“VIOLLET-LE-DUC AND THE ANATOMICAL BODY

OF ARCHITECTURAL KNOWLEDGE”

 

Aron Vinegar

Department of Art History

Northwestern University

This paper is concerned with two aspects of the 19th-century restorer Eugène Viollet-le-Duc's architectural theory:  his understanding of anatomy and physiology and his emphasis on the importance of drawing as an epistemological act.  To be more precise, it is about the amalgamation of the two into a powerful visual language for constructing a scien­tific body of architectural knowledge.  Nowhere is this implementation more effectively and coherently mobilized than in the numerous illustrations–better yet, demonstrations–for his nine volume Diction­naire Raisonné of French Gothic architecture, published between 1854 and 1868 (Viollet-le-Duc, 1854-1868).  The Diction­ary was the amalgamation of all his experience restoring cathedrals for France's state-run Monuments Historiques; it was a locus for not only his observations about the archi­tectural past, but his understanding of the French Gothic as a laboratory for future architectural creation.  In Viollet-le-Duc's conception of historical knowledge, memory becomes active, dissecting the past in order to create in the present.  I will track this dialectic between dis-member­ing and re-member­ing through an analysis of Viollet-le-Duc's graphic and textual strategies in the Dictionary.

 

anatomy, physiology, and architecture

Viollet-le-Duc like many intellectuals in the 19th century, was self-conscious of the part he was playing within a culture that was developing a new conception and practice of history–in short, a scien­tific one.  The great progress anatomy and physiol­ogy had made in mapping the most mysterious of domains–the living organism–offered these disci­plines as paradigms of scientific investigation.  Above all, physiology and anatomy provided two dominant modes of thought and practice to 19th-century science and culture:  organization and analytical methodology.  George Cuvier's compara­tive anatomy offered one of the most systematic examples of dissective methodology applied to the study of complex organizations; a methodology that Viollet-le-Duc could adopt for his own architectural investigations.

In the section "Restoration" in the Dictionary, Viollet-le-Duc specifically equates scientific history with George Cuvier's accomplishments:  "Cuvier, by means of his studies of comparative anatomy, as well as his geological research, unveiled to the public almost literally from one day to the next a very long history of the world. . . ." (Rudwick, 1990, p. 197).  Cuvier's "unveil­ing" of history was at the heart of his radical depart­ure from the old order of natural history.  His move from a Linnean taxonomy–based on external charac­ter traits–to a classification centered on the internal functions of the biological organism initiated a paradigm shift from natural history to the history of nature.  As Foucault noted in The Order of Things:  "From Cuvier onward it is life in its non-perceptible purely functional aspects that provides the basis for the exterior possibility of classification. . . .the possibil­ity of classification now arises from the depths of life, from those elements most hidden from view" (Foucault, 1973, p. 268).

Viollet-le-Duc was participating in and defining a similar endeavor in his archaeological and restora­tion work for the Commission des Monuments Historique, which he entered in the late 1830s.  Following Cuvier's example, the restoration and classification of France's architectural past would henceforth be predicated on internal structures and functions rather than a taxonomy of external and historical forms.  Viollet-le-Duc specifically indi­cated that although the architect responsible for restoration must be familiar with the style and form of the building he is restoring, more importantly, he must know ". . .the structure, anatomy, and temper­ament of the building" (Rudwick, 1990, p. 216).

For Cuvier and Viollet-le-Duc, the primary means of revealing the interior structure of the biological or architectural organism was dissection.  The original meaning of the Greek word ana-tomei simply meant to cut through–dissection–and it signified a method of research rather than a body of knowledge.  This methodological conception of anatomy became a primary trope for man's rational­ity and power of scientific analysis; it was the via  negationis that probed beneath the surface of repre­sentation in order to produce new knowledge.  Thus dissective analysis was a means, not an ends, in epistemological inquiry.  For Cuvier, the primary purpose of dissection was to reveal the function of structures–functions being the prime measuring units of physiological investigation and structures meaning the skeletal frame of the human body–corresponding to our modern understanding of the word anatomy.

