Keeping It Real: Michael Baxandall and Social Art History

Martin Luther’s reformation in Wittenburg, northern Germany around the turn of the sixteenth century saw little of the dramatic violence towards iconography associated with Henry VIII’s England. Huldrych Zwingli in the south however, redoubled his determination to stamp out images in churches, becoming ever more fanatical in his fight against idolatry. But for all his efforts and those of the fiercely iconoclast Anabaptists the removal of church idols was not necessarily the marauding bands of protestant soldiers smashing and burning statues. Many of the retables of Augsberg and Ulm were rather removed quietly, in plenty of notice and stored safely to await more tolerant times. It is the reconstruction of the social climate that surrounds this historical moment that Michael Baxandall uses to illustrate his investigation into the function of sculpture in the Germany of 1470s – 1520s.

Baxandall’s method of art history reconstructs the socio-economic, political and cultural environment within which the artwork was made, reflecting the lives of the people who made, commissioned, and saw it. It is a method that employs a representation of the protocols and attitudes of the age by using literary and contractual evidence - offering clues about the society that produced the art. It is in contrast to earlier art historical techniques in that it does not seek to construct history to explain works of art, indeed Baxandall is deeply suspicious of such determinist systems and avoids concrete and absolute explanations of any sort, preferring to observe similarities between contemporary cultural phenomena. This position is evident in the preface to The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, ‘The suggestion is not that one must know about Renaissance Germany to enjoy the sculpture, but that the sculpture can offer a fresh focus on the cultural history of Renaissance Germany.’

In his earlier Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy Baxandall quotes contemporary literature in a bid to gauge the mentality of the age towards art. He quotes Fra Michele da Carcano’s explanation of the function of artwork in churches:

Know that there were three reasons for institution of images in churches. First, for the instruction of simple people, for they are instructed by them as if by books. Second, so that the mystery of the incarnation and the examples of the saints may be more active in our memory through being presented daily to our eyes. Third, to excite feelings of devotion, these being aroused more effectively by things seen than by things heard.

Baxandall discusses the text, summarising its content and then exposing potential problems of idolatry that accompany the inclusion of images in churches. He enlists further texts from eminent clergymen of the time on this matter before taking the essential question ‘what was the function of painting in churches?’ and reformulating it into the more focussed ‘what sort of painting would the religious public have found lucid, vividly memorable, and emotionally moving?’ This provides the impetus for the rest of the book.

The controversy surrounding Idolatry was far more vehement and consequential in Germany around the turn of the sixteenth century. Baxandall recreates the volatile atmosphere using contemporary literature of the time from reformers, clergy and guilds to provide samples of the confusion and political opinion, before going on to explore its impact upon art. Michael Hirst’s article Michelangelo in Florence: ‘David’ in 1503 and ‘Hercules’ in 1506 is a prime example of how twenty first century art historians have utilised this approach. Hirst builds a chronology of this part of Michelangelo’s career based on a rigorous investigation of surviving contracts, describing such details as deadlines and purchase of materials. This leads Hirst into a discussion concerning the placement of David, public acclaim and its never realised companion statue of Hercules.

The genre of the winged retable, such as the one in the Benedictine Abbey Church by Michael Erhart in Blaubereun, is prominent in the High alters of churches in southern Germany and constitutes the main focus of Limewood Sculptors. Baxandall shows that they were commissioned and paid for by a collective public effort and therefore represent a collective expression of the community. He identifies the importance of ‘the cult of municipal patron saints’ as establishing ‘a sense of unity, of common goals and the need to stand and work together, was something that every city needed if it was to survive’. This religious fervour sometimes became more than the church could control, as in the cult of St Sebald in Nuremburg which had gained a massive following but was however, utterly ‘vulgar’. The church felt obliged to commission Sigismund Meisterlin to write a history for him more in line with the decorum befitting a saint. Baxandall also recounts an episode where the iconography of the church was employed for more sinister ends. He tells of a story about how the people of Regensburg, jealous of their financial success, expelled all Jews from their town. They razed the synagogue to the ground, during which one of the workers hired for the demolition was seriously injured but miraculously recovered. A church was subsequently built which housed a painting of the virgin accompanied by a statue of her outside. More miracles followed, apparently performed by the images, consequently attracting thousands of pilgrims. For Baxandall this story is one of bigotry and manipulation but is provided as a kind of darkly twisted example of how artwork can operate under certain circumstances.

