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AN OUTLINE OF 

EUROPEAN 

ARCHITECTURE 




1 


AN OUTLINE OF 



New and Enlarged 
Edition 



JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.i 


i 


1 


Penguin Editions . 1943, 1945 
This Edition . 1948 


Made and Printed in Great Britain by 
H(tzell f Watson & Viney, Ltd,, London md Aylesbury 



Contents 


page 

FOREWORD xyj 

INTRODUCTION xix 

CHAPTER 

I TWILIGHT AND DAWN FROM THE 6TH TO THE IOTH CEN¬ 

TURY j 

II THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. IOOO -C. 1200 15 

UI THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II50-C. 1250 31 

IV THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. I25O-C. IJOO 56 

V RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-C. 1600 77 

VI THE BAROQUE IN THE ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES 

C. 1600 -C. 1760 i 20 

VH BRITAIN AND FRANCE FROM THE l6TH TO THE l8TH 
CENTURY 

VIH ROMANTIC MOVEMENT, HISTORICISM AND MODERN MOVE¬ 
MENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 188 

APPENDIX I BIBLIOGRAPHY 2I7 

APPENDIX 2 SOME TECHNICAL TERMS EXPLAINED 223 

APPENDIX 3 A COMPARISON BETWEEN THIS AND EART.TKft 

EDITIONS 227 

INDEX 229 


V 



Acknowledgments 


Author and Publisher wish to thank the following for permission to reproduce 
photographs: 

Messrs. Aerofilms, pi. xcm; Fratelli Alinari, pis. xxn, xlvi; Messrs. Anderson, 
pis. xl vn, XLIX, l, iiv 9 LXII, lxv, Lxvi, lxvhi; Architectural Press, fig. 38; 
Archives Photographiques, pis. xna, xvn, xvm, xxv, xxvn; Mr. F. L. Atten¬ 
borough, pi. xxxiv; Messrs. B. T. Batsford, fig. 77, pis. xli, lxx; Professor 
K. J. Conant, pi xni; Country Life Ltd., pis. xlii, ixxvxn, xcn, xcvi, xcvn; Mr. 
F, H. Crossley, pi. xxxvi; B.N.A., pi cnr; Mr. H. Felton, pi. xxxm; Fox Photos, 
pis. ci, ch; Mr. Charles Holden, fig. 100; Kunstgeschichdiches Seminar, Mar¬ 
burg, pi. lxxiv; Rijksbureau voor de Monumentenzorg, The Hague, pi lxxxv; 
Sir John Soane Museum, pi xcvin; The Spanish Embassy, pi lxix; Mr. 'V. Turl, 
pi xxxv; Warburg Institute, University of London, pi c; Mr. F. Reece 
Winstone, pi vin; Mr. F. R, Yerbury, pi xcv. 



List of Illustrations 

FIGURES IN TEXT 

i- Ravenna: S. Apollinare Nuovo, early 6th. century 3 

2. Pompeii: Basilica, c. 100 b.c. 4 

3. Rome:PalaceoftheFlavianEmperors,lateistcenturyA.D. 5 

4. Rome: “Basilica” of Porta Maggiore, 1st century a.d. 5 

5. Ravenna: S. Vitale, completed 547 7 

6. Ingelheim: Charlemagne’s Palace, early 9th century 9 

7. Fulda: Abbey Church, begun 802 IO 

8. Centula: Abbey Church, 790-99 (reconstruction) 12 

9. S. Juan de Banos, dedicated 661 13 

10. Bradford-on-Avon: An Anglo-Saxon church plan 14 

11. Tours: St. Martin’s, begun shortly after 997 16 

12. Cluny: Abbey Church, as begun c. 960 16 

13. Hildesheim: St. Michael’s, begun shortly after 1000 17 

14. Block capital: St. Michael’s, Hildesheim, nth century 20 

15. Decorated block capital from the crypt of Canterbury 

Cathedral, early 12th century 22 

16. Hildesheim: St. Michael’s, begun shortly after 1000 23 

17. Fluted capital: Winchester Cathedral, nth century 29 

18. Debased Corinthian capital from St. Stephen’s, Nevers, 

late nth century 29 

19. Capital from Vezelay, c. 1120: Revived interest in Antiquity 29 

20. Crocket capital from Laon, c. 1175: Early Gothic resilience 29 

21. St. Denis: Abbey Church, consecrated 1144 , 31 

22. Pair of wrestlers, a Cistercian church plan and the p lan of 

the Cathedral of Cambrai. From Villard de Honne- 
court’s textbook, c. 1235 34 

23. Another Cistercian plan, and a disciple on the Mount of 

Olives 36 

24. One of the radiating east chapels of Rheims Cathedral 37 

25. Elevation of the nave ofNoyon Cathedral, designed c. 1150 38 

26. Elevation of the nave of Laon Cathedral, designed c. 1170 38 

27. Probable original elevation of the nave of Notre Dame 

in Paris, designed c. 1170 39 

28. Paris: Notre Dame, begun c. 1163 41 

vii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

29. Nave of Chartres Cathedral, designed c. 1195 43 

30. Nave of Rheims Cathedral, designed c. 1211 44 

31. Elevation of the nave of Amiens Cathedral, begun 1220 45 

32. Salisbury Cathedral, begun 1220 52 

33. Nave of Salisbury Cathedral, designed c. 1220 54 

34. Harlech Castle, chiefly 1286-90 55 

35. Selby Abbey, east window, c. 1325 57 

36. Juan Gil de Hontanon: Salamanca Cathedral, begun 1512 64 

37. Guillermo Boffly: Gerona Cathedral, begun 14x7 65 

38. Cothay Manor, Somerset, late 15th century 68 

39. St. Nicholas, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, 1414-19 71 

40. Rouen: St. Maclou, begun 1434 < 73 

41. Tomar, window of Chapter-house, c. 1520 76 

42. Filippo Brunelleschi: Sto. Spirito, Florence, begun 1435 80 

43 and 44. Filippo Brunelleschi: S. Maria degli Angeli, 

Florence, begun 1434 82 

45. Temple of Minerva Medica, Rome, c. a.d. 250. Michel¬ 

ozzo’s Rotunda at the east end of the SS. Annunziata, 
Florence, begun 1444 83 

46. Projected Sforza Chapel, Milan. Plan reconstructed from 

Sperandio’s medal, c. 1460 85 

47. Antonio Filarete: Projected Chapel for the Hospital, 

Milan. Reconstructed from the original drawing, c. 1455 85 

48. Antonio Filarete: Church for Zagalia. Reconstructed 

from the original drawing, c. 1455-60 85 

49. Michelozzo: Palazzo Medici, Florence, begun 1444 89 

50. Leone Battista Alberti: S. Andrea, Mantua, begun 1470 91 

51. Leone Battista Alberti: S. Sebastiano, Mantua, begun 1460 92 

52. Giorgio Spavento: S. Salvatore, Venice, begun 1506 93 

53. The Chancery Palace (Palazzo della Cancelleria) in Rome, 

1486-98 94 

54. Leonardo da Vinci: Design for a church 95 

55. Leonardo da Vinci: Sketch for a church 96 

56. Donato Bramante: Original plan for St. Peter’s in Rome, 

1506 98 

57. Antonio da San Gallo: PalazzoFarnese, Rome, begun 1530 102 

58. Andrea Palladio: Villa Trissino at Meledo, c. 1560 107 

59. Giorgio Vasari, Giacomo Vignola and Bartolommeo 

Ammanati: The Villa of Pope Julius III, Rome, begun 

1552 III 

via 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

< 5 o. Michelangelo Buonarroti: Plan for the completion of 

St. Peter’s in Rome, 1546 115 

61. Giacomo Vignola: Church ofjesus (Gesu), Rome, begun 

1568 117 

62. Giacomo Vignola’s design for the front of the Gesu 118 

63. Carlo Madema (and Gianlorenzo Bernini ?): Palazzo 

Barberini, Rome, begun 1628 122 

64. Giacomo Vignola: S. Anna dei Palafrenieri, Rome, 

begun c. 1570 124 

6 5. Carlo Rainaldi: S. Agnese, Rome, begun 1652 125 

66. Gianlorenzo Bernini: S. Andrea al Quirinale, Rome, 

begun 1678 125 

67. Francesco Borromini: S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 

begun 1633. Front, 1667 126 

68. Martino Lunghi the Younger: SS. Vincenzo ed Ana- 

stasio, Rome, 1650 127 

69. Gianlorenzo Bernini: The Royal Staircase (Scala Regia) 

in the Vatican Palace, Rome, c. 1665 128 

70. Narciso Tome: “Trasparente” in tire cathedral of Toledo, 

completed 1732 132 

71. 72 and 73. Balthasar Neumann: Vierzehnheiligen in 

Franconia, begun 1743. Section (not showing the west 
towers), plan on ground-floor level, plan of vaults 138 

74. Plan for rebuilding monastery of Weingarten, 1723 140 

75. Enrique de Egas: Staircase in the Holy Cross Hospital, 

Toledo, 1504-14 142 

76. Bruchsal, Episcopal Palace. The central staircase by 

Balthasar Neumann, 1732 144 

77. Pietro Torrigiani: Tomb of Henry VII at Westminster 

Abbey, designed in 1512 147. 

78. Hampton Court: Great Hall, detail from the hammer- 

beam roof, 1533. Probably by James Needham 151 

79. Salamanca: Portal of the University, c. 1525-30 153 

80. Cornelis Floris: Antwerp Town Hall, 1561-65 154 

81. Typical Flemish and Dutch strapwork ornament of the 

later 16th century (from the Rhineland County Hall, 
Leiden, 1596-98) 155 

82. Jacques Lemercier: Church of the Sorbonne, Paris, 

1635-42 163 


IX 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FAGS 

83. Louis Levau: Church of the College des Quatre Nations 

(now Institut de France), Paris, 1661 163 

84 and 85. Louis Levau: Vaux-le-Vicomte, begun 1657 164 

86. Jules Hardouin-Mansart: St. Louis des Invalides, Paris 169 

87. Sir Christopher Wren: St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 

1675- 1710 171 

88. Sir Christopher Wren: St. Stephens, Walbrook, 

London, 1672-87 172 

89. Versailles: The garden front by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, 

1676- 88, the gardens by Andre le Notre, begun 1667 174 

90. Louis Levau: Hotel Lambert, Paris, about 1645 175 

91. The two chief types of Baroque staircases 177 

92. Jean Courtonne: Hotel de Matignon, Paris, begun 

1722 178 

93. Fenton House, Hampstead, London, 1693 180 

94. Sir John Vanbrugh: Blenheim Palace, begun 1705 182 

95. Garden Seat from P. Decker’s Gothic Architecture De¬ 

corated, 1759 193 

96. Claude Nicolas Ledoux: One of the city gates of Paris, 

designed between 1784 and 1789 196 

97. Carl Friedrich Schinkel: The Old Museum (Altes 

Museum), Berlin, 1822-30 201 

98. Robert Norman Shaw: Stores and Inn at the Bedford Park 

Garden Suburb, Chiswick, 1878 208 

99. Charles F. Annesley Voysey: House at Colwall, Malvern, 

1893 209 

100. Charles Holden: Arnos Grove Station, of the London 

Underground, 1932 213 

Figures A to E illustrating technical terms 224—226 


x 



List of Plates 


PLATE 

x. Athens: The Parthenon, begun in 447 b.c. 
xr. Rome: Basilica of Maxentius, c. a.d. 310-20. 
in. Ravenna: S. Apollinare Nuovo, early 6th century. 

iv. Ravenna: S. Vitale, completed in 547. 

v. Aachen: Cathedral (the chapel of Charlemagne’s Palace), 

consecrated in 805. 


jS. Maria deNaranco, c. 848. 

vm. Earl’s Barton, Northamptonshire, 10th or early nth 
century. 

ix. Castle Hedingham, Essex, 12th century. 

x. Winchester Cathedral: North transept, c. 1080-90. 

xi. Durham Cathedral: The nave, early 12th century. 

xna. Jumieges: Abbey Church, begun c. 1040. 

xnb. Toulouse : St. Semin, the nave, early 12th century. 

xiii. Cluny: Abbey Church from the east, late nth century. 

xiv. Toulouse: St. Sernin. Choir consecrated in 1096. 

xv. Angouleme Cathedral, early 12th century, 

xvi. Perigueux: St. Front, c. 1125-50. 

xvn. Vezelay: Church of the Magdalen, early 12th century, 
xvm. Autun: St. Lazare, early 12th century. 

xix. St. Gilles, c. 1150. 

xx. Cologne: Holy Apostles, c. 1200. 

xxi. Worms Cathedral, c. 1175-1250. 
xxa. Milan: S. Ambrogio, 12th century. 

xxm. Florence: S. Miniato al Monte, nth century and later. 

xxiv. St. Denis: Choir ambulatory, 1140-44. 

xxv. Laon Cathedral: Nave, last quarter of the 12 th century. 

xxvi. Paris: Notre Dame, nave, designed c. n 8 5. 
xxvii. Amiens Cathedral: Nave, begun in 1220. 
xxvm. Rheims Cathedral: The west front, begun c. 1225. 


XI 



LIST OF PLATES 


PLATE 

xxix. Rheims Cathedral: From the north, begun in 12x1. 

xxx. Lincoln Cathedral, chiefly 1192-1280. 
xxxia. Lincoln Cathedral: The choir, begun in 1192. 
xxxib. Lincoln Cathedral: The nave, roofed in 1233. 
xxxii. Lincoln Cathedral: The Angel Choir, begun in 1256. 
xxxnr. Salisbury Cathedral: Chapter-house, c. 1275. 

xxxiv. Southwell Minster: Capital from the chapter-house, 
late 13 th century. 

xxxv. Bristol Cathedral: Choir aisle, 1298-1332. 
xxxvi. Ely Cathedral: From the Lady Chapel, 1321-49. 
xxxvii. Gloucester Cathedral: The choir, 1337-77. 
xxxvnr. Gloucester Cathedral: The vault of the choir, 
xxxix. Penshurst Place, Kent, begun c. 1341. 

XL. Coventry: St. Michael’s, 15th century. 
xli. Swaffham, Norfolk: Timber roof, 1454 or later. 
xlii. Cambridge: King’s College Chapel, begun 1446. 

XLiii. Valladolid: St. Paul’s, c. 1490-1515. Designed by Sim6n 
de Colonia. 

xliv. Nuremberg: St. Lawrence, choir, 1445-72. 
xlv. Strassburg Cathedral: Portal of St. Lawrence, 1495. 
xlvi. Florence Cathedral, begun 1296. 
xlvii. Filippo Brunelleschi: Sto. Spirito, Florence, begun 1435. 
xlviii. Filippo Brunelleschi: Foundling Hospital, Florence, 
begun 1419. 

xlix. Luciano Laurana (?): Courtyard of the Ducal Palace, 
Urbino, c. 1470-75. 

l. Leone Battista Alberti: S. Francesco, Rimini, begun 
1446. 

li. Leone Battista Alberti: Palazzo Rucellai, Florence, 
1446-51. 

lii, Raphael: Palazzo Vidoni Caffarelli, Rome, c. 15 15-20. 
urn. Donato Bramante: The Tempictto of S. Pietro in 
Montorio, Rome, 1502. 

liv. Antonio da San Gallo: Palazzo Farnese, Rome, x 530-46. 
lv. Baldassare Peruzzi: Palazzo Massimi alie Colonne, 
Rome, begun 1535. 

xii 



LIST OF PLATES 


TLATU 

lvt. Giulio Romano: His house at Mantua, c. 1544. 

lvh. Andrea Palladio: Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza, begun in 
1550. 

Lvra. Andrea Palladio: Villa Rotonda, outside Vicenza, 
begun c. 1567. 

lix. Michelangelo: Anteroom to the Laurenziana Library, 
Florence, begun in 1526. 

lx. Giorgio Vasari: The Uflizi Palace, Florence, begun in 1570. 

lxi. Giacomo Vignola: Church of the Gesu, Rome, begun 
in 1568. 

lxii. Michelangelo: The dome of St. Peter’s in Rome, 
designed in 1558-60. 

Lxm. St. Peter’s in Rome: Aerial view. 

lxiv. Francesco Borromini: S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 
Rome, begun in 1633. 

lxv. Francesco Borromini: S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 
Rome, the front, begun in 1667. 

lxvi. Pietro da Cortona: S. Maria della Pace, Rome, begun in 
1656. 

lxvii. Gianlorenzo Bernini: The Scala Regia in the Vatican 
Palace, Rome, c. 1660-70. 

Lxvm. Gianlorenzo Bernini: Altar of St. Teresa at S. Maria 
della Vittoria, Rome, 1646. 

lxix. Narciso Tomi: The Trasparente in Toledo Cathedral, 
completed in 1732. 

lxx. Luis de Arevalo and F. Manuel Vasquez: Sacristy of the 
Charterhouse (Cartuja), Granada, 1727-64. 

lxxi. Cosmas Damian and Egid Quirin Asam: St. John 
Nepomuk, Munich, 1730-c. 1750. 

lxxh. Johann Balthasar Neumann: Vierzehnheiligen, 1743-72. 

lxxiii. Jakob Prandtauer: The Monastery of Melk on the 
Danube, 1702-36. 

lxxiv. Matthaus Daniel Popplemann: The Zwinger at 
Dresden, 1709-19. 

Johann Balthasar Neumann: Staircase in the Electoral 
Palace at Bruchsal, designed 1730. 

xiii 


LXXV 
LXXVI 
a and b. 



LIST OF PLATES 


PLAT® ' 

LXXVH. Johann Michael Feichtmayr: Stucco cartouche, Bruch- 
sal, 1752. 

Lxxvni. Cambridge: King’s College Chapel, southern lunette 
of the west side of the choir screen, 1532-36. 

lxxix. Blois: The Castle, wing of Francis I, 1515-c. 1525. 

lxxx. Pierre Lescot: South-west pavilion in the Louvre 
Courtyard, Paris, 1546. 

lxxxi. Burghley House, Northants: Centre pavilion in the 
courtyard, 1585. 

lxxxii. Longleat, Wiltshire, begun in 1567. 

lxxxiii. Inigo Jones: Queen’s House, Greenwich, begun in 
1616. 

lxxxiv. Francois Mansart: The Orleans wing of Blois Castle, 
1635-38. 

lxxxv. Jacob van Campen: The Mauritshuis, The Hague, 
1633 - 35 - 

lxxxvi. Claude Perrault: The Louvre, Paris, east front, begun 
in 1665. 

lxxxvii. Jules Hardouin-Mansart: St. Louis des Invahdes, Paris, 
1675-1706. 

lxxx vni. Sir Christopher Wren: St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 
1675-1710. 

lxxxdc. Sir Christopher Wren: St. Stephens, Walbrook, 
London, 1672-78. 

xc. Germain Boffrand: Salon du Prince in the Hotel de 
Soubise, Paris, c. 1737. 

xci. Sir John Vanbrugh: Blenheim Palace, near Oxford, 
begun in 1705. 

xcn. Sir John Vanbrugh: Blenheim Palace, gate pavilion of 
the kitchen wing, 1708-09. 

xciii. Blenheim Palace from the air. 

xciv. John Wood the Elder: Prior Park, near Bath, begun 
in 1735. 

xcv. John Wood the Younger: Royal Crescent, Bath, 
begun in 1767. 

xcvi. Robert Adam: Kenwood, near London, The Library, 
1767-69. 



LIST OF PLATES 


run 

xcvn. Robert Adam: Syon House, the entrance screen, 1773. 
xcvni. Sir John Soane: Design for the architect’s own house, 
Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, 1813. 
xcix. Friedrich Gilly: Plan for a National Theatre, Berlin, 

1798- 

c. Sir Robert Smirke: The British Museum, London, 
1823-47. 

ci. Sir Charles Barry and A. W. N. Pugin: The Houses of 
Parliament, London, begun in 1835. 
cii. Sir Charles Barry: The Reform Club, London, begun in 
1837. 

cm. Charles Gamier: The Opera, Paris, 1861-74. 

Civ. Walter Gropius: Model Factory at the “Werkbund” 
Exhibition, Cologne, 1914. 


xv 



Foreword 


A his tory of European, architecture in two hundred pages 
can achieve its goal only if the reader is prepared to concede 
three things. 

He must not expect to find a mention of every work and every 
architect of importance. If this had been attempted, the space avail¬ 
able would have been filled with nothing but names of architects, 
names of buildings and dates. One building must be accepted as 
sufficient to illustrate one particular style or one particular point. 
This means that in the picture which the reader is going to see 
gradations are eliminated, and colour is set against colour. He may 
regard that as a disadvantage, but he will, it can be hoped, admit 
that the introduction of subtler differences would have doubled or 
trebled the bulk of the book. Thus the nave of Lincoln will be dis¬ 
cussed but not the nave of Wells, and Sto. Spirito in Florence but 
not S. Lorenzo. Whether St. Michael’s, Coventry, is really a more 
complete or suitable example of a Perpendicular parish church than 
Holy Trinity, Hull, the Palazzo Rucellai of the Italian Renaissance 
than the Palazzo Strozzi, is of course debatable. Unanimity cannot 
be achieved on matters of that kind. Yet, as architectural values can 
be appreciated only by describing and analysing buildings at some 
length, it was imperative to cut down their number and devote as 
much space as possible to those finally retained. 

Besides this limitation, two more have proved necessary. It was 
out of the question to treat European architecture of all ages from 
Stonehenge to the 20th century, or the architecture of all the 
nations which makeup Europe to-day. Neither would, however, be 
expected of a volume called European Architecture. The Greek 
temple, most readers probably feel, belongs to die civilisation of 
Antiquity , not to what we usually mean when we talk of European 
civilisation. It will also be agreed, though for quite different reasons, 
that the architecture of, say, Bulgaria need not be dealt with in these 
pages. The main reasons here are that Bulgaria in the past belonged 
to the Byzantine and then to the Russian orbit, and diat her im¬ 
portance now is so marginal as to make her omission pardonable. 
So everything will be left out of this book that is only of marginal 



FOREWORD 


interest in the development of European architecture, and every¬ 
thing that is not European or—as I thus propose using the term 
European—Western in character. For Western civilisation is a dis¬ 
tinct unit, a biological unit, one is tempted to say. Not for racial 
reasons certainly—it is shallow materialism to assume that—but for 
cultural reasons. Which nations make up Western civilisation at any 
given moment, at what juncture a nation enters it, at what juncture 
a nation ceases to be of it—such questions are for the individual 
historian to decide. Nor can he expect his decision to be universally 
accepted. The cause of this uncertainty regarding historical categories 
is obvious enough. Though a civilisation may appear entirely clear 
in its essential characteristics when we think of its highest achieve¬ 
ments, it seems blurred and hazy when we try to focus its exact out¬ 
lines in time and space. 

Taking Western civilisation, it is certain that prehistory is not 
part of it, as die prehistory of every civilisation—the word expresses 
it—is a stage pne, i.e. before that civilisation itself is bom. The birth 
of a civilisation coincides with the moment when a leading idea, a 
leitmotiv, emerges for the first time, the idea which will in the course 
of the centuries to follow gather strength, spread, mature, mellow, 
and ultimately—this is fate, and must be faced—abandon the civilisa¬ 
tion whose soul it had been. When this happens, the civilisation 
dies, and another, somewhere else or from the same soil, grows up, 
starting out of its own prehistory into its own primitive dark age, 
and then developing its own essentially new ideology. Thus it was, 
to recall only the most familiar example, when the Roman Empire 
died, and Western civilisation was bom out of prehistoric darkness, 
passed through its Merovingian infancy, and then took shape first 
under Charlemagne and finally during the reign of Otto the Great in 
the i oth century. 

Now, besides prehistory and Antiquity, nearly all that belongs to 
the first thousand years a.d. has had to be left out, because the events 
of that age, centred in the Eastern Mediterranean—i.e. the oriental- 
isation of the Roman Empire, early Christianity, early Talmudism, 
early Mohammedanism and the Byzantine Empire, with its successor 
civilisations in the Balkans and Russia—make up a separate civilisa¬ 
tion of its own, of a character fundamentally different from the Greek 
and Roman as well as the Western. 

So these three omissions—all omissions in time—will, it is to be 
hoped, be considered justifiable. As for limitations in space, a few 

xvif 



FOREWORD 


words will suffice. Whoever makes up his mind to write a short 
history of European architecture, or art, or philosophy, or drama, or 
agriculture, must decide in which part of Europe at any time those 
things happened which seem to him to express most intensely the 
vital will and vital feelings of Europe. It is for this reason that, e.g. 
Germany is not mentioned for her 16th-century but for her 18th- 
century buildings, that Spain’s role in Western Mohammedan 
architecture is left out, but her r6le in Western Christian architecture 
considered, that buildings in the Nedierlands are only touched 
upon, and Scandinavian buildings not mentioned at all. The only 
positive bias towards the work of one nation which has been per¬ 
mitted (and needs no special apology) is towards British examples, 
where they could be introduced without obscuring the issue, 
instead of examples from abroad. The issue, to say it once more, is 
Western architecture as an expression of Western civilisation, des¬ 
cribed historically in its growth from the 9th to the 19th century. 

This book was published for the first time fiveyearsago by Penguin 
Books. It has since had a second enlarged Penguin edition, and new 
additions to text and illustrations have been introduced for the 
present edition. A fist of the alterations which were made for 
the second as well as for this new edition will be found on p. 227. 

Most of the drawings in the text of this edition were specially 
drawn by Miss Margaret Tallet. The index is the work of Pamela 
Reekie; the author wishes cordially to thank her for having given 
up so much of her limited spare time to its compilation. He also 
wishes to place on record his gratitude to Margaret Whinney and 
Anthony Blunt for reading the text of the whole book in typescript 
and improving it in many ways. 

London, 1948 N. P. 


xvm 



Introduction 


A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of 
architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale 
sufficient for a human being to move in, is a building; the 
term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to 
aesthetic appeal. Now aesthetic sensations may be caused by a build¬ 
ing in three different ways. First, they may be produced by the treat¬ 
ment of walls, proportions of windows, the relation of wall-space 
to window-space, of one story to another, of ornamentation such as 
the tracery of a 14th-century window, or the leaf and fruit garlands 
of a Wren porch. Secondly, the treatment of the exterior of a build¬ 
ing as a whole is aesthetically significant, its contrasts of block against 
block, the effect of a pitched or a flat roof or a dome, the rhythm of 
projections and recessions. Thirdly, there is the effect on our senses 
of the treatment of the interior, the sequence of rooms, the widening 
out of a nave at the crossing, the stately movement of a baroque 
staircase. The first of these three ways is two-dimensional; it is the 
painter’s way. The second is three-dimensional, and as it treats the 
building as volume, as a plastic unit, it is the sculptor’s way. The third 
is three-dimensional too, but it concerns space; it is the architect’s 
own way more than the others. What distinguishes architecture 
from painting and sculpture is its spatial quality. In this, and only in 
this, no other artist can emulate the architect. Thus the history of 
architecture is primarily a history of man shaping space, and the 
historian must keep spatial problems always in the foreground. This 
is why no book on architecture, however popular its presentation 
may be, can be successful without ground plans. 

But architecture, though primarily spatial, is not exclusively 
spatial. In every building, besides enclosing space, the architect 
models volume and plans surface, i.e. designs an exterior and sets 
out individual walls. That means that the good architect requires 
the sculptor’s and the painter’s modes of vision in addition to his own 
spatial imagination. Thus architecture is the most comprehensive of 
all visual arts and has a right to claim superiority over the others. 

This aesthetic superiority is, moreover, supplemented by a social 
superiority. Neither sculpture nor painting, although both are 


xix 



INTRODUCTION 


rooted in elementary creative and imitative instincts, surround us to 
the same extent as architecture, act upon us so incessantly and so 
ubiquitously. We can avoid intercourse with what people call the 
Fine Arts, but we cannot escape buildings and the subtle but pene¬ 
trating effects of their character, noble or mean, restrained or 
ostentatious, genuine or meretricious. An age without painting is 
conceivable, though no believer in the life-enhancing function of 
art would want it. An age without easel-pictures can be conceived 
without any difficulty, and, thinking of the predominance of easel- 
pictures in the 19th century, might be regarded as a consummation 
devoutly to be wished. An age without architecture is impossible 
as long as human beings populate this world. 

The very fact that in the 19th century easel-painting flourished at 
the expense of wall-painting and ultimately of architecture, proves 
into what a diseased state the arts (and Western civilisation) had 
fallen. The very fact that the Fine Arts to-day seem to be recovering 
their architectural character makes one look into the future with some 
hope. For architecture did rule when Greek art and when mediaeval 
art grew and were at their best; Raphael and Michelangelo still con¬ 
ceived in terms of balance between architecture and painting. 
Titian did not, Rembrandt did not, nor did Velasquez, Very high 
aesthetic achievements are possible in easel-painting, but they are 
achievements torn out of the common ground of life. The 19th 
century and, even more forcibly, some of the most recent tendencies 
in the fine arts have shown up the dangers of the take-it-or-leave-it 
attitude of the independent, self-sufficient painter. Salvation can 
only come from architecture as the art most closely bound up with 
the necessities of life, with immediate use and functional and struc¬ 
tural fundamentals. 

That does not, however, mean that architectural evolution is 
caused by function and construction. A style in art belongs to the 
world of mind, not the world of matter. New purposes may result 
in new types of building, but the architect’s job is to make such new 
types both aesthetically and functionally satisfactory—and not all 
ages have considered, as ours does, functional soundness indispensable 
for aesthetic enjoyment. The position is similar with regard to 
materials. New materials may make new forms possible, and even 
call for new forms. Hence it is quite justifiable, if so many works on 
architecture (especially in England) have emphasised their impor¬ 
tance. If in this book they have deliberately been kept in the back- 


xx 



INTRODUCTION 


ground, the reason is that materials can become architecturally 
effective only when the architect instils into them an aesthetic mean¬ 
ing. Architecture is not the product of materials and purposes—nor 
by the way of social conditions—but of the changing spirits of 
changing ages. It is the spirit of an age that pervades its social life, 
its religion, its scholarship and its arts. The Gothic style was not 
created because somebody invented rib-vaulting. The Gothic spirit 
existed and expressed itself in rib-vaults, as has been proved and will 
be mentioned again later, before the constructional possibilities of 
the rib had been discovered. The Modem Movement did not come 
into being because steel-frame and reinforced-concrete construction 
had been worked out—they were worked out because a new spirit 
required them. 

Thus the following chapters will treat the history of European 
architecture as a history of expression, and primarily of spatial 
expression. 


e . a .—2 


xxi 




CHAPTER I 


Twilight and Dawn 

FROM THE 6TH TO THE IOTH CENTURY 

T h e Greek temple (pi. i) is the most perfect example ever 
achieved of architecture finding its fulfilment in bodily beauty. 
Its interior mattered infinitely less than its exterior. The colon¬ 
nade all round conceals where the entrance lies. The faithful did not 
enter it and spend hours of communication with the Divine in it, as 
they do in a church. Our Western conception of space would have 
been just as unintelligible to a man ofPericles’s age as our religion. It is 
the plastic shapeofthe temple that tells, placed before us withaphysical 
presence more intense, more alive than that of any later building. 
The isolation of the Parthenon or the temples of Passtum, clearly dis¬ 
connected from the ground on which they stand, the columns with 
their resilient curves, strong enough to carry without too much 
visible effort the weight of the architraves, the sculptured friezes and 
sculptured pediments—there is something consummately human in 
all this, life in the brightest tight of nature and mind: nothing harrow¬ 
ing, nothing problematic and obscure, nothing blurred. 

Roman architecture also thinks of the building primarily as of a 
sculptural body, but not as one so superbly independent. There is a 
more conscious grouping of buildings, and parts are less isolated 
too. Hence the all-round, free-standing columns with their archi¬ 
trave ly ing on them are so often replaced by heavy square piers 
carrying arches. Hence also walls are emphasised in their thickness, 
for instance, by hollowing niches into them; and if columns are 
asked for, they are half-columns, attached to, and that is part of, the 
wall. Hence, finally, instead of flat ceilings—stressing a perfectly 
clear horizontal as against a perfectly clear vertical—the Romans 
used vast tunnel-vaults or cross-vaults to cover spaces. The arch and 
the vault on a large scale are engineering achievements, greater than 
any of the Greeks, and it is of them as they appear in the aqueducts, 
baths, basilicas (that is public assembly halls), theatres and palaces, 
and not of temples that we think, when we remember Roman archi¬ 
tecture (pi. n). 

However, with very few exceptions, these grandest creations of 

i 



TWILIGHT AND DAWN FROM THE 6TH TO THE IOTH CENTURY 

the Roman sense of power, mass and plastic body belong to a period 
later than the Republic, and even the Early Empire. The Colosseum 
is of the late 1st century A.D., die Pantheon of the early 2nd, the 
Baths of Caracalla of the early 3rd, the Basilica ofMaxentius (usually 
called of Constantine) of the early 4th. 

By then a fundamental change of spirit and no longer only of 
forms had taken place. The relative stability of the Roman Empire 
was overthrown after the death of Marcus Aurelius (180); rulers 
followed each other at a rate such as had been known only during 
short periods of civil war. Between Marcus Aurelius and Constantine, 
in 125 years, there were forty-seven emperors; less than four years 
was the average duration of a reign. They were no longer elected by 
the Roman Senate, that enlightened body of politically experienced 
citizens, but proclaimed by some provincial army of barbarian 
troops, often barbarians themselves, rude soldiers of peasant stock, 
ignorant of and unsympathetic to the achievements of Roman 
civilisation. There was constant internecine warfare, and constant 
attacks of barbarians from outside had to be repulsed. Cities declined 
and were in the end deserted, their market-halls and baths and blocks 
of flats collapsed. Soldiers of the Roman army sacked Roman towns. 
Goths, Alemans, Franks, Persians sacked whole provinces. Trade, 
seaborne and landborne, came to an end, estates and farms and 
villages became self-supporting once again, payments in money were 
replaced by payments in kind; taxes were often paid in kind. The 
educated bourgeoisie decimated by wars, executions, murder and a 
lower and lower birthrate had no longer a share in public affairs. 
Men from Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, from Spain, Gaul and Germany, 
held all the important positions. The subtle political balance of the 
Early Empire could no longer be appreciated and was no longer 
maintained. 

When a new stability was brought about by Diocletian and 
Constantine about 300, it was die stability of an oriental autocracy 
with a rigid oriental court ceremonial, with a merciless army and 
far-reaching State control. Soon Rome was no longer the capital of 
the Empire; Constantinople took her place. Then the Empire fell 
into two: that of the East to prove mighty, that of the West to 
become the prey of Teutonic invaders, the Visigoths, the Vandals, 
the Ostrogoths, the Lombards, and then for a while to be part of the 
Eastern—the Byzantine—Empire. 

Now during these centuries the massive walls, arches, vaults. 


2 



LATE ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN STYLE 

nich.es and apses of Roman palaces and public buildings with their 
grossly inflated decoration grew up all over the vast Empire. But 
whilst this new style left its mark on Trier as much as on Milan, its 
centre was the Eastern Mediterranean: Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, 
Palmyra—that is the country in which the Hellenistic style had 
flourished in the last century B.c. And the Late Roman Style is in¬ 
deed the successor to the Late Greek or Hellenistic. 

The Eastern Mediterranean led in matters of the spirit too. From 
the East came the new attitude towards religion. Men were tired of 
what human intellect could provide. The invisible, the mysterious, 
the irrational were the need of that orientalised, barbarised popula¬ 
tion. The various creeds of the Gnostics, Mithraism from Persia, 
Judaism, Manichseism, found their followers. Christianity proved 
strongest, found lasting forms of organisation, and survived the 
danger under Constantine of an alliance with the Empire. But it 
remained Eastern in essence. Tertullian’s: “I believe in it because it is 
absurd” would have been an impossible tenet for an enlightened 
Roman. Augustine’s “Beauty cannot be beheld in any bodily mat¬ 
ter” is equally anti-antique. Of the greatest of the late Pagan philo¬ 
sophers, Plotinus, his pupil and biographer said that he walked like 
one ashamed of being in the body. Plotinus came from Egypt, St. 
Augustine from Libya. St. Athanasius and Origen were Egyptians; 
Basil was born and lived in Asia Minor, Diocletian was a native of 
Dalmatia, Constantine and St. Jerome came from the Hungarian 
plains. Judged by the standards of the age of Augustus, none of them 
was a Roman. 

Their architecture represents them, their fanaticism and their 
passionate search for the invisible, the magic, the immaterial. S. 



1'O 2D 30 +0 , r . 

1 I I - I |—I-1 

O 30 

I. RAVENNA: S. APOLLINARE NUOVO, EARLY 6tH 
CENTURY. 


3 







twilight and dawn from the 6th to the ioth century 

Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (pi. ra an4 fig. i) was built early in 
the 6th century by Theodoric, ruler of the Ostrogoths in Italy. Yet 
there is nothing specifically Teutonic in it; it belongs wholly to that 
universal but, in its essentials, Eastern style that goes under the name 
of Early Christian. The functional elements of a Christian church 
are here already so completely established that neither a Gothic nor a 
present-day church has gone beyond it. The church is taken as the 
visible symbol of the way of the faithful towards the mystery of the 
Real Presence. The altar under the apse and the miracle of the Real 
Presence are the goal. There may be a transept as a halt between nave 
and apse—a rare motif incidentally, confined mainly to some major 
churches of Rome built under Constantine and his immediate 
successors (Old St. Peter’s, S. Paolo fuori lc mura, S. Giovanni in 
Laterano, S. Maria Maggiore). With or without transepts, the main 
axis of propelling movement is indicated by the nave with its un¬ 
interrupted sequence of columns dividing off the aisles. It is this that 
drives us irresistibly on towards the East. There is no articulation in 
that long colonnade to arrest our eyes, nor in the long row of window 
after window up in the clerestory; and the solemn and silent mosaic 
figures of martyrs and holy virgins, with their motionless faces and 
stiff garments, march with us. One monotonous mesmerising rhythm 
fills the whole of the church—no secondary motifs weaken its 
fanatical single-mindedness. This type of plan and spatial develop¬ 
ment is so fitting that one feels tempted to regard it as a Christian 
invention. That is,however,not so. Basilica is the nameundcrwhich 
such churches with nave, lower aisles and apse are known to this 
day. We have met it before meaning a public hall in Rome or the 












THE BASILICA 



Roman Empire. The word is Greek and means royal. So it may 
have come to Rome with Hellenistic regal pomp. But Roman 
Basilicas are in no surviving form the immediate predecessors of the 
Early Christian church building. They usually have colonnades not 
only between “nave” and “aisles”, but also on the narrow sides, that 
is a complete ambulatory, like a Greek temple turned inside out—or 
rather outside in (fig. 2 ). Apses were not uncommon; even two apses 
are found; but they are as a rule cut off from the main body by the 
colonnades. Thus as a general term for a large-aisled hall the word 
basilica may have been transferred from Pagan to Christian, but 
hardly the building type as such. Other guesses have been made : the 



a id MO 

fittfH-m-)-1——j feet 

4. ROME: “basilica” of porta MAGGIORE, 1ST century a.d. 


5 













twilight and dawn from the 6th to the ioth century 

scholce, or the private halls in large houses and palaces (for instance, 
that of the Flavian emperors on the Palatine (fig. 3))—smaller apsed 
rooms, which may indeed have been used for private worship by 

Christians. . 

But since 1917 we know of a. much mote direct connection between 

Christian and Pagan religious architecture. The so-called Basilica 
of Porta Maggiore (fig. 4) is a little subterranean building of only 
about forty feet length. With its nave and aisles, its piers and apse it 
looks exactly like a Christian chapel. Stucco reliefs reveal that it was 
the meeting-place of one of the many mystical sects which had come 
to Rome from the East, before and after the advent of the sect of the 
Christians. It is attributed to the xst century a.d. Considering the 
close dependence of Early Christian thought on that of the other 
oriental religions believing in a saviour, in sacrifice and re-birth, the 
basilica of Porta Maggiore is the most convincing single source of 
Early Christian architecture yet found. 

During the 4th century Constantine and his successors built vast 
basilicas in East and West; by the 5th century Christian churches 
existed everywhere—even in England (Silchcstcr). Most of them 
are varieties of the basilican plan. An exception were baptisteries and 
memorials or mausoleum chapels for which, on a Roman picccdcnt, 
centrally planned buildings were preferred. On a large scale central 
planning was developed chiefly in Byzantium itself. It culminated 
in Justinian’s two large churches, St. Sergius and Bacchus and then 
St. Sophia (532-37). On Italian soil a reflection of these, and a res¬ 
plendent one indeed, is found at Ravenna, which after the fall of the 
Ostrogoths had become the capital of Byzantine Italy. S. Vitale was 
built by the same Justinian and completed in 547 (pi* * v an< ^ 5 )- 
It is an octagon with a two-storied octagonal ambulatory, a chancel 
and apse added at die east end, and at the west end a narthex or ante¬ 
room for the congregation to collect before entering die House of 
God. The spatial motif diat determines the character of the room, a 
motif of purely aesthetic, i.c. no functional purpose, is the use of the 
niches into which the central octagon expands. As these niches are not 
enclosed by walls, but open out with arcades into the ambulatories on 
the ground floor and the first floor, no clear distinction exists between 
the two main parts of the building. The central space flows into the 
ambulatory, and the ambulatory becomes a senseless shape if looked 
at as an independent unit. The same sensation of uncertainty, of a 
dreamlike; floating, is created, where solid walls remain, by the 

6 



THE MEROVINGIAN AGE 



J. RAVENNA: S. VITALE, COMPLETED J47. 


mosaics covering them. These glowing surfaces with austere, gaunt 
figures in sombre tints, seem just as immaterial, as magical and 
weightless as the surging and drooping curves of the octagon. 

The Franks in Gaul, the Angles and Saxons in Britain, the Visi¬ 
goths in Spain could not possibly appreciate the complexity and 
sophistication of such churches. Theirs was still the outlook of native 
tribes, although Clovis had accepted in 496 what he understood 
as Christianity. With the same merciless cruelty in which the Anglo- 
Saxon warrior revelled in England, all but exterminating what had 
remained of civilisation on the island, the princes of the Merovin¬ 
gians sought to exterminate whole families of rivals. The pages of 
Gregory of Tours, who wrote in the second half of the 6th century, 
are full of assassination, rape and perjury. Yet this is how our own 
civilisation began, and how all civilisations begin—in the darkness of 
tribal barbarism. The Church was the only tie between these shifting 
kingdoms and the spiritual achievements of the South. Thus Anglo- 
Saxon brutality was tamed by Irish monasticism (inspired in some 
obscure way by the Coptic Church of Egypt) in the North and by 
missionaries from Rome in the South, until, early in the 8th century, 
the Venerable Bede and the circle around him attained a height of 
education unparalleled anywhere else in Europe. What they built 

7 












TWILIGHT AND DAWN FROM THE 6TH TO THE LOTH CENTURY 

seems primitive to us, but descriptions seem to indicate that large 
churches reflected more faithfully early Italian magnificence. Eddius 
in his Life of Wilfrid calls Hexham a building “columnis variis et 
porticibus multis suffultum, mirabili longitudine et altitudine , and 
Ripon also “variis columnis et porticibus suffultam”, and Alcuin 
speaks of York as possessing thirty altars, and again many columns 
and arches, beautiful ceilings and many porticus, whether these mean 
outer colonnades, or galleries, or aisles, or indiscriminately all of 

Yet what survives or has been excavated does not bear out such 
accounts. Churches appear small throughout the country, more 
Mediterranean in form in the South-East, more original in the North. 
At Canterbury and elsewhere in Kent apses were, it seems, usual, in 
Northumberland and the neighbouring counties there are long, 
narrow unaisled buildings, for instance at Ivlonkw car mouth and 
Jarrow, founded in 674 and 685- Chancels are separate, and the effect 
of the interiors is of a tall, tight gangway leading towards a small 
chamber. Externally masonry is rude and primeval. Geographically 
between the two regions lies Brixworth in Northamptonshire, the 
only partly preserved aisled basilica, built with the use of Roman 
bricks probably in the 7th century. 

Amongst the Franks of present-day France and the West of 
Germany the position was very much the same. There are a few odd 
Merovingian survivals, small in scale and of debased Roman and 
Early Christian forms (St. Jean Poitiers, Baptistery Venasque, etc.), 
and there are plenty of descriptions of buildings seemingly much 
more ambitious and accomplished—for instance, of the 6th century 
in Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks. A change which we can 
follow from buildings still upright or which can be reconstructed in 
our minds with some certainty came only with Charlemagne, 
heralded perhaps by a few major enterprises of his father, Pepin the 
Short. Charlemagne had grown up illiterate; he never wrote with 
ease. But he had a conscious programme of educating his people or 
peoples to a conception of Roman urbanity and Roman grandeur 
in a new Christian guise. Hence he gathered round his person the 
flower of European scholarship and poetry, men from England, 
Spain, France and Italy—all ecclesiastics, of course. Hence he built 
for himself palaces with hall, chapel and large ranges of rooms, all as 
clearly organised in their relative positions as the palaces of the 
Roman emperors on the Palatine, and all connected by vast 

8 



CAROLINGIAN PALACES AND CHURCHES 


colonnades of evidently Roman Eastern derivation (fig. 6). To 
visualise these palaces we have to rely on excavations and descrip¬ 
tion. Only in one case a substantial piece of one of Charlemagne’s 
palaces still stands: the Chapel Palatine of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle), 



6. ingelheim: Charlemagne’s palace, early 9TH century. 


one of the emperor’s principal residences. It was originally connected 
with the Great Hall (not now traceable beyond parts of the founda¬ 
tion walls) by colonnades nearly 400 feet long (pi. v). An equestrian 
statue of Theodoric, believed to be Constantine, looted from Rome, 
was significantly placed in this colonnaded forecourt, and columns of 
the chapel also came from Italy. So did undoubtedly its ground 
plan. There can be little doubt that the architect took his inspiration 
from S. Vitale. But he could see no sense in the curved-out niches, so 
he flattened them out, thus re-establishing the straightforward 
division between central octagon and ambulatory. He also elimi- 


9 



TWILIGHT AND DAWN FROM THE ^TH TO THE XOTH CENTURY 

nated the columns on the ground floor. Simple wide openings alter¬ 
nate with short, sturdy piers. The plainness and massiveness of this 
ground floor (and also of the giant niche of the facade) strike a note 
utterly different from the subtle spatial harmonies of S. Vitale. Yet 
the upper floors with their polished antique columns, superimposed 
in two orders, re-echo something of the transparency, and the floating 
of space from one unit into another, which make the beauty of 
Justinian’s churches. 

