 Good morning. We're going to continue talking about mannerism today, and I'd just like to pause to discuss the idea of mannerism. It's a relatively new concept. Throughout the time that mannerism was being practiced, and for, let's say, well into the 20th century, mannerism was simply considered to be part of the Renaissance. In fact, for quite a long time, let's say until the 19th century, late 19th century, Baroque was considered to be part of the Renaissance. People really didn't make distinctions. You could tell the difference between Gothic and classical, but parsing out the difference between different ways of using the classical language was not so easy. So if something like Farnese Palace or the Tempietto counted as really good Renaissance because of the ideality of the form or the perfection of the proportions or the use of ideal geometrical figures like the circle and the square, then everything that didn't do that didn't need a name like mannerism or Baroque. There was a perfectly good word ready to use to describe this stuff, and that word was bad. You would look at something mannerist and you would say, this guy is out of control. You would look at somebody who had really different ambitions, different ideas about what architecture could do, but if you have the wrong frame in which to situate an argument, you won't draw the right conclusions. So really it really wasn't until the 1960s that a man called Arnold Hauser wrote a book called Manorism, and this book began to say, no, these are not examples of a really poorly deployed Renaissance series of objectives. In fact, something really different is going on, and the different stuff that is going on is aimed at really different objectives. This is Frederick Hart, an art historian who wrote one of these definitive 500 page histories of Italian art, and he says, whereas the content of the high Renaissance art is often ideal, Manorist art often chooses subjects that are abnormal or unnatural, and the strange and unexpected aspect of a subject may be emphasized. Manorist interpretations sometimes stress uncontrolled emotion or withdrawal. In high Renaissance art, the narrative will usually be direct, compact, and comprehensible. In Manorist art, it is often elaborate, involved, and obtuse. So while space in high Renaissance will be measured, harmonious, and ideal, Manorist space can be disjointed, spasmodic, and or limited to the foreground plane. High Renaissance compositions are harmonious and integrated, they're often centralized, and they may assume a pyramidal or conical form, for example, ideal centralized churches like Santa Maria della Consolazione. Manorist compositions may be conflicting, and the forms often seek to frame or violate it. While high Renaissance proportions are normative and idealized, Manorist proportions can be uncanonical and usually attenuated. So, Hart is picking up on what Arnold Hauser had noticed that there are these differences. And while the Renaissance named themselves, they thought this idea of rebirth, those who recovered classics and recovered culture after a thousand years of darkness, would be a good name for themselves. The name Manorism was really placed on them, like so many other names. These are two books that are important in thinking about how Manorism operates. The first is from literary criticism called Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson. And the second you're probably familiar with, it's really an important 20th century book, Complexity and Contradiction by Robert Venturi. And both of these books make an argument in favor of the complex, in favor of ideas that are not singular but multiple, in favor of things that resonate with a lot of different nuances and layers of meaning. And both suggest that the complexity, the richness, the density of meaning, makes this actually better and more valuable to study than something that is too singular in its sense. And here's Hauser's little book on Manorism. Let's look at a couple of compositions to see how this notion about Manorism plays out. On the left is Raphael, the Madonna of the Fish. Because I just want you to notice that here's a fish. And you don't see that every day in an enthroned Madonna painting. It's the Madonna of the Fish, and of course the fish is a symbol of Christ. So it's not just that this person thought that the Madonna would like to have a fish. But these are both basically the same theme. Here we have Parmigianino, Madonna of the Long Knack, and Raphael, Madonna of the Fish. And the Raphael composition is like other Raphael compositions that we've seen before, like Madonna del Prato. Or pretty much like any Renaissance composition we've seen before. That is to say Raphael does this very nicely with this little perspectival stuff. There's a vanishing point that converges to a center line. Two-dimensionally there is this beautiful triangle that organizes all the figures. Truly couldn't be more balanced. Truly couldn't be more perfect. There's even this kind of nice play of rich saturated colors like red and blue. Then you look at the Parmigianino and you think, well that's a well-named picture. Just as Madonna of the Fish is well-made because there's a fish in the picture. But here Madonna of the Long Knack does not simply have a long neck. She also has a long baby. And she also has pointy feet. I mean it's as though she had been stretched. It's as though all these figures have been attenuated, pulled, stretched, and not only stretched but denied any space into which their actions can be situated. I mean if Raphael is all about making this little proscenium that his holy family can be organized