This line of enquiry was treated with suspicion by Ernst Gombrich who felt that Baxandall’s method seemed like a re-presentation of Zeitgeist and the Hegelian Metaphysics that it implied. Gombrich suspected that Baxandall was trying to conjure a ‘spirit of the age’ explanation in his work, relying on vague notions of how groups of people can share a collective spiritual harmony. This attack would seem erroneous and unwarranted when we consider Baxandall’s meticulous collection of facts and empirical evidence. However a further rift may be evident in Gombrich’s interest in scientific methods. His use of the Ockham’s razor principle would have been at odds with Baxandall’s method of collecting an abundance of material but drawing no definite conclusions from it.

Baxandall paints a picture of the uncertainty of these years, the emergence of opposing blocs for iconoclasm and reform against the mercantile classes reluctant to break relations with Charles V. He alludes to the intricacies of the interest of relevant groups and fraternities but resists any determinate explanation saying ‘It is the kind of historical shift of mind least possible to reconstruct’. Baxandall prefers to present arguments made by the people involved. He draws our attention to ecclesiastical literature that explains the church’s view on why religious iconography does not contravene the second commandment, citing a document called Preceptorium of 1452:

If it is said under the Old Law God had no image and that this was a sign for the New Law, the answer is that, if God had not afterwards become Man, then indeed he should not have had images.

The crux of the problem lay within individual’s inability to distinguish between Christ and a statue of Christ. In praying to the statue they were committing the sin of idolatry. Sebastian Franck and Erasmus were amongst the intellectuals that ridiculed the church’s stance on this and demanded reform. The reformers openly mocked the icons and demanded their removal from churches across Germany. The reformation in southern Germany halted the commissioning of High Alter retables by the elite. However Baxandall points out that the market was practically exhausted anyway; there were only a finite number of churches to make retables for. Retables lasted a very long time if properly looked after and sculptors left very detailed and specific instructions for their maintenance. The sculptors were left redundant. Unable to earn a living as carpenters because of strong guild restrictions the sculptors were forced to eke out a living making secular objects. This was not entirely new, there had always been a market for secular art in southern Germany and Baxandall here identifies the emergence of three specific genres from what were previously artworks performing ‘minor, residual functions’. The fleshy cabinet piece, fountains and portraits became the sculptors’ stock in trade.

Mieke Bal discusses genre labels as mastercodes for reading artwork, ‘promoting distinct although interacting, modes of reading’. Bal’s method of reading art in identifies genre as an important component before testing it with a close reading of the semiotics of the work. For Baxandall genre is more problematic, the demise of the religious statue and the rise of these three new genres is seen as an added complication by Baxandall. He takes care to clarify his definition of ‘genre’ and ‘function’, also outlining the problematic relationship the two notions have. Baxandall describes how genre can consume artworks and leave individual qualities in each of them unnoticed because the viewer arbitrarily recognises the genre and associates all the characteristics of it to the work without looking to see the details specific to that work. In this respect genre can conventionalise artworks and subsume them into its own ‘local histories and internal dialogues’. Alternatively an artwork may become conspicuous because it works against the genre, amplifying its meaning and communication to the viewer. For Baxandall this makes it more difficult to recognise the difference between conscious motives and actual consequences, a dichotomy located within the function of artworks.

The role that strong patronage can play in the connection between genre and the function of a work of art is taken up by Sarah Blake McHam in her article Donatello’s ‘David’ and ‘Judith’ as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence, discussing how Medici patronage employed Donatello’s bronze sculptures David and Judith and Holofernes to exploit Florentine public opinion. Referring to the writings of John of Salisbury as a pervasive influence upon fifteenth-century Florence, she constructs a mental climate where the debate about the legitimacy of tyranicide engages peoples’ thoughts and public debates. The Medici commissioned the sculptures in order to convince the Florentine public that they were ‘celebrators, even preservers, of Florentine liberty against any threat.’ This façade of being actively democratic was essential for the Medici whilst they were covertly moving towards a tyrannical regime of their own, ‘taking harsh measures to suppress any opposition.’ McHam’s account of the ‘powerful’ Medici message informing Donatello’s work and its function resembles Baxandall’s work in its methodology, it extends beyond the cultural developments of Quattrocento Florence and seeks information from the social and political climate. However, McHam’s paper sets out to provide a determinist explanation, something that Baxandall was careful to avoid. She closes her argument by assigning a deterministic conception and function to the works of art, ‘The program discussed here provides another instance of the family’s carefully calculated and sophisticated use of artistic patronage to further its goal of maintaining power in Florence.’ The Medici plan was not entirely successful, Jacob Burckhart’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance tells us that after the Giuliano de Medici had been assassinated, public opinion had shifted:

Judith with the dead Holofernes – was taken from their [Medici] collection and placed in the Palazzo della Signoria…with the inscription ‘Exemplum salutis publicae cives posuere 1495’ (The citizens erected [this statue] as an example for the public good).

Despite the symbolic power of art in Italy, the Italians had none of the problems experienced in Germany in their handling of idolatry. In Painting and Experience Baxandall uses an idea similar to Gombrich’s ‘The Beholder’s share’, in an elegant explanation of how Italian Quattrocento painting avoided idolatry. Baxandall tells us that painters developed schemata of generalised images, the figures were not individuals but generic, formulaic representations. Therefore when people viewed them they were not confronted by, for instance, Christ and His disciples, as in Masaccio’s The Tribute Money, but by an image of a group of men that reminded them of the Christ and His disciples, engaged in an already known Biblical narrative. The viewer was required to see the specific face in their minds, suggested by the generic image on the canvas. This meant that people were not worshiping the image, but using the image to inform their inner concept of Christ, the Virgin or the Saints.

The function of an artwork takes place as a dialogue between patron, artist and viewer, and so it is important to establish the position of the viewer - the public. Baxandall gives us an account of how most of the reformers are the urban poor. He describes the elusive and sinister organisation known as the Anabaptists, how they’re violent iconoclasm terrified the city. Although he also goes on to describe the power of the city councils, made up of merchants and the wealthy, he eschews the assignment of untangling the loyalties and motivations of the councils with the complexities and infinite permutations of allegiance. Baxandall’s aversion of a determinist explanation leads him to avoid a conclusion based on socio-economic circumstances. In stopping short of the ‘class war’ argument Baxandall has drawn criticism from T.J. Clark who sees Baxandall’s work as lacking the courage to make firm conclusions:

Experience being a code word for a kind of art history which feels the need to refer to those historical realities with which artist and patron are constantly in contact but which dare not name the nature of that contact – ideology, class…

Clark’s own methods require an economic explanation of social dynamics beyond the reductive Marxism of Antal and Hauser, but he rejects the possibility of writing social art history without a general theory of the structure of a capitalist economy. He sees Baxandall's work as a kind of cowardice, floating in an indeterminate hinterland. But Clark’s criticism is perhaps illustrative of a mentality based on him taking a position and then setting out to prove it. This method is problematic for art history. Walter Benjamin’s warning that all history is constructed by historians from an eclectic, even subjective selection of facts highlights the dangers of ideology. Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson have also argued that contexts are created and edited and cannot be taken as hard truth.

Baxandall’s commitment to authenticity is exemplified in his most acclaimed achievement, his concept of the ‘Period Eye’:

There is no question of fully possessing oneself of another culture’s cognitive style, but the profit is real: one tests and modifies one’s perception of the art, one enriches one’s general visual repertory, and one gets at least some intimation of another culture’s visual experience and disposition.

This is Michael Baxandall’s essential point. This realisation frees him of the obligation to discover the reasons why an artwork was made and allows him to investigate what may have contributed to its conception and fashioning. It is a process of discovery that does not need justification; it is passive and yet thought provoking, non-committal yet informative. Gombrich’s criticism of his method as approaching the metaphysical disregards Baxandall’s extraordinary research skills and deep commitment to finding empirical source material. Any ideas that lay outside material evidence are merely hinted at or suggested, never put forward as determinant. T.J. Clark’s attack is the reverse, that Baxandall is not confident enough in putting forward ideological hypotheses, having clearly amassed substantial evidence for doing so. But Baxandall does not need a cause, he simply seeks to explore areas of social history and its connection with the production of art, he does not wish to explain it emphatically.

