Rome, History, and the Spolia-of-the-Mind
Leonard Barkan, Princeton University
My subject is Rome, and particularly in a chronological stretch that goes from antiquity through
the fourteenth and, ultimately, the sixteenth century. But I am going to begin with three
quotations, all from closer to our own time. First, Charles Dickens, in a little known early work
entitled Pictures from Italy:
But whether, in this ride, you pass by obelisks, or columns, ancient temples,
theatres, houses, porticoes, or forums: it is strange to see, how every fragment,
whenever it is possible, has been blended into some modern structure, and made
to serve some modern purpose—a wall, a dwelling-place, a granary, a stable—
some use for which it never was designed, and associated with which it cannot
otherwise than lamely assort. It is stranger still, to see how many ruins of the old
mythology: how many fragments of obsolete legend and observance: have been
incorporated into the worship of Christian altars here; and how, in numberless
respects, the false faith and the true are fused into a monstrous union.
Next, Henry James, from his great novel, Portrait of a Lady. The subject is his heroine, Isabel
Archer:
[Isabel] had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and
moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place
where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches,
where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a
companionship in long unanswered prayers. There was no gentler nor less
consistent heretic than Isabel; the firmest of worshippers, gazing at dark altar
pictures or clustered candles, could not have felt more intimately the
suggestiveness of these objects nor have been more liable at such moments to a
spiritual visitation.
Finally, just barely making the tail-end of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams:
[Daydreams] bear very much the same relation to the childish memories to which
they refer as many of the baroque palaces of Rome bear to the ancient ruins,
whose hewn stones and columns have furnished the material for the structures
built in the modern style.
For Dickens, who travels to Italy in 1844, spolia signify everything that is ill-assorted
when the past insists on living into the present and refuses the march of progress; the fragments
that endure in the constructions of modern Rome are for him much like the hodgepodge of pagan
and Christian that he observes in the city’s religious observance: “a monstrous union.” Thirtyodd years later, Henry James, presumably far less interested in the purity represented by
Perpendicular British churches and the Anglican rites that go on in them, finds, on the other
hand, that the layers of spolia characterizing Roman ecclesiastical architecture—signalling for
him a history as variegated as it is long—exist in profound sympathy with what has become the
chequered life and shadowed consciousness of his now miserably married heroine. At the end of
that century, Freud clearly understood that the primal scene for such metaphorizations was
Rome; elsewhere in the same book he says, “The wish to go to Rome had become in my dreamlife a cloak and symbol for a number of other passionate wishes.”
But we shall go back in time before we move forward.
Around 1340 Petrarch spent some quality time with his friend Giovanni Colonna walking
amid the ruins of Rome, and at some point thereafter he wrote a long letter about it to the selfsame Colonna. (Why write a letter about the experience to the one person who shared the
experience is, perhaps, a relevant paradox, so far as history-writing is concerned.) The text,
Familiares 6.2, has had a very considerable diffusion, both in the immediately succeeding
periods (some of its pithier phrases, which we’ll come to later, get quoted repeatedly in the
antiquarian writings of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) and in the world of modern
historiography, where it stands as the manifesto for a certain sort of historical consciousness.
This is the text where, more explicitly than anywhere else, Petrarch makes the
momentous binary division between antiquity and modernity—the place, in other words, that
gives him the reputation for being the first “modern man”—for understanding that there are
distinct layers of historical time. What he actually says is, first, that he is more expert in antiquis
and Colonna more expert in novis. He goes on to locate the border line as before and after Christ
was venerated in Rome and by the Roman emperors. And later, speaking of a historical account
that he might offer (apparently Colonna’s expertise has dropped out of the picture), he describes
the bi-form subject as “antiquos et modernos,” thus introducing the precise terminology which
we still use.
What makes these few phrases add up to such a large set of historiographical claims is the
fact that they appear in the context of an exhaustively detailed topographical itinerary in Rome.
