Like Euripides’ play, Iphigenia at Aulis , the Shorter-spalding opera is open-ended and unresolved—partly because, again like the Euripidean version, it is multi-authored and somewhat incomplete. Euripides’ play, in the form(s) in which we possess it, presents at least three different endings, none of which is likely to come from Euripides’ own pen; other authors certainly contributed to various sections of the final scene. Euripides himself also had a musical collaborator, Cephisophon, who presumably continued to work on finishing and rehearsing the play after Euripides himself died, up to its first production. The Shorter-spalding opera, … (Iphigenia) , likewise is the result of collaboration—often at a distance, and over several years—between musicians, writers, and designers (as Morales describes in her Introduction to this issue). At least six different authors altogether are identified in the program notes as contributing to the libretto, including the three poets whose lyrics were sung in Act II: Ganavya Doraiswamy, Joy Harjo, and Safiya Sinclair, respectively South Asian, Native American, and Jamaican. As for the opera's ending—the most notoriously uncertain aspect of this myth ever since archaic Greek times—esperanza spalding states in her notes on the opera that the process of creating an ending has been one of constant adjustment, wholesale rewriting, and improvisation, and that even through the rehearsals the singers themselves onstage, as well as the instrumental jazz trio, were still trying out new things, right up to and including perhaps the performance that we saw. (I attended the Berkeley performance on February 12, 2022.) The opera is, we may say, unfinished.
In the second decade of the fifteenth century, the book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini and two friends recognized Vitruvius' De architectura among the moldy manuscripts at the monastic library at St. Gall in Switzerland. Although their find was not the first copy of De architectura to be identified, the reception of Vitruvius among Italian humanists tends to be afforded special attention in academic, public, and popular culture alike. Commonly shuffling at the center of that attention is L'Uomo Vitruviano of Leonardo da Vinci, usually dated to the 1490s. In Italian, and in his famous mirror writing, Leonardo mentions Vitruvius by name in the first word of his notes above his rendering of the homo bene figuratus and engages with the content of De architectura 3.1.2f. above and below it.
…(Iphigenia) is built around an obscenity of (a) death, the death(s) of Iphigenia, whose body, at first seemingly alive, then rendered a corpse (several times over), and later appearing as a revenant in humanimal form (human but horned), occupies center stage for the full length of the performance. The scene is all too familiar. It is multiply told and retold in Greek mythology and tragedy through a string of variations, and it recalls a further proliferation of violences done to women in our own time. With each telling, Iphigenia is murdered again and again.
For the historian of early modern Italian architecture, Vitruvius is unavoidable. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, the study of Vitruvius, in conjunction with the surviving physical models of ancient buildings, was a project that united architects. With the difficult tract as their guide, architects teamed together, often with learned aides, to understand the principles of ancient design. Comparing Vitruvian dicta with antiquarian fragments, architects endeavored to recreate the forms, numbers, and proportional rules prescribed by the ancient author. And using pencil, charcoal, and ink, they created images, filling in the voids of the famously unillustrated text.
Vitruvius is a full-figured text. Bodies proliferate endlessly-as touchstones of measurement, as images of ideal proportions, as analogies for building, empire, discipline, or text-and they dance just as deftly around the scholarship. If we had to pick a metaphor by which Vitruvius lived in writing, we could do no better than corpus. He is perhaps antiquity's greatest embodiment of body. But what I would like to argue in this article is that the Vitruvian body is not uniform; not alone; not ideal; and as an instrument of scientific discovery, it is not enough. It is lacking-and it needs to lack.
In the first chapter of De architectura book 3, Vitruvius famously expounds upon the theory of proportionality, ultimately crafting the analogy of the human body as a composition of ideal ratios. In this exposition, the architect repeatedly makes use of technical jargon, implementing terms found nowhere else within the Latin literary corpus. Amidst this series of rare Latin vocabulary, however, Vitruvius also includes a striking twenty-seven Greek borrowings—of which twelve are novel terms not found in the corpus before this passage, and seven are terms not found again. While many of these Grecisms are explicated by Vitruvius through the use of subordinate clauses or apposition, the very existence of Latin equivalents and the resultant redundancy of terms renders Vitruvius’ linguistic vacillation strictly unnecessary and rather obfuscating in effect. After all, why borrow a term that requires definition when a corollary already exists within one's primary, ‘matrix’ language? Likewise, once one has committed to adopting a second language of technical vocabulary, why bother translating? Other, similar lexical borrowings are evident throughout De architectura, yet the opening of book 3 offers a unique opportunity to analyze Vitruvius’ method of code-switching in close detail, revealing how the author uses the technique to draw attention both to the technicality of his art and to the Greek tradition evoked by these words.
