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From: Stephen Lauf
To: design-l@lists.psu.edu
Subject: Re: crossology
Date: 2004.04.01 12:47
Brian, I thought well of your contributions to 'crossology' (as you now put it) last night. I thought how you're very much adding 'modern' data to the record. I also like Pat's annexations. Crossology is a vast territory, and it's somewhat amazing what and how certain paths cross here at design-l.
1 April 1999 is when I first learned of St. Helena as the mother of Constantine and of her activity as builder of highly significant/original Christian basilicas. Five years ago it was Holy Thursday, and ten years ago 1 April was Good Friday, when (a close friend) R. David Schmitt died right in the middle of the afternoon.
"Calendrical Coincidence"
Interesting how this stuff happened in Philadelphia, where Broad St. and Market St. manifest the largest cardo and decumanus in the world--a planned and then 'concrete' crossing of two main urban street.
Initially, it was data, actually the absence of data within Piranesi's Ichnographia Campi Martii that led me to look for the 'architect' of Rome's Constantinian Basilicas, buildings which should be present within the Ichnographia, but are not--Rome's Pagan edifices are present, but not the (contemporaneous) Christian ones.
Much of my focus over the last five years has concentrated on the time between 28 October 312 (when Constantine 'converted' from leading his troops into battle under a Pagan guise/symbol to leading his troops into battle under a Christian guise/symbol) to sometime late 328/early 329 (when (I believe) Eutropia died). This period in time is when Christian church building was, as we say now, 'booming' throughout the Roman Empire for the first time, and it was Helena and Eutropia that were mostly responsible for all this (architectural) activity. From the very start, it thrills me that women, and not men, played this important historical role--and not just any women, but 'twin basilissas'.
Not too long ago, countable days actually, I first learned of Melania the Younger, and how her (enormously expensive) family estate just outside the walls of Rome at the Salarian Gate, was one of the great properties (along with the Gardens of Sallust) that were plundered when Alaric and his Visigoths broke into (at the Salarian Gate) and sacked Rome for the first time. The Visigoths initially camped for many months outside the walls of Rome (near the Salarian Gate) thereby starving the city by disrupting all deliveries of grain from Africa to the city. The Salarian Gate, the Gardens of Sallust, and the Gardens Valeriani (Melania's inheritance) are all delineated within Piranesi's Ichnographia Campi Martii right where they are supposed to be. Interesting, right next to this complex of buildings/structures, Piranesi also delineates a Porticus Neronianae, a completely fictitious building in the shape of a large cross within a circle (a composition, coincidentally, that follows the circle/square juncture pattern similar to the Timepiece gauge of the theory of chronosomatics). Within a day of assimilating all this new (to me) data, I came to see how the inner circle of the Porticus Neronianiae matches the circle of the compass/north arrow that Piranesi also delineated within the Ichnographia, and I came to see how if you rotate the cross of the Porticus Neronianae 45 degrees, its four points then correspond exactly to the four cardinal points of global direction. (Just like you wrote today, Brian, I realized that) the Porticus Neronianae of Piranesi's Ichnographia Campi Martii is the X that marks the spot where the first attacking Visigoths camped. [There are even more 'symbols' to interpret here, like 'shifting winds' and Nero as anti-Christ precursor, but more on that latter.]
I'm still thrilled, mostly because the thrill is still capable of being there.
Today, I'm probably going to make a quick visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, specifically to look again at the Life of Constantine tapestries designed by Rubens in the Great Hall (here I can see figural representations of Helena and Eutropia, among many others), then the campy nude portrait of Cosimo de Medici, then the period room from Southern Bavaria that Napoleon once slept in, then Prometheus Bound, then the gifts of Eva Stotesbury in memory of her husband Ned, then the portrait of Franklin looking at his electrical via lightening bell ringing invention, then the Duchamp Gallery, and finally (outside) Jennewien's polychrome mythology filling one of the museum pediments.
yours truly,
a Horace Trumbauer architecture fan
ps
I spent most of yesterday preparing two letters with pictures that my mother is sending to Johannes von Ow and Monika von Ow. One of the last things my mother physically did with these people was huddling in a baron's basement while Munich was being bombed in Spring 1944.
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