Monumental Monstrosity, Monstrous Monumentally

Author(s): Terry Kirk

Source: Perspecta, 2008, Vol. 40, Monster (2008), pp. 6-15
.Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta
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Monumental Monstrosity study for our intellects." This essay examines our reaction to
Monstrous Monumentally the transgression of aesthetic limits that makes monuments
monstrous, and perhaps monsters in the end monumental.
Terry Kirk
Monstrous
Monster comes from men, an Indoiranian root, whence
also memory, thought itself. Cicero's Latin links monstrum with
monere- to remind or warn, as in a portent or omen. "The noun
This is a test of aesthetic tolerance. Varying reactions 'monster,'" Augustine tells us, "evidently comes from monstrare,
to the National Monument to King Vittorio Emanuele II in Rome 'to show,' because they show by signifying something" out of
trace a trajectory of a volatile reception of the sublime and the ordinary. For Aristotle, "anyone who does not take after his
prodigious through the monumental and on to the monstrous. parents is really in a way a monstrosity, since in these cases
Monsters mark the boundaries*of cultural values. As outcasts Nature has strayed from the generic type." Monsters are deviant,
from our constructed systems of self-definition they fascinate transgressive, threatening, and therefore horrible, terrifying, and
and frighten. In a pioneering 1962 study, Georges Canguilhem tremendous yet also astonishing, marvelous, and prodigious.
analyzed monsters as products of the social organization The modern scientist orders monsters in terms of relationships
of knowledge. How monsters are made is symptomatic of to nature's norms. Paré classifed them as either prodigious
how a culture conceives of collective inquiry to the tolerated apparitions beyond the course of nature or deviant creations
limits of its self-awareness. As Ambroise Paré first explored in entirely against its course. Even Linnaeus included dragons,
1573, monsters warrant examination as evidence of nature's satyrs, pygmies, and troglodytes in his Systema Naturae. "By a
unbounded variety and our human response to it. Monsters monstrosity," Darwin presumed, "is meant some considerable
embody our notions of otherness in abstract terms, things deviation of structures, generally injurious or not useful to the
beyond the limits of imagination that cannot be thoroughly species." Monsters hold some distant but threatening relationship
explained. Keala Jewell ably clarifies this in a recent study: of difference to the norms we construct to order our world.
monsters inscribe logic that is qualitatively different from Deviations are terrifyingly monstrous to us when worked
rational thought. As such monstrosity is comparable in quality upon the human body. Gross congenital malformation where
and in effect, I will argue, to specific notions of aesthetic the canon of human proportions is horribly wrong encompasses
philosophy pertinent to the culture of nineteenth-century national the widest understanding of monsters. Monstrous bodies are
monuments. Monstrous feeds into monumentality through compositions of disparate and unrelated elements, organisms
sublime. Monsters and sublime architecture both elicit reactions that have failed to achieve a perfect final form. As a genetic
of astonishment, curiosity, and morbid wonder. This essay monstrosity, conjoined twins fascinated many and raised
explores the relationship between monumental architecture and existential questions such as whether these creatures had two
concepts of monstrosity. hearts or one. In the context of the eighteenth-century academic
Architecture comes late to a serious consideration debate on monstrous births, Samuel Thomas Soemmerring's
of its monsters, so we must rely upon achievements in the epigenetic theory pitted scientific embryology against
neighboring disciplines of natural sciences and psychology, providential determinism. As deviations from natural processes
and more recently literary criticism and cultural anthropology.1 of development, Soemmerring laid the pathology not in the hands
"Monstrosity" is at present still only a dismissive epithet in of God but in each of us: damage to the embryo in the womb.
architectural criticism. Itis usually leveled against anything Monsters are therefore worse than debilitating disease; they are
big, ugly, out of place, or dysfunctional, which in the popular disquieting miscreations of ourselves. All humans begin their
eye implies most of Modern architecture but especially the existence not as perfect predetermined beings but as vulnerable
products of 1960s Brutalism. A century ago the term appeared in embryos and potential monsters.
defense of European cities against American-style skyscrapers The nineteenth-century science of teratology set out the
and Antoni Gaudl's unclassifiable species of building. Even the boundaries of biological norms through experimental interventions
Eiffel Tower was subject to character assassination in the 1923 in embryo development. (The term is derived from the Greek
science-fiction film La Cité foudroyée, in which in a classic teras, to differentiate from superstitious monstrosity.) "I sought to
formulation the monster of the Parisian skyline is ritualistically follow organisms along their uncommon paths," wrote St.-Hilaire,
destroyed. Reaction to architectural monsters still smacks of a who filled collections of dissected specimens in formaldehyde
superstitious fear typical of primitive responses to otherness, jars to quantify birth defects. Georges-Louis-Leclerc Button's
while our colleagues in other disciplines have "naturalized" classification of monstrum per excessum (something too large
their monsters. As Michael Hagner puts itregarding the natural or with too many), monstrum per defectum (malfunction), of
sciences, we too might seek "to integrate, incorporate, and per fabricam alienam (outside the species) served as a basic
domesticate them in the material and discursive arsenals of framework for the quantification and naturalization of monsters in
enlightened rationality."2 modern science.
Monstrosity in architecture is a matter of reception. At a popular level, however, monsters remained culturally
Having studied monstrously big, ugly, out-of-place, and constructed repositories of superstition. Paré heads his list of
apparently dysfunctional buildings for some time- but too thirteen causes of monstrosity with 1) God's glory, and 2) God's
fascinated with them to fear them as such- I was at first put wrath. A supernatural origin made monsters portentous omens
out by the suggestion of P40's theme, until I reckoned with that fueled anxieties. At their most innocuous, monsters elicit
the pervasive reaction of horror to my work in Rome and took wonder; at their most horrible, threatening aggression. Chaucer's
seriously the proximity of the monumental to the monstrous. monster is "a wikked beast, that was so cruel, horrible, stinking."
"Monsters have their usefulness," wrote nineteenth-century As ominous portents, monstrous births were understood as a
scientist Étienne-Geoffrey St.-Hilaire. "They are a means of scourge not upon the hapless mother but as a collective curse

