Remarks on architecture: the Vitruvian tradition in Enlightenment Poland

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Architectural theory in Eastern Europe during the EnlightenmentReview of:Ignacy Potocki, Remarks on Architecture. The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland, Carolyn C. Guile ed. and transl., University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, 155 p.Basile BaudezEarly modern Polish architectural thought is largely absent from standard surveys of Western art and architecture. If Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski has recently studied the history of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth1 and if Andrezj Rottermund's work on neo-classicism has been partly translated2, no general study of eighteenth-century East European or Polish architecture exists in English apart from Stefan Muthesius' brief account in Art, architecture and Design in Poland, 966-1990 (Konigstein im Taunus: K. R. Langewiesche Nachfolger H. Koster Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1994). Due to a language barrier, limited or restricted access to primary and secondary sources, the situation of East-European studies began to change only in the 1990s and with time, historiography has shifted its concern from the strict research of a East-West borderland as it was defined by Oscar Halecki in 1980 in Borderlands of western civilization: a history of East Central Europe, to the study of multidirectional cultural transfers3. The historic notion of connected centres played an important role in understanding these phenomena, a more useful tool to think the age of Enlightenment than considering the cultural geography of Central Europe only in terms of centres and peripheries4. To understand Enlightenment art and architecture, analysing circulations and transfers proved to be more efficient than focusing on distinct regional boundaries. The conference organised in Warsaw in November 2013 by Letizia Tedeschi, Andrzej Rottermund and Sergej Androsov, 'Recepcja i odmiany antyku w Polsce i Rosji w okresie neoklasycyzmu' (Transmission of the Antique in Russia and Poland during the neoclassical era) was a sign of the renewal of East-European studies of architecture in particular. Carolyn C. Guile's edition and translation of Ignacy Potocki's manuscript Remarks on Architecture provides an exceptional case study of what rigorous and inventive scholarship can bring to our knowledge not only of the strategies at work in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, but also of the Enlightenment European architectural theory more generally. Guile, associate professor of art and art history at Colgate University, is a specialist of the early-modern architecture of Central Europe and her field of expertise focuses on the art and architecture of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Among other papers, she has contributed an essay on 'Winckelmann in Poland: An Eighteenth-Century Response to the History of the Art of Antiquity' in the December 2013 issue of the Journal of Art Historiography. The book here under review that she published with the Pennsylvania State University Press in 2015 provides the reader not only with the edition of an unpublished eighteenth-century manuscript treatise held in the Central Archive of Early Records in Warsaw (Archiwum Glowne Akt Dawnych), but also with a very clear translation and an illuminating introduction (1-56) which represents the first study available for English readers of the early modern architectural treatise in the East European borderlands and early modern Polish-language architectural theory5. A bibliography, which strangely mixes secondary and archival sources, and a very useful index of places, locations and topics complete this scholarly work, which takes an important place in the history of architectural theory of the Enlightenment.Architectural treatises studies, a historiographical genreSince the end of the 1980s literature on the history of architectural treatise focused mainly on the Renaissance and Baroque, with major contributions including Jean Guillaume's edited multilingual volume, Les traites d'architecture de la Renaissance published by Picart in 1988, Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks edited volume, Paper palaces: the rise of the Renaissance architectural treatise at Yale University Press in 1998 and Alina Payne's The Architectural treatise of the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture published in 2011 at Cambridge University Press. …