The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories. We might even follow the example of the Countess of Mount Edgcumbe, who in the late eighteenth century had a thirty-foot-high Neoclassical obelisk erected on a hill on the outskirts of Plymouth, in memory of an unusually sensitive pig called Cupid, whom she did not hesitate to call a true friend.
Top: Neolithic burial chamber, Pentre Ifan, western Pembrokeshire, c. 2000 BC
Below: Memorial to Cupid, Plymouth, c. 1790
The desire to remember unites our reasons for building for the living and for the dead. As we put up tombs, markers and mausoleums to memorialise lost loved ones, so do we construct and decorate buildings to help us recall the important but fugitive parts of ourselves. The pictures and chairs in our homes are the equivalents – scaled for our own day, attuned to the demands of the living – of the giant burial mounds of Palaeolithic times. Our domestic fittings, too, are memorials to identity.
12.
We may occasionally and guiltily experience the desire to create a home as a wish to vaunt ourselves in front of others. But only if the truest parts of ourselves were egomaniacal would the urge to build be dominated by the need to boast. Instead, at its most genuine, the architectural impulse seems connected to a longing for communication and commemoration, a longing to declare ourselves to the world through a register other than words, through the language of objects, colours and bricks: an ambition to let others know who we are – and, in the process, to remind ourselves.
Ideals
1.
In 1575 the city of Venice commissioned the artist Paolo Veronese to paint a new ceiling for the great hall in the Doge’s Palace, the Sala del Collegio, where the magistracy held its deliberations, and where dignitaries and ambassadors were received.
The resulting work was a sumptuous celebration, in allegorical form, of Venetian government. In a central panel Veronese depicted the city as a sober, beautiful queen of the seas, attended by two ladies-in-waiting, one of whom symbolised justice (she was carrying a pair of scales) and the other peace (she had a sleepy but not unferocious-seeming lion on a leash – just in case). Smaller panels around the edges portrayed supplementary Venetian virtues. Meekness showed a young blonde with an obedient sheep resting its front feet on her lap. Next to her, in Fidelity, a melancholic brunette stroked the neck of a St Bernard. Across from these was Prosperity, represented by a ruddy-cheeked, slightly chubby woman in a low-cut dress, holding a cornucopia overflowing with apples, grapes and oranges. And opposite her was Moderation, in which a sturdy maiden with braided hair and one exposed breast smiled impassively as she plucked out the feathers of a vicious-looking eagle (most likely standing in for the Turks or the Spanish). To judge from Veronese’s ceiling, there was little that was not just and peaceful, meek and faithful, about the Venetian Republic.
Paolo Veronese, Meekness, Sala del Collegio, Doge’s Palace, Venice, c. 1575
Paolo Veronese, The Triumph of Venice, Sala del Collegio
Andrea Palladio, Villa Rotonda, Veneto, 1580
On a plot of land not many miles away, in 1566, a scholar, courtier and merchant named Canon Paolo Almerico asked Veronese’s contemporary Andrea Palladio to build him a country house, to which he and his family might retreat to escape the intrigue and disease endemic to life on the republic’s lagoons. Palladio was impressed by how well Ancient Roman buildings had managed to embody the ideals of their society – orderliness, courage, self-sacrifice and dignity – and he wanted his own designs to promote a comparable Renaissance conception of nobility. The title page of his 1570 work The Four Books of Architecture would make this didactic ambition explicit, through an allegorical engraving which featured two maidens of architecture saluting the queen of virtue. The balanced façades of the Villa Rotonda, the grand house which Palladio conceived for Almerico, seemed to imply that in this one place on earth, amid the sunlit flatlands of the Veneto, the struggles and compromises of ordinary life had been overcome and supplanted by equilibrium and lucidity. Along the villa’s pediments and stairways, a sequence of life-sized statues by the sculptors Lorenzo Rubini and Giambattista Albanese gave human form to figures from classical mythology. Stepping out onto the terrace for a breath of air after reading a few chapters of Seneca or reviewing a contract from the Levant, the villa’s owner could raise his eyes to take in Mercury, the protector of commerce, Jupiter, the god of wisdom, or Vesta, the goddess of the hearth – and feel that, in his country dwelling, at least, the values closest to his heart had found lasting expression and glorification in stone.
From Palladio’s time forward, and due in large part to his example, the creation of houses which could reflect the ideals of their owners became a central ambition of architects throughout the West. In 1764 Lord Mansfield, England’s Lord Chief Justice, tasked Robert Adam with coordinating the refurbishment of the library at Kenwood, his house on Hampstead Heath, overlooking London. Under Adam’s direction, the library became an opulent consecration of the character of the most senior legal authority in the land. Its shelves were filled with volumes of Greek and Roman philosophy and history, and its ornate ceiling was inset with an allegorical oval. Entitled Hercules between Glory and the Passions, the vignette showed a young Hellenic hero, clearly a version of Mansfield himself, trying to decide whether to devote his life to pleasure (in the shape of three comely girls, one of whom was baring a plump thigh) or to follow the path of sacrifice to a worthy civic cause (personified by a soldier who pointed towards a Classical temple). The viewer was given to understand that civic virtue would win the tussle – though the painting, with its masterly Italianate command of flesh tones, seemed covertly to be making a more compelling case for the alternative. Another section of the ceiling displayed Justice Embracing Peace, Commerce and Navigation (it looked like a much-longed-for reunion), while over the fireplace hung a portrait of Lord Mansfield by David Martin, who had chosen – or been directed – to portray him leaning against the Temple of Solomon (the wisest of all the kings of Israel), under the approving gaze of a bust of Homer (the greatest of all storytellers), with his right hand holding open a volume of Cicero (the noblest orator). Here was a man of biblical, Greek and Roman sagacity.