10
FLESH OF STONE
Buildings, statues, entangled bodies
Tracey Eve Winton
Gods in Antiquity were bodily things. The Druids worshipped oaks; Egyptians worshipped animals; shapeless stones were venerated by the Greeks, and the Sherpa reverenced Mount Everest as their mother goddess. Hindu avatars and the mass of the Roman temple testify that invisible powers need bodily presence to dwell and act in the world. As conscious persons we identify ourselves with our corporeal flesh, which furnishes us with our finite limits and carnal pleasures. Our awareness, though, involves a world beyond the body’s limits. The flesh of the world and of others is sentient and responsive, vulnerable to our words and thoughts, especially to our desirous gaze and touch. I’d like to turn to the Hypnerotomachia,1 to which Alberto Pérez-Gómez first introduced me, and read out a poetic understanding of man’s intertwining with architecture.
In the Hypnerotomachia’s text and images, published at the height of Renaissance naturalism, embodiment is inseparable from thought’s phantasmic imagery. Poliphilo frames his vision of rarefied philosophical and theological ideas concretized in symbols with an ekphrasis of the world coming into physical being through the rising Sun, in the Spring as a time of universal rebirth. He dreams, and within his dream he dreams again: a Neoplatonic symbol for liberating the contemplative soul from bodily needs. Yet in this dream, his body and its organs haunt him in every scene. He missteps and trips over roots, stones, shards, and uneven ground; he suffers from thirst and exhaustion; he endures shame for being scratched and dirty; he sweats; he sighs, he eats; he grows aroused and blushes. In short, he brings his body with him.
Both woodcuts and text present types of heads and bodies, ranging from portraits and icons to the aniconic: tree trunks, nymphs, topiary or mineral statues, free-standing or in bas-relief, classical columns and capitals, obelisks, fountains in human form, funerary masks, hollow armor, grotesques, flat encaustic wall-portraits or fleeting reflections in mirrored surfaces, nuancing the continuum between Poliphilo as perceiving subject and the architectural objects of his desire. In all its variants, the statue – imago hominis in architectural matter – is the primary symbol of this space of exchange.
Figure 10.1 Poliphilo in the ruins of the ancient city. The limbless torso of a statue lies juxtaposed with a column capital
Architectural form, though organized by geometry and abstract qualities, is attributed animate features. Poliphilo’s vocabulary revives arcane Latin and Greek terms that depict architectural elements as organic tropes and, supported by ornamental statuary and carvings on the buildings’ visible surfaces, reveals that buildings have living parts: divine, monstrous, spiritual, human, animal and vegetal. The word he uses for “frieze” – zoöphor – is Greek for “that which conveys life.” Among the buildings’ defining lineaments and ornaments he names dentils (teeth), caulicoles (sprouts), echinus (sea-urchins), ovolo moldings (eggs), capitals (heads), auricles (ears), and astragals (ankle bones). He compares column bases and pedestals to feet, and a column’s entasis to pregnancy; building elements swell and protrude like flesh. Following Vitruvius, Poliphilo identifies sexual connotations that the columns carry in the details of the classical orders, but also notices “bisexual” rudentured shafts and unknown hermaphroditic orders mixing Doric (male) and Ionic (female) elements. He recollects the ancient atlantes and caryatids: structural columns taking human form, fluting mimicking women’s clothing, and responds to this animate, sexualized architecture with feelings of burning desire.
Ideas in the abstract risk sterility. To propagate desire, and fulfill our highest form of activity, creation, imagination requires the body’s sensuality and drives. Foreshadowing the depths of the matrix as flesh, Poliphilo conveys the incarnation of stone at the Great Portal through which he entered:
The craftsman had painstakingly set off this historia against a colored background of coralite stone introduced between the undulating moldings of the altar in the spaces surrounding the figures. Its incarnate coloration diffused itself throughout the translucent stone, imparting to the nude bodies and their limbs the semblance of blushing flesh.2
By extension, this intimates that the life force is latent in all of the architecture. Once inside, Poliphilo finds himself in a grotto whose mother-of-pearl revetment suggests his incorporation, enfolded in an architectural oyster-shell.3 An intimate form of encounter ensues in the pyramid’s foundations below where navigating a subterranean labyrinth by feel alone, he runs across a shrine to Venus glowing in the inchoate darkness.4 The body, in its turn, needs imagination to reciprocate love.
As he explores the debris-heaped terrain around a ruined ancient city, Poliphilo discovers a bronze colossus, lying on the ground, yet intact. This is an architectonic monument, a built form vast enough to inhabit. The colossus is a double, mirroring and merging the hero’s dreaming body with the architecture in his vision. In his recumbent, sleeping form, the gigantic statue is primarily bodily. Dreaming, he moans in pain, for ventilation holes bored into the soles of his feet suck in the breeze and make him resound like a musical instrument. Poliphilo clambers over his chest, spelunking his mouth, down his gullet, exploring the cavernous interior:
I saw intestines, nerves and bone, veins, muscles and flesh, as if I were in a penetrable human body. And wherever I was, each part that you would seen in every natural body had its name engraved in three idioms: Chaldaean, Greek and Latin, as well as what kind of diseases are generated in which, and their causes, remedies and cures.5
At the heart Poliphilo reads about Love, and suddenly feels his own unrequited love resurgent. As he breathes a heavy sigh, the entire bronze structure shudders in sympathetic resonance. The colossal figure is not solid, impervious metal, but enfleshed and responsive to his very spirit. Departing, Poliphilo sees a female counterpart, buried in rubble up to her neck. Like himself, the male statue suffers from existential separation, from love that is not able to exchange its life-giving energy and complete the erotic circuit.