The reason why there is a need to make the chronological distinction between the two men’s
expertise is that they are being called upon to read history in material traces that are located on a
continuum of some two millennia spanning pagan and Christian time. And Rome is, as it were,
the Greenwich of this time line: it is not just the worship of Christ that defines modernity, but
the acceptance of Christ in Rome.
It is no surprise, then, that the largest chunk of the letter is a chronicle of the walk itself.
I give you a much abbreviated sample:
Here the palace of Evander, the shrine of Carmentis, here the Cave of Cacus, here
the nurturing she-wolf and fig tree of Rumina with the more apt surname of
Romulus, here the leap of Remus, here the circus games and the rape of the
Sabines.... [skipping] Here threatening Porsenna and the Etruscan army, and
Mutius beset by his erring right hand, and the son of the tyrant competing with
liberty, and the Consul pursuing even to hell the enemy expelled from the city;
and the Sublician bridge broken behind the brave man, and Horatius swimming....
[skipping] This is that massive rock surrounded by two bronze lions which was
sacred to the deified emperors, and on whose summit, rumor has it, rest the bones
of Julius Caesar. This the sanctuary of Tellus, this the shrine of Fortune, this the
temple of Peace.... [skipping] This the house of Augustus, on Via Flaminia,
where some maintain is the tomb of the Emperor himself.... [skipping] here
Christ appeared to his fleeing Vicar; ... here Constantine got rid of his leprosy;
here Calixtus mounted his glorious bier. But where shall I end? ...
Well you may ask. If you try, as I have done, to map this walk [Petrarch1] and draw the
sequential line on the ground from one stop to the next [Petrarch2], you discover that it is a very
wild ride indeed. [Petrarch3] The reason, of course, is that what appears to be movement in
space is really designed as a movement in time. There are over sixty stops on Petrarch’s magical
mystery tour. It begins innocently enough in the highly conventional mode of the sites that
Virgil plots out in Æneid 8, from Palatine to Capitoline, from Aventine to Tiber. And notable
locations from the period of the Roman kings spread the compass only slightly wider, to include
some of the Esquiline, Viminal, Quirinal, and the Campus Martius. But then Petrarch and his
friend start to move like some kind of tour guide gone wild: back and forth between the
Janiculum and the Aventine, from the Palatine to the Capitoline, from Trajan’s Forum to the
Castel S. Angelo, from the Campus Martius to the Quirinal.
Underneath the pretense of a travelogue Petrarch composes a chronology of Roman
history: the legendary beginnings courtesy of Livy and Virgil; the early kings, ending with
Tarquin, Lucretia and Brutus; important figures in the history of the Republic like Coriolanus
and Camillus, along with powerful enemies such as Porsenna and Jugurtha; then Julius Cæsar,
Pompey, and Augustus; later emperors like Nero, Antoninus Pius, and Septimius Severus;
finally, the stories of early Christian Rome culminating in Constantine and Pope Calixtus I.
[Blank]
It isn’t just antiquus et modernus that makes this manifesto so significant, then, but the
sleight of hand by which a Roman space that is all but emptied of its contents can be read as a
living narrative in time. Like many subsequent walkers in Rome, Petrarch turns ruins into
history, producing, essentially, spolia of the mind. Through a kind of double vision, he can
discern the individual object whose state of decay marks it as frozen in a single moment in past
time, but he can also connect the dots so that nothing is precisely frozen in time any more.
In a syntactical series with dozens of separate terms, Petrarch sometimes sees buildings,
sometimes sees empty spaces where there used to be buildings, and sometimes sees events
without any direct reference to their sites. When the antique relic is [Septizonium] most
complete, like the Septizonium or [Dioscuri] the Dioscuri or the [Column] column of
Antoninus Pius, Petrarch has the least to say about its historical life. And when it comes to
Christian Rome [Blank], whose miracles have long been canonized and enshrined on specific
sites where fully functioning churches stand, he erases all reference to the building or the
location and merely recounts the event as taking place in a series of “here Peter was crucified,
here Paul was decapitated, here Lawrence was burned.” It seems like a magic carpet or a time
machine. In fact, it is an imaginative, poetic, invented archæology; Petrarch is fabricating a
material world with words.
