social space were simply and literally more far-reaching still. Together with these practices, the world at large became conceivable as an indefinite and more or less notional land including all places. Such inclusion is, however, contrary to places as discussed in the last chapter; places are bounded and definite, much as the Latin definitio is a real spatial metaphor, incorporating finire, ‘to set bounds’*.‘enclose’, and finis, ‘end’, ‘limit’, but also ‘territory’. Land, as we have seen at the end of the last chapter, is indefinite in that it is simply beyond the boundaries of a place. Planarity gives this indefinite­ ness a new dimension. A notional plane is indefinite in that it may be of any extent, and if land is understood in these planar terms, then it is also understood in terms of the conditions for measure, which is necessarily the imposition of an arbitrary unit of measure. Whatever may be measured may also be brought under a single rule. In English we use the same word, ‘ruler’, for a' king or emperor and for a device to measure distances and draw straight lines. In Latin the word for king is rex, the active form of which is regere, ‘.to rule’. The word regula, from which we take ‘rule’, ‘regular’ and ‘regularity’, means ‘rule’, ‘pattern’ (from pater, ‘father’, like ‘patron’) or ‘straight measure’. ‘Reign’, which we may use metaphor­ ically - ’peace reigned over all’ - is from regnum, ‘kingdom’ or ‘rule’, and again ultimately from rex. The same is true of ‘realm’. The Latin rectus (‘straight’), from regere, gives us the English ‘right’, which may refer to things that cannot be otherwise (‘right’ angles), to the ‘correct’ (cum plus rectus, ‘with right’), to the decorous and moral. The word ‘direction’ comes from a prefix, dis- meaning ‘apart’, and regere, the word meaning ‘to rule’. The directions, so to speak, rule or lead the world into parts; or lead us rightly through the world they themselves divide. As we shall see in Chapter 5, the new condition of planarity at social spatial scale made possible the hierarchical images that fundamentally changed the relation of images to social space itself. Hierarchy raises other issues of subordi­ nation and command, and of new social spatial forms and activities. The ‘columns’, the ‘rank and file’ (Figure 103) of military formations are also examples of planar order. ‘Regiment’ and ‘regimen’ are, like rex, from regere. Roman soldiers marching in normal formation were characterized as quadratics, squared. ‘Tactics’ is from taxis, ‘order’, from tassein, ‘to arrange’, and must refer to getting forces ‘in line’ before employing them in one way or another. So described, a fighting force is based upon what I shall call (in Chapter 5) a hierarchical grid, in which some units are larger than others, as officers are superior to soldiers. Similar kinds of order, as we shall see, combined with existing social hierarchies, could extend to the arrangement of courts and bureaucracies. The rulers who identified with the heavenly bodies defining this directional order (which in itself might give universal sanction to local central order), might thus also identify themselves with the order and regularity of the space and time of the world upon which the heavens face, and which they mark and measure. It is the ruler who guarantees the complex order of civilization by establishing and guaranteeing the weights and measures, who gives laws and enforces them with an authority reflecting the structure of the world. It is easy to understand

why rulers have traditionally insisted upon their status as builders; building on a grand scale states the sole right to demand common, politically unifying expendi­ tures of wealth and labour; or it displays the might of ruler and state in having seized the wealth and labour of others through conquest. Any palace or capital city accommodates the distinguishing (and regimented) activities of rule, but it may also be a representation and a presentation of the very grounds of the author­ ity to rule.

3.2 THE SUMERIANS

3.2 THE SUMERIANS

The building of cities and writing, the first of which gives us the word ‘civiliza­ tion’ (from the Latin civitas, ‘city’), and the second of which is generally regarded as one of the great watersheds in human history, the passage from preliterate to literate, and thus into historical time, first occurred in what the Greeks called Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now Iraq, Iran and Syria. The people with whom these great transformations are especially associated are called the Sumerians, after the language they spoke. The changes that began to take place in the early fourth millennium bc were based on already ancient patterns of settlement and trade, and, within these patterns, on the development of the values of the centre. The plain the Sumerians settled was fertile, but needed both dams and irriga­ tion to be productive; it was also very poor in natural resources, including wood and stone. Extensive control of water necessitated new levels of collaboration and organization; and more and more trade must have been necessary to meet the increasing needs of an ever more complex society for materials not locally available. Stone was brought from as far away as India and the Arabian peninsula, wood from Lebanon. Building materials were limited to mud brick, stone and wood being used only sparingly for sacred structures. Bricks were painted, white­ washed and finally glazed to protect them from erosion, but also to distinguish structures that otherwise would have been inappropriately drab. It was frequently necessary to repair and rebuild. Each Sumerian city-state belonged to a god, and the Sumerians believed themselves to have been created to serve the gods. Some cities were especially sacred because of the rank of their god. Eridu was regarded as the first city, founded by Ea, the divine founder of Sumerian civilization, and therefore of civilization itself. Nippur was the home of the patron god of Sumer, Enlil, the storm god and father of all the other gods. At Eridu a series of superimposed temples began with a small shrine about four metres (13 feet) square, built in the late fifth millennium bc. In successive rebuildings the house of the god stood higher and higher over other buildings. This temple (Figure 82) conforms to the pattern generally followed in Sumerian temples, both in the organization of its interior ritual space and in its charac­ teristic alignment, which is intercardinal, the walls facing the four quarters. Aside from the alignment of their temples, Sumerian cities seem to have been unplanned. The temple was the commercial as well as the ritual centre of the city. The city was bounded by walls, perhaps initially as much for definition of precinct and jurisdiction as for defence, although it is difficult to separate these two. As we have just seen, the powers of co-ordination that grew up with the

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82 Stratigraphic reconstruction of the Temple at Eridu, c.5000-3000 bc. Numbered levels VI-XVI are one above another and are staggered for clarity. Larger numbers indicate earlier levels. After J. N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia, Fig. 2:2

institution of kingship lent themselves both to the creation of armies and to the notion of empire, and thus, as might be expected, some of the earliest records are records of warfare among the earliest cities. Once established, the centre, marked by the presence of the temple, contin­ ued to be respected as the god’s shrine but was successively rebuilt, made more elaborate, more elevated, with more complicated ritual approaches. As temples became temple platforms, or ziggurats (from a word meaning ‘height’), they assumed the symbolic value of mountains. The ziggurat of Enlil was called ‘House of the Mountain, Mountain of the Storm, Bond between Heaven and Earth’. The Great Mother, Ninhursag, was the Lady of the Mountains. The preserva­ tion and restoration of the temple was the responsibility of the king and also presented the opportunity for a great votive offering to the god by the king and the people of the city-state (and also the opportunity to redistribute goods as wages). The king, or priest-king, was divine in the sense of being closest to the god, closest to the generative life of the centre, thus the intermediary between the life- and fortune-giving gods and the people. The ziggurat became the elevated and more or less exclusive place of access to these life-giving forces. 3.3 TEMPLE AND PALACE

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If the king was the planner and symbolic ‘builder’ of the temple, it fell to the people (either ‘subjects’ or ‘subject peoples’) actually to construct the temple and its platform, to transport the earth, mould the bricks, to move, raise and stack them. Like the building and maintenance of systems of irrigation, which also made the new collective life of the city possible, these projects required adminis­ tration. The temple, in addition to being the sacred centre of the city, also became its administrative centre. The head of this ever-growing administration must finally have been the king, or priest-king. And as the level of organization and administration grew, political power also grew and centralized, and over the centuries priest and king were differentiated. Over the centuries, too, new public buildings appear alongside the first public form of the temple, presumably to house administration. It is from these buildings, in turn, that the palace emerged, a form which, as kingship grew and strengthened, incorporated the forms of temple and ziggurat.

The god, and therefore the temple, not only owned the Sumerian city, but at first also owned the surrounding land that supported it. The meaning of the centre thus takes on an extremely important inflection: the house of the god not only anchors the four quarters that cross in it, it also unifies and gpverns the further division of the land it surveys. As the directions define the land from a centre, the surrounding area to an indefinite extent may be placed under the rule of the centre. The king and his administrators, who allotted land, thus established and enforced boundaries, and set the weights and measures according to which such allotments were made, and according to which wages, salaries, exchange and commerce could be regularized and therefore regulated. It was in these circumstances that tabulation and record-keeping, the beginning of writing, took shape in the characteristic cuneiform on clay tablets, and it is no coincidence that the earliest period of Sumerian history, called the Protoliterate by historians, which ended around 3000 bc, at about the same time as the invention of writing, is followed, not as might be expected, by the Literate, but by the Dynastic. Writing, this means, was fundamental to the establishment of the institution of kingship. Political unification and centralization required tabula­ tion and standardization, and the writing that made this record-keeping possible also made possible the transcription and preservation of oral myths of origin associated with the centre. Gilgamesh was the semi-divine and deified king of Uruk, who lived around 2600 bc. He built the great walls of his city, in which he was said to have placed a tablet of his story, which was recorded some 400 years later by the kings of the third Dynasty at Ur, no doubt partly to establish their own heroic lineage. As social order became more complex, and its parts more interdependent, these new relations became both more necessary to maintain and more fragile. As a larger number of non-agricultural groups - scribes, soldiers, traders and craftsmen - became dependent upon an agricultural surplus, the king’s mediation on behalf of the people to the gods became more important because now the survival of this whole interdependent system depended upon the gods’ good will. As the head of this system, the king became more powerful, but this position also became more precarious, for if water and life did not come to fields and crops then the king was responsible not only for famine but for potential social crisis of a new magnitude. It may be supposed that pressure to maintain these systems contributed to increased conflict as rulers sought to supplement the pro­ duction of their city-states by conquest. This provided an impulse to unification of the whole plain of Sumer, and to the invention of empire. As empires rose and fell, and as the idea of divine kingship was formulated, to persist for thousands of years afterward, the ruler continued to be called by the name that looks back to the intercardinal orientation of the Sumerian temple as the first statement of such absolute notional dominion: the ruler identified with one god as the ‘lord of the four quarters’. 3.4 KINGSHIP IN EGYPT The ancient Near East was not simply a collection of city-states, it was also a network of vigorous trade routes, along which goods were transported and exchanged. There were alliances and frictions, further complicated by the fact

3.4

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83 Palette of King Narmer, from Hierakonpolis, Egypt, c.3000 bc. Schist, height 63.5 cm (15 in). Egyptian Museum, Cairo

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that not all those in the region, much less those who continually entered the region, were city builders. The concentrations of wealth, the very splendour of the votive offerings felt necessary to assure the continued favour of the gods, must have made cities irresistible to groups who shared none of the piety of their inhabitants. Armies and military leaders emerged as ever more powerful, and the advantages of expansion, consolidation and regimentation became obvious. The Upper Egyptian city of Hierakonpolis (a later Greek name, which means ‘Falcon City’) was built after the middle of the fourth millennium bc with certain salient features of a Sumerian city. The temple precinct is in the centre, surrounded by a revetment with rounded corners similar to those found in some Sumerian temple precincts, like that of Khafaje, near Baghdad. The temple building at Hierakonpolis itself was rebuilt later, but its alignment remained the same, like the precinct as a whole. The builders of Hierakonpolis, perhaps the chieftains of the clan of the falcon, Horus, had thus built a microcosmic centre of the world at the crossing of its four axes, a centre dedicated to their patron spirit, expand­ able to entirely new proportions. The ruler of this centre was, by implication, the ruler of the world, and it was from this city, at the very end of the fourth millennium, that Upper and Lower Egypt were brought under one rule, much as they were subject to the long northward flow of the River Nile. The so-called Narmer palette (Figure 83), found in the temple of Horus at Hierakonpolis, was made as a votive offering and commemorates the unification of the two Egypts. It places the record of this momentous event, together with the image and name of the king whose accomplishment it was, forever in the presence of the deity with whom Narmer identified and whose divine force had magnified his own. Mesopotamian practices surrounding divinity and kingship must have added to already ancient African traditions of rule, and the style of

the palette is fully and characteristically Egyptian. It represents the adaptation and culmination of the highly developed craft traditions of Pre-Dynastic Egypt, and stands at the beginning of a royal canon for the representation of figures that would be maintained with little change for thousands of years. Such palettes, which were often buried with the dead, were made of schist, as this one is, and were used for grinding kohl, the pigment used by the Egyptians to paint their eyes. The palette was reserved for extraordinary function by its large size and fine facture, and perhaps was made for the ritual painting of the eyes of a cult statue, often the final step in the ritual enlivenment of an image. At the top of both sides of the palette are symmetrical frontal images of the goddess Hathor. Her name means ‘house of Horus’, and her cow heads flank the serekh, or ‘proclaimed, enclosing the name of Narmer. (Narmer is shown with a bull’s tail on both sides of the palette, and as a bull destroying a city at the bottom of the upper face, on which he wears the red crown of lower Egypt. One of the names of the pharaoh was ‘Horus, Mighty Bull, appearing in truth’, and bulls’ horns were prominent in the cenotaphs of the early kings at Saqqara.) Royal names, it may be noted, were the earliest Egyptian hieroglyphs, probably so that the king’s name could be forever repeated, remembered and invoked; it is also around the time of the unification that the attempt to preserve royal bodies by mummification began. The lower part of the serekh is an architectural facade with twin flanking towers. Its parallel buttresses, which are to be seen in many early royal tombs, also distinguished Sumerian temples. There are many closely similar representations of such temples in Protoliterate Sumerian art, and in the later stele of Hammurabi (Figure 84) the sun god Shamash is shown seated on a throne with a comparable pattern, with a range of tiny mountains as his foot­ stool. This suggests once again that the Sumerian temple added its example to the royal palace (and royal tomb) as a centre of divine rule. Cattle herding and agriculture took their places in the colossal northern African time-spectrum between about 6000 and 5500 bc. Agriculture was accompanied by pottery and social stratification, and Nubian cultures connect the beginnings of agriculture to the beginnings of dynastic Egypt. Nubian pot­ tery early on reached a high stage of refinement in ware that lasted into dynastic times. Egypt, the profuse source of coloured stones, also had long traditions of artisans highly skilled in working them. Pre-Dynastic burials were more or less elaborately articulated as houses of the dead, who were typically laid in the earth individually, foetally flexed, head to the south and facing west, surrounded by pottery, equipment, amulets and offerings. In some cases there are wooden coffins with shallow arched lids, buried with luxury goods beneath tumuli. By the time the first kings (including Narmer) were buried at Abydos, their tombs were cut in rock beneath what had become large, shallowly vaulted mud-brick structures called mastabas, the Arabic word for ‘benches’; they were oriented, fronted by stelae inscribed with the name of the king, surrounded by a wall to form a precinct and flanked by subsidiary burials of retainers and servants, mostly women. Egyptian gods were objects of local cults, founders of places of indetermi­ nate antiquity, usually with a consort and child, forming a triad. Some local gods assumed national importance because of their association with the king, whose ‘place’ thus became the whole of Egypt.

3.4 KINGSHIP IN EGYPT

84 Stele of Hammurabi, from Susa, Iraq, c.1760 bc. Basalt, height of whole stele 2.24 m (7 ft 4 in), height of standing figure c.53 cm (21 in). Louvre, Paris

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The origins of the god Osiris, or of the cult that became this god, are probably very ancient, reaching back to Egypt’s agricultural and pastoral beginnings, to the collective awareness of the great powers confronted and husbanded in planting, harvesting and storing seed, or in the breeding, herding and slaughtering of cattle. The kings of Egypt identified with this heaven-sent potency and regeneration from the beginning, and Osiris himself, with his crook_and flail, was said to have been a great king, the teacher of agriculture, the prototype of later kings, like Quetzalcoatl in Ancient America. As ancient founding king, Osiris had been cut to pieces by his jealous brother king, Seth. His sister and wife Isis bound him back together, thus bringing him back to reproductive life, the mythical origin of mummification. Osiris is shown as a mummy, legs bound and forearms crossed over his chest in innumerable images, royal and otherwise. Sometimes the mummy is shown with the erect phallus of the ancient god Min. This is the root of life of Osiris, quickened by Isis so that she might become the mother of Horus, the ever-reborn, eternally completing their triad. A second deity, perhaps the early consort of Osiris, whose core meaning must again be very ancient, is Hathor, whose cow-heads crown the palette of Narmer. Hathor, deity of pastoralists, mother of herds, is also associated with the sky, thus with Nut, the great overarching mother whose body is the heavens and whose hands and feet are the four corners of the world, the cosmic cow who is sometimes shown nourishing the pharaoh from her udder. Nut’s body is covered with stars; as the night sky she (not the earth) swallows the sun, which is literally rejuvenated in her entrails between her mouth and her vagina. The first emergence was the primeval hill, the benben (from a word which means ‘brilliant ascend­ ing’). The sun is born from the sky at the horizon, between two mountains. These primordial images will play countless variations, often at colossal scale, in the long history of Egyptian royal art and architecture. Nut, the sky, and Hathor, are mothers of the sun, with which the pharaoh came increasingly to be identified. In the story of Osiris, Isis, having been decapi­ tated in her sleep by her angry son Horus, took the head of the cow Hathor (which it will be recalled means ‘house of Horus’). Here is the mythic account of pharaonic succession, which passed from queen (Isis) to eldest daughter (Hathor), consort of the ‘Mighty Bull’. This meant, in the normal course of succes­ sion, that the pharaoh, in order legitimately to possess the land of Egypt, took his sister as queen. Isis donned the head of Hathor to become the consort of Horus/Osiris, hence the mother of the new Horus, who will continue to occupy the throne of Isis. The two images of Hathor on each side of the palette of Narmer (Figure 83), and the serekh between them repeat much the same thing. He is Horus in his house (or palace), and his name is the sun rising between two mountains (the towers of his palace). The name of the king, by virtue of simple position, has been literally elevated to divine status. Usually Horus, the falcon, is shown perched on the serekh, but in this case he is shown in the panel below, at the level of the king’s crown - the white crown of upper Egypt. He faces the king. In his right talon, Horus holds a rope tethering a head much like that of the person Narmer holds by the forelock. In the largest panel on either side of the palette, Narmer

brandishes a mace in his right hand over an obviously defeated foe, unclothed, that is, stripped of status. In this main panel - and in all others as well - hierar­ chy is denoted by relative size and position; the king is largest and highest, as well as most fully and elaborately dressed. Accordingly, Narmer must be shown victorious over another king, since the subjugated figure is also relatively large. The naked figures splayed and trampled beneath the king (the tiny plan of a rectangular city with buttressed walls is directly beneath the king’s right foot) are smaller still, and the sandal-bearer behind him, marked by a rosette, is the smallest of all. Narmer appears again on the other side of the palette, still under the double visage of Hathor, and above the panel with interlaced serpopards. (This is a Sumerian motif; it was in the circle between the necks that pigment would actually have been prepared and used, so that this side might have been visible to the image of the deity as his eyes were painted.) This time the king wears the crown of Lower Egypt in a review of defeated foes, shown as ten bound corpses, castrated and decapitated, their heads set between their legs. Above their sad ranks Horus is shown twice, once next to his shrine and again above a high-prowed boat, perhaps meaning that the image of the god was brought on the Nile to the scene of his victory. The king’s procession is led by bearers of the standards of four of the nomes (administrative areas), who, despite their near diminutive size in hierar­ chical scale, were central to the king’s consolidation of power. The king himself approaches from our left, preceded and followed by smaller figures. The Narmer palette states the essential elements of the long tradition of Egyptian divine kingship. Every pharaoh was Horus, seated on the Horus throne, which was called the ‘Mother of the King’, that is, Isis, or Hathor. In taking the throne, the pharaoh became a living centre; he ascended the primeval hill, the island that emerged from the first water, the benben stone, to sit upon the ‘Mother of the King’ with all its generative power. The coronation of the king coincided with the beginning of the year and marked a new beginning of time. When birds were released as part of this ceremony they were meant to carry the good news of the rebirth of time to all the four quarters of the world. The kings of the First Dynasty built a new capital at Memphis, in Lower (northern) Egypt, near modern Cairo, and this great city, of which little is now known, served as the administrative centre of Egypt. The chief deity of Memphis was Ptah, for whom the largest temple in the city, and in all of Egypt, was built. It is possible that Ptah was originally a great founder or inventor. There was no precedent for the capital city at Memphis, and someone must have planned it, just as someone must have invented the canonical royal proportions and formulae of presentation evident in Narmer’s palette. If so, however that may be, Ptah became a creator-god, who had not simply brought the world into existence, but who, by breathing their names, had given life and spirit to the gods who actually created the world. Like the pharaoh himself, Ptah came to be identified with the primeval hill; he was ‘that from which all emerged’, the principle of order, the ‘distinguishable’ (that is, the distinct from chaos), the patron deity of the arts. The chief priest of Ptah at Memphis in the Old Kingdom was called ‘Greatest of the Controllers of Artisans’. In Ptah, the magical power of the shaper of materi­ als, the mover, measurer, planner and builder, the possessor of incomprehensi-

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85 Projection of the complex of King Zoser, Saqqara, Egypt, c.2610 BC

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ble skill, the deviser of machines and maker of images, was associated with the king and the execution of his power. Through Ptah the king’s activities were identified with the creation of the cosmos of the world itself, and building and making were integral to the justification of Egyptian kingship from the very beginning. Around 2650 bc the third-dynasty king called Netcherikhe-Zoser (usually called Zoser) brought Egypt firmly under control from Memphis. Zoser was the first great king of the Old Kingdom, and when he set about the construction of his tomb at Saqqara, he greatly magnified existing traditions of Egyptian royal burial, by doing so shaping and establishing fundamental principles and forms of the ideology of kingship. Although earlier kings had been buried in shafts in living rock, and although stone had been used to distinguish important features like doorways in their precincts, Zoser and his architect Imhotep made dressed stone a royal and therefore divine material, evidence of authority of a much higher order. As they did so, they initiated foundational forms of religious and political architecture that have persisted for thousands of years. The white limestone burial precinct of Zoser (Figure 85), which absolutely distinguished his eternal home, established a decorum that was respected through the millennia of Egyptian royal building. The capital and palace of the pharaoh were built of clay brick, but his tomb, the dwelling of his eternal body, of his images and the images of his divine life, was worked in precious, indestructible stone. It was to this consummately finished and envalued precinct that the king’s uniquely powerful ka, his living spirit, could return after its sojourns among the gods and stars. If the Pre-Dynastic Egyptians had long been skilled artisans in stone, they had never been called upon for works of such magnitude. After Zoser, the quarry­ ing, moving and working of stone must have became major occupations, involv­ ing large numbers of people. At the same time that the number and degree of organization of such workers increased, however, the old traditions of refinement clearly persisted as technology and techniques were adapted and invented for the colossal new royal purposes. It was also during the Old Kingdom, the middle to late centuries of the third millennium bc, that nobles began to be given land, stone and artisans by the king for their own eternal houses. In order to meet the demand for artifacts necessary to distinguish - and to create distinctions among - the members of the aristocracy of a rich and powerful kingdom, and in order to replace these highly refined artifacts as they were continually buried with their

owners, it must have been necessary to maintain groups of artisans of all kinds, not only workers in stone, from quarriers and masons to sculptors, but also architects and painters, weavers and workers in wood and precious metals and cutters of seals. Taken altogether, these artisans literally fashioned the society and culture of divine kingship in Egypt. It is not surprising, then, that the precinct of Ptah, the god of artisans, dominated Memphis. Like Ptah, Imhotep, the administrator-architect who served Zoser, and the earliest practitioner of what we now regard as a ‘fine art’ whom we know by name, became divine. He was first regarded as a great man, a magician, then as a son of Ptah, and finally as a deity, a beneficent patron of healing. More than an architect, Imhotep was an official of the highest status. He was ‘Chancellor of the King of Lower Egypt, first after the King of Upper Egypt, Administrator of the Great Palace, Hereditary Nobleman, High Priest of Heliopolis, Builder, Sculptor and Vase-maker in Chief’. The last three titles indicate that Imhotep was responsible for architectural projects, but also for monumental stone images; he must have been heir to the skills of making the splendid vessels of rare stone, cut with drills and highly polished, distinguishing royal burials from the beginning, and found in Zoser’s tomb in great numbers. Like all Egyptian royal burials, the precinct Imhotep designed was a place of ritual, supported by a priesthood who ministered to the cult of the king, maintain­ ing the life of the sacred centre. The whole precinct (Figure 86) is aligned precisely northward, perhaps acknowledging the wandering but relentlessly northward flow of the never-distant, uniting and life-sustaining Nile. And, much as the site of Cuzco was considered an image of the heavenly rivers of the Milky Way, Egypt itself, with its great north-flowing river, might have been considered an image of the heavens, facing the northern horizon, where the constellations themselves set and rose in obedience to the Pole Star. If so, then the immemorial mean­ ings of the river’s flow were complemented by the observation of the stars, and by the astronomical knowledge of the rulers of people whose lives depended upon the regular recurrence of the seasons. This same sacred knowledge of absolute order crystallized in the perfect rightness, the animating alignment of the eternal house of Egypt’s king. The white limestone walls around Zoser’s precinct, about seven metres (thirty feet) high, repeat the serekh motif over and over, as do the earlier clay brick royal tombs at Saqqara. Precinct and boundary are perhaps images of Memphis, the Egyptian name for which means ‘white walls’. There are fifteen gateways, only one of which, at the southeast corner, actually provided entry. Throughout the complex, doorways, and thus ritual passage from one space to another, are treated with extreme care. Not only are there fourteen false entrances, but inside many doors were carved of solid stone, standing ajar on their pivots, as if for the ka to enter where no one else might. The extreme importance of passage is evident from the very first, from the entrance (toward the west from the east) which is also the only exit (toward the east from the west). Certainly the most important use of this entrance would have been the procession bearing the body of the dead king. The tall narrow doorway and vestibule is the first hypostyle hall in Egyptian architecture and the first colonnade in the history of world architecture, formed by the first columns

3.4 KINGSHIP IN EGYPT

30m

90ft 86 Plan of the complex of King Zoser. 1. Step Pyramid over mastaba. 2. Funerary temple. 3. Court with serdab and king’s image (Figure 89) in SW corner. 4. Great court with B-shaped turning posts for sed festival race. 5. Entrance hall, with only entry (SE) and portico (W). 6. Jubilee court with false chapels for gods of Upper Egypt (W) and Lower Egypt (E). 7. Small temple. 8. Court of northern palace. 9. Court of southern palace. 10. Southern tomb (27 m, 91 ft deep) with depictions of the king running his sed festival race

CHAPTER 3 THE APPROPRIATION

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87 Complex of King Zoser, entrance hall

(Figure 87). These columns are stout translations into stone of tapered bundles of reeds, originally painted red, standing on bases and ending in short block capitals. They are engaged, attached to massive walls by spurs. A narrow passage­ way may be taken immediately to the north, to the court of the king’s sed festival. At the western end of the colonnade, a second vestibule with four double columns leads to a second great ceremonial court. _ The bundles of reeds to which these columns refer may have been supports in the construction of earlier temples and palaces, but they are also like djed pillars, tall wrapped sheaths of reeds, splayed in multiple levels at the top. The djed is a hieroglyph for stability and eternity and was later associated with Hathor pregnant with Osiris, thus with renewal and resurrection. Djed hieroglyphs are to be seen in the stone model of Zoser’s palace quarters at the southern end of the complex. Much more than mere supports, then, the columns claim for the precinct of the king’s ka the ancient forces of the centre, the sacredness of eternal vitality, and eternity massively restated in the evidence of royal power, in eternal royal stone, worked to distinguished finish and brilliance. The passageway was the passage from life to death, or to the realm of death, where the king’s great spirit lived its endless life. The Zoser complex was an exclusive precinct meant to provide a place for the eternal activity of the king’s spirit, activity imagined as an endless continu­ ation of his ritual life. The sed festival was a crucial event in this ritual life, and stone pavilions were built, again in imitation and perpetuation of earlier reed counterparts, for its celebration. These pavilions face onto a narrow courtyard in which the king, in a rite that may reach far into African prehistory, was required to run a race to prove his fitness to continue to rule, his physical and spiritual potency. Since the word sed means ‘slaughter’ or sacrifice, it has been surmised that the king who failed this test was once put to death in order to make way for one stronger, although the sed festival may always have been a rite of passage, a rebirth like the birth into eternity through death. Among the delicate reliefs in his burial chambers Zoser is shown running this race, in full stride. The architectural form of the pyramid first appears at the heart of Zoser’s tomb complex (Figure 88), and this form, forever identified with ancient Egyptian culture and one of the greatest monuments of human imagination, and industry, thus appeared together with construction in stone, with the column, and as we shall see, with monumental sculpture in stone. The stepped pyramid of Zoser began as a large mastaba, unusual from the beginning in that it was entirely made of stone rather than clay brick. The amplification of the Upper Egyptian tradition of mastabas and sand tumuli effected in this change in materials was more than equalled in the progressive enlargements of the whole project. In the course of these enlargements the royal tomb became an image of a different kind, as Imhotep, chief priest of the city of the sun as well as architect, invented the social spatial ideology, and the means to construct the ideology, of divine kingship. After the mastaba had been finished with white limestone, it was encased, first in a fourstep pyramid, in effect four mastabas of decreasing size set one above the other. This was finally enlarged to a six-step pyramid 125 by no metres (411 by 3 58 feet) at its base and 64 metres (208 feet) in height, the surfaces of which were again finished with polished white limestone.

