Immersion: Classical Reception and Eastern European Transformations of Hygiene Architecture, ca. 1600-1830

Abstract

The dissertation explores bathing architecture in Eastern Europe from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century and its impact across the continent. During this period, the region witnessed unprecedented developments in hygiene infrastructure, thanks to a network of artists active in the Russian Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. These include artists working for the Commonwealth patrons, including Giovanni Battista Gisleni (ca. 1600-72), Tilman van Gameren (1632-1706), Emmanuel Héré de Corny (1705-63), Simon Gottlieb Zug (1733-1807), and Johann Christian Kammsetzer (1753-95), such protégés of the Russian Imperial court, as Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820), Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (1734-81), Charles Cameron (1743–1812), Mikhail Kozlovsky (1753-1802), Andrei Voronikhin (1759-1814), and Carlo Rossi (1775-1849), and those who worked for both groups: Vincenzo Brenna (1741-1820), Franciszek Smuglewicz (1745-1807), Giacomo Quarenghi (1744-1817), and Jean-François Thomas de Thomon (1760-1813). Works by those innovative artists and architects, most often analyzed through monograph studies, are reconsidered through a thematic approach that emphasizes their transnational dimension of their activities and collaborations. Eastern European baths, whose forms and functions simultaneously evoked Ottoman and Graeco-Roman counterparts, reveal the ideological tensions that surfaced within Russian and Polish-Lithuanian societies as they negotiated their fluctuating positions between the Orient and the Occident. More than just a cleansing site, the intimate, immersive space of a bathhouse served as a platform for a socially permissible merging of local and foreign cultural practices, as well as an exploration of the exposed human body. Controversies surrounding this phenomenon among foreign commentators – as articulated in genre scenes, travelog prints, and scholarly dissertations – constituted a vital point of reference within contemporary debates on human physiology and social improvement. Based on the close study of drawings, structures, and their reception, my analysis of this little acknowledged contribution will shed light on the emergence of the modern concept of hygiene and the new bodily models it generated.