In this episode of Houghton75 we speak with Joseph Connors, Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, about the historical practice of architectural sketching and how he incorporates it into his classes. We start the conversation with the sketchbooks from the late 17th century of a young Baroque architect, Gilles-Marie Oppenord, not much older than Professor Connors’ students.
This is our final faculty interview episode. Watch for more episodes soon, including a peek into the Harvard Review, the major American literary journal published by Houghton, and a salon series that celebrates their 50th issue.
Music
La Luna
Sprezzatura: 17th century Italian Virtuosos Music
(Dorian #93200)
Podcast Transcript and Music Notes
[Title sequence background music: Fireworks, Igor Stravinsky, performed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra]
Alex Csiszar: Houghton is just this amazing place.
Deidre Lynch: It’s fascinating.
Stephen Greenblatt: It’s yours for the asking, and that is incredible!
Stephanie Sandler: Plus it’s cool.
James Capobianco (JC): Welcome to Houghton75. I’m James Capobianco.
Hannah Ferello (HF): And I’m Hannah Ferello.
[end music]
JC: Houghton Library opened its doors at Harvard in 1942. Throughout 2017, we’re celebrating the library’s world-class collections, and support of research and teaching over the last 75 years.
HF: This podcast is only one of the ways to participate in our year-long program of events that promises a unique glimpse of some of Houghton’s most treasured holdings and the way they inspire scholars and students. Visit houghton75.org for more information.
[background music: Canzon prima a 3, by Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde. Performed by La Luna. Track 1 on their CD Sprezzatura: Virtuoso Music of 17th-Century Italy. Dorian Recordings, catalog number DOR-93200.]
JC: Sketching is an important practice in many disciplines, and a relaxing hobby for many of its practitioners. Much like today, Baroque artists and architects kept their drawings in sketchbooks. Some of these sketchbooks eventually made their way to Houghton Library, where they have been studied and examined by scholars for clues about life in a different place and time.
HF: We spoke with Joseph Connors, Professor of the History of Art and Architecture here at Harvard, about the historical practice of architectural sketching and how he incorporates it into his classes. We started with the sketchbooks of a young Baroque architect, not much older than Professor Connors’ students.
[end music]
Joseph Connors (JoCo): So this is an amazing thing, and it’s the phenomenon of a young Frenchman, Gilles-Marie Oppenord, who as a 20-year-old goes to Rome for 7 years of intense study of architecture old and new. He’s not a member, an official pensionnaire of the Villa Medici, but the director of the French Academy, a man called La Teullière, took him in and let him eat with the Fellows, and encouraged him to go out and draw everything. Now, he is in Rome at the end of the Baroque period when the great masters have lived their lives. Bernini is dead for about a decade by the time he gets to Rome, Borromini has died quite a bit before, Pietro da Cortona, and so on. All the great masters of the Roman Baroque are in the previous generation. But he’s seeing the buildings when they’re still as they were built, more or less, before the many changes and adaptions and demolitions that have changed the face of Rome so much. But he had sketchbooks in which he kept his record of detail, and everybody who saw these sketchbooks was amazed. The French words they used: génie, fécondité, riche. Beyond expectation, the quick hand, everyone was amazed by the drawings. And so, aside from the ability of the drawings, it’s like a photographic campaign of these buildings of great people when they were still fresh.
When he went back to Paris, La Teullière had no idea how he was going to get all the drawings back. There were so many of them. Many were very big as well. Late in life, after his death even, when his architecture was going a bit out of fashion, or very out of fashion, still his drawings were sought after. People paid the price in gold, really, to get these drawings.
[background music: Sonata sopra la Monica, by Biagio Marini. Performed by La Luna. Track 8 on their CD Sprezzatura: Virtuoso Music of 17th-Century Italy. Dorian Recordings, catalog number DOR-93200.]
JC: The drawings in this sketchbook are detailed and clean. It’s frankly hard to imagine a young architect sitting outside and quickly sketching these great buildings in such detail!
HF: Closer inspection reveals that these drawings were likely completed in stages, only the first of which took place on location.