3.4 KINGSHIP IN EGYPT

88 Complex of King Zoser, view of Step Pyramid

Zoser’s pyramid resembles a Mesopotamian ziggurat (the great examples of which are later) in being tiered. The Egyptian pyramid, however, was not a temple platform but rather a cairn or tumulus, progressively elaborated to become a gigantic image. Given the importance of the centre it marked, the place of the continued life and presence of the divine king, the point of contact of the land of Egypt with the powers of generation of earth and sky, it was itself a great source of regeneration, and it is again reasonable to suppose that it was an image of the first source of generation, the primeval hill, the first creation of the world. The hieroglyph for the primeval hill was a three-step pyramid, and this hill was symbolically ascended when the king assumed the throne, the ‘Mother of the King’. The dominant faces of the final pyramid were to the north and east. Zoser was buried in a vertical shaft sunk centre northward in bedrock beneath the original mastaba. On the eastern side are eleven vertical shafts, driven nearly 3 5 metres (115 feet) into stone, for members of the royal family. To the north of the pyramid was the mortuary temple from which a sloping passageway leads to the king’s tomb. In this temple were celebrated the incessant rituals of care for the eternally living king. The mortuary temple was double, perhaps to show that the two Egypts sustained - and were sustained by - their one monarch. In a chamber on the northeastern side of the temple, immediate to the pyramid, and overlooking its own courtyard, was a life-size seated statue of Zoser himself (Figure 89). Monumental sculpture in stone must be added to the epoch-making features of the growing royal style. Perhaps the first group sculpture, Zoser, his queen and daughters, stood in the court of the sed festival. Only the great broken mother figures of Malta may rival these royal figures in age. Zoser is carved of limestone and was originally painted. The squared stone out of which his image is made retains its cubic faces, one of which is divided and elaborated in the frontal symmetry of the figure, the whole taking its place in the embracing quadratic and cardinal geometry of the tomb and its precinct. The eyes, once of rock crystal, have been gouged out, but they still carry an utterly

89 King Zoser, from the northeast court adjoining the Step Pyramid (Figure 86, 3). Limestone with traces of colour (white on mantle, brown on skin, black on hair), height 137.5 cm (55 in). Egyptian Museum, Cairo

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self-contained, impassive and seemingly endless parallel gaze over high cheekbones and full African lips. The king is dressed for his sed festival, for renewal, and faces north to the celestial destination of the Nile. When the Egyptian kings appropriated the forms and values of the centre to their rule, the values of regeneration were associated with powers embodied in the king as king and as individual. It is understandable that, as this appropria­ tion occurred, the Egyptians began.both to preserve lhe royal body and to reproduce the image and presence of the royal person. The long tradition initiated by Zoser’s image is thus an insistence upon the continuity of kingship, minimally subject to changes in style, and never so individual as to break the series. And even if the pharaonic image should become a portrait in the sense we understand, that is, even if it should become a record of the features of an individual king, it is still a reproduction in an essentially immutable series. The forces of regener­ ation are subordinate to the reproduction of the king, to the dynasty and succes­ sion of the king. In Zoser’s time, at the beginning of the Old Kingdom, the greatest care was still given, as it was in many cultures, to the burial of the chieftain, the interces­ sor with the world of the spirit, who might continue to act on behalf of the ongoing generations. Embalming was not so much preservation as it was a ritual preparation for appropriate entry into eternal life. Since these long rites were originally uniquely royal, they must originally have had distinctly royal meanings. After embalming and mummification, a ceremony was performed called the Opening of the Mouth. At the entrance to the tomb, the mummy was placed upright, and the eyes and mouth were touched with an adze in order to re-ani­ mate the senses, once again to give the ka a home. This ceremonial adze was called by the same name as the constellation we called the Big Dipper. The Egyptians called it the Haunch of Seth, murderer of Osiris and enemy of Horus, and, in the most general mythical terms, representative of the principle of disorder and chaos. The constellation was thought to be bound to the Pole Star, around which it turns, and the touching of the king’s mouth with the image of the sacrificed Seth defeated disorder, thus once and for all identifying the pharaoh as the master over disorder, that is, as the controlling and unchanging Pole Star. The battle for the unification of Egypt was thus fought in the heavens themselves, and the victorious king was ever victorious. Osiris was ever reborn, Horus was ever triumphant; and the great and splendid tomb of the king, the image of the primeval hill, was like the one animating pivot of the heavens. Finally, it was an adze, a cutting tool, that was used in the ceremony, and the priest who performed it re-enacted the gesture by which Ptah animated the gods. It is art, the ultimate art of healing, the magic of Isis who lives in the throne, that joins the life of the pharaohs at once to the seasonal life of the river and of the people, and to the eternal life of the stars. 3.5 THE PYRAMIDS AT GIZA From our vantage point nearly five millennia later, while still working in trad­ itions initiated by the Egyptians, it is difficult to appreciate the radical novelty of their first constructions in dressed stone. This is partly because the innovation has been so often repeated as to have come to seem ‘natural’, and the innova-

3.5 THE pyramids AT GIZA

90 The Pyramids at Giza, Egypt, 4 th Dynasty, c.25 3 0-2460 bc, from the southwest. The Great Pyramid is farthest away

tiveness of their constructions is overshadowed by the sublimity of the scale at which these first great outcroppings of the human imagination crystallized, the immemorial rock bones of Egypt laboriously worked and thrust up in anticipa­ tion of the immortality of the living centre, constructed according to cosmic pattern. Egyptian royal architects and builders developed the potential meanings of materials and skilled facture to unprecedented monumental proportions, at once exploiting the level of organization made possible (and necessary) by national unity, stating the ideology of empire in the very self-evidence of their huge works, and shaping new precincts and new, uniform patterns of social behaviour and service. The most famous of these great stone structures is the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, the oldest and only surviving wonder of the ancient world. The Great Pyramid and its slightly later companion pyramids of Chephren and Mycerinus standing diagonally to the southwest (Figure 90) are the greatest works of divine kingship, or of the highly organized collective labour finally commanded by the god-king at the apex of new hierarchies. The Great Pyramid at Giza was built by the Fourth-Dynasty pharaoh Cheops (or Khufu) on a rock plateau on the western side of the Nile some 24 kilometres (15 miles) north of Memphis and Saqqara west of modern Cairo. The Great Pyramid originally reached a height of some 150 metres (480 feet) above its almost perfectly square base, 233 metres (756 feet) on a side. It was made of as many as 2.5 million blocks of limestone weighing an average of about 2.5 tons each. This colossal volume of stone was sheathed in polished white Tura limestone from the hills east of Cairo. Only the peak of the nearby pyramid of Chephren survives to suggest how this brilliant surface might have looked, the pyramids themselves having become quarries for later pharaohs, and for the building of Cairo in the tenth century. As extraordinary as the sheer magnitude of the Great Pyramid and the expendi­ ture of human labour it records is the precision with which it was planned and constructed. Not only were vast quantities of stone quarried, dressed, transported and manoeuvred into place, but these thousands of thousands of blocks were

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fitted so exactly that the sides of the pyramid differ only by inches from the obviously intended equality, and face the cardinal points with only the smallest deviations. Moreover, the burial chamber of the pharaoh is connected by narrow shafts to the north and south faces of the pyramid, which may in turn be aligned with stars and constellations. The pyramids at Giza were thus laid out, constructed and finished with the same precision to be seen in Egyptian stonework from the Pre-Dynastic period onward; now, however, this precision is realized in notional forms at much more than colossal scale. Cheops’s pyramid was built over a central outcropping of stone, the area around which was smoothed to near-notional exactness. This exactness was probably achieved by damming water over the table of stone, which was then worked to conformity with the water’s level. Given the enormity of the project of building the Great Pyramid, it seems unlikely that the central mass of stone was left merely to save time and labour. The site must also have been chosen with the utmost care and deliberation, and its laying out must have involved ceremonies in which the pharaoh himself took part. (The chief-of-works, and perhaps architect, was Cheops’s cousin the Vizier Hemon.) It would be altogether consistent with such ritual preparation if the fashioning of the foundations of the pyramid were the re-enactment of the myth of foundation and generation. Thus the water used to level the site, more than an archaic carpenter’s level, might be seen as Nu, the originary water of chaos, which became a perfect surface, out of which arose the primal mound, the beginning of order and the birthplace of the sun. The basis of the pyramid is then an image of the benben stone, the house of the benu bird, the phoenix, at Heliopolis. The precision with which the Great Pyramid was constructed is an indica­ tion of the importance seen by its builders not just in facture and finish, but in the notional limit approached by finish, as if, having grasped this limit, it was possible and necessary to construct a terrestrial reality at its level, to make a notional place where the king might appropriately live forever after his passage to death. Cheops and his architects, by fashioning a scrupulously near-notional model of the world and its origin, created an eternal home for the royal ka and the royal body, preserved, re-enlivened and perpetually sustained by esoteric ritual. As we have seen, it is often evidently important even in the simplest burials to place people at last in right relation to the larger order of things, however that is understood. At Giza (Figure 91) exact alignment with respect to the cardinal directions provides a single principle for the whole precinct to which the Great Pyramid is central. The ‘entrance’ to the pyramid is on the north face, and the high, corbel-vaulted Grand Gallery leading to Cheops’s tomb runs from north to south; all of the carefully determined directions were significant; the boat that must have borne Cheops to his burial was uncovered parallel to the south face, no doubt acknowledging the east-west passage of the sun in the southern sky. In fact, as the institution of kingship developed, the identification of the pharaoh with the sun became increasingly important. The other two pyramid builders we call Chephren and Mycerinus incorporated the name of the sun god, Re, into their own names, and the kings of the next dynasty built oriented sun sanctuaries with obelisks on square bases and began to call themselves ‘sons of Re’.

3.5 THE PYRAMIDS AT GIZA

91 The Pyramids at Giza, plan. 1. Pyramid of Cheops, z. Pyramid of Chephren. 3. Pyramid of Mycerinus. 4. Funerary temple and causeway. 5. Valley temple, Sphinx and Temple of Sphinx. 6. Valley temple

The Great Pyramid, again like the earlier Egyptian royal tombs, dominates a walled precinct, the boundary of which respects the same precise cardinal order. The cardinal, rectilinear grouping of smaller mastabas and pyramids in itself states the social hierarchy resulting from the unification of Egypt under a single rule. In life and death, the pharaoh and his court, sustained in new life by the pharaoh, will maintain their relations within this place of notional, planar order, absolutely justified by celestial alignments traced on the ground by the pharaoh himself. If pyramids had their origins as tumuli, their construction in stone and their magnification in size changed them into engineering problems of an altogether new order. Less than two hundred years separated the step pyramid of Zoser at Saqqara and the building of the pyramids at Giza. During this time there was constant adjustment among demands of structure, image and ritual, and there were changes both in the series of pyramids as a whole and in the construction of individual members of the series: The pyramids at Giza were built with larger blocks of harder stone than jheir predecessors. They also rise at a steeper angle - that of the Great Pyramid is just over 51 degrees - to greater heights, and seem to defy their great mass rather than yielding to its gravity and tendency to spread and level. The Great Pyramid is built around a central vertical tapering shaft, rather like a huge obelisk without its crowning pyramid. The blocks forming the pyramid lean slightly toward this shaft (and against each other) as their height increases toward it. Each vertical course of stone is thus stabilized by the weight

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of the one outside it, and the weight of the whole is conducted either vertically to bedrock or in the direction of the central core. The pyramid was thus made stronger by its greater height, until the final white limestone was fitted to the many-stepped pyramid to complete its polished faces. Like the stepped pyramid of Zoser, the Great Pyramid of Cheops underwent a number of important changes in plan during its construction, which had to do with the important matter of the location of the tomb chamber itself. In general, the series of pharaonic pyramids should probably be regarded not so much as the evolution of a form as successive monuments in a long tradition of mytho­ logical, theological and political ideological speculation. The changes must have been made because it was decided that each in turn was a more efficacious way to prepare the king for the afterlife. First a chamber was cut in the rock beneath the stone of foundation, then a second was built in the centre above this stone, and finally a higher and much larger chamber was built with a corbelled roof, approached by the elegantly corbelled Grand Gallery in an arrangement some­ what reminiscent of a Neolithic passageway tomb. The chamber itself, like that of Zoser, was built of polished pink limestone from Aswan, nearly 600 miles away, near the southern border of the kingdom. This stone was perhaps associ­ ated with the body of Upper Egypt, or with the source of the Nile, the source of life. The Great Pyramid clearly continues much older traditions of the significance of materials, and if the stones themselves were thought to possess generative power, this power was further heightened by finish approaching the notional, and they formed an appropriate space for the eternally living king. Cheops’s black granite sarcophagus was set against the western wall of the chamber, cut in a simple and exact proportion of 2:1, east to north. This final chamber is connected by shafts to the north and south faces. The precinct of the pyramid was joined by a long causeway to a ‘valley temple’ at the edge of the Giza plateau, in its turn joined to the Nile by a canal. The construction of the pyramid thus established the spaces of its ultimate ritual use. During construction, the enormous quantities of great stone blocks were barged up the Nile, left at a wharf at the site of what would become the valley temple, and dragged up the sloping causeway to the pyramid precinct. When the pyramid was completed, the wharf became the valley temple, the causeway was rebuilt in stone, ornamented and roofed over, and the mortuary temple built at the base of the pyramid’s eastern face. In his final journey, Cheops’s divine and ritually prepared body, gliding in its great solar boat, joined the traffic of gods from holy place to holy place on the Nile. After final preparation for burial at the valley temple, he was carried through the covered causeway, the former path of so much toil, to the morturary temple and finally to the entrance on the northern face of the pyramid. There his ‘mouth was opened’ and, after this final ritual enlivenment, he was placed in his sarcophagus at the western end of his unpainted burial chamber and the chamber sealed. The sealing of the burial chamber was only the beginning of the king’s cult. In the mortuary temple priests continued to minister to his needs, making offerings, conducting ceremonies, singing incantations and honouring his name. The eternal pyramid itself was given his name with a divine epithet: ‘Cheops is one belong-

3.5 THE PYRAMIDS AT GIZA

92 Planned town for builders of the Pyramid of Sesostris II, Kahun, Egypt, c.1886-1878 bc

ing to the horizon’. That is, Cheops is the rising sun. The famous Sphinx, associ­ ated with the second pyramid of Chephren, and, in a manner recalling the Great Pyramid, fashioned from an outcropping of rock, reclines to the east of its pyramid complex, facing east with perfectly level gaze, perhaps once with the features, now broken and eroded, of Chephren (or of the older brother whose rule he usurped). In either case, the pharaoh is again shown as the sun he forever faces, from which he alone forever takes power in forever gazing, as Re-Horakhte, ‘the sun as it stands above the horizon’. Neither the notional rhetoric of their vast forms, nor their ingenious and monumental defences protected the pyramids at Giza from despoliation. Leaving aside such factors as simple greed, or later purposes for materials, power was also to be asserted by denying such absolute statements of eternal central power, and the pyramids took their place in history and ongoing strife. But the extension of the planar order of the pyramids, significant as national order, established far deeper precedents than the forms of the pyramids themselves. The builders and artisans who actually devised and built royal tombs, or decorated and furnished them, were regimented on an unprecedented scale, as the labours of hundreds of thousands of others must have been in these great national projects. The later workers’ towns built in the second millennium bc at Kahun and Deir el-Medina are records of this new order. The towns, built at some distance from water, are rectangular and cardinally aligned, indicating that they were royal foundations. If this order stated the justification of power, it also provided the basis for new kinds of social spatial organization. The plan of Kahun (Figure 92) is a hierar­ chical grid (the southern part of which is lost to erosion and cultivation), and there is a clear correlation of status with location and allotment of spatial divisions. The whole town, built at the beginning of the pyramid complex of Sesostris II around 1895 bc, was walled, with a single surviving entrance to the northeast. North and east are once again the dominant directions. A north-south wall separates the larger, more varied eastern square from the workers’ quarters, which are much smaller. The workers’ area is divided by a major north-south

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street, with generally larger units to the east (for supervisors?). An east-west street runs the length of the northern half of the eastern section of the plan. At the end of this street, again to the north, is an elevated ‘acropolis’, on which stood a single, little-used palace, probably for the visting pharaoh, his family and court. Facing this street on both sides to the east are the large palaces of the priests (the town was built next to the pharaoh’s valley temple) and officials who not only oversaw the construction of the pyramid complex but maintained the cult of the pharaoh after its completion. At Deir-el-Medina there was a single entry to the north. Here workers were checked in and out. Not only the materi­ als they worked but even the materials out of which their tools were made were valuable, and tools were weighed on departure and return for each worker. There was of course a hierarchy among the workers themselves, and clearly one of the rewards for achieving distinction was an elite burial. To the west of Deir elMedina are the tombs of some fifty artisans and their families. They are of a standard plan, with paintings showing the occupants toiling through the tests of the underworld to a reedy paradise, an unending reprise of the life they left behind them and a reunion with those who had departed before them. Again, such burials are only for a minute fraction of the armies of artisans who passed through Deir el-Medina, which was occupied for about 500 years. Among countless relics of everyday life, different religious practices are also evident in the workers’ quarters. There are images of the ancient Hathor, but also of the jocund household god Bes - unusual in his frontality and in his large-headed, non-descriptive (and non-canonical) proportions - and Tauert, goddess of fecundity and childbirth. These are records of concerns far from the theology of Re and Osiris, which, however, justified the order in which so many lives were lived.

3.6 THE LORD OF THE FOUR QUARTERS As we have seen, the temple and its territory raised the issues of the relation of god, priest and king, of ownership and administration of land, and of the extent of divine holdings. If, for example, Nippur was the home of Enlil, father of all the other gods, was Nippur therefore the centre in relation to all other centres? And if so, how was this ownership to be effected? Who was to consolidate and execute it, and what was the relation of this person to the god? A century after the Egyptian kings had finished their incomparable mortuary precincts at Giza, around 2400 bc, the territorial unification of Sumer was undertaken by a Semitic usurper at Kish, who took the name Sargon, from a word meaning ‘True King’. Sargon the Great (as he came to be called) moved his capital to Akkad (which has never been found), and the dynasty he founded is called Akkadian. Like the Egyptian kings, the Akkadian rulers understood dominion not so much as the piecemeal conquest of cities but as true empire, a single and absolute rule, which they maintained by centralization and trade, and by force of arms. Not only did Sargon sieze the rule of Kish, he and his successors were thought to have usurped the place of the gods, of Enlil and Ishtar, patroness of Akkad itself, who is said to have rejoiced when her own city was destroyed and Sargon’s dynasty brought to an end. Sargon has been thought to be represented in the

copper alloy head in Figure 15. Whether or not this is a record of the appear­ ance of the king, it is a vivid record of how the Akkadian kings wished to be seen. The head is cast in honorific bronze, and its arrogant, implacable expression is countered by the violence of the mutilation of the left eye socket, perhaps the result of later ‘punishment’. The surfaces and edges of the elaborately curled beard and tightly plaited hair are worked to the precision of edge of bronze weapons. The visage of the king, from which eyes of semiprecious materials would have looked, seems at once unapproachably godlike and exoskeletal. It was the grandson of Sargon, Naram Sin, who was thought especially to have usurped the place of the gods, and it was Naram Sin who was first depicted with the attributes of a god, as a divine king. A commemorative sandstone stele (Figure 93), about 2 metres (6 feet 6 inches) high in its present broken and damaged form, records battle and conquest. As in the Narmer palette, historical events are intersected by clearly hierarchical relations of size and position. To our lower left descriptively proportioned Akkadian soldiers are literally fleshed out into full relief, their surfaces highly finished, so that they seem taut with energy. They climb on repeated wavy ground lines, their diagonal friezes a regimented upward advance, looking toward their objective and toward Naram Sin. The king, larger than anyone else, is also on the highest groundline. He repeats the motion of his soldiers, but carries an arrow in his right hand, a bow and an axe in his left. His left leg advances onto a plateau to trample the lifeless bodies of his foes, their heads and limbs dangling. Before Naram Sin unfolds a scene of terror and humili­ ation: a figure, mortally wounded but supporting himself with one arm, tries, in his last agony, to pull a spear from his throat with his free hand. Behind him a figure, echoed by figures on registers below him, turns to flee, pleading for his life as he does so. All eyes are on Naram Sin or upon his quarry and the goal of his conquest. The first in a sequence of dead, dying and beseeching figures is trampled by Naram Sin as he steps to the level of a smooth mountain bearing a cuneiform inscription. Over this mountain stand the radiant disks of three heavenly bodies (the top one nearly entirely broken away). Engagement and victory have taken place in mountainous terrain, with trees growing on its steep, irregular slopes. The ‘great man’ confronts the mountain much as in other Near Eastern reliefs the king confronts the god. Because of his elevation he is, like the mountain, closest to the radiant disks of heaven. Most significantly for present purposes, Naram Sin also wears the helmet identifying him as a god, turned so that its two horns are fully visible in contrast to his own profile, as his thorax is twisted in opposition to his legs in the Egyptian manner. Naram Sin is the first Mesopotamian king to appropriate this symbol of divinity, and, to return directly to our theme, he was called the ‘god of Akkad’ arid took the title ‘Lord of the Four Quarters’. He thus proclaimed himself a centre, the meeting of north, south, east and west, from which the world - and land - could be measured indefinitely in all directions. Naram Sin was the monarch, the single ruler and origin, of the territory encom­ passed by the directions. This conception of kingship was to have a millennial life in the iconography of Near Eastern, European and Far Eastern political and religious art. As for the stele of Naram Sin, it was carried off as a trophy of war by later conquerors, perhaps because of the very grandeur of the boast it recorded.

3.6 THE LORD OF THE FOUR QUARTERS

93 Stele of Naram Sin, from Susa, Iraq, c.23 00-2200 bc. Sandstone, height 2 m (78 in). Louvre, Paris

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94 Fragments of the Stele of Urnammu, Ur, Iraq, 3rd Dynasty (c.2112-2095 bc), originally about 3 x 1.5m (10 x 5 ft). University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia

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The rule of the Akkadian dynasty lasted only about a century and a half, and, near the end of the third millennium bc Akkad was destroyed by people from the mountains to the northeast, who, after about sixty years, were finally expelled by the southern Sumerian cities. United under the kings of Ur, these cities retained the form of united and centralized rule begun by the Akkadian dynasty, and Urnammu of Ur set about the pious aggrandizement of his capital at the new imperial scale. The fragmentary stele of Urnammu shows the king as reverent worshipper and builder. The two top registers were examples of what might be called planar narrative, in which the king’s uniquely important ritual acts are identified with planar order. At top centre were heavenly disks; below them is the largest figure of the king, facing a god, seated on a temple-throne (just visible in the upper right-hand corner of Figure 94) wearing a multi-horned hat. When the stele was whole this scene was rotated so that the king appeared twice, back to back with himself (a device I will discuss in Chapter 5), making homage to two deities while flying goddesses with overflowing flasks of water responded from the skies. In the register below - most of which is visible in Figure 94 - this scheme is repeated at smaller scale. Back-to-back figures of a standing goddess accompany the double king who on each side pours a libation on a tree at the front edge of the dais of an enthroned deity. With his right hand, the moon god Nannar extends to Urnammu a ring and staff. The ring is really a coiled cord, and the god, in exchange for the king’s offering, gives him the mandate to rule justly. The staff and cord are used to lay out a temple correctly, but the gesture also means that the god gives the king the right to rule his people with justice. In the fragment of the next register below, Urnammu, still in the company of the gods, but not himself horned, is shown as actual builder, ceremonially carrying and laying the first brick of the temple. (One of the great projects of Urnammu’s reign was the ziggurat of the moon god at Ur, Figure 77.) The Egyptian kings implemented their unified rule partly by building great

stone temples enclosing and controlling approach to local centres through models of the cosmos they alone had the authority to lay out and construct. Other royal unifications proved epochal in different but related ways. Hammurabi (who ruled 1792-1750 bc) not only united Mesopotamia from his capital in Babylon, but established the first uniform code of laws, that is, a uniform standard of political rule. A stele upon which his code is engraved (see again Figure 84) shows Hammurabi in colloquy with the sun god Shamash, who, seated on a mountain-dais and temple-throne, raises his right hand in response to the right hand of the king, offering Hammurabi the staff and ring of cord as right builder and right ruler. As the rays of the sun light the world, so the principles of justice extend throughout the reign of Hammurabi. At about the same time that Hammurabi promulgated his empire of laws, Abraham, descended from Ur, enunciated the principles of the monotheism that would become the basis of the traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There are not many gods, but one, of whom no image may be made, who is beyond all determination of place and time, who speaks and acts, but who can scarcely be circumscribed even in being addressed. Some four hundred years after the sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had taken the nomadic Hebrews from Canaan to Egypt, where they had become slaves, the great leader Moses arose to free them and take them back to Canaan. Moses was given the law by Yahweh on a mountain. The Hebrew tribes reluctantly joined together under Saul, their first king; as we have seen, David’s capital was established at Jerusalem, where his son Solomon built his palace and the Temple, and access to Yahweh’s word was fixed at that centre. The institution of empire continued to expand, effecting unification in adminis­ tration and tribute with respect to a central authority, but also bringing more or less separated cultures into greater contact and interaction. Through the eighth and seventh centuries bc the Assyrians, beginning from their cities along the northern Tigris River, established their rule from Egypt to Persia. The defence of empire is costly, however, and in 612 bc Nineveh, the great capital of a weakened Assyrian empire, fell to an alliance of Persian Medes, Scythians and Babylonians. With the collapse of Assyria, a new dynasty arose in Babylon. Under the second king of this dynasty, Nebuchadnezzar II, Babylon became the world’s most splendid city. Ancient writers included the Hanging Gardens, one the Seven Wonders, among his vast construction projects in Babylon, supposedly built for his homesick Persian queen. In 586 bc Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s Temple, following ancient precedent in taking its ritual implements (and perhaps more recent Assyrian example in displacing much of the conquered city’s population) to Babylon. Some forty years later, in 539 bc, Babylon capitulated quickly to the Persian king Cyrus II, called the Great. With Cyrus the Great, the themes of empire undergo significant changes. Cyrus had conquered Asia Minor before turning to Babylon, his son conquered Egypt, and by the beginning of the fifth century bc the Persian Empire extended from northern Africa eastward to the Indus River. Cyrus adopted the efficient administrative practices of the Assyrians, creating provinces, and he reversed millennial Mesopotamian practice by returning the images of local gods taken to Babylon after the conquest of their cities. As we have seen in Section 7 of the

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last chapter, it was Cyrus who rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, and he had its ritual implements returned as well. In general, Cyrus left the religious practices he encountered undisturbed and participated in the rites of conquered places. And, unlike the conquerors of Nineveh, Cyrus did not destroy Babylon. Cyrus also called himself ‘Lord of the Four Quarters’, and the Achaemenid kings (as their dynasty was called after its early seventh-century founder) brought artisans from all over their empire to work at the construction and ornamenta­ tion of their capitals, the series of which Cyrus began at Pasargadae, an intercar­ dinal precinct with similarly aligned columned pavilions. This set the pattern for the monumental capitals built by later Achaemenid kings at Susa and Persepolis. Persepolis stood until 331 bc, when the Persian empire was conquered by Alexander the Great. In retaliation for the burning of Athens by the Persians in 480 bc, itself revenge for the Greek humiliation of Asiatic Troy (and Athenian encouragement of an Ionian rebellion), Alexander had Persepolis stripped of its wealth and burned. By the time he died, in 3 2,3 bc, the empire of Alexander the Great was more or less coextensive with the Persian empire, but with one very important exception. It included Greece. Although the Persians punished the city states in southern Greece, they did not conquer them. Philip II of Macedonia, however, did, and his son Alexander, the pupil of Aristotle, made Greek culture the basis for his policies and actions as he retraced the paths of empire. In 3 24 bc Alexander returned to conquered Persia, partly to be hailed as a Persian king, but also to pay homage at the tomb of Cyrus the Great. He is also said to have spoken of a concord of East and West. Whatever Alexander may have believed, or wanted others to believe, about his own divinity, he was shown on coins with the curled ram’s horns of Ammon, an Egyptian royal god the Greeks identified with Zeus. Alexander went out of his way to visit the oracle of Ammon in the Libyan desert. Plutarch tells us that Alexander learned in Egypt that God is the common father of mankind, but that he especially favours the noblest and best. This might be taken to extend the idea of empire to all mankind. However that may be, Alexander left a legend that spread through many more lands than he conquered. The ‘Romance of Alexander’ had taken shape by late Antiquity and was current from medieval Europe, through the Middle East, to India and China. It was translated into many languages, and illustrated from France to Persia. In the various versions of the story, Alexander was a fantastic character, who travelled through the air borne by griffins and through water in a glass submarine of his own devising. But he was also a kind of universal prophet, mentioned in the Book of Daniel and the Koran. At about the same time that Philip II brought Greece under Macedonian rule, and Alexander was building ‘Alexandrias’ throughout the lands he had come so quickly to rule, the Romans began their expansion from Latium, first through Italy, then westward in the Punic Wars. By 30 bc lands under Roman control extended from Spain in the west, through Greece to Syria in the east, and, in Africa, from present Algeria to Egypt. 3.7 AUGUSTUS

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The original Pantheon in Rome (see Section 17 of the last chapter) faced northward across the Campus Martius (the Field of Mars, used for military exercises) and

was acknowledged by the Mausoleum of Augustus as part of a complex glorify­ ing the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the beginnings of the Roman Empire. This complex placed Augustus in the already long series of rulers who justified their rule by identifying themselves with the sun; and it also clearly identified Augustus with the ancient generative values of the centre. The name Augustus itself, taken by the young Octavian as emperor, is from augeo, ‘to cause to grow or increase’, like auctor. Augustus is thus the author, the founder and progenitor, of the Roman people and the empire. The theme of universal dominion was stated over and over again in the public spaces of the Campus Martius. There was a map of the world, and between the Pantheon and the Mausoleum of Augustus stood the Horologium Augusti, the largest sundial ever built. The gnomon., or ‘pointer’, was an obelisk some 3 5 meters (115 feet) high brought from just-conquered Egypt. (It had been the custom at least since the Assyrian conquest of Egypt to carry off obelisks, and as recently as 1937 Mussolini brought one of the great Ethiopean stelae from Aksum to Rome.) More specifically, this obelisk was taken from Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, to which it was rededicated in its new Roman location. In Rome, of course, the sun god was Apollo, the tutelary deity of Augustus himself. The gnomon-obelisk stood in the middle of a great marble plaza, which served as the analemma, inscribed with the arcs and lines making it possible to tell the hour of the day and the day of the year. As the Augustan architect Vitruvius tells us, it is necessary in order to construct a sundial first to know the length of the equinoctial shadow of a place, and from this the rest of the construction follows. Not coincidentally, Augustus celebrated his birthday on 23 September, the autumn equinox, and in the afternoon of that day the obelisk’s shadow pointed eastward to the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace. In the trophy obelisk and its solar symbolism the name of Augustus was implicitly repeated as victor and god, and the orderly movement of the divine sun to which he was likened traced the measured passage of time on the gridded face of the earth. As the sun ordered the world with its light, Augustus also set up a golden milestone near the Roman Forum, meaning not only that Rome was the navel of the world, and its own mythical centre exalted above all other centres, but that Rome was the point from which the world was to be measured, literally to be brought under Roman rule. The Ara Pacis (Figure 95), which has been moved from its original location in relation to the other Augustan monuments, was commissioned in 13 bc by the Roman Senate to commemorate the return of Augustus from campaigns in the western provinces, to proclaim the fulfilment of the prophecy that his reign would be a reign of peace. The altar was finished in 9 bc and dedicated on the birthday of Livia, the wife of Augustus. The Ara Pacis is small in, comparison to other parts of the ensemble to which it belonged, although what it gives up in size is more than made up for by the impressive scale at which Augustus, his family and the ruling class that supported him are cast. The altar is both Etruscan and Greek. Its carvers were Attic Greek, technical descendants of the Pheidian workshop that had first formulated the Western classical style in the sculpture of the Athenian acropolis some four hundred years before. Augustus used sculptors from this ripe tradition to give

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95 Ara Pacis Augustae, Rome, view from west, 13-9 bc. Marble, 10.5 x n.6x7 m (34 ft 5 in x 38 ftx 23 ft)

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suave surface and measure to his Roman messages, by a visual rhetoric to persuade through delight, to make Roman verities and legendary history at once celebrative and accessible. Augustus made white marble and the richness of the Greek style signatures of imperial Rome. (It was Augustus who first exploited the quarries at Carrara, near modern Pisa, where Michelangelo worked 1,500 years later.) The Ara Pacis is in effect an open-air templum, a magnificently bounded and embellished precinct, raised on a podium, with openings to the east and west. The main entrance was to the west, facing the Campus Martius, and the altar proper is to the east, itself raised on a three-tiered podium. The whole structure, like the Rome Augustus strove to build, is made of white marble. The enclosure walls are carved inside and out. The inside is simpler, imitating a pavilion with a wooden fence and all the paraphernalia of sacrifice. There are garlands heavy with the fruit of four seasons, and the altar itself is elaborated with small scenes of sacrifice, with apotropaic sphinxes and acanthus scrolls. Outside, lower panels with volutes, tendrils, flowers and birds are separated by a continuous fretwork frieze from a frieze of monumental figures, very large in relation to their formats in what would become the perennial manner of Western classicism. The flanking north and south walls also show processions of togate figures, members of the imperial family (on the south side), together with senators and members of the various aristocratic priesthoods, in the proces­ sion consecrating the precinct. These processions move from allegorical scenes of abundance and plenty on the eastern face toward scenes of the foundation of Rome on the main western face. Augustus is shown (Figure 96) near the head of the southern procession, as pontifex maximus (supreme builder of bridges), the ancient Roman head of the cult of state, and everyone else is shown in order of rank in relation to him. His toga shrouds his head, meaning that he is about to begin the ceremony. Behind Augustus are Agrippa, his adviser and son-in-law (who built the first Pantheon in his honour, and who died the year after the Ara

3.7 AUGUSTUS

96 Ara Pacis Augustae, outside south enclosure wall frieze, procession with Augustus as Pontifex Maximus

Pacis was begun, his ashes to be placed in the Mausoleum of Augustus), and Livia. Children are also conspicuous in the procession. Around the corner from the procession led by Augustus and his priestly retinue, the Trojan hero Aeneas, legendary ancestor of all Rome, his toga drawn up as a cowl over his head, like Augustus in the approaching procession, is shown sacrificing and founding the Etruscan town of Lavinium (named for his wife, Lavinia). Standing behind Aeneas is what has survived of the figure of his father Anchises, evidently forever youthful, holding the shepherd’s staff alluding to his union with Venus on Mount Ida, the union in which the semi-divine Aeneas was conceived. Aeneas began his long journey to Italy when he carried his father from the burning city of Troy together with the penates, the household gods, and the palladium., protector of Troy, then of Rome, as I will discuss in the next chapter. In the relief, images are shown safely enshrined in the temple in the background, as the penates of Aeneas were kept in the Temple of Vesta in Rome. Aeneas had been told that he should establish a city where he found a sow with 30 piglets beneath an oak tree (a tree sacred to Zeus, or Jupiter). The tree is in the very centre of the relief, behind the altar. From our left one young attendant brings the fertile sow to the altar, while another attendant, a libation vessel in his right hand, extends a plate of fruit to Aeneas with his left, perhaps the mundus^ the offering of first fruits that was part of the Etruscan and Roman ceremony of town foundation. This is not simply an act of piety, even of allegorical imperial piety, rather it is the very foundation of Roman history at its auspiciously fruitful and divinely ordained sacred centre. The badly damaged relief pendant to the Aeneas relief on the west side showed Mars, carved in the same grave, elegiac style as Aeneas, standing before another sacred tree, this time the fig tree under which the shepherd Faustulus found Romulus - the founder of Rome - and Remus, Mars’s twin sons by the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia. The allegorical hymn to imperial bounty and increase reaches its climax in