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implicating an entire community. They were harbingers of and the era of Romanticism endowed the creative genius with
locally targeted divine retribution and were promptly expelled. A prodigious powers. Prodigious monsters affirm positive qualities
hideous creature born in papal-controlled Ravenna shortly before that are exceedingly large or mighty. This sense emerges from
a bloody battle against the French in 1512 was seized upon the nineteenth-century, particularly in colloquial usage as a
by Lutheran propagandists. Its bizarre physiology prompted hyperbole for a great gathering or astonishing event. Daston
an exegesis like an iconographical reading of emblematic and Park highlight an understanding of monsters as wondrous
Renaissance allegories: its horns symbolic of papal pride, its reflections of aesthetic variety. They fascinate us because they
wings its fickleness, armlessness a lack of good works, tattooed excite sensations of amazement. Reactions to the prodigious,
chest of heresy, clawed foot for usury, eye located on the knee of particularly as they are explored in intellectual culture, played into
worldliness, and hermaphroditism of sodomy.3 the concurrent interest in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory of
Monsters proliferate in times of crisis. They are born not the passions and are encapsulated in the notion of the sublime.
of woman but of a prevailing apocalyptic mood, usually triggered
by political upheaval and threatening loss of control. Be it Sublime
Protestant schism, revolutionary France, or Cold War Hollywood, Baldine Saint Girons, our current authority on the
monsters emerge as concretizations of collective anxieties. The sublime, characterizes this phenomenon of aesthetic philosophy
spectator experience of the monster, the curious paying public at as a field of shifting sentiment from a pejorative passion toward
a village freak show or a Hollywood monster flick, is essentially fascination that touched a nerve in the eighteenth century and
a sigh of relief: Schadenfreude. We hoist upon the expurgatory set into motion a critical study of reception still relevant today.5
scapegoat our fears the unknown. In capturing, displaying, and The evolution of the sublime matches that of the monstrous in
killing the monster, we try to vanquish our anxieties. the period of its development as well as in its quality of cultural
The most fearful monsters are, then, those birthed meaning. Early eighteenth-century aestheticians, such as Joseph
of our own perturbed imagination. The imagination is a sense Addison writing in The Spectator, fostered the first definitions of
without an organ. It is self-nourishing, untiring, prolific, and the the sublime in English society while simultaneously commenting
most prodigious of our faculties. Leonardo da Vinci fabricated in judgmental astonishment on "monstrous flaxen Periwigs."
little monsters out of parts of animals and motorized them with Soon popular expressions like "monstrous"- as in bad- "taste"
pressurized bladders, causing horror among his unsuspecting entered the language of criticism. The Earl of Shaftesbury
subjects, which Vasari relates as a metaphor of creative marveled that monsters were "never more in request." Denis
imagination. Maternal imagination was thought to cause Diderot made the connection between teratology and art
monstrous births, such as the devout mother's prayers to John criticism when, at the Salon of 1767, he judged that no veritable
the Baptist and the birth of her monstrously hirsute child, or beauty in art is possible when as our model even nature herself
Frank Lloyd Wright's mother, who lined the nursery with photos produces monsters. In his Encyclopédie, as Marie-Hélène Huet