It is also a historiographical utopia, in which humanistic learning and humane
companionship come together. The mental faculties involved here become explicit after the
travelogue is over and Petrarch reminisces about the conclusion of his trips with Colonna, when
the two would climb to the top of the [Diocletian] Baths of Diocletian. “And as in our travels
through the remains of a broken city, there too, as we sat, the remnants of the ruins lay before our
eyes. What else may be said?” Quid ergo? Quite a lot, as it turns out. History, philosophy, the
origins of the liberal and mechanical arts: all of these things, Petrarch goes on to specify, came
into their conversations as they gazed on the ruins. The projects that lie on the other side of all
this historical ordering are transcendental, not just for the two friends but for the world: “for
who could doubt that Rome would rise again, if it began to know itself?” (Quis enim dubitare
potest quin illico surrectura sit, si ceperit se Roma cognoscere?) [Blank]
That, of course, is the moment—and this is one of the phrases that gets frequently
repeated in the later literature—when the walk among ruins turns into the narrative of rebirth,
when Christian resurrection gets joined with the notion of the eternal city where, almost
seamlessly, pagan became Christian (and that seamlessness in the story may be its most
revolutionary element) and where, in the hands of archæological visionaries who can read across
all this geography and history, some sort of syncretic golden age might return. Petrarch is, to be
sure, highly cautious about proclaiming success in all of this: it wouldn’t be a Petrarchan story if
it weren’t ultimately about a vision that can be entertained in the mind but not realized in the
flesh. And it’s not surprising that the failure of realization is here linked to a sense of personal
loss:
You request now that what I said that day I repeat and commit to a letter. I
confess that I did say many things which I can only repeat with different words.
Give me back that place, that idle mood, that day, that attention of yours, that
particular vein of my talent and I could do what I did then. But all things are
changed: the place is not present, the day has passed, the idle mood is gone, and
instead of your face I look upon silent words.
But a “failure” of this kind only serves to intensify the sacredness of the enterprise. The fugitive
imagination meets the already decayed ruins. The near tabula rasa of Rome is brilliantly
animated by the poetic imagination, but oh so briefly; and the poet is left to record the experience
in a letter that is several removes from reality—the time when the letter is being read, the time
when it is written, the reflection atop the Baths of Diocletian, the walk itself, and, of course, the
living history of Rome that shows up on the screen of the recuperative prose poem. Petrarch
makes a great show of being unable to write the book that he had promised Colonna on that
day—after all, Rome has not risen again and countless Renaissance art works will remain
fragmentary as if in response to this failure—but, in another sense, for Petrarch this letter itself
may be book enough.
Before considering some more discursive responses to this vision, a couple of vignettes
from those who, in one way or another, are following in Petrarch’s footsteps and turning the
process into something more like literal spoliation. Consider what happens to the Arch of
Constantine, in Botticelli’s Punishment of Korah, Daithan, and Abiram [Botticelli] from the
Sistine Chapel, which dates from the 1480’s. The arch is exquisitely constituted anew in all its
detail, friezes and cornices are gilded and perfected, missing heads added, in such a way that
both restores the arch and reimagines what such classicizing images might have looked like. But
atop all this spanking new antiquity the artist lays an incompetent slice of masonry that speaks of
decay, ruin, and the precariousness of time.
Ghirlandaio’s Adoration of the Shepherds from the Sassetti Chapel [Ghirlandaio
Shepherds], dated 1485, includes no such slab of disintegration; it glories in a remarkable
recreation of arches, columns, and, especially, an inscribed sarcophagus, all of which exhibit the
merest suggestion of time’s effects (although a sarcophagus itself suggests some sort of
vulnerability to time). His Uffizi Adoration of the Magi [[Ghirlandaio Adoration], from two
years later, goes even further into the realm of perfect fantasy recreation with an extraordinary
gold-encrusted design of pilasters. Yet if the stakes of reinvention are raised here, so are the
stakes of ruination, with the elaborate architectural construction blatantly broken at the
centerpoint. Or consider their earlier contemporary Mantegna. On the one hand
[Circumcision], the wildly overarticulated all’antica stonework and carvings of the
Circumcision, in all its pristine detailing; on the other hand [Vienna St. Seb], the Vienna St.