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97 Ara Pads Augustae, east enclosure wall relief, Pax with attributes of Venus and Tellus (Mother Earth)

the reliefs on either side of the eastern portal of the Ara Pacis. There was once a figure of Rome, seated upon trophies, now almost entirely destroyed, an allegor­ ical presentation of the ever-victorious emperor, bringing wealth by heavenfavoured conquest to his people. Pendant to this relief, at the southeast corner, from which the imperial procession also begins, is the so-called Tellus, or Mother Earth relief - she has also been called Venus, Italia and Pax (‘Peace’) (Figure 97). If the exact identification of this central, hierarchically scaled figure is disputed, however, her general meaning is clear. She is seated on an outcropping of rock like the altar at which Aeneas sacrifices. At her feet a horned ox rests and a lamb grazes, animals at once of agriculture and sacrifice; on either side are bare-breasted personifications of aurae, or breezes, with billowing drapery, of land, to her right, and sea, to her left. Around and behind her arises vegetation, poppies and corn, as if the source of the exuberant vegetation covering the entire lower part of the structure. 3.8 ANGKOR

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At least from the time of Asoka, there existed in India the ideal of the Chakravartin, the Universal Ruler. And, at least from the time of Hammurabi of Babylon, the ‘Lord of the Four Quarters’ had been associated, not just with rule, but with the sun-like rule of justice, of which the king was origin and final judge. We have seen such solar symbolism in Asoka’s columns (Figures 63 and 64), which have immediate Persian prototypes. The Buddha was himself of royal birth, and was said to have been given the choice of becoming Chakravartin, the ‘holder of the wheel’ of the law, or of becoming enlightened. Since he chose enlightenment, spiritual perfection must be higher; but, by the same token, the just rule of the Chakravartin, the perfect ruler, must have made him near-divine. The great temple complexes built by the Khmer kings of Cambodia (Figure 98) provide a spectacular summary of the idea of kingship in one of its culminating Eastern adaptations. Great irrigation projects had long been part of Southeast

3.8 ANGKOR

98 Angkor, Cambodia, plan of temple complex, early 9th-i4th centuries, showing alignment, major complexes and water control systems. 1. Angkor Wat. z. Angkor Thom. 3. Bayon. 4. West Baray. 5. East Baray. 6. Preah Khan. 7. Site of royal palace

Asian cultures, which were in general under the sway of Indian religion and culture through trade and colonization. The Khmer kings were perhaps exiles or hostages from an earlier Cambodian dynasty in the court of the Sailendra, the builders of Borobudur (Figure 74). However that may be, in 790, Jayavarman II unified Cambodia and began the integration of extensive irrigation systems into a series of dynastic capitals, monumental variations on the institution of divine kingship. The great hydraulic engineering enterprises of the Khmer kings, with their vast barays, or reservoirs, and grid networks of canals, made inhospitable land rich and fruitful. The way of life of the people thus again depended upon the control and regulation of water, and upon the continued favour of the heavens through their intercessory kings; accordingly, the vast temple precincts and dynastic shrines rivalled the pyramids of Egypt as collective undertakings. And if the royal architecture of Khmer Cambodia is both serenely grand and delicately lavish, the history of Angkor and its kings was not peaceful. Angkor Thom was built after the capital was laid waste, and throngs of slave and tribute labour must have worked at these constructions. Jayavarman II built his first capital at Phnom Kulen, ‘Mountain of the King of the Gods’, following the example of his Indonesian predecessors and establish­ ing a basic theme of Khmer royal sacred architecture. The Khmer kings were to build and rebuild Mount Meru, the centre of the Hindu cosmos, home of Indra, king of the gods, making their capitals the places for an ongoing cosmogony identified with their own dynastic continuity and succession. Centrality and continuity were stated at Phnom Kulen by a linga, the phallic presentation of Shiva as a divine creative force I will discuss in the next chapter. This became the usual pattern. The building of cosmic mountains, always identified with ruler and dynasty, culminated in Angkor Wat, built by Suryavarman II (1113-50), and Angkor Thom, built by Jayavarman VII (1181-1220) (Figures 99 and 100). Khmer cosmology was a regional variant of Hinduism and Buddhism, the balance shift­ ing from Hinduism at Angkor Wat to Buddhism at Angkor Thom. Following the broader practice with which we have become familiar in Buddhist and Hindu sacred architecture, the complexes were cardinally aligned. Angkor Wat faces west, and its observances may have been fundamentally mortuary and commem-

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99 Angkor Wat, plan, first half of the 1zth century. The structure rises on three successive platforms to support four flanking towers and one central tower

too Bayon, Angkor Thom, plan, early 13th century

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orative; Angkor Thom faces the more typical east. Both precincts are surround­ ed by moats modelling ocean at the perimeters of the worlds they schematize, ritually traversable worlds identified with rule. The central mountain of Angkor Wat is approached by a series of causeways, gateways, roadways, stairways, pavilions and arcades. The most elevated centre is crowned by the highest tower, beneath which a well reached, like the core of a great stupa, deep into the ground, into the underworld. At Angkor Thom, a smaller scheme was elaborated in a much larger precinct. Chapels in the central structure, called the Bayon (Figure 100), were dedicated by provinces, with images of the Hindu or Buddhist deities of their populations. Central to all was now an image of the Buddha. Facing outward to the cardinal directions from towers and gateways, surveying all the

3-9 CHINESE IMPERIAL CITIES

ioi Massive head on one of the face towers, Bayon, Angkor Thom

provinces and extending the contentment of just rule through the world, are colossal images of the Bodhisattava Lokeshvara, the ‘Lord of the World’, carved upon the same unmortared stones used in construction throughout, with the features of the builder, Jayavarman VII (Figure ioi). 3.9 CHINESE IMPERIAL CITIES

Chinese rulers in a long succession built fortified capital cities according to a remarkably consistent formula. These cities, although varying in accommoda­ tion to one or another set of circumstances, were rectilinear, gridded and cardin­ ally aligned. The major axis was north to south, a polarity in which south was favourable, but north was powerful. The cities were laid out all at once when

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loz D axing, begun by the emperor Sui Wendi in 582 ad, called Chang’an in the Tang dynasty. 1. Palace City. 2. Imperial City. 3. Soil and Grain Altars. 4. Ancestral Temple. 5. Vermillion Bird Road. 6, 7. East and West Markets. 8, 9. Other imperial buildings. After N. Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning, Fig. 11

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their locations and boundaries had been determined, and were built within fairly short periods of time; walls and foundations were made of rammed earth and buildings of wood. Both texts and monumental examples sustained and transmitted this tradition. The pattern of Chinese capital city building was so tenacious because the plan itself was an image of rule and of the authority to ruleraqd became integral with the fundamental political institution of imperial rule itselfi The Son of Heaven, as the emperor came to be called, because he was immediate to the order of heaven, could cause an image of that embracing order to be constructed and populate this image with representatives of all the regions of his domain. By doing this he confirmed his status as ruler, marshalling the powers of the heavens on the peoples’ behalf and, in the earthly realm, marshalling the labour and wealth necessary to bring these colossal projects to completion. The construc­ tion of cities thus again merged cosmic order with political authority by making massively and splendidly evident the emperor’s proximity to divine order; and it made equally and simultaneously evident the historical continuity of his rule with those who had built such cities before him. When realized, imperial cities were colossal displays, not just of rule, but of command, and of the orchestra­ tion of vast numbers of workers. Tang Chang’an (Figure 102), diagrammatically simple as it appears in plan, covered about 30 square miles, and its north­ south streets were some 75 metres (240 feet) wide. Rectilinear villages and palaces with south-facing central structures go back at least to the beginnings of the Shang dynasty in the second millennium bc, and the earliest rulers seem to have built new capitals when they assumed power. During the centuries of the Zhou dynasty (c. 1100-25 5 bc), construction of capital cities assumed its canonical form. The earliest text describing these cities refers to the Pole Star in the middle of the night sky, and houses aligned to the sun. Having found a fertile location, divination was performed, and, when the signs were favourable, building begun. Already in Zhou times it was specified that the emperor, ‘at the centre of the land shall be a counterpart to august Heaven. He shall scrupulously sacrifice to the upper and lower (spirits), and from there govern as the central pivot.’ In other words, the ruler, uniquely at the vertical centre, is the junction of the cardinal directions, the indispensable point for their definition, essential to the model of the world at large. He also unites the generational continuity of his dynasty and people, and the spirits determining the fortunes of the people. The emperor retained the powers of a head shaman with sole access to heaven. The Zhou capital at Luoyi, called Wangcheng, or ‘Ruler’s City’, was described as being perfectly levelled by the use of channels of water. Perpendicular posts were set up using plumb lines, and shadows from these posts used to establish the centre, that is, the actual meeting in the ordained place of the four directions. All of these steps were not just preliminary to construction, rather they established the right relation of the centre of rule to the world at large. Like Imhotep, the jiangren, the court official responsible for these foundations and for construc­ tion, is described as ‘building the state’. The jiangren must have been a diviner and surveyor as well as an architect or builder, and the presence of such a post in royal courts indicates that, from early times, there were specialized agents of

kings as builders. Having established this microcosmic framework, the cardin­ ally oriented square was marked off in nine measures, corresponding to nine east-west and nine north-south streets set at right angles to one another. Each side had three gates, twelve in all. To the left (or east), defined by the Emperor’s facing south, was the temple of the ancestors; to the right (or west) were the altars of soil and grain. Ying Zheng, the younger contemporary of King Asoka (see Section 13, last chapter), became king of the central state of Qin in 246 bc at the age of thirteen. He ruled for 36 years, and in 221 bc Ying Zheng proclaimed himself Shi Huangdi, First Emperor of the Qin dynasty. In the second year of his reign he began the construction of a vast mausoleum complex for himself; this was only one of his ambitious projects, projects of such grandeur as once again to rival the pyramids of Egypt. He joined the walls built by other rulers to prevent invasion from the north in the Great Wall of China, which he extended to about 1,800 miles (half its present length), and in the manner of earlier Chinese rulers he built a great capital city at the ancient site of Xi’an and began a palace of fabulous dimensions to the south of his capital. These enterprises taxed his subjects in more ways than one, and the Qin dynasty outlived its first emperor by only a few years, falling to a popular uprising in 206 bc. In the meantime, however, Shi Huangdi had united China for the first time, bringing to a close the so-called Warring States Period. By befriending those farthest away and attacking those immediate to his borders, Shi Huangdi united ‘all under Heaven’ within 25 years, and the building of the Great Wall not only provided protection, but implied defence of one great common land and symbolized protection under one rule. The new emperor implemented his unification by centralization of authority, standardization and regimentation. He concentrated power in himself and divided his empire into administrative districts whose heads were responsible to him. He established a uniform code of laws, standardized weights, measures, script and round coinage, and built a radiating system of roads from his capital of Xianyang. Shi Huangdi’s capital at the very ancient site of Xi’an on the Wei River was built over the palace complex of an earlier dynasty. He expressly built his capital in imitation of two nearby Zhou dynasty capitals from the early first millennium bc. By these means the first emperor identified himself with ancient founders and perhaps established a semi-divine genealogy for his rule. Although it has not been excavated, it is clear that Xianyang was a cardinally aligned square, about 2.5 kilometres (iVz miles) on each side. Within these boundaries he not only enclosed earlier Qin palaces, but built replicas of the palaces of the states he had defeated, much as the Egyptian pharaohs were careful to enclose references to Upper and Lower Egypt within a single boundary, thus stating dominion by enclosing images within a bounding image of heaven and of empire. Shi Huangdi’s legendary palace survives only as a memory of imperial scale. It is his mausoleum that provides the most vivid instance of his ambition and of his ideology of empire. The emperor built his mausoleum at Lishan, a mountain fifteen miles west of Xianyang, south of the Wei River. A great rammed earth tumulus in the shape of a pyramid some 300 metres (1,000 feet) on each side and 75 metres (250 feet) in height marks the burial. Its cardinally and geoman-

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103 Terracotta Army flanking the tomb of the Emperor Shi Huangdi, c.221-209 bc. Life-size figures, Lintong, near Xi’an, China

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tically aligned square is contained in the southern half of a double precinct, two long north-south rectangles, the walls of the inner some 4 kilometres (2V2 miles) in perimeter, those of the outer some 5.8 kilometres (3 Vi miles). In the traditional north-south alignment, both north and centre face south, toward the passage of the sun through the southern sky from east to west; this is a solar alignment, but not one defined by the sun’s rising, setting, or zenith passage. Within the north-south alignment of the precinct as a whole, Shi Huangdi’s tumulus itself follows earlier Qin royal tombs in being aligned to the east. The complex is an ideal palace, and although it has not been excavated, it is known from descrip­ tions that the ceiling of the tomb chamber showed the heavens and that its floor was a relief map of the empire, with rivers of mercury. Cartographers were members of the royal court from the time of the Zhou dynasty, but this map should also be understood as an image of imperial dominion, as the heavens looking down upon the earth. The First Emperor’s substantial military successes depended upon regimen­ tation and upon the tactics regimentation made possible. About a kilometre and a half (a little less than a mile) directly east of the tomb, and facing east, standing at the ready in close parallel ranks, is an army of some 7,000 terracotta warriors (Figure 103 \. They are all at least lifesize, but differentiated in size according to rank; they were fully equipped, with weapons, chariots and many horses. Protective flanking files face north, south, east and west. There are other subsidiary formations to the north of this one, and more may be found. (Two bronze four-horse chariots have been found to the west of the tumulus; they are distinguished by material and are two-thirds life size.) These figures, in thousands of permutations and individual variations upon a few physiognomic types, originally painted in rich colours and carrying bronze weapons, accompanied the emperor and displayed his might in perpetuity. They obey the cardinal order that established his tomb­ palace as an image both of the empire and of the world, and the emperor himself lay at the centre. At the same time, each soldier stands on a square plinth, on a

grid of tiles, so that, like their real counterparts, they maintain the disciplined planar order that made them a powerful fighting force, within the embracing imperial cardinal order. The army of the First Emperor has a portentous ancestry in funerary art, which will provide a brief foretaste of some of the issues concerning images in the next chapter. In early China, as in other cultures - early Egypt, Ur in Mesopotamia, Nubia and Ancient America, for example - exalted persons took with them in death a certain number of people - servants and musicians, for example - and animals as part of their appropriate staff and equipment for the afterlife. Early Shang dynasty burials contain large numbers of symmetrically arrayed men, women, children, horses and dogs. This practice was ended completely by a predynastic Qin ruler in 384 bc. Ceramic sculptures replaced sacrifices once and for all. Burial sacrifices, like the lavish goods and offerings that accompany them, must have indicated the very highest status, but it would have been unwise, even for a ruler as prodigal and harsh as Shi Huangdi, to bury large portions of the army upon which the might and stability of his kingdom would depend. At the same time, these terracotta soldiers have the presence of life, and were evidently intended as nearly as was practicable to be effigies, that is, to bear the features of individuals at the same time that they were units of a much larger order, like the regimented order of the 700,000 conscripts said to have built the tomb they defend. They are images of individual subordination, themselves a microcosm of a newly centralized and organized society. The army is also a colossal multipli­ cation and magnification of the guardian and apotropaic images to be found in countless tombs, temples and palaces in many cultures, including Chinese culture. Although the Qin dynasty lasted only four years after Shi Huangdi’s death in 2.10 bc, the foundations of a unified political administration had been laid down, and the rulers of the succeeding Han dynasty followed the Qin pattern by also building a capital at Xi’an, called Chang’an, south of the Wei River, and immediately to the south of Shi Huangdi’s capital of Xianyang. Chang’an repeated the traditional precise cardinal orientation but was not square in plan, with stepped breaks in the northwest and southeast corners. Although these may be explained by the features of the site, and by pre-existing palaces (also cardinally aligned), it is not surprising that Chang’an came to be called the City of the Dippers, as if the notched boundaries were images of the constellations we call the Big and Little Dippers. Since the capital was an image of the cosmos in any case, since the Dippers stand in highly visible relation to the Pole Star, and since the Pole Star was central to Chinese imperial ideology, it was perhaps inevitable that such an explanation for the deviations of the plan should have arisen. The Han did not rebuild their capital at Chang’an after its destruction in the early first century ad, but moved east to Luoyang. The new capital was once again irregular in relation to the old Zhou Wangcheng plan, and in the centuries following the final collapse of the Han dynasty, alternative plans were constructed. Through these changes, cardinal and north-south alignment persisted. An inner city, containing ceremonial and administrative spaces as well as the palaces of the imperial family, was enclosed within the walls, usually to the north, connected to the main south gate by a central, axial road, which came to be named for the

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104 Heiji-kyo (Nara), Japan, c.710-84 ad. 1. Hei-jo Palace. Black areas are temple complexes, white squares to the south are markets. After N. Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning, Fig. 97

2,36

red or vermillion bird, symbol of the favourable southerly direction. Cities also came to be organized more pronouncedly according to the divisions of a grid. A greater and much more regular capital was begun in 582 at Xi’an, now to the south of Han Chang’an, by Wendi, the first emperor of the Sui dynasty. This was called Daxing, but when taken over by the Tang dynasty, was also called Chang’an. By the seventh century, Chang’an (Figure 102) was the largest city in the world, with a population of over a million. It was also a great cosihopolitan centre with flourishing Buddhist and Taoist monasteries, and its pattern exerted a powerful influence outside China. The plan of Chang’an was replicated with variations in Mongolia, Korea and especially in Japan. The Chinese imperial city plan came to Japan as part of the great wave of Chinese influence during the centuries in which Buddhism was also established. Buddhism, from its beginnings in India, came to Japan first from Korea, and, after the late sixth century, deeply transformed indigenous Japanese traditions, including Shintoism and imperial rule. Heijo-kyo, o'r Nara, was built during the seventh and eighth centuries (Figure 104), and Heian-Kyo, present day Kyoto, was to be the imperial capital until 1869, nearly eleven hundred years after the beginning of its construction in 794. Nara was built on a rectangular plan about 5 kilometres (3 miles) on a side north and south and 4 kilometres (2% miles) on a side east and west, divided into a grid nine measures high and eight wide, each of which was divided into sixteen blocks. As at Chang’an, the great central north-south road was called the Vermillion Bird Road, at the northern end of which was the palace. The palace area was extended beyond a square to the east, just as twelve squares of blocks were added to the eastern side of the plan of the city as a whole. Nara was built as a Buddhist capital, and thus as a part of inter-Asian Buddhism. Since renunciation of the world is a high Buddhist ideal and an advanced spiritual attainment, Nara was laced with temples and monasteries; but more than institu­ tions of piety, these temples and monasteries were part of a larger scheme of political unification and centralization. The Emperor Shomu called his reign Tempyo, or Heavenly Peace, and the harmony to which he referred meant the pacification of his contentious feudal rivals. Like Prince Shotoku, the first Buddhist ruler, Shomu was intent upon the unification of Japan and, in the tradition of Asoka’s unification of India, this new dominion was to be a spiritual dominion under the principles of Buddhist enlightenment. Toward the actualization of this new unity, Shomu commanded the building of monasteries in all of Japan’s 67 provinces; each was to have a seven-storey pagoda, and each was to be devoted to the study of Buddhist texts, especially to one setting forth the principles of divine rule and subordination to the emperor. The education and ordination of monks took place at Nara, which thus became a religious and administrative centre immediate to the imperial court. The highest union of Japanese traditions with new Buddhist doctrines was said to have been effected when Shomu sent his adviser, the monk Gyoki, to the ancient Shinto shrine at Ise. There the oracle told him that the Buddha Vairocana, or Buddha of Universal Light, and the Shinto goddess of the sun were compati­ ble deities. This provided justification for the emperor’s appropriation of the forms of the new religion. As an image of his new empire, and as a great centre

of religious and political justice, Shomu vowed to cast a Buddha Vairocana some io metres (45 feet) high, a colossal image like the Vairocana that stood near the second Tang capital at Luoyang. Shomu asked for some contribution to this project from all the inhabitants of Japan, thus involving them in acommon, national purpose. He also appropriated all the copper in Japan. As I have discussed in Chapter 1, this amounted to exacting tribute, to a demand that nobles contribute to the new central seat of imperial power at the same time that they performed an act of votive piety. It also assured that no comparable rival images would be made. The gold necessary to cover the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, was found miraculously. This great sculpture, begun in 745, consumed vast quantities of materials and skilled labour. It was finally successfully completed at Nara. The Daibutsu was dedicated on a propitious day in 752., when the Indian monk Bodhisena, standing on a high scaffold, painted the irises of its eyes with a brush attached by strings to the hands of the Emperor, presumably so that there would be immediate contact between the Buddha of Universal Light and the one who had caused his image to be made, and brought it to life. The Diabutsu was placed in the Todai-ji, the large monastery on the eastern side of Nara. The Todai-ji is a rectangle, slightly elongated from the square to east and west. It is entered from the south and the space is organized on a north­ south axis in the Chinese manner. The structure housing the Daibutsu, the Daibuts-den, or Great Buddha Hall, required the levelling of hills for its construc­ tion and was once the largest wooden structure in the world. It stands at the centre of the precinct, a square plan at whose centre the colossal Buddha is seated upon a great circular dais. Vairocana faces south in a high timbered hall permit­ ting circumambulation of this most powerful spiritual and national centre. The monastery proper lies to the north. Shomu’s zeal for the realization of a Buddhist state was by no means univer­ sally shared, and his successors moved the imperial capital to Kyoto. The Todaiji as it stands today has suffered through the centuries since its imperial founda­ tion. Its great 30 metre (100 foot) east and west pagodas are gone, the Hall of the Great Buddha is smaller, and the Daibutsu itself survives only in fragments left after its destruction by fire in the late sixteenth century, fragments incorpo­ rated in its reconstitution in the seventeenth.

3.IO BEIJING

3.IO BEIJING

The cardinal order of traditional Chinese social spaces was deeply established in ritual and more general second nature. Han dynasty prescriptions for social decorum, for example, specify that host and guest proceed according to co­ ordinate patterns of east and west, left and right, along paths in which relative status determines movement into progressively more private and exclusive spaces. The imperial city might be seen as the most embracing construction of such decorum, at least in principle corroborated by the frame of the world itself. If such order might seem oppressive, it must also be noted at once that it was in the great co-ordinate quarters of Tang Chang’an that the Chinese garden began to assume its characteristic form, and that landscape painting, closely related to the garden, not only began to emerge as a major Chinese art, but as one of the great traditions of painting taken altogether. The art of making gardens may

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have begun as the imitation of royal gardens, in their turn the imitation of sacred places in which spirits might be addressed as part of imperial cult, but both the art of the garden and landscape painting turned away from the order of collective rule to the virtual and aesthetic, to the randomness of nature and the particular, to the experience of the individual spirit in the embracing spirit of nature. The Tang dynasty ended in the early tenth century, and by 960 the first emperor of the Sung dynasty had established a-capital at Bianzhou (modern Kaifeng). Under the Sung, trade flourished, populations increased - the Northern and Southern Sung capitals each had populations of over a million - and, perhaps in response to sensibilities shaped by the garden and painting, the traditional pattern of the capital city was loosened, as the ward system was abandoned in favour of a much freer intermixture of city life and commerce. Northern Sung rule ended in 1127, at which time emperor and court fled south, establishing a new capital at Lin’an (present Hangzhou). Lin’an fell, and the Sung dynasty ended, in 1279. By ending the Sung dynasty, Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, made all of China part of the vast Mongolian empire. The new Mongol dynasty called itself Yuan, ‘origin’. Kublai Khan (and his Chinese advisers) thus claimed the primordial generative values of the centre and, at the same time, did so in terms that transcended regional differences, bringing newly reunited China under the rule of a single principle. The Mongols were shamanists, groups of whom converted to one or another of the religions they encountered in their conquests, and they seem to have incorpo­ rated religions easily. (A thirteenth-century missionary and envoy of the king of France described mosques and a Christian church in Genghis Khan’s capital of Kara-Khorum, which he compared unfavourably to the object of his own monarch’s patronage, the royal church, mausoleum and monastery at St-Denis.) When Kublai Khan began the construction of the great capital he called Dadu in 1267 (Figure 105), he chose the site occupied by the earlier non-Chinese dynasties succeeding the Tang, the Liao and Jin. Dadu was laid out as a cardinally aligned rectangle longer in its north-south dimensions. Although it generally follows the ancient Chinese model in having three gates in each wall determin­ ing the major divisions of the grid (except for the north wall, which had two), Dadu was also laid out with respect to a stone ‘centre marker’, which stood to the east of a ‘centre pavilion’. Most of the large grid answering to the gates was subdivided by long east-west streets to accommodate the myriad activities of a metropolis. There were in effect three cities one inside the other. The state ceremo­ nial spaces, the audience halls and pavilions, were enclosed on the north-south axis defined by the central pavilion described above and by the central southern gate. To the west of this complex is Taiye Pond, with its artificial island, and, farthest to the west, palaces and gardens. (Dadu, it should be noted, was visited by Marco Polo, who praised the great city, six miles in length on each of its four sides, precisely for its order - like a chessboard - and its magnificence; standing on the towers of the walls, he noted, it was possible to look down the broad streets to the corresponding towers on the other side.) Almost a century after the construction of Dadu, in 1368, the Mongols were defeated, initiating the Ming dynasty. The first Ming capital was Nanjing. Dadu

was renamed Beiping (Northern Peace), then Beijing (Northern Capital) and rebuilt as the imperial capital in the first two decades of the fifteenth century. (Figure 106). The city was considerably modified, truncated by nearly two gate­ units to the north for defensive reasons and extended to the south. The central ceremonial spaces became the Forbidden City (the actual name of which was taken from the constellation of which the Pole Star is part), still surrounded by its administrative city. According to principles of Chinese geomancy, a city should have a mountain to the north, water to the south, and so the Forbidden City does. The north-south axis continued to dominate the Ming capital, and in fact was extended into the southern, ‘outer’ city, which was enclosed by walls in 15 53 to give Beijing the form with which it began its modern history. This extended axis passed between two large ritual spaces, laid out in obedience to the ancient grid and closed off by the new southern walls, the larger Altar of Heaven to the east of the axis, and the Altar of Agriculture (or of First Crops) to the west. The route defined by northward movement from these shrines toward the Forbidden City was a vast, monumentally elaborated path toward the imperial centre marked by a series of gates connecting great extended plazas along its axis. Each gate effected a transition to a space qualitatively higher by virtue of its greater proximity to the centre. So the southernmost gate led to the Thousand Pace Corridor, which in turn led to gates into what had now become the ‘inner’ imperial city. There a great rectilinear esplanade, passing through yet another great gate, was flanked by the precincts of the Ancestral Temple to the east and the Altars of Soil and Grain to the west, leading finally to the Forbidden City

105 Plan of Dadu, later Beijing, begun in 1267 by Kublai Khan. 1. Audiencfe hall. 2. Imperial garden. 3. Palaces and gardens. 4. Centre marker. 5. Ancestral temple. After Steinhardt, fig. 137 106 Plan of Beijing, I5th-i9th centuries, with extensions to the south in the 15th and 16th centuries. 1. Forbidden City (corresponds to 1 in previous figure). 2. Altar of the Moon. 3. Altar of the Sun. 4. Altars of Soil and Grain. 5. Ancestral temple. 6. Altar of Agriculture. 7. Altar of Heaven. After Steinhardt, fig- 2.

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107 Ceremony at the gate of the Forbidden City, c.1830; the Emperor is enthroned in the pavilion at the top of the stairs to our upper right. Copperplate engraving, 51 x 88.5 cm (24 x 35% in). British Museum, London

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itself, entered through the arms of the Gate of the Noonday Sun. Figure 107 shows a ceremony that took place around 1830 at the entrance to the Forbidden City. The emperor, facing south, that is, outward from the Forbidden City, is enthroned at the top of the second-level stairway to our right. This engraving gives a slight but still vivid indication of the adaptation of the colossal planar order of these spaces to ritual and broader social order. Inside this gate are five bridges, the central of which is reserved for the emperor. Great Harmony Gate led into the precinct of the elevated Halls of Great Harmony. This was the symbolic heart of imperial China. As we have seen, the Chinese ruler had long been associated both with the Pole Star and with the ruling principle of a properly designed city. The ruler himself is again a living centre, the meeting of earth and sky, of square and circle, the intersection of the five directions, the embodiment of celestial stability and order in human affairs. It was in the halls of Great Harmony that the emperor celebrated such crucially important occasions as the new year, the winter solstice (the beginning of the agricultural year) and his own birthday (the beginning of his individual life as the Son of Heaven). Outside the walls, altars of earth (to the north), sun (to the east) and moon (to the west) proclaimed the dissemination of celestial order into the empire from that centre. The Chinese were primarily an agricultural people, and these altars (like many within the city) responded to their concerns, concerns very much like those evident in the places of rule built by other peoples whose lives have primar­ ily turned on the benevolent round of the seasons. The largest of these altars were to the south, just inside the ‘outer city’, as we have seen. In the larger of these two, the Altar of Heaven, the emperor, as the Son of Heaven, and the sole representative of his people to the powers of heaven, proceeded on the day of winter solstice according to ancient rituals. Only the emperor could perform these rituals, as always from south to north, from the Circular Mound, to the Imperial Vault of Heaven, to the Hall of Prayer for a Prosperous Year. The political system to which Beijing was shaped lasted until the twentieth

century. Understandably, the millennial traditions of political rule and subordi­ nation to which Beijing gave unsurpassed monumental expression could not be discussed apart from that expression itself. When Mao Zedong raised the flag of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, he did so from the gate leading into the ‘inner’ imperial city, thus both defying and continuing traditional order. The gate, renamed Tian’an Gate, and the square on which it faced to the south, were in their turns to become a new focus, if not a new centre. The new order was stated in stone buildings and monuments that are Chinese variants of twentieth­ century Western state neoclassicism. These buildings and monuments are visibly modern, thus proclaiming by contrast the end of feudalism and the beginning of a new era and new institutions. It is important, however, that this was done, not by building a new capital but by modifying the old one, which thus became a symbol of the history of rule in China. Ancient meanings were turned to new purposes or denied. The new complex is to the south, but the central north-south axis was countered by extending a major east-west street across the Imperial Road, thus to neutralize the ancient political-ritual meaning of the alignment of Chinese imperial cities. All this was done in one simple iconoclastic gesture. In the large area to the south of Beijing’s new east-west axis - but still on the ancient north-south axis - Tiananmen Square was built as the capital of modern China. Farthest north along this axis, that is, in the ancient position of greatest honour, is the first of the new structures, the Monument to the People’s Heroes. To the west is the Great Hall of the People, replacing the traditional altars of soil and grain, built to be taller than the old imperial gates and to occupy more space than the old imperial halls; on the eastern side of the square, replacing the traditional altar of the ancestors, are the Museums of the Revolution and of Chinese History. On the old polar axis, but to the south, in contradistiction to the emperors, is the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong. The walls and gates of MingChing Beijing are gone, and the old imperial city has become the core of a modern metropolis.

3.II VERSAILLES

3.II VERSAILLES

The great royal palace of Louis XIV at Versailles (Figure 108), one of the represen­ tative works of the European Baroque style, was built in stages around an older building over a period of about forty years. The older structure, a moated hunting lodge built by Louis XIII, was encased by the later construction and preserved in part, perhaps as a kind of dynastic centre and shrine, even though it was stylis­ tically inconsistent with increasingly grandiose neoclassical forms. The older building was approximately cardinally aligned, to the north of west, and this alignment came to provide an armature for the elaboration of Versailles as the personal capital of the Sun King in the last great variation on the millennial themes of solar kingship. Versailles was first remodelled as a retreat to which king and court could retire from Paris. Entertainments famous throughout Europe were held there and colossal projects of terracing were carried out, extending the cardinal symmetry of the chateau into a vast park. The sculptures and fountains of the park stated the allegorical personality of the king, which had been carefully nurtured for him from his infancy. It was usual for European monarchs after the Renaissance

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108 Louis Le Vau and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Palace of Versailles, view from west to east, 1669-85

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to be compared to ancient gods, heroes and rulers, and meaning of this kind, although certainly learned and aristocratic, was not as esoteric as it might seem now, when the classical literature basic to the long tradition of royal iconogra­ phy is no longer familiar. Versailles was meant to be a showplace to the world, and the iconographic scheme of its gardens was explained in guidebooks, in which it was compared to the Wonders of the Ancient World. While identification of the king with great figures of the classical past may seem like mere flattery or self-aggrandizement, it had the absolutely serious purpose of asserting author­ ity and legitimacy through continuity with the great originative past, even of at least suggesting divine ancestry, much as we have seen rulers in many traditions to have claimed descent from deified founders. In being allegorically identified with Apollo and thus with the sun, Louis XIV took his place in an iconography of kingship reaching back to the pharaohs of Egypt and the kings of the ancient Near East, through the Roman emperors and the allegorical representation of Christ. Louis himself was very aware of this exalted succession and his personal emblem showed the sun with radiant face over the earth, with legend NEC PLURIBUS IMPAR. The academicians who devised the emblem understood these words to mean ‘not unequal to several suns’, that is, presumably, equal to several monarchs, or to the sum of several monarchs; Louis, however, understood it to mean - emblems were supposed to be mysterious and polysemous - that he might rule several empires, as the sun lighted many worlds. Such expansive imperial fantasy had a truly world imperial dimension that distinguishes Louis XIV from any of the earlier rulers we have considered; by this time Europeans had long since made contact with other regions of the world, the modern understanding of the geography of the world had been substantially achieved, and European colonization was well under way.

