Between Spaces: The Domus Aurea, the Vatican Loggetta, and Foucault’s Heterotopia
by Tyler Rockey
The Renaissance artists and antiquarians who descended into the earth and into the ruins of the Domus Aurea, the palace of the first-century Roman emperor Nero, found themselves in a strange space where their present was collapsed with the ancient Roman past and surrounding them was fantastical and bizarre painted decoration. This rediscovery in the late 1400s of an ancient Roman structure, with extant examples of grotesque painting, expanded and spurred interest in this style and technique of decoration. Quickly, it became a pronounced and ubiquitous feature of Renaissance interior spaces.1 Rather than trace the development and diffusion of this decorative mode or stylistic exercises of fantasia, I would like to present a way of thinking, informed by Michel Foucault’s work, about space itself and about the complex relationships between spaces, as negotiated through the artistic practice of imitation and the Renaissance archaeological imagination.2
The Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena in the Vatican (fig. 1), a narrow, vaulted space covered in grotesque decorations designed by the famed Renaissance artist Raphael and his workshop around 1516, provides an intriguing case study due to its mirroring of the form and decoration of the Domus Aurea’s similarly long, vaulted hallway, known as the cryptoporticus (fig. 2). At the time of its discovery, this subterranean ruin had become an example of what Foucault describes as a “heterotopia,” a “different place” at variance with the norms of time and reality.3 The translation and transposition of this space into the Vatican is not, however, a simple anachronism or copy of this heterotopic place. It is a physical product of the Renaissance task of imagining a re-completed and living antiquity, realized through art.
Foucault’s concept of heterotopia seeks to define different spaces in relation to broader cultural norms and social functions. This model assumes that the spaces we inhabit are laden with “bundles of relations” that both demarcate them as discrete and localizable as well as tie them together through proximal connections.4 In this way, space is organized in a manner that makes sense. But within this model there are certain spaces at variance with other sites; these spaces neutralize or reverse these relations with other spaces because they are utterly different. They are heterotopias, or different places.5 They can contain a sense of the uncanny, where time and space are different, where people are expected to behave differently, or where multiple spaces are juxtaposed into one, such as in cemeteries, theaters, or museums.6
The underground ruins of the Domus Aurea can be read as such a location. It exists alongside the history of the city of Rome, yet is locked within a different archaeological stratum. In effect, it is both present and distant, both familiar and alien. An anonymous fifteenth-century artist who visited this place poetically described this experience of difference and the oddities of being there: “[I]n every season the rooms are full of painters. Here summer seems cooler than winter . . . we crawl along the ground on our stomachs, armed with bread, ham, fruits and wine, looking more bizarre than the grotesques.”7 For the Renaissance visitors, the Domus Aurea was a place where time was confused. Here the present and past collided in new temporal-spatial connections and fantastical decoration charged this space with a strangeness that the visitors saw in themselves.
Furthermore, this type of decoration was the antithesis of what the Renaissance had understood as classical and sought to implement through its antique vocabulary. Grotesque decoration, derived from ancient Roman precedents, was employed in fresco or sculpted on walls, ceilings, and architectural frames. It was characterized by hybrids of plant, animal, and human forms; metamorphic and sprawling ornamental candelabra motifs; and illogical and irrational compositions. All of these are noticeable in an anonymous sixteenth-century French artist’s drawings from the cryptoporticus (figs. 3, 4).8 In essence, for the Renaissance viewers, the grotesque presented an inversion of the classical aesthetic ideals of naturalism, harmony, proportion, and rationality of form. And yet this antithesis emerged from the Roman earth and directly out of the classical past, greatly shifting attitudes around this decorative mode through the significance of the discovery of the ruin.9
In the early Renaissance, prior to the finding of the Domus Aurea and before other archaeological projects of exhumation, the work of reconstructing ancient spaces was less architectural. Rather, this reconstruction occurred within the mind and was transmitted through writing and poetry. To Petrarch and his scholarly contemporaries in the mid-fourteenth century, classical truth was indeed buried in deep, inaccessible caverns. Thus, any restoration ought to rely on imagination and literary invention.10 Reading and writing, in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century humanist philological practices, were the keys to a Roman resurrection—not as a physical location but as an idealized and re-completed mental form based on the contemplation of the material remains.11
However, the work of subsequent fifteenth-century humanists laid the groundwork for a shift from imagination to outward reality. In his work Roma Triumphans of 1459, Flavio Biondo presented a literary construction arguing for a unity of authority between Rome’s pagan and Christian histories.12 This was a mode of thought by which the Roman past would become more clearly part of a contemporary Christian reality through the juxtaposition of the ancient city and early modern theology. Thus, new vigor and expanded license would be added to the project of resurrection that shifted from humanist fiction to a reality mediated by the visual arts and the curation of spaces. The figurative culmination of this project was the letter of Baldassare Castiglione and Raphael to Pope Leo X, written around 1519, where the humanist-diplomat and the artist describe their work of restoring and fleshing out the “lacerated corpse” of Rome as the obligation of the moderns.13 Sixteenth-century artists went beyond the humanist literary imagination, which had conjured a vision of both present and past engendered by the study of ancient materials, and worked instead directly into the physical urban fabric in order to resurrect the body of ancient Rome.