around, this Madonna and her child seem to be not even seated on the throne but pulling forward smashing against the picture plan. And Parmigianino does everything to exaggerate this. For example, look at the little baby down here. Or look at this miniature person. What is the deal with that? We saw this in the Michelangelo Donitondo. Also this radical juxtaposition in scales between people who are close to us and people who are far away. Incredibly deep space is being suggested. Or there is a similar theme to the Donitondo. That this represents the new order and this represents the old order. And the transformation from the age of pagan antiquity to the age of Christianity is happening at such accelerated pace that little pagan guy gets left behind with his broken column that also could represent the overturning of the old order and the institution of a new order. The subject is the same. The handling of paint is the same. But the space is really different and the idea about the figure is really different and you might say the density of meaning is really different. In the Raphael, we have a big symbol of the fish going on. Way to go Raphael. For the rest of it, it's pretty straightforward. It is pretty much all about the Holy Family. But in the Parmigianino, meaning upon meaning upon meaning have been compressed together and it becomes an archaeological task to dig through the meanings to figure out what the painting is about. Here's another example, comparing Leonardo's Last Supper, which is fabulous and a really good example of a high Renaissance sensibility. We looked at this before and we saw how the painting divides in half along the heads of the people dining. We have the lower range of life on earth. We have the upper range of this vault, vault of heaven, or simply evacuated space. Christ's head is in the middle and the perspective lines converge on Christ's head. So everything about the construction of the painting and everything about the space of the painting seems to be establishing the same kind of objectives that Raphael was after. Look over here at the Tintoretto. Tintoretto is a Venetian painter and quite an oddball, really, in his way of painting. I oscillate in my life between loving him and hating him and I've been loving him for the last ten years. The things about him that I hate, you can't see because the slides are too washed out, but he has this sloppy handling of paint. It's not sloppy like, say, Titian is sloppy or Rubens is sloppy where they're totally in control or Rembrandt is sloppy, but he's really sloppy and you get a sense that he's got 25 people working for him and he's got the guy painting the hands and the guy painting the noses and the guy painting the feet and they don't always collaborate so these big workshop paintings, which could be as big as this wall over here, sometimes don't hang together very well, but clearly is in control of the composition and the compositions are really quite amazing. Like if the Leonardo divides in half in a decorous way, enforcing the ideality of geometry and celebrating the square and circle which frame the Christ. Here we have a diagonal, this radical diagonal recession and we have a juxtaposition of quite different worlds. The last supper on one side of the diagonal and people washing dishes with their cat on the other side of the diagonal. It is really stuff that you shouldn't see or something like the last supper. It's been brought down to earth. There's a radical collision between members participating in this painting between the very holy, glowing, sainted figures on the far end and these ordinary figures and you get the same kind of thing here with this dark group of angels swooping down from above. They keep getting weirder. You can look at these manorous things forever because everything that we've been appreciating and learning to love and learning to respect Renaissance paintings seems to be undermined but undermined deliberately. It's clearly not that people like Bronzino here or people like Tintoretto over there were just not good enough to get the Renaissance space down. Clearly they didn't want to get the Renaissance space down. They were after other things. They were after other relationships. So these are two paintings, two allegorical paintings. We have The Birth of Venus by Botticelli that we've looked at before and here is Bronzino's Allegory of Love. A lot of it has to do with how clear the subject is in the Botticelli. It is all about the thing in the center and the thing in the center is Venus. Venus on her little half shell, her shell representing a kind of virgin birth and therefore making clear that the Venus allegorically refers to the virgin. Fabulous. We divide the canvas in half. We situate something in the middle. We carved out a space for all of this action to happen. And look what's happening in the Bronzino. It's like a tangle of people. It's like they've deliberately gone out of their way to twist limbs together to make almost a brocaded knotted fabric pushed up against the picture plane. Plus, not a bit clear what the action is. Not even so clear who owns which arms and legs. Like whose hand is this? Whose butt is this? Whose arm is this? Whose, it's unknowable. And why you need all these people in here is also sort of mysterious and unknowable. And if this is allegory of love, let's say maybe Venus, maybe Cupid, but who else is, who else are these people? Who is this big man over here with a shiny bald head? And if you want to just be horrified and think for a moment who that man might be, look at the Donetondo for a moment. And look at the types of the Donetondo. This