Poliphilo’s dream-quest is to find and join his Polia. She is the female to his male, the mythos to his logos, the (lost) history to his (melancholic) modernity, the otherness hidden within him and around him. The neologism “hypn-eroto-machia” incorporates the philosopher Empedocles’ dual principles of cosmic change: universal Sympathy (the basis of natural magic, related to mimesis and the forces of attraction) and Antipathy (the force behind fragmentation and dissolution): Eros and Machia, Love and Strife. Poliphilo’s dream materializes these through divine figures, the former by Venus–Aphrodite, and the latter by Minerva–Athena in her martial aspect. Polia towers over Poliphilo’s narrative like a marble Venus crowned with the head of Minerva, an “Idea” as he calls her, willful and irrational, elusive and sensuous, strange and familiar. She is a matrix overflowing with Nature’s unlimited plenitude: a theocracy simultaneously generous and cruel, a paradox brimming with poetic ambiguity, resistant to analytic thought with its rational, divisive categories. The ancient city is a woman whom you love at your peril. To know her at an intellectual distance – a visual distance – can never satisfy him; he hungers for an unmediated, corporeal, tactile encounter. And the architecture he describes thus evidences his yearning to enter her – to become one with her – an intertwining of the self and the world.
A quattrocento commonplace characterized an unresponsive lady as being made of stone. In a sonnet, Lorenzo de’ Medici calls his mistress “adamantine,” hard as diamond.6 Polia too, not reciprocating Poliphilo’s love, is “frozen and stony.” To be a body of flesh is to return love, to recirculate the vital energy that links and bonds the world together. Only the embodied imagination, with its capacity for desire, can do so, and thus can participate in world making. To be flesh and thus receptive radiates and circulates erotic energy, not just between lovers, but throughout the universe into which the superabundant creative force overflows.
In every tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses love transforms. Yet the metamorphoses in the Hypnerotomachia illustrate two kinds of subject–object intercorporeality: one constituted through mutual visibility (Athena–Minerva); and the other through touch (Venus–Aphrodite). With sensitive caresses Pygmalion coaxes hard materials to warm into flesh and by eye contact Medusa petrifies pliant flesh into rock. Both emerge between the lines in enigmatic images to unfold this cosmic process through poetic metaphor.
Poliphilo himself plays Pygmalion, a sculptor, and priest of Aphrodite. In the days when the love goddess had punished hard-hearted women by turning them to stone, Pygmalion builds his own woman, a statue of ivory. She is so beautiful he falls in love with her and asks Aphrodite to intervene. As he adorns the statue, strokes her, kisses her, he feels the hard ivory soften like beeswax under his fingers, sees her blush, and hears her begin to breathe. She comes to life as flesh and blood, an organic creature who in time will bear his child.7 Similarly, Poliphilo’s dream traces his invention of Polia from architectural “Idea” to a living woman with her own voice and story. She, ultimately, will make Poliphilo visible to himself.
Polia instantiates the other process as a type of Athena Polias, virgin goddess of wisdom and the city, who wears Medusa’s head on her breastplate. Beautiful Medusa makes love with Poseidon in Athena’s temple, and the angry goddess turns her hair to living serpents, cursing her that her eye contact will convert living flesh to stone. To avoid her eyes, Perseus deploys his mirrored shield, and decapitates the pregnant Medusa. Her monstrous offspring are Pegasus and Chrysaor, a golden giant, and in the ruined city Poliphilo encounters them as monuments: the winged horse and the bronze colossus. Perseus mounted on Pegasus, holding Medusa’s severed head, flew past Atlas holding the sky aloft, and transformed him into a mountain. At the city gate, the vast Titan materializes as a massive pyramid of white marble reaching to the heavens, entered through the howling mouth of a marble Medusa’s head, her giant snaky tresses serving Poliphilo as stairs.
Though flesh and stone are both stuff of the world and share materialized form, life and the non-living are differentiated by self-aware compassion, the bonding spark of desire linking subject and object. The paradoxical exclusiveness of the world and a body that share properties and qualities engenders the libidinal will to action, the intention to engage. Things of extreme beauty come to life, and monstrous things contaminate their surroundings, by a conversion of the erotic force. This motive force, however, is a mode of relationship, one possible only through the embodied imagination, and as such the ground of meaning. As Pérez-Gómez explains in Built upon Love,
architectural meaning is neither intellectual nor aesthetic in a formal sense, but originates instead in our embodiment and its erotic impulse. … The harmony of architecture is always tactile and “mater-ial” (referring to the mother of all). Architectural meaning, like erotic knowledge, is a primary experience of the human body and yet takes place in the world, in that pre-reflective ground of existence where reality is first “given.”8