This is what we see in the Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, a space constructed by Raphael14 and decorated by the grotesque specialist of his workshop, Giovanni da Udine.15 Raphael and Giovanni had descended into the heterotopic Domus Aurea sometime around 1510, reemerging with the imagined and idealized mental forms of the spaces they encountered, and transformed these concepts into tangible forms in the current time and space of the Vatican.16 The shape of the Loggetta clearly recalls that of the cryptoporticus and the ethos of the former’s decorations are inspired by the latter’s ceilings and walls in a manner that most closely imitated the original space to date.17 Thin garlands hang between delicate architectural forms, birds and animals perch on curling acanthus leaves, plants transform into animals and faces appear from vegetation. All of this seems to hang in space in an arrangement showcasing the stylistic expansion of the Renaissance grotesque into a largely unbound, full-field mode, set against a plane of white (fig. 5). Similar bird-human hybrids, paired with decorative sea creatures, emerging from ground lines are seen in both the pages of the French sketchbook (fig. 3) and in the top register of a wall segment of the Loggetta (fig. 5). Additionally, the part-plant, winged beasts from the same sketchbook (fig. 4) bear strong visual resemblance to the forms on the bottom register of the same segment. Furthermore, much of the work here was done in the classical rapid technique of grotesque painting, as recorded by Pliny the Elder, wherein an artist works directly on the wall and produces forms free-hand, thus mirroring the ancient manner of execution in addition to the mode of decoration and architectonics.18
Yet this architectural and decorative transposition from the ruins to the Vatican leaves traces of the heterotopia from whence its imagining came within this space. Due to the fidelity of its imitation, this is a place of collapsed time. Indeed it is much like Foucault’s example of the museum, where the decoration from an “anti-classical” classical past haunts and mingles with the present.19 It is also a place of multiple places, as part of a curial apartment suite and a projection of a ruined, subterranean chamber. But the relationship between these spaces is more complicated; here, an understanding of the Renaissance mindset regarding time and art is crucial.20 This period’s valuation of the past allows for what Thomas Greene terms a “creative anachronism,” which is the conscious and productive use of chronological difference in the making of a synchronous present,21 a mode of thought whereby the calculated imitation of classical art already collapses time.22 Thus, this reimagining of the cryptoporticus and the resurrection of its decorative mode and means of execution in effect suspend the heterotopic, temporal difference at play between the Loggetta and the Domus Aurea. They reintroduce some proximal bundles of relations that tie this space to the larger fabric of the Renaissance. This is what lies in between these spaces: an awareness of the past, the desire for re-completion, and the utility of art in mediating temporalities.
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Tyler Rockey
Tyler Rockey is a PhD student at Temple University specializing in the art of early modern Italy. His research interests include the persistence of the classical tradition, Renaissance-era philosophy and theories of art, antiquities collecting, and the physical, temporal, and semiotic instabilities of ancient sculptures in the early modern context.
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Footnotes
1. For comprehensive discussions of the grotesque style of decoration, see Nicole Dacos, La Découverte de la Domus Aurea et la Formation des Grotesques à la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969); Clare Lapraik Guest, The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance(Boston, MA: Brill Publishers, 2015); and Alessandra Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque: Fantastical Decoration from Antiquity to Art Nouveau (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008).
2. James S. Ackerman, Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 126.
3. Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 178.
5. Ibid., 178.
6. Ibid., 181.
7. Michael Squire, “Fantasies so Varied and Bizarre: The Domus Aurea, The Renaissance, and the ‘Grotesque,’” in A Companion to the Neronian Age, ed. Martin T. Dinter and Emma Buckley (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 448.
8. Frances Connelly, “Grotesque,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.temple.edu/view/10.1093/acref/9780199747108.001.0001/acref-9780199747108-e-344.
9. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making in Renaissance Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 17.
10. Thomas Greene, “Resurrecting Rome: The Double Task of the Humanist Imagination,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. P. A. Ramsey (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982), 42.
11. Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 59.
12. Guest, The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance, 369.
13. Greene, “Resurrecting Rome,” 43.
14. Dacos, La Découverte de la Domus Aurea, 105.
15. Zamperini, Ornament and the Grotesque, 124.
16. Nicole Dacos, The Loggia of Raphael (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 2008), 29.
17. Nicole Dacos, Per la Storia delle Grottesche: La Riscoperta della Domus Aurea (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1966), 48.
18. Dacos, The Loggia of Raphael, 34.
19. Foucault, “Different Spaces,” 182.
20. Aaron J. Gurevich, “Medieval Culture and Mentality According to the New French Historiography,” European Journal of Sociology 24, no.1 (1983): 194.
21. Thomas Greene, The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 221.
22. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 18.