12. ‘Houses of the dead’? Columnar sarcophagi as ‘micro-architecture’

Abstract

At the end of the twentieth century architects across the world sought to bring architecture closer to humanity. ‘Micro-architecture’ in the form of shelters, street furniture, and inhabitable sculptures, designed as places of retreat or isolation, stimulated creative design. Simultaneously, medieval art historians considered how a ‘micro-architecture’ of religious ornaments and furnishings, reproducing small buildings in miniature, had enabled individual viewers to identify more deeply with heavenly ideals. Small-scale, sacred architectural forms – reliquaries, censers, screens, stalls, pulpits, fonts and baldachins – triggered emotional responses and offered spiritual refuge. As FranÅois Bucher claimed, a quarter of a century earlier, these ‘fluidly superimposed systems of decoration’, combining ‘formal bravado with theological complexity in a small space’ and offering ‘dazzling structural dexterity’ and geometric complexity, were exemplars of Gothic style that sheltered the mysteries of Christianity. Based on an aesthetic vocabulary taken from monumental archetypes, they acquired, through the innovative designs of architects seeking new fields for experimentation, sophisticated forms transcending those larger structures and became almost the raison d’Þtre of the buildings housing them. Modern and medieval manifestations of micro-architecture differ in scale, but both make statements about relationships between ideal and real space, between body and soul, between different genres of architecture, and between architecture and the human body. Classical antiquity knew ample instances of such ‘micro-architecture’, but their religious or philosophical significance has yet to receive similar investigation. Studies, for example, of the small ash urn from Chiusi (Figure 12.1) have focused instead on its potential as a literal representation of an Etruscan house and its use to historians as evidence for larger structures. Yet,