What Is History For?

History, the Humanities, and the Artist

Cesare Ripa, Historia

Academia and the media generally are abuzz about the “crisis of the humanities,” and I don’t think I’m far off in imagining that has a lot to do with perceptions of how history is taught: whose history, what narratives, etc. At some level every culture asserts a view of history that fits its self-perception. And for some time there has been a strong undercurrent of suspicion of history’s value as model or lesson. “History will teach us nothing” sang Sting in his 1987 album paradoxically titled Nothing Like the Sun—apparently, he did glean something from Shakespeare.

The pessimistic view of the past is as much a reason to study it as not to; as George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In that view, you study history in order to learn what not to do.

When architectural history becomes political history there is a natural temptation to throw the baby out with the bathwater—whether it’s Fascist Italy and Germany, or (lately) the Renaissance, the ends to which architecture has been put disallows an innocent appreciation of its aesthetics. But it could also be argued that only in the twentieth century did architecture assert the glory of power for its own sake. At least until the nineteenth century, architecture advertised a ruler or a society’s virtues—and noble ones, perforce. Whether those matched reality is another matter: it’s hard to imagine any person or society living up to the parade of Virtues appended in sculptural form to classical buildings of the Renaissance and the Baroque.

I would argue that the value of political history is different than that of art and architectural history, or literary and music history for that matter. No political society ever finds its perfect model in the past—while Florentine humanists celebrated the Roman Republic, they also recognized it was not a Christian society like theirs. If America’s Founding Fathers looked to the Roman Senate as a model for America’s democratic republic, or to the Swiss Federation as a model for their united states, they did not see their project as recreating ancient Rome or early modern Switzerland.

But Renaissance artists and architects did see their project as recovering the achievements of their ancient predecessors, albeit in an emulative mode—they were not neoclassicists recreating the past, they were a rebirth, a renaissance, “anciently modern and modernly ancient” as Pietro Aretino said of Giulio Romano. They were not advocating apprehending all that was wrong with Rome, but they saw the value in what was good. Not merely aesthetically, but intellectually and poetically.

As a professor of mine said many years ago, “How can you have a cynic teaching history? History is where you fall in love with architecture.” It’s fine, even essential, to teach history “warts and all.” But it does beg the question of what history is for if the past is all warts. If there is absolutely nothing of value in the past, not because it is irrelevant because it is old, but noxious because it is fundamentally flawed, there is nothing to be learned apart from not repeating the same mistakes.

Piazza dell'Anfiteatro, Lucca

Those of us privileged to live in beautiful places filled with old buildings and art would be hypocrites if we enjoyed the benefits of the past without wanting to pass them on to the future with new work. You cannot credibly love and loathe the same thing. If beautiful old cities can evolve to serve better modern societies, certainly it would be arrogant and obnoxious to want to destroy the old neighborhoods simply because they are old—as Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin would have done to Paris. But preservation is, by itself, a weak broth, diluted with more and more new work so at odds with, and less good than, what has been preserved.

I would say that the artist and architect’s study of history could be a model for why we study history at all, and how it is best taught. We should study history to learn from the past—while acknowledging its flaws, both aesthetic and political—in order to make the future. If history has nothing to teach, there is no point in teaching it. And there would be no point in looking at Raphael, listening to Monteverdi, or reading Shakespeare. The Futurists said as much, and they inspired the Fascists.