Kirsty Roberts (UK)

I've been thinking about the possibilities of Architectural biography, whether or not a voice is recorded in a site. Whether a building or garden becomes a stage, a place where a character is delineated. At the Tempio Malatestiano the process is extremely deliberate, we are told that Sigismondo associates himself with an elephant, there are elephants all over the church, along with his face in profile, his insignia, his initials intertwined with those of his lover. I've been trying to think about places where this staging is more accidental, or collective, the history of taste inscribed in a surface. Walter Benjamin in the arcades project says that architecture, fashion and the weather are the same in the collective as the interior organs in the individual. Civic surface is haunted, over determined. I’m also thinking about how these places become a container for memory, both anecdote, actual memory spoken in different voices and constructed memory. Reading Francis Yates’ the art of memory looking at how classical orators used architecture to fix ideas (e.g a speech placed around a building so that it is vivid, physical and fixable as a memory) then how these memory traditions were used in magical thinking in the renaissance. This chunk looks at the Tempio Malatestiano, I will now attempt to sew things into a visualisation of the architecture of the church as an artificial memory map.

Siggey Darlink, the poor devils are dying of the cold, stop murdering the innocent brats and lunch with me you brute!

And that he did amongst other things Empty the fonts of the chiexa of holy water And fill up the same full with ink That he might in God's dishonour Stand before the doors of the said chiexa Making mock of the inky faithful, they Issuing thence by the doors in the pale light of the sunrise Which might be considered youthful levity but was really a profound indication;

“whence that his, Sigismondo's, foetor filled the earth And stank up through the air and stars to heaven Where – save that they were immune from sufferings - It had made the emparadised spirits pewk” from their jewelled terrace. Ezra Pound Pisan Cantos

The Tempio Malatestiano is a much contested site. Built in Rimini on the orders of Sigismondo Malatesta in 1450's ??. It's formal innovation, unusual iconography, obsessive autobiography have turned it into a political vessel. I'm interested in the material readings of the site by Ezra Pound, Aby Warburg and Adrian Stokes in 1913-27. In how a series of characters have been fossilised in a site creating a powerful and ambivalent mythology.

I first heard of the Agostino di Duccio reliefs at the Tempio Malatestiano through their literary offspring. Adrian Stoke's sickly sweet Stones of Rimini impressed me enormously at 18. I'd never read any art history before. He spoke like a latter day Ruskin, an anachronistic insistence on sculptural concerns a quest for truth. Re-reading the Stones of Rimini last year I realised that underlying the repetitive descriptions of the contents of the Tempio's chapels Stokes was proposing an extremely retrogressive form of localism. His material reading of the site is very directly influenced by Ezra Pound's. The two men met and discussed the church, though there is no mention of Pound's enormous shadow which hovers over the Stones of Rimini. Pound's Architectural biography is a faux-forensic sweep over a heritage site which allows him to reconstruct a lost history. In the Pisan Cantos Ezra Pound animates the early renaissance warlord Sigismondo Malatesta through trampling over the monument he created. We are given Sigismondo's post-bag , domestic squabbles with the divine Isotta, his character in the Cantos is constructed from the commissioned stone. The Cantos wander widely in time and distance, the poetry of ancient China introduced to the west in mistranslated confidence, fascists exhaulted, in historical and contemporary accounts, our Sidge is the poster boy of this masculine resurgence. The Tempio Malatestiano is fascinating and repugnant in it's literary accounts (modernity = virility + violence, an artist should be young, strong and full of cum) Mussolini is cast as the natural heir to Sigismondo's political fortune. These things felt like a constant in the literature I read about the Church, I couldn't work out if it was something embodied in the stone, or a string of obscure influence/ incidental conversations which we no longer have access to at play. Aby Warburg speaks more temperately of the Tempio Malatestiano as the place where classical movement was reanimated in the renaissance, a place of Dionysian revelry. For me this site was already overdetermined, housing a choir of squabbling art historians, cultural tastemakers, historical re-enactment societies. I began to wonder what it might be like to visit.

“In a sense, every life that is recounted is offered as an example; we write in order to attack or defend a view of the universe, and to set forth a system of conduct which is our own. It is none the less true, however, that nearly every biographer disqualifies himself by over-idealising his subject or deliberate disparagement, by exaggerated stress on certain details or by cautious omission of others”. Marguerite Yourcenar

I started a cycle pilgrimage to the church from Basel, I printed out a pilgrim's passport intending to follow the via Francigena through the Alps and the Appenini to Tuscany then cut back across the lowlands to Rimini. I was extremely nervous about visiting the Tempio Malatestiano, I had formed a gothic fantasy that this place was where art writers indulged in their wildest macho extravagances. A pilgrimage is a pretentious place to begin anything let alone a thesis. Sigismondo was a mercenary general, he was excommunicated by his enemy the Pope supposedly for the excesses of the imagery at the Tempio, then welcomed back to the Catholic church when the Pope wanted to hire his efficient and modern army. Tales of mercenary Catholicism abound. As I started to get close to Rimini I spoke to people about the church, at an American themed street party in St Pietro in Vincoli I heard the common tale that it was a lascivious work, a pagan temple, dedicated to pleasure rather than to god. The great beauty of the church praised, the doctrinal basis in doubt. The people who knew of the church all told a similar story. I wondered what historical basis there is for this idea, the facts seem sketchy at best in historical accounts, the version told by Ezra Pound who uses the building to legitimize his unevidencible claims seem to have infiltrated the common perception of the place.

