Hello,
my name is Basile Baudez and I am an assistant professor
of architectural history in the Art
and Archeology department at Princeton.
Today,
I want to present a new book project that
takes us to the margins of architectural
history and that interrogates the
way we think of public urban spaces
as a part of the commons, a
shared resource in which each
stakeholder, individual citizens, and
public managers, have an interest.
Last December, a New York restaurant
was criticized on social media
over its outdoor dining set up.
They had built a tent that swallowed
up the sidewalk outside the eatery -
creating a covered passage that forced
people to walk through the structure
to get by. The traffic sign on the tent
even instructed pedestrians to enter
through a door-size opening to get to the
other side, with no room to walk around,
other than the street itself. We all have
heard of the tensions resulting from the
licenses given to restaurants by municipal
authorities to set up temporary outside seating
during the pandemic months. In a
dense and overcrowded streetscape,
cyclists lost a lane,
sidewalks became narrower, but on the
other side, New Yorkers felt a sense of
liberation and joy at being able to reclaim
public spaces and leave their apartments
while restaurant owners and
employees could earn their living.
What interests me here,
is that the space of conflict between the
different stakeholders on the sidewalk is
delimited by a piece of architecture made
of fabric and the features of that material -
ephemerality, availability, easiness of
setting, reversibility, cheapness, connected
to other textile elements in the city that
speak out about dialogues between public
and private domains. The same way one
expresses their opinions, support, or belief
by raising a flag outside their window,
wears a certain outfit in the street or when
an awning outside an apartment building
transforms the sidewalk that it covers
into a semi-private space. As an
architectural historian interested
in the history of representations and
a specialist of early-modern Europe,
I wanted to test this reading to a
city where this dialogue is the most
visible, the City-State of Venice.
So, why Venice?
As the most densely populated city in Europe,
Venice has developed a network of narrow
streets that have been mostly replaced by
waterways as transportation thoroughfares.
This has a consequence that
has seldom been noticed:
one doesn't stop on a movable
surface such as a canal,
no gathering is really possible,
no temporary structures can be erected
in order to sell food or goods.
Therefore, all the urban functions
generally divided between different
types of empty spaces in a normal
city are largely concentrated in
the squares. And there is one square
that is particularly important,
the largest of the city, the center
of its religious, political, and
cultural power, the one devoted to
the patron saint of the Republic, Saint
Mark.
This is where I would like to focus today.
We are speaking here of one of the most
celebrated and reproduced cityscapes
in the world since the 18th century
when it embodied the genre of the veduta,
the city view. In Constable and
Link's catalog raisonné of Cannaletto
for example, we count no less than
76 surviving paintings devoted to the
square, without counting the massive
production of prints that served as
models or numerous other paintings or
copies. Until now, scholarship on these objects
has mostly focused on questions of
dating, made possible by our knowledge of
architectural changes that occurred during
the century, on questions of perspective
and light, and histories of collecting
and seriality. Besides the rendering of
the buildings and the construction of a
perspective or convincing space that allowed
the owner of the painting to recollect or
enjoy one of the most famous cityscapes
in the world,
I believe that there are details added
by the artist that reveal more than just
the will to animate the picture plane.
Let's compare a painting with a
contemporary print of the square.
As we can see very few elements of
life have been added to the rendering
of the architecture, transforming the
cityscape into a lifeless theater stage.
View paintings on the other hand introduce
life on and deep inside the stage
and that life is expressed by textile
elements: washing hanging from the
windows, awnings on the facades or on
poles encroaching on the square itself,
human figures reduced to the variety
of their garments, but also sellers'
stalls at the foot of the campanile,
or around the three flag staffs.
By focusing on these details,
I propose to read them as revelators
of the existing tensions over public
space among different stakeholders.
In this short presentation, I wish to argue
that the study of the presence of textile
in urban settings allow us to identify the
tensions resulting from the State's attempts
to spatially restrict and control
the life of the city dwellers.
So what are the markers of these
attempts at controlling space?
This painting by Antonio Diziani
shows us two recurrent but
time-limited and dynamic ways
the Republic used textile to take
possession of shared public space:
first, the Republic's
official religious procession,
for which a textile canopy snakes around
the entirety of the surface of the square.
The second marker is a series
of ensigns of Venice.
