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Mythic Geology: Under the Surface at Palazzo del Te
By Tracey Eve Winton
Rustication ain’t prety, but there’s something about it gets under your skin.
Sebastiano Serlio felt it, and his treatises helped this curious, crude idiom spread, becoming far more popular in the sixteenth century than earlier Roman and Tuscan models of rustic simplicity. Ancient rustication – vernacular, not a classical order – featured coarse- hewn massive stonework, fortiications and cyclopean walls of close-iten boulders: unwieldy, irregular and patinated, too huge for man to cut or set. Everyone knows the Cyclopes built them, a troglodyte race of uncivilized giants with one eye in the middle of their head. Marble is earthborn, like the giants. And so is terra cota brick. And stucco. And plaster.
How to recognize rustication, because it doesn’t really have rules, as you might notice from reading Serlio carefully: It works by thickening or deepening the material surface that gives you the feeling of looking inside of raw mater. hat impression is ampliied by modeling in low-relief, almost sculptural, maybe evoking reptile hide or tree bark or a goat’s shaggy pelt, or imitating unworked natural stone with inclusions and impurities. Or a vernacular of living surfaces, following each stone variety’s natural lines of cleavage. he nearly planar surface in smooth ashlar breaks up into objects and textures in the rustic through ridging
or hammering the inish. he efect is unsystematic, even though structural masonry naturally follows level courses. Lines widen and mortar joints sink back deeply from the face of the stone, which is either let rough-hewn to look uninished or laboriously worked into a natural, crude appearance. he uneven surfaces, projections and crevices work by seizing and holding shadow, giving the overall façade a captive darkness that enhances its feeling of raw material and integration with the mortal world of time and secret things. Rough stone catches light in a diferent way, showing its crystalline inner form, but it also casts micro-shadows on and across the surface, the texture of which deepens color and through the incorporation of darkness efects a feeling of a solid, and heavy mass. Most typically we see rustication in the lower registers of a building, or at binding joints such as foundation lines and in quoins, and it’s used in a way that ampliies the horizontal and lateral emphasis of the base. When used elsewhere, like portals, and keystones, it transfers that sense of strength and stability.
Besides Rome, medieval Florence and environs ofered precedents. Michelozzo, built Palazzo Medici like a kind of geode, the exterior bristling with crude ashlars; intricate and delicate within. His façade renders in masonry a gradation of reinement from the lower storey’s deliberate coarseness of bossy blocks at street level, to later, but still articulated on the piano nobile , and a smooth upper storey under the cornice. It’s as if the solid ground itself is the material substrate out of which a massive palace organically rises, its rustication austere, noble and civic, an idiom of the public realm.
When rusticated, architecture’s lesh is conveyed by a vulgar treatment of its material, which deepens the liminal space of the surface and emphasizes separate stones in the assemblage. We experience our immediate relation to architectonic objects through a sense of corporeality, a near-erotic sympathy with leshed-out objects and elements, a visceral and not logical sense of recognition in them of some of our own qualities. Where we encounter it in tactile range, rustic stone’s corporeal protrusions, at a scale resonant with our own bodies and limbs, create an archaic sympathy of living mater, connecting lesh and blood with our mineral kin.
Our feeling for architecture responds to material beauty as well as the form in which it gets shaped. By material beauty I mean ‘form already visible in mater,’ like wood-grain, the threads in a textile, the crystalline structure in ore, or veining in marble. We don’t normally recognize or acknowledge the inward organization of material as form. It tends to ly under the radar of everyday perception, although jewel-cuters and woodworkers know it well. his inward order responds to an outward order brought by cuting or carving, or wear from the elements, a dialogue between the ‘outward’ laws of crat and the arts, and the hermetic ‘inward’ laws of Nature. When the two are proportionate you could call it a conversation, or a batle when they don’t align, and each asserts violently against the other.
