Divers Vases: artifactual imagination and architectural history circa 1700

In the decades preceding the turn of the eighteenth century a debate developed among European historians over the trustworthiness of textual sources as compared to artifactual evidence.  More recently, scholars have outlined the role played by architects in this perceived “crisis” of historical method.  Erika Naginski, for example, argues that the conventions of architectural representation helped contribute to an emergent “regime of visual truth,” one that ultimately transformed the historian’s basic means of understanding the past.  

This talk examines the reverberations of the pyrrhonists’ debate along the opposite vector. Surely the newfound enthusiasm for material evidence, ranging from coins to tools, altered the “objectscape” of eighteenth-century designers. This shift is especially apparent in a work like Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (Vienna, 1721). The book’s fifth and final chapter, a graphic collection of Prunkgefässe, has consistently befuddled later interpreters.  What reason could Fischer possibly have for ending his systematic exposition of world monuments with a motley array of vases?  Alongside his occasional use of medals as supporting evidence for his architectural reconstructions, the vases in the fifth chapter seem to represent his most direct engagement with artifactual evidence.  And yet, most of the artifacts illustrated are the product of his own fantasy, with fabricated provenance attached.  What this suggests is a different mode of relating to objects: the activation of an artifactual imagination.  

This talk reasserts the integral role of the vases in Fischer’s larger project by reading his final chapter as an explication of design method. Here, Fischer demonstrates an alternative process for translating historically- and geographically distant aesthetics to new architectural scenarios, not via the rule-based system of the orders, but through the intuitive leap in scale from object to building.  Mirroring the emerging antiquarian methods, but in reverse, Fischer’s diverse vases become plastic points of entry for new architectural inventions.