“Sostegno e adornamento.” On the Social Symbolism of the Architectural Orders

Abstract

This text originated in a paper given at the thirteenth German art historians’ conference in 1972 and was published the same year in Kunstchronik. At this point the radical students of the 1960s were writing up their doctoral dissertations, gaining academic positions, and completely changing the practice of art history in Germany. A field that had previously focused on issues internal to the artwork itself—such as aesthetic value, connoisseurship, and provenance—was redefined almost as a social science, with visual information employed to decode social hierarchies and relations. This is the strategy employed by Christof Thoenes in his study of the combined arch and column, in which formal analysis is combined with Marxist critique. The evolution of this conjoined form during the Italian Renaissance in the work of architects like Brunelleschi, Alberti, and Bramante is interpreted as a response to historical necessity and to the social imperatives of the day. Thus the Gothic pier, composed of several elements bound together to make one support, is seen as a feudal structure with the subsidiary components obligated to the whole. In contrast, the freestanding Renaissance column stands for individual freedom and autonomy.