Basile Baudez - Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe

Inessential Colors

Inessential Colors

ARCHITECTURE ON PAPER IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Basile Baudez

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2021 by Princeton University Press

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Jacket illustration: Pierre-Adrien Pris, section of the Chteau of Colmoulins, ca. 1782. Black ink and colored washes on paper, 25.8 36.2 cm. Bibliothque Municipale, Besanon, Collection Pierre-Adrien Pris, vol. 484, no. 65. Bibliothque Municipale de Besanon.

Illustration on

Frontispiece (): Eustache Le Sueur, Saint Bruno Examining a Drawing of the Baths of Diocletian, Site of the Future Charterhouse of Rome, 16451648. Oil on canvas, 162 x 114 cm. Muse du Louvre, Paris. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Baudez, Basile, 1974- author.

Title: Inessential colors : architecture on paper in early modern Europe / Basile Baudez.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identi fi ers: LCCN 2020049897 | ISBN 9780691213569 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Color in art. | Architectural drawingEuropeHistory.

Classi fi cation: LCC NA2705 .B38 2021 | DDC 720.28/4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049897

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN (e-book) 9780691233154

Version 1.0

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

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Inessential Colors

A large drawing links an angelic fi gure draped in brilliant blue allantica and Saint Bruno (frontispiece).)? Why show a variety of colors when they are not essential to architectural drawings? This study investigates the reasons for and ways in which color was used, exceptionally, in the representation of architecture. An examination of these two paintings suggests paths toward an understanding of the roles assigned to pigments. The reds of Castel SantAngelos roof tiles and of the roses in Tessiers painting recreate the colors of objects that we perceive visually: they were meant to imitate nature. The gray washes of the baths vaults, the pink color in the plan, and the colored outlines of the continents on the globe bear no relation to visible reality: they act as signs, which are legible thanks to a convention understood by artist and spectator. Finally, the pink and blue of the drawing of the forti fi cations echo the colors of the flowers and of the book leaning against the wall: the painter employed these colors to balance his composition; to produce harmony and beauty in order to create an affective relationship between the spectator and his painting. Imitation, convention, affect: these three ways of using color constitute the reasons for and modalities of the introduction of color into the monochrome world of architectural representation.

Louis Tessier, Arts and Sciences. Oil on canvas, 84 116.5 cm. Galerie Michel Descours, Paris.

Although references to monochromy and the absence of color correspond to no scienti fi c reality, the reader understands them, just as the early modern spectator clearly distinguished between a drawing in gray or brown grisaille and a sheet washed in blue, green, red, or yellow. Black, which today we consider a color, was not thought of as such from the period marking the beginning of this study until the late eighteenth century, with the emergence of Romanticism. Yet it seems more interesting to imagine that architectural drawing evolved not only in tandem with the development of architectural styles, but also autonomously, with its own history and in continual dialogue with other, related arts and disciplines.

Titian, Portrait of Giulio Romano, ca. 1536. Oil on canvas, 101 86 cm. Museo Civico di Palazzo Te, Mantua.

The drawings and engravings discussed in this book are primarily concerned with the fi guration of an architectural object that was built, was intended to be built, or could have been built. Following the architect and theorist Jean-Paul Jungmann, I retain a distinction between representational images intended as documentationvehicles of informationproduced, among others, by architects, and pictorial images, made expressly to be read and perceived in an aesthetic mode, such as landscape drawings that might include buildings, fantasias and capricci (even when drawn by architects) or paintings of vedute, vistas, landscapes, ftes, and architecture executed by artists.

Giovanni Niccol Servandoni (attrib.), Self Portrait, ca. 1730. Oil on canvas, 130 97 cm. Muse National des Chteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.

In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle countered the earlier Platonic bias against the imitation of nature, mimesis, by arguing for its pleasures, while in his Poetics he laid the foundation for a theoretical distinction between drawing and color. In that respect, architectural drawings are unlike those of painters; they do integrate color as a sign, as a convention, and not simply as a means of imitation or affect.

Markus Friedrich Kleinert, Portrait of Balthasar Neumann, 1727. Oil on canvas, 95 76 cm. Mainfrnkisches Museum, Wrzburg.

The representation of architecture shuttles between two poles, the imitation of visible nature and the use of conventions that can convey the information necessary for the object to be understood in mathematical terms. We should recall, however, that even in painting the doctrine of imitationmimesis, as formulated by Aristotle, which shaped all Western thought on the nature of artistic activityis open to question. When the art historian Ernst Gombrich addressed the long mimetic tradition, he proposed a symbolic theory of pictures, according to which the artist does not hold up a mirror to nature, but tries out pictorial arrangements intended to make illusions of reality more effective. It aids in classifying, distinguishing, associating, contrasting, and hierarchizing. We will see that, as regards architecture on paper, this axiom was certainly true for part of its history, when French military engineers were codifying the conventional usage of color, but this interpretation is less convincing with regard to architects in the second half of the eighteenth century, when colors capacity for affect acquired a new importance. Thus, the reasons for employing color shuttled between taxonomy and aesthetics, depending on whether architects were adopting the graphic language of engineers or that of painters; but color would never fully replace monochrome drawing in its essential function of transmitting measurable information.