On February 18th, as part of the Department of Art History’s Visual Studies program (with support from the Coca-Cola Company), Eva Berar gave a lecture from a series titled “Forming the Image of the ‘Big City’ at the Turn of the 19th-20th Centuries. St. Petersburg-Europe.” Professor Berar is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in France. The lecture series will focus on how cities were imagined, portrayed and built in Russia and Western Europe. Berar’s lecture “Urban Conversation, or, A Place of Democracy,” was devoted to the image of the city as polis — a place of free and responsible speech and “serious discourse” by citizens on issues of public importance.
In the first part of her presentation Berar described different aspects of studying the city as a sociocultural phenomenon and demonstrated its relevance. Today, a large portion of the world’s population lives in cities; we have become urban species. It is primarily in cities that capital, both material wealth and knowledge, accumulates. A large city (German: Großstadt) will come to be understood as not just a city. What differentiates the civilization of megalopolises from the civilization of cities? The beginning of urban civilization as we know it started in Athens. Ever since, for the past 25 centuries cities have existed, surrounded by countryside. Despite their supremacy, up until the first half of the 20th century cities depended on villages both demographically (for military and labor resources) and economically (for agriculture). This centuries-long balance began to disintegrate at the beginning of the 19th century. By its second half, the city had radically changed in both form and function, as had the identity of citizens.
The study of perceiving and forming the image of the city began with literature. First and foremost, the city’s image was both perceived with and affixed in words. Yurii Lotman and Vladimir Toporov, for example, studied and examined the city through reading and literature. In his work on the sociology of the city titled “Paris, a Modern Myth,” Roger Caillois contended that the myth of Paris was born from the collective reading of texts about Paris; that is, at the beginning of the 19th century with the introduction of compulsory primary school education.
It was Victor Hugo who first sensed the inadequacy of a purely literary perception of the city. In “Notre-Dame de Paris,” the narrator observes the city from a bird’s eye view, from the cathedral’s bell tower. For him, Paris is a great stone book in which the entire city can be read. Architecture was the first written language, where the column formed letters, the arches—syllables, and the pyramid—the word. According to Hugo’s narrator, Gutenberg’s invention killed this stone language: a new form of written language killed the language of architecture. The confluence of the written word with the plastic arts, books, painting, and sculpture is a well-studied topic that becomes more complex when discussing the city.
Even in the title of his book “The City as a Work of Art” (1986) American historian Donald Olsen asserted that the city could be seen as an artistic production. In Berar’s view, however, this claim is contentious: such production strives for perfection and reaches a point in its development where it is completely static. Even the most semiotically monotonous city is always a living, imperfect and developing organism. It’s no wonder that the first urban utopias gave rise to the image of a flawless, symmetrical city completely devoid of inhabitants, since they are harbingers of chaos. In reality, the city is always a collection of heterogeneous units.
When, in the early 20th century urban sociology and urban history came to be formulated as particular disciplines, a dispute arose amongst researchers: what are the specific components of urban sociology? What constitutes a city in this case — demographics, or architectural constructions? According to British historian Harold Dios, the history of the city is the history of a generation of buildings and a generation of people. Furthermore, it is the history of trade economy, which distinguishes the city from the countryside. The city can be seen as a source of cultural institutions. According to Yurii Lotman, “The city is a complex semiotic mechanism, a cauldron of texts and codes and all kinds of semiotic collisions.”
Berar next invited the audience to compare images of Moscow and Paris, providing her own commentary. In her view, Yurii Pimenov’s “Novaya Moskva [New Moscow]” (1937) presents the ideal 20th century city, in which the automobile is an essential component. In Edvard Munch’s “Rue de Rivoli” (1910), there is a similar device for viewing the city: the gaze is directed toward automobile traffic, and the highway fills the entire space of the painting. If we believe that our perception of the world is a function of time (Bergson), then we can say that Pimenov’s painting expresses speed in terms of eternity. It is static, in fact: although the viewer doesn’t see the classical architecture, he or she does have the sense of the immobility and orderliness inherent to classicism. In Munch’s painting, the same rhythm and speed are rendered through chaos.
