Home to the Shakespearean play Romeo and Juliet, Verona was but a short day trip away for us from Venice. The first structure that we analyzed was its Amphitheater, which bears a striking resemblance to the Colosseum in Rome, but without the layering of Classical orders. It is unclear how tall the original structure was, as only 2 of its stories survive to the present day. Although we are still on the Italian peninsula, it still amazes me how far the culture of Rome spread and the fact that they would build such massive structures the same everywhere they went. It certainly gave the Roman Empire a sense of continuity, as they would come and lay down a town in exactly the same way everywhere they went (talk about superstition). The structure is built mainly out of large tufa blocks, which have been shown plenty of times around the ancient Roman world to be of high and lasting quality.
The 1st century BCE Roman Theater, which is still in use today for concerts, was the next Roman building on the agenda. It was constructed facing the river, which adds to the sense of drama when it was filled to capacity with an audience. What survives today of it is a good amount of the seating, some of which was covered up in the 10th century when churches and houses were built on top of it at the back of the theater. What was astonishing to me was that it was only discovered in the 19th century after systematic excavations. It must have been covered quite a bit for it to be excavated that far down: it rises some 107 meters from the bank of the river!
The building that I personally enjoyed the most visiting on this day was Castelvecchio. Acting aesthetically like a mid-14th century fortified residence, but restored from 1959-1973 by Carlo Scarpa, Castelvecchio provides a really interesting case study into retrofitting museums, what it means to build a new museum vs. renovating an older structure, and how the experience of a museum is changed through the architect’s positioning of art and sequence of spaces. Scarpa, who is a local architect from Vicenza and was never officially licensed, simply had a different way of approaching museum design when he attacked this project. John Peponis wrote an essay analyzing the sequence of rooms and spatial procession within the museum. It was his contention that the arrangement of paintings didn’t just give the viewer an opportunity to learn about local artwork of the Renaissance. Instead, the arrangement allowed you to be a part of the room and have a co-presence with the artwork. As I would come to find out some of the paintings were freestanding in the middle of the room, giving a new depth and perception to the entire experience of walking through a museum, instead of having them all flush up against a wall.
We were also asked to consider whether seeing is culturally constructed. This is a matter for everyone to consider within the confines of his society. It’s quite clear that we are all raised within a certain construct of our civilization, whether it be in the Modern world, Renaissance world, or Prehistoric world. And clearly our perception of the world is dictated both by our subjective experience of it, and the forces of society that seek to apply their standards of the world on you; the timeless nature vs. nurture debate. I think that seeing the world is definitely more culturally constructed than it is personally constructed. You can be as daring as you want in terms of asking questions about the society you’re raised in, but if you never leave the bubble you’re born into, society will grab ahold of you and steer you in the direction they want, not what you want for yourself. I would say that I try as much as I can to see different perspectives of the world through the eyes of different cultures, but most of the time I always come back to what I know. When I return home from this trip I’ll be surrounded by my family in Norton, Massachusetts, a small suburban town south of Boston that has your typical New England feel to it. I’m used to this feeling, I like this feeling. However, if I’m unable to leave and continually view the world from the same location, I’ll be reinforced with those feelings and will have a rather myopic view of the world. I have actively chosen to try and experience different cultures around the world. At least from my perspective, I try not to let just New England values and ideals influence my way of life. This may sound nearly impossible, but it would benefit society greatly, I think, for everyone to try and experience as many different cultures as we can in order to try and see things from different perspectives. As it pertains to this particular project, I believe we all do see the artwork through our own cultural values and personal preferences. An Atheist may see a painting of a Pope or Priest as just another example of a fundamentalist ruler imposing his beliefs on a people, whereas someone of faith may see him as doing the Lord’s work and spreading the gospel as he is simply commanded to by the Bible.
The way we see the actual building may be culturally constructed as well. Someone from the 18th century may have found the use of steel supports in this structure blasphemous. There was a widely held belief, popularized by John Ruskin, that steel should in no way act as a supporting member in a building or bear any weight of the structure whatsoever. To look back on these comments centuries later is somewhat laughable; steel is one of the most efficient ways of structurally supporting a building. Could you even imagine today building the Empire State Building out of stone? Preposterous! It couldn’t be done. While the emphasis in the Romantic era was on hand-crafted techniques and truth in materials, a retrofitting of this type of structure that requires it to last for at least another century would be nearly impossible without steel supporting members. My point here is that the culture surrounding any era which has different tastes and theories than another era supports and reinforces certain practices and principles, and it is only when we take a broad-minded approach do we come to solutions that will be appealing to multiple generations.
An interesting quote from the presentation today by Nelson Goodman, “a museum is a tool for the cure and prevention of blindness…we should be interpreters rather than consumers”. The artwork contained within the museum and all art for that matter should raise questions and make you try to interpret your world just a bit differently than what you’re used to. Art should challenge your preconceived notions of the world, and make you active in the process; after all, it’s you who the art is aimed at, and therefore you should be the one who is both affected by it and perhaps changed by it.
No comments:
Post a Comment