of great cathedrals. This marks, however, the first step in shifting points out, Diderot also connected the imaginative genius of the
causes from supernatural to science. artist to a monstrous genesis.6 Edmund Burke 's landmark 1757
Monsters continue to exert their power because they are inquiry into our ideas on the sublime and the beautiful charts
ultimately products of culture. They are explicit recognitions of the trajectory from the indeterminate passion of repugnance
our norms- physical, psychological, and juridical- because they at the monstrous- "prodigious Darkness and frightful Sights,"
violate these constructed systems. They have what Canguilhem as a contemporary wrote- toward the positive aesthetic value of
called a negative value and what Foucault specified as our the sublime.
discursive strategy through which cultures make sense of the Burke's concept of the sublime is rooted in Longinus's
world and legitimate their conceptions of it.4 The abnormal treatise on rhetoric, Peri Hypsous, datable to the first centuries of
challenges the order of things with troubling indeterminacy, the ancient Roman Empire. The Greek title means height, climax,
violating regulatory cognitive, moral, and aesthetic decorum. while the term in Latin, as used by Quintilian, sublimis, suggests
They are organisms that not only fail to achieve the ideal but exist the upward direction toward that height, a rising oblique gaze,
in defiance of the ideal. However, this challenging negative value as in enthusiastic inspiration. In its first modern translation of
also affirms the norm and helps us define ourselves by resistance 1674, Longinus's treatise carried the subtitle "On the Marvellous
to deformation. Monsters reinforce a dynamic polemical concept in Discourse" since itelaborated on the rhetorical techniques
of normality and inscribe its values. that excite awe. Longinus suggests abrupt rhythms of speech,
Imagined monsters continue to fascinate us, repulse our comparable to a strike of lightning that suddenly reveals the
senses, and attract our attention. As repugnant creatures they idea and draws the listener up in wonder. "What is wonderful,
are horrifying portents; as astonishing curiosities- a product with its stunning power, prevails over that which aims merely
of Paré's Glory of God- they are marvelous wonders. Lorraine at persuasion and at gracefulness."7 Longinus's sublime dazzles.
Daston and Katherine Park explore the simultaneous and Itenraptures with irresistible empathy in a kind of violence
overlapping connotation of monsters that elicit wonder, the root thatseizes the soul. "The sublime," Jean-Francois Lyotard
of scientific curiosity. Dante's Virgil expresses an "ammirazione summarizes, "really isn't something that tenders its own proofs
pieno" before the monstrous griffin, and Peter the Great is and demonstrations, but a marvelousness that seizes, and
"merveilleusement espouventé" in his Wunderkammer of birth inflicts sensation."8
defects. A positive connotation of monsters courses through our Burke's interest lay in the unreasonable fear that affects
language as something extraordinary, tremendous, marvelous- mind and soul. Whereas beauty is merely pleasurable, the
from Petrarch's "o de le donne altero e raro mostro" to Cocteau's sublime terrifies, astonishes, and elevates the soul. Sublime light,
"monstres sacrés." Exceptional examples- preternatural like the brightness of the sun or abrupt contrasts of sunlight and
and prodigious qualities, even the exceeding perfection of shadow, overpowers the senses. Even sound can be sublime-
genius- are framed as wondrous monsters. According to like thunder, cannon fire, or gushing water that "awakes a great
Aristotle, child prodigies are monsters in a positive sense, and aweful sensation in the mind." Burke gives an example:

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"The shouting of multitudes has a similar effect; and by the sole of selfhood to the sublime as the essence of modernity.10 For
strength of the sound, so amazes and confounds the imagination, Coleridge, "The Greeks idolized the finite, and therefore were
that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the best established the masters of all grace, elegance, proportion, fancy, dignity,
tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down, and joining majesty- of whatever, in short, is capable of being definitely
in the common cry, and common resolution of the crowd." The conceived in defined forms, or thoughts. The moderns revere the
empathetic force of the sublime enraptures. infinite, and affect the indefinite as a vehicle of the infinite; hence
Architecture is sublime, Burke specifies, when it"fill[s] their passions, their obscure hopes and fears, their wanderings
the mind with that sort of delightful horror." Contrary to the small, through the unknown, their grander moral feelings, their more
smooth, and soft of the beautiful, sublime architecture is massive, august conception of man as man, their future rather than their
rugged, and hard-edged. An overwhelming scale- or at least past- in a word, their sublimity."
the appearance of vast magnitude- of an arduous construction Thus the sublime infiltrated nineteenth-century
with strong contrasts of light, inside and out, day to night, create architectural culture from many angles. Indeed the concept
an overpowering effect. The work must cause our imagination threads through the evolution of modern aesthetics to
"to rise to ... [an] idea of infinity." To do so, Burke admits, will transform our criteria of reception. The inheritors of Burke's
involve a certain "generous deceit on the spectators [to] effect the sublime no longer expected a building to be merely beautiful
noblest designs by easy means." The appearance of infinity can or pleasing, they expected to be confronted, moved, and
be created with an uncountable array of elements or a uniformity uplifted by ingenious invention. The public became active
of composition, like a columned rotunda. Height is more effective participants, judges, and subjects of the architectural event.
than excessive breadth (and precipices into depth are the most Its efficaciousness is measured not against learned criteria of
terrifying), which implies here the original Latin etymology of a beauty or allegorical references, but according to its success
gazing obliquely upward and an inherent inferior status of the in moving the spectator. The sublime was understood as a