Sebastian, in which the same architectural and decorative scheme is treated to such conspicuous
demolition and punctuated [[detail] by extra debris from some nearby classical storehouse of
statuary fragments. [Blank]
If overwrought antiquity is forced up against ostentatious ruin, if the remains of classical
art are both perfect and mutilated, that is because of the paradoxes inherent in the spolia narrative
of death-and-rebirth that Petrarch helped bring into being. It is not easy to valorize ruins and
new production at the same time. New art cannot be old, it cannot partake of the splendor and
misery that comes with surviving a thousand years in a pleasing state of decomposition. The
Renaissance can imitate antiquity, but only in very problematic ways—basically, via pastiche or
forgery—can it imitate antiquity’s most salient characteristic, which is ruin.
How do you make brand-new art and still stage the drama of time and age, of history and
decay? At one level, it’s very simple: you erect massive constructs, preferably all’antica, and
you build into them a consciousness of their fragility. But the consequence is a story far more
vulnerable to doubt than is the case with those Renaissances that are merely beginnings. Thomas
Greene argued very eloquently, from the same Petrarchan materials I have been considering
here, that Renaissance archæological consciousness led to the creation of works that were meant
to be, in his expression, sub-read. I would add that it led to the creation of glorious works in
which the new is infected with the old, the living with the dead. That is why Spenser’s Bower of
Bliss in the Faerie Queene must be destroyed and why Prospero’s speech in the latter phases of
the Tempest:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
is so much more powerful than any construction that Shakespeare might have put on that stage.
My second vignette in the aftermath of Petrarch takes us to a different Colonna. The
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is the quintessential archæological romance. Or perhaps the world’s
only archæological romance. There is no shortage of grandly polished re-creations of antiquity
within these pages, nor any shortage of death-in-life. Virtually the first sight of Poliphilo’s
dream landscape [HP pictures], framed by two illustrations, is of a
fragmented and half-ruined building. It was of white Parian marble, with its
square and rectangular stones fitted without cement, placed equally and level,
smoothed and painted with red along their edges as exquisitely as could be.... I
discovered there a colonnade of the noblest form imaginable as to its decoration,
design and material; it was partly fallen, partly still in place, and partly
undamaged. There were the epistyles and capitals, excellently designed and
roughly carved; cornices, zophori or friezes and arched beams; huge broken
statues missing many of their brass details.... Great baths and aqueducts, and a
host of other fragments ... lay shattered here and there, nobly carved, but reduced,
as it were, to their first elements, so that one could not tell what they had been
when whole.
The book wants it both ways: the romance of ruin and the thrill of perfection. Fittingly, the two
images are incompatible with each other and with the verbal description. One is of the classic
garden of ruins, the other of some impossible temple surmounted by an unimaginable obelisk,
the whole thing with the vague addendum of a broken column or two in the foreground.
But what emerges from the Hypnerotomachia as distinct from the sacred art of Botticelli,
et al is the fact that death-and-rebirth turns out to be, quite apart from its historiographical and
historicist claims, an erotic subject. The relationship of the individual to the ruined landscape in
which he is walking is defined by desire; and if Rome, or antiquity, cannot rise again, it is a story
of impossible love. Petrarch of the Rime (who, by the way, looked for the ruined traces of Laura
in the landscape), may I introduce you to Petrarch of the spolia-watching stroll through Rome?