For Baxandall, as well as Hirst, McHam and others who came after him, the function of an artwork is what brings together patrons and artists as makers of art, and the public as receivers of art. This is a massively important dynamic as it explains the motivations for how a work of art came to exist and operate in the world. It involves the attitudes of a cross section of society; religious orders and fraternities, laymen and merchants. The emergence of genres is intrinsically linked to function, the two affecting and modifying each other. Particular works of art will fall into, and be conventionalised by, a genre. In return the function of art gives genre its definition.







Bibliography



Mieke Bal, A Mieke Bal Reader, (University of Chicago Press lt., London, 2006) p 313.



Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson ‘Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Context and Senders’ / from Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1998)



Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (Yale University

Press, New Haven and London, 1980)



Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford University Press, 1972)



Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (Phaidon Press,1945, 1995) p41-42.



E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Phaidon Press ltd, fifth edition 1977) p168.



Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art Histroy A Critical Introduction to its Methods (Manchester University Press, 2006) p135.



Michael Hirst, ‘Michelangelo in Florence: ‘David’ in 1503 and ‘Hercules’ in 1506, The Burlington Magazine, Vol 142, No. 1169 (Aug., 2000)



Allan Langdale, ‘Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye’, Art History, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December 1998



Sarah Blake McHam, ‘Donatello’s “David” and “Judith” as metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence’, The Art Bulletin, Vol 83, No. 1 (Mar., 2001)



David Summers, ‘Form’, Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description’, 1989 / from Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1998)

Renovatio Urbis: Doge Andrea Gritti's transformation of Venice.

There can be no more obvious manifestation of economic success than the emergence and growth of the big city. The city is the manifestation of extraordinary human ambition, realised through surplus of means:

From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while control of their disbursement typically lies in a few hands. This general situation persists under capitalism, of course; but since urbanization depends on the mobilisation of surplus product, an intimate connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization.

The ‘intimate connection’ that Harvey refers to is the primary interest of Italian architect and historian Manfredo Tafuri. Tafuri’s book Venice and the Renaissance investigates the tension that was created around the notions of mediocritas, the traditional Venetian idea of modesty in architecture, and novitas, the new style introduced to Venice following the sack of Rome in1527. This clash of ideologies happens at a particularly fruitful time for Venice, under the dogeship of Andrea Gritti, igniting his renovatio urbis or renewal of the city. The history and atmosphere that surrounds the famous city suggests itself to Tafuri’s method of juxtaposing conflicting positions. It is a city proud of its republican origins, its principles derived from the great Roman republic of antiquity and yet proud of its individuality and independence. Jacob Burkhardt attests to this independence as an extreme, almost a siege mentality, ‘The Keynote of Venetian character was, consequently, a spirit of proud and contemptuous isolation, which, joined to the hatred felt for the city by other states of Italy, gave rise to a strong sense of solidarity within.’ Whilst Venice celebrated itself as a utopian city, the Serenissima, with civic freedom and equality cherished, paradoxically there was also an urge to be the Alter Roma, the successor to papal Rome. Venice is therefore a city of contradictions.

The first Venetian houses of stone and brick were built around the turn of the first millennium. The city’s wealth and size was growing exponentially due to astute trading enterprises and masonry was a material that could withstand the many fires that came with the increased population. The architecture of the time was republican, that is to say that it was modest and unassuming. Patricians were encouraged to adhere to a law passed by one of the founders of Venice, Zeno Daulo, who instructed people to build houses of equal size, therefore putting on a display of republican solidarity and constraint. The palazzos were built along the canals, usually with a central corridor and the façade at right angles in a ‘T’-shape, the crossbar of the ‘T’ adjacent to the canal. By the twelfth century these canal facades had been rebuilt in a more decorative fashion, sporting tesserae and such ornament, however when compared with Florentine and Roman architecture, buildings such as Ca’ Da Mosto retain a modesty consistent with mediocritas. Once patrician class palazzo’s were built, the spaces in between were filled with buildings of equal size, but as housing blocks, providing homes for four or five families.

Political influence is at the heart of Tafuri’s investigation, he looks at the patrician class for the political and economic reasons for the cultural developments. Tafuri’s adherence to a method of describing architecture in terms of political power echoes Marx’s assertion that the state is not independent of economic conditions, it is in fact created by them. ‘The state is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests.’