spectator. universally efficacious language of form, therefore a potential

The sublime exercises a power over the spectator. It universal instrument of communication. Coupled with emerging
always involves, as Burke notes, "some modification of power." consciousness of nationhood, the aesthetic of the sublime
The sublime, especially in architecture, is a strategy of domination endowed architecture with the means to marshal moral
by provoking an anxiety-charged response. "Astonishment is that communities onto the foundations of modern civil society.
state of mind, in which all its motions are suspended with some The sublime was hence the most effective formal language for
degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its national monuments.
object, that itcannot entertain any other, nor by consequence
reason on that object." Itis an enthralling violence upon the Monumental
senses. Immanuel Kant's sublime also drew the rational mind Monument derives, like monster, from monere, to
into agitation in its trying to establish a relation to boundless remind, and back to men, memory, thought. Monuments are
objects. Mountain ranges, waterfalls, the pyramids of Egypt, and constructions that concretize collective memory. Monument
Saint Peter's in Rome elicit the sublime, according to Kant. The connotes the erection of a sumptuous edifice to keep in mind
sublime object shows the mind its incapability of wholly grasping a notable person, action, or event. It commemorates, and as
it,thus becoming a symbol of the mind's relation to transcendental Shakespeare used the word, itwarns: "And wherefore gaze this
order. Initial frustration or fear resolves in ultimate pleasure to goodly company | As ifthey saw some wondrous monument |
"fill the mind with renewed and increased wonder and awe." In Some comet, or unusual prodigy." Addison also overlapped the
robbing the mind of its power to act and reason, the experience notions of monsters and monuments in describing the rhetorical
of the sublime pushes to the limits of human senses and tests the force of Cato's "dreadful looks: a monument to wrath." And in the
boundaries between known and unknowable. German language, Mahnmal- from mahnen, to warn- specifies
As a test of tolerance, the sublime is synonymous a monument to awful deeds, a portent. Monuments impose
with notions of the monstrous. Addison had already focused themselves upon our psychic and physical landscape with a
on the spectator's response to monsters- dreadful "hideous dreadful purpose.
Objects" of "frightful Appearance"- in his essays dedicated Monuments constitute the largest and most
to the imagination. For Burke the monstrous was the opposite prominent architectural production of the nineteenth century.
of the beautiful, and Lyotard draws the logical conclusion that A "monumentomania" swept Europe and America, invading its
even ugliness can be sublime because its deviance shocks. The cities in the crucial gestation of modern nationhood. Monuments
sublime object, like the monster, stuns and strains the imagination. served as focal points for moral civil society, legitimizing
Like dreadful monsters, the sublime inflicts an experience of fear, cumulative self-understanding. Rome's monument to King
and "by distancing this menace," Lyotard writes, art "produces a Vittorio Emanuele II was conceived with a carefully wrought
pleasure of relief, of delight ... the soul is returned to the agitated aesthetic as the nation's foremost expression of the political
zone between life and death, and this agitation is its health and its relation between the state and its people.11
life," thus delimiting boundaries of existence.9 Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of a politically united
The idea of the sublime persisted and was enriched Italy, served his nation perhaps more effectively upon his death in
through the nineteenth century predominantly among the 1878 than in real life. He is buried in the Pantheon, but the living
German Romantics. According to Friedrich von Schiller, "It is a presence of the monarchy is embodied in the monument to him.
composition of melancholy which at its utmost is manifested in His commemoration afforded the first opportunity to express the
a shudder, and of joyousness which can mount to rapture." The nature of the new state in monumental and permanent form. The
Romantic state of mind confronted tremendous and prodigious international architectural competition of 1880 elicited more than
force deliberately to foster extreme modes of expression. 300 responses: commemorative columns and arches, towers,
Kari Elise Lokke, in her essay on the role of sublimity in the domes, and pyramids, monumental bridges and open forums,
development of modern aesthetics, ties in the growing awareness and numerous piles of indescribable variety set in various