Michelangelo painting that we looked at last time. The Donetondo has a elaborate cast of characters. We have the Virgin, we have Joseph, we have the Child, we have ambiguous guy here who oscillates between being St. John, the Devil, and Cupid. And we have a bunch of people here that we pretty much say must represent pagan antiquity because they have these grape leaves in their hair. So if you compare the Bronzino to the Michelangelo, you almost see the same figures getting redeployed in different actions across the canvas. I find this to be so alarming because when we looked at the Donetondo, we said, this is a bizarre pose. The posture of the Virgin, this heaving something over her head is not something you see every day, but you see it again in the Bronzino. You see the bald man hovering above the Virgin in an embracing protective way here. Here you see the bald man, I don't know, in the act of violating someone or something. And strangest of all is this reinterpretation, let's say, of what the little children do where it's as though the baby crawls down from the arms and begins to molest the woman. So I don't know. I mean, Bronzino is a Florentine. Michelangelo is a Florentine. The Doni are rich people. I don't know if the Donitondo got widely displayed. It could have been something they just had in their house. But it's still kind of alarming. And Bronzino does this all the time. Here's another Bronzino where he's making a kind of a riff on his own painting where he has this strange act of bosom love going on between butt boy or else the other guy and the woman. And here he simply recasts figures that child and other child become interested in each other's bosoms. But what can I say? It's so odd. So that's mannerism. That's mannerist language. And it happens as strangely in architecture as it happens in painting. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that the iconological programs are getting more and more complex. And by iconological, I mean the set of symbols going into it. For some of these buildings, you would get learned cardinals writing two volume iconological program briefs and saying this is what we want to symbolize. To symbolize it, the moon means this. This is the astrological chart. You've got to get that in there. And the artists have this burden of loading up the symbolism and off they go. And of course, if you have to mean a lot of things, a good way to express meaning is to use language. So architecture becomes increasingly linguistic. And by linguistic, I just don't mean the kind of language of architecture that we saw in classicism where there's a syntax. And by syntax, I mean the method of composing the pieces correctly. And by vocabulary, I mean the pieces. For example, column and tablature, pediment, triglyph. These are all parts of a vocabulary that can be put together according to a grammar and a syntax to make a meaningful construction like temple. Rhetorical tropes are figures of speech. You're probably familiar with some figures of speech like metaphors and similes. Like, your eyes are like the moon or other things. Like that. Or things like repetition where you say something again and again. Jesse Jackson has great rhetorical style. It's too bad we don't hear him speak more. But if you would listen to him give speeches, there was one famous one where he said something like, from the poor house to the workhouse to the governor house to the white house. And that's an example of repetition where the argument becomes amplified by pushing it forward and each time shifting the terms a little bit. And so if you look at some of this mannerist stuff, you begin to see rhetorical tropes exploding. I was just looking at a list of rhetorical tropes and all of them seemed appropriate. I was putting some of them down and it just seemed like, why bother? They all seem appropriate. Because there is some tweaking of the language toward rhetorical exaggeration of meaning that happens again and again. There was that going on in Michelangelo's Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo where there was this juxtaposition between tall and long or between incredibly crowded and incredibly evacuated. And even some of these rhetorical tropes like repetition, we see the same figure again or the denial of one condition with another condition in the way Michelangelo situated the columns and the walls in the same plane. So as to suggest the sameness of both or the impossibility of either to do the task at hand. When Michelangelo does the portapia in Rome, this is really quite late in Michelangelo's work. It's around 1560. In many ways his task is simple. Build a gate to the fortified wall of Rome. And there are certainly precedents that abound for something like that. This is just one of the many arches in the Roman Forum, the Arch of Settemus Severus. So if Michelangelo weren't such a screwy guy he might have done something like this. But of course Michelangelo wouldn't dream of doing something like that when he could do something like this. And what is something like this? This is a gate. This is not so different from the Arch of Settemus Severus except that instead of being singular and unified and focused, it seems to be multiple and exaggerated. It seems to present itself not so much as a thing but as a billboard or a sign of a thing. It's probably very effective, right? You're walking down the road this is the eastern gate to Rome you want to come into Rome and from long away you see this because it's like a tower it's so high up. But it's also making a gate and then making a gate again. It's this doubling, it's this repetition. It's the Jesse Jackson from