I slept in a ditch in a lay-by 50m from where the Italian army were doing their wild camping exercises in neat snot-green lines. I slept in the woods by an enormous Etruscan burial site, the eyes of the tomb/ caves visible in the moonlight. I got sunstroke, then read my little volume of modernist poetry until frightened half to death, hearing crones chant 'those are pearls that was his eyes' in my sleep. Near Milan I turned up at a friend's house in time for the end of his birthday party. Dirty and badly dressed after a long day cycling I was lectured by his drunken father over my aims with the tour. 'Emiglia Romagna is dull and mosquito ridden, the Tempio Malatestiano a den of vice, you should cycle up through the lakes and look at the Palladio villas instead'. An image conscious neo-classical beauty of the middling sort, inoffensive coach-tour vistas, re-rendered villas. In this childishly artificial state of hyper-sensitive over-excitement I arrived at the Tempio Malatestiano.

When I arrived, the Agostino di Duccio reliefs were roped off. The reliefs sit in six chapels, around the main nave of the church, leaning over the velvet rope it was only possible to see the front facing reliefs completely, the others were obscured in the darkness. I asked the elderly verger if I might be able to go and look at the Agostino reliefs properly, he refused me entry, 'you must gain permission from the cardinal 2 weeks in advance'. This was not mentioned on the website and I had to leave the next day. I pleaded, I spoke of my pilgrimage but he wouldn't relent, I asked a priest who said that he also didn't have the authority to allow me access. I was told that this was a conservation issue, that if I was allowed in, then everyone would want to see the chapels. This seemed unlikely to me, the chapels containing a Giotto painting and Piero della Francesca fresco were much more popular and allowed unrestricted access. I began to wonder if there was something that they didn't want me to see.

Through prior repeated study of reproductions of the reliefs in the church I was able to identify the pieces and could make out their shapes in the half lit blur, if not their splendour. Satan eating his children, an enormous crab suspended threateningly over an aestheticised medieval Rimini, angels hitching up their skirts to reveal the eroticised tomb of Isotta, the mistress of the warlord holding the purse-strings, Hercules and Mars flex their muscles, History, Rhetoric, Poetry are scantily clad maidens who seem to be dancing. Elephants and stylised roses abound (representing our generous lord and master). Dolphins with razor sharp teeth carry fat putti over the doors. The insignia and portrait of Sigismondo Malatesta interwoven with those of Isotta cover every surface. I went to confession in one of the Agostino chapels so got to see some of the ugly, leering, threatening cherubins in these unholy reliefs up close before my hastily mistranslated sins were forgiven.

Outside in the town, the season was winding down. Mile after mile of privatised pay per pitch beach boarded up for the winter. The town's hostels filled with self-help business disciples who had travelled from all over Europe to learn how to make themselves highly effective people. Rimini is a bit like a bigger, even more depressing version of Bognor Regis (it is as hard to imagine Giotto painting there as it is Joyce writing Finnegan's Wake above a decrepit chippy in Bognor). I found a bed in a room full of monkish business affectionados and returned to the Tempio Malatestiano in the morning, hoping to be let into the chapels properly but was chased off again by the verger without apology.

The old verger at the Tempio Malatestiano has put me in a very comfortable position. As I couldn't see the Agostino's I can't add my voice into the cacophony of critics claiming it as a generator of the Renaissance revival of Classical movement, or a pioneer of a disreputable form of modernity. Left in the shadows, reconstructed through a familiarity with the images they hum quietly in indistinct territory, un-claimable for my dastardly purposes.

Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne, pl. 25 Agostino di Duccio's reliefs in the Tempio Malatestiano, Rimini looks almost exactly like my studio wall. My images taken from the Stones of Rimini chart an associative visit to the church, arranged as I remember seeing them, things lost in the half-light of the church repeated, stressed in the studio display. Unconsciously influenced by Warburg through a string of obscure influence? I like to think that this form of display is simply an appropriate way to behave when faced with something simultaneously obscure and obscene, an attempt to work out a positioning for one's own body within the fray. An automatic chanelling of a Dionysian revelry. Aby Warburg's mnemosyne atlas plate starts to reconstruct a visit to the Tempio Malatestiano, the top line shows images of the church to put the Agostino reliefs in context, we then start to travel through the chapels, the images arranged associatively, reconstructing the mental processing of the site, an indication of the physicality of the space, an image with the same wandering methodology that Stokes and Pound employed. I was thrilled but unsurprised to stumble across Agostino in Phillip Alain-Michaud's Warburg biography. The Tempio Malatestiano was in my mind whilst reading Bahktin on Rabelais, forcing an appraisal of the bodilly lower stratum in the vicinty of the divine. The Tempio Malatestiano was already explicitly present for me 2 chapters before it's arrival in the Michaud bio when the Intermedi were described, a pantomime, a fossilised set, something active having a natural sedimentation. At times my fixation with this site seemed fabricated, looking for traces of biographical significance in an overdetermined monument re-built by literature. But it is a powerful and anachronistic space built on psychological perversions and cosmology. I now think it makes perfect sense to read this space as theatre, a point of intense movement, a space through which it is possible to bring the past to life, to breathe history with Pound or Warburg through a material reading of a site.