Viollet-le-Duc's Cuverian amalgamation of dis­sective methodology, anatomy, and physiological explanation is neatly summed up in the preface to the Dictionary where he states that in order to understand the complex nature of Gothic architecture and its numerous parts one must "dissect, as it were, each building, as well as describing the functions and applications of all the component parts" (Viollet-le-Duc, 1854, vol.1, p. vi).  Other physiologists would later criticize Cuvier's localization of func­tions in individual organs as the primacy of anatomy over physiology.  For Viollet-le-Duc, however, the Cuverian approach was suited to his needs precisely because it emphasized structure as well as function (Coleman, 1971, p. 18).  In the Dictionary each com­ponent of the Gothic structure is dissected in order to elucidate its particular function.

But just as important to Viollet-le-Duc were the fundamental principles of Cuvier's comparative anatomy that raised it above the mere exploration of raw data to the level of a scientific discipline.  Behind Cuvier's exaggerated empiricist stance–his careful description and comparison of bone struc­tures–were the teleological principals of the "condi­tions of existence" and the "correlation of parts." The "conditions of existence" assumed that an organism was provided at the outset with all the necessary functions for its existence.  Thus no organ was superfluous, each played a specific role in the functional adaption of the creature to its environ­ment.  Viollet-le-Duc makes a direct reference to this in the section "Restoration":  "the constructions of the middle ages were calculated with scientific precision; these buildings really are delicate organ­isms.  There is nothing excessive or superfluous about them, any more than there are any features that serve no purpose" (Rudwick, 1990, p. 224).  Concomitant with this principle was the "correlation of parts."  According to Cuvier, "every organized being forms a whole, a unique and closed system, in which all the parts correspond mutually, and contrib­ute to the same definitive action by a reciprocal reaction.  None of its parts can change without the others changing too; and consequently each of them, taken separately, indicates and gives all the others" (Rudwick, 1997, p. 217).

The "correlation of parts" was the critical principal for Cuvier's palaeontological reconstruc­tions; if every part was a microcosm of the whole organism, one could confidently deduce all the others from a single element, and vice versa.  This was epitomized in Cuvier's provocative claim that he could reconstruct an entire animal from the fragment of a single bone (Figs. 1-2).  Like a modern day Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, he brought fossils of incomplete bone fragments to life fully restored to their original state.  And as Martin Rudwick has noted, "each fossil animal that Cuvier reconstructed was a monument to his principal of the coordination of parts" (Rudwick, 1972, p. 113).  Viollet-le-Duc makes the same claim in the entry "Style" in the Dictionary:  "just as in viewing a single leaf it is possible to reconstruct the entire plant, and in viewing an animal bone, the animal itself, . . . . similarly the nature of the finished construction can be derived from an architectural member" (Rudwick, 1990, p. 42).  It was exactly the predic­tive–one might say deterministic–nature of Cuvier's system of comparative anatomy that Viollet-le-Duc found so attractive.  Proceeding from effect to cause and cause to effect, these principles gave him the confidence, or perhaps overconfidence, to operate with a degree of certainty in his restoration and classification of Gothic monu­ments.

The "correlation of parts" was the linchpin of Cuvier's comparative anatomy, and it plays an equally dominating role in Viollet-le-Duc's Dictio­nary:  not only does it guide his analytic investiga­tion and understanding of architectural structure and function, but it also provides the organizing principle for the very discourse of that structure.  The form of the Dictionary is a dissective tool that divides the Gothic monument into discrete elements for investi­gation.  It makes little difference at what point the reader makes his entry into the Dictionary because one is constantly led back to the underlying princi­pals of a functionally integrated organism.  "Synthe­sis," as the art historian Hubert Damisch has pointed out "is only meaningful at the moment when the analytical mind sees the whole within the parts" (Damisch, 1979, p. 86).  The reader/viewer of the Dictionary's text and images follows the same anatomical process; analyzing and synthesizing based on the principal of the functional relationship of the part to the whole.