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locations throughout the capital city and beyond. One proposal messages of the monarchy- meant to forge collective memory
planned to rename the stars in the sky after Italian heroes. All the and establish a historiography and hagiography of its players
entries elaborated upon the language of the sublime as outlined while counterbalancing ecclesiastical tradition. This is the
by Burke and Kant: arduous constructions of awesome height, "Altare delia Patria" (Altar of the Nation), declared Primo Levi,
monuments of uniform composition or an uncountable array of "the altar of the new Religion. ... Here, more than ever, Rome will
elements, raising the mind to suggestions of infinity. The winning feel Italian, and Italy Roman, such that this will be the temple of
entry was a student project from Paul-Henri Nénot, drawn up Jupiter, this willbe Saint Peter's, one fused and confused with
during his Rome Prize. He was awarded a pat on the back, and the other." Papal historian Edoardo Soderini received a tour of
a second competition was called with clearer parameters and the work in progress from the architect himself, who as his gaze
opened only to Italian designers. A site high on the Capitoline swept across the skyline is reported to have said, "'Just look
Hill was determined, on axis with Rome's straightest and longest at Saint Peter's!'" Soderini elaborated that Sacconi "seemed
street, the Via del Corso. The choicet necessitated the demolition to want to say that will be for us the eternal touchstone for
of a fortification tower named after Pope Paul III. Edging out comparison; we will never manage to do anything its equal. 'Just
papal markers, the location places the new secular symbol of rule look at Saint Peter's!' And he could have added that the political
alongside Michelangelo's Renaissance civic forum at city hall and ideal will never accomplish what the religious ideal has done
the memory of ancient temples that once crowned the hill. and continues to do." Sacconi and the monarchic regime may
The second competition for the monument opened in never have had a chance of accomplishing itifitwere not for the
1882 with a program that specified an equestrian statue of the strategy of the sublime that lies at the core of the monument's
monarch against a tall architectural backdrop, a screen designed affective force.
to mask the only remaining religious presence (Santa Maria in Everything about the monument has been designed
Aracoeli). All 101 submissions were gargantuan. The winner of the for maximum impact. It has an irresistible empathy; itis difficult
competition was young architect Giuseppe Sacconi (1854-1905). to remain indifferent before its shocking presence. At this place
In relation to the other entries, his was a comparatively restrained of mass gatherings, speeches, and rituals of the state, the
design of ramparts and terraces, with flights of steps that rise shouting of the crowd provides the real experience of Burke's
to a concave screen of Corinthian columns. Bronze quadrigae sublime sound that staggers the mind. Central to the monument's
atop the end pavilions can be seen from most points in the city, function is a modification of power. The senses of the spectator
and the structure below is covered with sculpture. Figures in the are worked upon with violence to the end of dominating the
pediments and attic, processional reliefs, allegorical statue groups former papal city, its formerly divided citizens, and all subjects of
in white marble or gilded bronze, fountains, altars, pedestals, and its imperialist aspirations.
inscriptions all serve as the setting for the colossal equestrian The sublime operates in environments marked by
statue of Vittorio Emanuele II at the center. The logic of its rich collective anxiety. The real magnitude of crisis is in inverse
visual language lies in its historicist references to public and proportion to the force of the sublime employed. Architectural
political notions of ancient temples, basilicas, stoas, forums, form, like the rhetoric of political speech during national crises,
and piazzas, and their complement of victory columns, rostra, seeks to effect a modification of power. Be itthe architecture
river gods, and allegorical groups like those on papal tombs. The of monumental cemeteries or the spaces of totalitarian rally
relationship of Sacconi's design to the Spanish Steps is most grounds, the sublime manipulates mass subjects in a climate of
revealing: what was King Louis XIV's foiled attempt to command fear to affect "that state of mind," to cite Burke again, "in which
the skyline of the papal capital with a commanding site for his all its motions are suspended with some degree of horror."
equestrian statue (designed by Bernini) was finally realized by Boullée built would be unbearable, as Speer's Kongresshalle for
King Vittorio Emanuele II. Berlin forebode. The sublime is an aesthetic of sensory violence.
The Vittoriano, as itis often referred to, is exemplary of Any concrete realization of ittransforms a threat into reality: an
late-nineteenth-century monuments. It is big, and itis prominent. architecture of ominous disquiet that oppresses.
High on the spur of the hill, the itrises squarely above the roofs The strength of propagandistic landscapes lay in
of everything around it,emphatically redrawing with a horizontal constructed modes of reception: through liturgical events and
bar the skyline of the city once characterized by curved church crafted cinematographic representation (Leni Riefenstahl, as
domes. The twinned temples and long connecting colonnade with Fascist Italy's Istituto Luce photographic and film service
overwhelm with their sweeping symmetry and countless columns. under Mussolini). Nothing captures this better for us still today
The monument is massive, hard-edged, and blazingly bright. at the National Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II than the annual
Botticino limestone was selected over the local creamy travertine ritualistic celebration of the state staged every November 4th on
as much for its striking effect as for the minister of public works' the Altare delia Patria, when fighter jets flying in tight formation
family connections to the Brescia quarry that supplied it. Sunlight flash stunningly overhead streaming tricolor trails through the
plays in stronger contrasts and dazzles across this compact white infinite skies.
stone. Unlike so many comparable national monuments, Sacconi's The subjective aesthetic faculty worked, as Kant
is made to be climbed. Long flights of stairs pull the stunned spec- theorized, universally, but by shifting the parameters of
tator to airy heights- surprising piazzas suspended in the sky. reception- or deconstructing their cultural frames- the
Sacconi structured the monument upon the essential marvelous and tremendous may quickly become transgressive
features of the sublime. The towering mass draws our gaze and terrifying. There is an inherent volatility in the aesthetic of
upward, marshals our movement up dizzying oblique paths, and the sublime. When a monument's sublime language is seen
seizes our rational minds with sensory overload. The Vittoriano is in a different light- in the flash of an atomic bomb- its force
the epiphany of national consciousness, a setting for the liturgy becomes repugnant. The monument turns into a monster.
of the nation-state enshrined in stone and bronze, and renewed The Italian monarchy laid the groundwork for the
in continual ritual. It is the keystone of national symbolism- an subsequent Fascist regime; in fact, itguaranteed it. The monu-
instrument of influence that communicates the moral and political ment to Vittorio Emanuele II was the stage of the nationalist