[end music]
JoCo: Now many of theses sketches are very careful in the sense they’re done with pencil, and then they’re filled in with ink, and then over the ink goes a kind of gray wash. They look colorful at first, but actually it’s all gray and then the brown ink. You can imagine he’s there, not only with his pen but with his eye. Some are really quick, but I think many are done after he gets back to his room. He will sit down with a ruler and so on, and really do it right. So there must be other sketches that are really rough on the site that are then feeding into these. And then some of these, of course, are really quick as well. So he had all levels of quick, ink (never sloppy, but he can be quick), and then these really careful drawings which are based in pencil, rule lines, ink, and beautifully subtle gray wash.
[background music: Balletto primo, by Biagio Marini. Performed by La Luna. Track 13 on their CD Sprezzatura: Virtuoso Music of 17th-Century Italy. Dorian Recordings, catalog number DOR-93200.]
JC: With all of the palaces, chapels, and fountains in and around Rome, it must have been a daunting task to select which landmarks to draw.
HF: The choice wasn’t entirely Oppenord’s to make. He arrived with a specific set of instructions from his financiers.
[end music]
JoCo: Now the people who financed this was the French state, and they expected him to bring back the best of the moderns, you know, Michelangelo, Palladio, Bramante, and so on. And he did, but he was easily seduced by the less acceptable, more fanciful and imaginative architects of the Baroque, like Borromini or Cortona. And so towards the end of his stay in Rome he was sent up to Vicenza, where Palladio’s villas are thick on the ground, and lots of little places on the way, for Palladian villas in the countryside, to study them. And yet when you open a book like this you see a couple of Palladio and lots of Baroque things. And my analogy is like those suspicious companies that keep two sets of books, he might have kept a set of Palladio to show his financiers and has this sort of thing because that’s what really attracts him. But what he brings back to Paris, as I say, there are thousands of drawings and at least six of these sketchbooks and probably many more. He became rather close to a printmaker called Huquier and then to the famous artist Watteau. And if you see in the back of a Watteau fête champêtre, say a fountain with monsters on it and all very Bernini-like, Watteau never travelled to Rome. He’s getting that through Oppenord.
[background music: Balletto primo, by Biagio Marini. Performed by La Luna. Track 13 on their CD Sprezzatura: Virtuoso Music of 17th-Century Italy. Dorian Recordings, catalog number DOR-93200.]
HF: Although sketching was part of the education of every architect, Oppenord’s sketchbooks were different from the rest. His fascination with Baroque styles made him stand apart from the others, who primarily studied the more classical structures. But one thing was certain – everyone had to sketch. Michelangelo, included!
JC: Even now, Professor Connors ensures that his students are not exempt from this tradition.
[end music]
JoCo: Well, everybody from the Renaissance on, you had to go to Rome and draw the Antique. And we have the phenomenon of sketchbooks, usually bound, by every Renaissance architect. The Renaissance word is taccuini, and they are all after the Antique, or maybe Bramante or some very classical architects. We have loose sheets by Michelangelo after the Antique, except when you really look at them they’re after somebody else’s sketchbook because Michelangelo didn’t want to waste time. His architectural self-education was through somebody else’s sketchbook. By the time we’re in the 17th century, you’re getting people who are interested not only in the Antique, but in what the previous generations have done, what Michelangelo had done. Eventually Palladio would become so important because of his books that people want to see the original Palladio, so they go to see the villas and palaces in Vicenza and it becomes a real standard, a sort of gold standard of how to be a modern classical architect.
But Baroque architecture, which was always considered a little too fanciful and too imaginative, is not often the subject of such sketchbooks. But Oppenord knows what he wants. His taste is fixed at age 20, and he loves this stuff and he devours it. We have drawings in the darkest of crypts, [which] must have been done with him going down by torchlight. He had an eye that could look at a building and slice it right down the middle, and then give you a section of what it looked like, what rooms are where. Sketchbooks and eye go together. You draw and you see at the same time. The more you draw, the more you see. The training of the hand has a lot to do with the training of the eye, and the training of the eye has a lot to do with the training of the mind. Hand, mind, eye.
[musical interlude: Sonata sopra la Monica, by Biagio Marini. Performed by La Luna. Track 8 on their CD Sprezzatura: Virtuoso Music of 17th-Century Italy. Dorian Recordings, catalog number DOR-93200.]