Aachen sums up the historic position of Carolingian architecture 



7* FULDA: .ABBEY CHURCH, BEGUM 802* 


at the extreme end of Early Christian and at the beginning of Western 
developments. Roman-Christian intentions—it is eminently signifi¬ 
cant that on Christmas Day of the year 8oo Charlemagne made the 
Pope crown him with the crown of a new Holy Roman Empire— 
are everywhere traceable but appear marred or in other cases rejuve¬ 
nated by the naive vigour of an unskilled, but very determined, 
somewhat barbarous youth. Of the major churches of which we 
know some are in plan surprisingly pure Early Christian—St. Denis 
and Fulda derive directly from St. Peter's and the other Roman 


io 



AACHEN, FULDA AND CENTULA 

basilicas with transepts. 1 Fulda was begunin 802 (fig. 7), the other oag 
St. Denis, even before Charlemagne came to the throne, about 

Centula (or St. Riquier near Abbeville), on the other hand (fig. 8J^i 
is in most features unprecedented. The church which was built in 
790-99 no longer stands, and is known to us only by an old engrav¬ 
ing and a still older description. First of all it had in its exterior just 
as much accent on the west as on the east parts. Both were strongly 
emphasised by towers over the crossings rising in several stages and 
by additional lower staircase towers—a group, varied and interest¬ 
ing, and very different from the simple detached campanile or clock- 
tower which Early Christian churches occasionally possessed. Then 
there were two transepts, one in the east and one in the west. Also 
the east apse was separated from the transepts by a proper chancel. 
This became almost a matter of course in the coming centuries. The 
Western part has a complicated spatial organisation, with a low, 
probably vaulted entrance hall and a chapel above, open towards 
the nave. Such a Westwork, as it is called in Germany, was also a 
popular feature of later churches, especially in Germany, as was the 
bold grouping of manifold blocks with manifold towers. However, 
we cannot trace a direct uninterrupted connection from Centula to 
the nth and 12th centuries. 

Some of the ideas of Centula appear again in an immensely inter¬ 
esting original plan on vellum which, about the year 83 5, had been 
sent by some bishop or abbot close to the emperor’s court to the Abbot 
of St. Gall as an ideal scheme (‘exemplar’) for the rebuilding of his 
monastery. But then, under the grim frosts of the later 9 th and the 10th 
centuries the premature flowering of Carolingian thought and im¬ 
agination withered away. Less than thirty years after Charlemagne’s 
death in8i4theEmpire was divided. France and Germany henceforth 
took separate courses. But internal struggles, earl against earl, duke 
against duke, shook both. And from outside, the Vikings ravaged the 
North-West—Normans they called them in France, Danes in England 
—the Hungarians menaced the East, the Saracens, i.e. Mohammedan 
Arabs, the South. No progress was possible in art and architecture. 
What we know is almost as primitive as Merovingian work, although 
forms taken up under Charlemagne and his immediate successors 

1 The plan may have suggested itself to the Carolingian rulers on a Northum¬ 
brian precedent, if the published plans of excavations at Hexham (apparently 
badly handled and recorded) are at all reliable. They show a large church of the 
same type of plan, and there is no reason not to assume that it is Wilfrid's, that is 
a building of the 7th century. 


XI 



TWILIGHT AND DAWN FROM THE 6TH TO THE IOTH CENTURY 



8. CENTURA : ABBEY CHURCH, 790-99 (RECONSTRUCTION). 


were still used.. But the spirit in which they were used was blunt and 
crude. And since during die pre-Carolingian centuries intercourse 
with Roman architecture had not entirely ceased, the period between 
about 850 and 950 seems even more barbaric. 

Not much of this dark age has stood the ravages of war and the 
zeal of later builders in France and Germany. To see greater num¬ 
bers of 9th- and 10th-century buildings in anything like their 
original state one must go to the borderlands of Western 
civilisation, to Spain and Britain. 

12 



ARCHITECTURE IN SPAIN BEFORE 1000 

In Spain the Visigoths, rulers from the 5th to the early 8thcentury, 
had built churches of an oddly mutilated basilican type. S. Juan de 
Banos, for example, dedicated in 661, consisted originally (fig. 9 
shows the plan before the later alterations) of a short nave separated 
from the aisles by arcades with horseshoe arches, exaggeratedly pro¬ 
jecting transepts, a square apse, two rectangular eastern chapels or 
vestries inorganically detached from the apse and, as another in¬ 
organic appendix, a rectangular west porch. There is no spatial flow 
nor even a unity of plan in this minute building. The exterior 
colonnades originally running along the north, south and west 
walls are of Late Antique-Oriental origin, as 
incidentally is the horseshoe arch. 

This motive however the Arabs, when 
they conquered the South of Spain in the 8th 
century, made so much their own that for 
several centuries to come it remained the 
hall-mark of Mohammedan and Mozarabic, 
i.e. Christian Spanish, architecture under 
Arab influence. The Arabs, as against the 
Vikings and Hungarians, were far from 
uncivilised. On the contrary, their religion, 
their science and their cities, especially Cordova with her half¬ 
million inhabitants, were far ahead of those of 8th-century Franks 
in France or Asturians in Northern Spain. The Mosque at 
Cordova (786-990), a building of eleven aisles, each twelve bays 
long, with interlaced arches and complicated star-ribbed vaults, has 
a filigree elegance more in keeping with the spatial transparency of 
S. Vitale than of the sturdy uncouthness of the North. 

Owing to their proximity to Mohammedan sophistication, the 
Asturias show a certain airiness here and there which is absent in any 
other contemporary Christian buildings. At S. Maria de Naranco near 
Ieoh, for example (pi. vi and vn) the fluted buttresses outside—as 
a structural device and a decorative motif still remotely evocative of 
Rome—and the slender arcade inside which now separates nave from 
choir are in a strange contrast to the heavy tunnel-vault, the odd 
shield-like or seal-like medallions from which spring the transverse 
arches of the vault and the clumsy spiral shafts with their crude block 
capitals along the walls. 

The building incidentally is of very special interest, in so far as in 
all probability it was designed between 842 and 848 as a Royal Hall 



o » 20 30 1 

H" 1.».r 1 /**£ 

9. S. JUAN DE BANOS, 
DEDICATED 66 1 . THE 
EAST PARTS HAVE LATER 
BEEN ALTERED. 


13 









TWILIGHT AND DAWN FROM THE 6TH TO ■ THE IOTH CENTURY 

for Ramiro I of Asturias—the only surviving early mediaeval exam¬ 
ple of such a building. It has a low vaulted cellar or crypt, and above 
this the ball proper, now the nave of the church. This is reached by 
flights of outside steps leading to porches in the centres of both the 
long sides of the building. On the east and the west there were 
originally open loggias, communicating with the main room by 
arcades, of which one, as has been said before, survives. The present 
choir is in fact one of the loggias blocked up towards the outside. _ 

In. British 9th- and 10th-century architecture one would look in 
vain for such subtleties. Where buildings are preserved complete or 

nearly complete, we can see 
that their ground plans were 
just as elementary. At Bradford- 
on-Avon (fig. io), e.g., the nave 
has no aisles. The chancel is 
accessible from the nave only 
by a narrow door with crudely 
worked joints. The porches on 
the north and south sides are 
also separated from the main 
room. Compartment is added 
to compartment, very much as 
in the Visigothic churches of 
Spain. Anglo-Saxon decoration is just as elementary. The craftsmen 
who worked the Ruthwell Cross in Bede’s time seem superior to 
those who, one or two generations before the Conquest, decorated 
the tower of Earl’s Barton. The only structural part of its decoration 
is the emphasising of the three stories by plain string courses (pi. vm). 
All the rest, the wooden-looking strips arranged in rows vertically 
like beanstalks, or higher up in crude lozenge patterns, is structurally 
senseless. Yet they are in a similar relation to CaroHngian architecture 
as Asturian decoration was to the Muslim style. But while the day-to- 
day proximity of Arab to Spanish civilisation created the mixed 
idiom of Naranco and the Mozarabic style of the loth century, the 
British builders reduced the Romanising motifs of CaroHngian 
decoration to ungainly rusticity. The so-called long-and-short work 
up the edges of Earl’s Barton tower, and so many other contem¬ 
porary English towers, is another indication of the rawness of the 
minds and the heaviness of the hands of these late Anglo-Saxon 
architects, if architects they can be called. 

14 



IO. BRADFORD-ON-AVON; 

AN ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH 
PLAN. 



CHAPTER ,11 


The Romanesque Style 

C. 1000-C. 1200 

Y et during these dark and troubled years the foundations of 
mediaeval civilisation were laid. The feudal system grew, one 
does not know from what roots, until it had became the frame¬ 
work round which all social life of the Middle Ages was built, a 
system as characteristic and unique as mediaeval religion and mediaeval 
art, strictly binding lord and vassal, and yet so vague, so dependent 
on symbolical gestures that we to-day can hardly recognise it as a 
system at all. By the end of the xoth century it had received its final 
form. By then political stability too had been re-established in the 
Empire. Otto the Great was crowned in Rome in 962. At the same 
time the first of the reform movements of monasticism set out from 
Cluny in Burgundy. The great abbot Majeul was enthroned in 965. 
And again at the same time the Romanesque style was created. 

To describe an architectural style it is necessary to describe its indivi¬ 
dual features. But the features alone do not make the style. There must 
be one central idea active in all of them. Thus several essential Early 
Romanesque motifs can singly be traced in Carolingian architecture. 
Their combination however is new and determines their meaning. 

The most significant innovations of the late 10th century are those 
in the ground plan—three above all—and all three caused by a new 
will to articulate and clarify space. This is most characteristic. 
Western civilisation was only just beginning to take shape, but 
already at that early stage its architectural expression was' spatial, as 
against the sculptural spirit of Greek and Roman art—and spatial in 
an organising, grouping, planning way, as against the magic floating 
of space in Early Christian and Byzantine art. In France the two chief 
plans for the east ends of Romanesque churches were conceived; 
the radiating plan somewhere near the future centre of the country 
(probably at St. Martin’s in Tours, begun after a fire in 997, dedica¬ 
tions in i0X4andi020 1 ),andthestaggeredplanatClunyapparendyin 
1 But some French archaeologists attribute the same plan to the rebuilding of 
Notre Dame at Clermont Ferrand in 946, and even claim it for an earlier build¬ 
ing of St. Martin’s, Tours, a building of about 915. The case is uncertain and would 
require further investigations on the spot. 

LA— 3 15 



THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. 1000-0 1200 



XI. tours: st. martin’s, the thick 

BLACK LINES ARE THE WALLS OF THE 
CHURCH BEGUN SHORTLY AFTER 997, 
DEDICATIONS IN IOI4 AND 1020. 


Abbot Majeul’s rebuilding dedi¬ 
cated in 981 (figs. 11 and 12). 
The functional reason for both 
was the growing worship of 
saints, with its ensuing need for 
more altars. To find accom¬ 
modation for them, chapels in 
the eastern parts, i.e. the parts 
reserved for the clergy, were 
added to the original one centre 
chapel or apse. One can imagine 
how crudely Anglo-Saxon or 
Asturian architects would have 
added them. The architect of the 
new age groups them into one 
coherent unified entity, either by 
laying an ambulatory round the 
apse and adding radiating chapels, 
or by running the aisles on past 
the transepts, finishing them in 
small apses parallel or nearly 
parallel with the main apse and, 
in addition, placing one, two or 


even three apses along the east wall of each transept. 

Alm ost exactly at the time when the French began to evolve 
these new schemes, in Saxony, the centre province of Otto’s empire, 
just north of the Harz mountains, another and even more thorough 



12. CLUNY : ABBEY CHURCH, AS BEGUN C. 960 AND DEDICATED IN* ySr. (l» .A< '.K — EX 1 STXNG 

foundations; outlined—hypothetical,) 

16 





THE INNOVATIONS OF THE IOTH CENTURY 

“metrical system” was found to articulate the whole of a church, 
the system followed by Central European architects for the next two 
centuries. St. Michael’s at Hildesheim (fig. 13) was begun immedi¬ 
ately after the year 1000. It had (for now, alas, it is completely 
gutted) two transepts, two chancels and two apses, a logical develop¬ 
ment of ideas first tried out in a rudimentary form at Centula. Thus 
the monotony of the Early Christian arrangement was replaced by 
a grouping less single-minded and rhythmically more interesting. 
And St. Michael’s went decisively beyond Centula in dividing the 



13. hildesheim: st. Michael’s, begun shortly after 1000. 


nave into exactly three squares, with aisles separated from the nave 
by arcades that have an alternation of supports, pillars to stress the 
corners of the squares, columns in between. Each transept again con¬ 
sisted of a centre square flanked by a rectangle. The pentre squares 
were clearly singled out by means of chancel arches not only to the 
east and west, but also to the north and south. In later buildings 
each transept was to be square too, and the aisles consisted of sequen¬ 
ces of squares. On the east side at Hildesheim a square chancel was 
inserted between crossing and apse. Chapels branched off the tran¬ 
septs parallel to the main apses—a complex ground plan, yet fully 

ordered by an active conquering power of reason. 

Who conceived this “metrical system” we do not know. What 
we do know, however, and have no reason to question, is the fact, 
recorded by his biographer, that St. Bemward, the bishop who was 
responsible for the building of St, Michaels, was foremost in 

17 



THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. IOOO -C. 1200 

writing, experienced in painting, excellent in the science and art or 
bronze founding and in all architectural work.” Similarly we know, 
e.g., of Aethelwold, the great English bishop, that he was a “theoreti- 
cus architects”, well versed in the building and repairing of monas¬ 
teries, of Benno, Bishop of Osnabruck in the nth century, that he 
was “an outstanding architect, a skilful planner (‘dispositor’) of 
masonry work”. We also possess the plan of about 835 for St. Gall, 

which has been mentioned before, and was obviously the sender’s_ 

that is a bishop s or abbot s—conception. Such and many similar 
contemporary references justify the view that, while actual building 
operations were of course at all times the job of the craftsman, the 
designing of churches and monasteries in the early Middle Ages may 
often have been due to clerics—at least to the same extent to which 
Lord Burlington was responsible for the design of his villa in Chis¬ 
wick. After all, during those centuries nearly all the literati, the 
educated, the sensitive were clerics. 

The same tendency towards an elementary articulation which the 
new ground plans reveal can be found in the elevations of the i ith- 
century churches. At St. Michael’s, Hildesheim, the system of alter¬ 
nating supports, the rhythm of a b b a b b a (a representing square 
piers and b columns), serves to divide up the long stretch of wall, and 
ultimately the space enclosed by the walls, into separate units. This 
system became the customary one in Central European Romanesque 
architecture. In the West, and especially in England, another equally 
effective method was developed for achieving the same aim. It had 
been created m Normandy early in the nth century. The Normans 
by then had lived in the North-West of France for a hundred years 
and from being Viking adventurers had become rulers of a large 
territory, clear-minded, determined and progressive, adopting 
French achievements where they saw possibilities in them—this 
applies to the French language, suppler than their own, to feudalism 
and to the reform of Cluny—and imbuing them with the energy of 
their native spirit. They conquered Sicily and parts of Southern Italy 
lnt “ e l . I2t h centuries and created an eminently interesting 

civihsation there, a blend ofwhat was most advanced in the adminis¬ 
tration of Normandy and in the thought and habits of the Saracens. 

In the meantime they had also conquered England, to replace there 
by d*n own superior mode of life that of the Northern invaders 
who had come before them. The Norman style in architecture, the 
most consistent variety of die Romanesque style in the West, 

18 



THE EARLY ROMANESQUE STYLE 

strongly influenced France during the nth century; in England it 
did more than that: it made English mediaeval architecture. One can- 
not discuss the Romanesque style without taking into consideration 
English Norman cathedrals and abbey churches. French writers too 
often forget that. The ful film ent of what had been initiated at 
Jumieges about 1040 (pi. xna) and Caen about 1050 lies at Ely,.at 
Winchester, at Durham, to mention only a few. 

The new principle was the separation of bay from bay by tall 
shafts running through from the floor to the ceiling—a flat ceiling 
everywhere; for the art of vaulting the width of a nave was all 
but lost. Thus again an articulation was achieved that conveys to 
us at once a feeling of certainty and stability. There is no wavering 
here—as there was none in the ruthless policy ofWilliam the Con¬ 
queror in subduing and normanising England. Blunt, massive and 
overwhelmingly strong are the individual forms which architects 
used in these early buildings, sacred as well as secular. For the Nor man 
keep (pl.ix),the other architectural type which theNormans brought 
from France, has got the same compactness, the same disdain of em¬ 
bellishment as the Norman church. There were, of course, reasons of 
defence for the bareness of the keep, but it was a matter of expres¬ 
sion, i.e. of aesthetics, too, as a comparison with such a piece of 
building as the transept of Winchester Cathedral (c. 1080-90) proves. 
At Winchester (pi. x) the solid wall, though opened up in arcades on 
the ground floor and the gallery floor and again in a passage-way in 
front of the clerestory window, remains the primary fact. We feel 
its mighty presence everywhere. The tall shafts are bound to it and 
are themselves massive, like enormous tree-trunks. The columns of 
the gallery openings are short and sturdy, their capitals rude blocks 
(cf. fig. 14), the simplest statement of the fact that here something of 
round section was to be linked up with something of square section. 
If the elementary block form of the capital is given up, it is replaced 
by fluting, the future favourite motif of the Anglo-Nor man 
capital, in its most primitive form (fig. 17). This plainness is typical 
of the nth century, a plainness of statement expressed in terms of 
the plainest of forms. 

By the end of the century changes began to appear, all pointing 
towards a new differentiation. More complex, more varied, more 
lively forms can be found everywhere. There is perhaps less force in 
them, but more individual expression. Now comes the age of St. 
Bernard of Clairvaux (died 1153), who called it his aim as a preacher 

19 



THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. IOOO -C. 1200 

(and he was one of the greatest 
of mediaeval preachers) to 
move hearts, not to expound 
scripture, the age of Abelard 
(died 1142), the first to write 
an autobiographical account o£ 
his personal problems of love 
and scholarship, and in England 
the age of Henry II and Thomas 
Becket (died 1170). They stand 
before us as human beings; 
William the Conqueror as a 
natural phenomenon, irre¬ 
sistible and relentless. Just 
before 1100—when Western 
Christianity rallied round 
the banners of the first 
14. block capital from st. Michael’s, Crusade the pioneer work 

HILDESHEIM, EARLY IITH CENTURY. WaS doilC j n architCCtUrCJ 

Early Romanesque was trans¬ 
formed into High Romanesque. Durham is the crucial monument 
in England, begun in 1093, the east parts vaulted in 1104, the nave 
c. 1x30 (pi. xx). The nave appears higher than it is, because, instead 
of the flat ceiling usual until then and usual in England for some 
time to come, it is covered by a rib-vault. As our eyes follow the 
lines of the shafts upwards, this movement docs not come to a 
standstill where the walls end, but is carried farther up with the 
ribs. The vaults of Durham choir (now renewed) arc the earliest 
rib-vaults of Europe. In this lies Durham’s eminence in the history 
of building construction. 

Engineering skill had developed considerably during the century 
between the earliest examples of the Romanesque style and 1100. 
To vault in stone naves of basilican churches was the ambition of the 
craftsmen, for reasons of safety against fires in church roofs as well 
as for reasons of appearance. The Romans had known how to vault 
on a large scale; but in the West there were before the late nth cen¬ 
tury only vaulted apses, tunnel- or cross-vaulted aisles or narrow 
tunnel-vaulted naves without aisles (for instance Naranco), and even 
smaller tunnel-vaulted naves with aisles (St. Martin de Canigou in 
French Catalonia of 1009; in its historical importance enormously 



20 







THE BEGINNINGS OF ROMANESQUE VAULTING 

overrated by M. Puig y Cadafalch, and the so-called crypt of St. 
Wipert at Quedlinburg in Saxony of c.930). Now the vaulting of the 
wider naves of major churches was mastered, and—as always hap¬ 
pens when an innovation is the full expression of the spirit of an age 
—mastered independently by several ingenious architects in several 
centres of building activity at about the. same time. Burgundy re¬ 
mained faithful to massive tunnel-vaults. The earliest that can be 
dated seem to belong to about 1065; those at Cluny, when this 
mightiest monastery of Europe was rebuilt, about 1100, had the 
widest span anywhere. Speyer, the imperial cathedral on the Rhine, 
received her first cross-vaults in the eighties. And then there is 
Durham. A good deal of controversy still remains about dates of 
early vaults (especially concerning S. Ambrogio in Milan, whose 
rib-vaults some count amongst the pioneer works, while others date 
them about the second and third quarters of the 12th century). 
The new powerful initiative of the late nth century however is 
beyond doubt. 

Now the most remarkable fact about the vaults of Durham is that 
rib-vaults as against ribless cross-vaults are accepted as one of the leit¬ 
motivs of the Gothic style. Their structural advantages, just like those 
of pointed arches and buttresses, lie in the fact that they concentrate 
thrusts alo ng specially chosen lines and leave the masonry between 
stretched out lie the canvas of a tent from post to post. Thus great 
saving in stone and in solid timber centering could be achieved. Hence 
the Gothic style appears to most people as a constructional affair ex¬ 
clusively. Durham proves this materialistic theory to be wrong. The 
ribs here are not built up independently, the filling masonry is not 
lighter. The motif is there, but its constructional application has not 
yet been discovered. The reason of theDurham builders for introduc¬ 
ing so telling afeature must havebeen the very fact that it is so telling, 
thatitrepresents the ultimate fulfilment of that tendency towards ar¬ 
ticulation which had driven Romanesque architects forward for over 
a hundred years. Now the bay has become a unity not only by the 
two-dimensional means of lines of demarcation along the walls, but 
by the three-dimensional means of those diagonal arches set across. 
Where the two arches meet, where later architects inserted their 
bosses, there each unified bay has its centre. We move along through 
the cathedral, not driven towards the altar without halt as in Early 
Christian churches but stepping from spatial compartment to spatial 
compartment in a new measured rhythm. 


21 



THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. lOOO-C. 1200 



IJ. DECORATED BLOCK CAPITAL FROM 
THE CRYPT OF CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, 
EARLY I2TH CENTURY. 


The rib-vault imparts indeed to 
the whole structure an alertness 
opposed to the weight of inert 
wall so oppressive in 11th-century 
interiors. This alertness is taken up 
in the more animated expression of 
the arcades and their mouldings, 
and the introduction of a few 
sharp ornamental forms, the zig-zag 
above all. Still, in spite of this 
quickening of rhythm Durham is 
far from playful or busy. The 
circular pillars of the arcades arc 


still of overpowering strength, their 
sheer bulk being emphasised by the elementary decoration, lozenges, 
zig-zags, flutesexquisitely carved into their surfaces. The fact, inci¬ 


dentally, that all ornament at Durham is abstract, is typical only 
of Norman architecture in England and Normandy, not of Roman¬ 
esque architecture in general. In France many types of foliated 
decoration, especially of capitals, exist. The best-known instance in 


England is characteristically enough in the crypt of Canterbury, the 
gateway through which a Continental style had passed once before, 
about 600, and another one was going to pass in 1x75. The capitals 
here (fig. 15) have foliated decoration, and some even beasts. But 


nature had no immediate influence on these. They derive from sam¬ 
ple-books kept in the lodges of the masons and based on illuminated 
manuscripts, ivories, previous work of the lodge, etc. Originality 
was a conception unknown, so was observation of nature. Style as a 
restrictive force of discipline ruled as unchallenged as authority in 
religion. Still, Durham seems more humane than Winchester, and 
12th-century capitals more humane than the block shapes ofthe ixth, 
just as the sermons of St. Bernard seem more humane and more 
personal than those of the theologians before him. 

The exterior of Durham Cathedral is one of the most magnificent 
sights of England. There it stands, flanked on one side by theBishop’s 
Castle, on the top of its steep wooded hill with its mighty tower over 
the crossing and the two slenderer western towers to balance its 
weight. They are not Norman in their present form, the western 
towers dating from the 13 th, the central tower (originally with a 
spire) from the 15th century. But towers were planned from the bc- 


22 



ROMANESQUE EXTERIORS 


ginning, and where they were carried out, they ended in spires 
of moderate pitch such as those at SouthwelL The outside 
appearance of Romanesque churches thus differed just as widely 
from that of Early Christian churches as their interiors. While at 
S. Apollinare Nuovo the exterior hardly mattered—even church 



1 6. hildesheim: st. Michael’s, begun shortly after iooo (axono- 

METRIC RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ORIGINAL STATE). 


towers, when they were introduced, stood separate from their 
churches—a few Carolingian and then most larger Romanesque 
churches were designed to display variety and magnificence outside 
as well as inside. St. Michael’s at Hildesheim with its two choirs, 
towers over both crossings and staircase turrets on both ends of both 
transepts, is the earliest surviving example of a truly Romanesque 
exterior (fig. 16). 

Altogether Germany was eminently important for the develop- 

23 












THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. lOOO-C. 1200 

mcnt of axt and architecture in the early nth century. It was the 
years of Ottoman and Salian power, the years before the Emperor 
Henry IV had to humiliate himself before a Cluniac pope. There is 
nothing in the arts of Italy or France to emulate the bronze doors of 
Hildesheim Cathedral. Similarly, in architecture the introduction of 
yet another key element of the Romanesque (and Gothic) style 
seems to be due to Germany: the two-tower facade. Its first ap¬ 
pearance is at the cathedral of Strassburg in its form of 1015. Then, 
however, the motif was at once taken up by the most active province 
of France: by Normandy; and from Jumieges (1040-67), and the 
two abbeys of William the Conqueror at Caen (Holy Trinity and 
St. Stephen’s, c. 1065-80), it reached Britain. 

Perhaps we should not speak at all of France concerning the nth 
and 12th centuries. The country was still divided into separate terri¬ 
tories fighting each other, and consequently there was no one uni¬ 
versally valid school of architecture, as, thanks to the Norman 
kings, there already was in England. The most important schools in 
France are those of Normandy, Burgundy, Provence, Aquitaine 
(or rather, broadly speaking, the whole South-West), Auvergne 
and Poitou. Their comparatively static customs were crossed by a 
strong current from the North and West of France right down to 
the far North-West of Spain, the current of the principal pilgrimage 
routes. Pilgrimages were one of the chief media of cultural com¬ 
munication in the Middle Ages, and their effects on church planning 
are evident. They can be seen from Chartres via Orleans, Tours, 
Poitiers, Saintes to Spain; from Vezelay via Le Puy, Conques, or via 
Perigueux to Moissac and on to Spain; and from Arles to St. Gilles 
and Toulouse and then to Spain. The goal was Santiago de Compos¬ 
tela, a sanctuary as celebrated as Jerusalem and Rome. The Cluniac 
Order had much to do with the development of 'the pilgrimage 
routes, and characteristics of Cluny can be found in the chief monas¬ 
teries all |he way along. What these were, we can read from the 
many surviving Cluniac houses—the Order, according to Dr. Joan 
Evans’s calculations, possessed some 1,450 priories at the height of its 
power—and also from the excavations and reconstruction of Cluny 
itself, carried out for the Mediaeval Academy of America by Pro¬ 
fessor Conant. 1 Cluny, as rebuilt at the end of the nth. century and 
early in the 12th and destroyed by the French themselves in 1810, had 

1 I am greatly indebted to Professor Conant for allowing me to illustrate his 
reconstruction. 



THE REGIONAL SCHOOLS OF FRANCE 

two transepts (as later became the rule in English cathedrals), each with 
an octagonal tower over the crossing. The more important ofthese, the 
one farrW west, had octagonal towers to the right and left of the cross¬ 
ing as well (one of these survives), and two eastern apses to each arm. 
The eastern transept had four apses too. Moreover, the chancel apse had 
an ambulatory with five radiating chapels. Thus one saw looking at the 
church from the east (pi. xm) a graded development in many carefully 
proportioned steps from the low radiating chapels over the ambula¬ 
tory, the main apse, the chancel roof, the tower over the eastern 
crossing, to the tallest tower farther west—a structure so complex, 
so polyphonous, as earlier centuries in the West could not have con¬ 
ceived, and the Greeks would have detested, but the ideal expression 
no doubt of that proudest moment in mediaeval Christianity, when 
the Reform had conquered the throne of the popes, asserted the 
superiority of the papal tiara over the imperial crown, and called up 
the knights of Europe to defend the Holy Land in the first Crusade 
(1095). 

Of the architectural elements of Cluny, it was especially the tunnel- 
vaulted naves with galleries (pi. xnb) and the stepped-up east ends 
which appear in the great churches of the Order and on the pil¬ 
grimage route: St. Stephen’s in Nevers, St.Martial’s in Limoges (de¬ 
stroyed), St. Faith in Conques, St. Semin in Toulouse (the grandest 
in its exterior, pi. xrv) and Santiago itself. The motif of the radiating 
chapels, it need hardly be added, had been used at Tours long before 
any of these churches took it over. Regional modifications of this pil¬ 
grimage style make the individual churches all the more fascinating. 

Of the main regional characteristics only a few can here be men¬ 
tioned. Of Normandy withits basilicas, flat-roofed or with plain cross¬ 
vaults or rib-vaults, and with galleries, we .have already spoken (pi. 
xna). The school of Provence liked tunnel-vaulted churches without 
any aisles, or occasionally with aisles the same height as the nave. In 
Poitou the sameheightfortall naves and tall narrow aisles was the rule 
—a proportion very different from that of the South and Provence. 
In Auvergne aisles are also as a rule as high as the nave, but they do 
not look it, because they have galleries. Burgundy (in accordance 
with her geographical position between Provence, the North Italian 
sphere of influence and the Rhineland) kept to the basilican tradi¬ 
tion and used for vaulting either tunnel-vaults or cross-vaults. Cluny 
belonged to the first kind; V&zelay, begun in 1096 and completed, 
it seems, in 1132, is the supreme example of the second (pi. xvn). 


25 



THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. IOOO-C. 1200 

The church was supposed to possess the relics of the Magdalen; they 
made it a favourite goal of pilgrimages. It lies majestically on a hill 
over-shadowing the houses of the minute town. The main entrance 
is through an aisled narthex or galilee of three bays (a Cluniac motif, 
for Vezelay was Cluniac too), and on through one of the wildest of 
Romanesque figure portals. The nave has nothing of that violence. 
With its later and fighter choir in the far distance, its length of about 
200 ft. between narthex and crossing, its unusually high nave vaults, 
its arches of alternating grey and white courses and its inexhaustible 
profusion of capitals with sacred stories, it possesses a quick and 
lively rhythm and a proud magnificence without being less robust 
than Durham. 

One more school must be mentioned, with a system quite apart 
from all the others: the school of Aquitaine, with Angoulemc and 
P6rigueux as its centres. They preferred aisleless churches—only 
occasionally are there aisles of nave height—consisting of several 
domed bays, with or without transept. Their simplicity and grave 
majesty are unparalleled (pi. xv). The centralising tendency which 
is apparent wherever domes are used, culminates at St. Front in 
Perigueux (pi. xvi), where during the second quarter of the 12th 
century the decision was taken to create a purely central building— 
a great rarity in the Middle Ages—by leaving without the western 
bay of its nave an Aquitanian aisleless church which had already its 
transepts. Thus a Greek cross resulted, with a square for the centre 
and four squares for the arms. Each square has in its turn again short 
arms and is covered by a vast dome. The interior (for the exterior 
is badly restored) is the classic expression of Romanesque clarity 
and determination. 1 There is no sculptural decoration anywhere 
except for some arcading along the walls. The system is copied 
from S. Mark’s in Venice, begun in 1063. There, however, where 
it stands in the centre of the most oriental and most romantic of 
European cities, as an outpost of Byzantine architecture, it has all 
the magic of the East, mosaics, luxuriant capitals, arcades to separate 
centres from arms and concealed spatial relations in the sense which 
we have seen at Ravenna. At P6r.igue.ux it is stripped of all tfiat 

1 The term classic is used throughout in this book with a meaning different 

from classical. Classical applies to anything inspired by, or copied from, the style 
of Antiquity, classic to the short moments of perfect balance achieved by many 
styles. When we say of a work of literature or art that it is a classk f we mean some- 
thing similar, namely that it is perfect of its'kind, and universally accepted as such. 



THE REGIONAL SCHOOLS OF GERMANY 

suspicious glamour and appears pure and sheer, great for its architec¬ 
tural nobility and none other. There is something strikingly Roman 
in this bareness. No wonder that the ground plan was re-invented in 
almost identical form by the Italians of the Renaissance. 

So' much of France. Germany could not do better than develop 
thfe theme set at Hildesheim, and the cathedrals and monastery 
churches of the central Rhineland, notably Speier, Mainz, Worms 
and Laaoh, make a splendid display of towers over their crossings 
and staircase towers, of double transepts and double chancels in an 
^ ri ddin g variety of proportion and detail (pi. 20a). The second 
main school of German Romanesque architecture is that of Cologne. 
Of the Saxon school something has already been said—the others 
are more provincial. Cologne, until five years ago, possessed an 
unrivalled number of churches dating back to the ioth, nth, 
12th and early 13th centuries. Their loss is one of the most grievous 
casualties of the war. Their hall-mark (since St. Mary in Capitol, conse¬ 
crated in 1065) is a resolutely centralising scheme for the east ends, 
a scheme in which both transepts and the chancel end in identical 
apses. Oriental influence has been presumed. The exteriors were 
as glorious and as varied as any higher up the Rhine. 

North Italy has one church of the same type: S. Fedele at Como. 
Some have tried to construct a dependence of Cologne on Como, 
but it is now certain that if there is any relation it must have 
operated the other way. In other respects the connections between 
Lombardy and the Rhine are still controversial. Nobody can deny 
them', but priority in types and motifs will scarcely ever be estab¬ 
lished beyond doubt. The most likely answer to the question is that 
along the routes of the Imperial campaigns into Italy there was a 
continuous give and take of ideas and workmen. Probably Saxony 
and the Rhine were leading to the end ofthenth century,andNorth 
Italy in the 12th. At that time gangs of Lombard masons must have 
travelled far and wide, just as they did again in the Baroque. We 
find their traces in Alsace as well as in Sweden, and one man 
from Como appears in Bavaria in 113 3 * The leitmotiv of this Lom- 
bardo-Rhenish style is the dwarf-gallery, that is the decoration of 
walls, and especially those of apses, high up under the eaves with 

little arched colonnades. ■ , 

In her ground plans North Italy was less enterprising. Some of the 
most fam ous churches have not even a projecting transept, that is, 
keep close to Early Christian traditions. This appHes, for instance, to 

27 



THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. IOOO -C. 1200 

the cathedral of Modena and S. Ambrogio in Milan. S. Ambrogio is 
the most impressive of them all (pi. xxn), with its atrium and its aus¬ 
tere front, its low squat nave, its massive piers, its wide domed cross¬ 
vaults and its broad primitive ribs (on these see p. 21). Generally 
speaking the interior characteristics of these Lombard cathedrals are 
cross-vaults or rib-vaults, galleries in the aisles, polygonal domes o^fer 
the crossings, their outside characteristics isolated towers (campanile 
is their Italian name), and those miniature arcadings already referred 
to. The extreme case of such decorative arcading is the front and the 
leaning tower of the cathedral of Pisa in Tuscany, both of the 13 th 
century. 

Pisa strikes one altogether as of rather an alien character—Oriental 
more than Tuscan. Similarly alien is the style of Venice with its 
Byzantine and of Sicily with its Arab connections. To see the Italian 
Romanesque at its most Italian, that is at its most purely Tuscan, one 
has to look to such buildings as S. Miniato al Monte in Florence (pi. 
xxni), which, in spite of its early date (its ground floor may even be 
contemporary with the transept of Winchester, pi. x), possesses a 
delicacy of treatment, a civilised restraint in sculptural decoration 
and a susceptibility to the spirit of Antiquity unparalleled anywhere 
in the North—a first synthesis of Tuscan intellect and grace with 
Roman simplicity and poise. 

Yet in those parts of France in which classical remains abound and 
men, climate and scenery strike one as so akin to Italy, a new sym¬ 
pathy with the heritage of Rome also appeared with the 12th cen¬ 
tury. The most important monuments of this blend of the Roman- 
esque andthe Roman stand in Burgundy and Provence. The Burgun¬ 
dian church of St. Lazare at Autun (pi. xvm) has fluted pilasters, and 
Autun as well as Vigilay and others possess capitals in which the de¬ 
based “Corinthian” ofthe earlier Romanesque style (fig. i8)isrestored 
to something like its original meaning by a new live understanding 
ofthe vegetal and decorative character of the acanthus leaf (fig. 19). 
A similar understanding, not of Roman detail, but of Roman archi¬ 
tecture as a whole distinguishes the facade of St. Gilles in Provence 
(pi. xix). For while its three round-headed porches and the mani¬ 
fold mouldings to their arches are unmistakably Romanesque, the 
columns in front of the walls between the doorways have straight 
entablatures, a feature of antique, never of W^estem architecture, and 
luxuriant Corinthian capitals. Moreover, there are figures of saints 
standing upright in straight-headed recesses. Life-size sculpture had 

28 



ROMANESQUE CAPITALS 






THE ROMANESQUE STYLE C. IOOO-C. 1200 

been the greatest achievement of Classical Antiquity. In the days of 
S. Apollinare Nuovo it had all but disappeared. There is no large- 
scale Carolingian figure sculpture either. Only during the nth 
century, when the plastic sense returned to church architecture, it 
reappeared; only towards its end did it begin to produce work of 
an aesthetic standard equalling that of the buildings themselves, and 
only centuries later did it gain independence from architecture. 



CHAPTER III 


The Early and Classic Gothic Style 

c. 1150-c. 1250 

I n x 140 the foundation stone was laid for the new choir of St. 
Denis Abbey near Paris (fig. 21). It was consecrated in 1144. Abbot 
Suger, the mighty counsellor of two kings of France, was the soul 
of the enterprise. There are few buildings in Europe so revolutionary 
in their conception and so rapid and unhesitating in their execution. 
Four years was an exceptionally short time in the 12th century for 
rebuilding the choir of a large 
abbey church. Whoever de¬ 
signed the choir of St. Denis, 
one can safely say, invented 
the Gothic style, although 
Gothic features had existed 
before, scattered here and 
there, and, in the centre of 
France, the provinces around 
St. Denis, even developed with 
a certain consistency. 

The features which make up 
the Gothic style are well 
enough known, too well in 
fact, because most people for¬ 
get that a style is not an 

r r ' 1 . 21 . st. denis: abbey church, conse- 

aggregate of features, but an crated 1144 . 

integral whole. Still, it may be 

just as well to recapitulate them and re-examine their meaning. They 
are the pointed arch, the flying buttress and the rib-vault. The pointed 
arch conveys weight down on to walls or piers at a more reasonable 
angle than the semicircular arch, and had for this purpose already 
been used frequently in the Romanesque buildings of Burgundy 
and Poitou. The other and at least equally important advantage of 
the pointed arch, the advantage that it enables masons to vault bays 
of other than square plan without getting into trouble about level 
heights for their arches, had not been understood in the West before 

31 



E.A.— 4 




THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II5O-C. 125O 

St. Denis. With rounded arches the mason who is dealing with a 
narrow rectangular bay has to stilt some of his arches or depress some 
to achieve level heights. Now all this could be adjusted by varying 
the degree of pointing. Ribs we have met as early as about 1100 at 
Durham. But the discovery how by means of ribs stone vaults can 
be reduced to a few strong supporting lines holding each other in 
position, with light thin panels of masonry between, belongs to the 
Gothic style. Flying buttresses were invented to transfer the vertical 
thrust from the vault on to the more distant buttresses of the aisles 
instead of leaving it to press downwards vertically on the clerestory 
walls and the arcades of the nave beneath. As such they had already 
been used, though hidden by aisle roofs at Durham, in the Auvergne 
and elsewhere. But only the Gothic style realised that thanks to 
buttresses—a device to strengthen walls at regular intervals already 
known to the Romans and carried on, though in a somewhat weakly 
way, through the Early Christian and Romanesque centuries— 
and flying buttresses, piers could be made taller and slimmer and 
walls could be built more lightly than ever before. 

The whole Gothic system is more logical and ingenious, more 
scientific and abstract than any constructional device of antiquity. 
Yet it was not created for technical reasons. It is wrong to say that 
the Gothic style is the outcome of such material innovations. On 
the contrary, it has been pointed out that the understanding of the 
material advantages came later than the spiritual desire for a new 
kind of expression. Architects wished to enliven inert masses of 
masonry and to quicken spatial motion. For these and no other 
reasons they introduced shafts to articulate walls and ribs to articulate 
vaults. 

It is only at St. Denis (pi. xxiv) that Gothic construction and 
Gothic motifs are linked up with each other to form a Gothic system. 
The consequence is at once obvious. Rib-vaults cover the varying 
shapes of bays, buttresses replace the massive walls between the radiat¬ 
ing chapels which now form a continuous wavy fringe to the ambula¬ 
tory. Their side walls have disappeared entirely. If it were not for 
the five-ribbed vaults, one would feel like walking through a second, 
outer ambulatory, with exceedingly shallow chapels. The effect 
inside the church is one of lightness, of air circulating freely, of 
supple curves and energetic concentration. No longer is part de¬ 
monstratively separated from part. The transept, recent excavations 
have shown, was not intended to project beyond the nave and 

32 



THE ANONYMITY OF THE MIDDLE AGES 

chancel walls as it had always done until then. 1 Articulation re¬ 
mains; but it is a far more sophisticated articulation. Who was the 
great genius to conceive this ? Was it Abbot Suger himself who so 
proudly wrote a litde book about the building and consecration of 
his church? Hardly; for the Gothic, as against the Romanesque style, 
is so essentially based on a co-operation between artist and engineer, 
and a synthesis of aesthetic and technical qualities, that only a man of 
profound structural knowledge can have invented such a system. 
We are here at the beginning of a specialisation that has gone on 
splitting up our activities into smaller and. smaller competencies, 
until to-day the patron is not an architect, the architect not a builder, 
the builder not a mason, let alone such distinctions as those between 
the quantity surveyor, the heating engineer, the air-conditioning 
engineer, the electrical installation expert and the sanitation expert. 

The new type of architect to whom St. Denis and the later French 
and English cathedrals must be ascribed is the master craftsman as a 
recognised artist. Creative master craftsmen had of course existed 
before, and probably always designed most of what was built. But 
their status now began to change. It was a very gradual development. 
Suger in his book does not say one word about the architect of St. 
Denis, nor in fact about the designer of the church as such. It seems 
curious; surely he must have known very well what a daring work 
he had put up. To explain his silence one must remember the often- 
quoted and often-misunderstood anonymity of the Middle Ages. It 
does not mean of course that cathedrals grew like trees. They were 
all designed by someone. But in the earlier mediaeval centuries the 
names of these men, immortal as their work seemed, did not count. 
They were content to be workmen working for a cause greater than 
their own fame. However, during the 12th and, above all, the 13th 
centuries the self-confidence of the individual grew, and personality 
came to be appreciated. The names of the architects of Rheims and 
Amiens cathedrals were recorded in a curious way on the pavement 
of the naves. A preacher complained that master-masons got higher 
wages than others by simply going about with their staffs in their 
hands and giving orders, and—he adds—“nihil laborant”. A century 
after this the King of France was godfather to the son of one of these 
men and made him a considerable present in gold to enable him to 
study at a university. But two hundred years had to elapse after the 
time of Suger to make such intimacy possible. 

1 See College Art Journal, vol. 6, 1947, p. 216. 

33 



THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II 5 O-C. 12.50 



22. PAIR OF WRESTLERS, A CISTERCIAN CHURCH PLAN, AND THE PLAN OF 
THE CATHEDRAL OF CAMBRAI. FROM VILLARD DE HONNECOURT’s TEXTBOOK, 

<r.I235. 

One of the earliest cases in which we can form a live impression 
of the personality of one of the great master-masons of the early 
Gothic style is that of William of Sens, architect to the choir of 
Canterbury Cathedral—a work as revolutionary in England as St, 
Denis was in France. Afire had destroyed the old choir in 1174, as 


34 



VILLARD DE HONNECOURT 

wc arc told by Gervase, the chronicler of the cathedral, who had 
himself lived through the events he relates. There was great despair 
amongst the brethren until after a while they began to consult by 
what method the ruined church might be repaired. Architects, both 
French and English, were assembled; but they disagreed. Some 
suggested repair, while others insisted that the whole church must 
be taken down, if the monks wished to dwell in safety. This over¬ 
whelmed them with grief. Among the architects there was one, 
William of Sens, a man of great abilities and a most ingenious work¬ 
man in wood and stone. Dismissing the rest, they chose him for the 
undertaking. And he, residing many days with the monks and care¬ 
fully surveying the burnt walls . . . did yet for some time conceal 
what he found necessary to do, lest the truth should kill us in our 
hopelessness. But he went on preparing all things that were necessary, 
either himself or by the agency of others. And when he found that 
the monks began to be somewhat comforted, he confessed that the 
damaged pillars and all that they supported, must be destroyed, if 
the monks wished to have a safe and excellent building. At length 
they agreed ... to take down the ruined choir. Attention was given 
to procure stones from abroad. He made the most ingenious machines 
for loading and unloading ships, and for drawing the mortar and 
stones. He delivered also to the masons models (cut-out wooden 
templates) for cutting the stones. . . .’ Then the chronicler tells us 
exactly what during each of the following four years was done. At 
the beginning of the fifth year, however, William, while on the 
scaffolding, fell down to the ground from a height of fifty feet. He 
was badly hurt and had to <6 entrust the completion of the work to^a 
certain ingenious monk who was overseer of the rough masons.... 
But though lying in bed, he gave orders what was first and what 
was last to be done.. . . At length, finding no benefit from the skill 
of his surgeons, he went to France to die at home , and an English 
successor was appointed. 1 

So here we have the craftsman, equally skilled in masonry and 
engineering work, diplomatic with his patrons and appreciated by 
them, but never while conducting work abroad forgetting the land 
of his youth. At Sens, wherefrom he came, a new cathedral had been 
begun about thirty years before he went over to Canterbury, a 
cathedral with certain features evidently imitated at Canterbury. 

1 The quotations are from Mr. Charles Cotton s edition (Canterbury Papers 
No. 3. Published by the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral, 1930). 