3-II VERSAILLES

109 Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Charles Le Brun, Galerie des Glaces, Palace of Versailles, begun 1678

In 1668, with the thirty-year-old king’s fortunes in European politics in the ascendancy, it was decided that Versailles would be changed significantly in character, and rebuilt on a scale appropriate to his glory and the glory of his realm. An ‘envelope’ in a grand Italian style would be built around the old chateau with a gallery to the west joining wings to the north and south. As might be expected in a programme intended further to glorify the king, the elabora­ tion of the theme of the sun continued in this new second phase. Allegorical figures of the months were placed on the western gallery facade, beginning in the classical manner with March at the southern end and moving northward, to end with February. Although the northward direction of the series mimics the movement of the sun on the horizon from spring equinox to summer solstice, the facade is not a simple scheme of the sun’s movement, since the sun proceeds southward again after the summer solstice; rather it should be seen as a complete revolution of the sun, the round of the seasons from spring to spring, from regeneration to regeneration. This annual solar cycle is explicit in the associa­ tion of each of the months with one of the signs of the zodiac. This arrangement also means that the date of Louis’s birth, 5 September, under the sign of Virgo, falls in the centre, along the axis organizing the central meanings of both palace and gardens. In 1678 the Dutch War ended in favour of France, making Louis XIV the pre-eminent monarch of Europe. It was decided to replace the western gallery with the Galerie des Glaces - the Hall of Mirrors - thus to complete the most splendid royal palace in Europe (Figure 109). Until the 1660s the secret of making large mirrors was jealously guarded by the Venetians, for whom they had become a lucrative export as mirrors became a more and more fashionable element of architectural design. After industrial espionage complete with bribery and murder,

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Colbert, the famous financial minister of Louis XIV, who figured importantly in the history of Versailles, succeeded in learning the Venetian secrets and in breaking their monopoly. In 1673, some six years before the Galerie des Glaces was built, a royal patent was given for plate glass, which could be made in much larger sizes than had been possible before. The French mirror industry was then first in the world. This model triumph of Colbert’smercantilism thus made the Galerie des Glaces into a dazzling showcase of French commerce and industry at the same time that it realized an unprecedented and uniquely modern invention on the theme of the ancient solar iconography of kingship. When the new gallery was built, rooms of Jupiter, Saturn and Venus were destroyed to the north and south to make room for it, and a Salon of Peace (on the queen’s end) and a Salon of War (on the king’s end) were built instead. The northern Hall of Apollo, with its ceiling painting of the solar god in his chariot, the rising of the sun, which now abutted the Salon of War, became Louis’s throne room. If the figures of the months on the western facade mark the annual passage of the sun, then the month of Louis’s birth coincides with an image on the inside, on the ceiling of the Galerie des Glaces, of Louis-Helios-Apollo beginning his sole rule of France. The same axis also defines the chambre du roi immediately behind the Galerie. The windows of this room face the east and Paris. It was in this room, called in its turn the centre of the world, that the rising and retiring of the king - the rising and setting of the sun - were daily observed in elaborate court rituals, to which staged access was had according to rank. As might be expected, the same east-west orientation is to be seen in the Chapel at Versailles, and the literal parallel between the space of traditional religious ritual and the secular rituals of absolute monarchy are not incidental. Religious and royal orientation had often shared social spatial forms in the traditions with which we are concerned, nor does there often seem to have been much desire to distinguish them. In this case the royal orientation, although sanctioned and corroborated by the religious orientation, is much the more monumental and expansive, reaching along the Avenue de Paris to the east and through the Galerie des Glaces and the sublimely scaled parks to the setting of the sun in the west. By the time Versailles was built, the displacement of the ancient Western understanding of the world as a cosmos - a divine artifact - was well under way, and this epochal change concerned exactly the two bodies of most importance in the long and broad traditions of Western royal and religious iconography, namely the sun and the earth. According to the cosmology that had reigned for some two thousand years, from the ancient Greeks onward, the earth itself was a centre, around which the sun, moon and known planets turned in perfectly concentric orbits, the whole contained within the sphere of the fixed stars, enclos­ ing creation as a universe, one harmonious set of rotations. This understanding of things as a divinely ordained and unified order, like other constructions of the fabric of the cosmos in other traditions, provided the analogical basis - the putatively natural basis - for all kinds of hierarchical social arrangements, so that its modification might be expected to undercut this analogical basis, thus to call the natural basis of those arrangements radically into question. The new Copernican theory made the sun the centre of the universe; in this new scheme

the earth became what we now regard it to be, a planet, that is, not a fixed centre but a wanderer. Again, as an astronomical hypothesis this may seem a merely possible alternative. But the mere alternative inevitably raised the question of whether or not the order of divine creation is or even can be the paradigm for human institutions, and it is not hard to understand why the Church strongly resisted Copernicus’s new idea. Galileo, in perhaps the most famous confronta­ tion between emerging modern science and traditional religion, was forced to recant his belief in the Copernican theory about seventy-five years before Versailles was begun. But Galileo is supposed to have said after his recantation, ‘and yet it [the earth] ... moves’, and his capitulation did nothing to prevent the contin­ ual advance of the modern Western understanding of the universe as uniformly physical, of which the Copernican theory was a fundamental part. Because the meaning of the sun and its movement was much more than merely astronomical, and was bound to the rhythms of agriculture, the iconography of rulers likened to the sun had a powerful historical momentum of its own and was slow to change. Louis, as the king of a largely agricultural people, still proclaimed for himself the ancient generative value of the centre, in a way not essentially different from Augustus, who, as Louis certainly knew, also identified himself with Apollo. But the advisers of the Sun King seem also to have drawn from modern ideas; there is an insistence upon the centrality of the sun (and of the Sun King); and whereas in the older schemes the sun was the bringer of light and life, the principle of order and justice throughout the world and the regula­ tor of time and the seasons, the new cosmology offered all that plus the still grander allegorical possibility that the king, in his ancient identification with the sun, was an absolute centre, around which everything else moved. From this centre the rays of the sun reached out into a universe of any possible extent. So the absolute ruler commands an empire of any extent, and the seemingly endless continuation of landscape subjected to the central axial order of the palace at Versailles is without boundary. In such a space, in other words, one of the constituents of place has been lost, and at Versailles the long tradition of the meanings it still embodies was transformed, becoming almost modern.

3.IZ REVOLUTION The immemorial allegorical sun of kingship shone in the decorations for the coronation of the twenty-year-old Louis XVI at Reims Cathedral in June 1775. On 20 January 1793 Louis was executed in the newly renamed Place de la Revolution, formerly the Place Louis XV, the empty pedestal of whose statue stood near the guillotine. Louis’s severed head was displayed to the crowd, relics of the portentous event were taken, and his body was thrown into a mass grave. At St-Denis, the shrine of the patron saint of France, birthplace of the Gothic style and burial place of French kings for over a thousand years, Louis’s predeces­ sors on the throne of France suffered a like fate. Their bodies were disinterred that of Louis XIV among them - and reburied en masse. As for Versailles, it had been the destination of the march of a popular army from Paris demanding bread in October 1789, and, following a night of violence, it was the scene of Louis’s capitulation to the demand that he change his residence to Paris, first to become a constitutional monarch, but finally to face death. Versailles itself was locked

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and boarded up, to become not only a symbol of the ancient regime but of the whole previous age. Galileo’s first view of the moons of Jupiter through a telescope urged the conclusion that the heavenly bodies were not composed of some supra-terrestrial material, some quintessence, as had long been believed, but that they were instead composed of the same elements as the world, below, as we ourselves. This inference was massively confirmed by Newtonian physics, which described the whole universe as the vast but steady theatre of the same fundamental forces. At the same time that the gods vanished from the planets and the heavens, the earth also lost its mythic mantle, in its own way becoming a great conglomeration of elements, subject to physical laws, not alive with mysterious powers of growth and renewal but rather rich with resources to be exploited and turned to use. In such circumstances it was difficult to maintain the age-old idea that the king linked the people to the generative powers of heaven and earth, or that there was a substantial difference between the person of the monarch and others that made this union possible. By the eighteenth century, rule demanded justification in terms of other realities. One could not speak literally of the sacred person of the king, and the revolutionaries finally insisted that the royal person was not differ­ ent by tossing it, without ceremony or distinction, into a common grave. Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium caelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs) was published in 1543, and it was in the sixteenth century that the metaphor of ‘revolution’ began to be used for political transformation. Although there had of course always been violent internal changes in rule - coups, wars of succession, popular uprisings - and although the influence of heavenly bodies had long been thought to bear heavily on human affairs, the metaphor of revolution came to imply that such changes were like great physical processes, physical and astronomical rather than spiritual and astrological. When the term was applied to the American Revolution and - more fully and consciously - to the French Revolution - it was partly compounded of traditional millenarianism and utopianism, both of which were given new direction by the Enlightenment. Rather than awaiting the New Jerusalem, or imagining an ideal state as the end of political and institutional effort, it was possible to return, partly to a ‘golden age’, but, more fundamentally, to first principles, upon which just societies could be constructed. In this sense, the inevitable return to beginnings was not so much the recurrence of the same cycle as it was an abrupt change from last to first, from ends to beginnings. Radical institutional transformation fused with geomet­ ric simplicity and with ideas of sublime mass and momentum. The great force of the metaphor, deeply established in the imaginative basis of the new physics, lay in the sublimely simple inevitability it gave to change and to the historical agents of change. As the unfathomably vast and silent orbs of the heavens com­ pleted their round, precisely and predictably measuring their own years, so the great circles of the ages of human history also closed, to begin again, but from a new beginning. So understood, the metaphor of revolution contains the kernel of the absolute authority of the primitive and primordial and of the demand that societies should be given absolutely new forms and that the human imagination should create absolutely new worlds. When enacted, the sublime notional simplic­ ity of this turn through a point from old to new, with its implicit equally simple

annihilation of what had been, also turned out to herald the unleashing of characteristically modern violence. In many examples in this chapter, just rule has been associated with the sun, which sheds its light regularly and impartially. The just ruler oversees his realm as the sun surveys the world in its daily course. But if the just king is like the sun, the unjust king is unlike the sun, and is so to speak himself judged by the sun’s justice. By the time of the French Revolution these metaphors had undergone fundamental changes. Not only was the sun the centre according to the new astronomy, but, perhaps more importantly, the French Revolution was a culmina­ tion of the Enlightenment, which is obviously another light metaphor. The ‘light of reason’ is in effect another sun, and another sun of justice. It is universal in that it is distributed among human beings, and may provide access to first princi­ ples of nature and society. The ‘sun’ of reason is democratic, in short, and implies a consensus with an authority essentially incompatible with the assumption of the monarch’s unique central status and access to higher power. The powerful new faith in the light of reason, although it might separate king and deity, also elevated the ‘people’ and the ‘common man’, and, as its metaphor­ ical lineage might suggest, this ‘light’ not only urged democratic institutions, but it assumed triumphalist religious forms. Notre Dame in Paris, like many other churches in France, became a Temple of Reason, and the Church of Ste-Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, became the Pantheon, which, in contrast to the Gothic crowdedness of the royal crypt at St-Denis, was to be a shrine to the heroes of enlightenment, not a place of origin and succession but a monument to the eternal clarity of reason and to the age of democratic freedom toward which it pointed. During the French Revolution, earlier traditions of pageantry and spectacle continued, but turned to new purposes. Those who devised these pageants and spectacles followed in the paths of the religion they sought to replace by linking art with instruction and education, a traditional posture of the Catholic Church strongly reaffirmed in the Counter Reformation, and to be embraced, in its secular form, by many modern totalitarian governments. The neoclassical painter JacquesLouis David was responsible for the design of many of these events. David was a passionate Jacobin, who voted for the death of the king. His task was a heady one, for not only did David have to illustrate myth and allegory, as painters had long done for royal and aristocratic patrons, but he also certainly had to help invent these myths and allegories themselves, not least of all to give shape and discipline to the newly unleashed and terrible forces of mass action. While those who devised the iconography of the French Revolution overthrew some traditional political and religious forms in simple, violent iconoclastic gestures, they pointedly inverted and incorporated others, including some that take us back to basic themes of Chapter 2. As an example we may consider the Festival of the Supreme Being, conceived by Robespierre and designed and carried out by David, held in what had been renamed the Champ de Reunion on 20 June 1794. The Champ de Reunion, formerly the Champ de Mars, a military parade ground, had already been transformed into a great revolutionary shrine and amphitheatre. In the preparations for the Fete de la Federation of 14 July 1790, in which, as had occurred all over France, regional identity and rivalry were forsworn in favour of citizenship in the French nation, 150,000 people of all

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social ranks - even Louis XVI lent a hand - laboured in an outpouring of revolutionary enthusiasm to prepare the site and raise at this centre the ‘Altar of the Fatherland’. This enterprise, reminiscent of the many corporate projects we have examined (which might have included the earthworks necessary to regularize the site at Versailles), was itself seen as an act of transcendent fraternity and democracy, in which all worked equally to fashion.a new sacred space for the celebration of solidarity and liberty. Robespierre considered belief in a Supreme Being and in the immortality of the soul at least to be necessary for the rational organization and conduct of a society, and the Festival of the Supreme Being was intended to inculcate such deistic principles of the new republican religion, both by public spectacle and by the mass involvement of the people in the spectacle itself. David’s festival was a great Gesamtkunstwerk, combining architecture and sculpture with theatre and choral music. This festival took place according to the new revolutionary calendar (which I shall discuss in a moment) but certainly appropriated the day of Pentecost, the celebration of the Descent of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles in the calendar it had replaced. It was presented as a rite of collective purification, a return to nature by which justice, liberty and virtue would be restored. To begin there was a triumphal procession, a form as old as Roman military triumphs, to which the allegorical triumph of abstract ideas and especially of virtue had been added in innumerable festivals after the Renaissance. At the centre of the Champ de Reunion, where the Altar of the Fatherland stood, David erected a huge artificial mountain. The backbone of this construction seems to have been a column, atop which stood a colossal Hercules, presumably showing virtue triumphant, and well established as a symbol of the French people, holding a figure of Liberty in his hand. There was also a ‘liberty tree’, the cult of which had been a part of the Revolution from early on, as it had also been a part of the American Revolution. (With an iconoclastic sense of anti-decorum, liberty trees were sometimes planted at the crossing of desecrated churches.) Liberty trees had been planted in public spaces all over France as symbols of the birth and rebirth of the peoples’ freedom, their return to their natural state. The tree was the point of generation of a new people, not simply liberated but restored to their natural condition. It was the genealogical tree of the Great Family of the Free, which would eventually populate the whole universe. In such a context, the classicism of David’s figures, exemplars and allegories of virtue and justice, must have seemed less timeless than primor­ dial, the divine ancestors not of royalty, but of the people. It was from this centre, mountain and tree that, as Robespierre said, ‘we shall give to the world the example of republican virtues’. The Altar of the Fatherland beneath the mountain had declared that ‘all mortals are equal; it is not by birth but only virtue that they are distinguished. In every state the Law must be universal and mortals whosoever they be are equal before it.’ The principles that would emanate from this centre, at once modern and truly and intentionally primitive, were also truly universal, fulfilling a notional dream of empire at the same time that, at least in principle, they undercut the possibility of any empire at all, except one arising from the universal will of all people. Louis XIV and his advisers may have understood the new heliocentric cosmology to be an allegorical improvement over the old in that it placed the king at the centre of the universe; but the deeper

meaning of the new science was not that the sun is the centre of the universe, but rather that the universe is not centred at all, that it is infinite, without ontologi­ cal hierarchy, physical and subject to the same physical laws throughout. And, just as the light of reason is in everyone, so the centre is everywhere. All calendars begin from what might be called central events - the creation of the world, the crowning of the pharaoh, the institution of the Olympic games, the birth of Christ, the hijrah^ the departure of the faithful from Mecca to Medina. Much as Christian theologians argued that the resurrection took place on the eighth day, the day after the Jewish sabbath, the literal dawn of a new era, so the French revolutionaries inverted the symbolism of the old royal order to establish a new age in a demythologized (or remythologized) nature. The founda­ tion of the new republic was also the beginning of a new republican calendar, both beginning on the autumn equinox, 21 September 1792. As the sun passed from one hemisphere to the other, so the people had ended the era of subjection to monarchy. In this new age the sacral calendar of feasts and saints’ days was abolished or transformed. The seven-day week, sanctioned by Biblical creation itself, was abandoned in favour of a ten-day period, like the fingers of the hand. Revolutionary clocks ticked every 100,000th of the day. The new calendar did not take hold, but, as I shall discuss at length in Chapter 7, the universalization of metric space and time provided a basis for the modern world. One of the ancient prerogatives of the ruler was the fixing of weights and measures. This literally asserted ‘rule’, facilitated exchange within a jurisdiction, but also compli­ cated exchange among jurisdictions and promoted difference. The revolution­ aries saw the multiplicity of weights and measures as an aristocratic impediment to unification and as a covert means of division and control. Thus weights and measures were also universalized, founded not on royal fiat but upon given nature. The metre, the measure, was based on newly determinable longitude; it was one ten-millionth of the distance from equator to pole on a meridian defined by Dunkirk and Barcelona, which, not incidentally, runs through Paris. The patchwork boundaries of the old jurisdictions were also abolished. At first it was proposed that France be divided by a uniform grid, but this was rejected for a subtler mathematization based on population and on the modern mapping of France (which, again, is its description in terms of a uniform grid). In this way a framework of equivalence, and therefore of equality, was created, as well as a system of co­ ordinates against which populations could be plotted. In this way too, ‘popula­ tion’ emerged as a force whose characteristics could be described and quantified. This promised a sociology, a science of society itself, a scientific basis for the adjustment and formulation of policies and institutions. In the present argument, the French Revolution may be considered a pivotal formative phase in the establishment of the modern metric world that began in the Western late Middle Ages, the world I shall discuss as ‘metaoptical’ in Chapter 7. It is one thing to say that the natural world is metric (and co-ordinate), or even to treat it as if that were so, and quite another to attempt the reform of human institutions with respect to that assumption. The universalization of metric time and space was not to be agreed upon by international convention for a hundred years, and the universalization of measure and currency remains to be achieved. (As this book itself shows, there is resistance in certain quarters to the metric

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system, and Europe has just adopted the euro as I make my final revisions.) Independently of such agreements, however, the de facto spatiotemporal grid of the world, most simply evident in the completion of the centuries-long carto­ graphic description of the world and in common metric time, is the co-ordinate system within which the industry, commerce and communication of the modern world have taken their places, creating new, uniquelyjmodern social spaces, as I shall discuss in Chapter 7. In the French Revolution the new, potentially universalizable metricization took place in open and very conscious opposition to the millennial agricultural values of centres and kings. The new order denied any hierarchy, at the same time undercutting the very possibility of the old jurisdictions. To be sure, the new order might be imperial in new ways, and modern justifications were found - nation, race and progress, for example - to continue ancient centrisms, as well as the destruction and appropriation of centre by centre. As I remarked at the beginning of Chapter 2, modern centres form charac­ teristically differently, as consequences of economic, demographic and social forces, always subject to the embracing system of which they are part. In these terms, there may be any number of centres, all of which, however, must acqui­ esce in the larger system. This system was understood from the beginning to deny ontological uniqueness and hierarchy, and may easily be seen to undercut traditional centres together with the ways of life that have formed around them. This perceived threat lies at the heart of resistance to ‘modernization’, ‘develop­ ment’, ‘globalization’, and ‘Westernization’, problems to which I will return at the end of the book. Considered in itself, the order of the modern Western metaoptical world is potentially both inclusive and non-hierarchical, just as the stated goals of the French Revolution, however imperfectly achieved, were democratic in a newly modern sense. But the institutions based on these principles raise pressing problems of their own. Those who left the land of the ancient kings and aristocracy to come to the cities to work the new machines of the Industrial Revolution, which made the forces of nature controllable, predictable and punctual, participated in a rationalization of human real space and time unprecedented in its pervasive­ ness and perfectibility. In this new space and time they themselves would emerge collectively as new historical forces in their own right, perhaps predictable and controllable forces, but perhaps not.

Images

chapter

I THE ORIGINS OF IMAGES

If by ‘original’ we mean ‘first’, then the first images must have been made indepen­ dently in many places, and can never be found, or could not be identified as first if they did happen to be found. The simplest substitutive images would have become indistinguishable from other objects once their fragile and fugitive contexts were lost, and resemblant images - images that are clearly o/something - although associated with dates as early as 30,000 bc in Africa, Europe and Australia, are very difficult to date with any precision, and it is impossible to establish chronologies for traditions of activity that might have lasted for millen­ nia, but have come down to us only in a few randomly preserved fragments. Images, in short, may have ‘originated’ and then originated again in the same place, as well as ‘originating’ in many places and times. Or they might never have originated at all in other places and times, where, however, they were (and are) always a possibility, always an available next step from conditions at hand, just as it has always been possible to stop making images, or to change the way they are made, and the purposes for which they are made. Perhaps because images have become so ubiquitous and available for so many purposes - and this ubiquity and availability are basic features distinguishing the modern world - we are inclined to think of making images as simply natural. We persist in this belief even though, as we shall consider at length in Chapter 7, the conditions of presentation of modern images are obviously highly cultur­ ally specific, and unlike anything else before the twentieth century. We should also be warned against the assumption of the naturalness of images by at least two considerations. It may be only because fugitive and temporary marks have not survived, but images appear late in the hominid-human record; and images assume so many social spatial forms that they can hardly be assumed to arise directly from universal biology or psychology. If our distant ancestors had the physiological capacity for speech several hun­ dred thousand years ago, long before the earliest surviving images were made, it is most crucial for my purposes that any explanation of the origin of both language and images must acknowledge that both occurred within given real spatial conditions. Language and images might have had intimately entangled histories, as in fact they continue to have. Australian aboriginal sand-drawing, for example, which accompanies narrative, instruction and direction, involves a kind of continual spatiotemporal modelling, together with ‘poking’ or draw­ ing or pointing, fusing something like ostensive indication with the use of pictographic symbols at various levels of specificity or abstraction. If spoken language is older than the earliest images, we have also seen that the aeonic chronology of tools and places reaches back much farther still, in turn suggest­ ing that tools and places long preceded language, and that certain characteris­ tic elements and relations of social space and action were already there to be articulated a second time by both words and images. Whether or not they are older, images are deeper than language in the sense

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that they are immediately rooted in real spatial conditions. The constitutive real spatial conditionality of images has the important consequence that their ‘first’ making must be explained by more than correspondence to appearance. Palaeolithic animals, for example, are descriptive, often remarkably so, and are often explained simply in relation to immediate visual perception. This cannot further explain, however, why animals continued to be painted in the same way and in certain places for so long. The painting and engraving of Palaeolithic Europe is as un­ mistakable as any style in the history of art, and was maintained over many millennia, in fact, over a period about as long as human history since the last of these images was made. Rather than supposing that painters continued to recall very similar visual memories of the same things (animals) and nothing else, it is more likely that painting was taught by one painter (or group among whom some painted) to another, and that the requisite skills were either passed on as a ritual activity, or closely imitated. Images were often superimposed or recontoured in Palaeolithic art, which suggests that the act of making, or remaking in the same place, was as important as the images themselves, and that the formula of drawing in a certain way persisted not because an originative perception kept being recorded, but because the formula was part of broader patterns of behaviour (which need not always have been the same). If the ‘painters’ were, for example, shamans, then continuity of the ‘style’ must have meanings very different from those that come to hand if we suppose that what is often presented as the beginning of the history of art is no more than the immediate experience of nature, always uncluttered by intervening and interfering representations. If by seeking ‘origins’ we wish to raise the question, not of when or where the earliest images were made, but rather of why they might have been made, what needs or purposes they might have served, then I will argue that, in the broadest conditional terms, images are fashioned in order to make present in social spaces what for some reason is not present. Images do not simply represent, rather they inevitably make present in determinate ways, situating, continuing and preserving. Moreover, if images place or re-place the absent, their uses are always defined by present purposes. Images, in short, are put in social spaces, in determinate sizes, in order in some way to complete the social spatial definitions and differentiations treated in the two previous chapters.

4.2 REALITIES OF IMAGES Modern Americans routinely use images as means of information, advertising, entertainment, or as some combination (or confusion) of these. Images ‘tell’ us things (or persuade us about things), about other places and times (news, documen­ taries, travelogues), or they show us available products, coupled with other images that engage our fantasies, thus inducing us to buy products, as if to realize our ‘self-image’ by acting upon the fantasies associated with those products. Or fantasies not directly connected to products might induce us to consume fantasies themselves for purposes of diversion or recreation. Modern images are in fact overwhelmingly shaped to these activities and expectations, which are hardly secondary to our lives. We cannot, however, understand all images and their uses from the standpoint of these assumptions and habits. As we have seen, the modern Western aesthetic-formalist view of ‘fine’ art grew

up together with the gathering of works of self-referential quality into collections, ultimately into the institutional spaces of museums (and more broadly, into the spaces reserved for those of means and educated taste). At the same time, these changes in the institutional purposes of art made resemblant and narrative ‘subject-matter’ secondary to ‘form’, effectively relegating images to more popular and technological ‘media*. The purest art of ‘form’ itself, ‘abstract’ art, is in fact often called ‘non-representational’, ‘non-objective’, or ‘non-figural’. The aestheticformalist view of art underlying abstraction is, however, broader than abstrac­ tion, and is in itself iconoclastic in the straightforward sense of ignoring images even when they are present; aesthetic appreciation requires that we always look through and around whatever images we find in the art of any tradition to their more essential ‘forms’ and their relations. While all this has been going on in the newly specialized modern realm of ‘art’, however, we have also come to be inundated with images in unprecedented profusion, and the images we make and use without thinking of them as ‘art’ both continue to have real spatial meanings and to generate new real spatial meanings, new social spaces and institu­ tions. One of my purposes in writing this chapter is not simply to explain con­ tinuities among the uses of images in various traditions, but to try to provide a basis for the understanding of the vast culture of images in the present. Television, ‘seeing at a distance’, to take a most pervasive contemporary example, has its own place in the long human history of images, making the whole world in princi­ ple contemporaneous, but also presenting the past as ‘live’. Stimulation and manipulation of fantasy and ‘self-image’ are constant and again pervasive in modern life, and huge industries of advertising and ‘public relations’, from which political and economic institutions are hardly separable, are devoted solely to the creation, transformation and dissemination of ‘images’, which have as much to do with political change and institutional formation in the modern world as the realities to which we are inclined to believe they unproblematically refer. In short, we cannot begin to understand our own art history, and the ways images have come to bear on our lives, without raising questions about the conditions of presentation of the images we use, and about the relation of those conditions to our own spatiotemporality. Egyptian tomb images were fed and ministered to regularly by priests. Images of deities were treated like great lords and ladies, awakened, bathed, anointed and fed each day. They were carried on litters on feast days and taken to visit other gods in their temples. The mass of people addressed their supplications to the gods on the occasions when their images were brought out of their darkened and exclusive sanctuaries. Votive images of the elite, as mediators to the gods, might also become objects of popular veneration. Life in Christian Rome turned for centuries around icons of Christ and the Virgin Mary, objects of devotion and pilgrimage, carried on appropriate occasions in procession, sometimes to visit one another in their ‘houses’, much as Horus might have been taken to the temple of Hathor or Isis. The history of the ancient Mediterranean is bound together at a deep level by an image called the Palladium. Ilus, the founder of Troy, was said to be des­ cended from Zeus and Electra. In response to his prayer at the founding of the city, an image of Pallas fell from the skies. (Pallas was a feminine deity of unknown

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origin; the Greeks identified her with Athena, the Romans with Minerva.) Perhaps this ‘image’ was an unworked stone, a meteorite, like that of the mother goddess Cybele. However that may be, Troy was supposed to be impregnable as long as it possessed the Palladium. This was stolen, Troy fell, and the powerful image began its legendary peregrinations through the classical world. It was said to have been enshrined in the Temple of Vesta in Rome, where the sacred fire of the state was tended, close to the central, originary shrines and monuments of the city. Rome in its turn fell, the Palladium having passed to Constantinople. It had innumerable later echoes in the Christian Middle Ages. An icon of Christ saved the city of Edessa, and the Byzantine emperor Heraclius attributed his rule to the agency of an icon of the Virgin Mary; Constantinople itself was said to have been saved from invaders by an icon, perhaps of the Virgin and Child together, although the Virgin is especially praised as the all-powerful mother of God. As this suggests, icons, and especially icons of the Virgin Mary, demand­ ed the very highest devotion and the most determined defence; they made present a spiritual imperial power from which the emperor himself took the strength and authority of rule. Much later, and in other political circumstances, in Italian cities like Florence and Siena, icons were the focuses of civic unity, invoked in times of collective danger and thanked for deliverance. The Virgin of Guadalupe has attained a similar status in Mexico. What links all of these examples is behaviour as if the images involved were effective, or potentially effective, as agents of powers, powers closely related to the central values discussed in the last chapter. To us, Egyptian votive sculptures and Byzantine icons are to be seen in museums, where they have quite different values, demanding altogether differ­ ent behaviour. (Even at that, we might believe that their forms express the ‘spirits’ of ancient Egypt and Byzantium, as if they were still in some way animated in the institutional spaces of the modern world, if not, however, animated by what they represent.) These examples may serve to call into question the self-evidence of images of all kinds, thus to introduce the issues and distinctions pertinent to the consideration of images in the modern world.

