the cherubs are not what they seem \/\/ heavenly architecture 1

Heaven, according to Dante

The West, meaning Europe, was a really crappy place to live for the millennia-and-a-half (roughly) between the fall of the Romans and the Renaissance, especially when you compare the state of European life during the dark ages to the life elsewhere on the planet.  Architecturally (again roughly), it was all about churches and castles.  Churches and monastic centers meant to solidify and eternalize the dominance of the Christian religion, and served as the infrastructural hardware requisite to homogenize European identity generally in a time of feudal competition between insular communities.    Defensive castles, rarer than churches (though no less important), served to ensure that the rich people didn’t get killed every time a barbarian horde decided to invade.

The contemplative and stoical Romanesque, coupled with intellectual, geometry-obsessed Byzantine architecture, piggybacking on religion and utilizing a more or less standard cannon of rules concerning construction and design, provided a stylistic unity for Europe roughly until the dawn of the 2nd millennia.  The Gothic mode intensified the brooding, introspective aspect of European architecture, until the relative opulence of the Renaissance resuscitated a certain levity and exhibitionist confidence in European structures.

The idea is that when life sucks it becomes all the more important to concentrate on the hereafter.  Rome, of course, was dead.  Rome’s architecture, even in its relative sobriety and brute functionalism compared to its extroverted Greek precursor, was a ruined ideal, outside the realm of possibility in terms of scale and grandeur for European nations for more than a thousand years, only to be echoed, never reinvented; yet, there was always Heaven to look to, a more perfect place with better, more permanent living solutions.  Architectural spaces in the monastic mode found that part of their function was to facilitate contemplation of heavenly matters, and one of the most important of such issues concerned the eternal soul’s final resting place, its eternal home: stripped of its moral components, ultimately, a question of dwelling.  In the darkest ages of medieval times, people sought to surround their most important spaces with representations of otherworldly, divine, perfect structures, and over a thousand years or so, it is no surprise that we have thoroughly associated material fonts of worldly power with a symbolic grammar of divine power.

Icon of the 9 Orders of Angels in the Christian tradition (note the eye in the pyramid)

I don’t know what impulse there is in the human spirit that drives us to imagine the structures of Heaven; to count angels in a dream; to assign to each human endeavor a patron spirit; to see, above them all, stranger spirits still: wheels within wheels, flaming thrones, Heavenly furies bursting light and sound and raging impossible power; but we do it!  Quoting Zizek loosely, this is properly ideological behavior: ideology, as Zizek defines it, is that of which we do not know, but we do.  When ideological work plays out in architectural modes, in particular locales imbued with expressed functional meanings, we see ideology act more forcefully that we do elsewhere.  Ideological activity gains an aspect of intentionality, an aspect of design; the ideological object loses its atmospheric sublimity in favor of a more focused, quasi-linguistic (in that it lacks a true syntax) statement.  Rather than the Zizekian trope, we have: ideology is that which some know, and therefore we do.  Ideology, by way of design, can be controlled.

In the Christian angelic host, there is an architectonic of hierarchy surrounding the light, or the empty space – God.  On the lowest levels: Angels, Archangels, and Princes.  These, the most anthropomorphic beasts of Heaven, are messengers and administrators, solders, governors of agriculture, the tides, the machinations of the world, etc.  Above them are stronger, grander angels, the clerks of Heaven, administrators of the cosmos: pure forces with more universal duties.   For example, we find the Virtues in this realm of celestial middle-management: Justice herself, presumably.  In the highest choirs, we find the divine beings that are the most wild, and the most interesting to me personally in that some are purely architectural.  The Ophanim: the wheels within wheels, on fire and winged, spinning together in symphony, each rimmed with hundreds of eyes.  The Erelim: the thrones, which support the highest angels, encased in blazing fire.  Cherubim: the preservers and protectors, psychological amalgams of beasts and man, whose wings are winged, and whose wings are covered in thousands of eyes.  Seraphim: “the burning ones,” whose wings are veils of fire, terrible and holy, storms of flame.

Botticini - 'The Assumption of the Virgin'

The architectural analog to the angelic court is the dome.  The most notable dome, the one which seems to inaugurate the form most completely, is ironically a pre-Christian structure: the Pantheon of Rome (BC 31), whose dome of unreinforced concrete is, to date, the largest structure of its kind in the world.  The dome is interesting as a precursor to the other notable dome we’ll talk about, for one thing, because its original purpose is unknown, as empty as the oculus in its vaulted heights.  It is also interesting in that since the purging of “pagan idols” by Pope Boniface IV circa CE 609 and the subsequent conversion of the site into a Catholic church the coffered dome has stood without ornament of any kind.  Its oculus in the place of God, empty and without ornament, the bare concrete dome of the Pantheon itself still evokes a divine structure, an encompassing, Heavenly mandala.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the conversion of the Pantheon to the Sancta Maria ad Martyres left the structure itself intact.  For whatever reason, Pope Boniface IV found destroying the Pantheon and building anew undesirable.  Perhaps the structure was just too beautiful to level.  Perhaps Boniface IV knew that during his time it would be impossible to eclipse the structure with a more majestic one.  Perhaps, in spite of the theological need to expressly disavow Rome’s heretical, pagan past, there was lurking still some subterranean nostalgia for its former glory.  