35 



THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II50-C. I250 


We are fortunate in possessing at least one even more complete 
record of the personality and work of a Gothic architect, a notebook, 
or rather textbook, prepared about 123 5 by Villard de Honnecourt, an 
architect from the Cambrai region of Northern France. This text- 


h.v> yrd'^ rcv,r *-' im lTU,Uc 




23. ANOTHER CISTERCIAN ELAN, AND A DISCIPLE ON THE MOUNT OF 
OLIVES. FROM VILLARD DE HONNECOURT’S TEXTBOOK, C» 1235. 


book, pr eserved at the National Library in Paris, is an eminently per¬ 
sonal document. Villard addresses his pupils. He promises them tuition 
in masonry and carpentry, drawing of architecture and figures, and 
geometry. Of all this the book contains examples, drawn and briefly 
described. It is invaluable as a source of information on the methods 
and attitude of the 13th century. Villard, although anarchitect, draws 
a Crucifixion, a Madonna, and figures of the sleeping disciples as they 



VILLARD PE HONNECOURT 


tticakatsttc «*u«rVfn»«affffcef 

ca^dif 't&lt tttf 

Emifieimm* , t*?ra ctileftt) cnfi oora«3ef 6?. 


tjamsaraaiJ waiutft *^au®nr cfttt o£h$ 


S ^TO i iaL^iiMa 









































THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II50-C. 1250 

records parts of buildings, the ground plans of church choirs (fie 
22), a tower of Laon Cathedral (he says: “I have been in many 
countries as you can see from this book, but I have never seen such 
another tower ), windows from the choir of Rhelms (fig, 24; he 
says: I was on my way to Hungary, when I drew this, because I 
liked it best ), and a rose window at Lausanne. He traces a labyrinth 
and draws foliage. He designs a Mated end for a choir stall and a 
ectern with three evangelists. He has diagrams of mouldings and of 
timber construction. He adds proudly a good many pieces of machin¬ 
ery, a sawmill, a device for lifting heavy weights, and also such auto¬ 
mata as a lectern eagle that turns its head, or a heatable metal orb 
for a bishop to hold in his hand. He even notes a recipe for getting 
rid of superfluous hair.J 8 b 



















FRENCH CATHEDRALS II4O-I25O 


Such was the range of knowledge and experience of the men who 
built the great Gothic cathedrals. They were invited abroad as the 
bringers of die new Gothic style, the “opus francigenum”, as it is 
called in a German record of that time; they kept their eyes open 
while they travelled, and noted buildings, sculptures and paintings 
with the same eagerness. They knew as much of the carving 

of figures and ornaments 



27. PROBABLE ORIGINAL ELEVATION OF THE 
NAVE OF NOTRE DAME, DESIGNED C. 11 70. 


as of building construc¬ 
tion, although their draw¬ 
ing technique was still 
elementary. 

St. Denis must owe its 
novelty to a master-mason 
of this calibre. And many a 
bishop and an architect 
burned with ambition to 
emulate Suger and St. 
Denis. Between 1140 and 
1220 new cathedrals were 
begun on an ever-growing 
scale at Sens, Noyon, Senlis, 
and then Paris (Notre 
Dame, c. 1163 seqq.), Laon 
(c. 1170 seqq.), Chartres {c. 
1195 seqq.), Rheims (1211 
seqq.), Amiens (1220 seqq.) 
and Beauvais (1247 seqq.). 
These are by no means all; 
there are many more all 
over France. We must, 
however, here confine our¬ 
selves to a brief analysis of 
the main development in 
the lie de France and the 
surrounding regions, which 
just then became the centre 
of a national French king¬ 
dom, It is a development as 
consistent and as concise as 
that of the Greek temple. 


39 






THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II50-C. 1250 

Of St. Denis we possess only the choir and, very restored, the west 
front. This is of the two-tower type of Caen which became now 
de rigueur for North French cathedrals, but, against Caen, enriched 
by a still round-headed triple portal. Chartres followed St. 
Denis at once. Of the cathedral of about 1x4.5 only the west portals 
remain, gloriously vigorous, alert and human in their sculpture, as 
against the rest of France. We can guess what the naves of St. Denis 
and Chartres were like from the cathedrals of Sens and especially 
Noyon. At Noyon, the walls are enriched, as against the Norman 
system of arcade, gallery and clerestory, by a low wall-passage or tri- 
forium between gallery and clerestory. This division of the wall into 
four zones instead of three does away with much that had remained 
inert before. The arcades have alternating supports, composite piers 
as major and round ones as minor divisions. In accordance with this 
the vaults are sex-partite as they had been in some Norman and 
Romanesque churches. That means that between two transverse 
arches ribs run across diagonally from composite to composite pier, 
while the shafts on the round piers are followed up by subsidiary 
ribs parallel with die transverse arches and meeting the diagonal ribs 
in the centre of the whol<j bay. The effect again is more lively than 
we know in the Romanesque style (fig. 25). 

However, the architects of the two immediately following cathe¬ 
drals must have felt that in the walls, piers and vaults of Noyon there 
was still too much left of Romanesque weight and stability. The 
alternating supports and sex-partite vaults especially produced square, 
that is static, bays. So at Laon (pi. xxv and fig. 26), after some 
experimenting with alternating supports, all the piers are circular, 
although on the upper floors an alternating between groups of five 
and of three thin shafts rising from the circular piers is still preserved, 
and there are still sex-partite vaults. The many thin shaft-rings, or 
annulets, round the shafts also still emphasise the horizontal. All the 
same, in walking along the nave the halting at every major support 
is avoided. That was a decisive step to take. Notre Dame in Paris goes 
yet one step farther (pi. xxvi and fig. 27). The shafts on the circular 
piers are no longer differentiated, and the shaft-rings are left out. But 
the wall was still, it seems, originally in four stages, with gallery and 
then, instead of the triforium, a row of circular windows below those 
of the clerestory. However, the proportions have now changed 
sufficiendy to show what tendency lay behind these gradual modi¬ 
fications. The gallery arcades have coupled openings in the choir— 

40 



NOTRE DAME DE PARIS 


as was the Norman tradition—but trebled, that is much slimmer, 
openings in the slightly later nave, and the separating colonnettes are 
exceedingly slender. 

Still more daring than the elevation of Notre Dame is its ground 
plan (fig. 28). Already at Sens and -Noyon a slighdy centralising tend- 
ency can be noted: at Sens by a lengthening of the chancel between 
transept and ambulatory, at Noyon by semicircular endings of the 
transepts to the north and south. Now in Paris the architect has 
placed his transept almost exactly half-way between the two west 
towers and the east end. He has adopted the most ambitious plan 



28. PARIS: NOTRE DAME, BEGUN C . 1163. TOP HALF—GROUND-FLOOR; LOWER HALF— 
UPPER FLOOR. THE CHAPELS BETWEEN THE BUTTRESSES OF THE NAVE WERE BEGUN C. I235, 
AROUND THE EAST END IN 1296. 


for nave and chancel, the one with double aisles, familiar from Old 
St. Peter’s in Rome as well as from Cluny. His transepts project 
very httle beyond the outer aisles, and there were originally no radiat¬ 
ing chapels at ah. The present ones, as well as the present chapels 
between the buttresses of nave and chancel, are a later addition. 
The resulting spatial rhythm is much smoother than that of Roman¬ 
esque cathedrals or of Noyon. It is no longer split into numerous 
units which one has to add up mentally, as it were, to summarise 
the spatial totality, but concentrated in a few, in fact three, sections: 
west, centre, east. The transept acts as the centre of the balance. 
The facade and the double ambulatory round the apse are the two 
scales. Within this rhythm the evenness of the narrowly spaced 
arcade columns is most important. It leads you on towards the 
altar as forcibly as did the columns of Early Christian basilicas. 

The movement which had grown from St. Denis to Noyon and 
from Noyon to, Paris reached maturity in the cathedrals designed 

4i 





THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II 50 -C. I 25 O 

from the end of the 12th century onwards. Early Gothic changed into 
High Gothic. Chartres was rebuilt after a fire in 1194 (fxg. 29). The new 
choir and nave at last do away with the sex-partite vault and return 
to vaults with only diagonal ribs. But whereas the Romanesque rib- 
vaults were placed over square or squarish bays, the bays now are 
roughly half that depth. The speed of the eastward drive is thereby 
at once doubled. The piers remain circular, but they have on each 
side a circular attached shaft. Towards the nave this shaft reaches 
right up to where the vault starts (as the shafts of Winchester and 
Normandy had already done). So the isolation of the circular column 
is overcome. Nothing at arcade level stops the vertical push. And 
the wide and tall gallery has disappeared. There is now only a low 
triforium, dividing the tall arcades from the tall clerestory windows. 
These innovations constitute the High Gothic style. The plan is less 
radical than that of Paris, but has the transept also mid-way between 
the west front and the choir end. 

Once Chartres had introduced the new type of piers, the three¬ 
storied elevation and the simplified vaulting, Rheims, Amiens and 
Beauvais did nothing more than perfect it and carry it to the boldest 
and most thrilling extremes (figs. 3oand3i). As in the plans so in the 
interiors a balance is achieved no doubt but not the happy, seemingly 
effortless and indestructible balance of the Greeks. High Gothic 
balance is a balance of two equally vehement drives towards two 
opposite directions. One’s first impression is of breathtaking height. 
In Durham the relation between width and height of nave had been 
1:2-3, in Chartres 1: 2-6, in Paris x: 2*75. In Amiens it has become 
1:3, and in Beauvais 1:3*4. The absolute height in Durham had been 
approximately 80 feet. In Paris it is 1x5 feet, in Rheims 125, inAmiens 
140 and in Beauvais 157. The drive upward is just as forcible as, or, 
owing to the slenderness of all members, even more forcible than was 
the drive eastward in Early Christian churches. And the eastward drive 
has not by any means slackened either. The narrowness of the arcades 
and he uniform shape of he piers do not seem to call for even a 
momentary change of direction. They accompany one on one’s way, 
as closely set and as rapidly appearing and disappearing as telegraph 
poles along a railway line. There is not time at first to stop and ad¬ 
mire hem. Yet in pressing forward, he transept halts us and diverts 
our eyes to the right and left. Here we stop, here we endeavour for 
he first time.to take in the whole. In an Early Christian church 
nothing of this kind was provided, in a Romanesque church so 

42 \ 



FROM CHARTRES TO AMIENS 


much of it that movement went slowly from bay to bay, from com¬ 
partment to compartment. At Amiens (pi. xxvii and fig. 31 ) there is 
only one such halt, and it cannot be long. Again nave and aisles, now 
of the chancel, close round’us, and we do not come'to an ultimate rest 
until we have reached the apse and the ambulatory, gathering with 



29. ELEVATION OF THE NAVE OF CHARTRES CATHEDRAL, DESIGNED C. 1195 ' 


43 














































































































THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II50-C. 125O 

splendid energy the parallel streams of east-bound energy and concen¬ 
trating them in a final soaring movement along the narrowly spaced 
piers of the apse and the narrow east windows up to the giddy heights 
of the vault ribs and vaulting bosses. 

This description is an attempt at analysing a spatial experience, 
ignoring of course the fact that a normal 13th-century church-goer 
would never have been admitted to the chancel. What will have 
become evident from it is how spectacularly Rheims, Amiens and 
Beauvais are the final achievement of an evolution which had begun 
backinthe x ith century in Normandy and atDurhamand had worked 
one after another, seemingly small, but very significant changes at St. 
Denis, Noyon, Laon, Paris and Chartres. This final achievement is, 
to say it once more, far from reposeful. It possesses the tension of two 
dominant directions or dimensions, a tension transformed by a 
supreme feat of creative energy into a precarious balance. Once one 
has felt this, one will recognise it in every detail. The piers are slen¬ 
der and erect, part of the upward drive. Yet they are round, firm 
and shapely, with their exquisite realistic foliage (cf. pi. xxxrv). The 
mouldings of the arcades are sharp and manifold with rolls and deep 
hollows, high lights and black but precise shadows. The clerestory 
is all opened up into vast sheets of glass. Yet they are subdivided 
by vigorously moulded shafts and by geometrical tracery. The 
introduction of tracery, an invention of the Gothic style, is 
especially telling. Its development can be traced from Chartres to 
Rheims and from Rheims to Amiens in figs. 29, 30 and 31. Before 
Rheims tracery is just a punching of pattern into the wail, the wall 
itself remaining intact as a surface. At Rheims, for the first time, we 
find what is called bar tracery as against plate tracery. The stress now 
rests on the lines of the pattern, not on the surface of the wall. Each 
two-lighted window is crowned by a circle with a sexfoil ornament 
—repose at the end of forceful action. Amiens is an enrichment of 
Rheims, with four lighted windows and three circles instead of one. 
The same energetic vitality appears in the vaults. Each boss signifies 
Gothic balance—the firm blotting of four lines of energy, con¬ 
ducted by shafts and then by ribs. 

Tbs balance of bgh tensions is the classic expression of the 
Western spirit-—as final as- the temple of the 5th century B.c. was 
that of the Greek spirit. Then it was rest and blissful harmony, now 
it is activity, only just for one moment held in suspense. And it re¬ 
quires concentrated effort to master the contrasts and partake of the 

. 4.6 ; 



GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE AND SCHOLASTICISM 


balance. Like a Bach fugue, a Gothic cathedral demands all our 
emotional and intellectual powers. Now we find ourselves, lost in 
the mystical ruby and azure glow of translucent stained glass, 
and now called back to alert attention by the precise course of thin 
yet adequately strong lines. What is the secret of these vast temples 2 
Is it in their miraculous interiors with vast stone vaults at an im¬ 
mense height, walls all of glass and arcades much too slim and tall 
to carry them e The Greek architect achieved a harmony of load and 
support convincing at once and for ever, the Gothic architect, far 
bolder constructionally, with his Western soul of the eternal ex¬ 
plorer and inventor, always lured by the untried, aims at a contrast 
between an interior all spirit and an exterior all intellect. For inside 
the cathedral we cannot and are not meant to understand the law 
gover ning the whole. Outside we are faced with a frank exposition 
of the complicated structural mechanism. The flying buttresses and 
buttresses, though by no means without the fascination of intricate 
pattern, will chiefly appeal to reason, conveying a sensation similar 
to that of the theatre-goer looking at the stage apparatus behind the 
scenes. 

One need hardly point out in so many words how exactly the 
Gothic cathedral re-echoes in all this the achievements of Western 
thought in the 13 th century, the achievements, i.e. of classic 
scholasticism. Scholasticism is the name for the characteristically 
mediaeval blend of divinity and philosophy. It grew up with the 
Romanesque style, the centuries before the nth having in the main 
not done more than simplify, regroup and, here and there, modify 
the doctrines of the Fathers of the Church and the philosophers and 
poets of Rome. During the 12th century, when the Gothic style was 
created and spread, scholasticism developed into something just as 
lofty and at the same time just as intricate as the new cathedrals. 
The first half of the 13 th century saw the appearance of the com¬ 
pendia of all worldly and sacred knowledge, St. Thomas Aquinas’s 
Summa, and the works of Albert the Great and St. Bonaventura, the 
Specula of Vincent of Beauvais, and in poetry Wolfram’s Parsifal. 

One of these encyclopaedic tomes, the De Proprietatibus Rerum by 
the English Dominican Bartholomaeus Anglicus, written about 
1240, begins with a chapter on the essence, unity and the three per¬ 
sons of God. The next chapter deals with the angels, the third with 
Man, his soul and senses. There follow chapters on the elements and 
temperaments, on anatomy and physiology, on the Ages of Man, 
E.A.— 5 47 



THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II5O-C. 1250 

on food, sleep, and similar physical needs, on diseases, on sun, 
moon, stars and zodiac, on time and its divisions, on matter, fire, 
air, water, on the birds of the air, the fishes of the water, the beasts 
of the land, on geography, on minerals, trees, colours, tools. Vincent 
of Beauvais, who writes about 1250, divides his work into the 
Mirrors of Nature, of Doctrine, and of History. And just as the 
Mirror of Nature starts from God and Creation, so the Mirror 
of History starts from the Fall of Man, and leads up to the Last 
Judgment. The cathedral was—besides being a strictly architectural 
monument of the spirit of its age—another Summa, another Speculum, 
an encyclopaedia carved in stone. The Virgin stood at the centre post 
of the centre portals of Rheims Cathedral (pi. xxvm). Figures were 
placed into the jambs of this portal representing such scenes as the 
Annunciation, theVisitation, the Presentation. High up in the gables 
of the three portals appear the Crucifixion, the Coronation of the 
Virgin and the Last Judgment. But there are also in the Gothic 
cathedrals the lives of Christ, the Virgin and saints told in the 
stained glass of the windows, and, spread over the plinths, the jambs, 
the voussoirs and, up against the buttresses, saints with their attri¬ 
butes by which they are recognised—St. Peter with the key, St. 
Nicholas with the three golden balls, St. Barbara with the tower, 
St. Margaret with the dragon—and scenes and figures from the Old 
Testament, the Creation of Man, Jonah with the Whale, or Abraham 
and Melchisedek, and the Roman Sibyls who had foretold, it was 
believed, the coming of Christ, and the Wise and the Foolish Virgins, 
and the Seven Liberal Arts, and the months of the year with their 
occupations—the grafting of trees, sheep-shearing, harvesting, pig 
slaughtering—and the signs of the zodiac, and the elements. The 
profane and the sacred—a compendium of knowledge; but every¬ 
thing, as St. Thomas puts it, “ordered towards God”. For Jonah is 
represented, not because he comes into the Old Testament, but 
because his three days inside the whale represent the resurrection of 
Christ, as Melchisedek offering bread and wine to Abraham re¬ 
presented the Last Supper. To the mediaeval mind everything was'a 
symbol. The meaning that mattered lay behind the outward 
appearance. The simile of the two swords, the emperor’s and the 
pope s, was a symbolic expression of political theories. To Guliel rtm s 
Durandus the. cruciform church represented the Cross, and the 
weathercock on the spire the preacher who rouses the sleeping from 
the night of sin. The mortar, he says, consists of lime, that is love, 

48 



THE CATHEDRAL PROGRAMME AND THE SPIRIT OF THE I 3 TH CENTURY 

sand that is earthly toil which love has taken upon itself, and water 
uniting heavenly love and our earthly world. 

All this one must keep in mind to realise how alien this world is to 
ours, despite all enthusiasm for the cathedrals and their sculptures. 
We are liable to a reaction in these vast halls which is far too roman¬ 
tic, nebulous, sentimental, whereas to the cleric of the 13th century 
everything was probably lucid. Lucid, but transcendental That is the 
antagonism which defeats us in our age of agnosticism. In the 13 th 
century the bishop and the monk, the knight and the craftsman ^ 
believed firmly—though each to the measure of his capacity—that 
nothing exists in the world which does not come from God, and 
derive its sense and sole interest from its divine meaning. The medi¬ 
aeval conception of truth was fundamentally different from ours. 
Truth was not what can be proved, but what conformed to an 
accepted revelation. Research was not conducted to find truth, but 
to penetrate more ^deeply into a pre-established truth. Hence 
authorities meant more to the mediaeval scholar than to anyone now, 
and hence also the faith of the mediaeval artist in the ‘exemplar’, the 
example to be copied. Neither originality nor the study of Nature 
counted for much. Even Villard de Honnecourt copied in nine out 
of ten of his pages. Innovations came by degrees and much less 
deliberately than we can imagine. 

Yet the Gothic style surely was a deliberate innovation and the 
work of strong and self-confident personalities. Its forms allow us 
to assume that, and we find in fact within scholasticism, as the chief 
innovation of the 13 th century, a marked departure from the purely 
transcendental attitude of the Romanesque and earlier centuries. 
St. Peter Damiani, in the first half of the nth century, had said: 
“The world is so filthy with vices that any holy mind is befouled 
by even thinking of it”. Now Vincent of Beauvais exclaims: “How 
great is even the humblest beauty of this world! I am moved with 
spiritual sweetness towards the Creator and Ruler of this world, 
when I behold the magnitude and beauty and permanence of His 
creation”. And beauty according to St. Thomas Aquinas (or a close 
follower of his philosophy) “consists of a certain consonance of 
diverging elements”. 

But it is never—not yet—the beauty of the world as such that is 
praised. It is the beauty of God’s creation. We can enjoy it whole¬ 
heartedly; for God Himself “rejoices in all things, because everyone 
is in actual agreement with His Being” (St. Thomas). Thus stone- 

49 



THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II50-C. I25O 

carvers could now portray the loveliest leaves, the thorn, the oak, 
the maple, the vine (pi. xxxrv). When St. Peter Damiani wrote, 
ornament was abstract or severely stylised. Now youthful life pulses 
in it, as it pulses in shafts and ribs. But the ornament of the 13 th 
century is even at its most naturalistic, neither petty, nor pedantic. 

It is still subordinate, never forward, always ministering to a greater 
cause, that of religious architecture. 

Yet it would not have been possible at an earlier age than that of . 
St. Francis’s song to Brother Sun and Sister Earth and Brother 
Wind, than that of the “dolce stil nuovo”, and the French epics of 
chivalry. The earlier monastic orders had lived in the seclusion of 
their cloisters, the new orders of the 13 th century, the Dominicans 
and Franciscans, had their monasteries in towns and preached to the 
burghers. The first Crusades had been called up to liberate the Holy 
Land, the fourth, the one of 1203, was deflected by the Venetians to 
Constantinople, which they needed for the benefit of their com¬ 
merce. But still in the fifth there was in the person of the French 
King Louis IX, St. Louis, a true Christian knight, a hero in whom 
the ideals of religion and chivalry burned with equal ardour. 
Wolfram’s Parsifal is the greatest epic of the 13 th century. Here at 
the moment when Rheims Cathedral was begun, the young knight 
is taught to “keep his soul pledged to God, without losing his hold 
on the world”. And he is taught that “in joy and in grief right 
measure” should always be his guide. That sounds like the Greek 
“Nothing in excess”, but it is not. It is just as in architecture, a 
balance gained as the ultimate prize by him who indcfatigably strives 
for his redemption. A noble and upright ideal worthy of the great 
cathedrals and the superb sculptures of their portals. At Chartres, 
under the name of St. Theodore, one can see him, the knight of the 
Parsifal virtues, standing in the porch of the south transept, and at 
Rheims, as an unknown king, under a canopy ofone of the buttresses, 
and on horseback at Bamberg, and again with the most beautiful 
young women that Western sculptors ever carved, women both 
vigorous and maidenly, around the choir of Naumburg Cathedral. 

In England the emissaries of Henry VIII and of Cromwell have 
destroyed the majority of what there was of cathedral sculpture. A 
few pieces that are left, such as a headless figure at Winchester, are of 
the same character and quality as 13th-century sculpture in France. 
But neither the facade of Wells nor the surviving statues at Lincoln 
and Westminster are up to the standards of Chartres and Rheims. 


■SO 



THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EARLY ENGLISH STYLE 

The English are not a sculptural race. Their architecture, however, 
the style which they evolved, is just as exquisite as that of the French 
cathedrals, and at the same time typically English, known under the 
name of Early English. 

Originally it came from France, as did the Gothic style in all 
countries. The Cistercians, the new reformed order of the 12th 
century, to which St. Bernard belonged, favoured it. Cistercian 
houses in England were amongst the first to use pointed arches. Into 
cathedral architecture it was introduced by William of Sens at 
Canterbury. Details there are French in character. What is, however, 
unusual in France, is the duplicating of the transepts as we find it at 
Canterbury and then at Lincoln, Wells, Salisbury and many more 
cathedrals. It is not a feature invented in England. Cluny, the centre 
of the most influential Benedictine order before the foundation of 
the Cistercians, had it—not in the 10th-century shape of the church 
which is illustrated (fig. 12), but as it was rebuilt in 1095 seqq. (pi. 
xm). The fact that this duplication remained solitary in France but 
became so popular in England is eminently characteristic of the 
different approach to architecture in the two countries. The Gothic 
style in France, as we have seen, tends all to spatial concentration. 
The Early English style lacks that quality. A cathedral such as 
Salisbury with its square east end and its square double transepts 
(fig. 32) is still the sum, as it were, of added units, compartment 
joined to compartment. Looking at; say, Lincoln and then at Rheims 
(pis. xxx and xxix), this difference comes out most eloquently. 
Rheims seems vigorously pulled together, Lincoln comfortably 
spread out. The same contrast can be found in the west facades. The 
English ones are comparatively insignificant. Porches, added to the 
naves and developed sometimes into superb pieces of independent 
decorative architecture, serve as main entrances instead. And where 
there are fully developed facades, as at Wells and Lincoln, they have 
an existence unrelated to the interiors behind, are screens, as it were, 
placed in front of the church proper, and not the logically designed 
outward projection of the inside system, as are French facades. It has 
been said that this seemingly conservative attitude of English archi¬ 
tects was due to the survival of so many big Norman cathedrals, the 
foundations and walls of which were used in the rebuilding. But this 
materialistic explanation, like so many of the same kind, does not 
hold good. Salisbury was a new foundation. There was nothing on 
the site when the first stone was laid in 1220 (the same year in which 

51 



THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II50 ~C. I25O 

Amiens Cathedral was begun), yet the ground plan is of the same type 
as Lincoln (fig. 32). The preference for the “additive” plan must 
therefore be accepted as a national peculiarity; and once one has 
realised that, one will recognise its essential similarity to the Anglo- 
Saxon ground plans of churches such as Bradford-on-Avon (fig. 
10), and also its harmony with the specifically national qualities 
in Early English elevations. 

Canterbury cannot unreservedly be called English; Wells and 
Lincoln are. Wells was begun just before 1x91, Lincoln in 1192. If 
one compares the nave of Lincoln roofed in 1233 (pi. xxxib) with 
that of Amiens, the national contrast is obvious. Yet both cathedrals 
are of the aristocratic, youthful yet disciplined, vigorous yet graceful 
spirit of the 13 th century. The bays in Lincoln are wide, while they 
are narrow in Amiens, the piers are of comfortable proportions; no 
shafts run right through from bottom to top. Those supporting the 
ribs of the vaults rest on corbels just above the capitals of the piers— 
an illogical arrangement from the French point of view. The tri- 
forium gallery has broad, low openings and pointed arches, so low 
that they seem round 1 —another inconsistency, a French critic would 
say. And most curious of all to anybody thinldng in terms of Amiens 
or Beauvais is the vault. For while the French vault is the logical 
termination of the bay system, the vault of Lincoln has besides the 
transverse ribs separating bay from bay, and the four cross ribs, a 
ridge-rib running all along the centre of the vault parallel to the 

1 Though not as exaggeratedly depressed as they are at Salisbury a little later 
(%• 33 )- 



32 . SALISBURY CATHEDRAL, BEGUN 1220. 


52 




ENGLISH CHARACTER AND EARLY ENGLISH STYLE 


arcades, and so-called tiercerons, i.e. ribs springing from the same 
capitals as the cross ribs, but leading up to other points along the 
ridge or at right angles to the ridge. Thus the vault in Lincoln 
assumes the shape of a sequence of stars—more decorative but less 
reasonable than the French system. 

In all this, the Early English style appears the true representative 
of a national character that seems scarcely changed to this day. There 
is still the same distrust of the consistent and logical and the extreme 
and uncompromising. Now it has not been possible to discover these 
peculiarly English qualities in Norman architecture, and it is worth 
mentioning in this context that just about the middle of the 13 th 
century there are other indications as well of an awakening of 
national consciousness. The Provisions of Oxford of 1258 are the 
first official document with a text not only in French (or Latin) but 
also in English. And they declare that no royal fiefs shall in future 
go to foreigners, and that the commanders of royal castles and 
ports must in future all be English. It is known that Simon de 
Montfort’s revolt was a national movement, and that Edward I was 
influenced by Simon’s ideas to a considerable extent. The same ten¬ 
dency towards national differentiation can incidentally be noticed 
during the same period in other European countries. It may be 
connected with the experiences of the Crusades. Here the knights of 
the West, though united in a common enterprise, must for the first 
time have become aware of the contrasts of behaviour, feelings and 
customs of the nations. 

As far as architecture is concerned, the Crusades have had, beyond 
this, one more immediate effect. They caused a complete reform in 
the p lanning and building of castles. Instead of the Norman reliance 
for defence on the keep, a system of concentric curtain walls with 
towers at intervals was now adopted. It came from the mighty 
castles (such as Le Crak des Chevaliers) built by the Crusaders in 
Syria and the Holy Land. The Crusaders took it from the Turks, 
who in their turn had derived it from Roman military architecture. 
The Tower of London, as enlarged by Henry III and his successors, 
is an instance of this concentric plan. What is, however, more specially 
important here, is the fact that the new functional standard is 
accompanied at least in a number of cases by a new aesthetic standard. 
To the architects who designed the Edwardian castles of Wales the 
appearance of the Norman casde, with its irregular bailey and its 
keep on a mount in one corner, was haphazard and untidy, They re- 

53 



THE EARLY AND CLASSIC GOTHIC STYLE C. II50-C, I25O 

discovered symmetry as a possible 
p lanning principle for castles—re¬ 
discovered, because Rome had 
known it. Just as theydesigned newly 
founded towns (New Winchelsea, 
e.g.) on the chessboard pattern, 
they ventured to make of Harlech 
and Beaumaris completely sym¬ 
metrical configurations (fig. 34). 
The effect, in Harlech especially, 
is one of overwhelming majesty. 
Far too few people know that here, 
in Wales, the most consummate 
masterpieces of European military 
architecture are to be found. For 
grandeur and daring of conception, 
only the Emperor Frederick Ifs 
slightly earlier Castel del Monte in 
South Italy can be compared, again 
a synthesis of Roman, Eastern and 
Gothic elements. 

In English religious architecture 
the achievement that lends itself 
most readily to a comparison with 
Harlech and Beaumaris is the 13th- 
century chapter-house, again some¬ 
thing specifically English, again 
something hardly known abroad 
and—owing to the British 



0 to 

lttlltlt.il* I 

. 

I 3 \ -fee b 

1 > 1 1• 1 t l * t I 1 1 

l 

1 l J eec 


33. ELEVATION OF THE NAVE OF 
SALISBURY CATHEDRAL, DESIGNED C. 
1220 . 


in- 


feriority complex in matters of art—insufficiently appreciated over 
here. Salisbury Chapter-house of about 1275 (pi. xxxm) is centrally 
planned, an octagon with a central pillar and spacious windows fill¬ 
ing the walls entirely except for the arcade strip just above the stone 
benches for the members of the Chapter. But while in France such 
glass walls give a sensation of a rapturous union with a mysterious 
world beyond ours, the proportions of the windows at Salisbury 
with their generously sized tracery circles keep the interior in safe 
and happy contact with the ground. A sunny breadth is achieved 
which makes Amiens feel both over-pointed and over-excited. 

At the same time the Early English style has just as much refine- 

54 






CASTLES OF THE I3TH CENTURY 

meat, crispness and noblesse in every individual motif as the French 
style of the great cathedrals. It is in fact this essential similarity of 
detail that reminds one all the time of the ultimate identity of spirit 
behind French and English 13th-century architecture. To feel this, 
it is only necessary to look at the central pier at Salisbury or the piers 
of the nave arcade in Lincoln with their slender detached shafts and 
their resilient crocket capitals (of a type equally characteristic of c. 
1200 in England and France, cf. fig. 20), or at the clarity and erect¬ 
ness of the English lancet window (English in that it presupposes a 
solid wall into which it is placed as against the French elimination of 
the whole wall), or at the masterful carving of the leaves around the 
capitals of Southwell Chapter-house (pi. xxxiv) throbbing with life, 
yet kept under the strict discipline of architecture, economic m 
treatment, nowhere fussy or ostentatious and of a precision of sur¬ 
face only to be compared with the classic Greek art of the Parthenon. 

But the Classic is only a moment in the history of a civilisation. 
The most progressive had reached it in France and England at the 
end of the 12th century. The most progressive were tired of it and 
embarked on new adventures shortly after the middle of the 13th. 
In France, however, the magnificent creative impulse soon flagged 
—after the Sainte Chapelle in Paris and the gigantic choir of 
Beauvais there was nothing for a long time with such intensity of 
life. England on the other hand kept up her creative energy for 
another century. In fact, the architecture of England between 1250 
and 1350 was, although the English do not know it, the most or- 
ward, the most important and the most inspired in Europe. 



55 



The Late Gothic Style 

c. 1250-c. 1500 


I AXE Gothic, though by the predominant use of the pointed arch 
still part of the Gothic style, is essentially different from the High 
-'Gothic of the great French cathedrals of Paris, Rheims and 
Amiens, and the English cathedrals of Salisbury and Lincoln. Its 
coming can clearly be traced within Lincoln Cathedral. The retro- 
choir, or Angel Choir (pi. xxxn), was begun in 1256. It is of supreme 
beauty, but it possesses no longer the freshness of spring or early 
summer; this abundance of rich and mellow decoration has the 
warmth and sweetness of August and September, of harvest and vin¬ 
tage. But what generous fulfilment in the luxuriant foliage of the 
corbels and the gallery shafts and capitals, the full mouldings of the 
arcades and tracery of the gallery, and, above all, the two gorgeous 
layers of tracery up in the clerestory: one in the windows and one 
separating the wall-passage from the interior. 

While here there is still breadth and fullness, in other equally ad¬ 
vanced work of the same date a tendency becomes noticeable to¬ 
wards the more sophisticated and at the same time the more 
complicated. This tendency runs parallel with the dominant tend¬ 
ency in contemporary philosophy—the abstruse intricacies of Duns 
Scotus (born c. 1270) and his pupil Occam (died c. x 3 4 7 )-and also 
with that in French architecture. But whereas the result in France 
is on the whole lean and retrospective, England went on inventing 
forms with amazing profuseness, forms merely decorative, no longer 
strictly architectural. The most perfect expression of this new spirit is in 
the kind of tracery which is called flowing as against the geometrical 
tracery of 1230 to about 1300. The economy of the Early English 
—a feature of all classic phases—is in strong contrast to the infinite 
variety of the Decorated. Where there had been exclusively circles 
with, inscribed trefoils, quatrefoils, etc., there are now pointed 
trefoils, and ogee or double curved arches, shapes like daggers and 

S (%35) C ^ VeSka P ' SCiS ’ and Wh ° le systcms of filiations 

To study this new English flow in terms of space, one must go to 

56 




3 5 • SELBY ABBEY, EAST WINDOW, C. 1 3 25. 













































THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. 1250-C. 1500 

one west country and one east country church: the cathedral (then 
abbey church) of Bristol, and the cathedral of Ely. The chancel of 
Bristol was begun in 1298 and chiefly built during the first third of 
the 14th century (pi. xxxv). It differs in four significant things from 
all English cathedrals of the preceding period. It is an aisled hall, not 
a basilica—that means that its aisles are as high as its nave, so’that 
no clerestory exists. This type of church elevation had existed in 
Romanesque South-western France (see p. 25), but it had then no¬ 
where attempted what it now does: the creation of a unified room 
with piers inserted, instead of the classic Gothic principle of a stag- 
gered elevation from aisle to nave. This tendency towards the unified 
room has its origin in the refectories and dormitories of monastic 
architectureand suchretrochoirs as that of Salisbury. Its introduction 
into the body proper of the church made the Bristol architects 
change, with a self-certainty remarkable at such an early date, the 
shapes of both piers and vaults. The piers, a peculiarity exceptional 
before the 15th century, have no capitals, the vaults no special 
emphasis on the transverse arches. That means that no halt stops the 
flow up these shafts and into the ribs, and the flow along the star¬ 
ve formations of the primary and secondary ribs. There appears 
in this a deliberate break with the classic Gothic principle of func¬ 
tional articulation all the way through from pier base to vault boss 
Moreover to support the weight of the nave vault, which in a 
basilican Gothic church is conducted down by flying buttresses to 
the roof of the aisles and then by buttresses to ground level, the 
aisles are crossed at the level of the springing of their vaults by curi¬ 
ously ingenious and yet naive struts or bridges thrown across below 
the transverse arches. From their centres ribs sprout up to help in 
forming transverse pointed tunnel-vaults to abut die nave vault. 
The device may thus have been thought out for technical reasons: 
it is aesthetically most effective all the same. A classic Gothic interior 
TTT* T US ? ^o^tionsonly: the facade-altar direction 
™ 'f a ' * ^ to which make us see the sheets of 

^ traCCry ° n the ri § k and the lefi - At Bristol our 
eyts are lured all the time into glimpses diagonally up and across. 

wW sameeffect can be studied on a larger scale in Wells Cathedral, 

tion 3 3 rk en0rm0US ardl ° r Strut ofsimikr design and func¬ 
tion was placed between nave and crossing to support the crossinn 

SX? b f n \ bm A. wS 

self the cathedral architect has given a more playful version of the 

J8 ; 



BRISTOL AND ELY 


same spatial motifs in. the sacristy of the cathedral. Here the ribs of 
the little vault are accompanied by a skeleton of secondary flying 
ribs starting at a lower level than the others, shooting through the 
air and meeting the primary ones at the central boss. The effect is 
again one of deliberate and pleasing confusion. Classic Gothic ribs, 
just like classic Gothic arches, keep strictly to the strata of space 
assigned to them; they never stray into others. 

At Ely more than anywhere else the new attitude towards space 
has found an adequate form. Between 1322 and 1342 the crossing of 
the cathedral was rebuilt in the form of an octagon. The choice of 
this shape by the designer, who probably was the King’s carpenter, 
Master William de Hurle, can have been no thin g but a deliberate 
attempt at breaking the I3th-century’s discipline of right angles. The 
diagonal axes, with their large windows and flowing tracery, destroy 
the precise dividing lines between nave, aisles, transepts and choir 
whichhad been the groundwork in the plan and elevation of a classic 
Gothic church. It has been argued that the glass of Amiens or the 
Sainte Chapelle also breaks this logicality of the earlier Middle Ages 
by opening the room towards a mysterious transcendental world. 
That is not so; the sheets of glass may give a diaphanous character to 
the enclosure, but it is an enclosure all the same. It doesn’t really allow 
the eye to wander into dim, incomprehensible distances. The octagon 
of Ely has this very effect, an effect of surprise and ambiguity. 

The Lady Chapel at Ely (1321-49) achieved the same aim by 
subder and more delicate means. The rectangular chapel isolated 
from the main building, as only chapter-houses usually are, has all 
the way round an exquisite arcading with crocketed ogee arches 
gathered together by larger three-dimensional or nodding ogee 
arches (pi. xxxvi). Ogee-curved quatrefoils with seated figures fill the 
spandrels. The arches are covered with a luxuriant growth of vegeta¬ 
tion, no longer as crisp as that of the 13 th century, but with its un¬ 
dulations of knobbly leaves and its intricacy of minute detail at once 
more sophisticated and, strangely enough, more uniform in its 
general appearance. This is due to a treatment that makes it impossi¬ 
ble to isolate part from part,'as one could in looking at the leaves of 
Southwell. Now all one sees is an incessant ripple and flow, lights 
and shadows whisking over bossy surfaces, fascinating but far re¬ 
moved from the clarity of a hundred years ago. 

The three-dimensional ogee arch is a motif of great significance. 
It does what the octagon does in Ely Cathedral, and the piers with- 

59 



THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. 1250 -C. I500 

out capitals, the vaults without transverse arches and the bridges in 
the aisles did in Bristol—it sets space into a motion, quicker, more 
complicated and less single-minded than any to be experienced in 
Early English churches. Its immediate forerunner in the three- 
dimensional treatment of a wall is the chapter-house of York 
Cathedral, c. 1290, where the seats around the walls have not blind 
arcades behind, as at Salisbury (pi. xxxm) about fifteen years before, 
but are placed into tiny polygonal niches. Their forty-four times re¬ 
peated projection causes a spatial ripple too slight still to be felt as 
breaking the continuity of the wall, but quite noticeable, once one 
is aware of the coming of this new tendency. 

This tendency was by no means exclusively English. Continental 
countries experienced it too, though considerably later. France 
especially did not fully wake up to the spatial and ornamental impli¬ 
cations of the Late Gothic style until the end of the 15 th century. 
Only in the midi there exists work of European significance, cul¬ 
minating in the Cathedral of Albi (begun 1282). Albi, a fortified 
church, is a mighty compact block from outside without any of the 
elaborate articulation of classic Gothic exteriors, and inside consists 
of a single nave with side chapels—originally fully as high as the 
nave placed between the buttresses. Thus spatial unity is achieved, 
though a unity of plainness and not of complex interwoven move¬ 
ment as at Bristol. 

This tendency towards inner and outer plainness, as characteristic 
of the change-over from High to Late Gothic as the intricacies of 
the Decorated in England, is chiefly an outcome of the influence of 
the new Orders of Preachers, the Franciscans and Dominicans or 
Grey Friars and Black Friars,founded in 1209and 1215, andspreading 
from 1225 onwards at a rate only comparable to those of the Cluniac 
and Cistercian spreads in their respective centuries. The 13th-century 
churches of the friars, in whatever country they were built, were, 
in accordance with the reformed rules of the new orders, of simple 
and useful plan, large, and with very little to suggest a specifically 
ecclesiastical atmosphere. They did not need much in the way of 
eastern chapels, as many of the friars were not priests, but they 
could not do without very spacious naves to house the large con- 
gregations which came to listen to their popular sermons. 

he friars, it is known, where the orders of the people. They liked 
strong effects and active fives. They scorned the sheltered and 
leisurely existence of the other orders on their country estates, 


60 



THE FRIARS AND THE NEW PLAINNESS 

chose busy towns to settle in and there developed their preaching 
technique as a medium of religious propaganda to a degree never 
attempted since the days of the Crusades. 

Thus all they needed was halls of vast dimensions, a pulpit and an 
altar. Beyond that their church plans differ in the various countries. 
In Italy, the land of their origin, they were at first aisleless halls, 
barns as it were, with an apseless choir and smaller chapels along a 
transept, on one of the standard early Cistercian patterns. The size 
of such churches as those of the Franciscans and Dominicans at 
Siena is enormous, 300 feet in length and more. In the north we 
find aisleless as well as aisled friars’ churches, and in Germany some 
hall churches too. Their bare long walls without any towers can be 
most impressive (Erfurt). The English Franciscans and Dominicans 
relieved this exterior monotony by a tower or spire over the bay 
between nave and choir. Otherwise there was often no structural 
division between the two parts at all. But hardly anything survives 
of complete friars’ churches in England, and one may therefore 
easily underestimate the influence their style must have had about 
1300. Of this more will be said later. 

This international tendency towards plainness in the architecture 
of the new orders seems at first glance in contrast to the spatial 
adventures of Bristol and Ely. In fact, however, the Friars’ style and 
the Decorated style of England both belong to the same general 
trend. The connection between the two can in some ways best be 
pointed out by a look at the Late Gothic style in Germany, since it 
combines the principle of the plain enclosure with that of a Wald- 
weben inside. In Germany^ too, the friars were instrumental in dis¬ 
seminating thenew style. Itwas, however, created in parish churches, 
and parish churches are its chief monuments, the parish churches 
of the 14th and 15 th centuries in which, as in the friars’ churches, the 
sermon grew more and more to be the centre of the service. The 
movement away from High Gothic principles started later than in 
England and Italy, about 1350, and culminated as late as in France: 
about 1500. Its favourite vehicle was the aisled hall, an exception— 
in spite of Bristol—in English (and also in French) church architec¬ 
ture. For 14th- and 15th-century Germany it became almost a matter 
of course, especially in "Westphalia, in the brick districts of the Han¬ 
seatic coast towns and of Bavaria, and, after the discovery of silver, in 
the newly founded, newly prospering towns of Upper Saxony. It 
had had a long national history, going back much further than the 

61 



THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. 125O-C. I5OO 

date of Bristol. There are occasional Romanesque aisled halls in Ger¬ 
many, even one (on a small scale) as early as 1015. It may thus not be 
necessary to suppose connections with the aisled halls of South- 
West France. Aisled halls in Gothic forms were built directly the style 
had been taken over. As in England, the new inspiration came pro¬ 
bably from the refectories and chapter-houses of German (chiefly 
Cistercian) monasteries. The type spread during the second half of 
the 13th century, and assumed its German characteristics: wide 
arcades and wide aisles. These, needless to say, invite the eye, even 
more than the narrower opening of Bristol, to wander off the main 
Gothic lines of vision. Diagonal vistas spread on all sides. Space 
seems to flow directionlessly around us while we walk in the church. 
A proof of the master builders’ conscious development are the cases 
in which a choir in the new Late Gothic style was added without 
any aesthetic mediation to an earlier nave. This is for instance the 
case at St. Lawrence’s, Nuremberg, of 1445-72 (pi. xliv). Having 
walked along the nave in the rigidly prescribed way of the Roman¬ 
esque or earlier Gothic basilica, the entrance into the wider and higher 
choir with nave and aisles of identical width comes as a startling 
surprise. Bays are wider, piers slenderer, vaults of a rich star-like 
configuration (as created by the English nearly 200 years before), 
weighing down the vertical push of the piers. These have no capitals 
(again a motif of English priority), and so the streams of energy con¬ 
ducted upwards flew away undammed into ribs extending in all 
directions. 1 The sculptural decoration of the choir emphasises its 
spatial freedom. The magnificent stone spire of the tabernacle (now, 

I understand, destroyed by a bomb) rises in an asymmetrical position 
into the vault, and the huge locket of Veit Stoss’s wood-carved 
Annunciation hangs down, joyful and transparent, into the space in 
front of the altar, so that you see it against the light of the central 
upper window. There are two rows of windows all the way round, 
and this, as the close pattern of the star-vault, adds weight to die 
horizontals. The classic Gothic excelsior is effectively (and no doubt 
consciously) broken. The earth claims her own against heaven. The 
clouds of the Reformation were gathering. Luther was born before 

1 Some of the latest and best German churches of this period (e.g., Annaberg) 
have octagonal piers with concave sides—a particularly dear indication of the 
tendency to make the space of nave and aisles surge up from all directions against 
the stone divisions. The same type of piers occurs in Cotswold churches (Chipping 
Campden). Flying ribs as in the sacristy of Bristol, inddentally, are also a speciality 
of the boldest of these Late Gothic German churches. 

62 



THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE IN GERMANY 

the tabernacle and the Annunciation were commissioned. The dis¬ 
crepancy between interiors of undulating flow, in which the in¬ 
dividual may lose himself as between the trees of a forest, and 
exteriors of powerful solidity with unbroken walls and two rows 
of windows, heralds the mood of the German Reformation, torn 
between mystical introspection and a hearty new thrust into this 
world. Moreover, the new rooms of German Late Gothic had a 
practical advantage—the same as the aisleless halls of the Italian friars: 
they were evidently much better suited for hstening to long sermons 
than the old interiors with parallel and separated avenues. 