the workhouse to the governor house to the White House going on here and the same thing gets reiterated and reiterated and reiterated. There's also a weird attitude toward architectural language. We said that good syntax puts the pieces of a language together in a clear and readable way. The cat is black. Not black is cat the. One of them makes a sentence and the other one is just a bunch of words. So if syntax and architecture would say pediment and tablature columns all worked out that way what is Michelangelo doing down here? He's giving us the pieces we want to have but he's not letting them cohere. He's also, he's not simply giving us the pieces that we want to have but he's doubling or quadrupling the pieces that we want to have. Like let's look at this central portal over here. What is it that makes the opening? We've talked about different things that can make openings. We've said well you could have a lintel you could have a pediment. In the case of Michelangelo we have all of them. We have a lintel, we have an arch, we have another arch, we have another arch we have a pediment, we have another pediment. It is this like super position of multiple iterations of the same figure all of which transform and all of which are in some way critical of the other figures that are going on there. Like even this pediment in a sense splits apart as though the idea of center that seems to be the big theme being reiterated here even that can't hang together and the center splits apart and is only tethered together by this little festoon, this little carved piece of ornament. Crazy and things transform. They start off as one thing and they become another thing. Porta Pia is Michelangelo at his crazies. This is Michelangelo when he's carving that Rondanini Pietà, the one that looked like it was Gothic. He had hacked away so much material from it. So this is him really running with the most extreme presentation of what architecture can do. Like, look what's happening over here. What are these little ears doing on the side? In a sense, it looks like they want to be brackets or they want to be ionic column capitals that have folded down in the wrong direction and the same kind of thing happens here. Michelangelo loves the ear. He loves taking something that seems to be about a square and making it specific, flaring it out to make it kind of look like a column capital, slipping it down to begin to suggest that in spite of the ideality of the square, things can't hold. And what's this? What's this piece over here? Well, it's round. It must be perfect. We love those circles. We can't get enough of them. But is this just a droopy column that's like a towel hanging over a circle? Has he just begun to play around with the idea of architectural language to suggest ways that it could work perfect, plaster, fluted, great, and ways that it can't work and putting them together in such radical juxtaposition you have no idea what's going on. Or look at this. Keystone. I couldn't be happier. It's exactly where I want it. It's right in the middle of whatever this thing is. If it were in the middle of an arch kind of is this octagonal arch, great. Of course, there's a super fancy of Keystone. From Keystone to Littlehead, to Keystone on top of Littlehead, to Big Plack, all of which seem to serve as Keystone. And if you didn't get enough Keystones, look down here underneath this perfectly ideal plaster. What do we get on the column capital or the plaster capital? We get a baby Keystone. He's out of control. But he's Michelangelo. There's no stopping him. So look at that. Baby Keystone. Crazy. Sadly, if you walk around to the back of the Porta Pia, you don't see much because it is an 18th century façade. But if you look at any piece of language on this thing, it seems to take your expectations and subvert them. Here, for example, I am at column capitals. Delightful, but just like frosting on a cupcake. Not like anything that is working syntactically, like a column capital is supposed to work. Best thing ever Michelangelo. In a more low key way, you could say that the Palazzo Massimo that we looked at before is playing a lot of the same kinds of games. For example, on the front, it proposes itself as an ideal Renaissance Palazzo and yet it bends. It distorts its ideality to conform to the bend of the street. It's also incredibly ambiguous about how many stories are here. You don't get to read it very clearly. You see a bunch of little punches that don't quite seem big enough to organize a wall or a room. And when you get to the interior of the Palazzo Massimo, the space of the system becomes clarified. Another kind of device that you see frequently in Manorist architecture kind of reminds me of that Bronzino allegory of love. Not in its creepy subject matter, but in the idea of density. In the idea of accretion of tangled ornament or pattern making on a surface. And this is the Palazzo Spada in Rome. Not really important in and of itself, but there's a very important piece of Baroque architecture stuck inside of it. The Galeria Spada by Boromini that we'll look at in a couple of days probably. We're going fast. But you can see that this whole surface is encrusted with a kind of ornamental pattern. Manorism really finds its best subject matter not in the Palazzo, not in urban architecture, but in garden architecture. And I think that's because garden architecture at the very point of departure suggests contrast, suggests the putting together of two possibly irreconcilable conditions. Architecture with geometry, with culture with the shaping of space and nature with its fecundity and its growth and its uncontrollable