Rhyme Paysage

Go back to the Renais­sance and see it in anoth­er way, with­out the nar­ra­tive already baked into the name. Think of it as a cos­play, as a recon­struc­tion of the order of a life that seemed worth liv­ing, as a cob­bling-togeth­er of the sur­vivals of the past in a stage com­plete enough to act in. 

Look at a Renais­sance gar­den, par­tic­u­lar­ly. Then, as now, the gar­den was a dis­play of pow­er, a col­lec­tion of local desir­able plants and mate­ri­als, cul­ti­vat­ed to their fullest poten­tial, a micro­cosm of the world to be dom­i­nat­ed out­side. It was an inher­i­tance of the knowl­edge of medieval times, banked in a port­fo­lio of mate­r­i­al hold­ings such that it grew in inter­est over time. But equal­ly, it was a pur­pose­ful extrap­o­la­tion from the frag­men­tary real­i­ty seen in Pliny the Younger, from side men­tions here and there of the Roman author­i­ties what a gar­den was sup­posed to be. Put your­self in the vil­la at Fiesole. What to con­tem­plate? Some­thing recur­sive – not only the present life, done cor­rect­ly, but what the past life, the more cor­rect life, was in its round­ness. These were the grounds for a well-ordered simulation. 

Pop­u­late the gar­den with a famil­iar cast of char­ac­ters, by act­ing them out. Skin the walls of the vil­la with the paint­ings of the Domus Aurea. In these spaces, the pow­er­ful great­ly reduce the checks that meet them at all turns in their projects in the wider world. They may act and observe with an even greater degree of lat­i­tude. Aztec emper­ors, Chi­nese emper­ors, Roman emper­ors: they make abscess spaces, con­trolled sim­u­la­tions that reduce inter­fer­ence from the sur­round­ing world; they col­lapse the dis­tances, and stretch the width of the pos­si­ble spec­trum of cli­mates. They con­vene mate­ri­als, styles. But their micro­cosms are not still; they are not mon­ey pits, or sealed trea­suries. They are meant to live, to be oper­at­ed by liv­ing in. Dom­i­na­tion, again, is one side of the coin; the oth­er is a pro­jec­tion into a space of fantasy.

Is this a prod­uct of wealth and wealth alone? I don’t think so; this will to make, or re-make, a world is present in the major­i­ty of gar­dens, mon­ads that each reflect a wider realm. A fash­ion is not only a con­strained set of options that can be read­i­ly bought, or a token of belong­ing, but a fan­ta­sy of a shared cul­ture, and a way of pro­ject­ing that fan­ta­sy into the shared world. Our gar­dens trans­pose life, our usu­al set of sur­round­ings, into a more leg­i­ble and minia­ture set of terms, for nego­ti­a­tions with the mar­ket world, for encoun­ters with the cul­ture one wants to belong in.

The idea of a sim­u­la­tion is help­ful here com­plete­ly apart from the idea of sim­u­lacra; the gap between real­i­ty and its sub­set is, after a cer­tain point, a canard. The idea of sim­u­la­tion is, as a lens of see­ing the work­ings of the world, itself a sim­u­la­tion; which is to say it iso­lates a coher­ent set of con­di­tions and rela­tions that illu­mi­nate an aspect of the whole. Think here of a state of affairs that is pop­u­lat­ed by actors; that is at once rep­e­ti­tious and sub­ject to emer­gence; that is restart­ed at inter­vals with new con­di­tions, or altered with a com­bi­na­tion of knobs and slid­ers; that is gen­er­at­ed against a ground with a pre­dictable set of preconditions.

In run­ning, such a sim­u­la­tion achieves a cli­na­men from its orig­i­nal goal; it is found embed­ded in anoth­er tar­get. Lack­ing the means to repeat the Roman gar­den and its inhab­i­tants, it ends else­where; out­run­ning a Cola di Rien­zo, or a Mus­soli­ni, it ends up a repeat­able mod­el, that has in fact gone on repeat­ing ever since.

As with any open work, the ques­tion becomes the form and iden­ti­ty of that work, when all the pieces are in ques­tion — a name, a text, a place? A fam­i­ly resem­blance? The shared project we can see of the Renais­sance princes and arti­sans, to elab­o­rate from all angles an ambigu­ous space of fan­ta­sy; what made it hold togeth­er? Why project togeth­er, how to agree on a shared realm? What did Nep­tune and Thetis sup­ply that St. Sebas­t­ian and St. Agatha could not? How did this world, half res­ur­rect­ed and half invent­ed, relate to the world it hoped to colonize?