THE RIGOROUS STUDY OF ART
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It would be difficult to find a better clarification of the implications of this train of thought than Linfert's study located at the end of the volume. As the text explains, its very subject matter, the architectural drawing, "is a marginal case." 13 But it is precisely in the investigation of the marginal case that material contents reveal their key position most decisively. If one examines the abundant plates accompanying Linfert's study, one discovers names in the captions that are unfamiliar to the Jayman and, to some extent, to the professional as well. As regards the images themselves, one cannot say that they re-produce architecture. They produce it in the first place, a production which less often benefits the reality of architectural planning than it does dreams. One sees, to take a few examples, Babel's heraldic, ostentatious portals, the fairy-tale castles which Delajoue has conjured into a shell, Meissonier's knickknack architecture, Boullee's conception of a library that looks like a train station, and Juvara's ideal views ["Prospettiva ideale"J that look like glances into the warehouse of a building dealer: a completely new and untouched world of images, which Baudelaire would have ranked higher than all painting. 14 In Linferes work, however, the images are submitted to a descriptive technique that succeeds in establishing the most revealing facts in this unexplored marginal realm. There is, as is commonly known, a manner of representing buildings using purely painterly means. The architectural drawing is sharply distinguished from images of this sort and is found to have the closest affinity to nonrepresentational [unbildmCissige] workthat is, the supposedly authentically architectonic presentations of buildings in topographic designs, prospects, and vedutas. Since in these, too, certain "errors" have survived up through the late eighteenth century despite all the progress in naturalism, Linfert takes this to be a peculiar imaginary world [Vorstellungswelt] of architecture, which is markedly different from that of the painters. There are various indications that confirm the existence of this world, the most important one being that sllch architecture is not primarily "seen/' but rather is imagined as an objective entity [Bestand] and is sensed by those who approach or even enter it as a surrounding space [UmraumJ sui generis-that is, without the distancing effect of the edge of the image space [Bildraum]. Thus, what is crucial in the consideration of architecture is not seeing but the apprehension [durchspurut] of structures. The objective effect of the buildings on the imaginative being [vorstellungsmassige Sein] of the viewer is more important than their" being seen." In short, the most essential characteristic of the architectural drawing is that "it does not take a pictorial detour. "