Slovak National Gallery, Esterházy Palace, Bratislava; arrangement of two rooms at the reviewed exhibition. Photograph: Sylvia Sternmullerová

Slovak National Gallery, Esterházy Palace, Bratislava; arrangement of two rooms at the reviewed exhibition. Photograph: Sylvia Sternmullerová

Slovak National Gallery, Esterházy Palace, Bratislava; arrangement of a room at the reviewed exhibition. Photograph: Sylvia Sternmullerová

Slovak National Gallery, Esterházy Palace, Bratislava; arrangement of a room at the reviewed exhibition. Photograph: Sylvia Sternmullerová

Architectura delineata et sculpta: The Image of Architecture in 16th–18th Century Graphic Arts
Curator: Martin Čičo

Bratislava, Slovak National Gallery, Esterházy Palace
31 March – 29 May 2011

The Slovak National Gallery’s exhibition ‘Architectura Delineata et Sculpta’ offers an in-depth overview of architectural imagery from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth century. The title reveals the variety of media in which architecture is presented—as the subject of drawings (delineata), paintings (picta), and, most frequently, prints (sculpta). The eighteen sections of the exhibition are, however, dedicated not to media but to architectural genres (vistas, ideal architecture, capriccios, and ruins, just to mention a few). The display allows other themes to cross over the divisions, which contributes to the overall richness of the show.

The exhibition begins with the definition of architecture as both a product of human industry and a field existing between science and art. This twofold definition is forcefully visualized in one of the first works encountered, a painting of the Tower of Babel by Nicolas Cochin and Balthasar Moncornet, where the huge construction progresses as a collaborative effort and at the same time dominates the workers.  An engraving of St. Sebaldus presents an alternative attitude. Here, the patron saint of architects holds the model of a church in his hands, and the engraving can be seen as denoting the control patrons and builders had over buildings. In this case, it is man who dominates architecture and not vice versa.

The second room houses two sections. In the first, titled ‘Architectural theory,’ curator Martin Čičo argues that modules and schemes of the classical orders, as evidenced in the many architectural treatises of the time (Serlio, Palladio, Vredeman de Vries, Scamozzi, Pozzo, and Vignola), contributed to the homogenizing of architectural thinking. Furthermore, these treatises presented architecture only according to three modalities: ground plans, sections, and elevations. The second section, ‘Ideal, occasional, and ephemeral architecture,’ focuses instead on a fourth modality of architectural representation: perspective renderings. Vredeman de Vries’s painting of the meeting between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba stages the royal encounter in front of a two-storey palace whose magnificence is emphasized by a sophisticated use of one-point perspective. Much of the other material in this section consists of prints, which played a decisive role in the spreading of architectural imagery, somewhat independently from the treatises and in a more popular way. The contiguous presentation of these two sections helps the viewer to focus on the differences between alternative approaches to representing buildings. This method of presentation also helps the viewer revaluate the importance of painters and engravers, whose images not only derived from existing architecture, but as often served architects as a source of inspiration.

The questions raised through the display of the other sections, although clearly articulated from a curatorial point of view, are not as intriguing. Yet those sections present visitors with a rich excursion, and with admirable variety, into sixteenth- to eighteenth-century architectural representation. As well as works of well-known artists such as Pozzo, Galli-Bibiena, and Piranesi, the display includes those of lesser known artists, such as Salomon Kleiner’s grand vistas of Vienna’s Belvedere and Gustav A. Wolfgang’s Illumination in Frankfurt, a rare case of a vista printed on silk.

The visual variety Čičo presents is praiseworthy. The show shrewdly makes use of electronic media: screens showing moving photographs of engravings, digital reproductions of treatises, and projections of paintings. One room, for example, reproduces the dome of Vienna’s Jezuitenkirche, painted in one-point perspective by Andrea Pozzo. All these devices greatly contribute to the visual experience. Nevertheless, the show would have been even more remarkable had the media been interactive. Electronic tools were there to be watched rather than used by visitors, generating passive reception rather than active participation.

‘Architectura Delineata et Sculpta’ is a comprehensive and stimulating survey of the many facets of architectural imagery in the early modern period. The same quality is also expressed in the exhibition catalogue, which opens with an essay by Čičo, as curator. All the contributors must be praised for the completeness of their information, even though the inclusion of more scholarly essays and different viewpoints would have improved the publication. A similar criticism can be made of the range of the institutions that contributed loans to the show. Čičo involved Slovakia’s most important cultural centres, such as the Historic Museum, the Slovak National Archive, the East Slovakian Museum Košice, the Červený Kameň Museum, the University Library in Bratislava, and the West-Slovakian Museum in Trnava. Collaboration with foreign cultural institutions would have refined the result, however, especially in view of the wide geographical scope of the phenomenon of architectural imagery, a phenomenon whose cultural impact changed from region to region. Such a broader cooperation might also have provided answers to questions about the attribution and influence of the many anonymous works on display.

Eva Kotláriková
[Comenius University]
Bratislava, Slovakia

Publication related to the exhibition:
Martin Čičo, ed., Architectura delineata et sculpta: Obraz architektúry v grafike 16. –18. storočia, Bratislava: Slovenská národná galéria, 2011, 112 pp., colour and b/w ill., € 9.30, ISBN 978-80-8059-158-8 (with a summary in English)