If Viollet-le-Duc was going to implement ana­tomico-physiological strategies to maximum effect in the Dictionary, he would have to inscribe them not only conceptually and textually, but also visually.  Physiology and anatomy were about spatial relation­ships that were best conveyed by visual means.  As Cuvier often noted, the functional relationship of organs was a physiological coordination rather than a geometrical juxtaposition (Coleman, 68, 1964).  Viollet-le-Duc utilized the techniques of represen­tation from anatomy itself, because the strict archi­tectural set of plan, elevation, and section was exactly the type of geometrical abstraction inimical to both his physiological interpretation of Gothic architecture, and his valorization of what Foucault has called the ". . .regard médical":  the increasingly analytic gaze of 19th-century science.

In addition, I would suggest that it was also anatomy's graphic capabilities to determine the viewer's gaze, and hence knowledge of the object presented, that Viollet-le-Duc found so attractive.  Anatomy and its graphic representation is, by its very definition, an active critical process involving the cutting, separating, and exposing of certain organs for display at the expense of others.  By inscribing the anatomical metaphor within his architectural drawings, Viollet-le-Duc could filter the viewer's conception of architecture through his own appropriation of anatomy's selective methods of representation.  Thus the Dictionary operates as a sort of imagination technology:  it is an instrument for the extension of imagining or visualizing activi­ties through the selective amplification and suppres­sion of information and material (Maynard, 1997).  The images in the dictionary are never merely a reflection of a historical entity called Gothic archi­tecture, but rather a critical element in the construc­tion of that history.

 

exploded views

The two large-scale exploded views of a Spring­ing of a vault (Fig. 3) and A Portion of the nave wall from the church of Notre-Dame at Dijon (Fig. 4) are the most obvious examples of Viollet-le-Duc's novel drawing techniques and are emblematic of the visual strategies implemented throughout the Dictionary.  There is no precedent for the exploded view in the tradition of academic architectural drawing; how­ever, it has a long, if sporadic tradition in anatomi­cal and machine drawing dating back to the 16th century (Vinegar, 1995, pp. 38-41).  To cut a long story short, the exploded view reappeared with renewed vigor in 19th-century anatomical illustration due, in no small part, to Cuvier's use of it to demon­strate his system of classification based on function.

The pertinent observation that Cuvier's Gallery of Comparative Anatomy at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, was full of objects to be "looked not at, but into" (Outram, 1984, pp. 175-176), probably refers to the striking number of skeletal parts displayed demon­tées and separées (Deleluze, 1823, pp. 670-672).  Exploded skulls (Fig. 5) and vertebrae (Fig. 6) were pried apart, each bone separated from the next by metal rods.  They en­couraged the visitor to compare, contrast, and look into the differences and resemblances between species according to the functional properties of each bone, and the functional interrelationship of each bone within individual specimens.  Cuvier's ex­ploded views were also adopted by functional anatomists such as Jean-Marc Bourgery (Fig. 7) whose anatomical atlas–Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme (Bourgery, 1831-1854)–was owned by Viollet-le-Duc and reviewed twice by Étienne Delécluze, Viollet-le-Duc's uncle (Delécluze, 1834 and 1840).  The materiality of the finely dissected parts were characterized by Delé­cluze as vérités palpables, palpable truths.

Viollet-le-Duc's exploded views (Figs. 3 and 4) showed the organic interrelation of adjacent parts in which each element that carried a load maintained its own independent function and could be freely compressed.  With Viollet-le-Duc's visual and textual guidance the reader/viewer, in an act of participatory cognition, reconnected the exploded masonry and in the process reenacted how the stress and strain of the vaults was transmitted down and out to the buttresses.  Each stone in the springing of the vault served a purpose and related to the next in an organic union of interacting forces following Cuvier's principle of the "correlation of parts."  Because Viollet-le-Duc believed medieval architec­ture embodied and distilled the principles of nature, he considered it a veritable "architectural organism" (Rudwick, 1990, p. 259).