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rituals of Mussolini's rise to power. The Tomb of the Unknown The National Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II tests the
Soldier was added on 4 November 1921 in a solemn crypt tolerance of our reception to prodigious architecture. By design,
designed by the last of the great architects of the sublime, monuments inhabit the volatile region between tremendous and
Armando Brasini. The theme of death -not part of the original transgressive, exactly as monsters do. The fascination we feel for
meaning of the monument- was introduced and capitalized on such experience reveals the dynamic nature of the architectural
by the Fascists. In 1926 Mussolini moved his office to Palazzo aesthetic of the sublime.
Venezia, opposite the site, and many conflate the Fascists Examining the monstrousness of monumentality serves
with the entire conception of the Altare delia Patria. Itwas the as a discursive strategy to make sense of the architectural world
locus of the hypnotic nightmare of Fascism. Here for the war in crisis, to legitimate our norms, and to mark our boundaries.
effort wives gave up their wedding rings and mothers their sons Monsters proliferated at the outset of Modernism and at its
for worthless tin and anonymous broken bones in return. The decline. The sublime was the monstrous face of architecture
monstrous trauma of nationalist hysteria found the ideal stage for that filled the anxious space between wonder and warning. In
its violence against the individual. our current cultural atmosphere of crisis, itis not surprising that
With these memories the monument is now perceived the language of the sublime has returned. We have witnessed
as a monstrum per excessum. Itis unbearably large and recently the proximity of our understanding of the monstrous, the
unacceptable in today's scale of reference. The miniature and prodigious, and the monumental. The sublime shifted once again
massless holocaust memorial by B.B.P.R. of 1946 in Milan is, from the pejorative to the positive when the frightening conjoined
by contrast, postwar Italy's most acclaimed monument. The twin towers of Lower Manhattan, which had struck us all as
Vittoriano seems a monstrum per fabriam alienam; its eclectic monstrous apparitions on the skyline, were struck down. In our
admixture appears an incomprehensible heap. It is finally a minds they rise again as monuments.
monstrum per defectum, effectively a nonfunctional remnant of
former political regimes. The monument's continuing presence
in the Roman landscape makes itunbearably monstrous to

anyone with memory of the recent past. Indeed only tourists- by

definition viewers without cultural memory- actually like it. It is
an enduring reminder of egregious collective transgression that
was the paroxysm of Italian nationalism. It remains a frightening
monster in our midst, particularly unnerving for a collective
conscience that has not seriously confronted in any other way
its responsibility in supporting twenty-two years of dictatorship
and its crimes against humanity. The Fascist period is dismissed
blithely in common Italian speech as "the period between the
wars," or a parenthesis.
This monstrous monument rising in the heart of the
nation's capital is an omen of political pathology, a collective
scourge. We can read it,like the monster of Ravenna, as a
catalog of political miscreation: the emptiness of its structure,
the inflated pride of its gargantuan elements, the vaporousness
of its blanched surfaces, and the heresy of its superabundant
decorations. There have been famous attempts to destroy it:
architectural competitions for its removal or hurried reduction
to a ruin, attacks with paint bombs, and closure for decades on
end. These measures of dealing with the monster are fatuous
insofar as they are not accompanied by recognition of guilt.
The collective political conscience of Italy, unlike Germany's,
is deficient in serious self-reflection, so comments on this
monument remain naively restricted to dismissal of its formal
qualities alone. This monster reveals the disquieting potential of
miscreation from within, and therefore is most terrifying.
Monsters kill. Architectural monsters metaphorically
stop our souls- and the Vittoriano literally killed its architect.
Folklore has itthat Sacconi hurled himself from its scaffolding
rather than face his misdeed. In his 1987 film The Belly of an
Architect, Peter Greenaway characterized the monument
as carnivorous, and in his fiction itcauses the death of the
protagonist. Laying a honorific wreath at the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier remains ostensibly the Vittoriano's only present
function. For this reason itwas the locus for the nation's first
spontaneous use of this stage since Fascism: the mourning
of eighteen soldiers killed by terrorists at Nassyria, Iraq, in
September 2004. The event inhabited an ambivalent space
between Greenaway 's carnivorous metaphor- a man-eating
maw- and the former rhetoric of nationalism.