In architecture, form describes the external lineament or boundary deining an element in space, the horizon of our awareness in physical things. Rustication is an architectural atempt to render visible mater’s secret life. he root comes from the Latin for the coarser things of the countryside and its natural setings, rus in contrast to urbs , the civil society of the city. Going back further, the Proto-Indo-European root reu ̯ ə - refers to an open, undeined expanse.^1 Turning to its cognates, there’s imagery of chewing, intestines, digging or tearing out, and ruins: processes that convert deinite form to the formless. If we consider the design process as intent to deine form, the rustic ofers back to the material denatured by imposed geometries a chance to recuperate some of its vital character by exposing the raw interior.
Serlio mentions “that most beautiful palace called the Te” a building then very recent, in his discourse on how the Ancients used to mix Rustic with the other orders,
by this representing, part a work of Nature, and part a work of artiice: such that the columns with straps of rustic stone, and also the architrave, and frieze interrupted by voussoirs were demonstrating the work of Nature, while the capitals and parts of the columns and thus the cornice with the frontispiece were representing the works made by the hand of man: which
1 Julius Pokorny Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, Bern: Franke Verlag 1959
- Frontispiece of Il Terzo Libro, Sebastiano Serlio. Venice: Francesco Marcolini
- Courtyard façade (west face) of Palazzo del Te, Mantova, by Giulio Romano,
the internal cortile imply a cardo and decumanus , the irst rudiments of form sketched out in space, and a symbolic crossing of Art and Nature. he inner four faces, each distinctive, are dressed in similarly complex style mingling the Doric order with Rustic. hese façades look like nothing ever before.
Everything’s more complicated than it irst appears. Spoiler: most of the villa’s powerful-looking stonework is actually stucco troweled over load-bearing brick masonry. Which, however, has been ingeniously contrived for that purpose, a cleverly structured skeleton waiting for lesh, on top of the reused foundations. Mantua wasn’t a place with living rock or quarries from which to excavate material for hewn or carved stone, so Necessity brought on Invention, which, judging by both Vasari’s and Serlio’s writings seems to be the most desirable trait of an architect in this period.
We might think of plaster or stucco as a white, unifying surface, but it’s really a mixture of water with a binder like lime, gypsum, or animal glue, using sand as an aggregate, like concrete. It’s a manmade species of mud: a very archaic building material. Not unrelated to clay brick, in the sense you can really get your hands into it when it’s still wet. Anyhow, it was the stucco reliefs found in Nero’s submerged Domus Aurea in 1480 that ignited an interest in ‘grotesques’ as they were called, when misconstruing the buried palace as an underground groto materialized an old myth into built form. he term ‘grotesque’ is cognate with grota , a groto, and crypta , a vault or cavern, denoting a hollow in the earth or something secreted underground: a rich symbol for the distinct experience of interiority, and archaic esoteric wisdom. In 1498 when Mantegna was still alive, and possibly involved, Isabella d’Este writes of a ‘Grota’ she had built under her studiolo , complete by a decade later, the irst of two.^2 his new fashion in architecture had been introduced to practice by none other than Giulio Romano’s beloved master, Raphael, one of the irst artists to climb down into the underground complex ater it was discovered, and it was
2 Beth Cohen, “Mantua, Mantegna and Rome: he Grote of Isabella d’Este Recon- sidered” pp. 323-370 in he Rediscovery of Antiquity: he Role of the Artist , ed. J Feifer et al. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2003
Raphael who named the fantastical style ‘ groteschi .’