Thus, the exploded view "figured" a fundamen­tal concept for Cuvier, Bourgery, and Viollet-le-Duc:  natural kinds.  The notion of natural kinds posits that there are divisions, gaps, or orderings in nature that exist independently of our conceptualiza­tion of them.  Natural kinds suggested that "nature was cleaved at its joints."  This unfortunate phrase taken from Plato, though inaccurate, does serve a point.  It appears that it is difficult to avoid speaking of natural kinds in anything but metaphorical terms–­to describe nature as a vertebrate dissected at its articulations (Kornblith, 1993, p. 15).  Viollet-le-Duc limits the separation between literal description and metaphoric analogy by inscribing the exploded view directly into his drawings.  The drawings collapse the semantic space necessary for the tech­nique of metaphor.  The thin and flexible vertebrae of the metaphor become the "material" backbone of his Gothic structure and the reader/viewer is encour­aged to scientifically analyze this structure (Fig. 4) as if it were a real organism by the instructions in the text:  "Let's dissect this construction piece by piece" (Viollet-le-Duc, 1859, vol. 4, p. 140).

 

hybrid views

Because the Gothic monument was a complex physical entity–a three-dimensional structure occupy­ing space–the primary tool for its graphic dissection was the perspective view.  As Viollet-le-Duc noted:  "Monuments in general and those of the Middle Ages in particular are not made to be seen straight on [en géométral] but from certain angles, and that is entirely natural:  the axial point is unique, the others infinite in number.  Thus one must make buildings not in anticipation of this one point, but of course with multiple [view] points in mind" (Van Zanten, 1994, pp. 259-260).  Taken collectively, the multiplicity of perspective views in the Dictionary provided an "objective" understanding of the Gothic monument.  The only equivalent to the exhaustive and complex perspectival strategies in the Dictionary are found in contemporary anatomical illustrations.  In the hands of the anatomical illustrator the perspec­tive view became the equivalent of the dissector's scalpel:  a sharp rhetorical tool emphasizing precise information about the object depicted.

According to Frank Netter (1994, p. 1090), a prominent 20th-century anatomical illustrator, there are three criteria for an effective anatomical image:  point of view, focus, and plane.  Point of view decides whether the pedagogical point will best be made "from the front or back, right or left side, top or bottom, or from some particular angle."  This selective process requires an excellent knowledge of anatomy because the artist must know what struc­tures will be seen from these viewpoints.  Focus is the amount of subject to be included in the drawing.  It is the first step in graphic dissection, initiating the screening and rhetorical aspects of anatomical drawing:  the exclusion of extraneous information in order to emphasize a particular organ.  Plane indi­cates the depth of dissection; the complexity of an organism often necessitates a drawing in multiple planes.  Needless to say, the illustrator had to have an excellent knowledge of anatomy in order to know what structures lie at each plane.  The combination of focus, point of view, and plane resulted in com­plex hybrid illustrations combining perspective views from different viewpoints with multi-level cuts.

Bourgery's superficial dissection of vessels, nerves, and muscles of the axilla and neck (Fig. 8) is a perfect example of this process.  He uses num­erous cuts, indicated by thin white lines, to show specific anatomical information at different depths.  The perspective view is at an odd angle, taken slightly from below, in order to capture the complex interaction of elements in the neck region.  Viollet-le-Duc's perspecti­val sectional cut-away of two bays of a wall (Fig. 9) follows similar procedures.  He takes an oblique perspective view from below and uses the same type of diagonal cuts in increasing depth in the triforium area to expose the skeletal structure behind the lightweight sheathing of the Gothic monument.  The detailed exposure of each layer of masonry in its textural detail is characteristic of Viollet-le-Duc's cut-away drawings and is also a prominent feature of Jacob's lithographs where each layer and texture of the perimysial sheathing, mus­cle, and bone are carefully rendered.  In keeping with Viollet-le-Duc's graphic strategies, these cut-away drawings emphasize the organic connection between internal function and exterior form.

 

viollet-le-duc's graphic restorations

Viollet-le-Duc's section "Restoration" in the Dictionary begins with the following highly epigram­matic–and enigmatic–summation of his views on architectural restoration:  "To Restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair it, nor to rebuild it; it means to establish it in a finished state, which may in fact, never have actually existed at a given time" (Rudwick, 1990, p. 195).  The ultimate visual embodiment of Viollet-le-Duc's statement is the bird's-eye view of the Ideal Cathedral (Fig. 10) in volume two of the Dictionary.

