ROBERT ADAM AND ATHENIAN StUART
a representative of the Classical Revival, He did go to Rome as a.
young man, from there crossed over to Spalato to study and measure
the remains of Diocletian's Palace, and after his return home pub-
lished the results of his research as a sumptuous volume in 1763.
Now these engraved folios of the monument of antiquity are quite
rightly regarded as a hall-mark of the Classical Revival. Adam's
was preceded by the most important of all, James Stuart's and
Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens, of which the first volume
came out in 1762. The two architects had worked at the expense of
the recently founded Society of Dilettanti, the London club of
archeologically interested gentlemen. Six years later the temples
of Paestum were illustrated by Thomas Major. In these books the
architect and the virtuoso in England could see for the first time the
strength and simplicity of the Greek Doric order. For what until
then, and eve'r since the Books of Orders of the i6th century, had
been known and used as Doric, was the much slenderer variety now
known as Roman, if fluted, and Tuscan, if not fluted. The short and
thick proportions of the Greek Doric order, and the complete
absence of a base, shocked the Palladians. Sir William Chambers,
champion of Palladian traditions in the generation after Burlington
and one of the founders of the Royal Academy in 1768, called it
downright barbaric. Adam did not like it either. Its reappearance
in the books of the sixties is memorable. It became the leitmotif &£ the
severest phase or variety of the Classical Revival, that known in
England as die Greek Revival. Stuart and Revett's work was
paralleled in French by Le Roi's skimpier Ruines de Grbce of 1758
and in German by Winckelmann's classic History of Ancient Art of
1763—the first book to recognise and analyse the true qualities of
Greek art, its "noble simplicity and tranquil greatness".
However, Winckelmann's recognition of these qualities was still
more literary than visual; for he pkced the Apollo Belvedere and the
Laocoon,that is examples of Late Greek Baroque and Rococo, higher
than any other antique statuary. Would the figures of Olympia and
Aegina and perhaps even those of the Parthenon have shocked him ?
It is not at all unlikely. His Grecian tastes probably did not go further
than say Josiah Wedgwood's. Wedgwood copied vases from those
Greek examples of the sth century which were then believed to be
Etruscan, and even called his new factory up by Stoke-on-Trent
Etruria. But the style of Wedgwood ware is gentle and elegant—
an Adam not a Greek style. Still, there is the undeniable desire to be
E.A.—14 191