So, what I like to do in my Landmarks of World Architecture course is to have students keep a sketchbook. I say, “Sketch the Corinthian order and details of the façade of Widener.” Every week they have a sketch assignment, and they’re to fill up a page or maybe two of the sketchbooks. And they turn this in, and I put the best up on the website of the course as a kind of emulation. I hope emulation begins to have them say, “Well, I could do that!” What students realize is that it takes time. They all say, “I don’t have any drawing training.” And I say, “I don’t care. Just go and look, and be willing to rip up pages out of your sketchbook because they were bad and start again.” But at the end they’re very proud. They’ve seen this sketchbook build up, and by the end of the semester they have half of the sketchbook full. Now is it of this level? Well, not really, but I like to show them this and I like them to see what it could be like at its very best when people really knew how to draw. This is a 20 year-old, so it’s not too different from their age, and yet someone who had it in his hand and eye.
[background music: Sonata sopra la Monica, by Biagio Marini. Performed by La Luna. Track 8 on their CD Sprezzatura: Virtuoso Music of 17th-Century Italy. Dorian Recordings, catalog number DOR-93200.]
JC: Sketching has been integral to the study of architecture for hundreds of years. But today it isn’t the only means of capturing architectural details for later study. For Professor Connors, photography also fulfills his observational needs, and provides an easy method of bringing distant buildings back to his students.
[end music]
JoCo: Well, when I traveled in Italy I used to do a lot of drawing. Now I’m building up a photographic corpus of slides for these big courses I’m doing. It’s a little hard to do both, so the last trip or two has been more photographs than drawing. Put it this way, within the world of art history painting historians have always had to depend on getting photographs from someone. You couldn’t take photographs in museums until recently anyway, and even now the light is terrible. It’ll make your photographs of paintings all look like they’ve been drenched in tea. So painting historians have always been dependent on getting a photograph from a museum or from some source. Architectural historians on the other hand have had the long tradition of always carrying a camera with us. We do all the time, and we take our own photographs. We’re outdoors and we can see something, or we’re in a church or in a chapel – we just do it.
[background music: Canzon seconda a tre (due canti, e basso), by Girolamo Frescobaldi. Performed by La Luna. Track 3 on their CD Sprezzatura: Virtuoso Music of 17th-Century Italy. Dorian Recordings, catalog number DOR-93200.]
HF: Architecture not only teaches us about the aesthetics of different places and times. By studying architecture, scholars can also catch a glimpse into the daily life of the people who lived in these buildings. Traces of the personal tastes of the artists and the patrons still remain for the observant scholar.
[end music]
JoCo: Palaces let you into the whole business of what noble families are doing. The ritual of everyday life, how they pray, how they move, how they respect the patriarch – all of that is built into the architecture. People now study this a lot, and it’s made an old field become extremely vivid and lively. But then, in the end, if you’re a real artist like Michelangelo or Borromini, you’re shaping what you do. There’s a kind of dialogue, even a wrestling match, between the architect and the patron where he says, “If you really want to symbolize this, this would be better.” That kind of dialogue is very interesting to see. Historians, of course, look at art and architecture a lot, but often don’t get into this wrestling of the artistic personality and it’s more a recounting of narrative – all very valuable.
[background music: Canzon prima a 3, by Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde. Performed by La Luna. Track 1 on their CD Sprezzatura: Virtuoso Music of 17th-Century Italy. Dorian Recordings, catalog number DOR-93200.]
HF: We’d like to thank Professor Joseph Connors for coming in and sharing his knowledge of Oppenord and the importance of sketching with us. I’m personally feeling inspired to go buy a sketchbook and start training my mind, hand, and eye!
JC: The music selections you’ve heard throughout the podcast were examples of virtuoso music from 17th-century Italy, music that Oppenord may have heard while exploring Rome. The pieces were performed by the chamber ensemble, La Luna. Our thanks to them for the recording.
HF: To see Oppenord’s sketchbook and other interesting faculty selections from Houghton collections, visit houghton75.org and view our online exhibition HIST75H: A Masterclass on Houghton Library. This particular sketchbook is also fully digitized and can be viewed online at any time through our online catalog.
JC: This is our final episode of Houghton75 focusing on faculty selections from Houghton collections. It’s been our great pleasure to be with you for this series. But be sure to tune in soon, as Houghton75 continues with a peek into the Harvard Review, the major American literary journal published by Houghton, and a salon series that celebrates their 50th issue.
HF: As always, thank you for listening. We hope you will visit us soon in the library or join us again here on the air!
[music continues to end]