These magnificent flags made of painted and
gilt silk are here exceptionally raised on
the three masts erected in the 14th century
in order to identify the
island with its ships.
The placement of the poles
is of utmost importance
and Georgio Bellavitis has convincingly interpreted
them as an external iconostasis
for the basilica, marking the sacred
space of the basilica itself and the
regal power of the doge; its prince.
Ultimately leaving the rest
of the square to the citizens.
The third dynamic use of textile as space
markers are the garments themselves.
Venice has a long tradition of producing
costume books and visitors all marveled
at the elegance and specificity of the
Venetian dress. More than anywhere
in 18th-century Europe, the Republic
kept producing strict sumptuary
laws that were proclaimed on St.
Mark's square and posted on every
church's door. The authorities
wanted to preserve republican virtue
by avoiding emulation and rivalry.
As one politician wrote, "Alter the
dress and everything is transformed -
even Liberty itself - into arbitrariness
and disorder." Ranks had to be kept
visible, especially in a city where
the elite was told to keep their wealth
private in the name of republican equality.
The State Inquisitors' agents
kept reporting in painful details
the dress infractions of the nobles,
of the prostitutes, and of the
Jewish population.
On view paintings,
the scale of the figures gives the
dresses a semiotic importance beyond any
other genre. As Goethe noticed, "Everything
(the Venetian wore) has its
meaning." On Diziani's painting,
the doge is easily recognized
by his golden dress,
the senators in red, the councilors in black,
all wearing the toga, a large mantle that
multiple laws tried to make mandatory for
any official to wear near St. Mark's place.
But as we saw, textiles are also
used by painters to mark the
city life that tries to escape
the authorities' control. These two paintings
made in 1723 by Canaletto show on the
left one, in a similarly awkward manner,
the staff emerging from the body of
the procurator of Saint Mark, one
of the three officials in charge
of the basilica and of the square,
while the pendant painting shows him
pointing towards a makeshift tensile structure
while several men are idly resting, I
think even laid a rug on the step of the
sacred column of San Teodoro, the
first patron of the City-State. Because
the vedute painting genre aims to
offer their viewers a recollection of a lived
city, painters multiply the indication
of that life by textural elements.
The square is indeed inhabited:
the two buildings that create its borders
are composed of residential apartments
That is shown by the curtains flowing,
the awnings sprawling out the windows,
and even the washing hanging on the
facades, interrupting the majestic
theater set designed by the Republic.
The ordonnance is even
disturbed by the inclusion of liaghi,
these wooden and glass boxes
that play the role of the North
African musharabbye and allow its
occupants to see without being seen.
The square is also a shopping center, under
the arcades and around its vertical isolated
markers, the campanile and the staffs.
The first ones appear on the painting
only as they expand on the square itself
and the second ones seem to overflow
from their reserved spaces around
the campanile and the staffs onto
the shared ground of the square
despite the numerous decrees that tried to
delimit the plots given to these informal and
ephemeral stands.
To conclude this talk,
I would like to end with an object
that embodies the complex relationship
of public control and private freedom
that textile elements help us to uncover.
This key sign is found on that many
details of Canaletto's paintings and
Guardi’s paintings, and it has become
the contemporary symbol of Venice.
It is the mask.
Imposed by the authorities to respect
decency in times of carnival and in
places of gambling, the mask and the
apparatus that conceal the body
are used by Venetians to escape the
constant surveillance of the state,
notably in their relations
with foreigners.
A black tricorne,
a mask called the volto or larva made of
white waxed cloth in a shape that permitted
unimpeded breathing, eating and drinking;
a blackmail made of silk and lace known as
the bauta; and a cloak called the tabaro.
The bauta conceals the gender,
the age, class, rank, identity of the
wearer, establishing their incognito.
As James Johnson has convincingly
argued, it allows the preservation of
privacy and freedom from performing
the social rituals that are expected
from members of the patrician class.
The importance of the mask in Venetian
culture reveals the fact that it allows
to protect one's privacy in public space
confronted not only to the intrusion of the
State, but also of the judgements of a small,
tight, and extremely dense urban
community. By looking anew and in
detail at these images that are still
constantly present in our imagination,
I hope to rethink soft architecture
as a space of competition, over shared
urban space. Here, textile elements
that are seen in an urban context
help to blur the rigid boundaries between
private and public space that our modern
societies are still eager to establish.