vigor. And how did these two things come together? What wins? Is it nature? Is it culture? And Bramante's Belvedere is really the first example of an effort to make some kind of garden space. And we looked at it before and we suggested that in many ways it picks up from Roman precedence things like the framed space like a forum but also things like verbal descriptions of gardens that Pliny or other classical figures would have had even more explicitly things like the temple of Fortuna Primigenia, republican Roman temple on the outskirts of Rome. And some of the themes that are going on in the Belvedere are themes that become very dear to the hearts of further garden makers. This is the text against which all subsequent gardens refer when they make their little distortions. So certainly one thing that's going on is the idea that architecture is a frame. Architecture becomes a frame that repositions nature and begins to allow nature to operate in very specific ways. The idea of the ground plane is also really important and as you move from low ground to high ground to higher ground you're either closer to the earth or you're closer to heaven and therefore your condition in the world changes. You either become immersed in the land or you become liberated into the sky or some gardens work in the opposite direction. You start out in the city and you find yourself in the dark forest lost and confused. Another thing that's going on in the Belvedere that you see again and again in the subsequent Manorist gardens is the instability of the center. The idea that a garden is supposed to be an ideal four-square paradise garden. Why can't it just be that? And it's not. There is a kind of suggestion of a center and then a displacement of the center. A suggestion of the center and then a displacement of the center. So it's a game of constantly repositioning yourself and re-centering yourself along the line as you move through the space. You finally come to this area right over here where the center is incredibly unstable. It's this Bramante Stair which moves you up, puts you on a center and then switches from concave to convex and you find yourself moving up in a very different way. In many ways, it's the first attempt to take stock of the lessons of the Belvedere courtyard and it does it really in a kind of similar way. If Belvedere had this transformation along a line from space up to space, up to space bracketing it with architectural constructs the papal apartments and the Belvedere Villa, then Villa Madama proposes to do the same kind of thing but using the architecture as a middle point that begins to transform your experience. The architecture becomes a kind of filter between different realms. Here we are in a bounded, somewhat urban courtyard, like a little form or like a little quartile. We pop through in this rotunda piece and then suddenly we find ourselves out in a garden, in a garden that proposes itself kind of as an ideal four-square paradise garden but one that's been attenuated, one that's moving on out and the proportions of the urban or urban courtyard and the landscape garden are similar. We also notice that Raphael died before the Villa Madama was completed leaving it in this provocative state of incompletion. And when I say provocative state of incompletion I mean, if this reconstruction represents Raphael's idea of a balanced thing, it's a renaissance thing. It's got the center line it's got the dividing line things organized into a perfect triangle it could be a Raphael Madonna but in this configuration, it's pulling apart. You have the hemicycle going one way, you have the loge going the other way and there's almost nothing in between them. This aero perspective I think shows you the power of how this thing is locked into its landscape. With these like a truck pool I don't know, what do we have tug of war where the axis coming out of the hemicycle moves in one direction the axis coming out of the garden moves in the other direction and the building just tugs so much so that the landscape fractures and you get this big sectional change at the point where the Villa engages this wall moving you down flattening flattening the space in a fairly radical way. We also notice that Raphael is using this strange material in the Villa Madama, this pinkish tufa to become explicit about the fact that this is a country house instead of an urban house. You might say this is a little bit more linguistic than it needs to be also he's assigning meaning to material. He's assigning meaning to rustication but he's even assigning meaning to the kind of stone he's using. Painting the Vatican Stanze the School of Athens the Fire in the Borgo the series of lunette paintings that Raphael managed there was a whole workshop of people. Peruppsi was one of the people working on that and also Giulio Romano was another painter who was good friends with Raphael and he was working on that too. When we spoke last time about the decorative program in the Villa Madama we said that this patterned we call it grotesque meaning as if in a grotto that little swirly patterned stuff that Raphael used in the loggia of the Villa Madama came from a Roman villa that he and Giulio Romano fell into when they were off walking around the Roman Forum and sketching so they were good friends but unfortunately Giulio Romano had to leave Rome and the reason Giulio Romano had to leave Rome is that it was the seat of the papacy and Giulio Romano was a pornographer. You can find the book at the Fine Arts Library they keep it behind the desk and so the thing to do is to ask for a whole bunch of Renaissance books and to stick this one in