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Vitruvius’ famous description of the homo bene figuratus possesses a slightly paradoxical nature. The description is meant to illuminate a fundamental but very abstract principle underlying the building of temples: symmetry or proportion. For the purpose of illumination, an analogy is drawn between temples and the human body. But even though the description serves an illustrative purpose, it does not at first sight appear to have a specifically illustrative nature since it largely consists of numerical fractions and proportional relations. Additionally, it seems quite difficult to tell what the homo bene figuratus actually looks like because the figure hardly possesses any individual features. And yet, the description inspired a rich reception of drawings during the Renaissance and later (of which Leonardo's version is certainly the most famous). The passage even seems to have taken on a life of its own since in those drawings the homo bene figuratus is usually treated independently of its original purpose and remains unconnected with temples or other buildings. Apparently, the passage—somehow—has an easily comprehensible or even perhaps vivid quality, despite the fact that it mainly lists abstract numerical details.
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
In the second decade of the fifteenth century, the book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini and two friends recognized Vitruvius’ De architectura among the moldy manuscripts at the monastic library at St. Gall in Switzerland. Although their find was not the first copy of De architectura to be identified, the reception of Vitruvius among Italian humanists tends to be afforded special attention in academic, public, and popular culture alike. Commonly shuffling at the center of that attention is L'Uomo Vitruviano of Leonardo da Vinci, usually dated to the 1490s. In Italian, and in his famous mirror writing, Leonardo mentions Vitruvius by name in the first word of his notes above his rendering of the homo bene figuratus and engages with the content of De architectura 3.1.2f. above and below it.
Vitruvius’ book is chock full of bodies. It is by means of his oiled body that Dinocrates gains an audience with Alexander (2.praef.1), and by means of his naked one, and the equivalent body of water that it displaces, that Archimedes solves his well-known quandary (9.praef.9f.). The body is a living, vital thing (7.praef.2f.), even as it is a book, a body of work (7.praef.10), arising from a body of education (1.1.12). Most important of all, Vitruvius outlines a ‘body of architecture’ (corpus architecturae, 6.praef.7) to propagate and extend the reach of the deified Augustus, commander-in-chief (1.praef.1), and this idea arguably gives rise to that of the ‘body politic’ (corpus imperii). Vitruvius’ text has been interpreted in terms of these bodies in important studies by Indra Kagis McEwen and John Oksanish; both authors treat the body as replete with meaning, the site of contact between architecture and the political, between text and author. This chapter adds to our understanding of the repertoire of bodies in Vitruvius by looking at those earlier incarnations of circular and square bodies which Vitruvius inherits, and in terms of which he construes the human body as a site of ideal proportions.
On September 16, 2017, the then-thirty-three-year-old Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales presented her oil painting Virtuous Woman at her first art gallery exhibition, called ‘Black Imaginary To Counter Hegemony (B.I.T.C.H.)’, at the Simard Bilodeau Contemporary in downtown Los Angeles. The work is based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous visualization of Vitruvius’ description of the homo bene figuratus, that is, of the ‘ideal’ or ‘well-formed’ human being on whose symmetry and proportions the construction of temples should be modeled (Vitr. De arch. 3.1; fig. 5.3). Rosales retains the presentation of a nude human figure in an interlocking square and circle on a background covered in handwriting. Yet Rosales’ rendition of the lettering is even less easily legible than the Italian paraphrases of, and expansions upon, Vitruvius’ Latin that the left-handed Leonardo had written in mirrored script around his sketch. Moreover, Rosales’ painting fills not the page of a book, but a large canvas damaged at the edges and marked by red-orange blemishes. Most importantly, the person at the center is no longer the stern and, to a modern viewer, White-presenting man of da Vincian fame. Instead, she is a Black woman (fig. 7.1).
