Excavated Antique Fragments Assembled and Signed as Invention

Run a finger along the Greek-key fret that rings the lunette, that locks the half-dome shut with a border copied from a thousand pavements—and ask it where it was born. It will not say. Beneath it the candelabra pilasters climb, slender stems of inked and tinted foliage lifted straight from the grotesque schemes of unburied Roman rooms; over the doorway the Three Graces step their relief step, the same procession quarried and re-quarried since the cinquecento; and in the left niche the antique male nude stands his museum stance, weight slung, gaze averted, asking nothing. Speak to him: Where did you learn to stand so? He cannot answer. He learned it elsewhere, on a plinth that is not this plinth, in a hall that is not this hall.

I will not pretend the hand is unskilled—the hand is sure. The frets are transcribed without a stumble, the marbled grays and pinks held in tune across a tall and difficult elevation, the scrolling vines drawn with real patience down each panel. And measured against the painted scrollwork of Ottoman tezhip—where the gilded vine is invented anew within its border, never the same leaf twice, a melody played once and trusted to memory—these foliate pilasters reveal what they are: faithful, even tender, but recited. The Ottoman illuminator composes; here the maker copies the composing of others, and copies it beautifully. Beauty of transcription is still transcription.

So I ask the wall the simplest thing: what here is yours? The fret is Rome's. The Graces are Rome's, then the Renaissance's, then everyone's. The nude is the cast-room's. The grotesque is the grotto's. What remains to the maker is the gathering—the choosing of a room to hold them all—and the trade has learned to call that gathering invention, to sign the anthology as if anthology were authorship, to dress borrowing in the robes of lineage. You are not a design, dear sheet. You are a fine and honest inventory, copied in a steady voice, waiting for a building that will never be asked who first said your every word. — GY