Extremely rigorous in its research, Tafuri’s working method is typical of a Marxist insistence of material evidence, however his approach to architectural history is not entirely consistent with Marxism, indeed it takes on a particular form of neo-Marxism. T.J. Clark, provides a platform for neo-Marxist art historians by establishing ‘a hierarchy of representations’ in order to avoid the pitfalls of ‘vulgar Marxism.’ In this Clark refers to certain strands of Marxist thought that cannot see past the empirical economic considerations as determinant in human activity, alluding to the paradox inherent in the notion of empirical economics. The art of an era is therefore a set of signs, indicative of class structure - consistent with Tafuri’s thinking. Tomas Llorens has pointed out that Tafuri’s writing takes the form of a palimpsest, a collection of individual passages of thinking, with connections made and presented as a coherent whole. It is clear that Tafuri’s writing does not follow a chronologically linear sequence; instead it is an abrupt intervention into a historical situation in the form of a series of dialectics to present argument and counter argument. The various strands of investigation are then linked together as in Engels’ theory, derived from Darwin’s observations, that apparently diverse things are linked by an underlying principle. The palimpsest methodology eschews the description of cultural continuity that was so dreaded by Walter Benjamin and David Summers, avoiding the dangers of the ‘political and moral anaesthesia’ endemic in such destructive ideologies as Fascism.

Tafuri relishes the conflict between protagonists and commentators, weaving complex arguments into each other, complicating his text with diverse and convoluted lines of inquiry. This is evident in his treatment of Jacopo Sansovino’s design for the interior of the church of San Francesco della Vigna. Tafuri identifies the problem of Sansovino's reluctance to use al’ antica in favour of a true linguistic austerity in the interior architecture. He establishes a dialectic that can only be resolved by searching Sansovino’s personality. Tafuri uses Sansovino’s building of the church of San Martino as a test case that will provide an explanation for San Francesco della Vigna. We are warned by Tafuri that this investigation will take us far from the original inquiry, his motive for doing so however is to prove that both churches have been designed according to Sansovino’s own design, free from any overbearing influence. Tafuri continuously tests his findings exploring such things as financial inequality between San Martino and Francesca della Vigna as well as interventions from other architects after Sansovino’s death, eventually arriving at the conviction that the interior of San Martino is faithful to the vision of Sansovino’s model. Following the ‘concentric circles’ of enquiry, Tafuri finds ‘…within such formal silence…’ windows that are original designs by Sansovino from the Badoer-Guistinian chapel in Francesca della Vigna, providing material evidence of a connection between the two churches. With this Tafuri has established Sansovino’s investment of his own aesthetic into these two buildings.

Refusing to accept the reductive notion that San Martino’s austerity is due entirely to a lack of funds, Tafuri launches an exploration into Erasmus’ call for religious reform and Savonarola’s call for religious asceticism. He discusses the ‘explicitly reformist’ Zorzi, Sansovino’s collaborator on San Francesco della Vigna, as well as the friendships with Serlio, the prominent architectural advisor to Gritti, and Lorenzo Lotto the painter with reformist connections. These men were all in favour of an interiorized worship of God, living dangerously on the cusp of Lutheranism, opposed to Catholic dogma under the shadow of the inquisition. It is this connection with reformist religion that Tafuri ultimately suggests as an influence upon the stylistic austerity of San Martino and San Francesco della Vigna.

In his review of Venice and the Renaissance, Martin Lowry expresses doubt about Tafuri’s evaluation of Sansovino’s influence saying: ‘professor Tafuri works hard – perhaps a little too hard – to bring the architect Sansovino under the influence of Erasmus’s anti-Romanism’ adding that he finds it ‘a little contrived’. But Lowry seems to be making this criticism a priori whilst ironically in the same article praising Tafuri’s investigative rigour in bringing ‘formidable qualities’ to a ‘formidable task’. A much more helpful contribution comes from Deborah Howard who has proffered an alternative explanation for the austerity of Sansovino’s design. She points out that San Francesco della Vigna was built for the ‘Observant Franciscans’, so called because of their strict observation to the life and teachings of St Francis of Assissi, renowned as a fervent ascetic. She points out that order had already intervened in the building of the church with Zorzi’s adjustment of the plans to include his neo-platonic thinking. Howard’s assertion represents the antithesis to Tafuri’s notion of Sansovino's motives for the interior of the church. By offering an alternative explanation for the style of the interior she sets up a tension between her account and Tafuri’s. A synthesis of the two arguments emerges in the idea that Sansovino’s exposure to reformist thought equipped him with the versatility, attested to by both Tafuri and Howard, to complete the commission to a design suitable for the needs of the patron.