there so they don't think you're just looking at their dirty pictures if you want to write it down it's called I-M-O-D-I and it's full of stuff like this I go very quickly through Giulio Romano's pornography because he was thrown out of Rome for it so he went north he went up to the town of Mantua where there was a bachelor Duke, Mr. Gonzaga and Mr. Gonzaga said yeah you can come here this would be fine welcome to my court this is a painting of Giulio Romano by the great Venetian painter Titian who was also his friends and it seems like in the north pornography was fine this is a famous painting by Titian called Venus of Urbino this was done for the court of Urbino it's a beautiful painting art historians love it you look at this thing and you say this really exemplifies the Renaissance nude but this is what Mark Twain thought when he wrote Tramp Abroad and this is a great book if you ever want to travel in Europe you should just bring your little Tramp Abroad with you because Mark Twain is funny and he says you enter the Uffizi and proceed to that most visited little gallery that exists in the world the Tribune and there against the wall without obstructing wrap or leaf you may look your fill upon the foulest, the vilest the obscenest picture the world possesses Titian's Venus it isn't that she's naked and stretched out on a bed oh no, it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand if I ventured to describe that attitude there would be a fine howl but there the Venus lies out for anybody to gloat over that wants to and there she has a right to be for she is a work of art and art has its privileges et cetera, so funny if you've been told that you have to put the smuttiness out of your mind when you look at art I give you license to look at the Venus of Rubino in a new way so Giulio Romano gets a commission from the Duke of Mantua to build a pleasure palace it's one of these country houses that is three miles away from town it's never very far away and Mantua is situated almost like on a peninsula by the lake in three directions there is a little island in a spit of water here with an existing sort of farmhouse and Giulio's task is to refit the farmhouse to redecorate the farmhouse in a modern way so you can see that there is this in its original condition not anymore bridges going to the plot of land onto which the Palazzo Te or the Palazzo del Te is situated and Te just means tea so it's the tea palace and Giulio would go to have tea so this is the original building and Giulio's first task his first commission is to do a series of paintings because Giulio is a painter he primarily comes to architecture through painting he does a series of rooms and these are all allegorical themes the giants, the gods and so forth after having done that he's given the commission to expand the palace and to redecorate the palace so it's a funny commission this farmhouse, the windows aren't exactly where you want them to be but if you're doing wall paintings you don't exactly care where the windows are then when he gets the task of refurbishing the facades he has to make sense out of these oddly placed windows which by this point he can't move because he's already done the paintings on the interior this is one of the large rooms with this banquet of the gods that Giulio has there great stuff and this is a room that I think is really one of the most interesting it's the Hall of Giants and in the Hall of Giants Giulio is, I think playing with this idea of the corner in Renaissance architecture and we've spoken at length about how difficult it is to do a good corner the column never quite wants to be in the corner it's always a difficult situation this is all wall painting, this is not architecture at all but one of the themes is that these giants are pulling the column out of the corner and the whole building is collapsing because this impossible column has been pulled away and the ceiling falls down revealing this pantheon of gods up above there's another room in the Palazzo del Te called the Hall of Horses you can kind of see how it works spatially here it's kind of blank down below and then up above there are all these kind of wonderful horse portraits because Gonzaga was a great lover of horses and in my mind although not in the mind of Italian friends that I've run this past but in my mind, and this is actually true I'm not making this up the word cavalletto means window jam or door jam or frame cavallo means horse ecto means little so cavalletto would mean little horse but cavalletto would also mean window frame he's substituting a little horse for a little window frame here and I think this is so brilliant and I've run this past Italian friends and they've told me no, we don't say it like that but if it were true it would be such an interesting way of really using language to drive the argument and I would say it is true not that my Italian is better than real Italian's Italian but it's the word the word is the same cavalletto means frame and cavalletto means little horse so why not put up a little horse as a window frame so the painting is great let's look at the palace Giulio expands this existing building he begins to put a series of support buildings here a grotto here and this hemicycle at the end and what this thing does is it catches the space but lets your view continue beyond the space so you get this kind of double reading and the double reading is containment and extension at the same time in fact there are a number of spaces that you encounter here it's really beautifully sequenced in terms of the different moments you get you have these various vestibules you have a courtyard