[Blank]
The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is, above all, an erotic dream. The eponymous narrator
experiences classic unrequited love for Polia, and in his tormented slumber he envisions union
with her. Sexual union is indefinitely deferred even in sleep, though there are two or three
occasions when the experience approaches what is all but explicitly a wet dream. The endless
deferral consists almost entirely of his imaginative recreation of an antiquity that is, like the
contemporary images I showed a few moments ago, both mega-destroyed and mega-reinvented.
So Poliphilo dreams of Polia but instead finds the ancient world. Or is it the other way
around? The name Polia (and, after all, the hero is merely a subset of that name, being the lover
of Polia) among other things—or rather among many things—hoary, white-headed antiquity. At
the beginning of the romance, she is a painted image carved in his heart; at the end she is the
solid column and pillar of his life. Throughout the book, he experiences insatiable desires, but
their object is not always clear. When we hear of his ravenous appetite and unspeakable desire,
when he is “stupefied by an excess of pleasure,” we may be surprised to learn (but only at first)
that he is not talking about the woman but about a classical portico. Even Polia herself, at one of
the numerous pre-consummatory moments, sends her lover off to go and admire some deserted
temples. Only after twenty pages of art appreciation does it occur to him that something dreadful
may have happened to his beloved, and even that comes into his mind only because he sees a
crumbling image of the Rape of Proserpina.
When the eros of a decaying, unreachable, originary antiquity is fused on to the fable of a
love that is unrequited through absence, indifference, or death, and when this whole story is told
in a dream that ends with the dematerialization of the love object, then one can begin to see the
entire self-reflexive romance of the past as a kind of death wish. At the most heated moment of
sexual desire in the Hypnerotomachia, when the hero is so frustrated that he is about to rape
Polia, he speaks of “a delicious little cleft between her breasts that was the delicate tomb of my
soul, such as Mausolus could not have built.” The famous mausoleum, recorded in Pliny’s
Natural History but long since obliterated by time (death twice over, as it were), was a byword
for the ephemeral beauty of ancient art. Reading Colonna’s romance, I ask myself how many
other Renaissance lovers of antiquity were trying to climb in to that same spot.
But let us step back from this precipice and consider a far soberer and, I think, even more
direct response to Petrarch. I have always found a powerful personal vector between the
Petrarch of the Letters and the Montaigne of the Essays, owing, I suppose to the vastness of their
reading and the extent of its overlap as well as to the relentless introspection (or egoism) of the
two men and of the literary forms that they were inventing and/or exploring. Montaigne
travelled to the Eternal City about two hundred and forty years after Petrarch. Like his
predecessor, Montaigne had himself granted Roman citizenship (minus the crowning as poet
laureate). In other respects, however, the later writer is considerably less enchanted with Rome.
And his walk among the ruins strikes a set of notes that I think should resound for us as we look
backward (from longer than Montaigne did) on the Renaissance’s claim at rebirth and its relation
to the remains of antiquity.
If Petrarch, for his own heuristic and inventive purposes, fantasizes a Rome more ruined
than it really is, Montaigne—who, of course, sees a metropolis both more demolished and more
constructed than was the case in the fourteenth century, as though it has in some respects
imitated quattrocento art—takes the destruction of the ancient city not as a trope designed to act
as a springboard for the imagination but as an overwhelming material fact.
Those who said that one at least saw the ruins of Rome said too much, for the
ruins of so awesome a machine would bring more honor and reverence to its
memory: this was nothing but its sepulcher. The world, hostile to its long
domination, had first broken and shattered all the parts of this wonderful body;
and because, even though quite dead, overthrown, and disfigured, it still terrified
the world, the world had buried its very ruin.
Montaigne begins by turning Rome into a tomb, a move that he presumably got from duBellay:
Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome
Et rien de Rome en Rome n’apperçois:
Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois,
Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme …
Rome de Rome est le seul monument
Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement.
For Montaigne to take such a tomb from above ground, where the sarcophagi that counted so
largely as ancient material culture for the purposes of Renaissance recuperation were located,
and then to bury it, is to declare for a kind of death that does not seem to admit of rebirth.