For Tafuri Doge Gritti is of critical importance in the development of Venice. He represents the key to the historical development of the republic. Tafuri first sets up the mediocritas of Niccolo Zen as the primary example of traditional Venetian republican values, whilst also alluding to Zen’s acceptance of a need for change. Tafuri goes on to establish a mobilised opposition to this in the activity of Grimani and his circle, loyal to the pope rather than the republic, who wish to adopt a policy of private magnificence in architecture akin to that of Rome. Morosini and Patrizi wrote of the perfect solution to government being a state ruled by a select few – an oligarchy. They felt a deep mistrust of the multitude and advocated that it was important for a state to display power and wealth through magnificent architecture as a show of strength to induce fear in rival states. This collides with the republican values of equality exemplified in the notion of the mixed state, which was intended to neutralize social dynamism and therefore provide a peaceful and stable state. Tafuri’s alignment of Zen to Gritti is later balanced by Gaetano Cozzi’s observation that Gritti is the model of Morosini’s ‘prince’ – Zen and Morosini therefore represent two polemically opposed figures, both satisfied and allied to the doge from different positions. Tafuri’s interweaving of argument and counterargument, his juxtaposition of cultural phenomena and theological values builds up the tension between these camps and is eventually relieved by the emergence of doge Gritti’s renovatio as the outcome of these opposing blocs.

It is the vision and dynamism of such men as Gritti that the urban space has come to dominate societies. One of the major achievements of the Victorian period in England was the development of railways. The original proposal of the construction of a railway between Liverpool and Manchester incited furious complaints and objections from the canals, Turnpike Trusts, coach companies and farmers. The protests succeeded in delaying the process but William Huskisson, a Liverpool M.P., countered that the canals were holding industry to ransom. Eventually Huskisson’s determination won through and permission was granted. The enterprise was an immediate success ’…setting the pattern for all later railway companies’, and providing a more efficient transport system that would properly facilitate the growing industry in the country. It was however private money that bought the cattle market in Liverpool for £9,000 and built Lime Street Railway Station.

Accusations of legal swindling, bordering on deception were common. Land owners who had valued their property in a different way to the railways threatened legal actions and circulated literature that complained of the railways despicable tactics and even offered legal advice to land owners. Despite the controversy the network grew from a mere twenty seven miles of track in 1825 to a staggering fifteen-thousand, five hundred in 1880 with a total capital investment of nearly seven hundred million pounds, returning sixty-two million pounds in revenue. The Liverpool Manchester Railway earned £463,970 net profit by 1836. The government recognised a massive advantage to the economy and passed two-hundred and nineteen Acts of Parliament in 1846 alone in order to help the railways grow. There was a massive boost to employment as well as the public also saw the advantages, by 1875 a quarter of a million people were permanently employed by the railway companies. Furthermore the public began to use trains to travel across the country as an affordable mode of transport. This public use eventually displaced industry as the primary use of the railways, helping to popularise seaside towns, aiding the growth of suburbs, permitting mass circulation of national newspapers and prompted the growth of a fast and efficient mail service.

The importance of Lime Street station became obvious as the main link between Liverpool, one of the country’s biggest ports and Manchester and Leeds – the centres of the massive textiles industry. It was the private sector that originally speculated the capital to build the rail network, the government who supported it by legislation and the public who benefited through jobs and cheap transport and ultimately industrialists who profited from a massively more efficient transport system. Lime Street was added to and received a curved, single span roof in 1849, at a cost of fifteen-thousand pounds. Made in a Dublin ironworks, it was the first time such a structure had covered the railway and was the largest iron roof used on any building. .

Sansovino’s success in San Francesca della Vigna lies in his remarkable sensitivity to the needs of the patron and his versatility in meeting these needs. For the revitalisation of Piazzo San Marco on the banks of the lagoon, Sansovino was commissioned to rebuild the Zecco, the City Library to house the books bequeathed by Cardinal Bessarion and the Logetta for meetings of nobles.