However, practical considerations alone did not create the new 
style, nor can it be said that the spirit of the coming Reformation 
alone created it. For it is just as noticeable in Spain as in Germany. 
In Spanish architecture of the 15 th century there was a good deal of 
German influence. Masters from Cologne and Nuremberg were 
called to Burgos and established such German motifs as star-vaults 
and net-vaults. But these masons and stone-carvers from the North 
would hardly have been so successful if there had not been an in¬ 
digenous Spanish trend towards the new Late Gothic expression. 
The star-vaults seemed no more than a variation of the theme of the 
Mohammedan dome with its flying ribs forming stars of many kinds. 
The conciseness of the classic French cross-vaults and indeed classic 
French ideals altogether had not appealed to Spaniards. As in Ger¬ 
many, imitation of French Gothic is rare, and as in Germany there 
are wide aisles, although they are lower than the nave (that is 
basilican), and side chapels between the buttresses so that the ex¬ 
teriors seem flat and less articulated than those of the 13 th century 
—again two clear proofs of the tendency towards one unified room 

This tendency is nowhere more obvious than m Catalonia, not 
until 1479 united with Central and Northern Spain. The typical 
Catalan plan of the 14th and 15 th centuries—closely connected with 
Southern French plans such as that of Albi—is a wide aisleless or aisled 
h all with side chapels between the buttresses and a very wide shallow 
apse. The exteriors are bare as in Germany, the interiors spacious 
and plain, the right kind to hold the large congregations of the pros¬ 
perous trading towns of the Catalan coast. Again this practical advan¬ 
tage may have had something to do with the plan chosen. But it is 
har dly enough to explain the interesting case of Gerona Cathedral, 
which had been begun in the French way with a choir, ambulatory 

E.A.— 6 63 



THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. I25O -C. 1500 

and radiating chapels in 1312. When these eastern parts were com¬ 
plete, work for some reason stopped, and it was not until 1416 that 
the then master-mason, Guillermo BofEy, suggested the adding of a 
new nave. His daring suggestion was a nave without aisles the width 
of apse and ambulatory put together. There was opposition amongst 



36. JUAN GIL DE HONTANON: SALAMANCA CATHEDRAL, BEGUN IJI2. ON THE. RIGHT 

THE OLD CATHEDRAL. 


the cathedral authorities, and so—a curiously modem idea—a 
commission was appointed to decide. Its members were twelve 
leading architects. Their answers have been preserved. Seven mem¬ 
bers were in favour of continuing the basilican scheme westward, 
but five were .taken with BofEy s idea. In 1417* in fact, BofEy was 
committed to start on his scheme. It is a masterpiece of building 
technique, with a clear span of 73 feet, one of the widest vaulted 
rooms of mediaeval Europe (fig. 37). The weight of the vaults is in 
the usual Spanish way carried by internal buttresses with chapels in 

64 







THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE IN SPAIN 


the interstices. The room is somewhat bare, as the friars* churches of 
Tuscany, but it has a great power, and it certainly is, with its sharp 
contrast of one room in the west and a system of three spatial units 
of staggered height and width in the east, the most convincing proof 
of the change of style from High to Late Gothic. 

But when did the one phase end and the other begin ? Our Spanish 
and German examples were of the 15th century, our examples from 




England of the early years of the 
14th. The nave of Gerona is plain 
and solid, without mystery. So are 
at least the exteriors of the Late 
Gothic churches of Germany. Their 
interiors on the other hand are full 
of movement, unrestrained in feel¬ 
ing, romantically rich and roman¬ 
tically vague. They share these 
qualities with Bristol and Ely. 
Neither Bristol, however, nor Ely 
aims at the contrast of square ex- 



37. GUILLERMO BOFFIYI GERONA 
CATHEDRAL. THE ARCHITECT ADDED 


terior volume and floating interior T0 A i^h-century choir with 

0 AMBULATORY A NAVE WITHOUT AISLES 

space. Nor did Britain, even at to the width of choir and ambu- 
the late date of the Nuremberg tatory. begun 1417. 


choir of St. Lawrence’s, go to such 

extremes. Nevertheless British architectural style had changed sig¬ 
nally between 1300 and 1450. The change is so obvious that, while 
for the Continent the terms High and Late Gothic are sufficient to 
indicate the chief stages, English tradition has for more than a hun¬ 
dred years preferred a division into three Gothic phases: Early 


65 






THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. I25O-C. I5OO 

English, Decorated and Perpendicular. Early English was at an end 
when the Angel Choir was growing. Decorated is the style of Bristol 
and Ely. Perpendicular corresponds to what we have seen of Late 
Gothic in Germany and Spain, and it is a contribution of equal 
national vigour. Once it had been created by a few strong-minded, 
clear-headed architects, it brushed aside all the vagaries of Decorated 
and setded down to a long, none too adventurous development of a 
plain-spoken idiom, sober and wideawake. People have tried to 
connect the coming of this new style with the Black Death of 1349. 
This is wrong; for it is there in all its perfection as early as 13 31 in the 
south transept and as early as 1337 in the choir of Gloucester Cathe¬ 
dral (pi. xxxvn). The thick circular piers of the Norman choir were 
left standing but with their galleries hidden behind a screen of lean 
uprights and horizontals divided up into rows of panels. The east wall 
was opened into one huge window with, except for the few main 
partitions, nothing but a system of glazed panels. The number of 
horizontal divisions invalidates all that might have been left of the 
upward soar of earlier Gothic architecture. In this the same new ten¬ 
dency is visible as in the double row of windows in German 
churches. But while on the Continent the walls were made solid 
too, English Perpendicular walls remained glass screens. And just as 
thus the wall structure was less drastically changed than in Germany 
or Spain, so the spatial character of Perpendicular rooms returned— 
under renewed influence, it seems, of French buildings of about 1240 
to 1330 —to the clarity of the High Gothic style. Basilican plans were 
only very rarely given up in favour of the spatially more promising 
aisled-hall plan of Bristol and Germany. The only fanciful feature in 
Gloucester and indeed in many other Perpendicular parts of cathedral 
and abbey churches is the decoration of the vaults (pi. xxxvm). There 
is as much imagination displayed in them as in the German and 
Spanish vaults. In fact neither of these two countries, let alone France, 
has produced anything so complicated as the scheme of Gloucester 
at so early a date. On the other hand, Perpendicular vault decoration 
is harsher than that of Continental Late Gothic, just as Perpendicular 
tracery is harsher than German, Spanish or French tracery of about 
1500 (or than English tracery of 1320). The ribs of Gloucester form 
patterns as abstract and as angular as the matchsticks on the walls of 
Earl’s Barton tower three hundred years before, patterns equally 
remote from the luxuriance of Ely, the resilience of Lincoln and the 
structural logicality of classic French rib-vaults. 

66 



GLOUCESTER AND THE PERPENDICULAR STYLE 

Of structural logicality especially there is none in Perpendicular 
vaults. These close-knit patterns of ribs have no longer anything to 
do with vault construction. The main transverse ribs and cross ribs 
are no longer distinguishable from the innumerable tiercerons (i.e. 
ribs connecting the caps of the vault shafts with points on the ridge- 
rib) and Hemes (i.e. ribs neither springing from the vault shafts nor 
leading to any of the main crossings). The whole is in fact a sohdly 
built tunnel-vault with plenty of decoration appHed to it. The use 
of the term tunnel-vault impHes that the effect of Perpendicular 
vaults is as much an emphasis on the horizontal, as it were, Hd charac¬ 
ter as the star-vaults of Germany and Spain. This interpretation is 
confirmed by the general substitution in English Perpendicular ex¬ 
teriors of low-pitched, often parapeted roofs for the higher pitch of 
the 12th and 13th centuries. 

Gloucester is the most consistent example of the Perpendicular 
in EngHsh cathedrals. The naves of Winchester and Canterbury 
(chiefly of the later 14-th century) are less uncompromising. In other 
cathedrals the late Middle Ages did Htde major work. To find 
' EngHsh architecture of 1350 to 1525 at its best, one should not visit 
cathedrals and abbey churches, one should go to the manor-houses 
and parish churches for the happiest ensembles and to the royal 
chapels for the highest architectural standard. This change in the 
relative importance of buildings is due to social and historical 
reasons. 

Taking domestic architecture first, what had happened between 
the age of Harlech and that of, e.g., Penshuxst in Kent (pi. jooox) 
begun, it seems, in 1341, is that half a century of internal peace had 
made owners of large houses in the country give up thoughts of 
mili tary defence and allow themselves more domestic comforts. 
The extremely compact arrangement of rooms in the earHer castles 
was no longer necessary. Its essentials were kept—the haU as the 
centre of household Hfe, with the high-table for the lord and his- 
family at one end, the entrance and a screened-off gangway at the 
other, a parlour or chamber with perhaps a solar above beyond the 
high-table end of the hall, and kitchen, pantry, larders, buttery etc., 
on the other side of the screens—but more rooms were added and 
the hall itself was provided with larger windows of several Hghts Mid 
a bay-window at the high-table end. The grandest of surviving 14th- 
century halls is John of Gaunt’s at Kenilworth, 90 by 45 feet in size. 
In some houses at that time a separate dini n g-room must already 

67 



THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. I25O-C. I5OO 

have existed. That appears from a passage in Piers Plowman. It means 
a first step towards the desertion of the hall as the living-room and 
dining-room of everybody, master and men. But nearly three cen¬ 
turies had to pass by after Penshurst had been designed, before the 
hall had finally become a vestibule and nothing else. 

It took nearly as long to recover the principle of symmetry for 
the English house which had governed tire plans of Harlech and 
Beaumaris with such splendid success. In the 14th and 15 th centuries 
a manor-house, or, for that matter, a French chateau and a Burg in 
Germany, were picturesque agglomerations of rooms. Symmetry 
did not go farther than that sometimes in the 15 th and early 16th 



38. COTHAY MANOR, SOMERSET, LATE IJTH CENTURY. 


centuries one straight axis runs from the gate-house to the entrance 
of the hall. But the hall was not the exact centre of the main block, 
and its entrance was eccentric anyway. The gate-house, even when 
it was in the middle of the outer front, did not separate identical 
halves (fig. 3 8). The results of this undisturbed growth are in Britain, 
as well as in France and Germany, extremely charming. But if one 
enquires about strictly aesthetic qualities, they are certainly not as high 
as those of Harlech. 

A comparison between the English cathedral of the 13 th century 
and the English parish church of the 15th shows the same changes. 
They are largely due to social developments. A new class had come 
into its own, the class responsible for the erection of the scores of 
splendid parish churches in Germany and in the Netherlands, and 
the class to which in France the business-minded royal admini¬ 
strators of the William of Nogaret type, in Italy the Medici and their 
friends and competitors and in Northern Germany the leaders of 
the Hanseatic League belonged. In England Richard the Lion- 

68 



MANOR-HOUSES AND ROYAL CHAPELS • 

Hearted had been on the throne when Lincoln and Wells were de¬ 
signed, and Henry III, the Saintly King as Rome called him, ruled 
when Salisbury and the new Westminster Abbey were designed. 
Simon de Montfort stood up against Henry III, a hero of the national 
English cause against too papal a policy, when the Angel Choir was 
added to Lincoln Cathedral. Less than a hundred years later, Edward 
III, who was crowned in 1327 and died in 1377, accepted with pleas¬ 
ure the honour of membership in the London Guild of the Merchant 
Taylors, i.e. the cloth merchants of the City. This is an eminently 
revealing fact, especially if it is viewed in conjunction with commer¬ 
cial and industrial developments in the Netherlands, Germany, 
Tuscany and Catalonia. In England the age of Edward III saw a rapid 
development of business enterprise. Flemish weavers were called 
into the country, trade interests played a considerable part in the 
vicissitudes of the Hundred Years War. Vast capitals were accumu¬ 
lated by men such as Dick Whittington and John Poulteney, whose 
country seat was Penshurst. In fact more of the manor-houses of the 
late Middle Ages were owned by merchants or their descendants 
than is usually realised. After the decimation of the old aristocracy 
caused by the Wars of the Roses, the proportion of nouveaux riches 
amongst the peers of the realm grew ever more rapidly, until in the 
council of sixteen whom Henry VIII named to reign for his little 
son, not one was a peer of twelve years’ standing. 

Thus by x 500 the most active patrons of art were the king and the 
towns. The Crown had, about 1330, built St. Stephen’s Chapel in 
the Palace of Westminster which was burnt in 1834. Judging from 
surviving drawings it must have been a building of great artistic 
importance. Then in the 15th century Henry VT and VII built Eton 
College Chapel (begun in 1441), King’s College Chapel, Cambridge 
(begun in 1446), Henry VII and VIII St. George’s Chapel, Windsor 
Castle (begun in 1481), and Henry VIII the Chapel of Henry VII at 
the east end of Westminster Abbey (1503-19). They are buildings 
of extremely simple exteriors and plans, but with plenty of master¬ 
fully executed decoration. The contrast is especially poignant at Cam¬ 
bridge. To design this long, tall, narrow box of a college chapel 
(pi. xlh), no spatial genius was needed. There is no differentiation 
at all between nave and choir. The decoration too is repetitive, the 
same window tracery is used twenty-four times, and the same 
panelled fan -vaulting motif. They were Nationalists, the men who 
designed and enjoyed these buildings, proud constructors, of a bold- 

69 



THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. JZ$ 0 -C. I5OO 

ness not inf erior to that of the Catalans. Yet they succeeded—and 
here we are faced with the same problem as in the contemporary 
German churches—in combining this practical, matter-of-fact spirit 
with a sense of mystery and an almost oriental effusion of ornament. 
Standing at the west end of the nave one can hardly think of the 
supreme economy with which this effect of exuberance has been 
attained. The fan-vault in particular helps, wherever it is used, to 
create an atmosphere of heavy luxuriance. Yet it is an eminendy 
rational vault, a technician’s invention, one is inclined to surmise. 
It originated from the vault designs of chapter-houses and their 
development into the palm-like spread of bunches of ribs towards a 
heavily bossed ridge-rib in the choir (early 14th century) and then 
the nave of Exeter. That had been the spatial imagination of the 
Decorated at its boldest moment. Then the Perpendicular came in 
and systematised and solidified it all, again first at Gloucester, in 
the east walk of the cloisters (1357-77). By giving all ribs the 
same length, the same distance from each other and the same 
curvature, and by applying the ubiquitous panelling to the span¬ 
drels, the palm-vault of Exeter is converted into the fan-vault of 
Gloucester. 

This system the king’s masons used at Cambridge, men who, 
although at this advanced hour in the development of mediaeval 
architecture they are sometimes already mentioned with their names 
in documents as surveyors of works and directors of works, were 
still by training and experience in the sa m e category as Villard de 
Honnecourt and the masters of the English and French cathedrals. 
But as members of the king’s household they now very gradually 
began to advance into-the status of civil servants. This develop¬ 
ment went on into the 17th century. Not until then were the 
royal architects in France and also in England primarily civil 
servants. 

In the 14th century a man such as Henry Yevele (died 1400) 
appears more as the successful London mason and contractor and 
distinguished member of his city guild than as a royal architect in 
the modern sense. We find his name coupled In one document with 
Chaucer’s, in another with Dick Whittington’s. So we imagine him 
in his stately fur-lined robes (which incidentally were part of his 
salary from the king) in his house by St. Magnus, London Bridge, 
or one of his two manor-houses in Kent. Of work by him, the 
masonry on Westminster Hall (1394-1402) survives. Such men, 

70 



ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES 


dignitaries of their guilds and the fraternities to which they belonged, 
built the stately town halls of England, the Netherlands and the 
cities of the Hanseatic League. They also built the halls of the London 
city companies, and they built the parish churches with their guild 
chapels. In designing them they felt that they were working for 
themselves and their equals; that was a more intimate connection 
between architect and building than had existed before. It gives its 
own peculiar atmosphere to the Late Gothic parish church. The largest 
of them are no less lofty than cathedrals and abbey churches. The 



tallest of all mediaeval spires in Europe is that of Ulm Minster, which 
is a parish church. St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol covers a larger area 
1-ban many a cathedral. Prosperous small towns such as Lavenham in 
Suffolk and dozens of others had parish churches in which the whole 
local population could assemble, and the villagers from the neigh¬ 
bourhood still find accommodation. York has (or had before the 
Second World Wax) twenty-one surviving mediaeval churches 
besides the Minster. 

Where existing churches were not entirely pulled down, they 
were enlarged, aisles were widened, naves heightened, new aisles or 
chapels added to the old, and the result is the picturesque, happy-go- 
lucky irregularity of plan and elevation of most English parish 
churches. However, while such churches may reflect most truly the 
history of their towns from the Anglo-Saxon to the Tudor age, they 
do not really reflect the aesthetic vision of any one period. What the 

71 






THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. 1250 -C. I5OO 

15th century in England desired the chief parish church of a pros¬ 
perous town to look like appears in such a building as St. Nicholas, 
King’s Lynn. The church (fig. 39) was erected as a chapel of ease 
from 1414 to 1419. One plan is responsible for the whole building, 
and that plan is as uncomplicated as those of the contemporary royal 
chapels. It consists of a rectangle of 162 by 70 feet, within which are 
comprised nave and aisles as well as aisled chancel. There is no 
structural articulation between west and east parts. All that inter¬ 
feres with the uniformity of the outline is the tower taken over 
from a previous building, the porch and the slightly projecting 
apse. This sturdy plainness is no doubt a reflection of a change of 
taste which the friars’ architecture had brought about. It is evi¬ 
dently in accordance with the style of the exteriors of German 
churches. But inside such churches as St. Nicholas, King’s Lynn, 
or the two parish churches of Coventry (pi. xt), or Holy 
Trinity, Hull, have nothing of the romanticism of Nuremberg. 
They stick to the traditional basilican elevation, piers are thin, 
mouldings wiry and tracery is of the straightforward Perpendicular 
type. There are no comers left in mysterious semi-darkness, nor any 
surprising vistas. Where the fantasy of the Late Gothic designer 
shows itself in the English parish church is in wooden screens and 
wooden roofs. An almost inconceivable profusion of screens origin¬ 
ally divided naves from choirs, aisle chapels from nave chapels and 
the many guild chapels from the public spaces. The most lavishly 
decorated are in Devon on the one hand, in East Anglia on the other. 
But the greatest glory of the English parish churches are their timber 
roofs (pi. xli), roofs constructed as boldly by the carpenter as any 
Gothic stone vaults by masons, and looking as intricate and techni¬ 
cally thrilling as any configuration of flying buttresses around the 
east end of a cathedral. There is a variety of types: the tie-beam roof, 
the arch-braced roof, the hammerbeam roof (devised for West¬ 
minster Hall by Yevele’s colleague, the King’s master carpenter, 
Hugh Herland in 1380), the double hammerbeam roof and others.* 
The most ingenious of them all is the one of the unaisled church of 
Needham Market looking like a whole three-aisled building hover¬ 
ing over our heads without any visible support from below. The 
continent has nothing to emulate these achievements of a ship¬ 
building nation. They are, in fact, strongly reminiscent of ships’ keels 
upside down. 

Such roofs add a quality of structural richness to English churches 

72 



THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE IN FRANCE 

which they would otherwise lack. However even they, looked at in 
detail, appear with their hard lines of rafters, purlins and braces 
sinewy, sharp and angular—as English in fact as the ribs of 
Gloucester choir and the decoration of Earl’s Barton tower—directly 
one compares them with contemporary work in France, Germany 
or Spain and Portugal. 

For even in France the 15th century had brought a belated accep¬ 
tance of the principles which in England had been incorporated in 
the Decorated style. Flamboyant is the French term for their Late 



40. ROUEN*. ST. MACLOU, BEGUN I434. 


Gothic, and some of the most enchanting examples of it are to be 
found in Normandy, for instance the main portal, the library court 
and the Tour de Beurre of Rouen Cathedral, and—in a spatially 
more interesting way—the church of St. Maclou at Rouen, begun 
in 1434 (%• 4-of 

As for Spain, the briefest comparison between an English parish 
church or even King’s College Chapel and, say, the decoration of the 
front of the church of St. Paul’s at Valladolid (begun shortly after 
i486, probably by Simon of Cologne; pl.xtm) is sufficient to realise 
the contrast between English restraint and Spanish extremism. Substi¬ 
tute the St. Lawrence portal of Strassburg Cathedral (pi. xlv) for 
Valladolid, and you would see Anglo-German contrasts as glaringly. 

73 






THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. 125O -C. I5OO 

It might be said, that German Late Gothic decoration is as extreme as 
Spanish, which would not be surprising, since Germany and Spain, as 
against France, England, Italy, are the countries of the extremes in 
European civilisation. However, there are obvious differences between 
the Spanish and the German ways of decorating. Ever since Moham¬ 
medan days Spain has had a passion for filling large surfaces with close- 
knit two-dimensional ornament. The Germans share this horror 
vacui, but there is always a marked spatial curiosity in their ornament. 
That connects German Late Gothic with German Rococo just as the 
flatness and the frantic movement of the Charterhouse vestry at 
Granada, which dates from the middle of the 18th century (see 
p. 133), seems heralded in the details of the Valladolid facade. 
Valladolid has no dominant motifs. The figure sculpture is petty in 
scale. Ogee arches and “Tudor” arches (i.e. depressed pointed 
arches) follow each other. The background is patterned from top to 
bottom, and the patterns change with every string course. There 
is something of a thistly undergrowth about this ensemble which 
makes English Perpendicular appear strong and pure. There can 
be no question which of the two countries would open itself to 
Puritanism and which would become the stronghold of Baroque 
Catholicism. 

The high-water mark, however, of Late Gothic frenzy was 
reached in Portugal during the spectacularly prosperous age of King 
Manuel (1495-1521). Manueline decoration in such places as Batalha 
■ and Tomar (fig. 41) is outrageously rich, a rank growth of forms, 
sometimes taken, it seems, from crustacean organisms, sometimes 
from tropical vegetation. Much Portuguese decoration was inspired 
by Spain and France, but here the architecture of India, Portuguese 
India, is the only parallel that comes to mind. If this connection is 
real it is the first instance in Western history of non-European 
influence on European art. 

However, no influence can ever act, unless the one party is ready 
to receive the message of the other. If the countries of the Pyrenean 
Peninsula had not already been possessed by a passion for overdone 
decoration, the art of the colonies would have remained mute to 
them. When the Indies became Dutch, their style did indeed after 
a time begin to influence the furniture of Holland and helped to give 
it its peculiar Baroque opulence, but architects wisely kept away 
from it. The Dutchmen of the 17th century could never have made 
of it what the Portuguese could, at that particular moment, the 

74 



THE GOTHIC STYLE IN ITALY 

moment just before the ornamental imagination of the late Middle 
Ages was harnessed into the Renaissance yoke. 

The Renaissance on the other hand could never have been con¬ 
ceived in a country which had as recklessly indulged in ornamental 
vagaries as Spain and Portugal, or as daringly explored spatial 
mysteries as Germany. In Italy there thus exists no Late Gothic style 
at all—the most striking illustration of the fact that by the 15th 
century the present natural divisions of Europe were more or less 
established. The Romanesque style had been international though 
regionally subdivided, just as the Holy Roman Empire and the 
Church of the nth and 12th centuries had been international forces. 
Then, in the 13th century, France became a nation and created the 
Gothic style. 

Germany went through the crisis of the Interregnum and decided 
on a national, as against the previous international policy. The same 
decision was taken at the same time in England, while in Italy a 
wholly different development of many small town-states set in. 
Gothic came into Germany, Spain, England and Italy as a French 
fashion. Cistercian monasteries first, and then Cologne, Burgos and 
Leon, Canterbury and Frederick II’s Castel del Monte (see p. 54) 
followed it closely. But already in Frederick II s Italian buildings 
there appear purely antique pediments side by side with the novel 
rib-vaults of France. The appreciative treatment of Roman motifs 
in Frederick II’s Capua Gate is unparalleled anywhere in the 
North, and in the Soujh only by Nicolo Pisano’s pulpits. Nicolo 
Pisano was the first of the great Italian sculptors, the first in whose 
work the Italian character dominates over international conventions. 
His transformation of the current style in sculpture into something 
more static and more harmonious was paralleled by similar trans¬ 
formations of Gothic architecture. The role of the friars in this trans¬ 
formation has been mentioned. There is no excelsior in their wide, 
airy, aisleless halls. The large ones with aisles, such as S. Maria Novella 
and S. Croce in Florence, have such wide arcades and such shallow 
aisles that the static nature of the rooms is hardly disturbed. The 
cathedral of Florence—a cathedral, but due to the financial enter¬ 
prise of the guild of the wool merchants—belongs to the same 
family (pi. xlvi). Its piers with their substantial bases and heavy 
capitals do not point upward. The uninterrupted cornice provides 
a strong horizontal division. The cross-vaults are dome-shaped, and 
clearly isolate bay from bay. Clarity is also the expression of the dark 

75 



THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. I25O-C. I5OO 

structural members against the whitewashed surfaces of walls and 
vaults. To the traveller coming from the North these Italian interiors 
of the 14th century appear spacious, restful and serene. 

It was only here—this will now be appreciated—that the style of 
the Renaissance could be conceived, here, in the land of Ro man 
traditions, of sun, blue sea and noble hills, of vineyards and olive 
plantations, of pine groves, cedars and cypress trees. 



41. TOMAR, WINDOW OF CHAPTER-HOUSE, C. 15 20 . 



CHAPTER V 


Renaissance and Mannerism 

c. 1420 -c. 1600 

T he Gothic style was created for Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, 
councillor of two kings of France, the Renaissance for the 
merchants of Florence, bankers to the kings of Europe. It 
is in the atmosphere of the most prosperous of Southern trading 
republics that about 1420 the new style emerged. A firm such as that 
of the Medici had its representatives in London, in Bruges and Ghent, 
in Lyons and Avignon, in Milan and Venice. A Medici had been 
Mayor of Florence in 1296, another in 1376, yet another in 1421. In 
1429 Cosimo Medici became senior partner of the firm. Just over 
one hundred years later another Medici was created the first Duke 
of Tuscany. But Cosimo, whom they called in Florence the Father 
of the Fatherland, and his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent, were 
only citizens, not even, by any official title, the first of their city. 
To these and to the other princely merchants, the Pitti, the Rucellai, 
the Strozzi. it is due that the Renaissance was at once wholeheartedly 
accepted in Florence and developed with a wonderful unanimity of 
purpose for thirty or forty years, before other cities of Italy, let alone 
foreign countries, had grown to understand its meaning. 

This predisposition of Tuscany cannot be explained by social con¬ 
ditions alone. The cities of Flanders in the 15 th century were socially 
of quite a comparable structure; so up to a point was the City of 
London. Yet the style in the Netherlands was a flamboyant Late 
Gothic; in England it was Perpendicular. In Florence what happened 
was that a particular social situation coincided with a particular 
nature of country and people, and a particular historical tradition. 
The geographical and national character of the Tuscans had found 
its earliest expression in Etruscan art. They were again clearly 
noticeable in the nth century in the crisp and graceful facade of 
S. Miniato (pi. xxin) and in the 14th in die spacious, happily airy 
Gothic churches of S. Croce, S. Maria Novella and the cathedral of 
S. Maria del Fiore (pi. xlvi). Now a flourishing trading republic 
will tend to worldly ideals, not to the transcendental; to the active, 
not to meditation; to clarity, not to the obscure. And since the 

77 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-C. l600 

climate was clear, keen and salutary, and the people’s minds clear, 
keen and proud, it was here that the clear, proud and worldly spirit 
of Roman Antiquity could be rediscovered, that its contrast with 
Christian faith did not bar its way, that its attitude to physical 
beauty in the fine arts and beauty of proportion in architecture 
found an echo, that its grandeur and its humanity were understood. 
The fragments of the Roman past in art and literature had been there 
all the time, and had never been entirely forgotten. But only the 
14th century reached a point that made a cult of the Antique possible. 
Petrarch—the first Poet Laureate of modern times, crowned on the 
Capitol in 1341—was a Tuscan; so was Boccaccio, so was Leonardo 
Bruni who translated Plato. And as the Medici honoured the philoso¬ 
phers and called them into their innermost circle, as they honoured 
the poets and wrote poetry themselves, so they regarded the artists 
in a spirit quite different from that of the Middle Ages. The modern 
conception of the artist and the respect due to his genius is again of 
Tuscan origin. 

Seven years before Petrarch was crowned in Rome, the civic 
authorities responsible for the appointment of a new master-mason 
to the cathedral and city of Florence decided to elect Giotto, the 
painter, because they were convinced that the city architect should 
be “a famous man” above all. So for the sole reason that they be¬ 
lieved that “in the whole world no one better could be found in this 
and many other things” than Giotto, they chose him, although he 
was not a mason at all. Now this marks the beginning of a new 
period in the professional history of architecture, just as Petrarch’s 
crowning marks a new period in the history of the social status of 
authors. Henceforth—this is especially characteristic of the Renais¬ 
sance—great architects were not usually architects by training. And 
henceforth great artists were honoured and admitted into positions 
outside their craft simply because they were great artists. Cosimo 
Medici is probably the first who called a painter, in recognition of 
his genius, divine. Later this became the attribute universally given 
to Michelangelo. And he, sculptor, painter and architect, a fanatical 
worker and a man who never spared himself, was deeply convinced 
that it was his due. When he felt slighted by some of the pope’s 
servants in an ante-room of the Vatican, he fled from Rome, desert¬ 
ing his post without hesitation and leaving a message that the pope 
could look for him elsewhere, if he wanted him. Leonardo da Vinci 
at the time when this happened evolved the theory of the ideal nature 

78 



THE SPIRIT OF THE RENAISSANCE 

of art. He endeavoured to prove that painting and architecture were 
of the liberal arts, not arts in the trade sense of the Middle Ages. 
There are two sides to this theory. It demands from the patron a new 
attitude towards the artist, but also from the artist a new attitude 
towards his work. Only the artist who approached his art in an 
academic spirit, that is as a seeker after law, had a right to be re¬ 
garded as their equal by the scholars and authors of humanism. 

Leonardo has not much to say about Antiquity. But the universal 
fascination of Antiquity was evidently both aesthetic and social, 
aesthetic in so far as the forms of Roman architecture and decoration 
appealed to artists and patrons of the 15 th century, social in so far 
as the study of the Roman past was accessible to the educated only. 
So the artist and architect who until then had been satisfied with 
learning their craft from their masters and developing it according 
to tradition and their powers of imagination, now devoted their 
attention to the art of Antiquity, not only because it enchanted them 
but also because it conferred social distinction on them. So strongly 
had this revival impressed the scholars from the 16th to the 19th 
century that they called the whole period that of rebirth, rinascita 
or Renaissance. Early writers by using this term meant the rebirth 
of art and letters in quite a general sense. But in the 19th century— 
a century of unlimited period revival—the emphasis was laid on the 
imitation of Roman forms and motifs. In re-examining the works 
of the Renaissance to-day, one must however ask oneself whether 
the new attitude towards Antiquity is really their essential innova¬ 
tion. 

The very first building in Renaissance forms is Brunelleschi’s 
Foundling Hospital, begun in 1419 (pi. XLvm). Brunelleschi (1377- 
1446) was a goldsmith by training. Yet he had been chosen to com¬ 
plete the cathedral of Florence by adding the dome over the cross¬ 
ing, a masterpiece of construction and of a shape distinctly Gothic 
in character. At the same time, however, he designed the Foundling 
facade, a work of a completely different kind, consisting of a colon¬ 
nade on the ground floor with delicate Corinthian columns and wide 
semicircular arches letting enough sun and warmth penetrate into 
the loggia, and a first floor with generously spaced moderately sized 
rectangular windows under shallow pediments corresponding exactly 
to the arches beneath. Medallions in coloured terra-cotta by della 
Robbia—the famous babes in swaddling clothes sold in cheap copies 
of all sizes by the souvenir-dealers of Florence—are placed into the 

79 


E.A.—7 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-C. 1600 

spandrels of the arcade. A subtly scaled architrave divides ground 
floor from first floor. Now the pediments over the windows are 
certainly a Roman motif. So seem to be the Corinthian columns. 
But arches on such slender columns are really in their expression 
just as different from those of, say, the Colosseum, as they are from 
any Gothic arcades. Their source and that of several other motifs 
of.the facade is the Tuscan Proto-Renaissance of S. Miniato 
(pi. xxxn), i.e. the architecture of Florence in the nth and 12th 



42. FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI: STO. SPIRITO, FLORENCE, BEGUN 1435. 


centuries, and nothing else. This is an eminently significant fact. 
The Tuscans, unconsciously of course, prepared themselves for the 
reception of the Roman style by first going back to their own 
Romanesque Proto-Renaissance. 

The relation of Brunelleschi’s churches to the past is very similar. 
Sto. Spirito (pi. xlvii and fig. 42), which he designed in 1435, is a 
basilica with round-headed arcades and a flat roof; Romanesque, 
one can say, in these general characteristics. The bases and capitals of 
the Corinthian columns, on the other hand, and the fragments of an 
entablature above are Roman, rendered with a correctness and under¬ 
standing of their vigorous beauty that were beyond the power of 
the architects of the Proto-Renaissance. The curious niches of the 
aisles are also Roman, though treated in a very original way. But 

80 












HIXPPO BRUNELLESCHI 


while the motifs mentioned so far can be traced back to the Middle 
Ages or Antiquity, the spatial expression created with their aid is 
wholly new and has all the delicacy and serenity of the Early Renais¬ 
sance. The nave is just twice as high as it is wide. Ground floor and 
clerestory are of equal height. The aisles have square bays, again half 
as wide as they are high. The nave consists of exactly four and a half 
squares, and the odd half was intended to be disposed of in a special 
way to be mentioned presently. Walking through the church, one 
may not at once consciously register ah these proportions, but 
they contribute all the same decisively to the effect of serene order 
which the interior produces. It is difficult to-day to imagine the 
^enthusiasm of the Early Renaissance for such simple mathematical 
relations in space. One must remember in order to appreciate it that 
at that very moment—about 1425—painters in Florence discovered 
the laws of perspective. Just as they had no longer been satisfied with 
an arbitrary presentation of the space inside their pictures, so archi¬ 
tects were now anxious to find rational proportions for their build¬ 
ings. The effort of the 15th century to master space is only compar¬ 
able with that of our own age, although that of the Renaissance 
concerned an ideal world and ours a material. The invention of 
printing towards the middle of the century proved a most powerful 
conquest of space. The discovery of America towards its end pro¬ 
duced results nearly as important. Both must be named with the 
discovery of perspective as aspects of Western space enthusiasm, 
an attitude utterly alien to Antiquity, and one to which attention 
has already been drawn more than once in this book. 

The feature of Sto. Spirito most important in this connection is 
the ground plan of its eastern parts. For here Brunelleschi has 
departed decisively from the normal composition of Romanesque 
or Gothic churches. The way in which he made the transepts 
exactly identical with the choir, ran an aisle round all three and 
placed a dome over the crossing makes us feel, looking eastward, as 
if we were in a centrally planned building, a type usual in Roman 
architecture, both religious and secular, but very rare in mediaeval 
Christian churches. 

Even the west end was intended to be finished in a way stressing 
• this centralising tendency at the expense of practical advantages. 
Brunelleschi had originally meant to continue the aisle round the west 
as round the east, north and south ends. He would then have had 
to put in four instead of the customary three entrances, to comply 

81 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. 1420 -C. l600 

with the four bays of aisle along the inner side of the facade. It would 
all have been exceedingly unusual—a sacrifice to aesthetic consistency 
and the desire for centralisation. Indeed, during the very year in 
which Sto. Spirito was begun, Brunelleschi had designed a com¬ 
pletely central church, the first of the Renaissance. It is S. Maria degli 

Angeli (figs. 43 and 
44). After three 
years, in 1437, the 
building was dis¬ 
continued, and only 
ground-floor walls 
now remain. But 
we can read the 
plan and compare it 
with reliable en¬ 
gravings taken, it 
seems, from lost 
original drawings. S. Maria 
degli Angeli was to be wholly 
Roman in character and very 
massive, the outcome no doubt 
of a long stay of Brunelleschi 
in Rome to which we can 
with a good deal of certainty 
assign the date 1433. The light, 
slim columns of the other 
buildings are here replaced by 
pilasters attached to solid piers 
at the eight corners of the 
octagon. Eight chapels sur¬ 
round it, each with niches 
hollowed out into the thick¬ 
ness of the walls. The dome also was to be of one piece in side and 
out like a Roman dome and not on the Gothic principle of an 
outer and a separate inner shell, still applied by Brunelleschi to 
Florence Cathedral. Of Romanesque or Proto-Renaissance con¬ 
nections there are here none left. What Roman building in 
particular inspired Brunelleschi we can no longer say. There were 
plenty of remains still in existence in the 15 th century and drawn 
by architects, which have now disappeared. 

82 



J-*4- 




'etb 


43 AND 44 . FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI: S. 
MARIA DEGLI ANGELI, FLORENCE, BEGUN 

*434* 












THE FIRST CENTRAL PLANS OF THE RENAISSANCE 


However, one more central 
building, or rather part of a 
building, was begun shortly 
after S. Maria degli Angeli 
and completed, and this is a 
direct copy of an existing 
Roman monument. Michel¬ 
ozzo (1396-1472) began in 
1445 to add to the mediaeval 
church of the SS. Annunziata 
a round east end with eight 

or nirlifs pxs.ctlv £LS lie Rome, c. a,d. 250. lower half, michel- 
cnapeis or nicnes exactly a ozzo’s rotunda at the east end of the ss. 

had seen it done in the so-called annunziata, Florence, begun 1444. 

temple of Minerva Medica 

in Rome (fig. 45). So while in the early works of Brunelleschi we 
cannot too much emphasise the independence of the new forms 
from those of Roman antiquity, the discovery of how much could 
be learned from Rome to satisfy topical aesthetic needs came as early 
as the thirties and forties. That it appears most clearly in centrally 
planned buildings is eminently characteristic. For a central plan is 
not an other-worldly, but a this-worldly conception. The prime 
function of the mediaeval church had been to lead the faithful to 
the altar. In a completely centralised building (fig. 44) no such 
movement is possible. The building has its full effect only when it 
is looked at from the one focal point. There the spectator must stand 
and, by standing there, he becomes himself “the measure of all 
things”. Thus the religious meaning of the church is replaced by a 
human one. Man is in the church no longer pressing forward to 
reach a transcendental goal, but enjoying the beauty that surrounds 
him -and the glorious sensation of being the centre of this beauty. 

No more telling symbol could have been conceived for the new 
attitude of the humanists and their patrons to Man and religion. 
Pico della Mirandola, one of the most interesting of the philosophers 
round Lorenzo the Magnificent, delivered an address in 1486 on The 
Dignity of Man. Machiavelli, a little later, wrote his book The Prince 
to glorify the power of Man’s will, and set it as the prime moving 
force against the powers of religion that had up to his time inter¬ 
fered with practical thought. And again a little later Count Castig- 
lione composed his Courtier to show his contemporaries their ideal 
of universal man. The courtier, he says, should be agreeable in his 

83 





RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. 1420-C. 1600 

manners, graceful, a good causeur and a good dancer, yet strong and 
fit, well versed in the pursuits of chivalry, riding, fencing and joust¬ 
ing. At the same time he should read poetry and history, be acquain¬ 
ted with Plato and Aristotle, understand all the arts, and practise 
music and drawing. Leonardo da Vinci was the first amongst artists 
to live up to this ideal: painter, architect, engineer and musician, one 
of the most ingenious scientists of his time, and enchanting in his 
personal ways. Only Christianity apparently did not occupy his 
mind at all. Lorenzo Valla, a Roman humanist, somewhat earlier 
had published his dialogue De voluptate, in which he openly praised 
the pleasures of the senses. The same Valla proved with a philological 
sagacity unknown before the rise of Humanism that the so-called 
Donation of Constantine, the document on which all papal claims to 
worldly domination rested, was faked. Yet he died a canon of the 
Lateran Cathedral in Rome. The philosophers of Florence founded 
an academy on Plato’s model, kept Plato’s supposed birthday as a 
holiday and preached a semi-Greek, semi-Christian religion in which 
Christ s love is mixed up with Plato’s principle of divine love that 
makes us pine for beauty of soul and body in human beings. On one 
of the frescoes in the choir of Sta. Maria Novella an inscription can 
be read stating that the frescoes were completed in 1490, .“when this 
loveliest of lands distinguished in riches, victories, arts and buildings 
enjoyed plenty, health and peace”. About the same time Lorenzo the 
Magnificent wrote his most famous poem, which begins as follows: 

Quant’d bella giovinezza. 

Che si frugge tuttavia. 

Chi vuol esser lieto sia. 

Di domari non c d certezza. 

The lines are well known, and rightly so. They are here quoted in 
Italian, because they should be remembered in all their original 
melodiousness. Literally translated they mean: 

How lovely is youth. 

But it flies from us. 

If you want to be happy, be happy now. 

There is no certainty of to-morrow. 

, Now these men, if they builta church, did not want to be reminded 
y its appearance of that uncertain to-morrow and of what may 
come after this life has ended. They wanted architecture to eternalise 

84 



MILAN AND THE CENTRAL PLAN 


the present. So they commissioned 
churches as temples to their own 
glory. The eastern rotunda of the 
Annunziata was intended to be a 
memorial in Florence to the Gon- 
zaga, rulers of Mantua. At the same 
time Francesco Sforza of Milan 
seems to have thought of such a 
temple. A record of what was in¬ 
tended survives in a medal of about 
1460 by the sculptor Sperandicr(fig. 
46). It seems to represent a building 
of perfectly symmetrical plan 
though of a type not yet met with: 
the Greek cross, that is the cross with 
all arms of equal length. It was to 
be covered with five domes, just 
as Perigueux and St. Mark’s in 
Venice three or four hundred years 
before. The design may be due to 
that mysterious Florentine sculptor 
and architect Antonio Filarete 
(died about 1470), who worked 
for Francesco Sforza from 1451 to 
1465. His fame now rests mainly 
on the Milan hospital, the Ospedale 
Maggiore, which was begun in 
1457, a vast enterprise not carried 
on in elevation to his designs, 
though in plan. The plan is remark¬ 
able in that it appears the first of 
those large symmetrical piles with 
many inner courtyards—nine at 
Milan—taken up in the 16th and 
17th centuries for such royal 
schemes as the Escorial, the 
Tuileries and Whitehall. 

But Filarete*s ambitions were for 
planning on a yet grander scale. He 
wrote a treatise on architecture, 

85 



46. PROJECTED SFORZA CHAPEL, 
MILAN. PLAN RECONSTRUCTED FROM 
SPERANDIO’S MEDAL, C. 1460. 



47. ANTONIO FILARETE! PROJECTED 
CHAPEL FOR THE HOSPITAL, MILAN. 
RECONSTRUCTED FROM THE ORIGINAL 
DRAWING, C. I455. 



48. ANTONIO filarete: CHURCH FOR 
2 AGALIA, RECONSTRUCTED FROM THE 
ORIGINAL DRAWING, 4 *. 1455-60. 
















RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. 142O-C. l600 


dedicated in different copies to Francesco Sforza and one of the 
Medici of Florence, where the architect returned when he left Milan. 
Perhaps the most interesting part of the treatise is the description of 
an ideal town, Sforzinda; for this is the first wholly symmetrical 
town plan in Western history, a regular octagon with radial streets 
and with palace and cathedral on the square in the centre—again 
the central obsession of this first century liberated from the ties of 
mediaeval authority. 

Thus it is not surprising to find that the churches of Sforzinda, of 
Zagalia (another town drawn up in the treatise) and of the hospital 

this church was never built either—were meant to be of central 
plan. They introduce us to yet more varieties. Sforzinda and the 
Hospital (fig. 47) are square with a central dome and subsidiary little 
domed chapels in the four corners—a plan for which an Early 
Christian (or rather 9th century) prototype existed at Milan, the 
Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre at S. Satiro and a Michelozzo proto¬ 
type at S. Maria delle Grazie at Pistoia (begun 1452). Zagalia (fig. 
48) has an octagonal central dome and octagonal chapels in the 
corners. All three churches were to be provided with four fantastically 
tall minarets over the four corner chapels, or somewhere between 
them and the centre (for the drawings are ambiguous in this). 1 A 
chapel actually built at S. Eustorgio in Milan in 1462 to Michelozzo’s 
designs is square and domed and has little turrets on the four corners, 
but no chapels below. Michelozzo also designed a palace for the 
Medici Bank at Milan. It was begun in die forms of Florentine 
Renaissance, but continued with the more irresponsible detail of the 
North Italian Godiic. The same happened to die hospital. 

Lombardy was not yet capable of an understanding of the Renais¬ 
sance. Time and again we find that up to the middle of the 15th 
century and beyond only the Tuscans were at ease with the new 
style. Michelozzo and Filarete in Milan were Florentine, and of a 
Florentine family also came the greatest of Quattrocento architects, 
Leone Battista Alberti, to whose work we must now turn. 

_ ^ Alberti (1404-72) we have again a new type of architect. 
Brunelleschi and Michelangelo are sculptor-architects, Giotto and 


rb a^ged for me to have the plan of the Zagalia 

filr °Kr erS - Spe , Qall X photographed from Filarete’s Codice Manila- 
S ri ( f ?°“ Ca a NaZ i 0nale ’ Flore f e ’ lr > ho; gih xvn, 30). The Zaghlia 
fc“ w ?!f? a r ed “f LaI ? zarolu 311(1 Munoz’s book on Filarete and has never 
5T k T ed ^ ef ° re ; Re-drawing was necessary for reasons of clarity and has 

been done by Miss Margaret Tallet. ' 


8<S 



LEONE BATTISTA ALBERTI 


Leonardo da Vinci painter-architects. Alberti is the first of the great 
dilettante-architects, a man of noble birth who first took an interest 
in art and architecture in the way Count. Castiglione demands it 
from the educated courtier. He wrote a book on painting and one on 
the art of building (in Latin), and while working in Rome as a 
member of the papal civil service, work which left him plenty of 
free time to travel, he studied intensively the ruins of Antiquity. It 
is obvious that directly the essence of architecture was considered to 
be philosophy and mathematics (the divine laws of order and pro¬ 
portion) and archeology (the monuments of Antiquity), the theore¬ 
tician and dilettante would assume a new significance. Roman 
architecture, both system and details, must be studied and drawn 
to be learnt; and the system behind the styles of Antiquity was soon 
—with the help of Vitruvius, the newly rediscovered Roman 
writer on architecture—found to lie in the orders, i.e. the propor¬ 
tions belonging to the Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite and 
Tuscan columns and entablatures. By means of books on the orders 
foreign countries were taught the rules of classical building. 