completely bounded and contained by architecture you pop out into a loggia where your view is focused toward the garden a loggia is a covered porch L-O-G-G-I-A here we see a little bridge and the little bridge is taking us across things called the fish ponds and then we walk across this green sword this garden and we find things at the perimeter so what's the language of the palazzo del te and you can see from this front elevation that it's a really varied rhythm and part of the reason the rhythm is so varied is that Giulio has to accommodate the strange window placings so instead of simply having a nice let's say Bremontian A-A-A or Bruno Leskin A-A-A same rhythm he's already oscillating the rhythm so that there's a kind of widening at the entry there's a every bay is a different dimension and he negotiates the difference in the bay sizes by playing with where these pilasters go here they're kind of far apart here they're close together and so there's kind of cleverness going on the wall is incredibly plastic he's using different layers within the wall to get these different differences in the geometry to fall into place he's also using rustication by rustication what do I mean Lisa exactly the roughening of the materials the deliberate use of rough stone to show us difference between these different layers you can know that this layer is different from this layer because the level of rustication is quite different in the Michelotto Palazzo Medici in Florence we saw rustication being used this layer is one thing, this layer is one thing this layer is one thing in a horizontal sense here it's a vertical sense, kind of archeological sense you peel away one layer and you find another layer you pop through the vestibule and you see your view lined up you get this skewer, this visual skewer through all the spaces, right like this and the vestibule itself is a kind of strange thing it's a heavily rusticated vestibule and the columns in the vestibule look like they're made out of Tutsi rolls they're really really rough and they're really kind of spongy that is to say they don't simply have endosys but they get really skinny at the top and skinny at the bottom so they bulge out as though there's some kind of primitive thing walk through what do you see? well, now things are looking pretty nice this is the courtyard that you're in this little courtyard over here it's got this beautiful Doric order colossal Doric order surrounding it and it's got a series of wonderful little triglyphs over here and these wonderful little triglyphs that we see part of the Doric freeze would make you think that finally Giulio has arraigned it and finally Giulio is becoming a little more canonical but if you look over here we begin to see that he's doing funny things with the triglyphs but if you look right over here you can see things are slipping down if the triglyph happens to be above a column it's okay but for these intermediate triglyphs they are in crisis and frequently Giulio will displace them Giulio will just slip them down to begin to say architecture is hard there's no easy way to balance the tectonic forces in a building things fall apart in fact it's almost as though that rupture set forth by pulling the column down on the painted wall of his building sets in action this chain reaction of dismantlement that configures the whole building this is still the same courtyard these are different stages of renovation they tend to paint everything white and so this is what it used to look like before they painted it a very pastel color but look at how the keystone gets used we saw Michelangelo layer and keystone upon keystone upon keystone and shrinking them down and sticking them on plaster capitals and here too the keystone is not really being used to suggest this is what's holding things together but it almost looks like this is what's splitting things apart it's too big and it's so rusticated it looks like a thing of the earth so it's popping up and splitting things apart and as all of this everything goes on in terms of the entablature and the keystone you also notice that there's another layer that's being revealed this really smooth layer but this smooth layer undulates it's kind of wavy and to me it looks like he's cladding jello with stone facing and the stuff underneath this stone facing is wobbling like crazy and occasionally when he cuts in these blind windows you can see the wobble you can see this kind of protein matter taking form and becoming something and the thing that it becomes is antithetical to the cultural constraints and geometrical constraints that architecture wants to put on it fabulous so we popped through the loja and we look over here at this little hemicycle down there and this is from inside the garden looking back at the exterior garden facade of the building and that too is pretty odd and you look at this thing and you see how it transforms before your very eyes between something that is essentially a columnar structure something that is essentially a wall structure constantly doubling or switching from pier to column or inserting blind window into pier so that local symmetries obtain at every moment but in terms of the whole thing it's really unstable and in fact he uses the reflecting pond we saw in the plan the bridge that goes across the reflecting pond to do a couple of things in one sense it's a kind of recreation of the journey across the bridge to get to the island that Palazzo Del Te is situated on and in another level it creates a stability and it creates a symmetry across the horizontal axis in the real world symmetry and balance are denied to you but in reflection