The Zecco was to maintain the shops on the ground floor with the republic’s mint, the Zecco, on the first floor, Sansovino contrasted a rustic architecture for the shops with the piano nobile of heavy lintels and half columns. The effect was to emphasise, by contrast with the al rustica of the ground floor, the power and strength of the mint. The library is a virtuoso performance of roman influenced architecture, a spectacular expanse of columns bedecked with ornament and sculptures. The building is adjacent to the mint and cuts a fine and beautiful contrast to the heavy and imposing Zecco. Equally ostentatious, the Logetta is a triumph of decorative design that, along with the mint and the library, transformed Piazza San Marco into one of the most beautiful urban spaces in Europe, rivalling St. Peters and achieving the desired effect, to re-invent Rome on Venetian soil. Gritti and Sansovino had renewed Venice. And yet after Gritti’s death Sansovino’s work fell into decline, perhaps a victim of his own success. Paradoxically towards the end of his life his buildings became ever more ascetic and his mediocritas vision gave way to the roman style that he had introduced so successfully to the fabric of Venetian life. Architects with even more flamboyant sensibilities, most notably, Andrea Palladio became prominent in major commissions. Kept on the margins of the renovatio urbis by Gritti, the subsequent doge gave free reign to Palladio’s talents resulting in such magnificent works as the Palazzo Chiericati, casting aside all notions of mediocritas.

Throughout Venice and the Renaissance Tafuri juxtaposes the autonomy of architecture and the instruction of Venice’s constitutional republic. His is a method of positing a fact and then testing it as rigorously as he can, gaining access to a hard won but worthy truth. It is a sensibility that engenders nihilistic thought at its extremes, reflecting Tafuri’s interest in Nietzsche. Tafuri’s nihilism exists in his commitment to the notion of ‘negative thought’. It was this way of thinking that led to his effort to surmount traditional Marxism whilst a member of the Italian Communist Party. His arrival at the conclusion that negative thought was the only option left after the traditional avant-garde had become predictable, almost decadent in its opposition to the bourgeois. T.J. Clark shares this neo-Marxist aversion to ideology saying that ‘ideology is an inertness to discourse’, saying that ideology is merely a set of limitations and restrictions to thought and debate. For Tafuri, in order for an ideology to be effective it needed to invert itself into negative thought – turning away from existing culture towards a utopian mission. By treating his work with such intellectual rigour and constant re-examination Tafuri is attempting to surmount the trappings of false consciousness that he so despised in lazy ideology. It is a tortuous manner of working, however a necessary one for Tafuri, to get to the ‘silent’ places where the real truths are. The rivers of ink that had been used to describe Venice over the years had not penetrated these places and had not found the truths; this was Tafuri’s mandate to himself.







Bibliography

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (Phaidon Press,1945, 1995)



T.J. Clark ‘The Painting of Modern Life’: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers’ (London, Thames and Hudson, 1985) pp3-22 and pp. 271-2. / from Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris, Art in Modern Culture (Phaidon Press Limited,1992)



Harvey, David, New Left Review, (Sept / Oct 2008)



Morrison, Ken, Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of Social Thought (Sage, 2005)



Tafuri, Manfredo, Venice and the Renaissance (MIT Press 1995)



Lowry, Martin, The Burlington Magazine, vol 129, no 1008, (mar1987)



Llorens, Tomas, ‘Manfredo Tafuri: Neo Avant Garde and History / from Porphyrios, D., On the Methodology of Arhitectural History (London: Academy Editions, 1981)



David Summers, ‘Form’, Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description’, 1989 / from Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1998)



Deborah Howard, The Architectural History of Venice (Yale University Press, 1980)



Tim Benton, A840 Chapter 5, Open University



Malcolm Falkus, Britain Transformed: An Economic and Social History (Causeway Press Ltd. 1987)



Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1914 (Methuen & co Ltd., 1969)



Francis Withshaw, ‘The Manchester and Leeds Railway’ from Railways of Great Britain and Ireland, 1842 / Alistair Clayre ed., Nature and Industrialisation (Oxford University Press 1977)



Harold Pollins, ‘The Finances of The Liverpool and Manchester Railway’, The Economic History Review, New Series, vol. 5, No. 1 (1952)



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