But Alberti was not a dry theorist. In him the spirit of the scholar 
lived in a rare and happy union with genuine imaginative and crea¬ 
tive powers. The front of S. Francesco in Rimini (pi. l), begun 
in 1446 but never completed, is the first in Europe to adapt the com¬ 
position of the Roman triumphal arch to church architecture. So 
Alberti was much more serious than Brunelleschi in reviving the 
Antique. And he did not confine himself to motifs. The side of the 
church, opened in seven round-headed niches with heavy piers 
dividing them, has perhaps more of the gravity of Flavian Rome 
than any other building of the 15th century. Now these niches hold 
sarcophagi, the monuments to the humanists of Sigismondo 
Malatesta’s court. For the east end apparently a large dome was pro¬ 
jected, as dominating as that of the Annunziata in Florence, and 
again as a monument to the glory of Sigismondo and his Isotta. 
Sigismondo was a typical Renaissance tyrant, unscrupulous and 
cruel but sincerely fascinated by the new learning and the new art. 
The church of S. Francesco is in fact known under the name of the 
Temple of the Malatesta; and on its facade an inscription runs in 
large letters with Sigismondo’s name and the date—nothing else. 

Again exactly the same pride is exhibited by Giovanni Rucellai, 
a merchant of Florence for whom Alberti designed the second of 
his church fronts. Again his name appears over-conspicuously on the 

87 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I420-C. 1600 

facade of S. Maria Novella, and when in his old age he wrote an 
account of his life he said of the architectural and decorative work 
he had commissioned for the churches of his beloved native town: 
“All these things have given me, and are giving me, the greatest 
satisfaction and the sweetest feelings. For they do honour to the 
Lord, to Florence and to my own memory”. It is this attitude that 
made it possible for the donors of the frescoes inside the choir of the 
same church to appear lifesize in the costumes of the day as if they 
were actors in the sacred stories. It is this attitude also that made 
the patricians of Florence—and the cardinals of Rome—build their 
Renaissance palaces. That of the Medici begun by Michelozzo in 1444 
was the first (fig. 49), that of the Pitti, originally, it seems, designed 
by Alberti about 1458 and considerably enlarged a century later, and 
that of the Strozzi are the most famous. They are massive yet orderly, 
faced with heavily rusticated blocks and crowned by bold cornices. 
Their windows, symmetrically placed, are divided into two by 
graceful columns (a Romanesque motif again). What one expects of 
Renaissance delicacy and articulation is to be found chiefly in their 
inner courtyards. There the ground floors are opened as cloisters with 
the graceful arcades of the Foundling Hospital and Sto. Spirito, and 
the upper floors are also enlivened by an open gallery or pilasters 
dividing the walls into separate bays, or some such feature. 

Only in Rome was a severer treatment of courtyards evolved. It 
appears first in the Palazzo Venezia, a building begun in 1455. It is 
derived from the classic Roman motif of columns attached to solid 
piers, the motif of the Colosseum and also of the front of Alberti’s 
S. Francesco in Rimini. Maybe it was he who suggested its resuscita¬ 
tion in Rome, though his name cannot be documentarily connected 
with the Palazzo Venezia. A most attractive compromise between 
the Florentine and the Roman systems appears in the Ducal Palace 
at Urbino (pi. xlix), another of the architecturally and altogether 
aesthetically most enterprising smaller courts of Italy. It is known 
that Luciano Laurana worked at Urbino between 1466 and his death 
in 1479 - Probably we owe the courtyard to him. It preserves the airy 
lightness of the Florentine arcades, but emphasises the corners by 
pilasters. The result is the happiest balance, making Michelozzo’s 
courtyard appear flimsy, and the Roman ones clumsy. 

Alberti himself designed one palace in Florence, the Palazzo 
Rucellai (pi. Li), begun in 1446 for the same patron as the facade ot 
S. Maria Novella. The courtyard here has no emphasis, but Alberti 

88 




49 - MICHELOZZO: PALAZZO MEDICI, FLORENCE, BEGUN 1 444. 





































































RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. 1420 -C. l6<X> 

used its pilasters in the facade and thereby introduces a splendid new 
means for articulating a wall. There are three superimposed orders of 
pilasters with a free Doric treatment on the ground floor, a free Ionic 
on the first floor and Corinthian on the top. 

While these pilasters divide the front vertically, sensitively de¬ 
signed cornices emphasise the horizontal divisions. The top cornice 
is probably the earliest in Florence, earlier even than that of 
Michelozzo’s Palazzo Medici. Before then projecting eaves in the 
mediaeval way had been used. The windows of the Palazzo Rucellai 
are bipartite as in the other palaces, but an architrave separates the 
main rectangle from the two round heads. The relation of height to 
width in the rectangular parts of the windows is equal to the relation 
ofheight to width in the bays. Thus the position of every detail seems 
to be determined. No shifting is possible. In this lies, according to 
Alberti’s theoretical writings, the very essence of beauty, which he 
defines as “the harmony and concord ofall the parts achieved in such 
a maimer that nothing could be added or taken away or altered 
except for the worse”. 

Such definitions make one feel the contrast of Renaissance and 
Gothic most sharply. In Gothic architecture the sensation of growth 
is predominant everywhere. The height of piers is not ruled by the 
width of bays, nor the depth of a capital, or rather a cap, by the height 
of the pier. The addition of chapels or even aisles to parish churches 
is much less likely to spoil the whole than in a Renaissance building. 
For in the Gothic style motif follows motif, as branch follows branch, 
up a tree. 

One could not imagine a donor in the 14th century decreeing, as 
Pope Pius II did when rebuilding the cathedral of his native town 
(renamed Pienza to perpetuate his name), that no one should ever 
erect sepulchral monuments in the church or found new altars, or 
have wall-paintings executed, or add chapels, or alter the colour of 
walls or piers. For a Gothic building is never complete in that sense. 
It remains a live being influenced in its destiny by the piety of genera¬ 
tion after generation. And as its beginning and end are not fixed in 
time so they are not in space. In the Renaissance style the building 
is anaesthetic whole consisting of self-sufficient parts. A composition 
in the flat or in space is arrived at by grouping such parts according 
to a static system. 

Now the Romanesque style is—as has been shown—also a static 
style. It is also a style in which the adding of clearly defined spatial 

90 



RENAISSANCE COMPARED WITH GOTHIC AND ROMANESQUE 

nnk s is essential. How then can the difference in principle be formu¬ 
lated between a Norman and a Renaissance church? Walls are 
equally important in both, whereas the Gothic style always en¬ 
deavours to invalidate them. But a Romanesque wall is primarily 
inert. If it is ornamented, the exact place where decoration is applied 
seems arbitrary. One hardly ever feels that a little more or a little 
less ornament, or ornament shifted to a slightly higher or slightly 
lower position, would make a decisive difference. In the Renaissance 
building this is not so. The walls appear active, enlivened by the 
decorative elements which in their sizes and arrangement follow 
laws of human reaso nin g. It is ultimately this humanising that makes 
a Renaissance building what it is. Arcades are airier and more open 
than they had been. The graceful columns have the beauty of animate 
beings. They keep to a human scale too, and as they lead from part 
to part, even when a building is very large, one is never overwhelmed 
by its sheer size. This, on the other hand, is just what the Norman 
architect wishes to achieve. He conceives a wall as a whole and then 
keeps the expression of might and mass to the smallest detail. Hence, 
one need scarcely add, Romanesque sculptors could not yet re¬ 
discover the beauty of the human body. This rediscovery, and the 
discovery of linear perspective, had to come with the Renaissance. 












RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-C. 160O 

Sto. Spirito, or the Palazzo Rucellai, proves this to anyone susceptible 
to their specific character. 

To illustrate the principle of an all-pervading order which Alberti 
postulates in an interior as well, the plan of S. Andrea in Mantua 
Alberti’s last work, may be analysed (fig. 50). As in Sto. Spirito the 
east parts are a central composition. Alberti had in fact also made a 
contribution to the architects’ burning problem of the completely 

central plan. His S. Sebastiano 
in Mantua (fig. 51) is a Greek 
cross. It was designed in 1460, 
that is just before or just 
after the Sforza Temple of 
Sperandio’s medal. But 
Alberti’s solution is original 
whatever its date, austere and 
aloof, with its curiously pagan 
facade. No wonder that a 
cardinal could write of it in 
1473: “I don’t see if this is 
meant to turn out a church 
or a mosque or a synagogue”. 

. . . From the point of view of 

practica c urch functions such central buildings are conspicuously 
useless. So we find from the beginning attempts at combining the 
traditional longitudinal plan with aesthetically more welcome 
central features. Sto. Spirito was one example. The most influential 
one, however, is S. Andrea in Mantua which was begun in 1470 
two years only before Alberti’s death. Here the architect replaces 
the traditional nave and aisles arrangement by a series of side 
chapels taking the place of the aisles and connected with the nave 
alternately by tall and wide and low and narrow openings. The 
aisles thus cease to be part of the eastward movement and become 
a senes of minor centres accompanying the spacious tunnel-vaulted 
nave. As to the walls enclosing the nave the same intention is 
evident in the replacement of the simple basilican sequence ofcolumns 
° Cadl otI f* without caesura, by the rhythmical alteration 

n ta a prmcip e of the closed and the open bays. To what extent 
the keeping ofthe same proportions throughout is responsible for 
Ae deeper restfiil harmony of S. Andrea will be appreciated, if one 
kses that the same a b a rhythm, identical even in details, is used 



92 



Alberti’s later works 


as the chief motif of the facade of the church, and that the propor¬ 
tion of the arches of the crossing repeats that of the side chapels. 

Alberti was not the only architect to experiment with such 
rhythmical combinations in the longitudinal church building. The 
North of Italy proved especially interested in the application of the 
principle to the church with nave and aisles, after a Florentine archi¬ 
tect had given the first, hints at Faenza Cathedral (1474). Ferrara, 
Parma and other centres picked them up and soon we see this trend 
of thought unite forces with that interested in central plans on the 
Milanese scheme of a central dome with four smaller and lower domes 
in the corners. Venice and the Veneto had begun to build central 
churches of this type shortly before 1500, and in 1506 an otherwise 
little-known architect, Spavento, found the classic solution for its 
application to the basilica. S. Salvatore in Venice (fig. 52) consists of 
a nave of two of the Milano-Venetian units plus an exactly identical 
crossing. Only the transepts and apses are tacked on a little incon¬ 
gruously. 

S. Salvatore stands in a similar relation to Alberti’s S. Andrea in 
Mantua as, in the field of domestic architecture, stands the Cancelleria 
in Rome (fig. 53) to Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai. The Cancelleria was 
built in 1486-98 as the private residence of Cardinal Riario, nephew 
of Sixtus IV, one of the most formidable of the Renaissance popes. 
These popes considered themselves worldly rulers almost more than 
priests. Julius II, another nephew of Sixtus IV, under whom the new 
St. Peter’s was begun, and for whom Michelangelo painted the 



93 













RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I420-C. 1600 

Sistine Chapel and Raphael the 
Stanze of the Vatican, asked 
Michelangelo to portray him in 
a statue for Bologna with a 
sword instead of a book; for, 
he said: “I am a soldier, not a 
scholar”. Of Alexander VI, and 
his nephew Cesare Borgia, it is 
sufficient to mention the names 
in this connection. The Palazzo 
Riario has a ground floor 
without pilasters, because it 
seemed more reasonable to 
preserve the integrity of the 
rustication, where only small 
windows were required. On 
the first and second floors 
there are pilasters, but not in 
the simple sequence of the 
Palazzo Rucellai. Again the a 
b a rhythm is used to give life 
and rule to the facade. It will 
also be noticed that, whereas 
Alberti’s horizontal divisions 
had to serve as cornices and at 
the same time window sills, 
the unknown architect of the 
della cancellerxa) in rome, 1486-98. ^anceileria gives each function 

its clearly visible architectural 
expression. Moreover the corner bays of the building are slightly 
projected, so that to the right and the left there is no vagueness 
about the composition either. 

The Cancelleria is the first Renaissance building of more than 
ocal importance in Rome. About the time, however, when it was 
Rome took the leadership in architecture and art out of 
the hands of Florence. This moment marks the beginning of the High 
Renaissance. The Early Renaissance was essentially Tuscan. The 
High .Renaissance is Roman, because Rome was at that time the 
only mternational centre of civilisation, and the High Renaissance 
as an ideal classicity which made it internationally acceptable and 

94 




LEONARDO DA VINCI AND BRAMANTE 

in fact internationally canonic for centuries. Rome’s place in the 
history of the Renaissance style corresponds exactly to that of Paris 
and the cathedrals around Paris in the history of the Gothic style. 
We do not know to what part of France the architects of Notre 
Dame, Chartres, Rheims and Amiens belonged by birth and up¬ 
bringing, but we do know that Donato Bramante came from Lom¬ 
bardy, Raphael from Umbria and Michelangelo from Tuscany. 
These are the three greatest architects of the High Renaissance, and 
none of them—again the case we have met before—was an architect 
by training. Bramante was originally a painter, Raphael too, and 
Michelangelo a sculptor. 

Bramante was the oldest of them. He was born in 1444 near 
Urbino. There he grew up while Laurana’s palace rose, and the great 
Piero della Francesca painted for the duke. Bramante as a youth 
must have been greatly impressed by Piero’s figures and his Albert- 
esque architectural backgrounds. In 1472 he went to Milan. His first 
building there, the church of S. Satiro, begun in 1479, presupposes 
a knowledge of Alberti’s S. Andrea in Mantua, a building only 
started a few years before. It looks as if Bramante had carefully 
studied the plans. His own church had no space for a chancel, and 
so—delighted to make a daring show of his knowledge of linear 
perspective—he feigned one in flat relief. If you stand in the right 
position, the trick comes off to perfection. 

The same church, S. Satiro, 
has a sacristy, centrally plan¬ 
ned; and S. Maria delle Grazie, 

Bramante’s next architectural 
workin Milan, has an east end 
also on a central plan, very 
similar incidentally to Alberti’s 
S. Sebastiano in Mantua. But 
when S. Maria delle Grazie 
was begun in 1492, another 
artist had already lived at 
Milan for nine years, the most 
universal that ever was, and 
one considerably to influence 
the slightly older Bramante: 

Leonardo da VincL Leonardo 
had gone to Milan in 1483 

E-A.—8 



INSTITUT DE FRANCE, BN 20 } 7 , FOLIO 56. 

95 












RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-C. 1600 

as an engineer, a painter, a sculptor, a musician—as anything 
and everything, but not as an architect. Yet in his fertile 
mind architectural problems moved all the time. In Florence 
he had already sketched the plans of Brunelleschi’s Sto. Spirito 
and S. Maria degli Angeli, and in Milan he looked carefully at 
the specifically Milanese solutions proposed by Filarete. The out¬ 
come were drawings in his 
sketch-books showing several 
kinds of complex central 
structures, for instance one 
with a central octagon and eight 
chapels, each of the Milanese 
plan with centre dome and little 
square corner bays (fig. 54). 
So here we find as against the 
central schemes worked out by 
Renaissance architects before 
Leonardo not a major contrasted 

church, from the ms. paris, institut a number or radiating 

DB FRANCE, b, folio 57 v. minor members, but a system 

of three grades each subordinate 
to the one above. Another project was to prove even more im¬ 
portant for the future. It appears in Leonardo’s Paris Manuscript B 
and consists of a combination of a major Greek cross with minor 
Greek crosses in the corners (fig. 55). Bramante must have seen this, 
and remembered it years after he had left Milan and moved to Rome. 
£-• Apart from what Bramante had learnt from Leonardo, the 
change from the Milanese to the Roman atmosphere, which 
took place in 1499, altered his style decisively. His architecture 
assumed at once an austerity far beyond anything in Milan. This 
appears already in his first Roman designs, the cloister for S. 
Maria della Pace and the Tempietto of S. Pietro in Montorio. 
At S. Maria della Pace the courtyard has piers and attached 
columns in the Roman way on the ground floor, and an open 
gallery on the first whose slim columns support a straight archi¬ 
trave instead of arches. At S. Pietro in Montorio Bramante 
appears even graver. The Tempietto of 1502 is the first monument 
of the High as against the Early Renaissance—truly a monument, i.e. 
_ more a sculptural than a strictly architectural achievement (pi. tm). 
It was built to mark the spot on which St. Peter was supposed to 

96 



BRAMANTE IN ROME 


have been crucified. One can thus call it an enlarged reliquary. In 
fact the intention had been to alter the courtyard in which it stood 
into a circular cloister to house the little temple. The first impression 
of the Tempietto after the churches and palaces of the 15 th century 
is almost forbidding. The order of the colonnade is Tuscan Doric, 
the earliest modem use of this severe, unadorned order. It supports 
a correct classical entablature, again a feature that adds weight and 
strictness. There is, moreover, except for the metopes and the shells 
in the niches, not a square inch of decoration on the whole of the 
exterior. This in conjunction with the less novel but equally telling 
simplicity of the proportions—the ratio between width and height 
of the ground floor is repeated in the upper floor—gives the Tem¬ 
pietto a dignity far beyond its size. Here for once the classic Renais¬ 
sance has achieved its conscious aim to emulate classic Antiquity. 
For here is—beyond motifs and even beyond formal expression—a 
building that appears as nearly pure volume as a Greek temple. 
Space—that all-important ingredient of Western architecture— 
seems here defeated. 

But Bramante did not stop there. Only four years after he had 
accomplished the ideal Renaissance expression of architectural 
volume, he set out to reconcile it with the ideal Renaissance expres¬ 
sion of space, as it had been evolved by the 15th-century architects 
from Brunelleschi to Leonardo da Vinci. In 1503 Julius II commis¬ 
sioned him to rebuild St. Peter’s, the holiest of Western churches. 
It was to be a building on a strictly central plan, an amazing decision, 
considering the strength of the tradition in favour of longitudinal 
churches on the one side and the immense religious significance of 
St. Peter’s on the other. With the pope adopting this symbol of 
worldliness for his own church, the spirit of Humanism had indeed 
penetrated into the innermost fortress of Christian resistance. 

Bramante was over sixty when in 1506 the foundation stone was 
laid of the new St. Peter’s (fig. 56). It is a Greek cross, with four 
apses, so extremely symmetrical that on the plan nothing indicates 
which of the apses was to hold the high altar. The main dome was 
.to be accompanied by minor domes over comer chapels. And just 
as in the Leonardo sketch of fig. 55 the rhythm is amplified by 
enlarging the corner chapels into Greek crosses so that each of 
them has two apses of its own, the other two being cut off by the 
arms of the major Greek cross. Thus a square ambulatory is created 
framing a huge central dome, designed to be semispherical like 

97 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. 142O-C. 1600 

the dome over the Tempietto. Four corner turrets (of Milanese 
origin) are added to finish the diagonal axes and complete the ex¬ 
terior into a square with projections only for the main apses. So far 
Bramante’s scheme was not more than a magnificent development 
of 15th-century ideas. What is new and entirely of the 16th century 



56. DONATO BRAMANTE: ORIGINAL PLAN FOR ST. PETER’S IN ROME, 1506. 


is the modelling of the walls and above all the piers supporting the 
central dome, the only parts of Bramante’s plan that were executed 
and still stand. In them nothing is left of the human scale and gentle 
modelling of Early Renaissance members. They are massive pieces 
of masonry, boldly hollowed out as if by the sculptor’s moulding 
hand. This conception of the plastic potentialities of a wall, in its 
origin Late Roman, and first rediscovered (drought less massively 

98 
















BRAMANTE AND RAPHAEL 

used) by the late Brunelleschi of S. Maria degli Angeli, was to be 
of the greatest importance for the future development of Italian 
architecture. 

The immediate future however belonged to Bramante, the master 
of classic harmony and greatness, not to Bramante, the herald of the 
Baroque. Raphael (1483-1520) was the architect to follow most 
closely the Bramante of the Tempietto, and the new courts of the 
Vatican (1503 seqq.), Bramante’s other Roman masterpiece. Of 
Raphael’s architectural works few are actually documented. Amongst 
the buildings attributed to him on good evidence is the Palazzo 
Vidoni CafFarelli in Rome (pi. tn), a very near descendant of the 
Palazzo Caprini which Bramante had designed just before he died in 
1514 and which Raphael had bought in 1517. It is now altered out 
of recognition. The Palazzo CafFarelli is also no longer as Raphael 
intended it to be. It was at a later date considerably enlarged in width 
and height. Here again the change of scale is noticeable which marks 
the High Renaissance. Balance and harmony are still the aims, but 
they are now combined with a solemnity and greatness unknown to 
the 15th century. Tuscan Doric columns replace the pilasters of the 
Palazzo Rucellai and the Cancelleria, and the happy aba rhythm is 
contracted into a weightier a b with a new accent on the a by the 
duplication of the columns, and on the b by the straight architraves 
over the windows. The design of the rustication on the ground floor 
also emphasises the horizontality, i.e. the gravity of the composition. 

The development from the Early to the High Renaissance, from 
delicacy to greatness and from a subtle plan n i n g of surfaces to a bold 
high relief in the modelling of walls encouraged an intensified study 
of the remains of Imperial Rome. Only now their drama was fully 
understood. Only now humanists and artiste endeavoured to visual¬ 
ise and perhaps recreate the Rome of the ruins as a whole. It is thus 
more than a coincidence that Raphael was appointed by Leo X, the 
Medici pope, in 1515 to be Superintendent of Roman Antiquities, 
that he had Vitruvius translated by a humanist friend for his private 
use, and that he (or in all probability he) drew up a memorandum 
to the pope advocating the exact measuring of Roman remains, 
with ground p lans , elevations and sections separate, and the restora¬ 
tion of such buildings as could be “ infallibilmente ” restored. 

Here precisely archaeology in the academic sense begins, an atti¬ 
tude quite different from that of the 15th-century admirers of 
Roman architecture. It produced scholars of ever wider know- 

99 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I420-C. l600* 

ledge and ever deeper appreciation of Antiquity, but artists of 
weakened self confidence, classicists where Bramante and Raphael 
had been classics. 

At this point a warning must be sounded against confusion 
between the three terms classic, classical and classicist. The difference 
between classic and classical has been pointed out on p. 26. If classi c 
‘ is the term denoting that rare balance of conflicting forces which 
marks the summit of any movement in art, and if classical is the term 
for anything belonging to or derived from Antiquity, what then is 
classicist ? A definition is far from easy. In our context it can be 
arrived at only in a somewhat roundabout way. 

Neither classic nor classicist are terms which signify historic styles 
such as Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance. They coincide rather 
with aesthetic attitudes. However, in so far as aesthetic attitudes as 
a rule change with historic styles, the two sets of terms can often be 
co-ordinated. In England the position until a relatively short time 
ago was that the term Renaissance was used to cover die art from 
the 15th right to the early 19th century. But there had been so man y 
fundamental changes of styles during these more dian three hundred 
years, that the term covering such a long period could not stand for 
any distinct aesthetic characteristics. Thus, on the example of the 
Continent, it was gradually divided up into Renaissance and Baroque, 
the Baroque to cover the work of such artists as Bernini, Rembrandt, 
Velasquez. However, since our knowledge of, and susceptibility to, 
distinctions in aesthetic expression has grown considerably within 
the last fifty years or so, it is becoming more and more patent that 
Renaissance and Baroque do not really define the qualities of all art 
of importance in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The contrast 
between Raphael and Bernini or Rembrandt is evident, but art of 
the period between roughly 1520 or 1530 and 1600 or 1620 does not 
fit into the categories of the Renaissance or the Baroque. So a new 
name was introduced about twenty or twenty-five years ago: 
Mannerism, a name which was not specially coined, but which in a 
derogatory sense had already been used to characterise certain schools 
of 16th-century painting. The name in its new sense is only now 
becoming known in this country. It has much to recommend it. It 
certainly helps to make one see the important differences between 
art of the High Renaissance and art of the later 16th century. 

If balance and harmony are the chief characteristics of the High 
Renaissance, Mannerism is its very reverse; for it is an unbalanced, 



RENAISSANCE COMPARED WITH MANNERISM 

discordant art—now emotional to distortion (Tintoretto, El Greco), 
now disciplined to self-effacement (Bronzino). The High Renais¬ 
sance is full. Mannerism is meagre. There is luxuriant beauty in 
Titian, stately gravity in Raphael and gigantic strength in Michel¬ 
angelo, but Mannerist types are slim, elegant and of a stiff and highly 
self-conscious deportment. Self-consciousness to this extent was a 
new experience to the West. The Middle Ages, and the Renaissance 
too, had been much more naive. Reformation and Counter-Re¬ 
formation broke up that state of innocence, and this is why Manner¬ 
ism is indeed full of mannerisms. For the artist now for the first time 
was aware of the virtues of eclecticism. Raphael and Michelangelo 
were recognised as the masters of a Golden Age equal to the Ancients. 
Imitation became a necessity in quite a new sense. The mediaeval 
artist had imitated his masters as a matter of course, but he had not 
doubted his own (or his time’s) ability to surpass them. This con¬ 
fidence had now gone. The first academies were founded, and a 
literature on the history and theory of art sprang up. Vasari is its 
most famous representative. Deviation from the canons of Michel¬ 
angelo and Raphael was not ostracised, but it assumed a new air of 
the capricious, or the demonstrative, or the daring: forbidden 
pleasures. No wonder that the 16th century has seen the sternest 
ascetics and the first writers and draughtsmen to indulge in the 
hidden sins of pornogr'aphy (Aretino and Giulio Romano). 

So far only names of painters have been mentioned because the 
qualities of 16th-century painting are at least a little more familiar 
than those of architecture. The application of the principles of 
Mannerism to architecture is only in its very tentative stages on the 
Continent and in America; in England it has not even been attempted. 
Yet if we now turn to buildings and compare the Palazzo Famese 
(fig. 57 and pi. irv) with the Palazzo Massimi alle Colonne 
(pi. lv) as the most perfect examples of High Renaissance and 
Mannerist palace architecture in Rome, the contrast between their 
emotional qualities will at once be visible. The Palazzo Famese was 
designed in 1530 by Antonio da San Gallo the Younger (1485-1546). 
It is the most monumental of Roman Renaissance palaces, an iso¬ 
lated rectangle of about 150-feet frontage, facing a square. The 
facade has strongly emphasised quoins, but no rustication. The 
ground-floor windows are provided with straight cornices, those 
on the first floor with alternating triangular and segmental pedi¬ 
ments, supported by columns (i.e. so-called cediculce ), a Roman 

101 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O -C. 1600 

motif revived, during the High Renaissance. The top floor and the 
overpowering top cornice were added later and in a diff erent spirit 
(see p. 114). The symmetry and spaciousness of the interior is worth 



57 - ANTONIO DA SAN GALLO: PALAZZO FARNESE, ROME, BEGUN XJJO. 


noting especially the magnificent central entrance with the tunnel- 
vaulted passage leading into the courtyard. This (pi. iw) possesses 
the cloistered ground floor of all Renaissance^ palaces^ now 

/• traditi0n ’ ^ Tuscan Doric 

STt '” ”f t0peS and ^ ofthe 

gilt columns of the Tuscan 15th century. The first floor has no 


102 







THE PALAZZI VIDONI, FARNESE AND MASSIMX 

gallery, but noble, pedimented windows set into blank arcades, and 
an Ionic order. This is correct according to Roman usage (Theatre 
of Marcellus): the sturdier Tuscan Doric must be on the ground 
floor, the elegant Ionic on the first and the rich Corinthian on the 
second. In this (but only in this) the later second floor of the Palazzo 
Farnese follows the archeological example. 

The Palazzo Massimi by Baldassare Peruzzi of Siena (1481-1536) 
a member of the Bramante-Raphael circle in Rome, begun in 1535’ 
disregards all canons of the Ancients. Nor does it really show much 
regard for the achievements of Bramante and Raphael. Both the 
Palazzi Vidoni and Farnese were logical structures in which the 
knowledge of any one part gives a clue to the whole. The entrance 
loggia of the Palazzo Massimi with its coupled Tuscan Doric columns 
and its heavy cornice is in no way a preparation for the upper floors. 
Both the Palazzi Vidoni and Farnese are modelled into a generous 
though not overcharged relief. In the Palazzo Massimi there is a 
poignant contrast between the deep darkness of the ground-floor 
loggia and the papery thinness and flatness of the upper parts. The 
first-floor windows are shallow in relief compared with what the 
High Renaissance regarded as appropriate, the second- and third- 
floor windows are small and have curious leathery surrounds. They 
are in no way differentiated in size or importance, as the Renaissance 
would have done. Moreover a slight curve of the whole facade gives 
it a swaying delicacy, whereas the squareness of the Renaissance 
front seemed to express powerful solidity. The Palazzo Massimi is no 
doubt inferior to the Palazzi Vidoni and Farnese in dignity and 
grandeur; but it has a sophisticated elegance instead which appeals 
to the over-civilised and intellectual connoisseur. 

Now this brings us back to the fact that classicism is an aesthetic 
attitude first appreciated during this phase of Mannerism. The Early 
Renaissance had rediscovered Antiquity and enjoyed a mixture of 
detail copying and a naive licence in the reconstruction of more than 
details. The High Renaissance was in their use of Roman forms 
hardly more accurate, but the Antique spirit was for a brief moment 
truly revived in the gravity of mature Bramante and Raphael. After 
their death imitation began to freeze up initiative. Classicism is 
imitation of Antiquity and even more the classic moment of the 
Renaissance, at the expense of direct expression. The attitude cul¬ 
minated, needless to say, during the late 18 th and early 19th 
centuries, in that phase of classicism par excellence which is on the 

103 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-C. 1600 

Continent often called Classicism pure and simple, but which in 
England goes under the name of Classic Revival. The idea of copying 
a whole Antique temple exterior (or a whole temple front) for 
Western use is the quintessence of classicism. The i< 5 th century did 
not go quite so far. But it did conceive that blend of academic 
rigidity with distrust of emotional freedom which made the 
latter-day all-out revival possible. 

A pupil of Raphael, Giulio Romano (1494-1546), artist-in-chief 
to the Duke of Mantua, designed a house for himself about 1544 
(pi. lvi). It is a striking example of Mannerist classicism—apart 
from being one of the earliest architect’s houses on such an ambitious 
scale. The facade is again flatter than would have pleased the High 
Renaissance. Detail, e.g. in the window surrounds and the top 
frieze, is hard and crisp. There is a proud aloofness, an almost arro¬ 
gant taciturnity and a stiff"formality about the building that reminds 
one at once of the Spanish etiquette accepted everywhere in the later 
16th century. Yet the apparent general correctness is broken by an 
occasional, as it were, surreptitious licence here and there (one such 
licence in Giulio Romano’s work as a draughtsman has been men¬ 
tioned before). The smooth band above the windows of the rusti¬ 
cated ground floor seems to disappear behind the keystones of the 
windows. The entrance has a most illicit depressed arch, anfl the 
pediment on top with no base to it is nothing but the main string 
course at sill height of the first-floor windows lifted up by the effort 
of the arch. These windows themselves are recessed in blank arcades 
like those of the Palazzo Famese, but as against the logical and struc¬ 
turally satisfying surrounds and pediments there, one flat ornamen¬ 
tal motif runs without hiatus along sides, top and pediments. It is 
exquisite, but very self-conscious, just like the contemporary sculp¬ 
ture of Benvenuto Cellini. 

This style, first conceived in Rome and Florence, appealed almost 
at once to North Italy and the transalpine countries. Giulio Romano 
was the first to show it north of the Apennines. Sammicheli, though 
fifteen years older, followed, partly under direct Roman influence, 
part y under the influence of Giulio’s early Mantuan masterpiece, 
the Palazzo del Te of 1525-35, and reshaped the appearance of 
Verona m tbs spirit of Mannerist classicism. At Bologna Sebastiano 
berlio, a pupil of Peruzzi, though six years Ms senior, and twenty- 
four years older than Giulio, preached it. In 1537 he began to publish 
a first part of a treatise on architecture which proved a source of last- 

104 



GIXJLIO ROMANO AND PALLADIO 

ing inspiration to classicist minds the other side of the Alps. Ser%. 
himself went to France in 1540 and was almost at once made"' 
“peintre et architecteur du roi”. The so-called school of Fontaine¬ 
bleau, where Serlio and the Italians Primaticcio and Niccolo del l’ 
Abbate worked, is the transalpine centre of .Mannerism. Spain 
accepted the new style even earlier—a violent reaction against the 
violence of her Late Gothic. Charles V’s new and never finished 
palace on the Alhambra at Granada (begun in 1526 by Pedro 
Machuca) looks, with its vast circular colonnaded inner court and 
the motifs of its 207 foot-long facade, as though it were based on 
Giulio, somewhat provincially interpreted. England and Germany 
were slower in succumbing to the dictatorship of classicism. The 
style was not in all its implications appreciated before the second 
decade of the 17th century (Inigo Jones and Elias Holl, see 
pp. 157-60), and then not so much in its problematical Giulio 
Romano-Serlio form as in that created by the happiest and most 
serene of all later 16th-century artists, by Andrea Palladio (1508- 
80). 

Palladio’s style, though it first followed Giulio, Sammicheli and 
Serlio, and as far as possible Vitruvius, the obscure and freely mis¬ 
interpreted Roman authority on architecture, is highly personal. 
His work must be seen at and around Vicenza. He designed no 
churches there (though his San Giorgio Maggiore and II Redentore 
in Venice are amongst the few really relevant churches in the 
Mannerist style, as will be shown later). What he was called upon 
to do was almost exclusively the designing of town and country 
houses, palazzi and ville, and it is significant that the far-reaching 
effect of his style can quite adequately be demonstrated without any 
analyses of his churches. For from the Renaissance onwards secular 
architecture became as important for visual self-expression as religious 
architecture, until during the 18th century the ascendancy of domestic 
and public buildings over churches was established. For the Middle 
Ages, in a book such as the present, it was sufficient to describe one 
Norman castle, one Gothic castle and one Gothic manor-house. As to 
the Renaissance examples discussed, half of them were secular. This 
will remain the proportion for the next two hundred years in the 
Roman Catholic countries. In those converted to Protestantism 
secular architecture was dominant at an even earlier date. 

Palladio’s buildings, despite their elegant serenity, would hardly 
have had such a universal success, if it had not been for the book in 


105 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-C. l 600 

which, he published them and his theory of architecture. Palladio’s 
Architettura superseded Serlio’s, especially after its revival in England 
early in the 18th century. His style appealed to the civilised taste and 
the polite learning of the Georgian gentry more than that of any 
other architect. Palladio is never dry or demonstratively scholarly. 
He combines the gravity of Rome with the sunny breadth of 
Northern Italy and an entirely personal ease not achieved by any of 
his contemporaries. In his Palazzo Chiericati (pi. lvh), begun in 
1550, the Tuscan Doric and correct Ionic order of the Bramante 
tradition with their straight entablatures are unmistakable. But the 
freedom in placing what had been confined to the courtyards of 
Roman palaces into the facade, thus opening up most of the facade 
and retaining only one solid piece in the centre of the first floor 
surrounded on all sides by air, is all Palladio’s. He was especially fond 
of colonnades in his country houses, where he used them to connect 
a square main block with fax out-reaching wings (fig. 58). 

The contrast between solid and diffused had a great fascination for 
kim. In one of his most complete schemes, the Villa Trissino at 
Meledo on the Venetian mainland (fig. 58), the house is almost'CWfP 
pletely symmetrical. The most extreme case, still existent and well 
preserved, of such extreme symmetry is the Villa Capra, or Rotonda, 
just outside Vicenza (pi. Lvm, begun c. 1567), an academic 
achievement of high perfection and one specially admired by Pope’s 
England. As a house to live in it has nothing of the informal snugness 
of the Northern manor-house, but it has nobility and, with its slen¬ 
der Ionic porticoes, its pediments, its carefully placed few pedimented 
windows and its central dome, it appears stately without being pom¬ 
pous. Now to get the totality of a Palladian countryside composition 
one has to add to such a nucleus the curved colonnades and low out¬ 
buildings by which the villa takes in the land around. This embrac¬ 
ing attitude proved of the greatest historical consequence. For here 
for the first time in Western architecture landscape and building 
were conceived as belonging to each other, as dependent on each 
other. Here for the first time the chief axes of a house are continued 
into nature; or, alternatively, the spectator standing outside sees the 
house spread out like a picture closing his vista. It is worth mention¬ 
ing that in Rome at about the same time Michelangelo planned a 
comparable vista for the Palazzo Famese which he had been com¬ 
missioned to finish, across the Tiber with the Farneae gardens on the 
Other side of the river. 





















RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. 142O-C. l600 

It may seem odd. to us that the Farnese family should have gone to 
Michelangelo the sculptor to complete their palace after San Gallo’s 
death. But it must be remembered that Giotto, Bramante and 
Raphael were painters, and that Brunelleschi was a goldsmith. All 
the same, the story of how Michelangelo became an architect is 
worth telling, because it is equally characteristic of him and his age. 
He had as a boy been apprenticed to a painter, until, when Lorenzo 
the Magnificent had discovered him, given him lodgings in his 
palace and drawn him into his private circle, he was sent to learn in 
a freer, less mediaeval way the art of sculpture from Lorenzo’s 
favourite sculptor, Bertoldo. His fame rested on sculpture. His huge 
David, the symbol of the civic pride of Renaissance Florence, he 
began at the age of twenty-six. A few years later Julius II commis¬ 
sioned him to prepare plans for an enormous tomb which the Pope 
wanted to erect for himself during his lifetime. Michelangelo re¬ 
garded it as his magnum opus. The first scheme provided for more 
than forty life-size or over life-size figures. The famous Moses is one 
of them. Architecture gf course was also involved, though only as an 
accompaniment. However, when Julius had decided to rebuild St. 
Peter’s to Bramante’s design, he lost interest in the tomb and forced 
upon Michelangelo the task of painting the ceiling of the Sistine 
Chapel instead. Michelangelo never forgave Bramante for having, 
as he suspected, caused this change of mind. So for nearly five years 
—as he worked without an assistant—he had to stick to painting. 

Then he returned to the tomb of Pope Julius, and perhaps in con¬ 
nection with conceptions that had passed through his mind when 
t h i nking of how architecturally to relate large figures with the wall 
against which they were going to stand, he began to take an interest 
in the plans of the Medici family to complete their church of S. 
Lorenzo in Florence by at last adding a facade. The church was 
Brunelleschi s work. Michelangelo in 1516 designed a facade two 
stories high, with two orders and ample accommodation for sculp¬ 
ture The commission was given to him, and for several years he 
worked in the quarries—a work he loved. Then however, in 1520, 
the Medias found too many difficulties in the transport of the marble 
andcancelled the contract. But they made at once another one with 
Michelangelo for the erection of a family chapel or mausoleum by 
S. Lorenzo. This was in fact begun in 1521 and completed, though 
less ambitiousiy than originally planned, in 1534. The Medici Chapel 
is thus Michelangelo s first architectural work, and the work, it must 

108 



MICHELANGELO AS AN ARCHITECT 

be added, of one never initiated into the secrets of building technique 
and architectural drawing. It has already—though again chiefly con¬ 
ceived as background for sculpture—all the characteristics of his 
personal style. Architecture without any support from sculpture is 
to be found in his work for the first time in another job for the 
Medicis at S. Lorenzo, the library and the anteroom to the 
library (pi. lix). The library was designed in 1524, the ante¬ 
room (with the exception of the staircase for which the model was 
supplied as late as 1557) in 1526. 

The anteroom is high and narrow. This alone gives an uncomfort¬ 
able feeling. Michelangelo wanted to emphasise the contrast to the 
long, comparatively low and more restful library itself. The walls 
are divided into panels by coupled columns. At the ground-floor 
height of the library itself the panels have blank windows and 
framed blank niches above. The colour scheme of the room is 
austere, a dead white against the sombre dark grey of columns, 
window niches, architraves and other structural or decorative mem¬ 
bers. As for the chief structural members, the columns, one would 
expect them to project and carry the architraves, as had always been 
the function of columns. Michelangelo reversed the relations. He re¬ 
cessed his columns and projected his panels so that they painfully en¬ 
case the columns. Even the architraves go -forward over the panels 
and backward over the columns. This seems arbitrary, just like the 
relations between ground-floor loggia and flat facade above or 
between second- and third-floor windows, in the Palazzo Massimi. 
It is certainly illogical, because it makes the carrying strength of the 
columns appear wasted. Moreover they have slender corbels at their 
feet which do not look substantial enough to support them and in 
fact do not support them at all. The thinness of the Massimi front 
characterises the blank windows with their tapering pilasters, fluted 
without any intelligible reason in one part only. The pediment over 
the entrance to the library is held only by the thin line around the 
door, raised into two square ears. The staircase tells of the same wilful 
originality; but the sharpness of detail which Michelangelo developed 
in the twenties is now replaced by a heavy, weary flow as of lava. 

It has often been said that the motifs of the walls show Michel¬ 
angelo as the father of the Baroque, because they express the super¬ 
human struggle of active forces against overpowering matter. I do 
not think that anybody who examines without prejudice his sensa¬ 
tions in the room itself would subscribe to this statement. There 


109 



RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. 142O-C. 1606 

seems to me no expression of struggle anywhere, though there is 
conscious discordance all the way through. This austere animosity 
against the happy and harmonious we have seen already, although 
hidden under a polished formalism, in Giulio Romano. What 
Michelangelo’s Laurenziana reveals is indeed Mannerism in its most 
sublime architectural form and not Baroque—a world of frustration 
much more tragic than the Baroque world of struggles between 
mind and matter. In Michelangelo’s architecture every force seems 
paralysed. The load does not weigh, the support does not carry, 
natural reactions play no part—a highly artificial system upheld by 
the severest discipline. 1 

In its spatial treatment the Laurenziana is just as novel and 
characteristic. Michelangelo has exchanged the balanced proportions 
of Renaissance rooms for an anteroom as tall and narrow as the 
shaft of a pit, and a library proper, reached by a staircase, as long and 
narrow as a corridor. They both force us, even against our wills, to 
follow their pull, upward first and then forward. This tendency to 
enforce movement through space within rigid boundaries is the 
chief spatial quality of Mannerism. It is well enough known in 
painting, for instance in Correggio’s late Madonnas, or Tintoretto’s 
Last Suppers with the figure of Christ at the far, far end. The most 
moving of all examples is Tintoretto’s painting of the Finding of the 
Body of St. Mark (Brera, Milan, c. 1565). Nowhere else is Mannerist 
space so irresistible. In architecture this magic suction effect is intro¬ 
duced into Giulio Romano’s extremely severe Cathedral at Mantua 
with its double aisles, the inner one with tunnel-vaults, the outer one 
and the nave flat. The uninterrupted rhythm of its monotonous 
columns is as irresistible as that of an Early Christian basilica. In 
secular architecture its most fa m iliar and easily accessible example is 
no doubt Vasari’s Uffizi Palace in Florence (pi. lx). It was begun in 
1560 to house Grand Ducal offices. It consists of two tall wings along 
a long narrow courtyard. The formal elements are familia r to us: lack 
of a clear gradation of stories, uniformity coupled with heretical re tail , 
long> elegant and fragile brackets below double pilasters which are no 
pilasters at all, and so on. What must be emphasised is the finishing 

1 But to Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian of the 19th century and the dis¬ 
coverer of the Renaissance in the sense in which we understand the style to-day, 
the anteroom of the^urenziana is but “an incomprehensible joke of the great 
tn^iter ( Geschchte der Renaissance in Mien, 7th edition, 1924, p. 208; written in 


HO 



THE mannerist conception 6e space 

accent of the composition towards the River Amo. Here a loggia, opeii 
In a spacious Venetian window on the ground floor and originally also 
In a colonnade on the upper floor, replaces the solid wall. This is a 
favourite Mannerist way of linkrng room with room, away in which 
both a clear Renaissance separation of units and a free Baroque flow 
through the whole and beyond are avoided. Thus, Palladio's two 
Venetian churches terminate in the east, not in closed apses, but in 
arcades straight in S. Giorgio Maggiore (1565), semicircular in the 
Redentore (1577)'—behind which back rooms of indistinguishable 
dimensions appear. And thus Vasari, together with Vignola (1507-73) 
designed the Villa Giulia, the country casino of Pope Julius III (1550- 
5 5), as a sequence ofbuildings with loggias towards semicircular courts 



59 * GIORGIO VASARI, GIACOMO VIGNOLA AND BARTOLOMMEO AMMANATi: THE VILLA OF 
POPE JULIUS III, ROME, BEGUN 1552. 


and with vistas across from the entrance through the first loggia 
towards the second, through it towards the third and through that 
into a walled back garden (fig. 59). 

For the garden of the 16th century is still walled in. It may have 
long and varied vistas, as you also find them at the Villa Este in 
Tivoli or at Caprarola, but they do not stretch out into infini ty as in 
the Baroque at Versailles. Neither do the low colonnades on the 
ground floors of Mannerist buildings, such as the Palazzo Massimi 
and the Uffizi, indicate infinity—that is, a dark, unsurveyable back¬ 
ground of space, as a Rembrandt background. Back walls are too 
near. The continuity of the facade is broken by such colonnades— 
that is what the Renaissance would have disliked—but the layer of 
opened-up space is shallow and clearly confined in depth. Palladio’s 
e.a.— 9 


in 





RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I42O-C. 1600 

Palazzo Chierigati is the most perfect example of this screen technique 
in palace architecture, although, in its serenity, different from Floren¬ 
tine and Roman Mannerism and particularly from Michelangelo. 
Palladio’s palace may have a certain coolness too, but it is not icy as 
the Laurenziana. 

This frozen self-discipline is not usually connected with the genius of 
Michelangelo and therefore needs special emphasis, emphasis above 
all because textbooks in Britain very often still treat Michelangelo 
as a master of the Renaissance. The truth is that he belonged to the 
Renaissance only for a very few years of his early career. His Pieta 
of 1499 may be a work of the High Renaissance. His David ma y be 
in the spirit of the Renaissance too. Of his Sistine Ceiling this can 
be said only to a limited extent; and of his work after 1515 hardly 
ever. His character made it impossible for him to accept the ideals 
of the Renaissance for long. He was the very opposite of Castighone’s 
Courtier and Leonardo da Vinci: unsociable, distrustful, a fanatical 
worker, negligent in his personal appearance, deeply religious and 
uncompromisingly proud. Hence his dislike for Leonardo, and for 
Bramante and Raphael, a dislike made up of contempt and envy. We 
know more of his character and his life than of those of any artist 
before. The unprecedented adoration for him caused the publication 
of two biographies while he was still alive. Both are based on 
a systematic collecting of material. It is good that it should be so; 
for we feel we must know much about him to understand his art. In 
the Middle Ages the personality of an architect could never to that 
degree have influenced his style. Brunelleschi, though clearer to us 
as a character than the architects of the Gothic cathedrals, is still 
surprisingly objective in his forms. Michelangelo was the first to 
turn architecture into an instrument of individual expression. The 
terribilita that frightened those who met him fills us with awe im¬ 
mediately, we are faced with any work of his, a room, a drawing, a 
piece of sculpture or a sonnet. 