he rough manifestation of building materials has its roots in the mythic topos of the groto. here’s also something of the original ‘grotesque’ in Giulio’s approach of concealing an armature under a ictive, crudely articulated surface. On the Palazzo’s north face, the elements look greatest and most monolithic as they hug the earth, lightening in appearance as they rise. From the architect’s perspective, the huge blocks of crudely hewn stone seem to structure the wall. As you go deeper, you notice the inset pilasters, a conlicting system, without respecting modular rhythm, replacing regular column bays with incremental compressions toward the edges, and expansions at the centre, that impart a sense of movement and lux. Besides stone-courses of blocks, the masonry appears also in arches. Pilasters project enough to sever the set- back lintel course with the Greek key carving, and the keystones of the triple portal rupture it also. Giulio’s mixes are unorthodox; his spacings inconsistent; his structural systems clearly ictitious. Window openings are irregular, but not enough that you notice at irst. Blocks burst forward and retract, smooth and rustic inishes combine. Triglyphs and blind windows run in sequences independently of other elements. If you enter the north portico, the rustic inish making up the rectangular pillars turns out to be on the front only; the sides are not only smooth but monolithic, without inscribed mortar joints. he question on the table is: what is this stuf?
In Florence Michelozzo’s simple sequence of blocks shows unformed mater caught in the act of evolving toward geometrical form, or divine idea, metaphorically climbing a great chain of Being from the stone’s chthonic birthplace towards Olympic heights. A century later Michelangelo, steeped in the same Neoplatonic philosophy, let his famous ‘slaves’ in the state of non- inito , igures caught in a struggle to free themselves from the marble block or collapsing back into it. In similar ways they recognized mater’s mythic geology, its continuous cycles of transmutation. Michelangelo felt a protean spirit in the stone. hese sonnet lines that he wrote around 1540 declare material’s primacy over the vicissitudes of form, recalling Aristotle’s image of the statue of
garden: a marvel of encrustation and colour, as if the rock were sprouting with life, overspilling its boundaries. Architects followed descriptives in Leon Batista Alberti’s treatise on building, relected in their use of unstandardized materials that were collected and hardly processed, if at all, like coral, mollusk shells, river pebbles, or porous volcanic rock, continuing to evidence their close, unsevered connection to the fertile matrix of the earth. hat by architecture’s geometric standards of order these materials were ‘formless’ was intentional. Using rough, uneven material as ornament symbolizing Nature, artiicial grotoes forged the atmosphere of transformation by composing heterogeneous pieces into surfaces and projections that revealed emerging but incomplete geometries forging spatial relations, cosmological diagrams symbolizing order. In Paradiso XIII, Dante had ofered this poignant image: “Nature is an artist who knows his crat well, yet works with a trembling hand.”^3 Grotoes in this way represented rudimentary, natural precursors to architecture, as Vitruvius recounts in his second book of De Architectura , where prior to building “men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves, and groves, and lived on savage fare.”^4 Instability propels the imagination to anchor itself in myths of origin, the primordial and the elemental. When Saturn ruled the Golden Age, the rustic and the raw meant carnal pleasures, and Arcadia’s pastoral idyll of satyrs and nymphs was a home in Nature. hen Jupiter banished his father and instituting divisions in space and time begot his Silver Age, with which came war and the foundations of architectural order. Now men had to build.
he Palazzo del Te had two ideal inhabitants: the lover and the architect, and in it each had his proper place. Two special frescoed rooms symmetrically arranged about the east-west ‘Nature’ axis demonstrated opposing cosmic forces, love and strife: eros being the power of linking and joining, while machia is the principle of separation and fragmentation. To the north is the Room of Amor and Psyche, dedicated to scenes of love, decorated with nymphly beauty and Dionysian satyrs. To the south, the Room
3 Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, translation by the author. 4 Vitruvius, he Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1914
of the Giants, with its violent imagery of il mondo soteraneo , what Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (philosopher of protean human reality) called the world of mater. If the Psyche room celebrated the body’s voluptuous pleasures, the Giants room is manifestly about architecture.
he Roman poet Ovid links Jupiter’s Silver Age to the invention and irst practice of architecture, supplanting man’s primitive shelters under boughs and in caves. It is in the Iron Age, following Bronze, that the batle of the gods and giants takes place. “Giants piled hill on Mountain to make a stair that reached the skies,” says Ovid.^5 his is the room with the double foundations and the double vault into which Giulio and visitors like Vasari poured their interest. Its unbroken fresco shows the gods and giants batling for supremacy, a well-established mythic tale of the forces of chaos and order. In a nutshell: When the king of the gods ruled from high on Mount Olympus, the giant Alcyoneus led a revolt against his citadel. he giants, earthborn creatures, atempted to storm Jupiter’s throne and overthrow his rule. hese primeval autochthons, brutal and hideous, have begun to climb toward the heavens, when Jupiter strikes them down with thunderbolts and lightning, crushing the revolt. Buried alive in the rocks, raw brutishness pulses in pain.
