Piranesi Semper Warburg: Three Views on the Trajectories of Architecture through Time

Caroline van Eck, Cambridge University

At first sight Piranesi, Semper and Warburg have nothing to do with each other. Semper hardly, if ever, mentioned Piranesi. In Warburg’s vast collections of images there was no etching by Piranesi; nor was his interest in Semper very extensive. Yet when looking a little longer, it turns out they do have much in common, and their shared interests have much to say, in my view, about the present state, or predicament, of architectural history. Put in the most brief terms, what they have in common are their attempts to think, or in the case of Piranesi, to figure, the history of buildings, artefacts and images as a trajectory of objects through time. In that sense they all break with the dominant mode of doing history in their times, which is to produce narratives that connect events, actions and the lives of persons.Their shared rejection of historical narrative as the main vehicle of historcal enquiry led to the development of three new approaches to the history of images, of architecture, and of artefacts in general, that are object-based, and focus on understanding the trajectories of artefacts through time and space, whether they are buildings, tapestries, or objects that carry images, with all the loops, returns, exiles and dead ends of these trajectories. In that respect, as I hope to show here, they have much to tell us today, now that there appears an increasing divide between architectural history, mainly practised by architects and other designers on side, and art history and other artefactual disciplines, such as archaeology or anthropology or heritage studies on the other.BiographyCaroline van Eck studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and classics and philosophy at Leiden University.In 1994 she obtained her PhD in aesthetics (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam. She has taught at the Universities of Amsterdam, Groningen and Leiden, where she was appointed Professor of Art and Architectural History in 2006. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art at Yale University, and a Visiting Professor in Ghent, Yale and York. In September 2016 she took up her appointment as Professor of Art History at Cambridge, and in 2017 she gave the Slade Lectures in Oxford on Piranesi’s late candelabra: ‘The Material Presence of Absent Antiquities: Collecting Excessive Objects and the Revival of the Past’. Her main research interests are art and architectural history and theory of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century; classical reception;

the anthropology of art; Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Gottfried Semper and Aby Warburg. Recent publications include Classical Rhetoric and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Art, Agency and Living Presence. From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Munich and Leiden: Walter De Gruyter/Leiden University Press, 2015); ‘Art Works that Refuse to Behave: Agency, Excess and Material Presence in Canova and Manet’, New Literary History, 46 (2015), pp. 409-34; ‘The Hôtel de Beauharnais in Paris: Egypt, Rome, and the dynamics of cultural transformation’, in: K. von Stackelberg and E. Macaulay-Lewis (eds.), Housing the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016);’The Primal Scene of Architecture: Gottfried Semper and Alfred Gell on the Origins of Art, Style and Agency’, Revue Germanique

Internationale 26 (2017), and Restoring Antiquity in a Globalizing World: Piranesi’s Late Work and the Genesis of the Empire Style (Munich: DKV,2019).

In 2014 she received the Prix Descartes-Huygens, awarded by the Académie des Sciences, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in France and the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences; in 2015 she was made a Chevalier of the Ordre National du Mérite, and in the same year she received the Grand Prix du Rayonnement de la Littérature et Culture Françaises, awarded by the Académie Française. In 2016 she received a honorary doctorate from the University of Neuchâtel.