For Michelangelo was a consummate poet too, one of the pro- 
foundest of his age; and in his poems he gives to posterity a reckon- 
ing of his struggles. The fiercest of them was that between a platonic 
ideal of beauty and a fervent faith in Christ. It is in the most con¬ 
centrated form the struggle between the age of the Renaissance In 
which he hved when he was young, and that of the Counter-Re¬ 
formation and Mannerism that began when he was about fifty years 
old, just before the sack of Rome in 1527. Now new stricter 



MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI 

religious orders were founded, the Capuchins, the Oratorians and 
above all the Jesuits (1534). Now new saints arose, St. Ignatius 
Loyola, St. Teresa, St. Philip Neri, St. Charles Borromeo. In 1542 
the Inquisition was reintroduced, in 1543 literary censorship. In 
1555 the Emperor Charles V abdicated and retired to the silence 
of a Spanish monastery. A few years later his son, Philip II, began 
his bleak and enormous palace of the Escorial, more a monastery 
than a palace. Spanish etiquette stood for a discipline as rigid as 
that of the early Jesuits and the Papal court of the same decades. In 
Rome nothing seemed left of the Renaissance gaiety. The Venetian 
ambassadors wrote home that even the carnivals were cold and lean. 
Paul V, the strictest of the popes, had meat on his table only twice 
a week. 

Michelangelo too had always been exemplarily sober and self- 
denying, He trained himself to need little sleep, and used to sleep 
with his boots on. While at work he sometimes fed on dry bread, 
eaten without putting his tools aside. He felt his duties to his genius 
more heavily than the light-hearted architects of the Renaissance— 
and he could therefore venture to reply to a critic who objected to 
his having represented Giuliano de Medici on his tomb beardless, 
though he wore a beard in life: “Who in a thousand years will care 
for what he looked like a saying utterly impossible before the Re¬ 
naissance had freed artists. For while the Middle Ages did not demand 
portrait likeness, because it is part of what is merely accidental in 
human nature, and while the early Renaissance had enjoyed portrait 
likeness, because it had only just discovered the artistic means for 
attaining it, Michelangelo refused to comply with it, because it 
would have hemmed in his aesthetic freedom. Yet his religious ex¬ 
perience was of the most exacting, and it grew more so as he grew 
older and the century grew older, until he, the greatest sculptor 
of the West x and the most admired artist of his age, gave up 
painting and sculpture almost entirely. Architecture alone he still 
carried on, and he refused to accept a salary for his work at St Peter’s. 

The final break seems to have come after he had passed his seven¬ 
tieth year. Between the Medici buildings of the mid-twenties and 
1547 he seems to have designed and built only the fortifications of 
Florence in 1529—an engineering job, we would say, but a type of 
job in which Leonardo da Vinci and San Gallo, his predecessor in 
most of his Roman works, also excelled. In 1534 he had left 
Florence for good and gone to Rome. In 1535 Paul III appointed 



renaissance and mannerism c. 1420-c. 1600 

him Superintendent of the Vatican Buildings, an all but nominal 
appointment at first. In 1537 he was consulted about a more stately 
rebuilding of the municipal palaces on the Capitol; but nothing 
materialised. Then in 1546 San Gallo died, and now Michelangelo 
was called upon almost at once to complete the Palazzo Farnese, 
redesign St. Peter’s and replan the Capitol. At the Palazzo Farnese 
we shall now easily discover his Mannerism in the second-floor 
details (pi. liv). The triplicating of the pilasters and especially 
the odd discordant framing of the windows with corbels on the 
sides not supporting anything and special corbels immediately above, 
on which the segmental pediments rest, are Michelangelo’s personal 
expression, individual to an unprecedented extent and impossible 
before the breaking up first of the transcendentally ordered world 
of the Middle Ages and then of the aesthetically ordered world of 
the Renaissance. 

Michelangelo’s architectural masterpiece, the back and the dome 
of St. Peter’s, are also an expression of revolt against Bramante 
and the spirit of the Renaissance, although they are not to the same 
extent Mannerist. When Michelangelo was appointed by Paul III, 
the Farnese Pope, to be architect of St. Peter’s, he found the church 
essentially left as it had been at Bramante’s death. Raphael and San 
Gallo had designed naves to comply with the religious demands of 
the first post-Renaissance generation. But they were not begun. 
Michelangelo returned to the central plan, but he deprived it of its 
all-governing balance (fig. 60). He kept the arms of the Greek cross, 
but where Bramante (fig. 56) had intended sub-centres repeating 
on a smaller scale the motif of the main centre, Michelangelo cut 
off the arms of the sub-centres, thus condensing the composition 
into one central dome resting on piers of a dimension that Bramante 
would have refused as colossal, i.e. inhuman, and a square ambu¬ 
latory round. As for the exterior, he altered Bramante’s plans in 
exactly the same spirit, replacing a happily balanced variety of 
noble and serene motifs by a huge order of Corinthian pilasters 
supporting a massive attic and by strangely incongruous windows 
and niches surrounded by cediculce and smaller niches of several 
sizes—a mighty yet somewhat discordant ensemble. At the west end, 
Michelangelo wanted to add a portico of ten columns with four 
columns in front of the middle ones. This—it was never built, because 
Madema after 1600 added a nave—would have destroyed Bramante’s 
ideal symmetry, and in fact the classic ideal of symmetry altogether; 

114 



mxghelangelo’s st. peter’s 


for the duplication of the centre columns is of course an utterly 
un-antique conception. Bramante’s cupola was to be a perfect semi¬ 
sphere, Michelangelo’s (pi. Lxn) —if we can take it (in spite of the 
emphatic denial by some scholars) that its present shape is Michel¬ 
angelo’s and not della Porta’s who completed it in 1588-90— 
is elongated and with the projecting coupled columns of the drum, 



60. MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI : PLAN FOR THE COMPLETION OF ST. PETER*S IN ROME, 

1546. 


the ribs up the dome and the coupled columns and concave top of 
the lantern a revision in very personal Renaissance forms of the 
essentially Gothic design of Brunelleschi’s Florentine dome. Now 
the triumphant soar of this dome is not Mannerist. This superhuman 
victory of gigantic forces against huge masses points towards the 
Baroque. To admit that does not mean invalidating the thesis that 
Mannerism was the predominant tendency of later 16th-century 
architecture. It merely means admitting the vastness of Michel¬ 
angelo’s genius. He—and the same is true of the other greatest 
masters of his generation, of Raphael and Titian—in growing out 







































RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM C. I420-C. 1600 

of, and beyond, the Renaissance conceived both the styles of the 
i<5th and the 17th centuries. The 16th followed his manner and turned 
it into Mannerism, the 17th appreciated the terribilitcl of his conflicts 
and made Baroque out of it. So the eternal city is crowned not by a 
symbol of Renaissance worldliness, as Julius II has visualised it, but 
by an overwhelming synthesis of Mannerism and Baroque, and at 
the same time of Antiquity and Christianity. 

It was Michelangelo’s last three-dimensional work of such violence. 
He was seventy-two when he designed it. The eighteen years that 
were left to him he spent in meditation on life after death. “Let 
there be no more painting, no more carving,” he says in one of his 
late sonnets, “to soothe the soul turned towards that Divine Love 
which opened His arms from the cross to receive us.” 

“N2 pinger tie scolpirfia pih che quieti 
L’anima volta a quell’ Amor Divino 
C’aperse, a premier not, ’n croce le braccia.” 

He carved after this only three more groups, all three Entombments 
of Christ. One of them was for his own tomb, one he left unfinished, 
or rather sublimated to so immaterial a form that it can no longer be 
regarded as sculpture in the Renaissance sense. His late drawings too 
are spiritualised to a degree almost unbearable in an artist who had 
done more than any before him to glorify the beauty and vigour 
of body and movement. And one of his last architectural plans—a 
fact not widely enough known—was to design the Roman church 
of the newly founded, severely counter-reformatory order of the 
Jesuits. He offered to take charge of the building without any fee, 
just as he had refused to accept a salary as architect to St. Peter’s. 

The Gesu was not begun until four years after Michelangelo’s 
death. It has perhaps exerted a wider influence than any other church 
of the last four hundred years (fig. 61). Giacomo Vignola (1507-73), 
the architect, following probably Michelangelo’s ideas, combines 
in his ground plan the central scheme of the Renaissance with the 
longitudinal scheme of the Middle Ages—an eminently character¬ 
istic fact. The combination as such is not new. Alberti had done the 
same a hundred years before at S. Andrea in Mantua (fig. 50). The 
facade too (fig. 62) seems to take up a theme that Alberti had con¬ 
ceived. The problem for architects of the Renaissance, and since the 
Renaissance, was how to project the dimensions of tall nave and 
lower aisles on to the exterior without abandoning the orders of 

ii* 



VIGNOLAS GBSU 

classical architecture. Alberti’s solution was to have a ground floor 
on the triumphal arch system and a top floor the width of the nave 
only but with volutes, i.e. scrolls, rising towards it from the en¬ 
tablature in front of the lean-to roofs of the aisles. This method was 
adopted by Vignola in his design for the Gesu facade (though with 
the fuller and less harmonious orchestration of his age), and then by 
della Porta who substituted a new design for Vignola’s. It has been 



repeated innumerable times and with many variations in the Baroque 
churches of Italy and the other Roman Catholic countries. 

As for the interior (pi. lxi) Vignola keeps Alberti’s inter¬ 
pretation of the aisles as series of chapels opening into the nave. He 
does not however concede them as much independence as the 
Renaissance architect considered necessary, always anxious as he 
was to let every part of a building be a whole. The extreme width 
of the nave under its powerful tunnel-vault degrades the chapels into 
mere niches accompanying a vast hall, and it has been suggested 
(Weise) that this motif was chosen by the Jesuits themselves to 
whom it was familiar from the late Gothic churches of Spain with 
th eir chapels between the buttresses and sometimes a passage con¬ 
necting them (see p. 63). If the suggestion is accepted, there is here 





















6z. GIACOMO VIGNOLA’S DESIGN FOR THE FRONT OF THE GESU. 


yet another instance of the post-Renaissance return to mediaeval 
ideals—another, after the revival of Catholic faith which showed 
itself m the new Saints and the new Orders, after the Gothic curve 
Of the dome of St. Peter’s and die reintroduction of a longitudinal 

I?8 

































vignola’s gesu 


emphasis in the Gesfi plan. In the Gesu this emphasis on the eastward 
drive is obviously deliberate. The tunnel-vault and above all the 
main cornice, running all the way through without a break, take 
it up most eloquently in the elevation. There is however one element 
in Vignola’s design that it would be impossible to find in the same 
sense in any medieval church: the light. In the cathedral of the 13 th 
century the stained-glass windows glow by means oflightpenetrating, 
but light itself is not a positive factor. Later on, in the Decorated 
style, light begins to model walls with their ogee-arched niches 
and play over filigree decoration, but it is never a major considera¬ 
tion of architectural design. In the Gesu, on the other hand, certain 
important features are introduced into the composition exclusively 
in order to make light-effects possible. The nave is lit from windows 
above the chapels—an even, subdued light. Then the last bay before 
the dome is shorter, less open and darker than the others. This con¬ 
traction in space and lightness prepares dramatically for the majestic 
crossing with its mighty cupola. The floods of fight streaming down 
from the windows of the drum create that sensation of fulfilment 
that Gothic architects achieved in so much less sensuous a way. 

The decoration of the Gesu appears sensuous too, luxurious though 
sombre. However, it is not of Vignola’s day. He would have been 
more moderate, with smaller motifs and a shallower relief; this is 
certain from what we know of late 16th-century decoration. Thus 
the effect of the mediaeval movement towards the east would have 
been much stronger, with less to deflect attention from the cornice 
and the mighty tunnel-vault. The redecoration was done in 1668-83. 
It belongs to the High Baroque, whereas the building is, to say it 
again, Mannerist, neither of the equanimity of all High Renaissance, 
nor of the expansive vigour of all Baroque. 



CHAPTER VI 


The Baroque in the Roman Catholic 

Countries 

c. \ 6 oo-c. 1760 


M annerism, it has been pointed out, was originally, and in 
this country still is, a noun connected with “mannered” 
and nothing else. In Continental and American terminology 
however, some twenty years ago, it changed its meaning and became 
the term for a specific historic style in art, the post-Renaissance 
style of the 16th century, particularly in Italy. The same process had 
taken place about fifty years earlier with regard to Baroque. Baroque 
had originally signified odd, especially of odd shape. It was therefore 
adopted to descibe an architectural style which to the classicist 
appeared to revel in odd, extravagant shapes, that is, the style of Italy 
during the 17th century. Then, chiefly in the ‘eighties of the last 
century and chiefly in Germany, it lost its derogatory flavour and 
ecame a neutral term to designate the works of art of that century 
in general. It is now fairly familiar as such in Britain too. 1 

We have seen the Baroque style first heralded in die massive 
torms and the gigantic excelsior of the dome of Michelangelo’s 
i>t. Peters. We have then seen that these efforts of Michelangelo 
towards the Baroque remained exceptional and that he himself in 
other works of architecture gave way to the pressure of Mannerism, 
t was o y after Mannerism had completed its course that a new 
generation at the beginning of the 17th century, especially in Rome, 
tired of the forced austerity of the late 16th, rediscovered Michel- 
angelo as the father of the Baroque. The style thus introduced 
culminated in Rome between 1630 and 1670, and then left Rome, 
7* * or & of Italy (Guarini and Juvara in Piedmont) and 
en or pain and Portugal and Germany and Austria. Rome, 
since the late 17th century, turned back to its classical tradition. 


V s printed “ 311 acce P te<i English textbook of the 
R '°7 f I ^ e Baroque signifies “a heavy and clumsy treatment of 
Rmassance archttecture -with, coarse aid florid detail and “is <Wo|eriy 

enote a supposedstyle which has no existence as the style of any period'^\ 



THE BAROQUE IN ITALY 


partly under the influence of Paris. For die Paris of Richelieu, 
Colbert and Louis XIV had become the centre of European art, a 
position which until then Rome had held unchallenged for well 
over 150 years. 

The popes and cardinals of the 17th century were enthusiastic 
patrons, eager to commemorate their names by magnificent churches, 
palaces and tombs. Of the severity of fifty years before, when the 
Counter-Reformation had been a militant force, nothing was left. 
The Jesuits became more and more lenient, the most popular saints 
were of a lovable, gende, accommodating kind (such as St. Francois 
de Sales), and the new experimental science was promoted under 
the very eyes of the popes, until in the 18th century Benedict XIV 
could accept books which Voltaire and Montesquieu sent him as 
presents. 

However, a general decline in the religious fervour of the people 
can hardly be noticed before 1660 or even later. Not the intensity 
of religious feelings , only their nature changed. Art and architecture 
prove that unmistakably. We can here analyse but a few examples, 
and it is therefore advisable not to choose the most magnificent, say 
the nave and facade of St. Peter’s, as Carlo Maderna designed them 
in 1606, and as they were completed in i626,but the most significant. 

Maderna was the leading architect of his generation in Rome. 
He died in 1629. His successors in fame were Gianlorenzo Bernini 
(1598-1680), Francesco Borromini (1599-1667) and Pietro da Cortona 
(1596-1669). Bernini came from Naples, Maderna and Borromini 
from the north of Italy, the country round the lakes, and Cortona, 
as his name shows, from the south of Tuscany. As in the 16th 
century, so there were in the 17th only very few Romans amongst 
the great men of Rome. In architecture the influx from Lombardy 
had a considerable effect on the appearance of the city. A breadth 
and freedom were introduced in distinct contrast to Roman gravity. 
Thus Madema’s ground plan of the Palazzo Barberini (fig. 63)— 
its facade is by Bernini and a good deal of its decorative detail by 
Borromini—is of a kind wholly new in Rome, but to a certain 
extent developing what Northern Italian palaces and villas (especially 
those of Genoa and its surroundings) bad done in the later 16th 
century. As against the austere blocks of the Florentine and Roman 
palaces (c£ the Palazzo Famese, fig. 57), the Barberini Palace has 
a front opened in a wide loggia and with short wings jutting forward 
on the right and the left. The Roman plan with colonnaded inner 


121 



THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. l 600 -C. 1760 

courtyard is, one might say, cut into two, and only one half remains 
The colonnades are now part of the facade. This exposing to the 
public of what had until then been kept private is eminently charac¬ 
teristic of the Baroque, as will be seen presently. The main staircase 
of the Barberini Palace also is wider and more open than those of 



63 - CARLO MADERNA (AND „NI?): PALAZZO BARBERINI, ROME, 


motif and rb” 7, ^ SeC ° n ? StaUXase is a Serlio-Palladio 
s “marcular niche to the entrance haU in the centre, 

“cTmiehfh f T'° Whkhitleads ’ “ forms *>“ «chi- 

!1 m f-° mm dmcba md “ of 


12a 








BERNINI AND BORROMINI 


It is important to remember that when Bernini with his South 
Italian impetuosity won the first place in Roman sculpture and 
architecture, this infil tration of North Italian elegance had already 
done its work. His noble colonnades in front of St. Peter’s (pi. Lxm) 
have something of the happy openness of Palladian villa architec¬ 
ture, in spite of their Roman weight and their Beminesque sculp¬ 
tural vigour. For Bernini was the son of a sculptor and himself 
the greatest sculptor of the Baroque. He incidentally also painted, and 
as for his reputation as an architect, it was so great that Louis XIV 
invited him to Paris to design plans for an enlargement of the 
Louvre Palace. Ber nini was as universal as Michelangelo, and nearly 
as famous. Borromini, on the other hand, was trained as a mason, and, 
since he was distantly related to Madema, found work in a small 
way at St. Peter’s when he went to Rome at the age of fifteen. 
There he worked on, humble and unknown, while Bernini created 
his first masterpiece of Baroque decoration, the bronze canopy 
under Michelangelo’s dome, in the centre of St. Peter’s, a huge 
monument, nearly ioo feet high, and with its four gigantic twisted 
columns the very symbol of the changed age, of a grandeur without 
restraint, a wild extravagance, and a luxury of detail that would 
have been distasteful to Michelangelo. 

The same vehemence of approach and the same revolutionary 
disregard of conventions characterise Borromini’s first important 
work, the church of S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (pi. lxiv), 
begun in 1633. The interior is so small that it would fit into one of 
the piers which support the dome of St. Peter’s. But in spite of its 
miniature size it is one of the most ingenious spatial compositions 
of the century. It has been said before that the normal plan for longi¬ 
tudinal churches of the Baroque was that of the Gesu: nave with 
side chapels, short transepts and dome over the crossing. It was 
broadened and enriched by the following generations (S. Ignazio, 
Rome, 1626 seqq.). But the centralised ground plan was not given up 
either. It was only the predominance of the circle in central churches 
which the Baroque discarded in Rome. Instead of the circle the oval 
was introduced, already in Vignola’s S. Annadei Palafrenieri (fig. 64), 
a less finite form, and a form that endows the centralised plan with 
longitudinal elements, i.e. elements suggestive of movement in space. 
An infinite number of variations on the theme of the oval was de¬ 
veloped first by the architects of Italy and then by those of other 
countries. They constitute the most interesting development of 

123 



( 54 - GIACOMO VIGNOLA: S. ANNA DEI PALA- 
FRENTERI, ROME, BEGUN C. 1570. 


THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. 1600-C. 1760 

Baroque church architecture, a 

chiefly to the second half of the g I 

17th century. In Vignola’s S. 

Anna the longer axis of the oval 

is placed at right angles to the 

facade. This is repeated by most J 

of the others, but S. Agnese in 

Piazza Navona (fig. 65), begun 

in 1652 (by Carlo Rainaldi and *? ^ 

provided by Borro mini with ^ J 

■ f xt 1 t. •)• ^ G1AC OMO VIGNOLA: S. ANNA DEI PALA- 

its iNortn Italian two — to i wcr frenierx, rome, begun c. 1570 

facade), consists of an octagon in a square, with little niches in the 

corners, and extended by identical entrance and choir chapels in west 

and east, and by considerably deeper north and south transeptal chapels 

so as to produce an effect of a broad oval parallel to the facade, with 

masonry fragments sticking into its outline. Bernini placed a real 

oval with eight mches into the same position in his late church of 

S. Andrea al Quirinale, 1678 (fig. 66). Vignola’s composition was 

aken up by Madema at S. Giacomo al Corso, 1594, and by Rainaldi 

at S. Maria di Monte Santo, 1662. This, incidentally, is one of the 

two identical churches by the Porta del Popolo, marking the start 

01 three radiating streets towards the centre of Rome. 

The oval even captured France, especially by the efforts of Louis 

I*vau as we shall see later. Meanwhile by far the most brilliant 

paraphrase on the oval theme is Borromini’s S. Carlo. The church can 

theR better ^• aay 0th fj analyse what treme ndous advantages 
the Baroque architect could derive from composing in ovals instead 

cW hfd'beT T £S ‘ merCaS ? d “ OU *fr ** Renaissan « spatial 
ctoty had been the governing idea, and the eye of the spectator 

rid ^m t0 A Un A Peded fr ° m ° ne A *> -other and 
Sfdt TnT? 1 ^ " d A ^ut effort, nobody, 

m^dt Ld L t Can at ° nCC Understand of what Aments it is 
r Y T f ertwined Produce such a rolling, 
rocking effect. To analyse the gtonnd plan (fig. 67) it wifi be btX 

n« to se, ont font die oral at right angfe I, * ^ 

^ “ * b “ •>- doLTi 

week cross oi the Renaissance. Borromini has given the dome 

aholute supremacy over the arms. Their comers J e I'eSd off" 

*at die walls onto the oval dome read fc an elongated feng” 


I24 



THE OVAL PLAN OF THE BAROQUE 



6j. CARLO RAINALDi: S. AGNESE, 66 . GIANLORENZO BERNINI: S. ANDREA 

ROME, BEGUN 165 2 . AL QUIRINALE, ROME, BEGUN 1678. 


opening out into shallow chapels, the dwarfed arms of the original 
Greek cross. The chapels on the right and the left are fragments of 
ovals. If completed, they would meet in the centre of the building. 
The entrance chapel and the apsidal chapel are also fragments of 
ovals. They just touch the side ovals. Thus five compound spatial 
shapes merge into each other. We can stand nowhere without 
taking part in the swaying rhythm of several of them. The Late 
Gothic churches of Germany had achieved a similar wealth of 
spatial relations, but by means of forms that seem wiry when com¬ 
pared with the undulating walls of S. Carlo. Michelangelo is re¬ 
sponsible for this turn of architecture towards the plastic. Space 
now seems hollowed out by the hand of a sculptor, walls are 
moulded as if made of wax or clay. 

Borromini’s most daring enterprise in setting whole walls into 
motion is the facade of S. Carlo which was added in 1667, the year 
of his death (pi. lxv). The ground floor and its cornice give the 
main theme: concave—convex—concave. But the first floor answers 
by a concave—concave—concave flow, complicated by the insertion 
of a kind of flattened-out miniature oval temple set into the centre 
concavity so that this bay seems convex as long as one does not look 
up to its top part. Such relations in volume and space sound dry 

125 







THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. l600-C. 1760 

when described; when seen, however, there is brio and passion in 
them, and also something distinctly voluptuous, a swaying and 
swerving as of the naked human form. Watch how the two west 
towers of S. Agnese stand away from the main front of the church 
separated by the convex curves of the two sides of the facade centre, 
or how in Pietro da Cortona’s—S. Maria della Pace (1656-57) the 
front is spread out—with straight wings on the ground floor, but a 

sweeping convex curve on 
the first floor out of which 
the centre of the facade 
reaches forward, ending in a 
semicircular portico on the 
ground floor and a slig htly 
set back shallower convex 
curve on the first floor (pi. 
lxvi). Columns and pilasters 
crowd together on it in a way 
that makes the composition 
of Vignola’s Gesu front seem 
restrained in the extreme. 

In fact the majority of 
Roman Baroque facades kept 
to the basic composition of 
Vignola and only endowed it 
67. francesco borromini: s. carlo ALLS wkh a new meaning by way 
quattro fontane, begun i6„. front, i66 7 . c f an excessive abundance of 

columns jostling against each 
other, and the most unconventional use and motives of decoration 
(fig. 68). None however was more daring in his detail than Borromini. 
In the facade of S. Carlo the curious oval windows on the ground 
floor should be observed with the palm leaves that surround them, 
and with a crown above, and some sort of a Roman altar in relief 
beneath, and so, motif for motif, up the facade until the ogee arch 
at the top is reached, and the polygons of odd shapes and diminkhing 
sizes that decorate the cupola inside. Every one of these details is 
senseless, unless they are seen together and as parts of a super- 
ordinate decorative whole. 

To understand the Baroque it is essential to see it in this per¬ 
spective. We are too much used—especially in this country—to 
locking at decoration as something that may or may not be added 

126 




THE GESAMTKUNSTWERK OF THE BAROQUE 


to architecture. In fact all 
architecture is both structure 
and decoration, decoration for 
which the architect himself, 
or the sculptor, the painter, 
the glass-painter may be re¬ 
sponsible. But the relation of 
decorationto structure varies in 
different ages and with different 
nations. In the Gothic style of 
the cathedrals all decoration 
served the mason’s work. 

Then ornamental sculpture, 
late in the 13 th and early in 
the 14th century, seemed to 
overgrow sculpture. Then, 
again somewhat later, ngure vincenzo ed anastasio, rome, 1650. 
sculpture and painting freed 

themselves from the supremacy of architecture altogether. A monu¬ 
ment like Verrocchio’s Cofleoni in Venice, standing free in a square 
without any architectural support, would have been inadmissible in 
the Middle Ages. Just as novel was the conception of easel painting as 
such, p ainting independent of the wall against which it was going 
to be placed. The Renaissance accepted the independence of the 
fine arts, but was able to hold them together within a building, 
because of the principle of relatively independent parts that governed 
all Renaissance composition. Now however, in the Baroque, that 
principle had been abandoned. Again, as in Gothic architecture, 
parts cannot be isolated. We have seen that at S. Carlo. But the 
Baroque, although believing in the unity of all art, could not restore 
the supremacy of structure. Architects of the 17th century had to 
accept the claims of the sculptor and painter, and in fact often were 
sculptors and painters. Instead of the Gothic relation of super¬ 
ordinate and subordinate, there is now a co-operation of all the arts. 
The result was still that “ Gesamtkuns'twerk ” (total art) which Wag¬ 
ner, in his operas, after it had been wilfully destroyed at the end of 
the Baroque, endeavoured in vain to recover for the 19th century. 
In the works of Bernini and Borromini, what binds architectural, 
ornamental, sculptural and pictorial effects into indivisible unity is 
the decorative principle common to all. 

127 



E.A.—10 







THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. I 600 -C 1760 



69. GIANLORENZO BERNINI: THE ROYAL STAIRCASE (SCALA REGIA) IN THE VATICAN 
PALACE, ROME, <T. 1665. 


Now this decorative creed could leave no room in the mindc of 
patrons and artists of the Baroque to be squeamish about honesty- 
in the use of materials. As long as the effect was attained, what could 
it matter whether you attained it with marble or with stucco, with 
gold or with tin, with a real bridge or a sham bridge such as we find 
sometimes in English parks? Optical illusion is in fact (to Ruskin’s 
grave displeasure) amongst the most characteristic devices of Baroque 
architecture. Bernini’s Royal Staircase, the Scala Regia in the 
Vatican Palace (pi. lxvh and fig, 69), illustrates this at its most 
suggestive. It was built during the same sixties which saw Borro¬ 
mini s facade of S. Carlo rise from the ground and the colonnades 
in front of St. Peter’s (pi. ran). As they are a masterpiece of stage 
setting, seemingly raising the height and weight of Madema’s 
facade, and at the same time making the loggia of the Papal bene¬ 
dictions and the Potta Santa visible to everybody amongst the tens 
of thousands who would stand in the forecourt on the occasion 
of great celebrations, so is the Scala Regia designed with a supreme 
knowledge of scenic effects. It is the main entrance to the palace. 

128 





bernini’s scala regia 

Co min g from the colonnades, one reaches it along a corridor. The 
corridor ends in about fifteen or twenty steps, and then there is a 
slight break just at the point where one enters at right angles from 
the galilee porch of St. Peter’s. So here two main directions meet. 
They had to be joined and connected up. It was a master-stroke of 
Bernini to place opposite the entrance from the church an equestrian 
monument to the Emperor Constantine. Coming up from the 
corridor it appears on the right and forces us to halt, before we 
enter the Royal Staircase itself. The sudden appearance of the white 
prancing horse against a storm-swept drapery lit by windows 
above serves to conceal the otherwise unpleasant change of direction. 

The Scala Regia had to be fitted into an awkwardly shaped area 
between church and palace. It is long, comparatively narrow and has 
irregularly converging walls. Bernini turned all this to advantage 
by means of an ingenious tunnel-vaulted colonnade of diminishing 
size. The principle is that of vistas on the Baroque stage. Streets there 
were made to appear long by the use of exaggerated perspective. 
In the same way Borromini treated the niches at S. Carlo (pi. lxiv) 
and the windows on the top floor of the Palazzo Barberini. Such 
scenic illusions were not entirely new. They are to be found in 
Bramante’s early works in Milan. Michelangelo too in his design 
for the Capitol in Rome had placed the palaces on the sides at such 
an angle as to increase the apparent height of the Senate House. Light 
is another means for dramatising the ascent up the Royal Staircase. 
On the first landing halfway up it falls in from the left, on the second 
in the far distance a window faces the staircase and dissolves the 
contours of the room. Finally there is the decoration, the splendid 
angels, e.g. with their trumpets holding up the Pope’s arms, to 
complete this gorgeous overture to the Vatican Palace. 

Angels, genii and such-like figures, preferably in realistic colour¬ 
ing, are an essential part of Baroque settings. Not only do they serve 
to cover up structural joints and to hide the contraptions “behind 
the scenes” which make these illusions work, but they also act as 
intermediaries between the real space in which we move and the 
space created by the artist. The Baroque does not want to keep the 
border line visible between audience and stage. Such terms from the 
world of the theatre—or should one rather say: the world of the 
opera, which was an Italian invention of the 17th century—come 
into one’s mind with good reason. However, there is more than a 
mere theatrical trick in this flow from reality into illusion and from 


129 



THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. 1600-c. 1 760 

illusion into reality. Bernini’s famous chapel of St. Teresa in the 
church of S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome proves that (pi. Lxvm). 
The chapel, which dates from 1646, is faced with dark marbles, 
their gleaming surfaces of amber, gold and pink reflecting the light 
in ever-changing patterns. In the middle of the wall in front of the 
entrance is the altar of the saint. It is flanked by heavy coupled 
columns and pilasters with a broken pediment, placed on the slant 
so that they come forward towards us and then recede to focus our 
attention on the centre of the altar, where one would expect to find 
a painting, but where there is a niche with a sculptural group, treated 
like a picture and giving an illusion of reality that is as startling to¬ 
day as it was three hundred years ago. Everything in the chapel 
contributes to this peinture vivante illusion. Along the walls on the 
right and the left there are also niches opened into the chapel walls, 
and there Bernini has portrayed in marble, behind balconies, mem¬ 
bers of the Comaro family, the donors of the chapel, watching with 
us the miraculous scene, precisely as though they were in the boxes, 
and we in the stalls of a theatre. 

The boundary line between our world and the world of art is in 
this most ingeniously effaced. As our own attention and that of the 
marble figures is directed towards the same goal, we cannot help 
giving the same degree of reality first to them as to ourselves, and 
then to the figures on the altar too. And Bernini has used all his 
mastery in the modelling of St. Teresa and the angel to help in that 
deception. The heavy cloak of the nun, the fluffiness of the clouds, 
the light drapery of the youthful angel and his soft flesh are all 
rendered with an exquisite realism. The expression of the saint in 
me miracle of the union with Christ is of an unforgettable volup¬ 
tuous ecstasy. She faints as though overwhelmed by a physical 
penetration. At the same time she is raised into the air, and the 
diagonal sweep of the group makes us believe the impossible. 
Beams of gold—they are gilt metal shafts—conceal the back wall of 
the niche, and an opening high up behind the entablature glazed with 
a yellow pane models the scene with a magical light. 

The chapel of St. Teresa is the most daring example of such 
Jlusiomsm in Rome. It is in fact an exception. Rome has never 
really believed m extremes. Bernini was a Neapolitan; and Naples 
was Spanish. To experience the thrills of extremes and excesses one 
.must indeed go to Spam, or else to Portugal, or of course Germany. 
To these countries the Baroque came late, but it was taken up with 

130 



THE TRASPABENTE 

tremendous fervour. Italy has no examples of such orgiastic inter¬ 
penetration of reality and fiction as can be seen in some few Spanish 
and many more South German churches of the early 18 th century. 

The most outstanding example on Spanish soil is Narciso Tome’s 
Trasparente in Toledo Cathedral (pi. lxix and fig. 70). The cathedral 
is a 13th-century building in the style of classic French Gothic. It has a 
high altar with a vastLate Gothicreredos. Catholic orthodoxy objected 
to people walking along the ambulatory behind the Blessed Sacra¬ 
ment. So an ingenious plan was worked out by which the Sacrament 
could be seen and would be respected from the ambulatory as well. 
It was placed in a glass-fronted receptacle—hence the name Tras¬ 
parente —and an altar scenery was built up around it of unheard-of 
pomp. The work was completed in 1732. Attention was focused on 
to the Sacrament by richly decorated columns. They are linked up 
with large outer columns by cornices curved upwards. These curves 
and the relief scenes in perspective on the panels below give the 
illusion—in the same way as Bernini’s colonnade in the Scala Regia 
—as though the distance from front to back of the altar was far 
deeper than it really is. Moreover, the glass-fronted opening is 
surrounded by angels to cover all structural props. By the clouds of 
angels our eyes are led up to where the last Supper is acted—at a 
fantastic height—by figures of polychromatic marble. Higher up 
still is the Virgin soaring up to Heaven. To enhance the effect of a 
miraculous apparition, the whole scene is floodlit from behind 
where we stand while we stare at it, lit that is in the way special 
stage lighting is operated to-day. What the ingenious architect has 
done is to take out the masonry between the ribs of half a Gothic 
vault of the ambulatory—the engineering skill of the 13th century 
allowed him to do so without weakening the construction—spread 
groups of angels around the opening, and then erect above it a 
dormer with a window, invisible from below, which lets in a flood 
of golden light past the angels and the bay of the ambulatory in 
which we stand, on to the altar with its figures and the Sacrament. 
And when, to discover this source of magic light, we turn round, 
away from the altar, we see in the dazzling light beyond the angels 
Christ himself seated on clouds, and prophets and the Heavenly 
Host surrounding Him. 

Such spatial extremism, the pulling of a whole room into one vast 
stupefying ornament, is, it has been said before, exceptional in 
Spain. What Spain and Portugal excelled in was this same extremism 

131 



70 . narciso rout : “trasparesto” in the cathedral 


OF TOLEDO, COMPLETED 1732 


























































SPANISH AND GERMAN BAROQUE 

expressing itself in the piling of ornament on to surfaces. This 
ornamental mania had been a Spanish heritage ever since Moham¬ 
medan times, the Alhambra, and the Late Gothic of such works as 
the front of St. Paul’s at Valladolid (pi. xxm), but never yet had it 
t- aVpn quite such fantastic shapes as it now did in the so-called 
Churrigueresque style, named after its chief exponent Jose de 
Churriguera (1650-1725). The immediate inspiration of the barbaric 
scrolls and thick mouldings of, e.g., the Sacristy of the Charterhouse 
at Granada (1727-64; pl. xxx; by Luis de Arevalo and F. Manuel 
Vasquez) must have been native art of Central or South America, 
as the immediate inspiration of the Manueline style in Portugal 
has been found in the East Indies. It is in fact in Mexico that the 
Spanish architects celebrated the wildest orgies of decoration. 

The Trasparente stands on a higher aesthetic level no doubt than 
the incrustations of the Churrigueresque, though morally, especially 
to the Ruskinian morality of Late Victorian England , they may both 
be equally objectionable. Southern Germany in the 18th century 
was almost as fond of ornament for ornament’s sake as Spain. There 
again the tradition leads back to the Middle Ages. But as it has been 
shown that German Late Gothic was fonder of spatial complexity 
than the late Gothic of any other country, so the exploitation of 
space became now the central problem of German Late Baroque, a 
problem occasionally solved with the knock-out technique of the 
Trasparente, but more often by purer strictly architectural means. 

Two architects only out of the many working between 1720 and 
1760 can here be introduced: Cosmas Damian Asam (1686-1739) 
and Johann Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753). 

Cosmas Damian Asam was a painter and decorator, his brother 
Egid Quirin (1692-1750) a sculptor. The two as a rule worked 
together, not considered as anything but competent craftsmen and 
not apparently considering themselves as anything else either. They, 
and in common with them the majority of the German 18th- 
century architects, were not really architects in the Renaissance or 
modem sense. They were brought up in villages to know something 
about building, and that was enough. No big ideas about professional 
status entered their heads. In fact the sociological position of archi¬ 
tecture in Germany before the 19th century was still medieval, and 
most of the patrons were still princes, bishops, abbots, just as they had 
been three hundred years earlier. Neumann belongs to another 
category, one that had not existed in the Middle Ages or the Re- 

133 



THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. I600-C. 1760 

naissance. Its source is the France of Louis XIV, as will be shown 
later (see p. 168). He had started in the artillery force of the Prince- 
Bishop of Wurzburg. There he had shown a keen interest in mathe¬ 
matics and fortification. Michelangelo too, it will be remembered, 
had worked on the defence engineering, and some of the other 
leading 16th-century architects in Italy, e.g. Sammicheli, had been 
distinguished military engineers. The Prince-Bishop singled out 
young Neumann for architectural work, made him his surveyor of 
works and sent him to Paris and Vienna to discuss the plans for his 
new palace at Wurzburg with his opposite numbers there, the French 
king’s and the Emperor’s architects, and to learn from them. Thus 
his most famous work, the palace at Wurzburg, is only partly his; 
but his experience grew, and the Bishop appreciated him more and 
more. He was made a captain, then a major, then a colonel, but 
he had no longer any duties of active service and could devote all 
Ins time to architecture. He did all the designing and supemsing for 
the Bishop that had to be done, and was soon also asked to design 
palaces and churches for other clients. 6 

Thus churchesofthe 18 thcentmy in Germany may originate from 
very different milieus: the workshop of the mediaeval craftsman or 
the drawing-board of the technically skilled courtier. Differences in 
architectural character may often be explained in this way. Asam 
churches are naive, Neumann’s are of an intellectual complexity 
equal to Bach’s. Spatial effects, however, are as important in the 
Asams as in Neumann’s work. But the Asams stick to the more 
ostentatious devices of optical illusion (raising them, it is true, to a 
high emotional pitch), while Neumann composes his configurations 
of space scorning easy deceptions. 

At Rohr near Ratisbon the Asams, instead of a High Altar, placed 
m the chancel of the church a showpiece, cruder than Bernini’s St. 
Teresa, and twice as melodramatic: the Apostles, life-size figures 
standing around a life-size Baroque sarcophagus, and the Virgin 
rising to Heaven supported by angels to be received into a glory of 
clouds and cherubs high above. Wild gesticulation and dark glowing 
colour all help to inflame the passions of faith. The chancel at 
Welfenburg, another church near Ratisbon, is the stage for a more 
mysterious apparition: a silver St. George on horseback wielding 
a flame-shaped sword and riding straight towards us out of a back- 
ground of dazzling Hght which is let in from concealed windows. 
The diagon and die princess stand out as dark golden silhouettes 

134 



THE ART OF THE ASAMS 

against all this glitter. Rohr was built in 1718-25, Weltenberg in 
1717-21. They are early works of the Asams. 

In their best later work they endeavoured to achieve more than a 
Trasparente effect. Egid Quirin owned a house at Munich; when he 
approached the age of forty he began to think of a monument that 
he might proudly leave behind after his death. So he decided in 1731 
to build on a site adjoining his house a church as his private offering. 
The church was built from 1733 to about 1750 and dedicated to St. 
John Nepomuk. It is a tiny church (pi. lxxi) less than thirty feet 
wide, relatively tall and narrow with a narrow gallery all the way 
round,-a-ground-floor altar and a gallery altar. The gallery balancing 
on the fingers of pirouetting termini or caryatid angels sways for¬ 
ward and backward, the top cornice surges up and droops down, 
the colour scheme is ofsombre gold, browns and dark reds, glistening 
in sudden flashes where light falls on it, light which comes only from 
the entrance, that is from behind our backs, and from concealed 
windows above the cornice. The top east window is placed in such 
a way that a group of the Trinity appears against it; God holding the 
Crucifix, and the Holy Ghost above, the whole again surrounded 
by angels—wildly fantastic, yet of a superb magic reality. What 
raises St. John Nepomuk above the level of Rohr, Weltenberg and 
the Trasparente is the co-operation of strictly architectural com¬ 
position with the merely optical deceptions to achieve an intense 
sensation of surprise which may turn easily into religious fervour. 

But sensational it is all the same, sensational in a literal sense: no 
artists before Bernini, the Asams and Tome have aimed at such 
violent effects. And are they therefore debauched, unscrupulous and 
pagan as our Pugins and Ruskins have made them out ? We should 
not accept their verdicts uncritically, lest we might deprive our¬ 
selves of a good deal of legitimate pleasure. We may indeed, up here 
in the North, where we live, fin d it hard to connect Christ and the 
Church with this obtruding physical closeness of presentation. To 
the Southerner, in Bavaria, in Austria, in Italy, in Spain, where 
people live so much more with all their senses, it is a genuine form 
of religious experience. While in the North during the lifetime of 
Bernini, the Asams and Tomi, Spinoza visualised a pantheism, with 
God pervading all beings and all things, Rembrandt discovered the 
infinite for painting in his treatment of light and his merging of 
action into undefined but live background, and Newton and Leibniz 
discovered it for mathematics in their conception of the calculus, 


135 



THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C . l600-C. I760 

the South had its more concrete realisation of an all-embracing 
oneness and a presence of the infinite in the architects’ and decor¬ 
ators’ unification of real and fictitious worlds, and in their spatial 
effects stepping beyond the bounds of what the beholder can 
rationally explain to himself. And Neumann’s work proves con¬ 
clusively what architectural purity and subtlety can be achieved by 
such spatial magic, provided the visitor to his buildings is able to 
follow his guidance. We of the 20th century do not usually find it 
easy to concentrate on spatial counterpoint just as our audiences in 
church and concert no doubt hear musical counterpoint less dis¬ 
tinctly than those for whom Bach wrote. The parallelism is in fact 
striking in quality too. The best German 18th-century architecture 
is up to the standard of the best German 18th-century music. 

Take Neumann’s pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen in Fran¬ 
conia, built from 1743 to 1772 (pi. Lxxn and figs. 71-73). The first 
impression on entering this vast, solitary pilgrimage church is one of 
bliss and elation. All is light: white, gold, pink. In this the church 
testifies to its later date than that of St. JfohnNepomuk. Asam’s work 
is still Baroque in the 17th-century sense, Neumann’s belongs to that 
last phase ofthe Baroque which goes under the name Rococo. For the 
Rococo is not a separate style. It is part ofthe Baroque, as Decorated 
is part ofthe Gothic style. The difference of Baroque and Rococo is 
only one of sublimation. The later phase is light, where the earlier 
was sombre; delicate, where the earlier was forceful; playful, where 
the earlier was passionate. But it is just as mouvementi, as vivacious, 
as voluptuous as the Baroque. One connects the term Rococo 
chiefly with France and the age of Casanova on the one hand, 
Voltaire on the other. In Germany it is not intellectually or sensually 
sophisticated it is as direct an expression of the people’s aesthetic 
instinct as late Gothic architecture and decoration had been, and one 
can see from the devotion to-day of the peasants in these Ger man 
Baroque—and the Italian Baroque—churches that their style is not 

a style of interest only to a privileged set of virtuosi. 

Yet the style of Vierzehnheiligen is not an easy style. It is not 
enough to be overwhelmed by it, as anyone may be in Asam 
churches; it asks for an exact understanding—which is a job for the 
expert, architects architecture, as the fugue is musicians’ music. The 
oyal central altar in the middle of the nave may well please the 
rustic worshippers who kneel round this gorgeous object, half a 
coral reef and half a fairy sedan chair. Having taken in this glory of 

136 



VXERZEHNHEILIGEN 


confectionery, the layman will then look up and sec on all sides 
glittering decoration, surf and froth and rocket, and like it immensely. 
But if he starts walking round, he will soon find himself in utter 
confusion. What he has learned and so often seen of nave and aisle 
and chancel seems of no value here. This confusion of the lay mind, 
a keen thrill of the trained, is due to the ground plan, one of the 
most ingenious pieces of architectural design ever conceived (figs. 
71—73). The church, if one looks at it from outside, has apparently a 
nave and aisles, and a centrally planned east end with polygonal 
ends to transepts and choir. In fact the choir is an oval, the transepts 
are circular, and the nave consists of two ovals following each other 
so that the first, into which one enters immediately one has passed 
the Borrominesque undulating front, is of the size of the choir 
oval and the second considerably larger. It is here that the altar of 
the fourteen saints stands. Here then is the spiritual centre of the 
church. So there arises an antagonism of great poignancy between 
what the exterior promises as the centre and what the interior reveals 
to be the centre—namely between the crossing where nave and 
transepts meet, and the centre of the principal oval. As for the aisles 
they are nothing but spatial residues. Walking along them, one feels 
painfully behind the scenes. What matters alone is the interaction 
of the ovals. At vault height they are separated by transverse arches. 
These however are not simple bands across from one arcade column 
to the one opposite. They are three-dimensional, bowing to each 
other, as the nodding arches had done on a small scale in the 14th 
century. This has the most exciting and baffling effect at the crossing. 
Here in a church of the Gesu type—and Vierzehnheiligen appears 
from outside to belong to this type—one would expect a dome, the 
summit of the composition. Instead of that, there lies, as has been 
said before, just at the centre of the crossing,' the point where choir 
oval and central oval meet. The two transverse arches struck from 
the piers of the crossing bend, the western one eastward, the eastern 
westward until they touch each other in exactly the same place as 
the ovals, purposely emphasising the fact that, where a normal 
Baroque church would have had the crest of the undulating move¬ 
ment of the vaults, Vierzehnheiligen has a trough—a most effective 
spatial counterpoint. Yet another spatial complication is incidentally 
provided by the insertion of a second minor transept farther west 
than the main one. Side altars are placed in it, just as altars stand 
against the east end of the church and against the east piers of the 

137 



AND 73. BALTHASAR NEUMANN*. 
(NOT showing the west tOwers). 