Having outlined the main issues associated with studying the image of the city, Berar began the second part of her lecture. She noted that in the era of megalopolises it is especially important to focus on one aspect: the city as a topos of political organization. She directed our attention once more to ancient Athens. The polis—or city state—consists of an independent urban community and its surroundings in which all free citizens establish and implement norms and laws and try to fulfil them, thus constituting a political organization. According to Aristotle, man is by nature a political creature. Outside the polis he is either a god or an animal. The polis exists for the good of its inhabitants, and politikē—the political community—is a part of ethics. The main principle of its existence became equal speech (the vote). In the Greek polis, debates were conducted in a special area—the agora—followed later by the Roman forum. From here there emerged the tradition of the city square as an open, public space. Architecturally this was a closed space, fenced off and delineated within the city. It simultaneously performed a number of functions, serving as an area for trade, debate, ceremonies and, finally, leisure. Winkelmann maintained that is was primarily the political freedom of polis rather than their prosperous climate that ensured the perfection of Greek art. Athens has thus remained a model of the city throughout history because its very structure contributed to the flourishing of the arts. The evolution of thought in the polis developed freely in the conversations around the table or during the walks.
Georges Duby, initiator of the history of “urban France,” proposed that the distinguished feature of the city was neither its numbers nor the activities of its citizens, but rather its legal status, its type of sociality and, consequently, its culture. In his book “The Culture of Cities,” (1938) American historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford characterized the city as a place most conducive to civic conversation. Dialogue, according to this view, is one of the most articulated means of self-expression in urban life.
In the third part of her lecture Berar traced the iconography of the “urban conversation” from the Renaissance to the 20th century. The Renaissance revived not only the arts and philosophy of antiquity, but also its topoi, and thus the environments in which they evolved. The ancient topos of urban dialogue occupied an abiding place in artistic contemplation. Frescoes depicting San Gimignano by Taddeo di Bartolo (1401) served as an “introduction” to the topic of urban dialogue. The foundation of the city is shown through a prism of religious consciousness: it begins with the church. The images of cities in the Bible, however, such as Jerusalem and Sodom and Gomorrah, are presented as hotbeds of vice. The Sienese painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted “The Fruits of Good Governance” on the walls of the Palazzo Publico (1337-1340). These frescoes, according to Berar, can be considered the first secular images of the urban landscape. The remaining walls in the interiors of the city council were painted with scenes of poor governance, as well as good governance in the countryside. Conversation as such is missing from the fresco, but it contains all the era’s representations of how city life should look. In the foreground we see the palazzo and fortress falls. The church, in the background, is hardly visible due to the other buildings. The city streets bustle with life: masons build, merchants trade, students study, and citizens stroll around. At the same time the arts flourish: people wear elegant clothing, and they study music and dance. We see a wedding procession. It’s interesting to note that images of power are absent from the fresco. These appear on a neighboring wall in the form of the allegory of the (bene commune) — the elder on the throne. Virtues are seated around him: generosity, tolerance, peace, etc. Robbers, thieves and social outcasts are represented at the bottom right. On the left are patricians, whose eyes are turned toward the common good. Some figures, however, don’t look at him — perhaps commenting something — this figure of urban dialogue will develop further.
In a fresco by Massacio and the Florentine painter Filippo Lippi “The Resurrection of the Son of Theophilus” (1424), conversation itself becomes the subject. Theophilus is presented as a Turk; he does not believe in the miracle of Peter. Next to him, on the left side of the painting, stands a group of patricians in the midst of discussion. Their faces are serious but they do not antagonize one another. Their conversation is full of urbanité, an important component of urban culture. The same can also be seen in the fresco of Masolino da Panicale’s “Healing of the Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha” (1424). The artist depicted urban daily life around the main subject — in the middle ground stand elegantly-dressed patricians, also absorbed in conversation. Perhaps they attract more attention than the saints themselves.
Two conversations at once can be seen in the episode of “The Meeting of Mary and Elizabeth” in Domenico Ghirlandaio’s “Visitation” (1424) in the Tornabuoni Chapel at the Church of Santa Maria Novella. The main, sacred dialogue takes place between Elizabeth and Mary, but in the background the viewer can also see citizens leaning on the parapet and considering the Florentine panorama while talking “about nothing” (clear from their relaxed postures). High and low culture coexist because the city before us is a “cauldron of texts and codes.”
In conclusion, Berar demonstrated the existence of the topos of “urban dialogue” in the 20th century by showing a clip from Marlen Khutsiev’s film “Mne dvadtsat’ let [I Am Twenty]” (1964). A serious civic discussion takes place between the film’s three main protagonists. They are in a public space — on the street, and then in a subway vestibule. A troika replaces the figure of the common good in Soviet cinema: at the beginning of the film three soldiers, October sentinels, represent the city’s past. At the end, the same three are the mausoleums’ honor guard.
In her introductory lecture Eva Berar outlined a variety of issues and questions, many of which will be developed throughout the series.
Sofya Abasheva