in the virtual world you can have that kind of stability clever let's look at another great mannerist garden and this is the Villa Lante by Viñola and Viñola is an interesting guy because he wrote a treatise on architecture which is really dry really cononic really formulaic these are the orders as put forward by Viñola ugh hate them and the reason I hate them is that there's none of this madcap stuff that we saw Julio going on with and by madcap stuff I mean playing with rustication on a column or playing with the proportions of the column to emphasize the meaning instead they're just there they are and it's funny that this guy Viñola was able to write this treatise because his architecture is inspired and it's inspired because of its engagement with the land and its ability to read nature as a force against which architecture is always measuring itself here we have the Villa Giulia the Villa Giulia is situated to the north of Rome this is the Via Flaminia one of the big old Roman roads here's the Tiber River and here's the Villa Giulia so this would have been considered a country house even though it is in fact a 3 minute bus ride from the center of Rome right now but it's not completely a country house it's maybe let's say straddling the line between country and city and so how does the architect make that manifest well this seems to be about an architectural edge and as we move in this direction there seems to be a dissolving of the architectural edge so maybe here too architecture becomes a filter between two different conditions architectural edge, the arrival and the dismantling of the architectural edge here's a section and the section I think is pretty interesting because it shows you that Viñola is not simply performing this operation of dissolving the coherence of the palace in plan but he's also doing it in section that as you move out this center gets established through carving down so many of the same games that we saw at the Belvedere the idea of ground playing ground playing being activated to create different spaces within the scheme but also to tweak the meaning of the spaces of the scheme architecture as frame you look at this thing it's got this big old frame around it you might even say that Viñola is doing seems like he's unplugging the villa that you would kind of imagine that this piece which is over here this sunken grotto could slide in and complete the villa but instead it's been pulled apart it's almost as though he's looking at the incomplete state of something like the Villa Madama by Raphael this hemicycle locked onto a loja and appreciating the tensions that are there and finding a way to actually make that the theme of his architecture and not just this residual condition left over by accident here's what it looks like so it really seems kind of like a decorous palazzo right oh we have a very nice center it's very symmetrical let's go in and just where you expect to find a courtyard you find this evacuation of courtyard and the wall that you would expect to bound the space has been pulled out there are a series of thresholds that you cross as you move through the Villa Giulia and each one reveals a different condition to you you also get this variation on a theme as you move through the space we get this kind of tripartite organization of arch with little arches on the front facade almost like a triumphal arch and if we look at the facade of the hemicycle you get something that also kind of looks like a triumphal arch and this triumphal arch motif repeats itself in varied forms as we move along the line here's what we see on the inside of the hemicycle it is elaborately painted to look like you're inside some kind of trellis some kind of garden that the garden has invaded the architecture we're moving on down the line we're seeing the condition of the triumphal arch become increasingly dematerialized as we approach it from the palazzo side let's say from the building side you see something like this which is essentially a wall that's been perforated and as you move farther in there's something that's simply a columnar triumphal arch this idea of the triumphal arch this figure of the triumphal arch doesn't simply happen in elevation but the same figure that we see in elevation also happens in plan so there's a kind of flipping in preposterous ways when we get to the grotto here's the grotto we have the same kind of triumphal arch motif now sunk down into that deep sunken space and the language has really changed even more it's not simply columnar but the columns have become animated they've become these half human half column things called corms, h-e-r-m and where are they situated they're situated in water this is a grotto it's really spectacular because as you move lower and lower the climate actually changes from hot getting beat up by the sun Rome to something where you're being washed with water, you're in the shade and the natural cooling properties of the earth change so the making of the grotto provides a real amenity for the garden this little microclimate within the whole of the system but it also begins to organize a center against which these transformations can be read we're pulling things apart we get ourselves our little grotto the grotto carves down and then when we finally come out through another triumphal arch construct we find ourselves the ideal paradise garden the theme of the constant displacement of center that we saw in the Belvedere is also going on here too the theme of the ground plane and now a new theme the theme of water, how water can begin to participate in the argument so we will talk about gardens again next time