VIERZEHNHELpiGEN IN FRANCONIA, BEGUN 1743. SECTION 
PLAN ON GROUND-FLOOR LEVEL, PLAN OF VAULTS. 






























































VIERZEHNHEILIGEN 

crossing. The latter are set diagonally so as to guide the eye towards 
the splendid high altar—a decidedly theatrical effect. _ 

This is one of the chief objections against such churches. Its 
validity has already been queried. Besides, why did architects and 
artists so fervently strive to deceive and create such intense illusion 
of reality? What reality was the Church concerned with? Surely 
that of the Divine Presence. It is the zeal of an age in which Roman 
Catholic dogmas, mysteries and miracles, were no longer, as they 
had been in the Middle Ages, accepted as truth by all. There were 
heretics, and there were sceptics. To restore the first to the fold, to 
convince the others, religious architecture had both to inflame and 
to mesmerise. But, it is brought forward as another argument 
against Baroque churches, that they seem worldly as compared with 
the churches of the Middle Ages. Now it is true that the character 
of Baroque decoration in a church and a palace is identical. But is 
not exactly the same true of the Middle Ages ? The idea behind the 
identity is perfectly sane. By the splendour of the arts we honour a 
king; is not supreme splendour due to the King of Kings? In our 
churches to-day and in those churches of the Middle Ages which the 
19th century restored, there is nothing of this. They are halls with 
an atmosphere to concentrate the thoughts of a congregation on 
worship and prayer. A church of the Baroque was literally the house 
of the Lord. 

Still, there is no denying the fact that we, observers or believers, 
never feel quite sure where in a church such as Vierzehnheiligen the 
spiritual ends and the worldly begins. The ecstatic elan of the archi¬ 
tectural forms at large is irresistible, but it is not necessarily a religious 
elan. There was, it is true, a real mania in Southern Germany and 
Austria between 1700 and 1760 for building vast churches and 
monasteries. However, not all this building was done entirely ad 
majorem Die gloriam. Did a monastery like Weingarten near the lake 
of Constance really need these far-stretched, elegaiitly curved out¬ 
buildings which appear in a rebuilding scheme of 1723 (fig- 74 ) ! 
This scheme was never carried out; but others—e.g. at Klostemeu- 
burg, St. Florian and Melk, all three on the Danube were. Melk 
was begun in 1702 by Jakob Prandtauer (died 1726); it is in many 
ways the most remarkable of the three (pi. i x x m ), shooting up 
out of the rocks, steep above the river. The church with its undu¬ 
lating front, its two many-pinnacled towers and its bulbous spires 
is set back. Two pavilions of the monastery buildings, housing the 

139 



THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. l 600 -C. 1760 

marble hall and the library, jut forward to its right and left con¬ 
verging as they approach the front bastion. They are here connected 
by lower roughly semicircular wings. Between these, exacdy in 
line with the church, is an oddly Palladian arch to keep the vista 
open from the west portal towards the river. It is an exquisite 
piece of visual calculation—a late and subtle development of 
Palladio’s so much simpler connecting of villa and landscape, and 



74 . PLAN FOR THE REBUILDING OF THE MONASTERY OF WEINGARTEN, 1723. 


evidently the work of the century which discovered landscape 
gardening (see p. 184). 

But, to return to our question, while the towering church on the 
c ^®~ a Durham of the Baroque—may be rightly considered a 
monument of militant Catholicism, the palaces for abbot and monks 
with their richly ornamented saloons and their terraces are amenities 
of this world, on exactly the same level, and planned and executed 
in exactly the same lavish manner, as the contemporary palaces of 
the secular and clerical rulers of the innumerable states of the Holy 
Roman Empire or the country palaces of the English aristocracy, 
or Caserta, the palace of the King of Naples, or Stupinigi, the palace 
of the Duke of Savoy and King of ■Sar dinia 
One of the most irresponsible of these schemes is the Zwinger 
in Dresden, built by Mathaus Daniel Poppelmann (1662-1736) for 
the Elector Augustus the Strong, athlete, glutton and lecher. The 

140 



THE ZWINGER AT DRESDEN 

Zwingcr—very badly damaged in 1944 and in course of restoration 
now—(pi. lxxiv) is a combined orangery and electoral grand¬ 
stand for tournaments and pageants. It was not supposed to stand on 
its own, as it does now, attached only to the 19th-century picture 
gallery; it was meant to form part of a palace stretching across to the 
River Elbe. It consists of one-storied galleries with two-storied 
pavilions between. The galleries are comparatively restrained in 
design, but the most exuberant decoration is lavished over the 
pavilions. Especially the gate pavilion is a fantasy unchecked by any 
consideration of use. The ground-floor archway has instead of a 
proper pediment two bits of a broken pediment swinging away 
from each other. The first-floor pediment is broken too, but nodding 
inward instead of outward. The whole first floor is open on all sides 
—a kiosk or gazebo, as it were, and above its attic swarming with 
figures of putti is a bulbous cupola with the royal and electoral 
emblems on top. 

If those who can admire a Gothic Devon screen feel repelled by 
the Zwinger, they either do not really look at the object before them, 
or they look at it with the blinkers of puritanism. What an exult¬ 
ation in these rocking curves, and yet what a grace. It is joyful, but 
never vulgar; vigorous, boisterous perhaps, but never crude. It is of 
an inexhaustible creative power, with ever new combinations and 
variations of Italian Baroque forms placed against each other and 
piled above each other. The forward and backward motion never 
stops. Borromini appears massive against this swiftness of movement 
through space. 

As in every original style, the same formal intention seems, in the 
German Rococo, to model space and volume. The three-dimen¬ 
sional curve is the leitmotif of the period. It appears at Vierzehn- 
heiligen as it appears in the Zwinger, and it pervades buildings from 
their main theme of composition down to the smallest ornamental 
details. Nowhere else perhaps can this be seen as convincingly as in 
one of Neu mann ’s secular masterpieces, the staircase of the Bishop’s 
Palace at Bruchsal (pis. lxxv, lxxvi a & b and fig. 76). The 
palace itself is not by Neumann. It was in quite an advanced state 
when, in 1730, Neumann was called in to redesign the staircase. 

The palace, one of the most deplorable of all war casualties, 
consisted of a rectangular centre block or corps de logis and lower 
projecting wings, i.e. the Palladian scheme which had from 
Northern Italy spread to England and also to France, where it 

141 



THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. 160O-C. 1760 

marble hall and the library, jut forward to its right and left con¬ 
verging as they approach the front bastion. They are here connected 
by lower roughly semicircular wings. Between these, exactly in 
line with the church, is an oddly Palladian arch to keep the vista 
open from the west portal towards the river. It is an exquisite 
piece of visual calculation—a late and subtle d evelopment of 
Palladio’s so much simpler connecting of villa and landscape, and 



74 - PLAN FOR THE REBUILDING OF THE MONASTERY OF WEINGARTEN, I723. 


evidently the work of the century which discovered landscape 
gardening (see p. 184). 

But, to return to our question, while the towering church on the 
cliff a Durham of the Baroque—may be rightly considered a 
monument of militant Catholicism, the palaces for abbot and monks 
with their richly ornamented saloons and their terraces are amenities 
of this world, on exactly the same level, and planned and executed 
in exactly the same lavish manner, as the contemporary palaces of 
the secular and clerical rulers of the innumerable states of the Holy 
Roman Empire or the country palaces of the English aristocracy, 
or Caserta, the palace of the King of Naples, or Stupinigi, the palace 
of the Duke of Savoy and King of Sardinia. 

V One of the most irresponsible of these schemes is the Zwinger 
in Dresden, built by Mathaus Daniel Poppelmann (1662-1736) for 
the Elector Augustus the Strong, athlete, gluttbn and lecher. The 

: 140 



THE ZWINGER AT DRESDEN 


Zwinger—very badly damaged in 1944 and in course of restoration 
now—(pi. lxxiv) is a combined orangery and electoral grand¬ 
stand for tournaments and pageants. It was not supposed to stand on 
its own, as it does now, attached only to the 19th-century picture 
gallery; it was meant to form part of a palace stretching across to the 
River Elbe. It consists of one-storied galleries with two-storied 
pavilions between. The galleries are comparatively restrained in 
design, but the most exuberant decoration is lavished over the 
pavilions. Especially the gate pavilion is a fantasy unchecked by any 
consideration of use. The ground-floor archway has instead of a 
proper pediment two bits of a broken pediment swinging away 
from each other. The first-floor pediment is broken too, but nodding 
inward instead of outward. The whole first floor is open on all sides 
—a kiosk or gazebo, as it were, and above its attic swarming with 
figures of putti is a bulbous cupola with the royal and electoral 
emblems on top. 

If those who can admire a Gothic Devon screen feel repelled by 
the Zwinger, they either do not really look at the object before them, 
or they look at it with the blinkers of puritanism. What an exult¬ 
ation in these rocking curves, and yet what a grace. It is joyful, but 
never vulgar; vigorous, boisterous perhaps, but never crude. It is of 
an inexhaustible creative power, with ever new combinations and 
variations of Italian Baroque forms placed against each other and 
piled above each other. The forward and backward motion never 
stops. Borromini appears massive against this swiftness of movement 
through space. 

As in every original style, the same formal intention seems, in the 
German Rococo, to model space and volume. The three-dimen¬ 
sional curve is the leitmotif of the period. It appears at Vierzehn- 
heiligen as it appears in the Zwinger, and it pervades buildings from 
their main theme of composition down to the smallest ornamental 
details. Nowhere else perhaps can this be seen as convincingly as in 
one of Neumann’s secular masterpieces, the staircase of the Bishop’s 
Palace at Bruchsal (pis. lxxv, lxxvi a & b and fig. 76). The 
palace itself is not by Neumann. It was in quite an advanced state 
when, in 1730, Neumann was called in to redesign the staircase. 

The palace, one of the most deplorable of all war casualties, 
consisted of a rectangular centre block or corps de logis and lower 
projecting wings, i.e. the Palladian scheme which had from 
Northern Italy spread to England and also to France, where it 

141 



75 - ENRIQUE DE EGAS: STAIRCASE IN THE HOLT CROSS HOSPITAL, TOLEDO, 1504-I4. 

has been modified and then, in its revised shape with the space 
between the wings treated as a formal corn d’honneur , taken over by 
Germany. In the centre of the corps de logis is the staircase, an oval 
room, larger than any other in the palace. This alone is a most 

significant fact. 

In the Middle Ages staircases had mattered little. They were 
nearly always tucked away—a purely utilitarian part of the building. 
Newel staircases taking up as little space as possible were the rule. 

142 












THE EVOLUTION OF THE STAIRCASE 


The very latest phase of the Gothic style with its new appreciation 
of space had sometimes tried to endow them with spatial expression. 
A proper show however was only made of staircases when Italian 
splendour had revealed to the peoples of the West the crabbed tight¬ 
ness of mediaeval forms. Then the French of Francis f s time could 
enjoy the exterior newel staircase' of Blois (pi. lxxix) and the 
splendid interior double newel staircase—two parallel spirals within 
the same well—in the centre of the symmetrical palace of Cham- 
bord, and the Spanish, bolder still, could create shortly after 1500 a 
new type of staircase to be of the greatest influence in the centuries 
to come: the squared-up newel staircase, with three straight flights 
of steps around a spacious open well and the landing on the fourth 
side. This type occurs for the first time in Enrique de Egas’s Hospital 
of the Holy Cross at Toledo (1504-14 ; fig. 75) and in Michele 
Carlone’s castle of Lacalahorra (1508-12). Now Michele Carlone 
came from Genoa, and it has often been said that the Genoese, who 
made wide and airy staircases open towards courtyards the happy 
rule in the later 16th century, were the inventors of this influential 
type. No case has however yet been pointed out quite as early as the 
first Spanish examples. Moreover, Spanish architects also seem to 
have conceived the other most spectacular Baroque type of stair¬ 
case, and conceived it as early as the 1560*5 (fig. 91). This type, 
which runs in a large oblong cage, starting with two straight arms 
and then, after turning by 180 degrees at the landing, leads up to the 
upper floor in one arm between the two below (or starting with one 
and continuing with two), appears to my knowledge for the very 
first time in Juan Bautista de Toledo’s and Francisco de Herrera’s 
Escorial (1563-84). It is eminently characteristic that these staircases, 
in which space is experienced most vividly by those who ascend them 
or descend them, originated outside Italy. The Italian Renaissance had 
no use for them, no use for this flow of spatial strata or compart¬ 
ments into one another. The best Italian Renaissance staircases, such 
as the one in the Palazzo Farnese (fig. 57), were comfortably wide, 
but led upbetween solid walls. Bramante’s most interesting staircase, 
in the Vatican Palace, was of the traditional newel type, though with 
a wide open well and of gentle rise and generous measurements. 
Serlio and Palladio followed Bramante in this, although they knew 
and used the Spanish square three-flight type. However their hearts 
were not in staircase design. The only innovation in their books 
which is worth noting because it is so characteristically Mannerist 


e . a .—11 


143 



jS. BRUCHSAL : EPISCOPAL PALACE. THE CENTRAL STAIRCASE BY BALTHASAR NEUMANN 

1732. top; ground floor; bottom: first floor. 9 




THE STAIRCASE OF BRUCHSAL 


is the newel staircase elongated into an oval shape (Madcrna in¬ 
cidentally kept to this in the Barberini Palace (fig. 63)). The 
Baroque -of the 17th century,' especially in France, enriched the 
current types (see p. 177). That of the Escorial became in many 
variations the hall-mark of princely magnificence. Neumann's 
Wurzburg staircase with its Tiepolo paintings belongs to it. 

But the staircase at Bruchsal is unique. Words can hardly re¬ 
evoke the enchanting sensation that one experiences in walking 
up one of its two arms. They start in the rectangular vestibule. 
After about ten steps one enters the oval. On the ground floor 
it is a sombre room, painted with rocks in the rustic manner of 
Italian grotto imitations. The staircase itself then unfolds between 
two curved walls, the outside wall solid, that on the inside opened 
in arcades through which one looks down into the semi-darkness 
of the oval grotto. The height of the arcade openings of course 
diminishes as the staircase ascends. And while we walk up, it grows 
lighter and lighter around us, until we reach the main floor and a 
platform the size of the oval room beneath. But the vault above 
covers the larger oval formed by the outer walls of the staircase. Thus 
the platform with its balustrade separating it from the two staircase 
arms seems to rise in mid-air, connected only by bridges with the 
two principal saloons. And the vast vault above is lit by many 
windows, painted with the gayest of frescoes and decorated with a 
splendid fireworks of stucco. The spatial rapture of the staircase is in 
this decoration transformed into ornamental rapture. It culminates 
in the cartouche over the door leading into the Grand Saloon (pi. 
lxxvh). The cartouche is not Neumann's design. It is by a Bavarian 
stuccoist, Johann Michael Feichtmayr. The contract was made in 
1752. These Bavarian stuccoists nearly all came from the same 
village of Wessobrunn, where boys were as a matter of course 
trained to become proficient in stucco work, just as the decorators 
of Romanesque churches so often came from certain villages round 
the North Italian lakes, the makers and vendors of plaster-of- 
Paris statuettes in the 19th century from Savoy, and the onion-men 
of to-day from Brittany. Feichtmayr travelled about from job to 
job, and, when he worked for a monastery, still received wages and 
board just as the workmen did seven hundred years ago. Neumann 
must have met him on some job and have recognised his immense 
wealth of ornamental inventiveness. He appears at Vierzehnheiligen 
as well as at Bruchsal. In his stucco ornament not one part is sym- 

145 



THE BAROQUE IN ROMAN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES C. l600-C. 1760 

metrical. The main composition is a zig-zag, from the alluring young 
angel on the right, up to the cupid or cherub higher up on die left, 
and up again to the cherub at the top. The forms in detail seem to be 
incessantly changing, splashing up and sinking back. What are they >. 
Do they represent anything; Sometimes they look like shells, some¬ 
times like froth, sometimes like grisde, sometimes like flames. This 
kind of ornament is called rocaille in France, where it was invented 
in the 1720’s by Meissonier, Oppenord and a few others of pro¬ 
vincial or semi-Italian background. It has given the Rococo style 
its name, and righdy so; for it is a completely original creation, not 
dependent on anything of the past, as the ornament of the Re¬ 
naissance had been. It is abstract art of as high an expressional value 
as any that we are offered to-day so much more pretentiously. 

Bruchsal with its perfect unity of space and decoration was the high- 
water mark of the Baroque style. It was also its end. For only a few 
years after it had been completed and Neumann had died, Winckel- 
mann published his first books, initiating the Classical Revival in 
Germany. Between Neumann’s world and that of Goethe there is 
no link. The men of the new world no longer thought in terms of 
churches and palaces. No church designed anywhere after 1760 is 
amongst the historically leading examples of architecture. Napoleon 
built no palaces. 

The English nobility, it must be admitted, did; right into the 
Victorian age. But they had nothing of the unreflecting attitude of 
the Baroque. This change from a style binding for all and understood 
by all to a style for the educated only, did not take place in Germany 
and Italy until 1760. In France and Britain it had come about earlier. 
But then neither France nor Britain (nor the north of Germany, 
Holland, Denmark and Scandinavia) had ever accepted the Baroque 
with aUits implications. Theirworld—it is in many respects the modem 
world- is that of Protestantism. In Roman Catholic countries 
mediaeval traditions lived and flourished down to the 18th century. 
In the North the Reformation had broken that happy unity. But 
it had also opened the way for independent thinking and feeling. The 
Protestant countries (and one should include here the France of the 
Galileans, Jansenists and Encyclopaedists) had created Puritanism, 
Enlightenment, the modern predominance of experimental 
science, and finally the Industrial Revolution in the material and the 
symphony in the spiritual world. What the cathedral had been to 
the Middle Ages, the symphony was to the 19th century. 

146 



Britain and France from the 16th to 
the 18th Century 

A t the time of Bruchsal and the Trasparente, large houses of 
Palladian or Neo-Classical style appeared all over England, 
houses such as Prior Park, near Bath, Holkham Hall, Stowe 
and Kenwood. In France meanwhile the classic grandeur of Ver¬ 
sailles had given way to the Neo-Classical delicacy of the Place de la 
Concorde and the Petit Trianon. Evidently the development of 
architecture after the end of the Gothic syle had been very different 
in Western Europe from that in Central Europe. 

Yet in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany, the 
position had been virtually the same early in the 16th century. In all 
these countries artists almost at the same moment turned their backs 
on their Gothic past, attracted by the same new style, the Italian 
Renaissance. Everywhere during the 15th century, the fascination 
of Humanism, of Roman literature and the clarity and suppleness 
of the classic Latin style had been experienced by scholars. The 
invention of printing helped to spread the new ideals, and many 
patrons arose among princes, noblemen and merchants. A few of 
these, when for some reason or other they found themselves in 
Italy, were converted to Italian art as well, as soon as they had under¬ 
stood its humanistic character. How forceful the sensation must 
have been it is hardly possible for us to appreciate. One keeps for¬ 
getting that it was still a time of scanty and slow communications. 
Perpendicular to the English, Flamboyant to the French and their 
national versions of Late Gothic to the Spaniards and Germans were 
the only architecture they knew. Now all of a sudden, when Charles 
VIII of France set out on his campaign against Italy in 1494, marched 
right across the country and captured Naples, or when Diirer, the 
greatest of German painters, went to Venice in the same year as a 
young man of twenty-three, they were faced with a style that made 
all they had known appear confused, crabbed and petty. At the same 
time, however, these airy, spacious halls, these bold square palaces, 
these columns, balusters and round-headed arches, these garlands and 

147 



BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

laurel wreaths and cupids were so disconcertingly novel that it took 
even the most progressive many years to digest them. Charles VIH, 
under whom the French army had first invaded Italy, died in 1498. 
No work of his reign survives in France in which Italian motifs 
occur. 

But his successor Louis XII called Italian workmen into the 
country, and he and his court entrusted them with a good deal of 
decorative architectural work. The earliest existing examples are of 
about 1500, and in 1507 Diirer went to Venice a second time, now 
to start embellishing his pictures and engravings with Italian orna¬ 
ment. Again only one or two years later Quentin Matsys, the leading 
artist of Antwerp, introduced Southern motifs into his works. And 
in 1509 Henry VII had an agreement drawn up with an Italian 
sculptor, Giulio Mazzini, called Paganino, who then worked at the 
French court, to carve his tomb. The job did not materialise, but in 
1512 Henry VIII found another Italian, Pietro Torrigiani, a fellow- 
student of Michelangelo in Florence, to design the tomb for his 
father. As Torrigiani carved it, so it now stands in Henry VII’s 
Chapel in Westminster Abbey (fig. 77), a stranger in the midst of 
the wonders of Gothic ingenuity that surround it. No more poignant 
contrast can be imagined than that between Perpendicular panels and 
these medallions surrounded by wreaths, Perpendicular piers and 
these daintily ornamented pilasters, Perpendicular mouldings and the 
Antique mouldings of this base and this cornice, or Perpendicular 
foliage and the smiling beauty of these roses and acanthus friezes. 

One should however keep in mind that, when France, England, 
Spain and Germany discovered the loveliness of this style and made 
a fashion of it, it was already a style of the past in Italy. 1 What the 
architecture of 1520 was like in Rome, has been shown. Bramante, 
Raphael and their followers had discarded most of that pretty orna¬ 
ment and turned towards a grave classic ideal. For this, time was not 
ripe yet—in France for some twenty years, and in Britain for nearly 
a hundred. Early Renaissance was in full blossom this side of the 
Alps, when on the other side art and architecture had already passed 
the summit of High Renaissance. Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel and 
Laurenziana with their Mannerist discords are earlier than the most 
exquisite piece of Italian decoration surviving in England, the stalls 
of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, of 1532-36 (pi. ixxvin). 

1 An example of Spanish Early Renaissance is Egas’s Hospital of the Holy Cross 
at Toledo, dating from 1504-14; see fig. 75. 

148 ‘ 






































BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

Again the contrast between the only slightly older chapel itself and 
this addition from abroad is striking. And as the one was in the idiom 
with which everybody had grown up, while the other seemed to 
speak a foreign language, it is understandable that English patrons 
wavered between admiration and bewilderment. Very few were 
prepared to go the whole way (more in fact in France, where there 
was less of a racial contrast than in England), and those who did, had 
to rely on craftsmen from Italy, because the English or even the 
French mason could not at once get into a manner so novel both 
technically and spiritually. 

Now of Italians there were more and more who found their way 
into France and were welcomed by Francis I, but few who travelled 
on to Britain. Leonardo da Vinci died in France. Primaticcio came 
in 1532, Serlio in 1540. They were all painters and not trained for 
building in the mediaeval sense. They only designed, and for the 
execution of their designs had to rely on the native master masons. 
A deep antagonism developed at once between the Italians and the 
competent traditional craftsmen of France to whom these Italian 
intruders were mountebanks and jacks-of-all-trades. So the new 
ideal of the artist-architect entered France in this interesting form of 
a struggle between the builder and the decorator. 

However, the contrast does not often appear in actual buildings. 
For—again probably thanks to racial affinity—the French master 
masons very soon adopted the Italian vocabulary and used'it to pro¬ 
duce an essentially original style neither Gothic nor Renaissance. 
Two stages can be distinguished: the first that of the Loire school, 
the second that of Lescot’s work at the Louvre. The wing of Francis I 
at Blois (pi. ixxxx) was built between 1515 and about 1525. 
Every motif used in its decoration is of the North Italian Early 
Renaissance. On the other hand, the very existence of a newel 
staircase, and also the fact that its vertical supports are scarcely 
disguised buttresses, are mediaeval. Yet the emphasis on horizontal 
divisions, the even stronger emphasis , on the top cornice, and 
the arcaded galleries along the whole garden front prove that the 
designer of Blois, a Frenchman for all we know, had a feeling for 
what the Renaissance meant. 

The attitude of English architects was characteristically different. 
Hampton Court had been begun in 1515 for Cardinal Wolsey. A 
little later Henry VIII asked Wolsey to make him a present of the 
palace in its unfinished state. He added to it, amongst other parts, 

150 



THE FIRST STAGE OF ITALIAN INFLUENCE 


the Great Hall (fig. 78). 
Now the -palace with its 
courtyard and gate towers 
is just as completely in the 
Gothic tradition as the hall 
with itshammerbeam roof. 
Of the Italian Renaissance 
there is nothing but 
a limited number of 
ornamental details, the 
medallions with the heads 
of Roman emperors on 
the gate towers and the 
putti and foliage in the 
spandrels of the hall roof. 
They are competendy 
done, but no attempt is 
made to bridge the gulf 
between English construc¬ 
tion and Italian decoration. 



78. HAMPTON COURT: GREAT HALL, DETAIL 
FROM THE HAMMERBEAM ROOF, 1 5 33. PROBABLY 
BY JAMES NEEDHAM. 


So while the first stage in the process of assimilation had been 

identical in Britain and France, their ways separated at the second 
already. The distance widened at the third. In the thirties two or three 
of the most talented French architects of the younger generation, 
Philibert Delorme ( c . 1515-70), Jean Bullant (c. 1515-80) and 
perhaps Pierre Lescot (c. 1510-78), had gone to Rome where they 
had devoted their time to the study of Antiquity and the Renais¬ 
sance, and in 1545 Serlio had begun to publish parts of his treatise 
on architecture in French at Lyons. Thus the facade of the Louvre 
towards the court designed by Lescot in 1546 is both classical and 
French (pi. lxxx). Italian forms are handled with ease and at the 
same time with a freedom which proves that they had become the 
architect’s natural idiom. The central motif especially is beyond a 
doubt of Italian origin: the triumphal arch motif with coupled 
columns in superimposed orders and niches between each pair. The 
motif goes back to Bramante if not further, and was also used by 
Bullant at Ecouen (c. 1550) and by Delorme at Anet (also c. 1550). 
The pediments on brackets above windows and the garlands held by 
cupids are also of Italian stock, but there is an agility in the presen¬ 
tation, a polish and a graceful splendour, that are French in the 


1*51 






BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

extreme. The segmental pediment especially, so sharply drawn and 
yet so smooth, with the two female figures holding with an inimit¬ 
able rhetorical ostentation the shield with Henri II’s crowned 
inirial, would be impossible in Rome, where at that time Michel¬ 
angelo placed his mighty cornice on the Farnese palace; impossible 
also in Northern Italy, where Palladio built the first of his serene 
villas and palaces, and utterly impossible in both Spain and England. 

For Spain after her early welcome of the severest Italian 16th- 
century classicism (see p. 105) had almost at once relapsed into 
the ornamental vagaries of her past. The austerity of the Escorial, 
P hili p II’s vast castle-monastery, with its seventeen courts and its 
670 feet of frontage without any decoration, is exceptional. What 
meets the traveller everywhere is the Plateresque, a wildly mixed 
style of Gothic, Mohammedan and Early Renaissance ingredients, 
spread over facades and inner walls as irresponsibly as ever. The 
Renaissance had evidently not yet been grasped in its meaning 
(fig- 79)- 

Almost the same happened in the Netherlands and Germany. 
An international centre such as Antwerp might put up a town hall 
(1561-65, by Cornelis Floris, fig. 80), tall, proud, square, of con¬ 
sidered proportions and with a three-bay centre of proud Italian 
display. The motif of the coupled columns with Ionic correctly 
placed on top of Tuscan and Corinthian on top of Ionic and the 
niches in between may have been seen by the architect in France 
rather than Italy, or else it may come from Serlio. The date of the 
Antwerp Town Hall is too early to make it probable or even possible 
that another of the popular and soon apparently indispensable Books 
of Orders or general Books of Architecture served as a model: Hans 
Blum’s Five Orders of 1550, Ducerceau’s Livre d’Architecture of 1559, 
Vignola’s Rule of the Five Orders of 1562, Bullant’s Rkgle Generate des 
Cinque Manures of 1564, Delorme’s Architecture of 1568 or Palladio’s 
Architecture of 1570. How characteristic of the ruling style of 
Mannerism this sudden outcrop of books on theory is has been 
pointed out before. It must however here be emphasised to what 
extent France shared in the new zest for publication. Germany, in the 
person of the humble Blum, made her voice heard, and England 
took part too, in a somewhat homespun way, with John Shute’s 
Chief Groundes of Architecture, published in 1563, and with John 
Thorpe’s drawings at the Soane Museum in London, done no doubt 
with an eye to publication but never printed. They were worked on 

152; 



79* SALAMANCA: PORTAL OF THE UNIVERSITY, C. 1525-30. 


late in the 16th and even in the first years of the 17th century, 
and Thorpe derived as much inspiration from French and Italian 
books as he did from the fantastic ornamental pattern books of the 
Netherlands, especially those by Vredeman de Vries which came 
out in 1565 and 1568. 

These pattern books summed up what is the most remarkable 
contribution of Flanders and Holland to the style of Mannerism, a 


153 





















































































































































STRAP WORK ORNAMENT 





81. TYPICAL FLEMISH AND DUTCH STRAP- 
WORK ORNAMENT OF THE LATER l6TH 
CENTURY (FROM THE RHINELAND COUNTY 
HALL, LEIDEN, 1596-98). 


novel language of ornament known as bandwork or strapwork. 
Floris in his town hall handles it with discretion. It hardly appears 
in the towering gable "with its obelisks, scrolls and caryatid pilasters, 
the finishing flourish to this 
ponderous building, and a 
motif entirely in the Northern 
mediaeval tradition. But in 
the smaller town halls, guild 
halls and market halls, and the 
private houses of the Nether¬ 
lands these gables, the leitmotif 
of the 16th and early 17th 
centuries, are overcrowded 
■with strapwork. The pro¬ 
vincial decorator-architects 
were not prepared to give 
up any of the exuberance to 
which the Flamboyant of the 
15 th century had accustomed 
them. And instead of making 
up an ollapodrida of Gothic and 
Renaissance, such as the Spanish did in their Plateresque, they were 
headstrong and imaginative enough to invent something for them¬ 
selves. For invention these forms must be called, even if they can be 
traced back to such Mannerist detail as that round the top windows 
of the Palazzo Massimi (pi. lv), and to the work of the Italian 
decorators at Fontainebleau. They consist chiefly of somewhat 
stocky thick-set curves of fretwork or leather-strap appearance 
(fig. 81), sometimes flat, but more often three-dimensional and 
contrasted with naturalistic garlands and caryatids. The popularity 
of the strapwork style soon spread into the adjacent countries— 
not to France of course, but to Germany as well as England. 

To understand Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture in England 
one has to be familiar with the three sources just mentioned: the 
Italian Early Renaissance, the Loire style in France and the strap- 
work decoration of Flanders. This wide-awake interest in so many 
foreign developments is the aesthetic equivalent of England’s new 
international outlook since Queen Elizabeth, Gresham and Burghley. 
However, one has also to remember all the time that a strong Per¬ 
pendicular tradition, the tradition of the picturesque, asymmetrical. 

155 



BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

stone-gabled manor-house with its mullioned windows and its 
extreme ornamental restraint* was still alive. Thus English architec¬ 
ture between 1530 and 1620 is a composite phenomenon with 
French and Flemish elements prevailing, where we are near the 
court, and English traditions, as soon as we get away from it. Much 
of it is derivative, both in the sense of imitation and of conserva¬ 
tism, but occasionally a new expression is developed as original and 
as nationally characteristic as Lescot’s Louvre. 

Burghley House, near Stamford, is the work of William Cecil, 
Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s trusted adviser and friend. It is a 
mighty rectangle of about 160 by 200 feet with an inner courtyard. 
The central feature of this courtyard is a three-storied pavilion, 
dated 1585 (pi. lxxxi). It is again designed on the French trium¬ 
phal arch motif with the typically French niches between the coupled 
columns. It has three orders, correctly applied; but on the third 
floor between the Corinthian columns there sits an utterly incon¬ 
gruous English muUioned and transomed bay window (the Englis h 
have at no time been happy without bay windows) and above that 
the pavilion shoots out bits of strapwork and obelisks—a crop of 
Flemish decoration. The analysis of style is confirmed by docu¬ 
mentary evidence. We know that no architect in a modem sense 
was wholly responsible for the building. Lord Burghley himself 
must have made a good many of the suggestions embodied in the 
design. He represents a coming type: the architectural dilettante. 
In 1568 he wrote to Paris for a book on architecture, and some years 
later he wrote again specifying one particular French book which 
he desired. On the other hand it is also certain that workmen for 
Burghley came from the Netherlands and that a certain amount 
of work was actuaUy done at Antwerp and then shipped to England. 
Thus Flemish as weU as French motifs are easily accounted for. What 
is harder to understand is why this happy-go-lucky mixing up of 
foreign phrases with the English vernacular (the chimney stacks are 
coupled Tuscan Doric columns complete with entablature) does 
not appear disjointed. The England of Queen Elizabeth—this is aU 
that can be said by way of an explanation—possessed such an over¬ 
flowing vitality and was so eager to take in aU that was sufficiently 
adventurous and picturesque and in some cases mannered that it 
could digest what would have caused serious trouble to a weaker age. 

However, while Burghley (and Wollaton Hall of 1580 and the 
entrance side of Hatfield of 1605—12) are spectacular and stimu¬ 
li 



THE ELIZABETHAN STYLE 

lating enough, the real strength of English building lay in less out¬ 
landish designs. One of the earliest, if not the earliest, in an unmis¬ 
takable Elizabethan style is Longleat in Wiltshire, begun in 1567 
(pi. Lxxxn). Here you find strap work only very inconspicu¬ 
ously on the top balustrade. The portal is small and in the Italian 
style; with its Tuscan Doric columns it appears surprisingly re¬ 
strained. Ornament is sparingly used. The effect is one of sturdy 
squareness. The roof is flat, the hundreds of many-mulhoned, many- 
transomed windows are straight-headed, and the bay windows 
project only slightly and have straight sides. This English squareness 
and the predominance of large expanses of window creates some¬ 
times, for instance at Hardwick Hall and even more in the garden 
side of Hatfield House, a curiously modem, that is 20th-century, 
effect. More often these large windows, the windows of Perpendic¬ 
ular tradition, are combined with the plain customary English tri¬ 
angular gables. Small houses of this type are still as asymmetrical as 
of old, larger houses are symmetrical at least in plan, of C or E 
shape or, if larger, still developed round courtyards. There is a great 
deal of difference between Longleat and Burghley, but it took a 
William Cecil and a Raleigh, a Shakespeare and a Spenser, and many 
clear-minded, hard-headed and strong-bodied businessmen to 
mala* up the England of Elizabeth. Yet it is one England, of one 
spirit and one style in building, vigorous, prolific, somewhat boast¬ 
ful, of a healthy and hearty soundness which, it is true, is sometimes 
coarse and sometimes dull—but never effeminate and never hysterical. 

Compared with the gulf that separates buildings like Burghley 
House (or Audley End of 1603-16, or Hatfield House) fiom Inigo 
Jones’s supreme achievements, the Queen’s House at Greenwich, 
designed in 1616, though not completed until immediately before 
the Civil War, and the Banqueting House in Whitehall of 1619-22, 
the change in English architecture between 1500 and 1530 seems 
almost negligible. Only now England experienced what France had 
experienced before the middle of thei6th century, and experienced 

it far more startlingly, became Inigo Jones transplanted whole 

* buildings of purely Italian character into England, where such men 
as Lescot, Delorme and Bullant had only transplanted features and 
up to a point—the spirit that stood behind them. 

Inigo Jones (1573-1652) began, it seems, as a painter. At the age 
of thirty-one he appears as a designer of costumes and stage-settings 
for one of the masques which were a favourite entertainment of the 

157 



BRITAIN AND FRANCE. i6tH TO l8TH CENTURY 

«ourt at that period. He became soon the accepted theatrical designer 
to the royal family. Plenty of drawings for masques exist. They 
are brilliantly done, the costumes of that fantastic kind which the 
Baroque connected with ancient history and mythology, the stage- 
settings nearly all in the classical Italian style. Jones had, perhaps, been 
in Italy about 1600, interested probably more in painting and archi¬ 
tectural decoration than in architecture proper. Then, however, the 
Prince of Wales made him his surveyor, i.e. architect, as did a short 
time later the Queen, and, in 1613, the King. So he went back to 
Italy, this time, we know from his sketch-books, to study Italian 
buildings seriously. His ideal was Palladio: an edition of Palladio 
annotated by Jones is preserved. 

Looking back from the Queen’s House (pi. Lxxxm)— a villa in 
the Italian sense, out at Greenwich—to Palladio’s Palazzo Chierigati 
(pi. lvh), the close connection of style is evident, though nothing 
is copied. In fact we find nowhere in Jones’s work mere imitation. 
What he had learned from Palladio and the Roman architects of the 
early 16th century, is to regard a building as a whole, organised 
throughout—in plan and elevation—according to rational rules. 
But the Queen’s House has not the weight of the Roman Renais¬ 
sance or Baroque palace. It was originally even less compact than 
Palladio’s country houses, for it was not a complete block, as it is 
now, but consisted of two rectangles standing to the right and the 
left of the main Dover Road and only connected with each other by a 
bridge (the present centre room on the first floor), across the road— 
a curious, if not unique, composition of a spatially most effective 
openness. In contrast to this freedom in general plan, the strictest 
symmetry governs the grouping of the rooms. Now in Elizabethan 
country houses we find the decision already taken to tidy up 
facades into more or less complete symmetry. One may even come 
across blocked windows and similar contrivances to force into out¬ 
ward symmetry what could not be made to match inside. For 
wholly symmetrical plans were still rare by 1610, although the 
trend towards them is unmistakable. In this Inigo Jones is the 
logical successor to the Jacobeans. But if one takes his elevations, 
thdr dignified plainness is in the strongest contrast to the Jacobean 
animation by windows of varying sizes, bay windows, rounded 
and polygonal, dormer windows, gables and high-pitched roofs. 
The centre portion of the Queen’s House with the loggia projects 
slightly: that is the only movement of the wall surface. The ground 

158 



INIGO JONES 

floor is rusticated, the top floor smooth. A balustrade sets the 
facade off ag ains t, the sky. The windows are thoughtfully pro¬ 
portioned. There is no ornament anywhere but the delicately 
moulded cornices above the first-floor windows. 

This was a principle with Inigo Jones. He wrote on Jan. 20,1614: 
“Ye outward ornaments oft to be sollid, proporsionable according 
to the rulles, masculine and unaffected . The character ofthe Queen s 
House could not be better described. And Jones knew that in building 
thus he was holding up an ideal not only in opposition to contem¬ 
porary Britain but also to contemporary Rome, i.e. the Baroque. 
“All thes composed ornaments”, he added, “the which Proceed 
out of ye aboundance of dessigners and wear brought in by Michill 
Angell and his followers in my oppignion do not well in solid 
Architecture.” Yet he did not despise ornament altogether. He uses 
it inside the Queen s House and, with luxurious exuberance, in the 
so-called double-cube room at Wilton House. Even there however 
there is nothing crowded. The form of his wreaths and garlands of 
flowers and fruit is compact. They fit into clear-cut panels, and 
never overgrow the structural divisions of a room. Again, Jones was 
fully aware of the contrast between his simple exteriors and his 
rich interiors. He wrote: “Outwardly every wyse man carrieth a 
graviti in Publicke Places, yet inwardly hath his imaginacy set on 
fire, and sumtimes licenciously flying out, as nature hirself doeth 
often times stravagantly”, and demands the same attitude in a good 
building. And once more the way in which he puts his observation 
is personal to a degree inconceivable in an architect in England in 
Elizabethan and Jacobean days. For Inigo Jones is the first English 
architect in the modern sense. He achieved in this country what the 
earliest artist-architects had achieved in Italy at the beginning of the 
Renaissance. And as one is interested in Alberti or Leonardo da 
Vinci as individuals, so the genius of Inigo Jones makes one deplore 
over and over again how litde is known of his personality. 

Of Jones’s other works—and those attributed to him with 
sojjie degree of certainty—only two more can be mentioned. 
One is Lindsay House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, because with its rusti¬ 
cated ground floor and its giant order of pilasters above, supporting 
entablature and top balustrade, it is the prototype for a whole series 
of representational English town houses down to the Royal Crescent 
at Bath (p. 186) and Nash’s Regent’s Park terraces. The other is 
the layout of Covent Garden with its tall houses, dignified and un- 

159 


E.A .—12 



BRITAIN AND FRANCE. i 6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

adorned, open in galleries on the ground floor, which Jones had 
taken from a piazza at Leghorn (in fact Covent Garden was biown 
in Evelyn’s and Pepys’s time as the Piazza), because it is the first of 
the regularly planned London squares. Its west side was centred on 
the small church of St. Paul’s with its low, very grave, Antique 
portico, a design inspired by the Italian 16th-century books on 
architecture and the earliest classical portico of detached columns 
erected in the North. 

Now here, though only for a moment, a church had to be men¬ 
tioned. For about one hundred years church architecture had all but 
stopped in Britain. And in France, although there are a number of 
interesting 16th-century churches with curious mixtures m varying 
proportion of Gothic conceptions with Southern detail (for in¬ 
stance St. Eustache and St. Etienne du Mont, both m Pans), they 
are not amongst the historically leading works. The same might 
ako be said of the 17th century, or at least its beginning. 
Paris now took over the Gesu scheme of facade and interior (see pp. 
116-1x8), the scheme which, as has been said before, became more 
widely popular than any other during the period between 1600 and 
1750 (Jesuit Novitiate Church begun 1612, now destroyed; St. 
Gervais begun 1616 by de Brosse; Church of the -Feuillants begun 
1624? by Francois Mansart). 

The parallelism between this French development based on Vignola 

and the English one based on Palladio need not be specially stressed. 
It was part of the universal tendency of the north of Europe early 
in the 17th century. In Germany at exactly the same time Elias Holl 
(1573-1646) built his Palladian Augsburg Town Hall (1610-20). 
And in palace architecture in France Salomon de Brosse (c. 1550/60- 
1626) at the request of Maria de’ Medici incorporated into his 
monumental plan for the Luxembourg Palace, begun in 1615, motifs 
of the Mannerist parts of the Pitti Palace in Florence. The plan of 
the Luxembourg consists of an H-shaped corps de logis with lower 
wings along a cour d’honneur and a screen wall on the front side. The 
central axis is strongly marked by the entrance pavilion in the screen 
wall and the centre pavilion of the corps de logis. 

Such grand symmetrical schemes, more rigidly formal as a rule 
than Elizabethan and Jacobean compositions, are characteristic of 
France. They were originally (that is early in the 16th century, at the 
time when the Loire chateau of Chambord was designed in perfect 
symmetry with thick round towers) a fusion of symmetrical dis- 

160 



FRENCH ARCHITECTURE ABOUT 1630 

cipline in mediaeval castles and in Italian Renaissance palaces. With 
Delorme’s plan of 1564 for the Tuileries (devised no doubt under 
the influence of the Escorial) the grand scale was reached. The 
Tuileries were to have a 200-foot front and five courts. A little later, 
under Charles IX, a yet bigger project was drawn up by Jacques 
Androuet Ducerceau (c. 1510—85) who has so far only been 
mentioned as a writer on architecture. Charleval in Normandy 
was intended to be a large square with a square inner courtyard and 
a com d’honneur in front, possessing on the right and left service 
wings each again with two courts. The size intended was over 1000 
by 1000 feet, far more that is than the Escorial. From such schemes 
Charles I’s and Charles iTs ideas for a gigantic Whitehall palace 
were derived, the ideas which were first put on paper by Inigo Jones 
and then in exactly as Italian a style by John Webb, his pupil. 

But before 1650 or 1660 Jones and Webb were almost alone in 
pursuing such Southern ideas. The popular style in England after 
the Jacobean and often still side by side with the Jacobean was a 
homely Dutch style with curved and pedimented gables (Kew 
Palace, etc.). To this corresponds in France the style of Henri IV 
still lingering on into the thirties of the 17th century, a style of 
brick buildings with stone quoins and window dressings, best 
illustrated by the architecture of the Place des Vosges in Paris 
(1605—12) and by Richelieu’s little town of Richelieu, founded 
in 1631 and designed with his palace by Lemercier (c. 1585-1654). 
The palace, long since destroyed, was modelled on the Luxembourg 
pattern and thus already a conservative work when it was completed. 

For in monumental French architecture Richelieu’s period and 
even more that of Mazarin are characterised by a broad new influx 
of Italian ideas—and that now meant ideas of the Baroque—and by 
the way they were developed in the hands of a few leading archi¬ 
tects into a classic French style which corresponds in terms of build¬ 
ing to that of Poussin in painting, of Corneille in drama and of 
Descartes in philosophy. There is no parallel in England to this 
phase, though from 1660 onwards parallelism, if in very different 
national idioms, is again patent. 

Francis Mansart (1598-1664) is the first great protagonist, Louis 
Levau (1612-70) the second. Mansart’s two magna opera were 
built between 1635 and 1650: the Orleans wing at Blois and the 
country house of Maisons-Lafitte. The corn d honnem at Blois 
especially (pi. lxxxtv ; on the extreme right a comer of Francis I s 

161 



BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO 1 8 TH CENTURA 

wing is just visible) is a masterpiece of civilised reticence, elegant, 
not very warm-hearted, yet far from pedantically correct with its 
two-storied triumphal arch and the remarkably original little 
semicircular third-storied pediment above. The links backward 
with Lescot’s age are as evident as the links forward with the subtle 
perfection of the Rococo hotel. The curved "colonnades especially 
convey that distinct feeling of Rococo. The way in which they 
smooth over the angular break at the corners is very French and very 
accomplished. A similar interior effect is achieved at Maisons- 
Lafitte by the oval rooms in the wings. These were new to France; 
an I talian motif introduced, it appears, by Mansart and Levau. Of 
its I talian use in churches and palaces (Palazzo Barberini) enough has 
been said. Its most prominent occurrence in France is in the mighty, 
very I talian and very Baroque fancy palaces published in Antoine 
Lepautre’s (1621-91) Desseins ie plusieurs palais in 1652—the parallel 
to Puget’s sculpture—in Louis Levau’s church of the College des 
Quatre Nations (now Institut de France) of 1661 and in his country 
house of Vaux-le-Vicomte, begun in 1657. The church of the Col¬ 
lege des Quatre Nations (fig. 83) is, broadly speaking, a Greek 
cross, but the arms and the comers between the arms are designed 
with considerable freedom and differ widely from each other. The 
dominant features of the church are the oval centre with its dome 
and an oval atrium. Oval also is the effect of the earlier Sorbonne 
Church (fig. 82) by Jacques Lemercier (1635-42), where a Greek cross 
is combined with a circular centre but with a great deal of deliberate 
stress on one axis of the cross as against the other. There is just as 
much spatial ingenuity in these plans as in those of contemporary 
Italy, although their detail appears cold and restrained against the 
Baroque of Rome. 

