Subjectivity in the Fictional Ruin: The Caprice Genre

"What a clever chap that architect is, though; how he takes his client's measure!" Edith Wharton (1) After Roland Mortier's La Poetique des ruines en France the study of the motif of the ruin in poetry and prose was extended to many schools, periods and types of representation, such that research on the topic, particularly on literary uses of the ruin seems to have little left to uncover. However, the question of how to extricate the ruin as a subject of poetics from references to real ruins remains and as with most questions of a theoretical order, should engage the research community for some time to come. The fine line between fiction and reality disappears in most critical treatments of ruins when the presupposition that the architecture being analyzed could exist encounters no obstacle. Such a presupposition cannot be made with respect to the caprice, a genre of ruin painting developed in the eighteenth century. This genre designates an imaginary arrangement of celebrated ruins and monuments. These representations announce their distance from reality and invite the viewer to marvel at the ingenuity with which the artist juxtaposed monuments far away from each other in reality. For this reason, we have chosen the caprice as the point of departure for this study of the ruin as a fictional structure. In painting, as in literature, the ruin often furnishes the landscape in which a narrative is set. As an element of landscape, however, ruins constitute the background of the principal representation. The caprice represents the move of the ruin in painting from the background to the status of subject. We can speak of the poetics of a representation when it has become the subject of invention and thus a work of art unto itself. In the case of the caprice painting, ruined architecture has become the focal point of the artist's invention. The first part of our argument will therefore examine the development of the ruin as a subject of invention in painting and analyze how Diderot first defined the poetics of this genre in the Salon de 1767. Diderot's ruin poetics takes leave of ekphrasis and invents the viewer's reaction to a caprice by Hubert Robert. One can say that Diderot "invents" the reaction because he describes it as another painting: an extension of the original. In the latter half of our argument, we hope to demonstrate that the fictional ruin in a literary text is likewise first an extension of and ultimately a departure from ekphrasis. From the sketch of the architectural ornament in Gian Battista Piranesi's texts to the ekphrasis of Piranesi's work in the fantastic genre, the fictional aspects of the representation of ruins appear as elaborate extensions of an existing edifice. In literature, the traces of a subjective reaction to architecture eventually translate into the complete portrait of the viewer and his passions. In the fantastic genre's variations on the theme of Piranesi's Prisons, the final portrait of the devastated artist constitutes, as we hope to demonstrate, the literary response to his ruin fantasies as well. The Ruin in Narrative Painting Throughout its history in painting, the ruin served only as a setting for religious subjects, among the more famous: the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, the stoning of Saint Etienne, the grotto or run-down stable in the Nativity and Christ chasing the merchants from the Temple. In Nativities for example, the ruin symbolized a humble beginning, or as Chateaubriand wrote: "[...]le dernier degre des conditions humaines, parce que nous etions tombes par l'orgueil[...]." (2) Jean Starobinski attributes a deictic funtion to ruins as indicators of an oriental desert landscape in the background of paintings of the martyrdom of Saint-Sebastian and in Nativities: [...] Tres tot [...]les peintres ont imagine des ruines pour en faire un decor intermediaire entre les structures factices et le monde naturel, entre le palais et le roc[. …