The Pantheon of Rome, interior

Whatever the reason, the Pantheon survived, and the new church assimilated the prior structure under its name.  Like so many decorated sheds of America, when one business fails, another preserves the structure, but provides for it a new jacket, which transmits the “new” function of the space to the consumer; but, still, there is something about the dome, something about the structure itself that also directs the sphere of possibilities for life beneath its bell.

The US Capitol Dome, exterior

When we compare the dome of the Pantheon to the dome of the US Capitol, there are many notable similarities as well as many obvious differences.  In terms of the differences, we should immediately recognize that at least superficially the US Capitol carries a secular emphasis rather than a divine one.  The Capitol is a place of government, of democracy, and not a place of worship.  The divine element, though persistent certainly in the structure itself, is ostensibly transferred to ornament in a form of architectural sleight of hand.  Ornament, typically, is viewed as being less primary in terms of statement than structure; yet, when we consider the message implicit in the structure of the US Capitol dome, which I suggest is identical to the Heavenly message intoned by the Pantheon, we see that that the transferal of divine imagery from structure to ornament is more directly reversible than is ordinarily supposed.

The US Capitol dome, view from the rotunda

Difference: the coffering in the US Capitol’s inner dome is adorned with golden bay-leaf and bayberry toruses vaulting to a ring of stars, whereas the cement of the Pantheon is unadorned.

Difference: the US Capitol dome has a drum of Corinthian pilasters and arched windows, whereas the Pantheon’s drum is much more reserved.

Difference: the oculus of the dome of the US Capitol is closed by a canopy, upon which is painted Brumidi’s fresco,  The Apotheosis of Washington, whereas the oculus of the Pantheon is open to empty air.

Brumidi - 'The Apotheosis of Washington'

It is in Brumidi’s Apotheosis of Washington that we find a direct connection to the structures of Heaven I described earlier.  It is hierarchically arranged, set among the clouds, with Washington centered in the composition beneath the empty “sunlit” space in the center of the view, which is presumably left open to invoke the presence of an unrepresentable divinity.  As such, Washington is deified, elevated into an eternal choir, and appropriately he is flanked by the Virtues Liberty and Fame.  Surrounding Washington are thirteen maidens, symbolizing the thirteen colonies, two of which are clutching the banner: E Pluribus Unum.  Below Washington, in a more practical realm (though no less fanciful and angelic), we see armed Freedom and the American eagle, holding arrows in its talons (but no laurels), smiting Tyranny.  Also, we see Minerva, representing Science, in conversation with Benjamin Franklin and others; Neptune, representing American naval might;  Mercury, representing commerce and trade; Vulcan, representing industry; and Ceres, representing agriculture.  Notice that in the portion of the fresco ruled by Neptune we see a pink cherub riding a dolphin.  The presence of the cherub, a central motif of the ornamentation of the Capital generally but also of Christian angelic imagery, in the centerpiece of the dome, strangely out of place, yet uncannily familiar given the function of such a representation as The Apotheosis of Washington, is worthy of note.

When we speak of capitalism, we too often forget the linguistic device the term employs: metonymy – that of the part which stands for the whole.  In one sense of the word, perhaps the most familiar one, we think of capital, meaning cold, hard cash, money, a universal standard, which can be exchanged for any arbitrary thing deemed worthy of a particular value; but, it is a mistake to forget that on the material side of the equation, the term capitalism refers to there being always a capitol, a central place from which government, science, power, commerce, industry, etc. originates.  Its etymology  traces to the Latin: caput, meaning “head.”  A dome, ultimately, as it emanates from the center and encompasses all it contains, is a capitalist structure. 

Considering this, we can now appropriately address the most fundamental similarity between the US Capitol and the Pantheon: that both structures have beneath their domes a free and open rotunda, in which all may stand in equivocal place beneath an overarching, encompassing, and eternal structure.

The central dome of the US Capitol, metonym for the whole, directs the entire structure toward a Heavenly theme.  Cherubs are everywhere in the Capitol, the pink sheep of the family of angels, doing the work of the founding fathers, now appropriately deified, holding place eternally in the divine order of the cosmos.  These cherubs, light bearers, drape holders, pages and sentries, are always on guard, making sure that the democratic capitalist system finds steady support in the symbolic dimension.  The US Capitol standardizes the ornamental aesthetic of the American economic system.  The Corinthian order and Neoclassical sensibility, down the unpotted rhizome of acanthus and laurel leaves we find adorning US currency, abounds almost universally in the halls of American civic life, from sea to shining sea.

Laurel and acanthus leaves adorn the US 1 dollar note

I must say, finally, that it is true that these structures are incredibly beautiful.  They reference the interior desire of man to model government after a universal kingdom, unperturbed by time or hardship, seated in the right for eternity and given sanction by  a cosmic, godly order.  Perhaps it is for these reasons that I resist so ardently the suggestion that, by way of adaptive consciousness or egalitarian technologies such as the internet (remember, the dome is an egalitarian technology in that it necessarily utilizes the public space of the rotunda), we might find the keys to an easy-does-it revolution and nullify so many of the problems rehibatory to the consumerist capitalist paradigm.  When we entertain the notion that what we need is radical change, no strategy for such change will succeed that does not account for the fact that it is not simply ideas that we are up against, but material structures that prioritize specific possibilities concerning the place and distribution of power.  This presents the most fundamental difficulty for radical political thought.  To destroy the material auspices of our most hallowed sites of heritage and thereby break with the past completely is precisely what none today are willing to do.