Review: Da Gerusalemme a Pechino da Roma a Vienna: Sul Saggio di architettura storica di J. B. Fischer von Erlach, by Marco Folin and Monica Preti

Abstract

Marco Folin and Monica Preti's Da Gerusalemme a Pechino da Roma a Vienna: Sul “Saggio di architettura storica” di J. B. Fischer von Erlach is a book about a book: the Entwurff einer historischen Architectur. Precursor of the global turn in architectural history, the Entwurff was unprecedented when it was first published in 1721 by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656–1723), architect of the imperial Habsburg court. It was designed as an oblong folio, divided into five books. The first illustrates “Ancient Jewish, Egyptian, Syrian, Persian and Grecian” structures; the second, ancient Roman buildings; the third, edifices “of the Arabians and Turks” as well as modern architecture “of the Persians, Siamese, Chinese, and Japonese”; the fourth, buildings designed by Fischer himself; and the fifth, ancient and modern urns and vases. Accompanied by a preface and short explanatory texts by numismatist Carl Gustav Heraeus (ca. 1671–1725), Fischer's “visually compelling images of monumental complexes, presented in bird's-eye perspective”—to quote John Pinto—“both individually and collectively stimulate the creative as well as the historical imagination.”1Over the years, scholars have interpreted Fischer's book in different ways. Hans Sedlmayr, for example, identified it as “the first monumental history of art in images”; George Kunoth described it as “the first comparative world history of architecture”; and Joseph Rykwert considered it both “the first general history of architecture” and “a new kind of architectural treatise.”2 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann claimed that the Entwurff presented “the architecture of succeeding world empires, which had developed from the Near East, through the Greeks and Romans, to the Holy Roman Empire and Vienna,” while Hanno-Walter Kruft argued that it was an “‘outline‘ … a collection of examples of ‘world architecture,’ not … a coherent history of development.”3 More recently, Gundula Rakowitz described the Entwurff as a “project,” a mental assemblage of monuments aimed at the creation of a new architecture.4 Even the earliest translations revealed how variously the work has been understood: the first French translation of Fischer's work was called Essai d'une architecture historique (1721), while the first English translation was called A Plan of Civil and Historical Architecture (1730).Folin and Preti's volume represents the latest word on the subject. Published on the occasion of two exhibitions in Bologna, the first at the Biblioteca dell'Archiginnasio (29 November 2018–3 March 2019), the second at the Accademia delle Belle Arti (29 November 2018–5 January 2019), the monograph's title offers a new translation, and hence interpretation, of Fischer's work: Saggio di architettura storica. According to the introduction, Entwurff should be translated as neither plan nor project, but rather as saggio or rassegna (a collection of examples), while historischen Architectur should be understood as an allusion to the slippery association between architecture and history in its most generic sense, thus suggesting something like “the architecture of all times,” or “the architecture of past and present.”Folin and Preti's discussion of the title discloses their broader methodological approach. Unlike Rakowitz, they focus not on Fischer the architect, but rather on Fischer as the maker of prints, and analyze the Entwurff in terms of an evolving editorial process rather than as a coherent architectural project in the form of a book. At the same time, they build their argument around the interpretation of minute, interwoven details, scrutinizing Fischer's work without mythologizing it or treating the long list of Fischer scholars with undue reverence.Da Gerusalemme a Pechino da Roma a Vienna is introduced by a short but dense preface by Carlo Ginzburg reflecting upon Fischer's book as a mirror of European expansionism. A series of appendixes includes an outline of Fischer's biography as well as a catalogue of all of the Entwurff's eighteenth-century versions and another of the engravings and their preparatory drawings for the manuscript and proof exemplar of 1712, which Fischer presented to the young monarch Charles VI; for the 1720 copy that Heraeus sent to Tessin in Stockholm; and for the 1721 edition, which was the first that was publicly available. The volume is richly illustrated, reproducing the plates from the 1725 Leipzig edition as well as additional images to support the authors' analysis of Fischer's visual sources.Part I consists of two chapters that summarize the crucial points of Fischer's career in Rome and Vienna. These also provide the context for the sixteen-year history of the making of the