Architecture and Language: Constructing Identity in European Architecture c. 1000–c. 1650 ed. by Georgia Clarke, Paul Crossley
Abstract
346 RHETORICA Roman notions of politics and ethics. Marijke Spies studies the claims made by an Amsterdam chamber of rhetoric, the Eglantine, that its writings on the art of rhetoric - which focused on natural human reason, took its examples from the vernacular and familiar, and gave instances of negotiation - were part of a process of reconciliation after the city left the Spanish crown to join the Dutch Republic in 1578. Several articles use ideas from classical rhetoric to interrogate modern German literature. Helmut Schanze discusses the relationship between the atrical speech and political oratory by examining the use of the metaphors of theatre and forum in Goethe, Jean Paul and recent studies of television and digital media. Gert Otto examines modern funeral orations by Max Frisch, Heinrich Boll and Christa Wolf in the light of the classical (Thucydides) and romantic (Grillparzer, Borne) traditions of consolatory oratory. Theodor Verweyen discusses the use of metonymy in Bertolt Brecht and Gottfried Benn in the light of modern analyses of classical theories this trope. Several of the modern pieces focus on the speech act and its context Rainer Schulze describes how studies of rhetoric have interacted with cognitive linguistics in the analysis of metaphors as constituents of understanding. Thomas O. Sloane mischievously argues that playing with words engenders a famil iarity and therefore a competence in playing with ideas—within defined playgrounds. As this brief notice has shown, the volume should be read as an un usually generous number of Rhetorica rather than a exploration of different aspects of a single topic (the editors wisely steer clear of an introduction). The wide range of the essays, literary critical, historical and theoretical, is a just tribute to the dedicatee's scholarship. Ceri Sullivan University of Wales, Bangor Georgia Clarke and Paul Crossley eds, Architecture and Language: Con structing Identity in European Architecture c. 1000—c. 1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). This volume of collected papers is noteworthy as containing the first extensive studies by art historians to acknowledge and explore the influence of teaching and theory of rhetoric on writings about architecture and on architectural practice in the Renaissance and early modern period. We have had a number of good books and articles on the influence of rhetoric on painting and on music in the Renaissance, and many works on architecture discuss political and social meanings of buildings without actually using the word rhetoric or employing rhetorical terminology, but until now we have lacked good assessments of the indebtedness of architectural treatises to Reviews 347 rhetorical invention, arrangement, and style, including viewing the classical orders of architecture in terms of rhetorical commonplaces, all of which is done in chapters of this book. The first four chapters discuss the language used by medieval writers to describe features of architectures in England, France, Italy, and Germany. It was only with Leon Battista Alberti, writing in the mid-fifteenth century, that the concepts and vocabulary of classical rhetoric entered architectural treatises. In "Architecture, Language, and Rhetoric in Alberti's De Re Aedificatoria ", Caroline van Eck shows that Alberti's source for theory and termi nology was not so much Vitruvius's De Architecture, as usually believed, but classical works on rhetoric by Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and others. (There is an English translation of Alberti's treatise by J. Rykwert et al., published by the Harvard University Press, 1988.) Cammy Brothers then continues the subject with a chapter entitled 'Architectural Texts and Imitation in Late-Fifteenth- and Early-SixteenthCentury Rome". Debates ox er imitetio and eemuletio among Renaissance rhetoricians are echoed in architectural writing, and Brothers concludes that "the desire for authoritative models emerges from architectural treatises with increasing clarity over the course of the sixteenth century and parallels the development of an increasingly strict Ciceronianism" (p. 100). Subsequent chapters that will especially interest students of the history of rhetoric include "Sanmichelli's Architecture anti Literary Theory", by Paul Davies and David Hemsoll; "Architects and Academies: Architectural Theories of Imitetio and Literary Debates on Language and Style", by Alina A. Payne; and "The Rhetorical Model in the Formation of French Architectural Language in the Sixteenth Century: The Triumphal Arch as a Commonplace", by Yves Pauwels. Important rhetorical terms...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2001-06-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2001.0015
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