In a striking visual contrast to the paradigm of graphic dissection in the Dictionary, Viollet-le-Duc synthesizes features from numerous Gothic cathe­drals "to create," as one scholar has noted, "an ideal invented composite, a perfect Gothic cathedral as such as even the Middle Ages had failed to realize in a single building" (Bergdoll, 1994, p. 251).  The process which led to Viollet-le-Duc's Ideal Cathedral involved a similar idealizing process on a smaller scale.  Each individ­ual Gothic monument was graphically restored to its supposed original state according to the purity of its ideal-type, worked out by Viollet-le-Duc in terms of regional schools of architecture (Rudwick, 1990, p. 79).

Such an idealizing composite figure is also a prominent feature in Cuvier's fossil reconstructions and Bourgery's practice of functional anatomy.  Bourgery, in the first volume of his anatomical atlas, explains that he created an ideal human body type in order to facilitate comparison between all anatomical elements in the atlas (Bourgery, 1831, vol. 1, p. 3).  As Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison (1992, pp. 84-85) have noted, "The purpose of these atlases was and is to standardize the observing subjects and observed objects of the discipline by eliminating idiosyncrasies....to replace raw experience–the accidental contingent experience of specific individ­ual objects–with digested experience.”

The comparative method initiated by Cuvier and adopted by Viollet-le-Duc and Bourgery, was a procedure for eliciting the secrets held by empirical data.  The ultimate goal was to subsume the constant flux and variation of phenomenal datum to law-like  statements.  Thus, the interpretive act involved in constructing the ideal type–the differentiation of the perfect from the accidental or variable–was never seen as a submission to subjectivity, but rather as a bulwark against it.  Like Cuvier or Bourgery, Viollet-le-Duc's exhaustive anatomical exploration of the Gothic monument was only possible through the matrix of ideal typologies.  Therefore, there is no real dichotomy between dissective analysis and imaginative synthesis (Figs. 3 and 10) in the Diction­ary–one cannot operate without the other.  In Viollet-le-Duc's method, the construction of regional ideal types allowed him to explore the minutiae of each structural element with law-like confidence, and the dissection of each element in the Gothic structure provided–or perhaps confirmed–the know­ledge for the construction of those ideal-types.  Whether this is a vicious or productive methodologi­cal circle is still open to debate.

Viollet-le-Duc's graphic restorations–like their anatomical counterparts–complicate any clear distinctions between fact and theory, analysis and construction, scientific objectivity and creative imagination.  Viollet-le-Duc's approach to the architectural past was not only about reclamation or revival, but also an act of critical imagination–an analysis that distilled and transformed the material structures of the past into new entities relevant to the present.  Viollet-le-Duc's incessant probing of Gothic architecture in the Dictionary constructed a scientific body of architectural knowledge, the critical and rhetorical power of which continues to influence our understanding of the architectural past and present to this very day.

 

REFERENCES

 

      Bergdoll, Barry.  (1994).  Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the age of industry.  Cambridge, Mass.:  The MIT Press and the Architectural History Foundation.

 

      Bourgery, Jean-Marc. (1831-1854).  Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme, comprenant le médicine opéra­toire, par M. le Dr. J.M. Bourgery, avec planches lithographiées d'après nature, par N.H. Jacob.  8 vols. Paris: C.A. Delaunay.

 

      Coleman, William. (1971).  Biology in the nineteenth century:  Problems of form, function, and transformation.  New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

 

      . (1964).  Georges Cuvier, Zoologist:  A study in the history of evolution theory.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

 

      Damisch, Hubert. (1979).  The space between: A structura­list approach to the Dictionary.  Architectural Design Profile  (Robin Middleton, ed.).  London.

 

      Daston, Lorraine & Gallison, Peter. (1992).  The image of objectivity.  Representations. 40, 81-128.

 

      Delécluze, Etienne-Jean. (17 May, 1840).  Des travaux anatomiques de M. le Docteur Bourgery.  Revue de Paris. 3, ser 17, 208-222.

 

      .  (15 November, 1834).  Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme, comprenant la Médicine opéra­toire par M. le docteur Bourgery, avec planches lithograph­iées d'après nature, par N.H. Jacob.  Feuilleton du Journal des Débats. n.p.

 

      Deleuze, J.P.F. (1823).  Histoire et description du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle.  2 vols. Paris.