In the lower part, that is, on the walls that stand upright, underneath where the curve of the vaulting ends, are the Giants, some of whom, those below Jove, have upon their backs mountains and immense rocks which they are supporting with their powerful shoulders, in order to pile them up and climb into the heavens, while their ruin is already underway, for Jove is thundering and all of the heavens burning with indignation; and it appears not only that the Gods are dismayed by the arrogant audacity of the Giants, upon whom they are hurling mountains, but that the whole world has been turned upside down and as if at its inal end. In this part Giulio painted Briareus in a dark cavern, nearly covered with massive chunks of mountain, and the other Giants all crushed and some dead
5 Ovid, he Metamorphoses , Book I. trans. Horace Gregory. London: William Heinemann 1959 p. 35
beneath the ruins of the mountains. Besides this, through a great hole in the obscurity of a groto, which reveals a distant landscape rendered with good judgment, many Giants may be seen leeing, all struck down by the thunderbolts of Jove, and, as it were, on the point of being overwhelmed at that moment by the ruins of the mountain, like the others. In another part Giulio fashioned other Giants, upon whom are falling temples, columns, and other pieces of buildings, making a vast slaughter and havoc of those proud beings. And in this part, among those falling fragments of buildings, stands the ireplace of the room, which, when there is a ire in it, makes it look like the Giants are burning, for there is painted Pluto, leeing towards the centre with his chariot drawn by parched horses, and accompanied by the infernal Furies; and thus Giulio, not straying from the subject of the story with this invention of the ire, made the ireplace a most beautiful ornament. In this work, moreover, to make it even more horrifying and terrible, Giulio represented the Giants, of enormous and fantastical stature, falling to the earth, smited in various ways by lashes of lightning and thunderbolts; some in the foreground and others in the background, this one dead, the other wounded, and still others buried by mountains and the debris of the buildings. Wherefore let no one ever think to see any work of the brush more horrible and terrifying than this, nor more naturalistic; and anyone who enters that room, on seeing the windows, the doors, and other thus-made things wrenched awry and on the very brink of collapse, with the mountains and buildings hurtling down, cannot but fear that everything will fall upon him….”^6
Vasari describes the terrifying drama swirling around the visitor as fully in the round.
And what is most marvellous in the work is to see that as a whole the painting has neither beginning nor end, but is seamlessly joined and connected together, without any divisions or ornamental partitions, that the things which are near the casements look very large, and those in the distance,
6 Giorgio Vasari, Vite , he Life of Giulio Romano” translation by the author.
where there is countryside, go on endlessly receding; whence that room, which is no more than iteen braccia long, has the appearance of open country. Moreover, the loor being paved with small round stones mounted on edge, and the lower part of the upright walls being painted with similar stones, there is no abrupt junction to be seen, which makes that surface seem like a vast expanse …
You are standing in the heart of the mountain. he uneven loor unbalances and slows natural movement. Far above you can see the peak. Jupiter’s throne sits in a circular Ionic temple that pays homage both to Mantegna’s oculus in the Camera degli Sposi, and beyond that to the cofered dome of Hadrian’s Pantheon. On the throne perches an eagle, Jupiter’s bird, like Mount Olympus itself, a Gonzaga emblem. Around their thunderbolt-wielding ruler gather the startled Olympians, occupying the upper part of the room rounded by the vaulting. In three directions you are surrounded by living rock fracturing into gigantic boulders. Trapped by an avalanche of rocks the fallen giants are crushed and mutilated, screaming in pain, and bleeding. Among them are Cyclopes, the muscular one-eyed workmen of Vulcan’s forge. his is a room, quoth Vasari, built on the principles of a furnace, with all the constructed details rusticated: doors, window surrounds, ireplace. You are also inside Mount Etna, and the opening above is the volcano’s crater. To the east, ires are raging. Originally, between the windows, a real ireplace merged with the hearth of the underworld. Rough stone blocks are interspersed with the protruding body parts and disembodied limbs: an arm, a hand, a knee, a head. Like Michelangelo’s Slaves , the colossal igures struggle to lit the tumbling rocks of themselves, but their bodies have become integrated with the dense masses pressing down on them. Between shapeless lumps of stone and lesh tree trunks are caught. Gaping holes have opened in two lanks of the mountain and through these the damage spreads in waves through the elemental forces of nature.
