ABSTRACT
Architecture is here understood metaphorically as an extension of the body. Conversely, the body identified as a literal extension of architecture has a different, but likewise very rich record that is worth recalling. The presence of bodies in walls and façades is determined by a long history of figural ornamentation. Petrified figures showing human bodies, as well as animals and vegetation motifs were largely used in Greek and Roman times. A plethora of figures were also applied in the medieval period when façades of religious buildings were used as information screens to describe biblical narratives. The German art historian Klaus Jan Philipp explains in his book ArchitekturSkulptur (2002) that buildings at that time did not just speak through the language of architecture itself, but also communicated historic, functional and moral aspects through the richness of imagery inlaid in them.28 A taste for grotesque figures developed especially with the setting of gargoyles and other beastly figures in Gothic cathedrals. The passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, however, brought with it the transition from figurative narratives to figural ornaments. Here figures of the human body acquired major importance in walls. In her essay on figural ornaments the architectural historian Alina Payne lists numerous types of bodies that conquered the wall outside the religious context – ‘parapet figures, reclining nudes on window pediments, caryatids or modified caryatids, figures on balustrades standing sentinel at entrances, not to mention varied figural bas-reliefs embedded in walls’.29 A growing ‘sculpturalization’ of architecture took place in which figures became more and more free-standing and employed to enhance the formal and tectonic expression of buildings.30 Rhythmic and
vertical compositions, as well as structural values in columns, beams and arches were reinforced through the literal representation of bones and muscles of bodies. Walls were understood as more than walls; they were parts of a body, a combination of both human and architectural flesh.31 With the logic of the contrapposto, for example, the expressive power of a building was enhanced to that of a carefully choreographed posture of twisting and dancing bodies. For Payne, the figural ornament augmented the combination between structural and corporeal references, allowing ‘texture, light, shade, and movement to enhance the tactility of the architectural elements of the façade’. An increasingly integrated wall corporeality took place. Figures started inhabiting walls and façades in which ‘the architectural details belong to sculpture in the same way that the geometry of the bodies placed along pyramids and diagonals suggests that they belong to architecture’, she claims. The Renaissance indeed accomplished another transformation, that of figural ornaments from a ‘sculptural motif into an architectural one’; figures ceased to be exceptional signature objects and became one of many that anonymously ‘inhabited’ the architecture.32 The Baroque later introduced many more figures into the wall, achieving an unprecedented three-dimensionality of sensuous attraction. Eighteenth-century Iberian Baroque and Rococo is particularly exuberant and ornamental when compared with its central European counterparts, which were more concerned with the tectonic and structural dimension of architecture. The majestic inner décors of Portuguese churches, such as the church of S. Francisco in Porto (eighteenth century), for example, stand out for their splendour and magnificence. In that period architects
and decorators progressively enriched churches with Talha Dourada (Gilt Carvings). This lead to a rather eclectic ensemble of motifs and spaces, which in turn created an opulent universe of niches, ornamental patterns, rhythms and an exceptional group of figures. This extruded and enriched threedimensional inner surface of architecture. Without an inherent structural logic, the Talha Dourada, however, is fascinating for the inhabitable depth and haptic opulence that the interior cladding of gold leaf creates within rather austere Romanesque and Gothic stone constructions.
