Staging sensation and architectural absorption: theatrical representation and eighteenth-century French aesthetic theory
Date
2005
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
What did the “theater” mean in late-eighteenth-century Paris? More specifically, what did it mean when used in the literary context of architectural theory? This thesis addresses these questions by examining how three architectural theorists – Germain Boffrand (1667-1754), Julien-David Le Roy (1724-1803), and Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières (1721-1793?) – used theatrical metaphors in their writing, and how the changing ways they used these metaphors over the course of the late-eighteenth century mirrored concurrent shifts in theories of representation in painting, garden planning, and, particularly, the theater. Drawing connections to the sensationalist philosophy of Étienne Bonnot, the Abbé de Condillac and the drama and art criticism of Denis Diderot, this thesis argues that the work of Boffrand, Le Roy and Le Camus was part of the richly textured intellectual context of Enlightenment France, out of which developed nascent modernist theories of representation and spectatorship. ☐ Boffrand’s Livre d’Architecture (1745) bridged the transition from conventional dramatic representation based on Horace’s Ars Poetica and a developing architectural concern for the sensory impact of a work on the viewer. The picturesque engravings of ancient Greek architectural ruins in Le Roy’s Les Ruines des plus Beaux Monuments de la Grèce (1758, 1770), in addition to his essay on architectural theory, gave new freedom to the expression of one’s experience of architectural monuments, and emphasized the importance of an architecture that kept a viewer interested and engaged. Le Camus, influenced by Le Roy and Claude-Henri Watelet’s theories of the picturesque garden, further argued in his Le génie de l’architecture; ou, L’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (1780) for an architecture that absorbed the viewer and kept him moving through an interior space. The work of architecture, therefore, for Le Camus, and Le Roy before him, began to resemble an aesthetic object, which offered a series of shifting and developing sensations, similar to the shifting tableaux of the stage and the apparently natural vistas of the picturesque garden. ☐ In conclusion, this thesis explores the subject of these new modes of representation: the modern viewer, reader and audience member. How was he addressed, and what type of experience was he expected to have before a work of architecture or seated in the audience of the Comédie Française? Now treated as an individual, the viewer was intended to have a solitary, contemplative and introspective experience that was generated and maintained by a well-designed work. Although it reflected a currency with contemporary intellectual discourses, this turn to the theater for Boffrand, Le Camus and Le Roy indicated architecture’s uneasy relationship with a modernist aesthetic approach in these earliest moments of its development.