4.3 IMAGES AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE The Spanish soldiers who conquered the Inca, and the priests who followed in their train, may well have believed that their paintings on panel and canvas, which showed the sacred narratives and personages of their faith as optical, spatiotemporal events, would appeal to everyone as being comparable to what we all see; but the Inca seeing these same images could quite reasonably conclude that the Christian God was nothing more than a piece of painted cloth that could not speak. The Spanish in this example, as Europeans of the Renaissance, assum­ ed images to be resemblant optical surfaces in virtual spaces. To be sure, images in Christian art respected the hierarchical planar decorum I shall discuss in Chapter 5, and were appropriately shaped and decorated for the rituals they faced, but these matters bore very differently upon them as images. As we have seen, the Inca were accustomed to religious art more primarily grounded in sub­ stitutive, real spatial values, art that, instead of making the past present, was meant to articulate the undisputably present. The Inca must also have associated cloth appropriate to divinity, and even images of divinities themselves, with

fine textiles, not with ‘painted cloth’. Few Europeans would have denied that a religious painting really is in a certain sense a piece of painted cloth, but the paint and cloth would have been regarded as the durable and portable but more or less indifferent vehicle for the reality made evident through the image, a position worked out in centuries of debate and conflict in the Byzantine and Western worlds concerning the nature of images and the representation of Christian divinity. The importance of this difference in attitude toward images, rooted in the certainty of ancient usages in both cultures, must be recognized in order to understand part of the mutual incomprehension of the Inca and the Spanish. And the fundamental depth of such convictions must also be recognized in order to understand the ferocity with which the debate about images was being rejoined in Renaissance Europe with the onset of the great schism of the Protestant Ref­ ormation just as European colonization was well under way. In general, the language available for writing about images has been thoroughly shaped by the long Western controversy over images. The simple Western opposi­ tion between ‘word’ and ‘image’ is in itself portentous and culturally loaded. Terms like ‘idol’ and ‘fetish’ can hardly be used neutrally in Western critical discourse. The first is from eidolon, the generic Greek word for an image, real, apparent or mental; the second is related to our ‘factitious’, a word like ‘artificial’ or ‘conventional’, referring to something with no real basis, something simply made by art (it is obviously related to ‘facture’), as dreams are made by the imagination. The early Christians distinguished themselves from pagans in reject­ ing ‘idols’, and the word ‘fetish’, whatever meanings might have been given to it by modern writers, was from the beginning heavily laden with the most elemen­ tal Judaeo-Christian and Platonic opprobrium. Modern scientific and scholarly prose itself arose in the midst of the iconoclasm contemporary with the beginnings of modern natural science, rejecting persuasion by the ‘colours’ of rhetoric in favour of factual inference. The word ‘species’ served for centuries to refer to appearances, and is related to specto, spectare (or specio, specere) and to the Greek skopein, all of which mean to look, look at or behold. It belongs to a rich but ambivalent cluster of words - ‘special’, ‘expect’, ‘respect’ and ‘spectator’, but also ‘specious’, ‘spectacle’, ‘specular’, ‘spectre’ (and ‘speculate’), much as skopein has given us words like microscope, but also ‘scepticism’. In modern usage, ‘species’ has become so identified with scientific taxonomy as to have lost all its earlier resonance. Words like ‘impression’, ‘conceptual image’, ‘idealiza­ tion’ and ‘fantasy’ presuppose a psychologistic reduction, which, however familiar and deeply habitual, is also historically and culturally specific. 4.4 TRACES, IMAGES OF TRACES, SIGHT AND ABSTRACTION Before beginning the consideration of substitutive images, I wish to introduce some fundamental questions about images through the general category of what I shall call traces. Like the semiotic index discussed in the Introduction, a trace is contiguous with its cause, but it does not have to resemble its cause. A trace may be defined as an index insofar as it functions as an image rather than as a sign. As a kind of index, traces belong to the category including the facture from which inferences of human agency and purpose may be drawn. In the Introduction I illustrated the index with the example of footprints, from which a skilled tracker

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might infer a vivid and accurate picture of the person who made them and the circumstances in which they were made. Complete and likely as these inferences may be, however, the trace cannot yield the equivalent of a resemblant image. Most of us have little experience in making such inferences; but we are altogether familiar with the metaphor of visual ‘impressions’, and we are accustomed to completing the marks that stand for them as images. The putative visual ‘impres­ sion’ may be regarded as a kind of retinal trace, and the rfiark, a brushstroke that stands for this impression, is both a trace in its own right and an image of the retinal trace. From such traces and images of traces we are altogether accustomed to inferring that, for example, those marks on that canvas show people bustling along a Parisian boulevard. Women of the Walbiri of Central Australia draw and tell ‘sand stories’. The story begins with the smoothing of a small area of sand, a model precinct for what is to follow. In this area marks are made, rubbed out and redrawn as narr­ ative advances. Some of these marks are highly schematized resemblances, which might represent a number of different things that can be similarly schematized. In other marks resemblance is not an issue at all; these are images of traces, which have a very different basis and authority. A kangaroo is not shown by its shape, even a very schematic shape, but by a series of marks on either side of a line. This shows the tracks of the kangaroo on either side of the mark left on the ground by its tail. A snake is shown by a ‘serpentine’ line, which is not just a schematization of the form of a snake but the mark of the snake’s path. One of the most important images of this kind is that of a person. Persons (unless sleeping) are not shown as ‘stick figures’, or even as sticks, both of which might be abstrac­ tions of the appearance of a person, rather they are shown as U-shapes turned in various directions in various narrative situations, accompanied by one or another appropriate attribute. The U-shape is the mark left on the earth by some­ one sitting cross-legged on the ground. For those accustomed to noting the slightest changes in flora and fauna, to whom an animal’s track may indicate its more or less recent presence as certainly as an actual sighting, the impressions left by people seated on the ground are a vivid indication of distinctly human presence and activity, with associations of stopping-place and centre, and therefore of group identity. But again, it is most important that the U-shape refers not to human appearance but to the distinctive trace on the ground of primary human social activity. The U-shaped images of traces take their definition from the results of actual contact - the marks left by people sitting on the ground - but they are also images of that actual contact. Moreover, in becoming images they are simplified and schematized, and, more importantly, they are abstracted from size, made smaller in order to be put to some use, in this case to be manipulated in a model of social space and time. It is this abstraction that makes the reference to actual contact manipulable in the narrative. I shall return to traces, and to their values of contiguity (closely related to central values) through the rest of this book. But images of traces also again raise the more general issue treated in Section 15 of Chapter 1, on models. The image of a trace, in abstracting from size, shifts apprehension from tactile to visual (at the same time that the final authority of the marks is tactile). But we may only

touch things at the size they are, and contiguity, like touch, implies an exact, concave-convex fit between cause and trace. We may, however, see the same thing as the same thing over a wide range of actual sizes, just as we are able to recognize someone close at hand or at a distance. To put the matter in the most general terms, all images are sight-like in being abstracted, from actual size, and this abstraction, this ‘drawing from’, is always the movement as an image into one or another space of human use. And, as we shall see, the abstraction of images provides the basis for the characterization of sight itself, as well as imagination and thought, as ‘places’ for images. 4.5 REAL METAPHOR Our word ‘metaphor’ is from the Greek metapherein, to transfer, to carry over or across. When we use language metaphorically we put one word ‘in place of another’ on the basis of some similarity between the things the words signify. Metaphors are not simply equivalent to what they replace, however, and the basis for comparison must be established by some embracing context. If I refer to ‘the lion Alexander’, or say ‘Alexander is a lion’, I might be taken to mean that there is a lion named ‘Alexander’. If I say ‘Alexander of Macedon is a lion’, then it becomes clear that I am comparing a person, a ruler, to something he is not, namely a lion. Since Alexander is not a lion, I must mean that he is like a lion in some way; but then I might mean that Alexander is brave and strong like a lion, or that he is lazy or rapacious, or that he has any number of other qualities that lions might be observed to have. If I say ‘Alexander of Macedon is a lion in battle’, then it becomes clearer that I mean he is brave and strong. Contexts are not simply verbal, of course. If I had lived in the ancient Near East, I might know that the lion is a royal animal, that rulers had always compared themselves to lions, and that to call Alexander a lion was to call him kingly and to place him in the company of kings. In language, metaphor usually consists of the interchange of two subtantives, which makes metaphor rich to the point of paradox and beyond; it provides the basis for any number of comparisons not specified by context at the same time that these comparisons are implicit in the metaphor itself. There is an inherent inequality between the possible characteristics of things and the characterist­ ics specified by context, and some poetry is distinguished by the high degree of elaboration and resonance among the characteristics of metaphors. In this section, I will focus on what might be called the metaphor underlying metaphor, corresponding to the first exchange of substantives. When substan­ tives - person, lion - are exchanged in speech, it is as if, before we are aware of the limits imposed by context, we actually put a lion in the place of a person. When we make what I shall call a real metaphor we actually do put something at hand in place of something else, something else which is absent, or not actually or practically present, that is, not present in a way that allows it to be treated or addressed. Real metaphor thus makes the absent present by the transfer of what is already at hand.' A stone, to take a simple hypothetical example, ‘takes the place’, or is ‘put in the place’, of a dead chieftain. Real metaphor is the most basic means by which substitution is effected, issuing directly from the most basic conditions of human spatiality, both presence and absence. The same people or

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things may be present or absent, and ‘in the absence’ of some person or thing, other persons and things are present, and may serve to make the absent as if present. This is an irreducible basis for the construction of significance within the extralinguistic spatial relations and possibilities acknowledged and indicated by language itself. The word ‘substitute’ is closely related to what I mean by real metaphor. ‘Substitute’ is related to ‘stand’, to ‘status’ or ‘stature’, arid to ‘statue’, which last might be taken to mean something standing in the place of someone who for some reason or another is absent. In general, a real metaphor is something that is able to take the place of something else, to make the absent in some sense actually present; it is something already present that has lent itself to being made to stand for something else. Like verbal metaphors, real metaphors are defined by context, but the context is a real spatial one. The transfer of something in order to be something else is a primary real spatial and social spatial act, and so is the consequent construction of spaces and times that specifies and sustains this identity. A stick becomes a hobby horse in the context of the game, that is, both within the space and time of the actual playing out of the game and within the premises and rules that shape and control this actual playing out. A stone becomes the presence of the dead chieftain in a place or precinct, a correlative space at once preserving identity and specifically shaping behaviour. In these elemental conditional terms, either stick or stone might be suitable for any number of uses in other contexts. Given its suitability to purpose, the identity of a real metaphor is thus radi­ cally dependent upon its real spatial context. As we shall see, degrees of separa­ bility of a substitute from context, in the sense of its having the same meaning outside its context, are achieved by facture (which makes it evident that a stone was shaped to some purpose), and more specifically by the addition of resemblant elements. Such ‘meaning’, however, can only be general and provisional. If recognizable eyes have been inscribed on a worked stone, we may see that it is anthropomorphic, and this recognition might be made by anyone unaware of its original definition by context. (By the same token, the more an image is articu­ lated, the more culturally and historically specific it becomes, so that it becomes more distant even as it becomes more referential.) Real metaphor, placement in social spatial context, asserts identity, and it also inevitably specifies how the two things are the same. In the case of a simple real metaphor, a stone, many possibilities are raised by the initial statement of identity. At the deepest level, ‘this is that’ also means ‘this may be treated as if it were that’. What permits this to be so in the simplest case is mere presence, which allows something to be faced and addressed. Actual presence, however, has its own conditions and co-ordinates. A stone takes up space, is of a certain size, ‘stands’, is permanent, and these features of the substitute may also be compared to what has been made present (or has made itself present). A stone may be said to ‘face’, but it may also be made explicitly to face by location relative to an observer in a precinct, or by the addition of features. Unless its precinct happens to have survived, or unless it has been distin­ guished or specified in some way by facture and figuration, a real metaphor simply rejoins the natural forms from which it was separated by human purpose.

In elemental instances, things do not have to be transformed in order to serve as real metaphors. Stones may simply be erected or piled, anointed or painted, or they may be set off by bounding; they may be significant by virtue of origin, which might be earthly or heavenly. (Meteorites, stones from heaven, have often been objects of reverence.) Whatever their intrinsic value is thought to be, however, this value must be articulated. These articulations may be minimal and temporary, so that countless shrines - and formative centres - must have slipped into oblivion. A stone regarded as a sacred presence might become just a stone, and pieces of wood might decay. Sometimes, however, real metaphors, like the places that sustain them, may become objects of monumental elaboration, and their identification is preserved by continual use. 4.6

4.6 REAL METAPHOR AND

RECOGNITION

REAL METAPHOR AND RECOGNITION

A real metaphor may effectively be what it stands for simply as a result of place­ ment in its proper context of use. It does not as a whole resemble what it stands for, but it may be specified or empowered by the addition of powerful, resemblant or significant elements, in which case it becomes what I shall call an icon. Act­ ual materials might be added that are thought to have intrinsic qualities, eagle feathers or leopard skins, for example, and if these added materials are represented - painted or incised, for example - they must be recognizable. Something may be recognized by someone as referring by convention rather than resemblance, as words do, and a non-resemblant mark placed anywhere on a simple real metaphor might be meant to have the value of an eye or hand, but if there are examples of such significant marking, they are in principle unreclaimable in the absence of translators, and even translators might give a number of meanings. For present purposes, recognizability is achieved through resemblance and relation. At base, resemblance is a real spatial (and real temporal) relation; that thing, or kind of thing, that appeared there or then now appears here. It is thus related to real metaphor, but stresses appearance, or reappear­ ance, rather than substitution. ‘To resemble’ means ‘to be like’, from the Latin similis, ‘like’, and similare, ‘to make like’. When we say something resembles something else, we make an at least implicit comparison. Non-resemblant marks may be recognizable because of relation, which is relation on a surface (in this case, the surface of a real metaphor). ‘Eyes’, for example, may be added to a real metaphor with simple marks, gouges or incisions, but these must be comparable to actual eyes in being side by side in the upper part of the form to which they are added. It is this most general anthropomor­ phic scheme, this minimal set of relations - of one to another, of part to whole - that makes the marks recognizable. This scheme, or order, which may vary considerably in itself, also allows a characteristic kind of development, since things that are not eyes can become metaphors for eyes as long as the scheme is maintained. Simple incisions might be filled with seashells or precious stones not so much to imitate the appearance of eyes as to state their properties or value, that they are, for example, bright or precious. The eyes of the presence stated by the real metaphor are like precious shells or stones. Although such metaphors may change, or even be interchangeable, the schema itself is irreducible, and if it is too greatly altered recognition becomes problematical.

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Since resemblance is also evident in corresponding relations on surfaces, schemata and resemblance are continuous. This has the simple but important consequence that those who make faces (for example) in one way may recognize those made by others in other ways; and it also has the important consequence that, as long as images continue to resemble sufficiently within this broad range, they may be subject to arbitrary invention and elaboration, both in their first utterance and in any successive utterance. Things are made to resemble principally by shape, which adds another fundamentally important dimension to relation. Shape, like resemblance, is always at least implicitly of. Moreover, the outlines by which shapes are usually effected tend to have the value of comprehending what they enclose. (Comprehendere meant to ‘grasp’, ‘unite’, ‘seize’, ‘include’ or ‘arrest’.) That is why both recogniz­ able parts and potent materials may be added to specify a real metaphor. Both in different ways make essences and powers present. 4.7

2.60

COMPREHENSION AND CONTOUR

The word ‘shape’ is related to the German schopfen, ‘to draw up’, as water is drawn, but also ‘to conceive’ (as suspicions) and ‘to create’ in all the grandest senses of that word. In English, the word is ambiguous, in that ‘to shape’ may mean to form something three-dimensional, but ‘shapes’ are generally twodimensional, and the recognizability I have been discussing presupposes relations on a surface. (I will discuss the problem of images on surfaces at the end of this chapter.) Shapes are definite in that they have outlines or edges, but they may also be ‘free’, when, although they are definite, they do not define anything, that is, do not make anything recognizable. When they do define something, they are said to be of that thing, the shape of a horse or tree, even of a triangle. Contour is a special case of shape that defines; the word means something like ‘turning with’, following and respecting the limits or bounds of a given form. To draw a contour is to abstract (from abstrahere, ‘to draw’ or ‘pull from’), but it is also to draw upon a surface. Contours are not only of things, they are also from them and after them. To draw a contour is to ‘take a shape’ or to draw the contour of a thing as if passing one’s hand over a surface in response to variations in the farthest visible surfaces of forms, but it is also to do so at any practicable size. The question of size, and of abstraction from size, is again crucial. In becoming of and from something, the image also enters a place of human use in being identified with a surface, and is abstracted from actual size in the very act of being put {o one or another purpose. I have already argued, in Section 3, for the analogy to vision in such abstraction. As we have just seen, the words ‘draw’ and ‘abstract’ are both related to the Latin traho, trahere, ‘to pull’ or ‘to draw’. ‘Trace’ (as well as ‘track’) and ‘portrait’ have a similar ancestry. ‘To portray’ means something like ‘to drag or draw forth’, literally to ‘take’ a likeness. These metaphors all suggest actual grasping, as in fact both ‘perception’ and ‘conception’ are emphatic variants of capio, capere, ‘to take hold of’, ‘grasp’ or ‘seize’, and only secondarily refer to the activi­ ties of sense and mind. A perceptio may be a harvest, and if ‘conception’ is the mind’s active grasp of form, it is clear why it also refers to biological conception. In all cases, representation is a transfer of some essence; it is more properly

4-7 COMPREHENSION AND CONTOUR

no Machu Picchu, Peru, sacred stone, c.1450-1500 ad

a reproduction, not in the contemporary sense of the endless exact replication of an ‘original’, but in a more natural biological sense. (One must say ‘natural biological’ because the artificial biology of cloning raises the prospect of the endless exact replication of individuals.) The term ‘comprehension’ itself refers to seizing or taking up, and we may still use it interchangeably with ‘grasp’. In general, contour has the value of circumscribing, comprising or containing what in some way or another is under­ stood to be essential to what a shape resembles; it is thus what is contained, this implicit essence, whatever it is thought to be, that is comprehended and brought into the space of human use by contour. (In a long Western philosophical tradition, ‘form’ is ‘abstracted’ from sensation, and form is always the more ‘substantial’ principle of life, growth and definition. The modern language of ‘abstraction’ continues this tradition; because they are not images, abstract forms are higher, and therefore more spiritual.) The Sacred Rock at Machu Picchu (Figure no) provides a straightforward example of what I mean by the comprehension of contour. To understand this example we must recall the discussion of the Nasca lines (Figures 57 and 58). I argued that these lines were made and kept as straight as possible in order to provide a ritual path always most nearly contiguous to its destination or sighting. A ritual path is best when it is most like the line of sight connecting observant and distant sacred centre. To return to Figure no, the Sacred Rock at Machu Picchu, by repeating the contour of the mountains, actually brings the power of the mountain in the image of the mountain into ritual space. The Sacred Stone stands at the northernmost edge of Machu Picchu, its outer side facing the mountain. Its inner side, toward the ritual centre, faces a sunken courtyard with flanking buildings. The image of the mountain is thus an explicit quasi-contact, or a fixing of visual contact, between sacred landscape and the space of ritual. More than just facing, the Sacred Rock brings the sacred form along the line of sight to ritual address close at hand, and the replication of contour, the tracing

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in Namerredje Guymata, Ngalyo the Rainbow Serpent and Kangaroo, c.1970. Natural pigments on eucalyptus bark, 77.5 x 58.5 cm (31 x 23% in). Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal Art, Charlottesville, Virginia

262

of contour as a votive act, is made part of the distinction and animation of the shrine itself. From this example I wish again to draw the general rule that contours, ‘turning with’ what they describe, comprehend or contain (‘hold within themselves’) the vital force of the forms they bring into human use. Innumerable other examples might be given. The ‘X-ray’ animals of Australian aboriginal painting (Figure in) might be taken to show us, precisely in what is contained in contours, what is vital and substantial about these animals; but over and above any single example, this relation between contour and content is conditional, and the implicit substance of what has a contour may assume any number of less explicit cultural forms (just as X-ray drawing may occur elsewhere than in Australian aboriginal painting).

If it is believed - as most people have believed - that living things possess life principles, and that these life principles may be separated from the body, then images might be considered traps, containers, or ‘homes’ for them. I will discuss this more fully in a later section of this chapter on masks. Drawing, in the sense I am using it here, is active, but its ‘activity’ involves much more than an action or the consequences of an action. Drawing something makes resemblance, but drawing is also used as if capturing, replacing or restor­ ing presence. This presence, however, can only occur under the conditions of presentation of drawing itself, on a surface, in a social space, and - at least potentially - for an observer. This conditional surplus is significant over and above resemblance as virtual substance. I shall discuss this issue at the end of the chapter, when I consider what I shall call the completion of images on surfaces. In general, and at the scale of social space, the relation between contour and content, of outline to what is outlined, is analogous to that between boundary and precinct as discussed in Chapter 2. In fact, the two are sometimes explicitly identified, as we may again see in the images among the Nazca lines (Figure 58). 4.8

4.8 LEPINSKI VIR

LEPINSKI VIR

Lepinski Vir, on the Danube River, was a literal necropolis, a city of the dead, used from the middle of the seventh to the middle of the sixth millennium bc. The dead were not segregated in the earlier Neolithic period and such arrange­ ments mark a fundamental development in the differentiation of social spaces. Lepinski Vir is named for the large whirlpool it faces. It is made up of similar and similarly aligned sanctuaries constructed on a truncated triangular plan with lime-plastered floors and rectangular stone altars. Rites of the dead included ex­ carnation, the removal of flesh from bones, perhaps by exposure to birds. The bones were gathered and buried beneath the rectangular stone altars, at the head of which one or two images were placed. These images (Figure 112) were made from river boulders, worked by grind­ ing, polishing and reaming with stone tools. Perhaps the boulders were selected because of their ovular shape, which must have been identified with their place of origin; that is, they might have been selected as something like ‘river eggs’. If so, they brought a presence with powers already specified to the cult and to the habitation of the dead. The presence was made sensate by the addition of eyes, becoming addressable (and perhaps also apotropaic) at the same time that its facing and gaze became part of the axial arrangement of altar and sanctuary. Figure 112 is an icon, an image concentrating a number of powers in a way that could not occur naturally; it has the mouth of a fish (a creature of the river, origin and source of nourishment), bird claw hands (perhaps acknowledging the role of birds in death and regeneration, like the egg shape), breasts and vulva (sustenance and birth itself). The whole was painted with red earth, associated in many places with the dead as blood and therefore life. This is thus not so much an image of a deity as it is an assemblage of powers articulating an initial substi­ tution, a real metaphor, perhaps made more significant by its origin, but also irreducibly significant in its own right; this presence is heightened and distin­ guished by facture, and by specifications of presence through figuration, the addition of resemblant elements.

112 Carved sandstone boulder, c.6000 bc, Lepinski Vir, Yugoslavia. Height 38 cm (15% in). National Museum, Belgrade

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113 Linga in shrine of Shiva cave temple, Elephanta, India, mid-6th century 4.9

114 ‘Master of animals’ in yogic posture with tiger stripes and mask, and horns of a buffalo. Steatite seal from Mohenjo-Daro, 2300-1750 bc, 1.4 x 1.4 cm (1% x i3/b in). National Museum, New Delhi

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SHIVA

At some Hindu shrines the deity Shiva may be addressed in the form of painted stones. The stones, simply in being painted, are already at a remove from simple real metaphor. Stones may be deliberately placed to mark shrines, and the most sacred stones spontaneously manifest presence, for example, through the attention of animals. However chosen, they are set off by inclusion within the precinct of the shrine at the same time that the precinct itself may be articulated by painting and striping with sacred vermilion. This striping effects distinction before it is associated as a symbol with the cult of Shiva, in which similar stripes might, for example, mark the foreheads of devotees. By the same token, painted circles articulate the sacredness of stone and shrine before they refer to the yoni, which may complete the presence of Shiva as his feminine principle. At a most basic level, as we have discussed in Chapter 1, this distinction by painting has the same significance as any greater degree of facture and is sufficient to articulate by elaboration the effective presence of the deity. Most basic to this articulation, however, are the stones themselves, whose presence has been made another presence for ritual address. All of these variants no doubt represent ancient practices, which have persisted to the present, forming a core around which millennia of factural development, iconographic elaboration and religious specula­ tion have gathered. The cult of Shiva centres around the linga (Figure 113), and the innermost sanctuary of every Shiva temple enshrines a linga, usually, as in Figure 113, a short, worked cylinder of stone with a rounded top, which may, however, reach

columnar size and proportions. The word linga means ‘sign’, perhaps a manifes­ tation of the past and present power of the deity. A linga need not be shaped and, as I have just said, Shiva may be addressed in all kinds of stones, upright or not, and in comparable forms made from all kinds of materials. The honorific refinement of such real metaphors may take the explicit form of a phallus, which is, however, a specification of more general ‘central’ meanings, and the rounded upright stone became canonical. Still, the linga is never distant from the originary forms to which it is related. If in general the word linga means ‘sign’, it also means sign of sex; that is, the stone is both the presence of the god and the more specific presence of the divine potency of the god. The cult of a deity like Shiva is very old. There are linga shapes of clay from the Indus River Valley cities, and a seal from Mohenjo-Daro (2.300-1750 bc) shows a large central figure, frontal and enthroned, seated in a yogic posture, his face a mask, surmounted by great buffalo horns marking him as divine (Figure 114). He is shown as ‘master of animals’, with confronted antelopes standing beneath his throne (as deer would in much later images of the Buddha). Vegetation sprouts from the top of his crown, and similar shapes, repeated and inverted, serve as legs of his throne. The figure’s erect phallus is central, perhaps indicating, not simply generation, but a ritual meditative state in which the power of generation is at once fully aroused and contained. At a certain point the linga was coupled with a female counterpart, the yoni, a channelled ring at the base of the linga. The yoni has a spout from which libations poured over the linga may run. This is a further articulation of the linga as a male sign, by implication uniting it with a female generative principle of the same degree of primordiality. When the earliest anthropomorphic images of Shiva were made, in the second or first centuries bc, some 1,500 to 2,000 years after the Mohenjo-Daro seal, the linga was presented as a phallus-column of large proportions. Much as the Egyptian Osiris might face outward from a djed pillar, thus to be identified with the most ancient signs of stability and generation, a full-figure frontal Shiva, standing on the shoulders of a kneeling monster, faced outward from the columnar linga. In this additive process figuration articulates and specifies more elemen­ tal meanings which are, however, not abandoned. Simply centring a linga on a square plinth, and cardinally righting this base, at once establishes relation to the cosmos and establishes the centre from which the rightness of the cosmos itself had its origin. If we project such meanings back to the deity from Mohenjo-Daro, the yogic containment of seed may be understood as a form of spiritual ascent, identified at once with the generative power and vertical dimension of the centre. In later forms, Shiva may be shown in a flamed mandorla, the cosmic linga, a pillar of light, an absolute centre of energy. As a further development of its Central and directional values, the linga is often given a face (Figure 115), four faces (one for each of the cardinal directions), or five (an additional face for the centre). As we have seen, the addition of facial features allows the presence established by a real metaphor explicitly to face and be faced and thus specifies ritual observance, but here it does much more than that. The identification of the gaze of Shiva with the notional lines defining the four directions from the centre defined by the linga places the observer and the whole world as

4.9 SHIVA

115 'Face-linga, early 6th century, Shiva temple, Bhumara, India

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a cosmos under Shiva’s central gaze. These faces multiply a central unity and this multiplication states the multivalence of the single centre. Perhaps the greatest exposition of the central values of Shiva is the rock cut temple on the island sanctuary of Elephanta. In this temple, which, like all Hindu temples, is cardinally oriented, the linga (Figure 113), elevated on its square base in the inner sanctuary, stands as a culmination of the major east-west axis. This linga has no faces; instead, its directionality is articulated by doorways, with colossal guardian figures, open to the four directions. These doorways yield to the radiating power of the central presence as surely as they permit access to this presence. (Originally this inner sanctuary cannot have been as easily accessible as it is now. Ascent to the level of the linga and passage through the supernaturally guarded doorways would have been ritually complicated, and the linga itself would have been concealed and covered, to be revealed only on certain occasions.) At the culmination of the north-south axis, facing north, is the colossal Shiva Mahadeva, the Great God, the ascetic Shiva, central and frontal (Figure 116). The crowned image rises to a height of some 5.5 metres (nearly 18 feet), its ‘greatness’ intensively stated by its size. Shiva Mahadeva raises his right hand (badly damaged) and holds a citron in his left. A crowned head in profile emerges from each of his broad smooth shoulders. These flanking faces are shown in a kind of realized profile, as if not to halve their actual presence. All three heads are shown in meditation, concentrating, that is, withdrawn each into its own centre. The image is in effect a great face-linga, and the withdrawal of concen­ tration means withdrawal to the primordial central unity of the linga, itself concealed, but visible in its powers and aspects. To Mahadeva’s right (our left), holding a serpent, is Aghora-Bhairava, the deity in his wrathful aspect; and to the left, holding a lotus, is Vamadeva, his feminine, active and worldly aspect. Reliefs to the sides of this colossal trinity show, to the proper right, Shiva as selfsufficient androgyne, his right half male, his left half female, the beginning of human generation. To the trinity’s left is the descent of the River Ganges, once again a scene of primeval generative union. We shall encounter such significant real spatial polarities again in Chapter 5. The Shiva Mahadeva is a complex and sophisticated icon in which the myster­ ies of divinity are set forth in terms of size, refinement, royal and religious symbol­ ism, anthropomorphic metaphor and profoundly imagined inwardness. All of these aspects, however, arise from a unity, and, powerfully realized as they are, all might be taken away. Even phallic resemblance might be taken away, leaving only the aniconic real metaphorical presence; and this, of course, might be elaborated, or re-elaborated, in the simultaneously real spatial and theological terms of which I have tried to give some indication. 4.10 UPRIGHT STONES AND ANICONIC IMAGES Menhirs (from a word meaning ‘long stones’), monoliths (‘single stones’), and stelae are found in separate traditions in many parts of the world. I have mentioned the massebot of the ancient Near East in the section of Chapter 2 on Jerusalem. Stelae are part of early Egyptian royal burials, and, in another form, stood atop Celtic tumuli as commemorative or apotropaic figures (or both). They are found

4-10 UPRIGHT STONES AND ANICONIC IMAGES

r 16 Trinity with Shiva Mahadeva (centre), AghoraBhairava to his right, Vamadeva (or Uma) to his left. Shiva cave temple, Elephanta, India, mid-6th century

in Central Asia (especially Bronze Age Mongolia) and ancient China. In utterly unrelated traditions, stelae were integral to the early first-millennium megalithic tomb architecture of San Agustin in Colombia, and there are memorial and ritual upright stones at Tiahuanaco in Bolivia. Many more examples might be given. The word most often used for a standing stone, stele, is the Greek word for an upright stone or post, from a verb meaning ‘to set up’. Greek uses of stelae, as gravemarkers arid for public proclamations (we might also recall the stelae of Hammurabi, Sargon and Urnammu (Figures 84,93 and 94)), are specific variants of the conditional form I will consider in this section as an extension of my remarks on real metaphor.

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In the terms of the present argument, ‘aniconic’ images, literally ‘imageless images’, are objects treated as if embodying some presence without resemblant features; they may be divided into three kinds: unworked objects, that is, real metaphors; objects distinguished by origin - meteorites are an obvious example; and objects distinguished by facture, by smoothing and ornamentation, but not by figuration, like the linga. __ The ancient Greeks, we are told by Pausanias, all worshipped ‘unworked stones’, and the cult of stones is very old in Aegean culture. Some were black meteorites, therefore ‘heavenly’ stones, but others were not. As we have seen, the Trojan Palladium was probably a meteorite. At the shrine of Apollo at Delphi there was a stone said to be the one swallowed by Kronos in the place of the newborn Zeus, and the omphalos, the navel of the world at Delphi, was a rounded stone rather like a linga. In all cases these stones must have been regarded as marking extraordinary manifestations, and, at least potentially, as marking or sanctioning centres. The Greek term for an aniconic stone, baetyl, has been traced to the Hebrew beth-el, house of god, the term used by Jacob for the stone erected to mark the place of his dream of a ladder reaching up to heaven. The Black Stone set in the wall of the Ka’ba at Mecca may have been, like the founda­ tions of the Ka’ba itself, part of a pre-Islamic shrine, turned to the purposes of the new faith precisely because it was not an image. Given the range of possibil­ ities opened up by real metaphor, from presence through distinction to figuration and description, Muhammad rejected all but the first, preserving ancient traditions of observance, while fixing and monotheistically universalizing a centre. The stone remained aniconic, and aniconicity assumed entirely new values. To return to the Greek world, unworked stones served as objects of cult together with stones shaped as cones or pyramids, and the much more familiar anthropomorphic representations we associate with Greek classical art. Because of their persistence, aniconic images cannot simply be regarded as the ‘primitive’ beginnings of Greek art, rather they must be supposed to have had the author­ ity of antiquity and deep foundations in immemorial piety and devotion, in contrast to which the sophistication of ‘realism’ might be seen as the conspicu­ ous embellishment of sacred sites by patrons able to command such skills. Many gods and demigods were honoured in aniconic form. Zeus and Herakles, Aphrodite, Eros and Apollo, were all worshipped in such forms. In the sanctu­ ary of the Temple of Apollo next to the House of Augustus on the Palatine Hill in Rome reliefs show priestesses in neo-Attic costume tying fillets around an elevated and crowned baetyl (a stone erected to mark an epiphany) very much like that visible through the central portal of the skenographia from the House of Augustus in Figure 261. We are quick to identify such an image as ‘phallic’, but these baetyls were hung with the quiver of Diana as well as the lyre of Apollo, and their central, generative values should probably be assumed to precede any such simple illustrational identity unless there is reason to think otherwise. Such practices were not unique to Augustus. In 204 bc the Romans sent an expedition to Asia Minor to claim a small meteoric stone identified with Cybele, the Great Mother, whom the Romans identified with Ops, the goddess of bounti­ ful harvest; her cult, practised by the Roman king and his daughters, honoured the storage of grain. The stone became the ‘face’ of a statue of Cybele, placed in

4-10 UPRIGHT STONES AND ANICONIC IMAGES

117 ‘Staff of Oranmiyan’, Yoruba, Ife, Nigeria, late Archaic period (c.8oo). Granite monolith and iron

118 Idena, the ‘Gatekeeper’, Yoruba, Ife, Nigeria, Pre­ pavement period (c.800-1000). Granite and iron. Museum of Ife Antiquities, Ife

a temple on the Palatine Hill. Thus the central spaces of Rome and their attendant rituals were complemented by the presence of this ‘image’. Substitution of the elemental kind I am describing is a possibility arising from the condition of the presence of objects. It is a possibility that may be taken up in many ways and, once taken up, may be articulated in many ways. At Ife upright stones were especially associated with Ogun, the pronouncedly masculine god of iron and kingship. In fact, a smith’s anvil, a stone, is a shrine of Ogun around which many central, generative values are clustered. The so-called ‘Staff of Oranmiyan’ (Figure 117) is a shaft of granite nearly five metres (something over sixteen feet) high with spiral-headed iron nails set along its length to form a trident (often associated with Ogun), the prongs of which rise from a boss on the stone’s surface. Oranmiyan was the hero son of Oduduwa, the founder of divine kingship, who is male in some accounts, female in others. If tradition has in fact preserved the meaning of this stone, and the trident refers to Ogun, then Oduduwa must be female in the myth that explains it. If the image is phallic, as it is said to be, it is perhaps once again more properly central, emphasizing collective generation. (The boss, for example, might also be a navel.) More importantly, this upright stone identifies generation specifically with royal ori­ gins and continuity. The aniconic is always potentially iconic, which brings us again to the subject of figuration. A further degree of specification of a real metaphor beyond the meanings of presence, evident collective effort and distinction by facture such as polishing, colouring and addition of resemblant elements to the surface, may be seen in the ‘Gatekeeper’ from Ife (Figure 118). Here the stone itself is shaped three-dimensionally. Like Figure 117, the ‘Gatekeeper’ was made from a rounded stone with iron nails inserted, but the stone has been worked to entirely differ­ ent effect and purpose. Rather than simply being elaborated on its surface, the shaft is deeply cut in order to describe the contours of head, neck and torso,

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119 Monolith, 16th century or older. Basaltic stone, Cross River region, Nigeria

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description consistent with the proportions of the figure as a whole. The continu­ ity and integrity of the stone are respected throughout, and the figure’s large sash and delicately folded hands rise from the surface and then rejoin it in a manner comparable to the boss on the Staff of Oranmiyan. The monolith in Figure 119 from the Cross River region of southern Nigeria and Cameroon was probably made between 1600 and 1900, although some may be much older. About 300 of them were made, a number of which have found their way into museums and private collections. They are rounded shafts of basaltic stone varying in height from 30 centimetres to two metres (just over a foot to more than six feet). They are worked in several more local styles, although in all cases the shafts remain undisturbed, suggesting that substitutive placement of the upright stones themselves was of primary significance. They are ancestor

and status images, showing powerful men with individual attributes, markings and signs of wealth; but they also share certain features, large ornamented navels, for example, or beards and open mouths, perhaps as if speaking. The monoliths were usually set up in large circles, once again certainly by group labour, since the largest stones weigh upwards of half a ton. Accordingly, the circles they defined were used for group activities, trade, play and ritual. Occasionally the stones are alone, and when they are moved from old to new villages they are grouped together or associated with central trees. The Cross River stones are distinguished by having been transported, smooth­ ed and set up, and this distinction is a first condition of their apparent life. The priests, chieftains or warriors for whom they were made possessed powerful spirits, in need of appropriate abode. The shaft is such an abode, and they were also allotted a reserved place, a precinct, where substitution was appropriate, and where their individual powers were multiplied and available for ritual address. It is in the precinct that the stones explicitly ‘face’. An upright shaft of stone may be said to ‘face’ in all directions, and the addition of features actualized one of these possibilites in the precinct, in relation to observers. Features also further articulate the anthropomorphic potential of the upright stone, which may not only be addressed like a person, but is sensate, with eyes to see and a mouth to speak. Some of the resemblant elements - eyes, nose and mouth - are immediately recognizable, others are not, although they were no doubt significant to those who made them. The multiple brows and beard are perhaps signs of rank and identity, like the patterns of facial cicatrization. Group continuity is asserted by substitution and representation through that substitution, not by resemblance to individuals. The figures’ outsized and distended navels, circled and crossed by beaded ornamentation, sometimes radiating large spiral forms, are elaborated to a degree indicating special significance. Perhaps the navels associate these erect male figures with their births, and so with their mothers, and thus with their divine lineages, bringing us back once again to the primordial values of centres.

