The Bodying Column in Renaissance Architecture

During the Renaissance, two ancient granite columns in the form of Egyptians stood in Tivoli. Depictions of the two monoliths reveal the networked exchanges of artistic ideas in the sixteenth century that engaged architecture within a long history of the reception of imperial conquest, including the subjugation of bodies under empire. Receptions of ancient, anthropomorphized columns flourished in sixteenth-century Europe, and the resulting discourse determined an iconography of these columns as architecture’s enslaved captives. The columns at Tivoli bore meaning as architectural fragments made of quarried and extracted African stone that attested to imperial Rome’s vast reach into its provinces. Processing the materiality of their stone medium along with the durational emergence of their sculptural becoming, this article advances the concept of the “bodying column” as a way to find the human in architectural fragments that are sculpted in the shape of human bodies.