To emphasize by contrast the rustic character of the cyclopean boulders that form the architecture of the mountain, Giulio renders on the north wall, at your entrance from the
a zone of complete formlessness which functions to provide an ultimate referent to the quasi-formless character of the more-than- rusticated rock clusters that sustain the shell of the mountain in which we are standing. he clouds are morphologically related to the massive boulders which they resemble, but irmly outside of architectural language. Still, once you look at the relation of the clouds and the boulders, some of the boulders seem to be loosening themselves from the bond of gravity in order to loat upward, rather than tumbling down — much like the rusticated keystones in the courtyard, breaking the pediments above as they rise.
In Plato’s dialogue he Sophist, the Eleatic Stranger presents the Gigantomachy as a batle staged over whether Being
Room of the Giants, Giulio Romano, Rinaldo Mantovano, and assistants. Vaulted ceil- ing, south and west walls
is bodily and material, or incorporeal and ideal, piting the Giants versus the ‘friends of Ideas’ or the Olympians of the myth.^8 he ‘gods’ people break the bodies of the ‘giants’ into bits, and call them a process of coming-to-be: Becoming rather than Being. he contrasts of Plato’s allegory are apparent, where the Giants’ colossal bodies are anatomized into limbs and members, to be compared by the visitor with a corresponding dismemberment of the architecture pictured on the north wall. Keep in mind the analogy to the architectural art of all the façades, though not precisely a post-Babel surrender to idiom. One wonders whether for Giulio the debate shits from Being to Architecture, whether in essence it’s a bodily or non-bodily thing, brought on by the classical orders’ ideal forms (the divinities) in contrast with the decayed reality of the ruins in Rome (the Giants), and the question of how those two worlds connect. he fresco of the Giants shows a complex descent of mater, and describes the reduction of a whole into partial elements and fragments, whose fractured liminal regions lack the precision lineaments of architectural jointing, and thus the impossibility of crated detailing. Just as grotoes with geometrical lines and relations starting to appear rising into visibility in the arrangement of coarsely shaped natural materials echo the transition from the undivided harmonious peace of the artless Golden Age to the Silver Age with its spatial divisions and architectonic forms. Partibility or disunity comes from discord, machia , and this is its space.
Plato’s outcome, like Giulio’s architecture, lies somewhere in-between, as between Being and Becoming lies chora , Plato’s space of appearance. Atention to Giulio’s conception of space in relation to materialized form shows a patern. We know that the Psyche room should have featured a statue of Venus holding the centre. he great vestibule features pilasters around the edges, and fully disengaged columns in the centre. hese are in fact the only free-standing columns in the complex, the most bodily of all the forms materially rendered. he interior court shows a corporeal character to the architectural elements, the bodying-out of the round columns in particular, that contrasts with the comparatively lat inset pilasters
8 Plato, Volume II heaetetus | Sophist , translated by Harold Fowler. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons Section 245-249.