4.II MAYA STELAE: l8 RABBIT

AT COPAN

4.II MAYA STELAE: 18 RABBIT AT COPAN

Independently of traditions anywhere else in the world, stelae were an important part of the elite centre culture of ancient America from its beginnings in the second millennium bc. A buried offering of jade figurines from the Olmec site at La Venta (Figure 60) models a ceremony taking place among upright shafts of polished stone, and the earlier Olmecs seem to have established the pattern of commemorating dynastic rites of passage and achievements by the erection of stone monuments with relief carving. Maya stelae are part of complexes result­ ing from corporate labour in megalithic construction, demanding the continual effort of groups in the moving of earth, the quarrying and transportation of stone, and the preparation and application of vast quantities of lime, stucco and pigment. In these centres, the members of a hereditary elite led their ritual lives, directing the construction of the centres themselves as well as the religious, political and economic fortunes of their supporting agricultural populations. Calendrical inscriptions are one of the hallmarks of classic Maya culture. The

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Maya system was vigesimal, zo x zo, rather than io x io, our century, or io x iox to, our millennium, and their calendar, interlaced with ritual and divina­ tion, developed together with pictographic and phonetic writing, so that dates and events could be recorded together. The Maya calendar began from an un­ known but probably originary event in the late fourth millennium bc, and its purpose (like that of any other calendar) was not simply to record occurrences but to place them in a larger framework of meaning. Maya rulers lived in mythical time, in which they re-enacted and emulated the feats of gods and heroes; writing expanded this chronology, recording names, accessions, marriages, anniver­ saries, sacrifices and military victories. Stelae provided a principal format for these inscriptions. The beginning of the dynasty of rulers who oversaw the expansion and eventual regional dominion of the city of Copan (in present-day Honduras) coincided with the beginning of the tenth baktun (the 400-year cycle in which the Maya counted their time), corresponding to the fifth century ad. Copan is a series of plazas and courtyards with temple platforms and subsidiary structures arranged on a north-south axis respected through all the phases of its construction. Like all Maya centres, Copan underwent continual building and rebuilding, in which temple platforms and images - including stelae - were rearranged, sometimes destroyed and incorporated into new structures, always within the same cosmic­ ally righted ritual order. The thirteenth ruler in the dynasty that ruled the great Maya centre of Copan, Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil, called 18 Rabbit, became lord in 695 and ruled for some 43 years before being captured and beheaded on 3 May 738 by Cauac Sky, lord of the tributary city of Quirigua. According to inscriptions, Cauac Sky smashed and burned the images of the deities at Copan, thus stripping the place of its supernatural protection. Such dates and information give some idea of the precision with which Maya dynastic chronology was kept. The Maya called their stelae ‘trees’, a term rich with connotations of centrality, and earlier rulers of Copan had set up stones outside the ceremonial centre in relation to landmarks associated with ancestors or in relation to phases of the sun and consequently to the passage of the agricultural year. 18 Rabbit erected seven stelae, all in the northern Great Plaza. Central to the plaza was a radial platform with stairways facing the cardinal directions built by the dynasty’s founder. 18 Rabbit rebuilt this platform at a larger scale, concentrating his stelae, standing over cardinally aligned cruciform underground vaults, on the eastern side of the plaza, all in sight of tl\e rising or setting sun. The sculptures of 18 Rabbit are surpassing virtuoso displays of stone drilling, cutting and knapping, altogether comparable to Maya eccentric flints (see again Figure 24), but at the greater degree of complexity of three dimensions. Some of the stelae of 18 Rabbit are characterized by especially deep undercutting; forms are set out in full relief, at the same time presenting strong, shifting con­ trasts of light and dark with changing sunlight. The images are thus doubly elaborated; they arc carved with transforming brilliance, and what is shown by this carving is an individual transformed to the point of divinity by splendid and powerful regalia, all without departing from the traditionally significant format of the stele.

4.II MAYA STELAE: 18 RABBIT AT COPAN

120 Drawing of west, east and northern sides of a stele from Copan, Honduras, commemorating 5 December, 711, the end of the first katun (20-year period) after 18 Rabbit’s accession. Stone with red paint, height 3.86 m (12 ft 6 in)

Early Maya stelae showed the ruler alone, in profile, with descriptive figural proportions, and, however iconically complex their image became, Maya rulers continued to be shown as historical individuals. Although he is shown in frontal planar wholeness in the manner of the god-masks he wears, 18 Rabbit is shown as active and, more specifically, as engaged in beneficial ritual. To mark the completion of the first period of twenty years falling in his reign, 18 Rabbit erected Stele C, carved with his image on both sides, facing east and west. Perhaps he sees the whole circle of the world, or the old time and the new, or both. The image facing east is perhaps younger, since that facing west, the setting sun, is bearded (Figure izo)k The western face is modelled and incised with the greatest subtlety and precision, as if with an individual inwardness endlessly reflected amidst the mysterious trappings of kingship. 18 Rabbit’s regalia, more than ornament, are powers, which he possesses, or in which he participates, to a superlative degree. In another image, Stele H, he cradles the sky serpent bar of rule in his hands and wears a great feathered backrack, the cosmos itself. He wears the net skirt of the maize god. He is First Father, ancestor of all humahity, who, like the kernel of maize, defeats death. For all his static majesty, 18 Rabbit dances the dance of creation and regeneration. At his sides twisted cords ending in serpents with white flowers rise to heaven. Another stele bearing the same date records the ritual in which 18 Rabbit invokes and

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enlivens his ancestors. The ‘tree’ is thus the shamanic centre through which the king communicates with the world of the ancestors and spirits; in the right order, and beneath the right configuration of the stars, he communicates with the genera­ tive energies of the world, affirming dynastic continuity, but, most elementally, enacting the rebirth, and the eternity of the rebirth, of the maize that gives life to all. The stele not only commemorated this occasion^ it left the image of the king and his power forever to be ritually observed, that is, approached, faced and addressed. Once again, however, the construction of social space within which these complex meanings could be realized presupposes the significance of real metaphor, and of quarried stones set upright. 4.12 MANIPULATION

izi Akua’ba, Asante, 19th century. Wood, height 34 cm (i3l/z in). British Museum, London

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So far I have discussed real metaphor in terms of fairly large monuments, often the results of group labour, and related to group spaces and uses. There are, however, more properly personal values of real metaphor rooted in what I shall call manipulability. Any real metaphor manifests a presence, which may be faced and addressed. This presence may also be anointed, bathed, painted, decorated, clothed, unclothed and reclothed, hidden and revealed, all as an extension of its reality in the space and time of ritual. Large or fixed images take a kind of basic meaning from their being unmovable by individuals, another side of the group labour necessary to make them in the first place. By the same token, other images are significant precisely by virtue of their being able to be handled, to be moved and treated at will. Manipulability again illustrates the principle that the actual size of images is always determined by use. There are many examples of manipulation, some of them close at hand, like snapshots of friends and family members. But Palaeolithic ‘Venuses’, as we shall see in the next chapter, are fashioned in the shape of tools, as if to make an implement with special powers, thus changing the value of both tool and image. Ushabtis, or ‘answerers’, placed in Middle Kingdom Egyptian tombs, were meant to take the place in the afterlife of the tomb’s owner, who might thus avoid labouring for the gods through eternity, as Egyptians laboured one quarter of the year for the pharaoh in life. Ushabtis were inscribed with the name of the deceased, and if this name was called these substitutive images were to go instead. They may also bear an inscribed request to go in the owner’s place. It was perhaps sufficient that image and name together designate an individual and, once this designation had been made, the small size of the figures evidently did not matter; but it is also precisely because of this small size that they may be seen to ‘fall to hand’, to be able to be ‘used’ should the need arise. Figure 121 is an akua’ba used by Asante women of West Africa to induce conception and beautiful children. It is wooden, and might have been embell­ ished with beads and string. Like most other African wooden sculpture, examples of akua’maa (the plural) are not older than the nineteenth century, although similar objects may have been made much before that. The faces are round or ovoid discs, rather like the ‘faces’ of the kind of hand mirrors descending from ancient Egypt in many traditions. The head is about two-fifths the height of the figure, head and neck together accounting for well over half the height, usually around 30 cm (12 inches). These are something like infantile proportions but

also indicate the relative importance of the face and head. The ‘body’ of these figures is formed by a handle, on which abbreviated arms are a kind of hilt, the ‘foot’ a stand (if the figure is set upright) or butt (if it is grasped). Akua’maa with arms and legs, because they are more ‘realistic’, are often said to have been made later, although there is no reason that such elaboration (as well as simplification) could not have taken place at any time. The handle-torso has a navel and breasts, the latter marking it as female. This is because the Asante are matrilineal, and the desire expressed for conception is the desire for a female child to continue the lineage. Akua’maa may be kept or used in shrines or they may be worn. They may also be used as dolls by young girls. All of these illustrate what I mean by the values of manipulability. Precisely because a shrine might be regarded as the proper ‘home’ of the image, the association of the image with the shrine may be added to one’s own person and activities. If the image itself is grasped and manipu­ lated, still other real spatial values come into play. The Asante have been reported to believe, as Europeans long have, that the sight of things is able to influence the developing foetus in a mother’s womb. The akua’ba is not simply a substitute for a child; it is a highly articulated real meta­ phor, which makes it possible to attract the spirit of a beautiful child, for which it provides a correspondingly beautiful habitat, thus to share its powers with its possessor. The making (or the having made) of an akua’ba is a votive act. The ‘beautiful child’ is a girl with certain characteristics, each heightened and refined by facture, approaching the notional rather than the descriptive. The regular shape of the head becomes a circle or oval; shiny smoothness of skin becomes the polish of the whole surface; another sign of health and vigour, the neck ringed with fat, is refined to the level of rhythmic pattern. If child and akua’ba are carried together, the force of the image might continue to guide the child’s growth toward these positive qualities. If the akua’ba is used as a toy by an older child, this does not remove it from the patterns of real spatial meaning I wish to indicate. On the contrary, it reaches to the very foundations of culturally specific space and action, to second nature. If the akua’ba has now become a ‘doll’, the child does not simply return to nature in play but rather models and mimics culturally specific behaviour, learning roles, values and ideals as she invents games, just like children playing with dolls in any other culture. The Yoruba of Nigeria have an unusual number of twins, and consider the birth of twins a portentous event. Twins are believed to share a single soul, and if one dies it must be persuaded not to take the other with it. A diviner may advise parents of a twin who has died to have an image carved called an ere ibeji. Figure 122 shows a pair of such images made for twin girls, perhaps by the well-known carver Akiode before 1936. At core, these are manipulable real metaphors, by means of which the spirits of the two children may be addressed, comforted and placated; and once again their identity depends not only upon resemblance but also upon the correlative spaces and times of which they are part. When such images are completed, the mother carries them home like children, dancing as she goes, accompanied by the songs of other women. If ritual is defined as the culturally specific acknowledgement of the extraordinary through extraordinary behaviour, the simple activites of motherhood are transformed into ritual. This

4.12 manipulation

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izz Attributed to the carver Akiode, ere ibeji (twin figures), Yoruba, before 1936. Wood, height zo cm (8 in). University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City

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pattern continues. Once home, figures are placed in a shrine in the room where the mother sleeps. There they are washed, fed, handsomely dressed and orname­ nted, and rubbed with oil and colour. Thus the twins’ spirits may be assuaged and even persuaded to bring the parents good fortune. Again as if to please the twins’ spirits, and the spirits among whom they dwell, the images are smooth and beautiful, whole and radiantly healthy, heightened at every turn by refinement and ornamentation. In general (early Japan is an exception), ceramics arose together with agricul­ ture, which made sedentary life possible and made the storage of seed absolutely necessary for the maintenance of collective life. In such circumstances the meaning of earth itself must have changed. Fired earth, terracotta in some form, became the container and preserver of dry grain, kernels of which, placed in the original earth and watered, split to create new green life. Earth in both cases was the source and preserver of life. Pottery is thus primordially utilitarian, and it is tied to human use in two ways: it is usually shaped to purposes, and these purposes are usually scaled to the human hand and to domestic activities. Although there are large pottery containers, like the great reserve jars of Knossos in Crete, and displays of ceramic virtuosity distinguished by simple size, like Greek geomet­ ric amphorae, most pottery is small - bowls, cups and jugs. As important as pottery may have become in the life of agricultural peoples, however, clay seems

first to have been formed into images. In the successive levels of occupation at Jericho, unfired clay figurines appear before pottery, and so it is not possible to account for the origin of ceramics on simple practical grounds. It was evidently more important to squeeze and press clay into resemblant shapes than it was to turn the same techniques to the fashioning of bowls and jars. For some purposes, it was more important to manipulate images than to manipulate things. In Palaeolithic Europe, long before agriculture, clay figurines were fired in kilns. Animals were modelled with the uncanny descriptive precision and concrete suggestiveness of surface and contour of cave painting and engraving. Female figures (Figure 123) repeated in fired clay the tool-like forms of stone figurines. Like the stone figurines, they are small - Figure 123 is just 11 cm (4*72 inches) tall - and they are manipulate. Clay figurines like Figure 123 are associated with hearths and fire, and this association continued. Both clay and dough are baked to yield substances with very different properties. In a temple at Sabatonivka in Moldavia from the first half of the fifth millennium bc - some 20,000 years after Figure 123 was made, and well into the European era of agriculture - a large group of female figurines, reduced to torso and broad thighs, lay on a dais near a bread oven surrounded by pots with burnt animal remains. This suggests that the simple but deeply mysterious processes of cooking and baking, the transformation by fire of animal and plant life for the sake of human life, were the subject of ritual, and that these rituals involved what were perhaps already millennially old ritual manipulations of female figurines. Like any material, clay may be worked skilfully and brilliantly, thus to make distinctions among some uses and users and others; there are many examples of ceramics as refined in their facture as work in the most precious materials, which are supplied only to the highest social levels. But clay may also be worked by almost anyone. In parts of India, clay figurines have been made in much the same way since at least the third millennium bc. To be sure, figurines have changed in response to elite styles in other materials, but the old ways have also persisted, much as the linga, rather than being supplanted by sophisticated anthropomor­ phic representations of Shiva, has persisted as a core of religious observance which is only elaborated in its later forms and may always be repeated without change. Terracotta figures continue to be made in India in great numbers for a var­ iety of votive purposes. They are made in all sizes, from tiny to very large, and are given as gifts to the gods to mark personal, family and civic occasions. At the scale of personal devotion, the practices that surround these votive offerings are associated with simpler shrines - beneficent trees, stones and springs, for example - rather than with the great shrines, with their priestly mediations, that have grown up around larger centres. The festival of the goddess Gauri observed in northwestern India may provide some clue to the understanding of the innumerable ceramic figurines, especially female figurines, that have been made in uncountable numbers by agricultural people in so many places, in the ancient Near East, in Old Europe and the Mediterranean, in Africa and America as well as India, even though the specific rituals are of course lost and irrecoverable. Just as we are inclined to see any

4.12 MANIPULATION

123 Woman from Dolni Vestonice, c.23,000 bc. Baked clay, height 11.5 cm (4V2 in). Moravian Museum, Brno

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124 Female figurine from Tlatilco, Valley of Mexico, c.izoo bc. Clay, height 15.7 cm (7l/g in). Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City

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upright stone as ‘phallic’, so we are inclined to see any female figurine as a ‘Venus’ or ‘fertility goddess’; in both cases, however, matters are much more complex, even if central values of generation are never far distant. Gauri is petitioned to bring health to,men and to bring happy marriages. Her festival coincides with spring planting. Having fasted, women go into the wet fields and fashion five tiny images of Gauri from the mud. These are put in a specially painted bowl and carried home in procession. Then they are placed before an altar set up for the occasion and painted with the images of the god­ dess and her consort. Offerings of flowers, food and sweet-smelling grasses are placed in the bowl with the images. More offerings are then made to large communal images of the two deities, after which the women take the bowls with images as offerings to a well, circumambulate the well three times in prayer, then drop the bowls and their contents into the source of water. In general, Indian votive ceramics are broken and discarded after use. The important thing is the gift to the god, the change of state of the image, follow­ ing which the clay may return whence it came. In this case, the fashioning of images itself is a homage and an observance, part of a gathering of salutary forces that is finally offered up to other life-giving forces. These images, scaled to and by the hand at the outset, are not simply representations of the goddess, rather the conditions of their making and holding involve them once again in the most basic meanings of use and ritual. In Mesoamerica, agriculture was practised for about 5,000 years before pottery began to be made, between 2300 and 1500 bc. In the centuries after 1500 bc small clay figurines began to be made in great numbers throughout present Mexico and Central America, becoming a fundamental part of the village culture that preceded elite ritual centre culture in these areas. A great variety of ceramic traditions developed, like dialects of a common language, in the 3,000 years before the Spanish Conquest. In this ‘formative’ period, villages grew up around the banks of Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico, where the Aztecs were to found Tenochtitlan over two and a half millennia later. One of these villages, now called Tlatilco, judging from its size and well-stocked burials, emerged as richer and more important than its neighbours. Tlatilco may help us to understand the role of art and images in this pervasive founding culture. The typical artifacts of Tlatilco are pottery and figurines. They are highly characteristic and are probably the work of specialized makers, perhaps shamans, although, as in the example we have just considered, makers might sometimes have been users. Most of these figurines, which are around 10 cm (4 inches) tall, are of women (Figure 124), although there are also male figures, sometimes in the identifiable costumes of shamans, warriors, musicians, acrobats or ball players, as well as masks and masked figurines. There is also a strong strain of interest in deformation, which may indicate a belief that physically unusual persons possess unusual powers, and that they and their images are therefore either especially appropriate participants in shamanistic ritual or especially powerful apotropaic images (or both). The figures of women are generally frontal and upright. They were not made to stand on their own, unless perhaps when pressed into the ground. Their proper-

tions are non-descriptive, the head being about one-third of the body height. The women are young but sexually mature. Their breasts are small and often hidden by hair. Their thighs are exaggerated, often to bulbousness. Hands, lower legs and feet are reduced to nubs. The figurines are typically naked, but are often elaborately coiffed and ornamented, and may have been dressed in imperma­ nent materials. Sometimes they wear short, fringed skirts. Their clay is usually slipped and painted in patterns perhaps reflecting those made with the ceramic body stamps also found at Tlatilco. Some are shown with infants. Although these women have no obvious supernatural attributes - other than the deformations I have noted; often they have two heads or fused faces - their condensed and emphatic thighs suggest fertility and birth. Perhaps these features are related; birth might be seen as doubling, fertility as the capacity to double. At Tlatilco, these figurines were laid in burials, usually those of women, together with shells, bowls and jars, the latter two of which contained food and drink. Uses of the figurines, however, were not primarily funerary, and much the greater number of them were used in domestic contexts. Those placed in burials seem to be part of the equipment for the afterlife, as if that were a contin­ uation of the present life, in which the same things were needed. The figures in burials are not broken, whereas those outside burials most often are, having been discarded with other debris. It might be supposed that the dead person in the course of her post-mortem journey might have been expected to break them. Why? Perhaps in the face of life’s transitions and crises, in situations of birth, sick­ ness, initiation, marriage, another generation of birth, death and departure to the afterlife, these figures, appropriately outfitted for one or another occasion, represented a gift to the gods. Good for no other occasion, they were broken and discarded. In their innumerable replications and adaptations these figures may have become little more than good luck charms; but even if that is so, they marked the significant stages and events of life and people courted good luck by the making, possession and manipulation of images. Like countless other manipulable images and offerings, these have an earnest human dimension; they are not only images of fertility but offerings against illness and injury - against the dangers of childbirth - or offerings in gratitude for deliverance from illness and injury.

4.13 VOTIVE IMAGES Many of the images discussed in the last section belong to the vast family of votive art. In this section I shall be concerned with the questions of why and how images play as important a role in votive art as they do. The word votwn is from the past participle of voveo, vovere, which may mean ‘to vow’, ‘to promise solemnly’, or, more simply, ‘to wish for’. Votive offerings are fundamental to religious activities in many cultures, and the more general meaning - to wish for - will perhaps help us to understand why these practices are so common and so widespread. Votive practices span unrelated traditions, and they also span elite and popular art forms within traditions. They are firmly established at the broad, practical level of many religions. To wish for something is to desire what is not present, a state of affairs that does not exist, usually a future state of affairs. A vow is an attempt to enlist higher aid in order to determine

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the future: if we win this battle, we will build a temple for Athena (who will have favoured us if we have won). Vows may also be individual: if I survive the plague, I will donate a new altarpiece to the family chapel; or, if I have survived, I owe a donation. Centres and shrines are the appropriate places for such offerings, since it is there that the offering may be near a power and come into the awareness of that power. _ The word sacer means ‘consecrated to a deity’, but it also has a fundamen­ tal real spatial meaning and implies a precinct. The opposite of sacer is profanum, which means before or outside the fanum, or temple precinct. The sacer is therefore by implication what is inside the fanutn. ‘To sacrifice’ is to make sacred, sacer plus facere, ‘to make,’ an act also by implication performed in the precinct. Perhaps because the act of making sacred, sacrifice, often involves the visible transformation of what is sacrificed, sacer was deeply ambivalent; it also meant doomed and forfeited (as sacrifices are) and, beyond that, accursed and detestable, as if the sacrifice deserved its fate. Profane ‘goods’, wealth and life itself, might be as nothing inside the precinct, thus to be consecrated to a higher purpose. These terms still survive with something of their old resonances in the modern, more secular world. ‘Victim’ is from the Latin victima, an animal for sacrifice, as if unexpected suffering and death finally made sense as a kind of consecra­ tion. The use of the term ‘holocaust’, a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire, has similar implications, but at the historical scale of the attempt to comprehend modern genocide. The act of offering - from ob-ferre, ‘to carry before or against’ - involves approach, and its fundamental values are values of proximity. Just as centres entail precincts, shrines are real spaces reserved for presences, and the precinct’s boundary implies a qualitative spatial change, which is essential to the sacrifice. Sacrificing, making sacred, or consecrating, putting with the sacred, bringing into the fanum., may be accomplished in two ways: by facture and by explicit denial of the ordinary. Sometimes there is little difference between the two. An artifact might be evidently reserved for some ‘higher use’ by brilliant display of skill, which in turn made it and its use extraordinary. The same goal might be achieved much more simply. Such practices as placing fine but broken pottery in burials might be explained by supposing that it was in this way made extraor­ dinary, like the passage by death of the one it accompanied, and thus appropri­ ate to its use in the other space and time of the afterlife, not only by facture but by breakage, by a double denial of its usual function. The issue quickly becomes much more, complex, and sacrifice in the usual sense, of animals, for example, or of human beings, involves death in this world in order that the blood of life itself be offered to a higher world. In all cases, what is offered is something of value. Gold and silver are of value in the profane world, where they facilitate commerce and serve to define social rank. They may be as nothing in the sanctu­ ary, but they are not literally nothing, and the ornamentation of a temple might make evident the relative status of the building in a city by a comparable use of gold and silver, which are, however, distinguished by facture and by manifest separation from usual function. Much of the world’s art might be so described, and, by the same token, much of the world’s art has been melted down or otherwise returned to ordinary purposes.

4.13 VOTIVE IMAGES

125 Votive statuettes from the square temple of the god Abu, Tell Asmar, Iraq, c.2900-2600 bc. Photo courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

A votive image places a resemblant presence before a sacred presence, and in this relation of mutual facing, proximity is a primary value. Proximity short of contact (but with the implicit goal of contact) may be defined by lines of sight, as if ‘facing’ were literal and as if sight were a kind of touch. Offerings placed before the shrine are close to, but also in sight of. The importance of the value of proximity to a shrine is exemplified with diagrammatic clarity by customs of burial in medieval Christian churches. Although the Church resisted interment within church buildings themselves, patrons, especially royal and high ecclesi­ astical patrons, insisted upon this prerogative. In general, places near the high altar and relics were more prestigious, and the common run of people were buried in the churchyard. The early French kings were arranged under the crossing of St-Denis, and tombs of the monarchs of England ring the high altar and shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey. Cosimo de’ Medici is buried under the crossing of San Lorenzo in Florence as pater patriae, flanked on either side by the dynastic burials in the sacristies of Brunelleschi and Michelangelo. As examples of the values of facing and proximity in votive figures we may consider the images by which we best know the ancient Sumerians (Figure 125). These tubular standing figures are often carved of soft gypsum and painted, with inset stone eyes and brows. They are of generally descriptive proportions, standing in attitudes of prayer with feet together, hands clasping offerings to their chests, their large eyes staring straight ahead. Although all are fairly small, some figures are larger than others, size probably denoting relative rank. These are substitu­ tive images of persons - men and women - of high status, worthy to present themselves dressed before the deity in the deity’s own house (early Sumerian temples were like houses), where they were set on benches facing the altar. The

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right to present themselves to the deity was perhaps granted by the priest-king for some service or donation to the temple. Such access to the god as these images indicate would thus have been limited and no doubt coveted, both as a privilege of rank and as means to divine favour. Images of select individuals were thus placed near the centre, in continual possible sight of the god. These images may see the god - hence the large envalued eyes - some Sumerian votive images are only eyes - and the god may see them, as forever observant and offering. They await the god’s word, or gaze, or perhaps even the god’s appearance, an epiphany. All stone and metal had to be imported to Sumer, and clearly identifiable images of the gods, which might be expected to have been made of the finest materials, are as rare as gold, copper and hard stone were valuable. Gypsum such as that used in Figure 12.5 was highly prized and statues like this were reworked and repaired. Over time numbers of them must have accumulated, and there would have been pressure to replace them with images of new devotees. The group of ten statues to which Figure 125 belonged was buried next to the altar of their temple. Votive figures of the lesser material of clay might be broken to become part of the fabric of the temple as it was enlarged, so that the same relation stated by the hierarchy of materials was maintained as images were kept in the sacred precinct, but relatively closer to or farther from the sacred centre. In both cases the images became foundations of the growing temple. The highest material of all was royal diorite, which came from Arabia. The pious Gudea of Lagash prided himself on the fact that his image was made of diorite. His pride may be used to illustrate an important duality in votive images. In the first place, use of the material displays unique status, as does Gudea’s being shown seated before the god, as donor of the temple structure, the god’s house itself. All of this states highest social rank, closest to the god, if still in an attitude of submission and offering. But the identification of the image with the prized and exotic material of diorite also raises another issue. It means, as the high finish and polish of the image also mean, that his image is uniquely worthy to stand before the god, thus the better to act as intermediary for his people. The figure is, like innumerable other royal votive offerings, at once an expression of piety, power and unique vicinity to higher or central power. Splendid offerings are pleasing in the eyes of the god and therefore elicit divine favour, but only one who possesses unique power may make such an offering. So the ruler, however just or unjust, may become a benefactor. This is another of the fundamental patterns of the appropriation of the centre. The phrases ‘splendid offerings’ and ‘pleasing in the eyes of the god’ bring us back to the question of sight as a kind of contact. In the example we have just considered (assuming there was an image of a god, or even a place for the god, on the altar of Sumerian temples) there was mutual ‘seeing’ on the part of the images of god and observant. An offering that is not an image might be made pleasing as if for the gaze of the god by material or facture. Again, it might be desirable to offer an image of oneself, or part of oneself, to the gaze of the deity in the hope of recognition and favour. The offering of a wax arm, for example, like the wax limbs seen at many Roman Catholic shrines, places an image near, but also in the sight of, the image of the shrine. In such a case, it is essential that the image be an act of offering on someone’s part and that it be recognizable.