Like Euripides' play, Iphigenia at Aulis, the Shorter-spalding opera is open-ended and unresolved-partly because, again like the Euripidean version, it is multi-authored and somewhat incomplete. Euripides' play, in the form(s) in which we possess it, presents at least three different endings, none of which is likely to come from Euripides' own pen; other authors certainly contributed to various sections of the final scene. Euripides himself also had a musical collaborator, Cephisophon, who presumably continued to work on finishing and rehearsing the play after Euripides himself died, up to its first production. The Shorter-spalding opera, ...(Iphigenia), likewise is the result of collaboration-often at a distance, and over several years-between musicians, writers, and designers (as Morales describes in her Introduction to this issue). At least six different authors altogether are identified in the program notes as contributing to the libretto, including the three poets whose lyrics were sung in Act II: Ganavya Doraiswamy, Joy Harjo, and Safiya Sinclair, respectively South Asian, Native American, and Jamaican. As for the opera's ending-the most notoriously uncertain aspect of this myth ever since archaic Greek times-esperanza spalding states in her notes on the opera that the process of creating an ending has been one of constant adjustment, wholesale rewriting, and improvisation, and that even through the rehearsals the singers themselves onstage, as well as the instrumental jazz trio, were still trying out new things, right up to and including perhaps the performance that we saw. (I attended the Berkeley performance on February 12, 2022.) The opera is, we may say, unfinished.
Early in the first act of Shorter and spalding's … (Iphigenia) the carousing band of Argive soldiers cum frat boys dumps the body of a deer stage left, close to the audience. A spotlight is trained onto the carcass, and there it remains: as the bodies of Iphigenias pile up alongside it through Act I; as the Iphigenias are revivified and we enter a new conceptual plane in Act II; as the mythic plot reconvenes in Act III; and during the curtain call, when the cast, musicians, and crew come onto the stage to take their bows. At one point, I half expected the ensemble to smile wide and extend their arms towards the rigid body of the deer, inviting audience applause for their fellow performer, still, even now, fixed motionless under a spotlight.
It is difficult to watch …(Iphigenia) and not think of abolition. To bear witness to Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding's opera is to experience the collision of classical and jazz idiom, the interruption of violent cycles, the emergence of liberation. Yet as much as …(Iphigenia) is a story of abolition, it is also a story about the staying powers of sacrifice and myth. Winds that turn the wheel of oppression are the same blessed winds that propel ships out to sea. Furthermore, the interruption of inexhaustible, parodic virgin sacrifice is framed by the bodily toil that results from rejecting that cycle. We might easily observe …(Iphigenia) as a retelling that moves myth forward, into the future. The last Iphigenia, of the Open Tense (performed by esperanza spalding), ultimately refuses her seemingly inevitable fate, retching out the words that might otherwise temporarily satisfy the whims of the bloodthirsty men around her. …(Iphigenia) , however, is a piece ‘at war with itself’. Perhaps in this way more than any other, it is able to communicate the tenseless timelessness of the Black radical tradition. The cyclicity of oppressive violence is the same cyclicity that dissolves artifice, the same cyclicity that produces solidarity as a substrate.
Iphigenia is not one. She is multiple. Central to Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding's opera titled …(Iphigenia) is the layered multiplicity of Iphigenias who are sacrificed/martyred, time and again, for the cause of Grecian nation building. Unlike other stage and filmic renditions of the opera that tell Iphigenia's story once, emphasizing the psychic drama of what it means to give one's blood for the ideological cause of nation building, …(Iphigenia) repeats the story piling up bodies on stage. Dressed in pink, red, white, silver, fur and more (Fig. 4), Iphigenia's body becomes multiple, becomes collective, becomes sisterhood, becomes interspecies.
Speaking by phone to a critic several weeks before the premiere of …(Iphigenia) , director Lileana Blain-Cruz announced: ‘esperanza challenges the absurdity of this myth… Men must kill a young woman so they can go to war. Why repeat what does not work? What does it feel like to be a young woman thrust into this absurd story?’ In fact, the Wayne Shorter-esperanza spalding production exaggerates the myth's absurdity, minimizing the pain of Agamemnon and flattening the familial calamity at the heart of Euripides’ play until it becomes a conflict between aggressive men and suffering women. It is easy to judge these toxic male warriors with their Wagnerian helmets and hints of white nationalism. It is also easy for the female members of the audience to identify with Iphigenia, and with the series of Iphigenias whom the warriors put to death. Yet, at our moment, Shorter and spalding's reimagining of a myth about the sacrifice of a virgin to power a fleet invites us to consider our own implication in an urgent calamity, one in which we are both warrior and virgin.
...(Iphigenia) is built around an obscenity of (a) death, the death(s) of Iphigenia, whose body, at first seemingly alive, then rendered a corpse (several times over), and later appearing as a revenant in humanimal form (human but horned), occupies center stage for the full length of the performance. The scene is all too familiar. It is multiply told and retold in Greek mythology and tragedy through a string of variations, and it recalls a further proliferation of violences done to women in our own time. With each telling, Iphigenia is murdered again and again.