the room contrasted with non-solid things playing against this: draped fabrics, voids, and unstable surfaces. He constructed the volumetric space of this ‘painted room’ with precise geometry, like the painted pilasters that seem to support the vaulting. Built material objects support the pictorial illusions: the frame around the ireplace supports the carpet that serves as a surface for the ictive staircase on which several court igures stand, one ‘in front of ’ a painted pilaster, and thus in ‘your’ space. At the centre of the vault above you, the ceiling is dematerialized by a trompe l’oeil oculus constructed with concentric circles. his giant cyclopean eye, a ‘hieroglyph’ for Alberti’s perspective, is open to the heavens, turning the enclosed room inside out, like a courtyard. From it, a troupe of foreshortened igures peers down; two of them are balancing on a rod a planter of wild quinces, symbols of marriage and fertility, about to tip it over on whoever is below.
he room’s uniied surfaces open a discourse about real space. he fruits poised to fall on you make you realize how your body takes primacy and focus by occupying the centre of the imaginary space. Like the Room of the Giants, this artistry synthesizes real, lived presence and imaginary or historical space. In Book I of his treatise Della Pitura Alberti describes the istoria painting as like an ‘open window’; perspective shows imaginary space beyond the wall surface.^9 Mantegna inverted his formula, and brought the imaginary depth to the inside, in front of the wall. his is why he painted false curtains on the third and fourth walls: to complete in detail the artiicial or imaginary space in which you are standing. He also painted draperies on the pictorial walls, but drawn back to reveal the Gonzaga dynasty to you, or to subject your momentary, vulnerable presence to their stable, eternal gaze.
Perspectiva, a Latin word, literally means ‘looking through.’ Mantegna’s closed curtains obliterate any picture-window transparency the wall might present, or perspectivally conceived depth. heir ‘double-negation’ restores to the wall its quality as
9 Della pitura e della statua di Leonbatista Alberti , Milano: Dalla Società Tipograica de’ Classici Italiani 1804, p. 28. “La prima cosa nel dipingere una supericie, io vi disegno un quadrangolo di angoli reti grande quanto a me piace, il quale mi serve per un’ aperta inestra dalla quale si abbia a veder l’istoria….”
an articulated plane, a sophisticated spatial thesis about a room, constructing the place of experience. Instead of the perspectival dematerialization of real architecture that opens a picture-window into imaginary space, Mantegna’s heavy curtains reclose that aperture in order to airm the material quality of the architectural stucco surface, but leave it ambiguously pliable and lowing with ornamental drapery.
In contrast to the Camera degli Sposi, the Room of the Giants uses a palpable screen of crude, crumbling rock and breaking architecture to rematerialize the space of the ‘picture-window;’ its painted geological ‘structure’ has a dense, solid thickness. his is not Alberti’s infrathin picture window that cleanly separates real and imaginary space from each other as if by a sheet of glass, nor Mantegna’s delicate pilasters and paterned curtains. he two rooms, the noble and the rustic, run full of parallels and enjoy a subterranean conversation about space as the arena in which mater transforms. Giulio’s last ‘postcard to Mantegna’ in the Room of the Giants is his ‘reclosing’ the oculus open to the sky with the dome of the Ionic temple.
he courtyard of Palazzo del Te reads like an outdoor room with its coherent revetment, staging the same forces and conlicts, materialized in the architectural surface, within which imaginary space opens up as tactile, not just visual. he gods are played by the Doric order with its austere masculine precision; the giants by the brawny Rustic. Each rough block, each deepening of the plane, is a victory for the Earthborn; each smooth element stabilizing the surface, clarifying form, one for Jupiter. Every visible rhythm and symmetry belongs to the Olympians, every rupture of Vitruvian order to the giants. he rising keystones, spliting apart the pediments as they press upwards, those are chthonic forces forcing their way into the heavens. he dropping triglyphs, centred on each bay of the west courtyard façade, taking chunks of the trabeation down with them: the thunderbolts hurled from above. he building’s faces are the Gigantomachy: neither a fresco nor a sculptural frieze, but an architecture staging the batle of the powers of Form and Mater. If we move up a scale, we see the same patern: the architectural skin of the façade is ‘at war’ with an expansive