Many votive images are made not so much in fulfilment of a vow as in gratitude; that is, they are made after some intercession as if in fulfilment of a vow. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who was to become known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, one of the great patrons of the Italian Renaissance, did not easily establish his reputation as a great and enlightened ruler. On 26 April 1478, Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano were attacked in Florence Cathedral by conspirators and Giuliano was killed. Lorenzo escaped with minor wounds, and in the months that followed he ruthlessly punished the conspirators, publicly hanging them (when behead­ ing was a proper aristocratic execution) and humiliating their memories. Images played a crucial role in Lorenzo’s public reaction to the conspiracy. Drawing upon an earlier Florentine tradition, he commissioned pitture infamanti, ‘defaming paintings’, of his enemies in the last indignity of their execution, images for which he composed derisive inscriptions. The artist who painted these pitture infamanti was Sandro Botticelli, who at about the same time must.also have been painting the nymphs and graces of his Primavera for one of Lorenzo’s cousins. The institution of pitture infamanti is itself an instructive example of the perennial substitutive value of images, doubly instructive because this episode took place in Florence alongside ethereal Neoplatonic allegory on the eve of the formation of the classic High Renaissance style. But even more interesting for our present purposes are the votive images Lorenzo had made of himself to give thanks for his deliverance. In this case the artist was Andrea del Verrocchio, among other distinctions the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, Verrocchio raised the crude and modest efforts of popular votive images to a new level of naturalism for this occasion. Wooden armatures were covered with wicker and cloth, and wax life masks, hands and feet were added and painted with oil colours; the figures were finished with clothing and even hair, so that, Vasari reports, the figures seemed natural and living. Three of these figures were made and placed before miraculous images, a crucifix and two Madonnas. It was no doubt considered appropriate to elevate the artistic level of the votive offerings of Lorenzo de’ Medici, in order to distin­ guish them from the simpler offerings of all and sundry, and Verrocchio was in a position to marshal all the accumulated skills of Florentine Renaissance natural­ ism in addressing the problem. But, however relatively sophisticated Lorenzo’s images might have been, they were, like other votive art, variations on themes still connecting them with popular practice, and placing them among broad traditions. After he had fled bleeding to the Medici palace, Lorenzo appeared bandaged to the people in the window to assure them he was still alive. It was an image of himself in this state, with a wound at his throat, that Lorenzo placed before the crucified Christ. Lorenzo’s own appearance to the people recalled the display of the wounded and humiliated Christ, and Lorenzo meant to say that the suffer­ ing Christ, seeing Lorenzo’s suffering, must have extended his mercy and grace. It was that image of distress that he offered in lasting gratitude to Christ’s gaze. To the popular shrine in the church of the Santissima Annunziata, built by his father to house a miraculously completed painting of the Annunciation, Lorenzo presented an image of himself in the robes of a Florentine citizen, as if to continue

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to live under the Virgin’s sustaining grace. (This account of Renaissance Florentine attitudes toward images cannot be completed without noting that the Medici effigies in the Santissima Annunziata were vandalized when the Medici were expelled from Florence in 1494, two years after Lorenzo’s death. The pitture infamanti of Medici family enemies were also erased.) The word ‘miracle’ is from a word meaning ‘to wonder or marvel’, ‘to look on with wonder’. Miracles, like prodigies and monsters,^are first of all extraor­ dinary appearances. Pliny in fact wrote of miracula in his Natural History as prodigies and monsters, as portentous appearances demanding interpretation, potentially either good or evil. Accordingly, extraordinary images may be beneficent and attractive or ugly and repellent, and in either case they may be apotropaic, ‘turning away’, preventing the approach of malevolent forces. Composite monsters may thus appropriately stand before a shrine, throne room or tomb, and, in the Mediterranean world, misshapen images might turn the ‘evil eye’ from a home, or a child’s cradle. In Christianity, ‘miracles’ became more unambiguously good, signs that the divine is indeed benevolent, although the devil still deceives, tempts and seduces. In all cases, the association with appearance is essential. Western votive images are often referred to as ‘miracles’ (miracoli in Italian, milagros in Spanish) and typically show us in some detail what the deity saw and testify to the fact that the deity did indeed see it and intervene. The making of a votive image is both an offering and a public witness and testimony, a statement of gratitude, which in turn encourages faith and hope in others. ‘Martyr’ is the Greek word for witness, and a martyr is one who bears witness to faith through self-sacrifice. The innumerable paintings of martyrs in Christian art not only commemorate such acts, but preserve their memories, literally keeping their exemplary deaths ‘before the eyes’ of observants. Similarly, votive images make more or less rich offerings, and, placed in the sight of the higher power, they testify to an intervention of that power in the narrative of an individual’s life. 4.I4 ICONS In this and the following sections I will make a distinction between two fundamen­ tal kinds of images, icons and effigies. In general, icons are substitutive, but they are also additive, as we have already seen in a number of examples. To make an icon, a real metaphor is specified by powerful materials or by resemblant elements, or both. Effigies take their primary authority from causal or indexical relation to what they reproduce, or continue to make present. Effigies are related to traces (as discussed in Section 4). A life mask is an example of an effigy. Icons continue the process of transfer of materials to social space and use begun by substitu­ tion, adding specific powers to presence. Materials must also be brought to making an effigy, but not because of their intrinsic power. A life mask is made with clay or plaster. Instead, effigies take their value from actual spatial contigu­ ity with their object, which implies temporal continuity, sequence, and literal re­ ference of image to an actual prototype. In a life mask, a mould is made from the face, then material is poured into the mould to make the final image. Contact with what was in contact with the original is maintained throughout, and this is essential to the value of the image. The word ‘icon’ (which I use reluctantly, and only with the following quali-

fications) is from the Greek eikon, meaning ‘image’, with strong connotations of likeness (and thus, as we shall see, with strong connections to the values of effigies as I have just defined them). But since, as I have discussed in the introduc­ tion to this chapter, neutral or positive terms for images are so rare, and since ‘icon’ has fairly good connotations (in another example of the survival of traditional religious terms in modern ‘popular’ culture, there are ‘national icons’ and ‘pop icons’) I have decided to adapt the word to a primary category of images. In narrower historical terms, perhaps the most familiar use of the word icon is in relation to the Byzantine icon (which I shall discuss below), an image for devotion and veneration. For present purposes I will stress and generalize venera­ tion or observance, making likeness secondary, in favour of actual presence, refinement and appropriate attributes and powers in relation to use. Understood in these broader categorical terms, an icon is a conditional possibility, with an open number of possible cultural variations, like real metaphor. The fundamen­ tal purpose of any icon in the sense I will use the word is to make powers present in a new unity. Although they may have resemblant elements, icons are not as a whole o/anything, although they may imply that they are. The nkisi n’kondi in Figure 126 was made collaboratively by a carver and a ritual expert, who used it once the carver had completed it. Many minkondi (the plural) were made up entirely of pouches of materials collected and assembled for their powers and virtues. (This one would certainly have been clothed and more or less elaborately accoutred in use.) If an n’kondi (which means ‘hunter’) is a human figure, as this one is, then the powers presented by means of it may be addressed, so that it may ‘see’ and in general act as the enforcing agent of the ancestors, from which its powers largely derive. Animating and empowering materials are sealed into the stomach (the ‘soul’ or ‘life’, here marked by a cowrie shell) and the head of these figures, which thus concentrate a greater or lesser number of spiritual powers. Minkondi are apotropaic, but they are also ‘crossroads figures’, ritually addressed at critical junctures in time. In such rituals blades and nails were driven into the figure to awaken the force of the n’kondi', and, since iron is always a powerful material, these additions should probably also be reg­ arded as offerings, further adding to the figure’s power. They are only disfig­ urements if we fail to see the n’kondi as an icon, that is, as an assembly of spirit­ ual potencies, some of which are associated with human features and capability to act. For an example at another scale of what I mean by an icon we may return to the Aztec Coatlicue, discussed in the Introduction (Figures 4 and 5) as an image primarily significant in terms of real spatial values. This is not how ‘Serpent Skirt’ might be imagined to have appeared had she at some time actually lived, rather the image is meant to make her effectively present, fully realized in the precinct for which the image was made, into which the deity’s terrible powers were to be brought for ritual address. The powers of agency and possibility of address and propitiation, colossally presented by the substitutive core, and specified in anthropomorphic (or gynaecomorphic) form, are complemented by the powers of eagle and serpent. Consistently with such an assembly of powers, the figure was repeated, so that what might seem narrative redundancy is the multiplication of presence.

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i Nkhi n'koiidi, Z.iirr, Yomhr i 41, 635 sensation and 568 Imhotep 163, 210, 211, 212, 232 imitation 54, 93-4, 319 implicit 74 Impressionism 320, 336, 588-90, 591-2, 625 Inca 80, 81, 88, 96,119-20,156,157-9, 185, 2-54-5; 40-1 independent images 351-3, 356-7; 151 index 27-8, 255-6 India 228, 658

architecture 166-70; 63-4 centres 133-4, *36 clay figurines 277-8 destruction of images 296 Mahayana Buddhism 175 metaphors of light 475 Mughal art 395 shrines 133-4, 152 indirectness 30, 575, 579 Indonesia 177-8 Indra 229, 287 Indra’s net 471 Indus Valley 265, 415 industrial design 84 Industrial Revolution 31, 250, 554, 567, 599 industrialization 565 infinity 194, 543-4, 562, 563, 581, 582, 585-6,587 information 654-5 Innana180 inspiration 3 24-5 installation art 643, 652 instincts 572-3 interest 5 8 interlaces, ornament 395, 396-8 Internet 655 intromission, theory of vision 509, 557, 567, 573-4 intuition, schematic 624, 625 Inuit 183, 306, 319, 376; 136 invention 103,105-6, 567 inversion 371 Ionic order 100, 409 iron 82 irrigation projects 199-200, 203, 204, 228-9 417 Isaac 144,148, 223, 298 Isaiah 144,192, 468 Ise 236,475 Ishmael 144, 298 Ishtar 220 Isidore of Seville 422; 200 Isis 208, 209, 214, 253, 313 Islam, 144,188, 223 architecture 194, 399-401; 187-8 calligraphy 398-9, 400; 186 Jerusalem 140-1,150-2 maps 422 minarets 475-7 orientation 184 ornament 398-403 prohibition of images 298-9, 399 sacred texts 398-9; 186 isometry, ambiguity of perspective, 526-7; 25 Israelites 141-7, 373 Istanbul see Constantinople Italy altarpieces 5 5-6 bronze sculpture 82 caricature 592 drawings 544-7 fresco paintings 469 Grand Tour 583 one-point perspective 507, 512, 517-26, 5585292 optical cube 500

quadratura 534-44; 303-8 see also Renaissance

Jacob 143-4, 223, 268 jade 79-80, 83, 86-7, 89; 13-14, 22, 23 Jainism 133,475 Janus 372 Japan 658 cities 236-7 Jomon culture 102,119; 32,40 materials 84 mirrors 475 overviews 609 pagodas 172; 70 Pure Land Buddhism 473-5 Shinto sites 118-19 stone circles 119; 40 woodblock prints 466; 244 yamato-e 475 Japheth 422 Java 177-8; 74-5 Jayavarman II 229 Jayavarman VII 229, 231 Jefferson, Thomas 200, 643 Jericho 277 Jerusalem 24,130,140-52,185, 655 Church of the Holy Sepulchre 140,148,150, r5i, 152,392,399 Dome of the Rock 140,141,150-2,194, 299, 399-4°°, 644; 53-4 maps 422, 429 Temple 131,140,142-8,165, 223, 224, 399, 476, 649; 47-8, 50 Temple Mount 128,141,145,146,147, 148, 150; 49 Jesuits 539 Jews 131,141-8,192 John XXIII, Pope 643 John the Baptist, St 393, 505 John the Evangelist, St 393, 457, 458 Johnson, Philip 643, 644-5, 646-7 Jomon culture 102,119; 32 Josiah, King of Judah 144 Judaism 140-8, 223, 398 Juno 100 Jupiter (god) 193, 227, 244 Jupiter (planet) 246 Justinian, Emperor 128-30, 370, 500; 44 Kahun 219-20; 92 Kalachakra 175; 73 Kandinsky, Wassily, Blue Segment 35-6, 622; 2 Kanishka, King 160 Kant, Immanuel 18, 34,73, 570, 572, 626 Critique ofJudgement zi, 58, 579, 580, 582, 586, 624 Critique of Pure Reason 30-2, 565, 577 Inaugural Dissertation 577 Kara-Khorum 238 Karnak, Temple of Amun-Re 164; 62 Karrku Jukurrpa 661; 343 Kepler, Johannes 508, 511, 563, 568, 576, 602-3 Khmer empire 228-31 Khnum 292, 313

Khorsabad 325; 140 kibulu 137-9 kings see rulers Kish 220 Klee, Paul 579 Kleobis 315; 138 Knossos 164-5, 2-76, 3°7,44°; 212 Koran 152, 224, 298-9, 398-9,400,468; 186 Korea 423 Kritios Boy 139 Kronos 268 Kublai Khan 23 8 Kubler, George 12,17,19, 25 Shape of Time 16 Kurgan people 187 Kwakiutl 306-7; 137 Kyoto 236, 237 Phoenix Hall 473

La Venta 86-7,161, 271, 350; 60 labyrinths 164-5, 3 9 6 Lakshmi 288 lamps, Palaeolithic m-12, 347; 36 land 197-200, 202 surveying 416, 417 landscape painting Chinese 237-8,460-5; 236-42 diminished forms 453-4; 229 German Romanticism 586-8 horizon 543, 562, 587-8, 607; 311 optical naturalism 29 personal style and 32 in social space 45 surficiality 336-7, 34t viewer space 459-65; 235 yamato-e 475 language development of 251-2 indirect 395-6 learning 54 meaning 322 metaphor 257 poetry 99 rhetoric 98-100,101, 321 scientific writing 99 semiotics 72 universal 655 lapis lazuli 78 Lascaux 111536,146 latitude 423, 426,428-9 laughter 595, 596 Laurana, Francesco, Bust Portrait of Battista Sforza 293-4; T33 Laussel 112-13, 349; 37 law codes 223 le Bon, Philippe 554 Le Corbusier 643 Le Vau, Louis 108-9 Lefebvre, Henri 23 left and right 377-80, 390 Leger, Fernand 643 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Monadology 581 ‘Leiden plaque’ 23 lenses 562, 608 Leonardo da Vinci 283, 331, 486, 539, 558, 627

Codex Urbinas 511-12; 286 Design for a Napping Machine 560; 313 drawing of man’s lower torso and leg 545-7; 312 Madonna of the Rocks 529-30; 297 Mona Lisa 331; 143 "Well Shaped Man’ 408, 579; 191 Lepinski Vir 263; 112 Lespugue 148 Li Ch’eng, A Solitary Temple amid Clearing Peaks 462-4; 240 Li K’an, Ink Bamboo 243 Liang K’ai, Li Po Chanting a Poem 354-5; 153 ‘liberal arts’ 31, 67, 86 liberty trees 248 life masks 284, 288-9, 290, 291 life principles 263 light 467-77 Analytic Cubism 633 artificial light 467-9, 554-5, 614 chiaroscuro 529-30, 534, 547-8, 627-9 divine light 469-71 as a force 567 highlights 483-4 metaopticality 5 5 5-7; 314 modelling 478-84, 544-8; 252-7 photography 602, 604-5, 607, 608 and power of rule 475 reflections 478,483-4; 256 as religious metaphor 468-75 representation of light from a source 477-84 theories of vision 508-12, 558, 573-5; 284—6 virtual light 469-71,477-8 see also shadows; sun likeness, of images 116, 290 Limbourg, Je^n and Paul, Tres Riches Heures 594-55 3 o-1 liminality 195 Lin’an 238 Lindisfarne Gospels 396-8; 185 Lindos 165 lines 578-9, 634 Analytic Cubism 633 groundlines 439-45; 210-14 oblique lines 453, 472-3, 498 orthogonals 489, 508, 514, 526, 587 transversals 519, 522, 587 uniform lines 353, 354, 360 see also drawings lines of sight centres 135 independent images 353 paths 157 quadratura 543-4 shrines 139 surveying 199 linga 229, 264-6, 268, 277; 113,115 Lippi, Filippino 469 Lishan 233-4 Locke, John 29, 565, 577, 584, 591 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 569-71 Lokeshvara 231 London 130

‘Longinus’ 528 Peri hypsous 582 longitude 423, 426, 428-9 Longshan culture 89; 22 Lord of the Four Quarters 220, 224, 228 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, Presentation in the Temple 505-6; 282 Los Dogues 436; 207 Louis XIV, King of France 201, 2.41-5, 2.48 Louis XVI, King of France 201, 245, 248 Louis Philippe, King of France 597; 320 Lucie-Smith, Edward, Art Today 660-1 Lucretius 318, 653 Lukacs, Georg 23 History and Class Consciousness 22 Luke, St 291 Luoyang 235, 237 Luoyi 232, 422 Lydia 310 Lysippus 408 machines 564-5, 566-7, 582-3, 620 Machu Picchu 261; no Madagascar 185 Madonna and Child see Mary, Virgin Madonna and Child on a Curved Throne 484; 258 magnified anthropomorphism 287-8 Mahayana Buddhism 175,471-3 Malevich, Kasimir 182 Malta 156-7, 213;59 Manco Capac 158 mandalas 172-3,175-7, 471, 473, 658; 73 manipulation, images 274-9 Mannerism 104 Mantegna, Andrea illusionistic ceiling oculus 525, 534-5, 537; 303 Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels and Eight Saints 524-5; 294 Mourning over the Dead Christ 525-6; 295 Mantua Camera degli Sposi 534-5 Palazzo delTe 535 Mantua, Ludovico Gonzaga, Duke of 535 Mao Zedong 241 maps 180, 249, 250, 421-30, 460; 199-203 marble 87 Mars 100, 227, 531 Martin of Tours, St 646 Martini, Simone, Funeral of Saint Martin 500; ^77 martyrs 284, 297 Marx, Karl 22 Capital $6$, 566 Marx brothers 663-4 Mary, Virgin 17 divine light 469-71 icons 253, 254, 291, 295; 134 images of 18, 392, 457,458, 504 Islam and 299 Madonna and Child 139-40, 355, 393, 469-71,494-55268 miracle-causing statues 296 Pantheon and 194 shrines 139-40

ultramarine pigment 78, 646 Masaccio 539 Madonna and Child Enthroned with Four Saints 507-8, 522, 523; 283 Saint Peter Healing with his Shadow 469; 246 Trinity with the Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and Donors 457-8, 524, 646; 233-4 masks 300-7; 135-7 of ancestors 291; 128 death masks 288, 292, 293; 132 Fang 372-3; 167 life masks 284, 288-9, 290, 291 and recognition 358 shamans 179, 301, 305-6, 376; 136 time 556-7 units of 403 universalization of 2.49-50 Mecca 141,151,152,184,185,400,403 Ka’ba 128, 144,151,185, 268, 299, 399, 645, 656 ‘mechanical arts’ 31, 67, 552 mechanics 328, 614 medals, humanist 329, 532 Medici, Cosimo de’ 79, 281 Medici, Giuliano de’ 283, 298 Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent 283-4, 293 Medici, Piero de’ 329-31; 142 Medici family 194 Medina 400 Mediterranean 422, 426 Memling, Hans, Last Judgement 484 memory association of ideas 570 imagination and 3 24-5 mental images 322, 323, 324 perception and 618 Memphis 163, 209-10, 211, 215 menhirs 266 Menil, John and Dominique de 643 mental images 316-18, 319-25, 551 Mercator, Gerhard, World Map 428-9; 204 meridians, maps 423, 428-9 Meroe 423 Meru, Mount 136,173, 229 Mesoamerica clay figurines 278-9; 124 effigies 289 masks 302 materials 79, 80-1, 83, 87 ritual centres 350 tejjiples 159-60 writing 62 ziggurats 136 Mesolithic rock paintings 434-7,439, 450-1; 205-8 Mesopotamia land and division 199-200 Sumerians 203-5 ziggurats 136, 160, 179-80, 213; 77 Messiah 144-5, *48 metals, hierarchy of 77, 80-2 metaoptical space 21, 23, 40,122, 527, 555-64, 581, 640, 657-8; 314 analytic drawings 560

beyond ‘normal’ limits of sight 562 definition 5 5 5-6 forces 561 French Revolution and 249 independence of viewer 562 infinity 562, 563, 582 Islamic science and 401 ‘perspective machine’ 561; 315 and Renaissance one-point perspective 558 and the visual angle 557-9, 561 metaphor caricature 597 double metaphor 340 real spatial metaphors 37 see also real metaphor meteorites 254, 259, 268 metric naturalism 312-16, 455-7 metric order, Greek colonies 418 metric space 21, 23,122 ‘perspective machine’ 561; 315 quadratura 543, 544 revolutionary calendar 249 metric system 249-50,403-5 Mexico 19 ball game 115 clay figurines 278-9; 124 icons 254 ritual centres 160-2; 60-1 see also Aztecs Mexico City 45,120 Michelangelo Buonarroti 194, 226, 281, 320 Creation of the Planets, Sun and Moon 373-4>469; 168 Crucifixion of Haman 4311,228 Last Judgement 379, 392,469; 171 Laurentian Library 646, 648 The Separation of Light and Dark 374, 469 Sistine Chapel Ceiling 105-6, 469, 535; 34 microscopes 562, 613, 616 Mictlantecuhtli 390; 182 Middle Ages 550 astronomy 562-3 clocks 556 facture and value 84-6 Gothic art 101 language of theology 99 ‘masterpieces’ 103 optical plane 493-7 virtuosity 103-4 Miletus 419, 420; 198 Milky Way 157, 158, 185, 211 Min 208 minarets 475-7 mind powers of 569-70 as a theatre 577 unconscious mind 624-5, 641 Minerva 100, 254 Ming dynasty 238-9 minimal art 642 minkondi (icons) 285; 126 Mino da Fiesole, Bust of Piero de’ Medici 329-31; 142 miracles 284, 291, 296, 563 mirror images 294 mirrors

availability of 5 51-2 Brunelleschi’s demonstration of perspective 516-17 Chinese bronze mirrors 475; 249 curved mirrors 562 Galerie des Glaces, Versailles 243-4 proportion and ratio 294 reflections 332-5 and Shinto 475 truthfulness of image 294, 345 Mitchell, WJ.T. 25, 27 Mithraism 347 Moche culture 289 modelling 451,469, 478-84, 519, 544-8, 607,633; 252-7 models 114-16, 256; 38 modernism 549-55 African influences 658 formats 551-2 images 551-2, 553 and ornament 99 rejection of realism 95 modernization, resistance to 250 modularity grids 411; 194 perspective 507, 520, 522, 526; 292 Mohenjo-Daro 265,415; 114 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, Untitled (Looking Down from the Wireless Tower, Berlin) 610; 322 Moissac, Abbey Church of St-Pierre 497; 271 Moldavia 277 Mondrian, Piet 411 Monet, Claude 648 Impression, Sunrise 588-90, 591-2, 623, 629;319 Mongolia 238, 267 monoliths 266, 270, 300-1; 119 monsters 325-6 Monte Alban 350 Montefeltro, Federico da 533; 300 monuments, stone columns 166-8; 63-4 moon, phases of 180,185 morality 572 Morgantina, House of Ganymede 498; 273 Mormons 416 Moses 141, 223, 373, 380 mosque lamps 468; 245 mosques 185,400-1; 187-8 Mother Earth 228, 417 Mother Goddess 189 motifs, ornamental 102 moulds, bronze casting 81 Mount Sinai 494-5; 268 mountains artificial 229, 248 as centres 136 images of 261-2 tumuli and 187 ziggurats and 204 movement 568, 569 depiction of 394 photographic analysis of 618-19, 620; 327-9 Mughal Empire 299, 395 Muhammad, Prophet 141,151-2, 268,

298-9, 399, 4°o mummification 207, 208, 214, 301, 313 mummy bundle portraits 291, 292-3; 131 Museo Antropologico, Mexico City 45 museums 52, 550, 551, 625-6, 627, 642-3, 652 music, harmony 407 Muslims see Islam Mussolini, Benito 225 Muybridge, Eadweard, Animal Locomotion 618, 619; 328 Mycenae 325 Treasury of Atreus 190-1; 80 Mycerinus, Pharaoh 215, 216 myths creation myths 163, 205 icons and 342

Nagasaki 24 Nannar 222 Nara 236, 237; 104 Naram Sin 221; 93 Narcissus 522, 528, 551-2 Narmer palette 206-7, 208-9, 221, 406, 440-1; 83 narrative 298, 342 Nasca lines 155-6,157-8, 261, 263; 57-8 nationalism 34, 626 nations 198 Native Americans 83, 123,125-7, 659; 43 naturalism 601-4 metric 312-16,455-7 oil painting 103-4 optical 29,42, 93,95, 316, 593, 597, 601, 621 Navajo hogans 123,125-7,130,186; 43 navigation 426-8, 429 Nazis 601 Nebuchadnezzar II, King of Babylon 131,145, 223 neoclassicism 101,407, 513, 572, 578-9, 583 Neolithic arrowheads 88, 89, in; 21 centres 198 female figures 157 jade 79-80 planarity 113, 345-6 Neoplatonism 468, 509, 578 New York City 24, 71,130, 469, 554, 655-6, 657 Newgrange 189,190,191 Newman, Barnett, Broken Obelisk 649; 341 ‘news’ photography 609 newspapers 551, 552, 599-600 Newton, Isaac 246, 557, 561, 563, 565, 566, 577,581, 591,640 Opticks 5 7 5 Niagara Falls 583 Nietzsche, Friedrich 181-2, 572, 640 Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music 649 Nigeria 81-2, 270, 275-6; 117-19 Night in Casablanca 663-4 Nile, River 198, 211, 218, 313 Nimrud 383-5; 175-6 Nineveh 223, 224,445; 15, 214, 217

Nippur 180, 203, 220 nomads 184,191 Nonakado Circle 40 north, direction 184-5, 186 North Africa 184 notionality 61-2, 89-90,107-13,114-15 novelty 66, 584, 627 Nu 216 Nubia 207 Numidia 79 Nut 208 Obalufon II, King of Ife 82; 16 obelisks 71, 79, 225 oblique lines 453,472-3, 498 observers 42, 44 see also viewer occlusion 370,442, 451 octagonal buildings, Rothko Chapel 643-4; 338-41 Oduduwa 269 offerings 139,159, 280, 282 Ogun 269 oil painting 53, 68, 69-70,103-4, 635, 637 Olakun 386 Olduvai Gorge 77,109,117; 10 Olmecs animal imagery 156 colossal sculptures 71, 94, 289; 27 destruction of images 296 elevation 159,160-1 jade 80, 86-7; 13 masks 302 stelae 271 Olympia 83-4,145 Olympus 3 27 Omar, Caliph 150 omphalos 137j 143, 268 opposition, planar 369-80 bilateral symmetry 368, 369 identity and 390-3 Ops 268 optical cubes 490,499-503, 505, 513, 517-19; 275-9, 290 optical naturalism 29, 42, 93, 95, 316, 593, 597, 601, 621 optical plane ambiguity of 492-3, 499; 267 in European Middle Ages 493-7; 268-72 Greek and Roman painting 489-92 groundlines 440 illusionistic meander 497-9; 2.73-4 optical planar order 457-8 and stage space 454-7,487; 231-2 optics development of science of 478, 486, 557-8 geometry 455-7, 478, 486; 259 theories of vision 508-12, 558; 284-6 Oranmiyan 269; 117 Orcagna, Andrea, Strozzi altarpiece 504-5; 281 order, and recognition 3 58-9 orders, architecture 89,100,409-10 Ordzhonikidze 26 organic symmetry 366, 368 orientation

cardinal directions 185,186 city planning 183, 419-20 disorientation in modern world 181-2 and human cardinality, 181 passage graves 189,190 temples 183-4 see also alignment originality 626-7 ornament 28, 98-102 decorum 99-100 hierarchy and 100-2, 395 historical characteristics 102 independent images 361 and invention 102 planar order 102, 395-8 rejection of 99 and rhetoric 98-9, 527-8 sacred texts and places 398-403 orthogonals 489, 508, 514, 526, 587 Osiris 208, 212, 214, 265, 313 Otto II, Emperor 496; 270 overlapping 451 overviews, photography 609-13; 322-3 Ovid 327, 530

Pacal, Lord 80; 14 Pachacuti 158 Padua, Arena Chapel 469, 531 pagodas 171-2; 68-70 painting allegory 533-4; 298-302 Australian aboriginal 262, 661-2; m, 343 cave paintings in, 163, 252, 289, 335, 348, 434; 146 chiaroscuro 547-8 composition 528-30 and cultural difference 254-5 as events in themselves 621, 622-3 facture 75-7 format 35-6,44-5, 53 imitation 54 Impressionism 588-90, 591-2 influence of photography 621 mental images and 319-21, 322-3 modernism 550 Navajo ‘sand paintings’ 125,126-7 observers 42 oil painting 53, 68, 69-70,103-4, 635, 637 personal style 69-70 pitture infamanti (‘defaming paintings’) 283, 284,296 quadratura 534-44; 303-8,310 realism 623 Renaissance one-point perspective 517-26, 5585292 rock paintings 434-7,439, 450-1; 205-8 suspension 647 trompe I’oeil 93,94-5 vase painting 442; 215 virtual light 469-71 as virtual space 43-4 virtuosity 103-4 see also landscape painting Palace Ladies Tuning the Lute 462; 239 palaces 120,122,165-6, 201, 204 Versailles 241-5; 108-9

Palaeolithic art 62, 346; 146 calendric tabulation 411-12 female figures 157, 274, 277, 346-9, 358; 123,147-9 images 252, 289, 434 materials 78 shamans 178 stone tools 61, 68,110-13 Palenque 80; 14 Paleotti, Gabriele, Discourse on Images 11 Palestinians 141 palettes 206-7,108-9; 83 Palladium 253-4, 268 Pallas 2.53-4 Panofsky, Erwin Meaning in the Visual Arts 16 Perspective as Symbolic Form 21, 22, 28, 662-4 paper 52 Paradise 196, 392, 393, 399, 422, 473 Paradise of the Storm God mural 357, 368, 370, 371,437-8; 166, 210 Paris 249 Notre Dame 247 Pantheon 247 Paris (mythological character) 442; 215 Parma Cathedral 537; 305 San Giovanni Evangelista 535; 304 Pasargadae 224 passage tombs 188-90, 218; 79 passions 570, 571, 572, 578 Pataliputra 166 paths 122-3,157-9 and elevation 159-60 ritual paths 173-5, 261 patterns, translation 395 Paul, St 393 Paul VI, Pope 643 Pausanias 268 Pauson 3 22-3 pectorals 92-3; 26 Peirce, Charles Sanders 27 Pelerin, Jean, De artificial} perspectiva 559 Pende, Eastern 137-9 perception 30, 316-17, 568-9, 574-9, 617-19 performance art 643, 652 peripheries 194-7, 371 Persepolis 166, 224, 368; 163 Persia 166,167,191, 223-4, 299,468 personal space 25,43 personal style 68-70, 75-7, 578, 593, 625 personification, allegory 531 perspective 23,433 aerial perspective 453, 589 ambiguity of 526-7; 296 anamorphosis 30 anomalies 631 Brunelleschi’s first demonstration 513-17; 288-9 chiaroscuro and 627 one-point 445,451,453,457, 507, 512, 517-17, 542-, 544, 558, 561, 580, 587, 630; 292 ‘perspective machine’ 561; 315

as subjectivity 580 persuasion 98-9 Peru 119-20,155-6, 157-9; 40,41, 57-8 Peter, St 149, 393 Pheidias 83, 84,121 Philip II, King of Macedonia 224 Philip II, King of Spain 194 Philipon, Charles, Sketches [of Louis Philippe as a pear] 597; 320 Philistines 141-2 Philo Judaeus 147, 530 Philoxenus of Eretria, Battle of Alexander the Great and Darius III at Issus 489-90,496; 263 Phnom Kulen 229 Phoenicians 417 photography 93, 433, 602-21 analysis of movement 618-19, 620; 327-9 cinema 620-1 as event 603-4 foreshortening 610 framing 603-9 horizon and horizontality 607 indexicality 331-1, 604, 617 influence on painting 621 instantaneity 623 light 602, 604-5, 607, 608 overviews 609-13; 322-3 portraits 617 snapshots 294, 613 of subatomic particles 614-16; 325 surficiality 331-3, 335, 606-7 telescopic 616; 326 X-rays 614; 324 physiognomy 311, 313, 593, 597 Picasso, Pablo 25, 633, 638 Glass and Bottle ofSuzejjy Head of a Harlequin 633; 333 Nude Woman 633; 334 The Sculptor 25-6; 1 pictorial imagination 18, 25, 29-33, 34-5, 41 635 pictorial space 630, 638-9 Piero della Francesca 486 Triumph of Federico da Montefeltro 533; 300 pigments oil painting 68 recognition of images 339, 340 value 78 pilgrimages Buddhist 168,177-8 centres 136 Jerusalem 141 Mecca 656 mirror images 294 paths 157 St Peter’s, Rome 149 pilot maps 426-8; 203 Piombo, Sebastiano del 69 Pitt, William 597 pitture infamanti (‘defaming paintings’) 283, 284, 296 Pizarro, Francisco 81 places 21,117-200 alignment and orientation 180-4

architecture 43 ascent 178-80 boundaries and precincts 152-7 centres 130-7,166-78 difficulty of approach 163-6 elevation 159-62 facture and 119-20,132 gender divisions 127-30 groundlines 439-50 Jerusalem 140-52 land and division 197-2.00 Navajo hogans 12.3,125-7, T3oi 43 paths 157-9 peripheries 194-7 planes and 3 50 relation and hierarchy 123-5 and ritual 128-30 shrines 119-22,139-40; 40, 42 tumuli and domes 186-94; 79~^T in twentieth-century art 24 World Trade Center 656 see also social space planarity 39, 343-43° ambiguities of measure 3 60 Aristotle’s metaphor for mind 323 colonies 417-21 condition of presentation 61-2, 74 definition, division and format 361-3 ex-planation 349-50 full-face, profile and virtuality 394-5 grids 410-17 ground plane 445, 446 hierarchy and 360-1, 368-9 identity and opposition 390-3 images and places as vertical and horizontal planes 355-6 images on surfaces 3 3 2-5, 336 independence and dependence 350-5 maps 421-30 measure and ratio 403-5 notionality 107, 108, 113 order and proportion 358-60 ornament 395-403 planar oppositions 369-80 planes and places 3 50 planes, grids and social space 415-16 ratio, proportion and harmony 405-10 recognition and planarity, contour and definition 356-8 representation of rule 381-90 rotation and translation 363-8 scale and format 414-15 social spaces 201-2 planets 185, 562-3 plastics 84 Plato 99,104,115, 298, 309, 316, 319, 320, 408, 468, 508, 530, 556, 578, 618 Cratylus 321 Critias 417-18 Phaedrus 325-6, 329 Philebus 114, 321, 595 Republic 320-1 Symposium 15 । Timaeus 114, 407 1 Platonism 533 play 1 oi~7

