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(More customer reviews)Rarely, perhaps once in a generation, does an enterprising scholar step forth with a truly novel research idea and the capacity to see it through. Du Prey''s Villas of Pliny is just this: an utterly fascinating, deliciously composed, and copiously illustrated treatment of a neglected theme in architectural history. Although it is the author's object to document the perennial allure for post-medieval architects of Pliny the Younger's literary picture of villa life in ancient Rome, the book's overall theme could be equally understood as the enduring architectural potency of one man's idea of 'the good life.' Du Prey succeeds triumphantly both in the close compass of the historian's exercise and in broader quality-of-life issues.
The book opens with a leisurely literary examination of Pliny's Como letters and proceeds to articulate the four 'cardinal points' of a villa described in the epistles to Gallus (bk. 2, ep. 17) and Apollinaris (bk. 5, ep. 6). Judiciously, Du Prey furnishes translations of these missives as appendices; the translation upon which he relies is John Boyle's unsurpassed mid-eighteenth century text. After setting forth some of the basic themes that unite various projects across the centuries, the author proceeds through a historical sequence of reconstruction exercises and built designs each determined by a conscious reflection upon Pliny's descriptions of his Laurentine and Tuscan villas. From the Medici's documented interest through various 'ruins and restitutions' and 'emulations,' Du Prey offers the reader an engaging tour through one of the most imaginatively fertile corridors of architectural history.
Although some of this material will be familiar to reader's of James S. Ackerman's recent study , Du Prey's fidelity to the literary exigencies of his topic keeps him from wandering back to familiar stylistic comparisons with survey material. In fact, it is Du Prey's tenacity in seeking out new imagery that keeps one eagerly turning the pages to digest the projects of Francesco Lazzari, William Newton, Stanislas Potocki, Friedrich August Krubsacius, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Louis-Pierre Haudebourt, Jules-Fr'd'ric Bouchet, and Hubert Stier. Not only has Du Prey expanded our understanding of historically well-established figures like Palladio and F'libien, he has also tilled the fields of relatively obscure talents to great advantage. The author dedicates the majority of one closing chapter to detailed discussions of several designs for a 1982 exhibition and colloquium in Paris; this amounts to a sustained essay in architectural criticism, and many readers will agree that, compared to his historical labors, this section constitutes the least successful portion of the book. Nevertheless, one hopes this study will generate an increased awareness of the significance of the Pliny theme and that other treatments ' such as Constantin Lipsius's 1889 project in the archive of Dresden's Academy of Fine Arts ' will find their way into future editions.
The opportunity to survey such a rich thematic vein as Pliny's legacy invites one to make new connections and associations. One such thought isThe Villas of Pliny should be regarded as a signal contribution to a growing awareness that, in terms of the History of Ideas, the overall continuity of much of nineteenth century art and architectural theory with what has been called the 'Renaissance'Baroque system' is more in evidence than ever before. In other words, while generations of scholars have tended to locate the formal sources of 'modernity' in the late-eighteenth century , the strands linking nineteenth-century ideas about art and creativity to much earlier periods are increasingly difficult to deny. Although such a perspective tends to attenuate the rupture of the 'High Modernism' of the 1920s, the conceptual lineaments of historicism are perhaps better served.
Regardless of the book's manifold historiographic value, its significance as a stirring, unforgettable read is impossible to deny.
[This review originally appeared in The New Criterion.]
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Pierre de la Ruffinière du Prey traces the influence of Pliny the Younger as a continuous theme throughout the history of architecture. First he looks at what Pliny considered to be the essential qualities of a villa. He then discusses the many buildings Pliny inspired: from the Renaissance estates of the Medici, to papal summer residences near Rome, to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and the home of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Equally important to du Prey's study are the many designs by architects past and present that remain on paper. These imaginary restitutions of Pliny's villas, each representative of its own epoch, trace in microcosm the evolution of the classical tradition in domestic architecture. In analyzing each project, du Prey illuminates the work of such great masters as Michelozzo, Raphael, Palladio, and Schinkel, as well as such well-known modern architects as Léon Krier, Jean-Pierre Adam, and Thomas Gordon Smith.
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