So that in the end that pot-scraping little runt Andreas Benzi, da Siena Got up to spout out the bunkum That the monstrous swollen, swelling s. o. b. Papa Pio Secondo Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini da Siena Had told him to spout, in their best bear's greased latinity;

Stupro, coede, adulter, homocidia, parricidia ac periurnus, presbitericidia, audax, libidinosus, wives, jew-girls, nuns, necrophiliast, fornicarium ac sicarium, proditor, raptor, incestuosus, incendinarius, ac concubinarius and that he rejected the whole symbol of the apostles, and that he said the monks ought not to own property and that he disbelieved in the temporal power, neither christian, jew, gentile nor any sect pagan, nisi forsitan epicureae.

This excerpt has Ezra Pound re-writing the biography of Sigismondo Malatesta. A heroic tale, Pound identifies Sigismondo and Mussolini as kindred spirits, the kind of men who saved Italy in her darkest hour, whom she must rely on once more. He revives the history of the building of the Tempio Malatestiano to valorise modern fascist politics. The persecution of Sigismondo in the Pisan Cantos, his triumph, his character seem to come from a material reading of the Tempio Malatestiano – a fantasy projected over the stone. A friend of Pound's said that he was no great Chinese Scholar, when he brought Chinese poetry to the west his translations were based of a quick flick through a dictionary, then meditating on the pictorial language. He simply assumed that what he read there was fact, that anyone else would read the same thing if they concentrated hard enough. For him this was not a fiction, but a verifiable translation process, a historically accurate method. His biography doesn't have space for the lengthy periods of scholarship required to become expert. I can't help but think that his methodology for re-constructing the history of the Tempio Malatestiano might have been similar. A look through the available scholarly information, some regard to battles fought, ledgers found etc but the voices of the protagonists seem to come from looking closely at the stone. I don't want to be critical of this methodology, this stone shouts loud, it seems to have many voices, Pound pursues them with great sensitivity.

Every time I stumble across Agostino it feels significant, post reading Stokes I would spend hours in the cast courts of the V and A looking for a clue in the face of his watery madonna. She turned up in the National Gallery, next to the Bernado Daddi painting the plaque said that Daddi died young of plague, that his great talent remained visible in just a few paintings. The surface is wonderful, every inch of figure, of fabric had patterns superimposed in contrasting colours, something entirely separate from the narrative of the painting, interfering with it almost, the weighty material surface, folded, screened made the painting feel incredibly still, an incrustation. The Agostino madonna was strangely mute next to the Daddi, her ovoid face devoid of any particular movement, an excessive sweetness, a positioning I felt uncomfortable with, buried under squirming writhing infants, her sickly smile worried me. In repetition at the Tempio Malatestiano these exaggerated ovoid features that the women bear start to look like fish, It seems extremely childish to think that this is what Stokes meant when he talked about the chapel being a 'stone- blossom' of the sea. A tired, blank-eyed Saturn chomps on the severed limbs of a screaming child, an enormous crab hovers menacing over an aestheticised Rimini (cancer over Rimini), the cut medieval towers surrounded by mountains unrecognisable in the modern beach sprawl.

Since Summer my production has been haunted by the Tempio Malatestiano. I apply it as a mental model to all kinds of making that at first glance seem entirely unrelated. An ambiguous, complex object recording multiple voices in it's stone. Warburg used Agostino and Alberti at the Tempio Malatestiano as examples of pioneers of renaissance movement. The psycho-history of art, lines of fracture, Dionysian revelry. For him, the Tempio Malatestiano is one of the most concrete examples of where the serpentine gesture, animated figure breathe life back into antiquity. A direct handing down of a gesture, a movement related to memory. I haven't reached a point where I can clearly see why it is so important to me. I think it is partly biographical, the point at which I first encountered the images of Agostino's work. Reading about the Tempio Malatestiano has produced an image of the site for me that is rich and complex. Ezra Pound's seductive animation of the site for compromised political aims. His words give breath to an ambiguous and terrifying figure 600 years after he entered the grave. Adrian Stokes uses the Tempio Malatestiano to argue for a kind of ultra-conservative localism in the end, again, purely through formal description of the site. How can something so determined in it's materiality become a container for the musings of the long distant future?