pleasure principle 572 Pleiades 161 Pliny the Elder 16, 318, 322 Natural History 82, 284, 314 Plutarch 224, 309-10 poetry 21-2,99, 528, 530, 531, 585 point of view optical cube 502, 518; 290 perspective 518, 525 and reality 580-1 Pole Star 136,180,186, 201, 211, 214, 232, 235,239, 240 politics caricature 592, 593, 599 revolutions 245-9 Pollock, Jackson 579, 662 Polo, Marco 238 Polyanisa 415 Polyclitus, Canon 408 Polygnotus 3 22 polyptychs 55-6, 63, 73-4, 504-8,-524; 280-3, 294 Pompeii 658 House of the Faun 263 Villa of the Mysteries 491-2; 265 Pompey 145 pop art 642 popes 166 porphyry stone 79 portolan maps 426-8; 203 portraits caricature 311-12, 593, 597-9 Chinese emperor portraits 388-90 on coins 310-11, 329 death masks 288, 292, 293; 132 life masks 284, 288-9, 29°> mummy bundle portraits 291, 292-3; 131 photographic 617 realism 289-90 Renaissance busts 329-31; 241-3 in Western art 305 Poseidon 121,132 post-Abstract Expressionism 16 post-formalist art history 15-28 post-impressionism 320 post-modernism 27 post-structuralism 27, 34-5 pottery see ceramics Pozzo, Andrea, Allegory of the Missionary Work of the Jesuits 539, 540; 308 Prabhutaratna 390; 180 prayer rugs 402-3; 189 precincts 152-7,163, 271 presentation, conditions of 39-40, 61-2 priests 164 primitive art 33, 34, 59,196, 320, 591, 641 printing technology 599, 600 prints, woodblock 466; 244 profile images 348, 375-7, 394~5, 434 progress 642 projectile points 63, 64, 65,75; 8-9 Prometheus 315 propaganda 600-1 proportion 359-60 in architecture 408-10

division of grids 411; 190,193 hierarchy and 359 Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Well Shaped Man’ 408; 192 ratio and 359, 369, 406-7, 408 Protagoras 520 Prudentius, Psychomachia 530 psychology 20, 29, 565 Ptah 209-10, 211, 214 Ptolemy, Claudius 423-6, 428, 429, 509, 556, 557;201 Geographia 423 Ptolemy I, Pharaoh 148 Pueblos 126 Pure Land Buddhism 471, 473-5 purpose configuration and 63 refinement and 90 Pygmalion 327 pylons 164 Pyramids Egyptian 55, 75, 212-13, 214-19, 651; 88, 90,91 Teotihuacan 161-2; 61 Pythagoras 114, 407 Python 137 Qin dynasty 23 3-5 quadratura 534-44, 609, 610; 303-8, 310 quality, aesthetic 59 Quetzalcoatl 17, 208, 390; 182 Quintilian 396 Qutb Minar, Delhi 475; 250 radio 551, 654, 655 radioactivity 614 random order 436, 437, 460 Raphael 194, 311, 312 ratio abstraction from size 115, 317, 360 diminished forms 453 in Egyptian art 406; 190 grids 410,411; 193 maps 428 modelling 479-81 neoclassical architecture 513 perspective 520 pleasure and 408 proportion and 3 59, 369,406-7, 408 Ravenna San Vitale 128-30, 500; 44-5 Sant’ Apollinare in Classe 455, 492-3, 497; 231-2 Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo 164 Tomb of Galla Placidia 498; 274 Re 216 real metaphor 20-1, 27, 257-9 aniconic images 268 anthropomorphism 287, 288 manipulability 274-9 and recognition 259-60, 339 real planes 350-1 real space 20, 21 art-historical interpretation 55-8 conditions of 3 6-41 definition 43

metaphors 37 relation to virtual space 5 3 see also personal space; social space realism caricature 312 from realism to construction 621-3, 627 metric naturalism 312-16 modernist rejection of 95 and naturalism 601, 602 portraits 289-90 trompe I’oeil 93, 94-5 reality and point of view 580-1 virtual images 432 reason 570, 575 recognition 116, 259-60, 339-41, 356-8 redundancy, hierarchical images 360-1, 369 refinement 86, 87-98,107,112, 395 reflections 332-5, 478, 483-4; 256 Reformation .25 5, 300,416, 599, 600 see also English Reformation relation, real metaphor and recognition 259 relativity, theory of 555, 662 relics 132,140, 289, 291, 297, 563 reliefs relief space 448-50; 225-6 virtual co-ordinate plane 445-7; 218-22 religion Jerusalem and 141 metaphors of light 468-75 votive images 279-84 see also individual religions reliquaries 85-6,132,140, 329; 18 Rembrandt 104, 548, 627 Landscape with a Farmstead 51-2, 577; 6 Renaissance 18,101, 254, 421 allegory 377-9, 532-3 bronze sculpture 82 canvases 66 drawings 544-7 gold 95; 29 Mannerism 104 maps 426 materials 79 ‘mechanical arts’ 67 one-point perspective 445, 507, 512, 517-26, 558, 562; 292 optical naturalism 601 portrait busts 329-31; 141-3 theatre 309 and value 86 virtuosity 103 votive images 283-4, 293 representationalism 319, 573-9, 625, 630, 632-3 resemblance, real metaphor and recognition 259-60 retina 35, 602 revolutions 245-50, 300, 566 Rhea Silvia 227 rhetoric 98-100,101, 321, 527-8, 530, 599 Riegl, Alois 28, 591 right and left 377-80, 390 rituals centres 133 female figurines 277-8

places and 128-30 ritual paths 173-5, 2^i Robespierre, Maximilian Marie Isidore de 247, 248 rock paintings 434-7,439,450-1; 205-8 Rodchenko, Alexander 414 Assembling for a Demonstration 611-13; 323 Roentgen, Wilhelm 614; 324 Roman Empire alignments 183-4, *86 aniconic images 268-9 Augustus 224-8 bronze 82 cities 154,186 colossal sculptures 106 conquest of Jerusalem 145-7, 148 expansion of 224 games 433 haloes 468 images of emperors 128-30 imagines 291; 128 landscape painting 453-4; 229 maps 422 masks 304 materials 79 optical plane 489-92 places 121-2 temples 152-3 theatre 309 Romanticism 320, 572, 578-9, 586-8 Rome 71, 79,121-2,130,154,165-6,185, 583 Ara Pacis Augustae 225-8, 414; 95-7 Arch of Titus 50 Campus Martius 224-5, 226 11 Gesu 539; 307 Horologium Augusti 225 House of Augustus 268,487-9, 500, 507; 261-2 Mausoleum of Augustus 193, 225, 227, 422 Palatine Hill 269 Palazzo Barberini 539; 306 Pantheon 193-4, 224-5, 226, 422; 81 St Peter’s 148-50, 188,193, 291, 469; 52 Sant’ Ignazio 539; 308 Santa Croce in Gerusalemme 392 Solarium Augusti 193 Temple of Apollo 268 Temple of Vesta 227, 254 Villa of Livia 491; 264 Romulus 154,193, 227 rotation 363, 364, 366, 368, 369, 390, 395, 396; 160 Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas 643-51; 33«-4* Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 196, 565 rulers appropriation of the centre 132,138-9, 201-5 Chinese 232 control of weights and measures 249, 403 divine rulers 201, 204, 205 Egyptian 164,165, 205-14 elevation 159 etymology 202

Khmer 228-9 mapmaking 422,428 representation of rule 381-90 Roman 225-8 sun kings 242-5, 247,475 Russia 182,188, 294-5, 639; 134 Russian Revolution 296, 611, 619-20, 655 Rutherford, Ernest 614 Ruysdael, Jacob van, View of Haarlem from Dunes to the Northwest 543; 311

Sabatonivka 277 sacred spaces 24 sacred texts, ornament 398-9,400; 186 sacrifices 235, 280 Sailendra dynasty 177, 229 St-Denis 97-8, 238, 245, 247, 281 Sakyamuni 390; 180 Saladin 152 Salt Lake City 416 .San Agustin 267 San Lorenzo 94,156; 27 Sanchi, Great Stupa 168,173-5; sanctuaries 128,163,164,165,172-3 sand Navajo ‘sand paintings’ 125,126-7 aboriginal sand-drawings 251, 256 Saqqara 207, 210, 211-12, 215, 217; 85-9, 218 Sarah 298 Sargon II, King of Assyria 325 Sargon the Great of Akkad 220-1, 267 Sarnath 166,167; 64 Sasanian dynasty 194 satire 594, 595 Saturn 244 Saul, King of Israel 142, 223 Saussure, Ferdinand de 72 scale disrelation of 658 and format 414-15; 197 see also size scarabs 60 scene painting see skenographia Schapiro, Meyer 25 schematic intuition 624, 625 Schiller, Friedrich Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man 21-2 Naive and Sentimental Poetry 21-2 Schopenhauer, Arthur 640 science iconoclasm 563 Islamic 401 scientific writing 99 Scowen, Paul 326 sculpture Aztec 45-50 colossal works 71, 94,106, 213-14, 237, 287, 368, 412; 27, 89 facture 75 grids 412; 195 materials 82, 83-4 metric naturalism 315-16 Palaeolithic women 346-9, 358; 147-9 as personal space 43

proportions 359-60, 369 reliefs 445-50; 218-22,225-6 technology and 71-2 Terracotta Army 234-5; I03 votive images 281-2; 125 Scythians 92; 26 seals 265; 114 second nature 23, 38, 53-5,103,117,133, i95,198, 552. semiotics 26-7, 72 Seneca 491 Sennacherib, King of Assyria 443-5 sensation 317-19, 569, 570, 571, 574-5, 578, 582, 617, 618-19, 624, 625 series of objects 64-5, 66,73-4,102 Sesostris II, Pharaoh 219 Sesostris III, Pharaoh 381-2; 173 Seth 208, 214 Seven Wonders of the Ancient World 55,83, 145,193,215, 223,242,476 sexuality and division of social spaces 127-30 linga 265 as prime mover of human consciousness 571 Sforza, Battista, Duchess of Urbino 293-4; 132-3 shadows ‘cast’ shadows 467 chiaroscuro 627 modelling 478, 481-2; 252, 254-6 Shakespeare, William 592 shamans 95 ascent 178-9 centres 132 masks 179, 301, 305-6, 376; 136 Palaeolithic art 252 Shamash 199, 207, 223 Shang dynasty 232, 235, 301,475 shape, real metaphor and 260-2 Shem 422 Shi Huangdi, Emperor of China 233-5; IQ3 Shiloh 141 Shinto 119, 236, 475 Shiva 131,137, 229, 264-6, 277, 287, 646; 113-16 Shomu, Emperor of Japan 84, 236-7,475 shrines 119-22,139-40, 660; 40-1 elevation 160 Inca 119,159 Jerusalem 141 manipulation of images 275 omphalos 137 Shiva 264-6; 113,115-16 Torah shrines 147-8; 51 votive images 280-1 Siena 254 sight see vision sikharas (crowns) 170,172,188; 71 Silk Road 171,410, 471, 498, 658 Simonides of Cos 322 simulacra 318, 575 Sioux 123 Sistine Chapel, Vatican 105-6,150, 373—4, 379, 45U 469, 535, 537J 34,168, i7i, 228 Siwiki 306-7 size

abstraction from 115, 317, 340-1 bilateral symmetry and 3 64 double distance 3 3 8-9 effigies and 294 hierarchical relations 368-9, 370 of images 257, 274 magnified anthropomorphism 287-8 metaphors of 370 notionality 108 one-point perspective 523-4 portrait sculptures 294 recognition and 116 skenographia 309, 471,487-9, 493, 498,499, 513-14, 520, 522, 558; 261-2 skill facility 102-3 refinement 88 and value 86 skyscrapers 160, 564, 655-6 Smith, Adam 566 Theory of Moral Sentiments 572 Smith, David 71-2 snapshots 294, 613 social relations, places and 123 social space 23,122 architecture as 43 conditions of 3 8-9 control of access 56 format and 18 grids 415-16 iconoclasm 296 inhabiting 55 Lefebvre’s use of term 23 planarity 201-2 see also places Socialist Realism 611-13 Socrates 310, 321, 325-6 Solomon, King of Israel 142-3,145,150, 223, 649 Solutrean point 64; 8 soul 318, 319, 322, 329, 563, 570, 575 south, direction 184-5, *86 South America, gold 80-1 Soviet Union 611 space common space and time 653-4, 655 force and 564 sacred spaces 24 see co-ordinate space; metaoptical space; metric space; personal space; real space; social space; viewer space; virtual space Spain, conquistadors 80, 81,131, 254-5 Spanish Civil War 296 spatial arts 41 species (small images) 255, 318, 575, 654 Spengler, Oswald, Decline of the West 22 Sphinx 219 Spinoza, Baruch 570 spirits, shamans 178-9 Spring (Roman mosaic) 483-4, 257 ‘Staff of Oranmiyan’ 269, 270, 289; 117 Stafford, Barbara 27 stage space 445, 457-8, 481-2,499, 508, 521 stained glass 467 standing stones 266-71; n7,119 stars 558

constellations 156,157,161,185, 211, 214, 2-35 Milky Way 157,158 status see hierarchy Steinberg, Leo 25-6 stelae 207, 221, 222,223, 266-8, 271-4; 84, 93~4, tzo stereotyping 600-1 still life painting 45 Still Life with Peaches and Half-Filled Jar of Water (Herculaneum) 490-1; 265 Stoics 478, 511 stone boundary stones 199 centres 134 colossal heads 71,94; 27 columns 163,166-8,169; 63-4 Egyptian monuments 210-20 hierarchy of 78-80 linga 264-6; 113,115 ‘living floors’ 117 Maya stelae 271-4; 120 quarrying 443-5, 651-2; 217 as real metaphor 257, 258-9 refinement 88-9 shrines 119-20, i5i;4i stone circles 119,153-4, 2.71; 4°, 55 tools 61, 63, 64-5, 68, 77-8, 90,109-11, 346-8; 8-11,13,35 upright stones 266-71; 117,119 Stonehenge 153-4, IS5, 651; 55 structuralism 27, 34-5, 72 stupas 115,140,160,167,168-71,173-5, 177,178,186,187, 645-6; 65-6 style, personal 68-70, 75-7, 578, 593, 625 subatomic particles 614-16; 325 subjectivity 559, 570, 572, 578, 580, 624-5, 641 sublime 579, 582-8, 604-5, 647-8, 658 succession, images on surfaces 341-2. Suetonius 310 Suger, Abbot 97 Sui dynasty 236 Sumerians 179, 203-5, 2°6> 2.07, 281-2, 645; 82 sun 558, 563 in Aztec mythology 48-9,180 in Buddhism 168 and Chinese dwellings 124 Copernican theory 244-5, 2.48-9 in Egyptian mythology 216 in Impression, Sunrise 590 Inca and 158-9 ‘light of reason’ 247 passage graves 189,190 representation of 477-8 rising and setting 180,186 solstices and equinoxes 136,153,185,186, 190 sun kings 201, 242-5, 247 sundials 225 Sung dynasty 238 superposition 371 surfaces 336-7 facing 337-8 images on 331-6, 337, 338-42

as potential random order 434-8 virtuality 431, 43 3-4 see also planarity Surrealism 625, 626, 641 surveying 199, 201, 416 Suryavarman II 229 Susa 224 suspension, paintings 647 Svarga Brahma Temple, Alampur 71-2 swords 90, 91; 25 symmetry asymmetry 394 aulic symmetry 171, 366-8, 524 circle symmetry 364; 161 formal symmetry 3 66 human body 346, 347-8 organic symmetry 366, 368 supernatural 372 see also bilateral symmetry synagogues 147-8,153 synchronic factors 72-4 synecdoche 348, 595

Tabasco 160 tabula rasa 345,430 Tahull, Santa Maria de 496-7; 271 Tai, Mount 136 T’ai-ku I-min, Travelling among Streams and Mountains 464-5; 241 Taima Mandala 471-3; 247 Taj Mahal, Agra 188, 194 Tang Chang’an 232, 237 Tang dynasty 171, 237, 238 Taoism 466 taotie masks 376; 169 Tatlin, Vladimir 641 Corner Counter-Relief 638; 336 drawing for the Monument to the Third International 639-40, 654, 655; 337 Tauert 220 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 619 Taylorism 619-20 technical drawings 560; 313 technique 68 technology 66-72, 642, 659 communications 654 definition 68 economic conditions and 41 etymology 66-7 institutionalization 553-4 inventions 567 limitations 71 metaoptical space 40, 555 oil painting 68 stone tools 68 sublimity 583 telescopes 562, 563, 613, 616; 326 television 93, 253, 551, 553, 654-5 Tell Asmar 125 tempera 68 temperament 594, 624-5 temples difficulty of approach 163-4 elaboration 100 elevation 159-60,161,162 etymology 152-3

Hindu 172-3; 71-2 materials 79 mortuary temples 213, 218 orientation 183-4 and place 120 planning 201 proportion 408 Sumerian 203, 204-5; see also shrines Tenochtitlan 45, 48,120,131, 278; 3 tents 184,191 Teotihuacan 15,19, 56-7, 70,161-2, 351, 353-4, 361, 368, 415, 416, 437-8; 7, 61, 166, 2X0 terracotta 276, 277 Terracotta Army 234-5; I03 Tethys 422 textiles 96,109 texts, sacred 398-9, 400 texture, virtual light and 483 theatre Greek drama 307-9 illusions 3 20 masks 304-5 mind as 577 and politics 309-10 tragedy and comedy 307-8, 312, 595 see also skenographia Theodora, Empress 128-30; 45 Theophrastus, Characters 311 Thespis 308 Thetis 93, 326 three-quarters views 377 thrones 159 Thutmose IV, Pharaoh 382-3; X74 Tiahuanaco 130, 267 Tibet 175-7; 73 time 564 clocks 556-7 common space and time 653-4, 655 time keeping 180 see also calendar Timgad 56 Titian 69, 320 Tlahltecuhtli 49, 50 Tlaloc 48, 50 Tlatilco 278-9; 124 Todai-ji, Nara 84, 237 tombs as centres 132 Egyptian 207, 218, 220 mausoleums 193, 233-4 passage tombs 188-90, 218; 79 tomb furniture 115-16; 38 Treasury of Atreus 190-1; 80 tumuli 186-7,19Z“3, ZI7, 2.66 tools, stone 61, 63, 64-5, 68,77-8,90, 109-11, 346-8; 8-xx, 13, 35 Torah shrines 147-8; 51 Tower of Babel 160 town planning 23, 201 Chinese imperial cities 232-3, 235-6, 238-41; Z02,105-7 Egyptian 219-20; 92 Greek colonies 419-21; 198 traces

effigies 289 images of 255-6 rock paintings 436 sensation and 317-18 subatomic particles 614-16; 325 trade 196-7, 205-6, 405,417, 658 tragedy, Greek drama 307-8, 312, 595 translation 364, 366, 368, 369, 395, 396; 162 trees, liberty 248 triptychS'505; 282-3 trompe I’oeil 93, 94-5, 398 Troy 224,227, 253-4, 268 Tsimshian 376; x 70 TsongKhapa 175 Tuleilat Ghassul 421; 199 tumuli 186-7,192.-3, 212, 2I7, 266 twin figures 275-6; 122 Twins of Delphi 315; 23 8 Uccello, Paolo 556 Geometric-Optical Analysis of the Surfaces of a Chalice 520; 291 Ulldecona 205 unconscious mind 624-5, 641 understanding 569, 570-1 United States of America 200, 655-6 upright stones 266-71; 2x7,119 uprightness 371 Ur 78, 205, 222, 223 Urban VIII, Pope 539 Urnammu of Ur 222, 267; 94 ushabtis 274 Vairocana 236-7, 471,475 Vajrayana Buddhism 175-7 value facture and 84-6 materials 77, 78-82, 84-6 money 405 and ornament 98, 395 refinement and 86, 87-8, 89, 95 vanishing point 514, 535, 542, 581 Vasari, Giorgio 16, 283 Lives of the Artists 16 vaults, domes 188-92,193-4; 79~^T Venice mirror industry 243-4 paintings 68, 69-70,104-5 Venus 100,185, 227, 228, 244, 408, 531 Venus of Laussel 112-13, 349; 37 ‘Venuses’ 274, 278, 346-7; 247 Veracruz 160-1; 60 Verona, San Zeno 524 Veronica, St 291, 331; 129 Verrocchio, Andrea del 283, 293 Versailles 241-6, 248, 552; 108-9 verticality ascent 178-80 centres 166-78 vertical planes 355,363 Vesalius 571 Vespucci, Amerigo 426 video art 652 viewer photographs 608, 610 ‘viewing’ works of art 56

viewer space 331, 440,445, 482 framing and detail in Chinese painting 458-66; 235 infinity 587 metaopticality 562 and perspective 521 quadratura 543 viewpoint see point of view villages, Fang 124 Virgil 530 The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints Theodore and George 494; 268 Virgin Mary see Mary, Virgin Virgin of Guadalupe 254 Virgin of Queen Jeanne d’Evreux 85-6; 19 The Virgin of Vladimir 294-5; 234 virtual co-ordinate plane 445-8, 454-5; 220-3 virtual images, recognition 339-41 virtual light 469-71, 477-8 virtual space 25-7, 431-548 Alhazen’s theory of vision 508-11 classical skenographia 487-9 completed forms 354 composition, rhetoric and allegory 527-34 definition 43-4 format 44-5, 53 framing 43 8-9 groundlines and surfaces 439-45 light as a theme 467-77 modelling and chiaroscuro 544-8 modelling, depicted shadows and reflection 477-84 optical cube 497-503 optical plane 454-8, 486-7, 489-97 overlapping, foreshortening, oblique lines, diminution 450-4 painting as 43-4 perspective 511-27, 544-8 quadratura 534-44 relation to real space 53 relief space 448-50 skene, hierarchy and theatre 503-8 surfaces 433-8 viewer space 458-66 virtual co-ordinate plane 445-8 virtuosity 103-6 Vishnu 287-8; 127 vision Descartes on 576-7 extension of 613-16 inner vision 3 5 and metaopticality 562 and one-point perspective 544 photography and 603 retina 35, 602 surpassing limits of 562 theories of 317-19, 508-12, 558, 573-5; 284-6 votive images 282 see also field of vision; pictorial imagination visual angle 455-7,478 Alhazen’s theory of vision 509 Brunelleschi’s perspective demonstration 5i4,557 foreshortening 486-7; 259 metaopticality 558-9

and perspective 518, 527, 581; 296 quadratura 542; 310 visual arts 41-3, 56 visual pyramid 333, 455-7, 581, 603 Vitalis, St 128 Vitruvius 100, 183-4, 225, 308-9, 320, 405, 419-20,428, 520 Ten Books of Architecture 407-8,409-10, 487-8,489, 513-14, 516 Volta, Alessandro 613 votive images 253, 254, 275,177-8, 279-84, 312-13; 125 Walbiri people 256 Waldseemiiller, Martin, World Map 426, 428; 202 walled cities 154 Wangcheng 422 Warburg, Aby 659 Warhol, Andy, Brillo Box 642 Watay 292 Watts, James 567 wax, bronze casting 81, 82 weapons 81, 346 weaving 396, 412 Weber, Max 23 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 22 weights see measure Wendi, Emperor of China 236 west, direction 184-5, 186 West Africa 302-4, 359, 385-8 Westernization, resistance to 250 Westminster Abbey, London 281 Weyden, Rogier van der 69 Wheel of the Law 167,168, 410 Willendorf 346; 147 Wilson, C.T.R. 614; 325 wind-roses, portolan maps 428 Wolfflin, Heinrich 591 Principles of Art History 11-12, 32, 547 women Palaeolithic figures 346-9, 358; 147-9 Tlatilco figurines 278-9; 124 woodblock prints 466; 244 words, in Cubist painting and collage 637 workers, Taylorism 619-20 World Trade Center, New York City 24,469, 655-6 World War II 649, 655 Wright, Holly, Untitled 332; 144 writing 343 calligraphy 398-9, 400; 186 ‘characters’ 311 cuneiform 205 hieroglyphs 207 invention of 201, 203 Wu Wei, The Pleasures of the Fishing Village 4545 230

X-rays 614; 324 Xi’an 233, 235, 236 Xianyang 233, 235 Yahweh 141-2,143,144,145, 146, 147, 223, 297, 373

Yamasaki, Minori 655 yamato-e 475 yin and yang 124,125 yoni264, 265 Yoruba 130, 275-6, 302-4; 227-28, 235, 256-7 Yuan dynasty 238

Zaire 137-9; 226 Zeus 83-4,137,145, 224, 227, 253, 268, 315.41°, 442-, 535 Zeuxis 309, 311,312 Zhou dynasty 232, 233, 234 Zhu Youtang, Emperor of China 388-90; 279 ziggurats 120,136,160,179, 204, 213, 222; 77 zodiac 185, 243, 658 Zola, Smile 571 Zoroastrianism 468 Zoser, King of Egypt 163, 210, 211-14, 217, 218,313585-9

Illustration credits Academy of Sciences, Archaeological Museum, Brno: 149 AlinariZAR,New York: 50, 95, 96, 97,133, 141,142,143,164,168,171,183,184, 187,188,191, 255, 265, 266, 277, 278, 279, 281, 282, 283, 291, 294, 293, 298, 299,300, 303,304, 307,308 American Institute of Indian Studies: 64, 66, 67, 72,113,113, 116,127,191 American Museum of Natural History, New York: 137 Artists Rights Society, New York/VISCOPY, Sydney: 343 Athlone Press, London: 59 Niccold Orsi Battaglini, Florence: 293 Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich: 321 Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: 309, 313, 316 Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan: 313 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome: 181 Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris: 203 Blackwell’s: 163 Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers: 42 After H. Breuil, Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art, Hacker Art Books, New York, 1979, p. 166, fig. 130:78 British Museum, London: 46,107,121,131, 140,168,176, 214, 217, 249, 312 British Library: 63, 184 British School at Athens: 212 Byzantine Photograph and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D. C: 269 Center for Land Use Interpretation: 342 D. V. Clarke: 33 Cleveland Museum of Art: 24,193 Cushing Whitney Medical Library, Yale University: 200. Daspet, Villeneuve-les-Avignon: 182 Detroit Institute of Arts: 126,167 Deutsches archaologisches Institut, Rome: 231, 261, 274 Dover Publications: 170 Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC: 13 Editorial Jaca, Milan: 210 Electa Milan: 81 Barbara Fash: 120 Fogg Art Museum, Harvard: 6 Foto Marburg/AR, New York: 29, 33,42, 109, 311 Fowler Museum of Cultural History, UCLA: 17S Peter Furst: 136 Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin: 28 J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: 332

Gibson Design Associates, Charlottesville, Va: 130,131,132,139,160,161,162,193, 194,196,197, 220, 221,222, 224, 223, 228, 232, 234, 233, 232, 233, 234, 236, 239, 260, 261, 267, 273, 284, 283, 286, 289, 290, 292, 293, 310,314. Giraudon/AR, New York: 93,108,147,163, 270 After G. Groslier, Angkor, Paris, 1924: 99 (p. -97, fig. 64), too (p. 47, fig. 27) The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, photograph Robert E. Mates: 2 Hirmer Fotoarchiv: 12, 77, 83, 87, 88, 89, 90, 130,138,173, 218 Honolulu Academy of Arts: 244 John C. Huntington, Compliments of the Huntington Archive, Ohio State University: 68, 69, 73, 76 Institute Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Mexico City: 4,3, 14,124,166 International Thompson Publishing Services: 56 Kazuno City Board of Education: 40 Barbara and Justin Kerr: 216 Kluge-Ruhe Collection of Australian Aboriginal Art, Charlottesville, Va: m Laboratoire Anthropologie-Archeometrie, Universite de Rennes; National Museums and Galleries of Wales: 21 After M. D. Leakey, Olduvai Gorge, Volume 3. Excavations in Beds I and II, 1960-1963, Cambridge, 1971, p. 27, no. 2.: 10 Erich Lessing/AR, New York: 13,18, 34 Library of Congress, Washington DC: 202 Ralph Lieberman: 287 Maritime Museum, Rotterdam: 204 Merriam-Webster Inc.: 134 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 327 G. Michel: 68 Moravian Museum, Brno: 121 Mount Holyoke College Museum of Art, South Hadley, Mass.: 320 Musee de 1’Homme, Paris: 37 Museo de Arte de Cataluna, Barcelona: 271 Museo Civico, Brescia: 275 Museum of Art, Philadelphia: 333 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: 72 Museum of Modern Art, New York: 322,323 Museum of Natural History, New York: 8,11 National Aeronautics and Space Administration: 326 National Archaeological Museum, Athens: 213 National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria: 13, 117,118,119 National Gallery, London: 143,300 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC: 98, 236,330 National Gallery, Berlin: 318 National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh:i72 National Library of Medicine, Washington, DC: 324

National Museum, Belgrade: 112 National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria: 136,13' National Museum, Tokyo: 133 National Palace Museinn, Taipei: 179 Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City 25,176, 239, 240, 241, 243, 247 Newberry Library, Chicago: 3 Niedersachsisches Landesmuseum, Hannov

Niigata Prefectural Museum of History: 32 After Olmec Art of Ancient Mexico, Nation Gallery of Art, Washington, 1996, p. 74: Oriental Institute of the University of Chica 125,223 Oxford University Press: 42, 79 After Samuel M. Paley, King of the World. Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria 883-839 BC, Brooklyn, 1976, p. 83:173 After W. M. Flinders Petrie, Illahun, Kahut and Gurob, London, 1891: 92 Pierpont Morgan Library, New York: 331 Princeton University Press: 288 Pontifical Biblical Institute, Jerusalem: 199 Edward Ranney: 19,41,110 Rene Millon: 61 Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden: 2 RMN/AR, New York: 19,30,31, 36,180, 226, 293,300,334 Rothko Chapel: 339, 340, 341 Scala/AR, New York: 33,43, 33,128,134, 139,147, 261, 271, 303,306,319 Seattle Art Museum: 1 Sellier and de Gruyter, Berlin: 82 Sinai Archive, University of Michigan: 268 Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC: 1 19,37,184,243, 230,329 Snark/AR, New York: 132 Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici, Bologna: 280 South American Pictures: 7, 27, 37, 38 Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt: 129 Nancy Steinhardt: 102,104,103,106 Taylor & Francis Company: 198 Textile Museum, Washington, DC: 188 Teylersmuseum, Haarlem: 227 Barbara Tsakirgis and Malcomb Bell, IH: 273 University Art Gallery, UC, Berkeley: 230 University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa Ci 122 University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology: 9, 94 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond,1 134,228,237 Visual Resources Collection, University of Michigan: 74,101 Washington University Gallery of Art, St Louis: 333 Worcester Art Museum: 3 6 Holly Wright: 144 Xi’an Diamond Network Limited: 103 Yale University Art Gallery: 31,32, 64

David Summers is the William R. Kenan Jr Professor of the History of Art at the University of Virginia. He is the author of two major studies, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (1981) and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (1987). Since 1987 his chief scholarly preoccupation has been the project that has culminated in this book.

In this bold, brilliant, original and important book, David Summers argues that current formalist, contextual and post-structural approaches to art cannot provide the basis for a truly global and intercultural art history. He believes that assumptions right at the heart of Western thinking about art must therefore be re-examined, and the new framework he offers is an attempt to resolve some of the problems that arise from doing so. At the core of the argument is a proposal to replace the modem Western notion of the ‘visual arts’ with that of the ‘spatial arts’, comprising two fundamental categories: ‘real space’ and ‘virtual space’. Real space is the space we share with other people and things, and the fundamental arts of real space are sculpture, the art of personal space, and architecture, the art of social space. Virtual space, space represented in two dimensions, as in paintings, drawings and prints, always entails a format in real space, thus making real space the primary category.

Adopting a wide definition of art that in principle embraces anything that is made, and underpinning his arguments with detailed examination of artifacts and architecture from all over the world, the author develops his thesis in a series of chapters that broadly trace the progress of human skill in many different tra­ ditions from the simple facture of hominid tools to the sophisticated universal three-dimensional grid of modern technology, which he describes as ‘metaoptical’ space. In wide-ranging and revealing discussions of facture, places, centres, twoand three-dimensional and planar images, virtuality and perspective, and the essentially centreless world of Western modernism, he creates a conceptual framework that, by always relating art to use, enables us to treat all traditions on an equal footing. At the same time this framework can help to accommo­ date and understand opposition and conflict both within and between cultures. In this wider framework, formalism and other theories of art can be seen and evaluated within the Western tradition whence they originated, without universal validity being claimed for them. Within this broad plan there is great richness of detail and vividness of description, based on a constant engagement with actual works of art, and the author’s ana­ lysis of the concrete metaphors that lie behind our critical vocabulary is revealing and thought-provoking. New terms are carefully defined and explained in such a way that any reader can appreciate why such terminology is necessary and useful. The author insists that all art is made to fit human uses, and can never be separated from the primary spatial conditions of those uses. With its universal scope and its sympathetic understanding of the innumerable forms art takes, this book will stimulate people to think in new and fruitful ways about the human purposes of art, and also to think more deeply and critically about the relations between art, political order and technology.

PHAIDON