Monstrosity and Excess in Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s Visionary Architecture

Abstract

Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s eighteenth-century designs mustered potent notions of sensuality, but more importantly, they promoted an architecture of visual excess that defied what Jacques-François Blondel embraced as “moral restraint in design.” This hybridisation of mythological figures with neoclassical design proposes that Lequeu’s erotic fantasies in built form interrogated the stringent orthodoxy of neoclassical thinking through his willingness to trangress conventions laid down by Vitruvian principles. Through his “draftsman’s revenge,” his defiance embraced the extravagance of fantasy and imagination, which overturned conventional rules of proportion, scale, and symmetry, replacing them with the monstrous, the overembellished, and the visually disproportionate. Blondel did not permit “chimerical decorations” into the ornamentation of architecture – he even believed sculpture distracted from the primary dimensions of form and composure. This paper argues that Lequeu’s chimeric assemblages of monstrous proportions challenged the widely accepted rationalism set down by Blondel. His overt transcendence of the architectural orders demonstrates how the visual excess of the eighteenth century redefined architecture in terms of iconography that evoked terror, horror, and wonder.

Author’s Note

I would like to thank Stuart King as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. L’Abbé Jean Terrasson, Séthos, histoire ou vie tirée des monumens anecdotes de l’ancienne Égypte (Paris: Chez d’Hautel, 1813), 19. Inscribed by Lequeu onto his drawing La maison gothique. Accessed August 23, 2015, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k619018/f19.image.r = feu.langFR.

2. Roland Barthes in Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris: Éditions Seuil, 1971) claims that “thus the Sadian enclosure is relentless; it has a dual function; first, of course, to isolate, to shelter vice from the world’s punitive attempts; yet libertine solitude is not merely a precaution of a practical nature; it is a quality of existence, a sensual pleasure of being …” (16).

3. Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), 19. Jacques-François Blondel still embraced the Greek style exemplified by Giovanni-Niccolo Servandoni’s design for the façade of St. Sulpice (1732).

4. Rykwert, The First Moderns, 1.

5. Christopher Drew Armstrong, Julien-David Leroy and the Making of Architectural History (London: Routledge, 2013), 4. Other key references on the production of architectural theory during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries include Anthony Gerbino, François Blondel: Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution (London: Routledge, 2013); Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1988]); Caroline van Eck, Classical Rhetoric and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 [2007]); Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 2007).

6. Freek H. Schmidt, “Expose Ignorance and Revive the Bon Goût,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 1 (March 2002): 4–29.

7. Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’architecture, ou Traité de la décoration, distribution, & construction des batîments (Paris: Chez Desaint 1771–1777), 398.

8. Schmidt, “Expose Ignorance and Revive the Bon Goût,” 9. On starting design, “according to Blondel, the analytical method of training architects would replace dissolution and caprice with a profound use of talent aimed at producing good architecture.” (9).

9. Most of Lequeu’s drawings and etchings are held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) in Paris, which are used throughout this article as illustrations.

10. Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 117. Lequeu’s bitter exposé against other architects continued in the form of dramatic dialogues: indicting Brongniart for stealing the decorations of Ledoux’s Hotel de Montmorency, Bélanger for his mistresses, debauchery, and financial dealings, Chalgrin for dishonesty, Cellérier for his desire for the beautiful singers of the Opera. See BnF, Estampes archives, 1631–1914, vol. 1809–1826, Ye1.

11. Vidler, The Writing of the Walls, 160.

12. Robin Middleton, “Jacques-François Blondel and the Cours d’Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 18, no.4 (December 1959): 140–148, 141.

13. Blondel, Cours d’architecture, 288 on the proper treatment of columns and pilasters. See Allan Braham, The Architecture of the French Enlightenment (London: Thames and Hudson, 1989 [1980]), 38.

14. Middleton, “Jacques-François Blondel and the Cours d’Architecture,” 143.

15. Middleton, “Jacques-François Blondel and the Cours d’Architecture,” 145. Character was of paramount importance for Blondel, situated in the architectural orders. Refer to Nicolas le Camus de Mézières, Le genie d’architecture, ou l’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (Paris: Chez l’Auteur 1780).

16. L’Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier, L’essai sur l’architecture (Paris: Chez Duchesne, 1753), 67–68. Refer to Maarten Delbeke and Linda Bleijenberg, “Reconfigurations of the Vitruvius’ Origin Myths in the Eighteenth Century,” in Von Ursachen Sprechen: Eine Aitiologische Spurensuche: Telling Origins: on the Lookout for Aetiology, eds. Christiane Reitz and Anke Walter (New York, NY: Georg Olms Verlag, 2014): 491–517.

17. Middleton, “Jacques-François Blondel and the Cours d’Architecture,” 146. Refer to Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, “Le Sixième Ordre d’Architecture, ou la Pratique des Ordres Suivant les Nations,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 36, no. 4 (December 1977): 223–240. Nations such as Britain, France, and Germany each invented a sixth order of their choosing to accompany the original five architectural orders. The national sixth order reflected each country’s emphasis on given aspects of classical design.

18. Jacques-François Blondel, with Charles-Nicolas Cochin, L’homme du monde éclairé par les arts, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Chez Monory, 1774), II, 13.

19. Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’architecture, vol. III, X, “Il a su soutenir le style Grec dans toutes ses productions, tandis que Paris, à son temps, n’enfantoit guère que des Chimères,” 351.

20. Aristotle, “Generation of Animals,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ Princeton University Press, 1984), 1187.

21. Benedetto Varchi, Lezzioni di M.Benedetto, Sopra la generazione de’Mostri & se sono intesi dalla Natura, ò nò (Florence: Filippo Giunti, 1548), 97. See also Giambattista della Porta, Fisonomia dell’Huomo (1598) and Elena Lazzarini, “Wonderful Creatures: Early Modern Perceptions of Deformed Bodies,” Oxford Art Journal 34, no.3 (2011): 415–431.

22. Amboise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, translated by Janis L. Pallister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 38.

23. Paré, On Monsters and Marvels, 41–42.

24. Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Routledge, 2007): 149.

25. Marcus Frascari, Monsters of Architecture (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1991), 37. The anthropomorphism of human characteristics ascribed to buildings and edifices stretches from Vitruvius to Corbusier. Monsters “demonstrate the architectural project where the arrow of premonition is shot by the image of the body …” (13).

26. Roland Barthes, Arcimboldo (Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1980), 26.

27. Sigmund Freud, “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex, 1924” in On Sexuality, vol. 7, translated by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). Freud often employed Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities to explain his theories of psychoanalysis. Refer also to Janine Burke, The Sphinx on the Table: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection and the Development of Psychoanalysis (New York: Walker and Company, 2006).

28. Andrew Curran and Patrick Graille, “The Faces of Eighteenth-Century Monstrosity,” Eighteenth-Century Life 2, no.2 (1997): 1–15, 2.

29. Terry Kirk, “Monumental Monstrosity, Monstrous Monumentally,” Perspecta 40, Monster (2008): 6–15, 7.

30. Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 13.

31. On Etruria, see Ingrid D. Rowland, The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

32. Vidler, Writing of the Walls, 123. Erika Naginski frames Lequeu’s constructions such as his Porsenna’s tomb as a “monstrous, incommensurable object of wonder” – see her lecture entitled “Impossible Design: Porsenna’s Tomb and French Visionary Architecture” originally given at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2014).

33. Mark Dorrian, “On the monstrous and the grotesque,” Word & Image 16, no. 3 (July–September 2000): 310–317, 310. “Theories of proportion and systems of decorum assign to everything a due and proper place. Through them things are spaced, set apart, made appropriately distant. The high and the low, the noble and the base, the good and the bad are separated out, and systematized. In monstrous and grotesque phenomena such spacing collapses” (313).

34. Emil Kaufmann, Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 42, part 3 (October 1952): 431–564, 552–553. See Anthony Vidler, “The Ledoux Effect: Emil Kaufmann and the Claims of Kantian Autonomy,” Perspecta 33, Mining Autonomy (2002): 16–29.

35. Vittoria di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 137.

36. Di Palma, Wasteland, 137. See Georges Bataille on the dialectical counterparts of geometrical regularity, “The Deviations of Nature,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, edited and with an introduction by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31.

37. Di Palma, Wasteland, 153–154.

38. Malgorzata Szafranska, “The philosophy of nature and the grotto in the Renaissance garden,” Journal of Garden History 9, no. 2 (1989): 76–85, 76. Refer also to Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1982); Philippe Morel, Les grottes maniéristes en Italie au XVIe siècle (Paris: Macula, 1998); Luke Morgan, The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

39. Peter Drake, Fisherman of Brentford, “The Grotto: A Poem,” (1732), Eighteenth Century Collections, Literature and Language. Accessed June 9, 2015.

40. Diana Balmori, “Architecture, Landscape, and the Intermediate Structure: Eighteenth Century Experiments in Mediation,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50, no.1 (March 1991): 38–56, 39. Intermediate structures could take the form of a grotto, hermitage, and/or artificial ruin.

41. For example, see A Plan of Mr. Pope’s Garden, as it was left at his death: with a plan and perspective view of the grotto. All taken by J. Serle, his Gardener. With an account of all the Gems, Minerals, Spars, and Ores of which it is composed, and from whom and whence they were sent. To which is added, a character of all his writings (London: Printed for R. Dodsley, at Tully’s Head in Pall-mall, 1745).

42. Paulette Singley, “Devouring Architecture: Ruskin’s Insatiable Grotesque,” Assemblage 32, (April 1997): 108–125, 111.

43. Singley, “Devouring Architecture,” 111.

44. My own translation from the sectional drawing by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, La saline royale d’Arc et Senans.

45. Richard A. Etlin, Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 110.

46. Faujas de Saint Fond’s etching of Pont de Guele d’Enfer (1778) portrays a similar type of waterfall. For other representations of underground fountains and caverns, refer to Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Grande fontaine de l’Esplanade, adaptée au panchant de la Colline opposée a la Maison de plaisance, Fig. 161 and Lequeu, Section perpendiculaire de la caverne un peu travaillée du petit parc, des jardins delectable d’Isis (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1791–1795).

47. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, part II on terror (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1792 [1757]): 80–81.