Long before Petrarch, Hildebert of Lavardin had composed what became a standard
pæan: “Nothing, Rome, is equal to you; even when you are nearly all in ruins, you teach us how
great you would be if your fragments were whole,” a sentiment that frequently got abbreviated to
[Serlio Frontispiece 1547] Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet. But Montaigne attacks the
mechanism, the ratios, at the heart of this whole enterprise by which ruin is flipped over into
glory. According to his fable, the powers of destruction had quite deliberately concentrated their
force on everything that was most beautiful; what is left is by definition the least beautiful, and it
admits of no such extrapolation into a modern greatness that is either imagined or, still less,
rebuilt. [Blank]
The sternest words, however, are reserved precisely for the enterprises of reconstruction.
Montaigne maneuvers all the weight of his skepticism on to how much we can know of the
ancient city by examining it now. He details the impossibility of conjecture,
since even [the city’s] site has infinitely changed in form, some of the valleys
having been filled up, even in the lowest places that were there; as for example, in
the place of the Velabrum, which because of its lowness received the sewage of
the city and had a lake, hills have arisen of the height of the other, natural hills
that are round about, as a result of the piling and heaping up of the ruins of these
great buildings.
Rome’s topography, in other words, has more to do with sewage than with traces of the ancients.
In fact, when he says, “one saw nothing of Rome but the sky under which it had stood and the
plan of its site; that this knowledge that he had of it was an abstract and contemplative
knowledge of which there was nothing perceptible to the senses,” he is aiming at the heart of the
very epistemology that underlies the Petrarchan project.
With that firewall between the learned historical imagination and the experience of the
senses in Rome, Montaigne lays bare all the humanist optimism involved in the utopic
imaginative possibilities that Petrarch and Giovanni Colonna indulged in when they sat atop the
Baths of Diocletian. If Rome is so ruined that there is no real experience of the senses, then
there has been no creative leap between the material world and that of the historical imagination.
It follows that when Romans attempt to remake this material world along those lines, the efforts
will be similarly vain: “the buildings of this bastard Rome which they were now attaching to
these ancient ruins, although fully adequate to carry away the present age with admiration,
reminded him precisely of the nests which sparrows and crows in France suspend from the
arches and walls of the churches that the Huguenots have recently demolished.” This is the kind
of spoliation that is mere destruction. Only Montaigne could perform this acrobatic piece of free
association whereby one man’s reborn classicizing golden age becomes another man’s violent
break with the past.
The fact that Montaigne approaches this problem through what is an implicit critique of
Petrarch’s epistemology (and not just his egoism) should also remind us that the real line of force
between these two writers is the question of the individual, especially as it is defined through the
relation between what one knows and what one is. Which takes us to a problematic for which we
must consult one final traveller in Rome. Before Freud walked in the Eternal City, he dreamt of
it. In one of these dreams, he is stuck on a train near Ponte S. Angelo and missing his chance to
explore; in another, the city is invisible under a mist; in a third, he finally gets there but only to
find in place of the great monumental city nothing more than a countryside with cliffs and
flowers and streams; in the last, Rome turns out to be not really an Italian place but part of the
German-Czech border territory of Moravia. In associating around these dreams, Freud speaks of
his long-term desire to visit Rome, his Moravian childhood, and his identification with the
Carthaginian (read, Semite) Hannibal; he also relates various stories concerning Jewish
experience, either painful or comic. Two factors emerge, to greater and lesser degrees of
explicitness, in Freud’s own account: Rome is an unattainable object of desire; and Rome is the
other that becomes nevertheless a mirror of the self. Not to mention the fact that Rome is the
ruined place where everything begins but where one has never been, the Mausolus tomb into
which one might like to crawl.