Entwurff, begun around 1705. Focusing on the world of printmaking, Folin and Preti also connect the Entwurff to the Anfang, a volume on Viennese architecture published in 1719 by Fischer's son. This analysis raises a number of broader issues, including the migration of individual prints from one work to another, the migration of architecture from paper to stone and back, the intertwining of architectural practice with editorial enterprises, and authorship concerns. However, Folin and Preti shed no new light on the many nebulous aspects of Fischer's life, particularly those related to his formative years and his contacts in Rome and in Naples (especially Philipp Schor and Francesco Antonio Picchiatti), or in Venice (including the brothers Giovanni and Pier Antonio Filippini), where he may have traveled twice. Neither do they resolve the uncertainty around Fischer's travel to London or whether he had a direct encounter with the circle of Christopher Wren. Instead, their primary aim is to investigate Fischer's selections, his sources, and his possible efforts to articulate a coherent historical vision.The answers to these queries unfold in a somewhat scattered manner throughout the following ten chapters of part II that focus upon each of the Entwurff's plates. Although Folin and Preti rely upon previous scholarship, they deserve credit for assembling extensive information on the subject in different languages and for offering new readings of many details of the Entwurff's creation. As they demonstrate, the author selected his models based on both pragmatic criteria and subjective preferences. Fischer adopted a range of different approaches: he might redraw works from other authors, he might rely on his imagination by compiling fragmentary sources into a new unicum, or he might opt to use lesser-known subjects or previously unpublished drawings. In some instances, as in book IV, he simply reused his own drawings. The Entwurff thus emerges as a nonsystematic collection of material with no agenda to construct a historical discourse, but also one that was sparked by “heterogeneous stimuli” rather than by the influence of particular works or figures, such as Carlo Fontana.5 According to Folin and Preti, Fischer's “historical architecture,” more than celebrating the past, his own designs, or his imperial patrons, celebrates the present.What instead results from Fischer's myriad uses of antiquarian sources is what Preti and Folin refer to as the Entwurff's “hybrid character,” oscillating between scholarship and visual pleasure. A fuller understanding of this ambiguous aspect, however, would have necessitated a deeper investigation of the larger issue of artists' contributions to the making of knowledge. In the Republic of Letters, where the boundaries between learned ways of making art and artistic ways of making learning were porous, philological and imaginative approaches might coexist. Suspended between accuracy, imagination, and more practical aims (including Fischer's professional aspirations as architect and as printmaker), the Entwurff is, above all, a mirror of the complicated life and times of its creator.In the early eighteenth century Europeans confronted a world with ever-expanding horizons. Diverse sources, ranging from sacred texts to fossils, pushed the study of origins ever further back in time. At the same time, travel accounts from distant countries poured into European libraries: according to the English naturalist John Woodward, it was impossible to understand the world without accounts obtained from its remotest parts. In Rome, Carlo Fontana (1630–1714), who trained the international generation of architects to which Fischer himself belonged, originally wanted to compare the Vatican Basilica with exempla such as the Temple of Samos, the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, the Temple of Diana in Ephesus, and the Temple of Serapis in Alexandria.6 In Fontana's view, the architect, in addition to being intendente and pratico, or well trained in architectural theory and building practice, also had to be a “historiographer.”7 In London, Christopher Wren (1632–1723) argued that the orders were “not only Roman and Greek, but Phoenician, Hebrew, and Assyrian,” while his assistant Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736) became “perfectly skill'd in the History of Architecture … in every Part of the World.”8 As scholars and architects engaged in a constant, multidirectional exchange of information, a single past branched out and multiplied. By the same token, Fischer's Entwurff attests to the challenging task of defining an authoritative, modern imperial architecture.Folin and Preti's close examination of Fischer's plates encourages us to rethink the Entwurff, while at the same time reminding us of the ongoing need for new research into the world of eighteenth-century architecture.