14 Kirk- Monumental Monstrosity Perspecta 40- Monster

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1. I refer particularly to collaborative research coordinated by Keala 6. Marie-Hélène Huet . Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Jewell in Monsters in the Italian Literary Imagination (Detroit , MI : Wayne University Press. 1993). 1-3.
State University Press, 2001) , as well as the probing contributions collected
in volumes edited by Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan Landes in Monstrous Bodies/ 7. Longinus , On the Sublime , trans . James Arieti and John Crossett
Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca. NY: Cornell University (Lewistown. NY: Meilen. 1985) . 10.
Press, 2004) : Michael Hagner, Der falsche Körper: Beiträge zur einer Geschichte
der Monstrositäten (Göttigen: Wallstein. 1997); Andrew Curran , David Morrill . 8. Jean-Francois Lyotard , "The Sublime and the Avant -garde , " Artforum
and Robert Maccubbin. "Faces of Monstrosity in Eighteenth-Century Thought" 22. no. 4 (1984) : 39.
Eighteenth-Century Life 21 , no. 2 (1997); Jeffery Cohen . Monster Theory : Reading
Culture (Minneapolis . MN: University of Minnesota Press . 1996) ; G. Cerina et 9. Ibid. . 40.
al. , Metamorfosi Mostri Labirinti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1991) ; and the excellent
study by Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park in Wonders and the Order of Nature, 10. Kari Elise Lokke , "The Role of Sublimity in the Development of Modern
1150-1750 (New York: Zone. 1998) . Aesthetics . " Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40 . no. 4 (1982): 421-29.
t

2. Michael Hagner , "Enlightened Monsters , " in The Sciences in 11. On the Victor Emanuel Monument , see primarily Catherine Brice ,

Enlightened Europe, ed . William Clark . JanGolinski. and Simon Schaf fer Monumentalste publique et politique à Rome. Le Vittoriano (Rome: Ecole
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1999) . 178. Française. 1998) ; Bruno Tobia, Una pátria per gli Italiani, Spazi, itinerari,
monumenti nell 'Italia unita (1870-1900) (Rome and Bari : Laterza. 1991); Bruno
3. Daston and Park. op. cit. , 180. Tobia, L'Altare délia Patria (Bologna: II Mulino, 1998) ; Maria Luisa Scalvini
et al . , L'Italia unita e i concorsi di architettura , ed . , Verso il Vittoriano
4. Michel Foucault, Les Anormeaux: Cours au Collège de France . 1974-1975 (Naples: Electa Napoli , 2002); Thomas Rodiek, "Das Monument Nazionale Vittorio
(Paris: Gallimard, 1999) . 60-61. Emanuele II in Rom, " PhD dissertation, Lang, Frankfurt. 1983; and Robin
Williams , "Rome as State Image : The Architecture and Urbanism of the Royal
5. Baldine Saint Girons. Fiat lux: Une philosophie du sublime (Paris: Italian Government . 1870- 1900 . " PhD dissertation. University of Pennsylvania,
Quai Voltiare, 1993) . See also Jean-Francois Lyotard, Leçons sur l'analytique 1993 . See also Lars Berggren and Lennart Sjöstedt , L'Ombra dei Grandi. Monumenti
du sublime (Paris: Galilée. 1991). Elizabeth Rottenberg, trans . , Lessons on e política monumentale a Roma (1870-1895) (Rome: Artemide. 1996) ; and Terry
the Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press. 1994) ; Kirk, The Architecture of Modem Italy . vol. 1. The Challenge of Tradition (New
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics York: Princeton Architectural Press , 2005) ch. 4.
of Individualization (New York and London : Routledge. 1992); and Kirk Pillow,
Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection on Kant and Hegel (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2000) .

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