It took Freud thirty years, and six actual trips to Rome before he could postulate exactly
how this relation between the self and the city might be expressed. In Civilization and its
Discontents, Freud imagines the full history of the city, Roma Quadrata on the Palatine, then the
expanded city including the area embraced by the Servian Wall, which dates from the period of
the early kings in the sixth century B.C.E., and finally the city as enclosed by the Aurelian Walls,
which were built almost a thousand years later. But Freud’s history of Rome is not
fundamentally linear. When Petrarch walked in the midst of the city, he seemed to experience
the past as a single timeline; when he concluded the walk and looked down from the heights, he
believed he could see the fullness of a multiple history as it was lived in those spaces. It is this
latter view that Freud is after:
Let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation
but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to
say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away
and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest
one.
We are once more in the realm of Petrarch’s equations: the fragmentary city and the buried
unconscious; the lavish narrative of past history (whether of city or psyche), the therapeutic
promise of the analytic method. With the example of Rome, the psychoanalytic triad—
experience, repression, analysis—comes to be expressed in the terms of the cultural triad—
history, ruin, archæology.
Except that Freud categorically rejects his own analogy. If Rome really were the
unconscious, he goes on to register with a palimpsestic sense of geography as learned as
Petrarch’s,
This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Cæsars and the Septizonium of
Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine....
Where the Coliseum now stands we would at the same time admire Nero’s
vanished Golden House. On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only
the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same
site, the original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground
would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient
temple over which it was built.
For Freud, only the unconscious has the privilege of such simultaneities, and the postulate of the
unconscious proves that it wasn’t history that Petrarch was discovering but his own psyche.
But what happens if we turn the tables and have Petrarch analyze Freud? Or perhaps
more precisely, if the analysis is performed by the whole humanistic, classicizing tradition that
believes it can read history in the spoliation of the city? History would say, I refute Freud thus.
Nero’s Golden House [Domus/Colosseum] does still occupy the site of the Colosseum, the
[Palatine] Palatine does contain remains from a wide range of centuries, the Pantheon is made
up of multiple layers, and [Santa Maria] the very name Santa Maria sopra Minerva—shocking
for its pagan/Christian juxtaposition—gives the lie to any sense that plural pasts cannot be
concurrent. In short, archæology, whether it is of the mind or of the shovel, deserves all the
historical and transhistorical privileges of psychoanalysis, for which it has provided so much
metaphoric material. [Blank]
Of course, pitting these figures against each other is a bit of a game because we are
ourselves the archæological composites of all of them, and we couldn’t choose beween selfhood
and history if we wanted to. But I think one final word from Freud may point precisely to the
what is at stake in turning spolia-of-the-mind into history. It was written before either of the
other texts, appearing in 1896 in a paper on the causes of hysteria, where Freud is just beginning
to define a psychoanalytic method.
Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is
aroused by an expanse of ruins, with remains of walls, fragments of columns, and
tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself
with inspecting what lies exposed to view, with questioning the inhabitants—
perhaps semi-barbaric people ... about what tradition tells them of the history ...
and he may then proceed on their journey. But he may act differently. He may
have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants
to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins,
clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is
buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory;
the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure-house ...; the
numerous inscriptions, which, by good luck, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet
and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield
undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate
which the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur!
It sounds as though Freud has been reading the Hypnerotomachia [HP image], though I doubt it.
Freud’s vision here is very like Petrarch’s. Petrarch’s subjects cannot speak because they are in
ruins; Freud’s because they suffer from repression. I don’t think we have to buy (or not buy)
psychoanalysis, nor do we have to buy or not buy positivist historiography in order to assert that
Petrarch atop the Baths of Diocletian in 1340, or, for that matter, Gibbon “musing amidst the
ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter”
in 1764, or Burckhardt covering the same territory in 1847, is engaging in the hope that the past
will speak, and we will understand the language. I can’t help hearing in Freud’s saxa loquuntur
another iteration of Frankenstein’s It’s alive! By putting together separate pieces, each of which
contains some remnant of life, we hope to create new life. Which is why, however dead the
spolia may be, I am happy to keep using Vasari’s, and Michelet’s, and Burckhardt’s lovely term
Renaissance.