Vaux-le-Vicomte (figs. 84 and 85) is in many ways the most 
important French building of the mid-i7th century. It was begun 
by Levau for Colbert’s predecessor Fouquet, and is surrounded by 
gardens in which the great Lenotre first experimented with ideas 
later to be developed so spectacularly at Versailles. Lebrun, Louis’s 
Premier Peintre, also worked at Vaux before he started at Versailles. 

In the house itself (as at Maisons and some others before) the 
traditional plan of the Luxembourg is given up for that of the 
Palazzo Barberini with very much shorter projecting wings, and 
the centre pavilion is occupied by a domed oval saloon, again on the 
pattern of the Barberini Palace. In the wings the roofs have still the 

162 



83. LOUIS LEVAU: CHURCH OF THE COLLEGE DES QUATRE NATIONS (NOW INSTITUT DE 

FRANCE), PARIS, l66l. 











































































































































HOLLAND, FRANCE AND ENGLAND 

high pitch characteristic of the French 16th and early 17th centuries, 
but slender Ionic pilasters appear in one giant order for both stories. 
Giant orders were nothing new. We have found them in Inigo 
Jones and before. Palladio had had them and France herself 
occasionally too (Bullant at Ecouen, Ducerceau at Charleval, 
etc.). But in this particularly light and elegant manner they are 
curiously s imilar to those which since about 1630 Holland had 
favoured. 

Holland just at that time attained the leadership of Western com¬ 
merce, and she was much envied and imitated by both Colbert and 
the English. She also led in science and could boast more men of 
artistic genius than at any other period in her national existence. In 
architecture her development had led her from a gay and jolly style 
of 1600, parallel to Henri IV’s style and the Jacobean, to a new 
classicism, parallel to Mansart’s in France and Inigo Jones’s in 
England. The Mauritshuis at The Hague, built by Jacob van Campen 
in 1633-35 (pi. lxxxv), has a correct pediment on correct giant 
pilasters, and giant pilasters also along its sides. In this it may well 
have influenced France and Vaux in particular, but its intimate size 
for a princely residence, its unpretentious plain brick walls and its 
all-pervading feeling of solid comfort are very Dutch and quite 
different from anything French of that period. 

England, on the other hand, could sympathise with.these North- 
Western qualities of the Dutch. And her architec ture since 1660 was 
indeed greatly influenced by the buildings of van Campen and 
Vingboons, and by Vingboons’s engraved publications of 1648, 
1674 and 1688. However, architects, amateurs and scholars, and 
especially the Stuart court, were not blind either to the glamour 
and the real achievements of the Paris of Colbert and Louis XIV. 
There was trading success on the one hand, the grandeur of absolute 
monarchy on the other. Hence representational architecture tended 
towards the Parisian, domestic architecture towards the Dutch. In 
Sir Christopher Wren’s work inspiration from both sources can be 
traced. He must have studied engravings of Dutch architecture with 
great care, and he went to Paris personally, when he had realised 
that the designing and supervising of buildings was to be his main 
job in life. For Wren (1632-1723)—this » again characteristic of 
Renaissance and Baroque—had not been trained as an architect or a 
mason. Nor was he a painter or sculptor or engineer. He represents 

yet another type, a type not so far met in this book. 

165 



BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

Wren’s father had been Dean of Windsor, his father’s brother 
Bishop of Ely. He was sent to Westminster School. At the age of 
fifteen, after he had finished school, he was made an assistant de¬ 
monstrator in anatomy at the College of Surgeons. Then he went 
up to Oxford. His main interest was science, in that curious mixed 
and vague sense which science still had in the mid-i7th century. 
During the time he was at college, “that miracle of a youth”, as 
John Evelyn called him, put before the authorities fifty-three in¬ 
ventions, theories, experiments and mechanical improvements. 
Some of them seem trifling now, others aimed right at the central 
problems of astronomy, physics and engineering. In 1657 he was 
made professor of astronomy in London, in 1661 in Oxford. It 
was the moment when experimental science was just coming to the 
fore everywhere in Europe. In Paris the Royal Academy of Science 
was established. The Royal Society in London started its activities 
even earlier. Wren was one of its founders and most distinguished 
members. Newton calls him together with Huygens and Wallis 
“huius setatis geometrarum facile principes”. His most important 
scientific work is on cycloids, the barometer and Pascal’s problem. 
In his inaugural lecture in London he revealed a prophetic vision of 
nebulae as the firmaments of other worlds like ours. In 1664 he 
illustrated Willis’s Anatomy of the Brain. And in 1663 he presented 
to the Royal Society a model for a building which he had designed 
at the request of Oxford University, the Sheldonian Theatre, com¬ 
pleted in 1669. Its roof is an ingenious piece of timber engineering, 
but its architecture is awkward, evidently the work of a man with 
little designing experience. The same can be said of his second work, 
Pembroke Chapel, Cambridge, of 1663-66. An even earlier con¬ 
nection with building construction is indicated by Charles II’s re¬ 
quest to him to fortify Tangier. So architecture, engineering, 
physics and mathematics go hand in hand in the development of 
Wren’s mind. The resolution to specialise in architecture may have 
been brought about by the Fire of London in 1666. Wren found 
himself a member of the Royal Commission for the rebuilding 
of the city, and very soon also the elected designer of the many 
new churches to be built in the city, including St. Paul’s. In 1669 
the King made him Surveyor-General. His only important journey 
abroad took him not to Italy but to Paris. That is a very significant 
fact. At the time of Inigo Jones’s Wanderjahre, Paris could not have 
been more than a station on the way to Rome. Now Wren, in a 

166 



ART AND ARCHITECTURE UNDER LOUIS XIV 

letter, called Paris “a School of Architecture, the best probably at 
this Day in Europe”. The most important it certainly was. While 
Wren was in Paris, Louis XIV, who intended to rebuild the east 
parts of the Louvre, had Invited Bernini to come and contribute 
designs. He did so, but his plans, a colossal square on the Roman 
pattern with giant orders of detached columns on the outer and the 
courtyard fronts and with a vigorous top cornice crowned by a balus¬ 
trade, plans which Wren only succeeded in examining for a short, 
precious few minutes, were dropped as soon as the great man left. 
They were replaced by the famous east front with the colonnades 
which Claude Perrault (1613-88) designed in 1665. 

The choice of Perrault was characteristic. He was an amateur, a 
distinguished doctor, his brother was a lawyer and courtier, author 
of a mediocre poem on Le Siecle de Louis le Grand, and had in 1664 
been made Inspector-General of the King’s buildings. In the history 
of French literature he is chiefly known as one of the leaders in the 
Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Boileau defended Antiquity, 
Perrault a contemporary style—which of course did not really 
mean more than a certain amount of freedom in applying the rules 
of the ancients. 

Claude Perrault’s Louvre front (pi. lxxxvi) goes beyond Mansart 
and Levau in several ways. It represents the change from Mazarin 
to Colbert, or from early to mature Louis XIV. It has a disciplined 
formality to which Perrault’s knowledge of Bernini’s project con¬ 
tributed two important motifs. Bernini as well as Perrault have flat 
balustraded roofs, and Bernini as well as Perrault model their fronts 
without any marked projections or recesses of wings. Both these 
features were new in France. Otherwise, however,Perrault Is wholly 
national. French in feeling, though very original and so un-academic 
that his less adventurous contemporaries never forgave him, are 
the slim coupled giant columns of the main story raised up on the 
tall smooth podium-like ground floor. French are the segment¬ 
headed windows, and French (of direct Lescot derivation) the oval 
shields with garlands hanging down from them. 

The whole Is a of grandeur and yet a precise elegance that the 17th 
century, in spite of Blois and Maisons, had never before achieved, 
and that the architects of Louis XTV’s later years never surpassed. 
Perrault has summed up to perfection the various, sometimes 
seemingly contradictory tendencies of the siecle de Louis XIV, the 
gravity and raison of late Poussin, Corneille and Boileau, the re- 

167 



BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

strained fire of Racine, the lucid grace of Moliere, the powerful 
sense of organisation of Colbert. 

It is necessary for an appreciation of this style to remember the 
atmosphere in which it grew, the straggles first between Protes¬ 
tantism and Catholicism in the 16th century, Henri IV’s decision to 
return to the Roman Church, because, as he put it, “Paris is worth a 
mass”, then the spreading of religious indifference, until it became 
all-powerful in the policy of Richelieu, the cardinal, and Father 
Joseph, the Capuchin, who fought Protestants in France but favoured 
them abroad, in both cases purely for reasons of national expediency. 
For the centre of their thoughts and ambitions was France, and a 
strong and prosperous France could only be created by first building 
up a rigorously centralised administration. Now the only visible 
symbol of the might of the state could be the person of the king. 
Absolutism was therefore the appropriate form of government for 
whoever was in favour of a national policy. Thus Richelieu prepared 
the ground for absolutism, Mazarin followed, and Colbert, the 
indefatigable, competent and tenacious bourgeois, made a system 
of it. He organised France with an unheard-of thoroughness: 
mercantilism in industry and commerce, royal workshops, royal 
trading companies, close supervision of roads, of canals, of affores¬ 
tation—of everything. 

Art and architecture were an integral part of the system. A 
flourishing school of painting, sculpture and the applied arts stimu¬ 
lated export and at the same time enhanced the glory of the court. 
Architecture was useful to create work and again to celebrate the 
greatness of king and state. But there should be no licence; style 
had to conform to standards set by the prince and his minister. 
Thus academies were founded, one for painting and sculpture, 
another for architecture, the earliest of a modem type, both educa¬ 
tional and representational, and the most powerful that have ever 
existed. And when artists had gone through these schools and gained 
distinction, they were made royal sculptors or royal architects, 
drawn nearer and nearer to the court, honoured and paid according¬ 
ly, but made more and more dependent on the will of Louis and Col¬ 
bert. It was in Paris at that time that the principle of architecture as 
a department of the civil service was established. The French and 
English kings had had their royal master-masons ever since the 
13 th century. But they were craftsmen, not civil servants. Also the 
competencies of the various surveyors, inspectors and whatever they 

168 




± 


/o 20 " 30 . -to JO / , 

■ H - .H - 


86 . JULES HARDOUIN-MANSART: ST. LOUIS DBS INVALIDES, PARIS. 


BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

were called later on, were never clearly defined. Michelangelo had 
been Superintendent of the Papal Buildings; but nobody would 
have considered such an appointment a full-time job. Now the 
architectural office developed, and a system of training at the draw¬ 
ing board and on the jobs. 

Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646-1708) was the perfect type of the 
official French architect, competent, quick and adaptable. In his 
church of St. Louis des Invalides (pi. ixxxvn and fig. 86) of 1675- 
1706 he achieved, just as Perrault did, that specific combination of 
grandeur and elegance which is not to be found anywhere outside 
France. The composition, externally and internally, is meant to be 
taken as an improvement on Lemercier’s Sorbonne and Levau’s 
College des Quatre Nations. The interior, except for the oval chancel, 
is more academically balanced, that is less dynamic in its spatial 
relations, than the works of Hardouin-Mansart’s predecessors. But 
the dome is constructed so that in looking up one sees through a wide 
opening in the inner cupola on to the painted surface of a second 
cupola, fit by concealed windows—a wholly Baroque spatial effect. 
Examining now the facade one will become aware of its Baroque 
qualities too, in spite of its seemingly correct portico with Doric 
and Ionic orders. The free rhythmical spacing of the columns (taken 
from Perrault) should be noted, and the graded advance in plan 
towards the centre: first step from the walls to the columns of 
the wings, second step to the columns on the sides of the portico 
and third step to the four middle columns. Not only the Greeks 
but also Palladio and even Vignola would have deprecated this 
strongly. 

Sir Christopher Wren did not. His St. Paul’s Cathedral of 1675- 
1710 (pi. ixxxvm and fig. 87) though apparently so much a monu¬ 
ment to Classicism is in fact just as much a blend of the classical and 
the Baroque as the Dome des Invalides. The dome of St. Paul’s, one 
of the most perfect in the world, is classical indeed. It has a more 
reposeful outline than Michelangelo’s and Hardouin-Mansart’s. 
The decoration with a colonnade round the drum is also character¬ 
istically different from the projecting groups of columns and 
broken entablatures of St. Peter’s and the segment-headed windows 
—so remarkably domestic-looking—and the slim, graceful shape of 
the lantern of St. Louis’s. But looking more closely, even there the 
alternation of bays where columns flank niches, with bays where 
they stand in front of loggias, introduces an element of unclassical 


170 



HARDOUIN-MANSART AND WREN 


variety. The lantern, too, is at least as bizarre as Mansart’s* And as for. 
the facade of St. Paul 5 s, begun in 1685, it is, with the coupled columns 
which Wren (just as Hardouin-Mansart) took over from Perrault’s 
Louvre facade, and the two fantastic turrets on the sides (designed 
after 1700), a decidedly Baroque composition. The side elevations 
are dramatic, though of a secular, palace-like effect. The windows 



87. SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN: ST. PAULAS CATHEDRAL, LONDON, 1675-I7IO. 

* 

have even a framing of sham-perspective niches of the S. Carlo and 
Palazzo Barberini type (see pi. lxiv). Inside there is a poignant 
contrast between the firmness of every part and the spatial dynamics 
of the whole. The dome rests on diagonally placed piers with 
colossal niches hollowed out. Niches also set the outer walls of the 
aisles and choir aisles into an undulating motion. With a similar 
effect windows are cut into the tunnel-vaults and saucer domes of 
choir and nave. Wren’s style in churches and palaces is Palladian, no 
doubt, but it is a Baroque version of Classicism. Such city churches 
as the ingeniously multiform St. Stephens, Walbrook (1672-87, 
pi. Lxxxrx and fig. 88), show this especially clearly. 

To analyse its ground plan is almost as hard as to analyse Vier- 
zehnheiligen. Yet its expression is of cool clarity. Outside it is a plain 
rectangle as silent about the interior surprises as Vierzehnheiligen. 
Inside its centre is a spacious gently rising saucer dome resting on 
eight arches supported by nothing but twelve slender columns. The 
technical achievement is as remarkable as the effortless lightness of 
appearance. The twelve columns form a square, and four arches 

171 


































BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

connect the two central columns of each side of the square, while 
fragmentary vaults curve up from the three columns of each corner 
of the square to form four more arches in the corners. Now, these 
three comer columns on each side are also tied together by straight 
entablatures, so that each of the four sides has a rhy thm of straight 
and low—arched and tall—straight and low. Here is a first ingenious 



88, SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN J ST. STEPHENS, W ALB ROOK, LONDON, 1672-87. 

interlocking of effects. Looking up the dome we perceive eight 
arches of identical height, but looking straight in front of us 
towards any one side of the square there is differentiation of the bays. 
However, that is not all. The arched centres of the sides can also be 
regarded as the entrances to four arms of a cross, a Latin cross, since 
the tunnel-vaults of the south and north arms are very shallow, 
whereas the east arm with the altar has a somewhat longer cross¬ 
vault, and the west arm one double the length of the altar arm. To 
achieve that, the western arm consists of two bays separated by 
columns in the normal manner of longitudinal churches. As these 
columns are exactly identical-with all the other columns, the first 
impression one receives on entering the church is one of a short nave 
with aisles leading towards a dome of unaccountable width. To finish 
the story, this seeming nave has narrow flat-ceilinged outer aisles as 
well, and these outer aisles run right through to the east wall. Only 
we cannot call them aisles,, all the way through, because at one point 
they rise into being the north and south arms of the cross and then sink 
again to become chancel aisles. The inner aisles of course, one dis¬ 
covers later, run into the wide crossing just as the nave. The whole 
rectangle of the church is set out with sixteen columns altogether, 

'172 ■ 



















wren’s CHURCHES AND HIS PLAN FOR LONDON 

noble columns of almost academical neutrality. Yet they are used to .. 
create a spatial polyphony which only the Baroque could appreciate 
—architecture of Purcell’s age. 

It is in connection with the spatial qualities of his ground plans 
that one should consider Wren’s plan for the rebuilding of London 
after the fire of 1666. He suggested sweeping alterations in the pat¬ 
tern of the city, new long, wide and straight streets meeting in star¬ 
shaped squares. Now this principle of the rond-point with radiating 
streets originated from the Italy of the Renaissance (see p. 86), was 
put into practice by the Mannerists—the most famous example is 
Scamozzi’s nonagonal town and fortress ofPalmanova in the Veneto 
(1593), a Baroque example of about 1660 is the Piazza del Popolo 
in Rome with the Corse and the two other straight streets' (seep. 124) 
—and taken over late in the 16th century by the French. Under 
Louis XIV. France (where the radiating chapels of the church plan 
had been conceived six hundred years before) became the second 
home of the rond-point. From Louis’s reign dates the Place de l’Etoile, 
although it was then in the country and became part of the city of 
Paris only after 1800. The grandest example of such planning on an 
enormous scale is, of course, Versailles (fig. 89). The garden front 
of the palace, 1,800 feet long, faces Le Notre’s magnificent park with 
its vast parterres of flowers, its cross-shaped sheet of water, fountains, 
seemingly endless parallel or radiating avenues, and walks between 
tall trimmed hedges—Nature subdued by the hand of Man to serve 
the greatness of the king, whose bedroom was placed right in the 
centre of the whole composition. On the town side the com d’honneur 
receives three wide converging roads coming from the direction 
of Paris. Town-planning was strongly influenced by these principles 
everywhere. Of the 18th century the most notable examples are 
perhaps Karlsruhe in South-West Germany, a whole town designed 
in 1715 as one huge star with the Ducal Palace as its centre, and 
L’Enfant’s plan of 1791 for Washington, D.C. 

As for Britain, Wren’s plan fell through after having been con¬ 
sidered by the king for only a few days. Was it too daring ? Could 
it have been carried out only in an absolute monarchy, where ex¬ 
propriation for schemes of civic grandeur was easier than in die City 
of London? Or was this logical, uncompromising programme to 
organise the background for future London life simply too un- 
English ever to be taken seriously ? The fact remains that the con¬ 
tribution of London to town-planning of the 17 th and 18 th centuries 

173 




89. VERSAILLES. THE GARDEN FRONT , BY JULES HARDOUIN-MANSART, 1 676-8 8 , THE 
GARDENS BY ANDRE LE N6TRE, BEGUN 1667. 



























THE TOWN HOUSE IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE 


is the square—introduced, as has been said, by Inigo Jones—i.e. an 
isolated, privately owned area with houses of, as a rule, similar but not 
identical design, examples of good manners and not of regimen¬ 
tation. It might be worth adding that the sensation in walking 
through the West End of London from square to square is clearly a 
modern and secular version of the typically English sensation of the 
visitor passing from isolated compartment to isolated compartment 
in a Saxon or Early English church. 

Regarding the individual town house, there is the same contrast 
between London and Paris. 


In London, but for a few 
exceptions, the nobleman 
and the wealthy merchant 
lived in terrace houses, in 
Paris in detached hotels. In 
London a ground plan had 
been evolved for these houses 
that was convenient enough 
to become standardised 
before the end of the 
17th century. With its en¬ 
trance on one side, leading 



straight to the staircase, one large front room and one large back 


room on each floor, and the service rooms in the basement, it 


remained practically unaltered for the largest and the smallest 
house until the end of the Victorian era. Of spatially effective 
elements it has little. In Paris, on the other hand, architects from 


about 1630 onwards developed house plans with great consistency 
and ingenuity towards ever subtler solutions of functional require¬ 
ments and spatial desires. The standard elements were a cour d'hon- 


neur, screened off from the street, with offices and stables in wings 
on the right and the left, and the corps de logis at the back. The 
earliest plan of wholly symmetrical organisation is the Hotel de 
Bretonvillers of about 1625-30. The first high-water marks are 
Mansart’s Hotel de la Vrilliere of about 1635 and Levau’s H6tel 
'Lambert of shortly after 1642, the latter with a courtyard with two 
rounded corners and an oval vestibule (fig. 90). A little later 
Lepautre’s Hotel de Beauvais (1655-60) revels in curves. Then the 
same reaction took place which we had seen between Vaux and the 
Louvre. Colbert did not like curves, he called them in 1669 “not 


E.A.—13 


175 






BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6XH TO l8TH CENTURY 

in the good taste, particularly in exteriors”, and the appartements of 
Louis XIV’s later years are of less spatial interests. 

The most important development between 1700 and 1715 is 
concerned with interior decoration. In the hands of one ofHardouin- 
Mansart’s chief executives, Jean Lepautre, it went more and more 
delicate and sophisticated. Grandeur was replaced by finesse, high 
relief by an exquisite play on the surface, and a virile deportment 
by an almost effeminate grace. Thus during the last years of Louis 
XIV’s reign the atmosphere of the Rococo consolidated itself. 

The Rococo is indeed of French origin, although we have in¬ 
troduced it in this book first in its German, that is its extreme and 
most brilliant spatial forms. The term Rococo is a pun, it seems, 
from barocco, alluding to the passion for those strange rock-like or 
shell-like formations which are typical of its ornament and have been 
analysed apropos Bruchsal and Vierzehnheiligen. They appear 
there in the fifties, but are a French invention of 1715-30—or 
rather an invention made in France. For the leaders of the gener¬ 
ation responsible for the step from Lepautre’s thin grace to full- 
blooded Rococo were without exception not properly French: 
Watteau the painter was a Fleming, Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672- 
1742) was the son of a Dutch father, Juste-Aurele Meissonier 
(1695-1750) of Provenfal stock and bom at Turin, Toro has an 
Italian name and lived in Provence, and Vasse was Provencal too. 
It is due to these architects and decorators that vigour re-entered 
French decoration, that curves of Italian Baroque derivation made 
their appearance once more, that ornament launched out into the 
third dimension again, and that the fantastic, completely original 
ornament of the rocaille was conceived. In exterior architecture less 
can be observed of this development than in interiors. Oppenord’s 
and Meissoniers’ designs for facades were not carried out. It is in 
the planning and decoration of houses that the Rococo celebrates 
its greatest triumphs. The Rococo is a style of the salon, the petit 
appartement and of sophisticated living (pi. xc) . Decoration is far 
more graceful and as a rule considerably less vigorous than in 
Germany, and planning is of an unprecedented subtlety. 

One difficulty in the standard Parisian hotel plan which the 
architects liked to face and overcome was, for instance, the fact that 
the front towards the cour d’honneur and the back towards the garden 
should both be symmetrical in themselves and even when they did not 
lie on the same axis. Courtonne’s H6tel de Matignon (fig. 92) shows 

176 



STAIRCASES IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE 

one very neat solution. Here and in 
any of the other contemporary hSteh 
the ingenious tricks of anti-chambres 
and cabinets and garderobes and little 
inner service courts should be studied, 
all devised to facilitate the r unning of 
a house and fill the many odd comers 
behind curved rooms and alcoves. 

The form and position of the stair¬ 
case was another problem. As to its 
position, it had to communicate easily 
with vestibule and service rooms, 
without interfering with the smooth 
run of room into room and the 
representational splendour of vistas. 

The same desire for a smooth run 
was extended to the interaction 
between floor and floor, and staircase 
forms were chosen accordingly. It 
has been shown that Spain, for all we 
know, invented both the most 
popular types of Baroque staircases 
(fig. 91). The square one with three 
flights round an open well became 
popular in Jacobean England, where 
it was interpreted in timber, character- 91 . thb two chief types of 
istically reduced in size to a somewhat baroque staircases. 

cramped mediaeval narrowness, but 

gorgeously decorated by Flemish or English woodcarvers (Hat¬ 
field, Audley End, etc.). Only when we come to Inigo Jones at 
Ashburnham House, London (perhaps by him), is the spaciousness 
of Spain emulated. However, Ashburnham House and a few other 
examples of Baroque breadth such as Coleshill, Berks (by Roger 
Pratt, one of Wren’s early competitors), are rare exceptions in 
England. There are at jthat time exceptions in Italy too (Longhena: 
S. Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 1643-45—the example from which 
Coleshill seems to be derived). Only Genoa took a real liking to 
staircases as wide, light and airy as those of Spain. France must have 
got to know of these through several channels. The Escorial type 
was taken up by Levau at the Tuileries in Paris. Since then it was 



177 









































THE TOWN HOUSE IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE 

established as the grandest of all types. The square open-well type 
occurs in Mansart’s Blois and then with coundess minor varia¬ 
tions in the Paris hotels (see e.g. fig. 92). These variations all aim 
at suppler, more elegant forms. 

Externally the Paris hotels are just as elegantly varied, though 
never anything like as boldly Rococo as the palaces and houses in 
Germany and Austria, whereas in London the exterior of the 17th- 
and 18th-century brick house was, except for ornamental details, 
almost standardised. It has no connection with the classic French 
style, that much is certain, although it may have had some originally 
with the less pretentious domestic architecture of Henri IV and later 
with Holland. 

As for country houses, they are—at least after 1660—of minor 
importance in France, where the life of the ruling class was centred 
in the court, while in England most of the noblemen and nearly all 
the squires still regarded their London houses only as pieds-h-terre, 
and looked on their seats in the country as their real homes. Con- 
sequendy it is here that one can expect variety and, indeed, finds it. 
All the more noteworthy, however, is it that about 1700, when the 
standardised town house had become an accepted fact, a type of 
cma lW country house had also been introduced (clearly on the 
Mauritshuis pattern) that—with many and delightful minor vari¬ 
ations—is to be found ah over the countryside, in the villages round 
London, at Hampstead, Roehampton, Ham, Petersham, round the 
close at Salisbury—everywhere. They are usually built of brick 
with stone quoins, either completely rectangular or with two short 
wings on the sides, the entrance with a pediment, hood or porch, 
and with a larger pediment to crown the centre of the house (fig. 93). 
These lovable houses of mellow and undated rightness are too well 
known to need further description. Their origin and diffusion 
have however not yet been fully elucidated. The earliest 
example seems to be Eltham Lodge, near London, of 1663. It was 
designed by Hugh May, with Pratt and Webb Wren’s most im¬ 
portant competitor in the sixties. By 1685 or 1690 the type was 
certainly fully established. It has as a rule a generously spaced three- 
flight staircase with an open well and rich woodcarving and rooms 
of simple and straightforward shapes; of that ingenious commodite 
on which all the French 18th-century architects insisted in their 
writings, they have little. 

Apparently, to the British, comfort was something quite different 

179 



BRIT ATM AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

from what it was to the French. But while these houses of about 
1700 are, whatever French critics might have said against them, as 
serviceable to-day as at the time when they were built, there are 
indeed certain English 18th-century country houses on a larger 
scale which—from our point of view at least—seem to be designed 



for display and not for comfort. This is an argument heard frequently 
against Blenheim, near Oxford (pis. xci, xcn, xcm and fig. 94), 
the palace which the nation presented to Marlborough. It was 
designed by Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) in 1705. His style 
derives from Wren at his grandest and most Baroque-—the Wren 
of Greenwich Hospital—but is always of a distinctly personal 
character. Wren never seems to forget himself. He is never carried 
away by forces stronger than his reason. Vanbrugh’s designs are of 
a violence and ruthless directness that could not but offend the ration¬ 
alists of his age. His family came from Flanders; his expansive tem¬ 
perament seems more of Rubens’s country than of Wren’s and 
Reynolds’s. He studied art in France, was arrested and put into the 
Bastille. After his release he returned to England and began to write 
plays. They were a huge success. Then suddenly one finds him 

180 






























VANBRUGH AND BLENHEIM 

engaged in architectural work at Castle Howard. In 1702 he was 
appointed Comptroller of W orks—a curious career, very different 
from Wren’s. 

Blenheim is planned on a colossal scale. One does not know 
whether the Palladian villa with its wings or Versailles with its 
corn d’honneur stands behind its plan. The corps de logis has a massive 
portico with giant columns between giant pillars, and a heavy attic 
above. The same Baroque weight characterises the side elevations, 
especially the square squat comer towers of the wings (pi. cxn). 

If in the case of Wren the term Baroque could be used only with 
careful qualifications, these towers would be called Baroque by 
anyone familiar with the work of Bernini, Borromini and the others 
in Italy. Here is struggle, mighty forces opposing overwhelming 
weights; here are fiercely projecting mouldings and windows 
crushed by thick-set pilasters placed too close to them; here is the 
deliberate discordance of the semicircular window placed against a 
semicircular arch right above and higher up again a segmental arch. 
Everything jars, and the top of the daring composition has nothing 
of a happy end either. Vanbrugh in the forms which crown the 
tower, the vases and the ball, does not accept any indebtedness to 
anybody. The pilasters and the windows are also highly original, 
but not to the same extreme degree. In some details they appear 
reminiscent of Michelangelo. However, the mentioning of Michel¬ 
angelo makes Blenheim—the whole of the entrance front—at once 
appear coarse, even meaty, and certainly theatrical and ostentatious, 
that is Flemish as well as Baroque. Yet in spite of that Vanbrugh, 
seen side by side with Michelangelo or Bernini, is also a classicist. 
It seems a contradiction but it is not. It simply is, just as in the case of 
Wren, the special English twist given to the Baroque. There is very 
little in Wren and Vanbrugh of that plastic treatment of walls which 
Michelangelo had first conceived and which produced the undulat¬ 
ing facades and interiors of Baroque buildings in Italy and Southern 
Germany. Movement is never in England so insinuating, nor so 
frantic. Spatial parts never abandon their separate existence, to merge 
into each other, as they do at S. Carlo or Vierzehnheiligen. The 
individual members, especially the solid round detached columns, 
also try to keep themselves to themselves. Vanbrugh’s drama lies in 
the visible forcing of this English aloofness into the service of an 
overmighty plan. English Baroque is Baroque asserting itself against 
an inborn leaning towards the static and the sober. 

181 



94 - SIR JOHN VANBRUGH: BLENHEIM PALACE, BEGUN 1705. 


The same conflict will be experienced in interiors of Wren’s and 
Vanbrugh’s time. There again spatial relations bind rooms together 
which are articulated and decorated according to the principles of 
Classicism—by panelling if they are small, by columns or pilasters 
if they are larger. At Blenheim there is an enormous entrance hall 
leading into the saloon which forms the centre of two symmetrical 
groups of rooms along the whole garden front, with all the doors in 
one axis, or as it is called, one enfilade, as at Versailles. But—this is of 
the greatest significance—the staircase, the dynamic element par 
excellence, is nothing like as prominent as it would be in a contem¬ 
porary palace in France or Germany. This lack of interest in spatial 
dynamics is by no means a sign of meanness in planning. On the 
contrary, Blenheim is just as vast as the largest new palaces ©f the 
minor rulers of Germany, and just as unpractical—at least from our 
point of view. 

However, it seems rather cheap to harp on the fact that kitchen 
and service rooms are far away from the dining-room—in one of 
the two wings in fact, opposite the other with the stables (an accepted 
Palladian tradition). Servants may have had to walk a long way, and 
hot dishes may have got cold long before they reached their destin- 

182 














POPE AND LORD BURLINGTON 

ation. To us that may seem a functional error. Vanbrugh and his 
clients would have called such arguments extremely low. Of ser¬ 
vants they had plenty. And what we call comfort mattered less than a 
self-imposed etiquette more rigid than we can imagine. The function 
of a building is not only utilitarian. There is also an ideal function, 
and that Blenheim did fulfil. However, not all Vanbrugh’s contem¬ 
poraries agreed that it did. There is, e.g. Pope with his famous, often 
quoted “ ’tis very fine, But where d’ye sleep, or where d’ye dine? 
What did he mean by that? Critics to-day interpret it as referring 
to a lack of material comfort. Pope was more philosophical than that. 
What, in the name of good sense, he asked for, is that a room and a 
building should look what they are. He disliked Vanbrugh’s colossal 
scale and decorative splendour as unreasonable and unnatural. For 
“splendour”, he insists, should borrow “all her rays from sense”, 
and again: 

“Something there is more needful than expense. 

And something previous e’en to taste—’tis sense”. 

In this he gave expression to the feelings of his generation, the 
generation following Vanbrugh’s. For Pope was bom in 1688, 
whereas Vanbrugh was of almost the same age as Swift and Defoe 
(and Wren as Dryden). 

The architecture that corresponds to Pope’s poetry is that of Lord 
Burlington and his circle. Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington, was 
some years younger than Pope (1694-1753). He went on his 
Grand Tour as a very young man, and brought back with him a 
promising young painter, William Kent. Full of the new Italian 
impression, he was, it seems, converted to the beauties of strict 
PaUadianism by Cohn Campbell, who in 1715 had begun to 
publish Vitruvius Britannicus, a book of illustrations of the best 
modem buildings of Britain. In the same year the Italian architect 
Leoni, who lived in England, had brought out a sumptuous 
F.nglkh edition of Palladio. So Burlington went hack to Italy in 
1719, this time to study Palladio’s works in and around Vicenza. 
Under his influence Kent turned Architect and edited at Burling¬ 
ton’s expense in 1727 a folio of engravings from Inigo Jones’s 
buildings and supposed buildings. These publications and Burling¬ 
ton’s personality and propaganda set a Palladian fashion in British 
country houses that lasted almost unchallenged for fifty years, and 
with certain modifications for nearly a hundred. 

183 



BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY 

The town house, however, was hardly affected. There are very 
few examples of Palladian influence beyond facade motifs. And 
where, as in a house designed by Lord Burlington himself, an 
attempt was made to interfere with the standardised London plan, 
the outcry against this imposition of the rationalist’s new rules was 
just as pronounced as the rationalist’s outcry had been against Van¬ 
brugh’s unruliness. Lord Chesterfield suggested to the owner that 
he should take a house opposite, so as to be able to admire his own 
at leisure without having to live in it. 

It is the country house that became wholly Palladian by Lord 
»Burlington’s efforts. In Vanbrugh’s work the variety of plans and 
exterior compositions had been unlimited. Now the corps de logis 
with a centre portico and isolated wings connected to the main body 
by low galleries became de rigueur. Prior Park, near Bath (pi. xcrv), 
is a typical example. It was designed for Ralph Allen in 1735 by 
the elder John Wood (c. 1700-54), a local architect, but, by virtue 
of his talent and the opportunities which he had in the most fashion¬ 
able spa of England, one of the leading architects of his generation. 
Compared with Palladio’s villas, these British derivations are larger 
and heavier. They also often incorporate motifs freer than Palladio 
would have tolerated: more variation in the shapes of rooms, or a 
boldly curved outer staircase into the garden (the one at Prior Park 
is of the 19th century). The sites, as a rule on a gentle slope, also add 
a quality that is absent in Palladio’s work for a flat country. But more 
important still is the fact that Palladian country houses in Britain 
were designed to stand in English parks. 

It seems at first contradictory that the same patrons should have 
wanted the formal Palladian house and the informal English garden, 
and that the same architect should have provided both. Yet it is a 
fact that William Kent, Lord Burlington’s profege, was celebrated 
as one of the creators of the English style in laying out grounds, 
and that Lord Burlington’s own villa at Chiswick (about 1725), 
a free copy of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda, was one of the earliest 
examples of what was called “the modem taste” in gardening. How 
can this have come about? Was the landscape garden just a whim ? 
It was not; it was a conscious part of an anti-French policy in the arts. 
Le N6treY parks express absolutism, the king’s absolute rulership 
over the country, and also Man’s rulership over Nature. The active, 
expansive Baroque force that shapes the house, flows over into 
nature. Progressive English thinkers recognised this and disliked it. 

184 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LANDSCAPE GARDEN 

Shaftesbury spoke of “the mockery of princely gardens”, and Pope 
satirised them in his neat couplet: 

“Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother. 

And half the platform just reflects the other \ 

Now this enforcing of architectural rule on the garden is certainly 
something unnatural. And so Addison wrote in The Spectator in 
1712: “For my own part I would rather look upon a tree in all its 
luxuriance and diffusion of boughs and branches than when it is cut 
and trimmed into a mathematical figure”. That profession of faith in 
nature not .tampered with is evidently a revolt of liberalism and 
tolerance against tyranny; it is a Whig revolt. But the curious 
thing about it is that although these attacks were made in the name 
of nature, nature was still understood by Addison and Pope in 
Newton’s and indeed in Boileau’ssense. Boileau’s objections in his 
Art of Poetry of 1674 against the Baroque of the South were that it 
was unreasonable and therefore unnatural. Reason and nature are 
still synonyms with Addison and Pope, as we have seen in Pope’s 
comments on Blenheim. 

Add to this Shaftesbury’s “passion for things of a natural kind” 
and his idea that “the conceit or caprice of Man has spoiled their 
genuine order by breaking in upon (their) primitive state”, and you 
will be near an answer to the puzzling parallelism between classicist 
architecture and natural gardening. The original state ofthe universe 
is harmony and order, as we see it in the ordered courses ofthe stars 
which were revealed by the new telescopes, and in the structures 
of organisms which were revealed by the new microscopes. “Idea 
or Sense, Order, Proportion everywhere”, to use Shaftesbury’s 
words once more. Now to illustrate the superiority of harmony 
over chaos Shaftesbury explicitly refers to the superiority of the 
“regular and uniform pile of some noble Architect” over “a Heap 
of Sand or Stones”. But is not the heap of sand nature in her primi¬ 
tive state ? That the early 18th century did not want to recognise. 
So we arrive at this curious ambiguity. Simple nature is order and 
harmony of proportion. So a natural architecture Is an architecture 
according to Palladio. But simple nature is also, in the common 
speech of everybody, fields and hedgerows, and of these people were 
genuinely fond, at least In England. So the garden should be left as 
close to this simple nature as possible. Addison was the first to reach 
this conclusion. He exclaimed: “Why may not a whole estate be 

' , : "185 ' 



BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6lH TO l8TH CENTURY 

thrown into a kind of garden’”, and “A man might make a pretty 
landscape of his own possessions”. Pope followed Addison in a 
contribution to The Guardian in 1713 and, more important still, 
in his own miniature garden at Twickenham. However, when it 
came to “ im proving” Twickenham (to use the 18th-century term) 
in 1719-25—another equally remarkable thing happened. These 
earliest anti-French gardens were by no means landscape gardens in 
the later sense. They were not Pope’s “Nature unadorned”. Their 
plans with elaborately meandering paths and rills are of as artificial 
an irregularity as Baroque regularity had been before. Or as 
Horace Walpole put it in 1750: “There is not a citizen who doesn’t 
raVp more pains to torture his acre and a half into irregularities 
than he formerly would have employed to make it as formal as his 
cravat”. Now all that, this “twisting and twirling” (to use Walpole’s 
words again), is evidently Rococo, and nearer in spirit to the 
Bruchsal Rocaille than to those gardens of the later 18th century 
which really tried to look like untouched nature. It is the English 
version of Rococo—as characteristically English as Wren’s Baroque 
had been in comparison with Continental Baroque. 

So while one remembers the grandeur and elegance of French 
17th- and 18th-century architecture as urban all the way through— 
for the straight avenues in the park of Versailles are urban in spirit 
too—one should never forget in looking at the formality of English 
Palladian houses between 1660 and 1760 that their complement is 
the English garden. John Wood’s Prior Park possesses such informal 
natural grounds. And even in the most urban developments of 
Georgian England such as New Edinburgh and above all Bath 
nature was close at hand and willingly admitted. 

John Wood was the first after Inigo Jones to impose Palladian 
uniformity on an English square as a whole. All the squares in 
London and elsewhere laid out since 1660 had left it to each owner 
of a house to have it designed as he liked, and it was only due to 
the rule of taste in Georgian society that not one of these houses ever 
violently clashed with its neighbours. John Wood now made one 
palace front with central portico and secondary emphasis on the 
comer blocks out of his Queen Square in Bath. That was in 1728. 
Twenty-five years later he designed the Circus (1754-c. 1770), 
again as a uniform theme. His son, the younger John Wood (died 
1781), in the Royal Crescent of 1767-c. 1775 (pi. xcv) broke open 
the compactness of earlier squares and ventured to provide as the 

' 186 



THE WOODS AND BATH 


only response to his vast semi-elliptical palace frontage of thirty 
houses with giant Ionic columns a spacious, gently sloping lawn. 
Here the extreme opposite of Versailles had been reached. Nature is 
no longer the servant of architecture. The two are equals. The 
Romantic Movement Is at hand. 

In London the principle of the palace facade for a whole row of 
houses was introduced by Robert Adam in his Adelphi (that magni¬ 
ficent composition of streets with its Thames front known all over 
Europe, which was destroyed, not by bombs, but by mercenary 
Londoners just before the war) and then taken up at Fitzroy Square 
and Finsbury Square. But Adam’s work, which won international 
fame in the sixties and seventies—at the same moment when the 
English garden also began to influence Europe—should not be 
discussed so close to the Palladianism of the Burlington group. 
It is of a fundamentally different kind. As a rule this difference is 
expressed by placing Adam at the beginning of the so-called Classical 
Revival. But that is not the whole answer, for the Classical Revival 
is really only a part of a much wider process, the Romantic Move¬ 
ment. So from the renewed direct approach to Greek and Roman 
antiquities as well as from the English creation of landscape garden¬ 
ing we are led into a consideration of the central European problem 
of 1760-1830: the Romantic Movement 


187 



Romantic Movement, Historicism 
and Modern Movement 

FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

T he Romantic Movement originated in England. In literature 
this fact is well enough known. For the arts and for archi¬ 
tecture in particular it has yet to be established. In literature 
Romanticism is the reaction of sentiment against reason, of nature 
against artificiality, of simplicity against pompous display, of faith 
against scepticism. Romantic poetry expresses a new enthusiasm for 
nature and a self-abandoning veneration of the whole, elemental, 
undoubting life of early or distant civilisations. This veneration 
led to the discovery of the Noble Savage and the Noble Greek, the 
Virtuous Roman and the Pious Mediaeval Knight. Whatever its 
object, the Romantic attitude is one of longing, that is antagonism 
to the present, a present which some saw predominantly as Rococo 
flippancy, others as unimaginative rationalism, and others again as 
ugly industrialism and commercialism. 

The opposition to the present and the im m ediate past goes through 
all utterances of the Romantic spirit, although certain tendencies 
within the new movement grew out of die 18th century’s Ration¬ 
alism and Rococo. It has been shown for instance how the concep¬ 
tion of the landscape garden—a truly Romantic conception'—dates 
back to Addison and Pope, but appears at first in Rococo dress. 
Similarly that most popular architectural expression of Romanti¬ 
cism, the revival of mediaeval forms, started long before the 
Romantic Movement proper and went through all the phases of 
18th-century style, before it became wholly Romantic in character. 

. In fact the Gothic style had never quite died in England. There 
is college work in Oxford of the 17th century which is unself¬ 
conscious Perpendicular, notably the staircase up to the hall of 
Christ Church. Wren also used Gothic forms in some of the 
London City churches, and others followed him. But the beginnings 
of an original handling of mediaeval elements, a revival and not a 
survival, are connected with V anbrugh and his school. His ownhouse 

188 



THE BEGINNINGS OF THE GOTHIC REVIVAL 

at Blackheath of 1717-18 is castellated and has a £ortified 4 ookmg 
round tower. He also introduced castellated structures into some of 
the grounds which he furnished or laid out. His reason for doing so 
was that mediaeval forms suggested strength, and he always wanted 
to be masculine in his designs. Hence thick round towers and battle¬ 
ments occur even in in his country houses which are otherwise in 
the current style. However, it was not only their aesthetic qualities 
which tempted him in mediaeval castles. He saw more in them. 
Not that he actually built sham ruins as the later 18 th century did, 
but he defended the preservation of genuine ruins when he found 
them, because they “move lively and pleasing reflections ... on 
the persons who have inhabited them (and) on the remarkable 
things which have been transacted in them 55 , and because “with yews 
and hollies in a wild thicket” they make “one of the most agreeable 
objects that the best of landscape painters can invent 95 . 

Vanbrugh’s austere version of medievalism found no successors, 
but the two passages quoted from his memorandum of 1709 on 
Blenheim form the foundation of Romantic Revivalism. As will 
have been noticed Vanbrugh uses two arguments: the associational 
and the picturesque. Both were developed by theorists of the 18th 
century. A building is clothed in the garb of a special style, because 
of the meditations which that style will rouse. And a building is 
conceived in conjunction with the surrounding nature, because the 
virtuosi had discovered on the Grand Tour amid the ruins of Roman 
architecture in and around Rome, the truth and the picturesque¬ 
ness of the heroic and idyllic landscapes* of Claude Lorraine, Poussin, 
Dughet and Salvator Rosa. These were bought freely by English 
collectors and helped to form the taste of artists and gardeners, 
amateur and professional. 

Lorraine may have been admired by Pope and Kent (who after 
all was a painter before he became an architect), but the gardens of 
Twickenham and Chiswick had nothing of the serene calm of a 
Lorraine landscape. The Rococo had to die, before this kind of 
beauty could be reproduced. The Leasowes, the garden which 
William Shenstone the poet had laid out for himself about 1745, 
was apparently amongst the first to replace the “twisting and 
twirling” of the earlier style by a gentler flow of curves which, 
together with the many memorial seats and temples which he 
erected, helped to rouse feelings of pleasant meditation. The great 
name in the history of mid-i8th-century gardening is Lancelot 

189 



ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

Brown (Capability Brown, 1715-83). His are the wide softly 
sweeping lawns, the artfully scattered clumps of trees and the ser¬ 
pentine lakes which revolutionised garden art all over Europe and 
America (pi. xcin). This is no longer Rococo, it has the gentle 
sim plicity of Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield and the chaste elegance 
of Robert Adam’s architecture. 

But Adam’s is a more complex case than Brown’s. Robert Adam 
(1728-92) is internationally known as the father of the Classical 
Revival in Britain. His revival of Roman stucco decoration and his 
delicate adaptation of classical motifs have influenced the Continent 
just as widely as the new English style in gardening. Yet delicacy is 
hardly what our present knowledge of Greece and Rome would 
lead us to expect from a true classical revivalist. Where in Adam’s 
work is the severe nobility of Athens or the sturdy virility of Rome > 
There is in fact more severity in Lord Burlington’s Palladianism 
and more virility in Vanbrugh than can anywhere be found in 
Adam. Compare, e.g., the walls and ceiling of Adam’s Library at 
Kenwood (pi. xcvi) with those of any Palladian mansion. Adam 
covers his walls with dainty and exquisitely executed stucco work 
in a light and quick rhythm. And he loves to run out a room into a 
gently rounded niche screened off by two free-standing columns 
with an entablature above. This veiling of spatial relations, this 
transparency—air floating from room to apse between the columns 
and above the entablature—is decidedly anti-Palladian, original and 
spirited. It occurs again in exterior architecture in the entrance 
screen to the grounds of Syon House (pi. xcvn). Here too Lord 
Burlington would have spoken of flippancy and frippery. And 
Vanbrugh’s centre pavilions in the wings of Blenheim Palace (pi. 
xcn) look, compared with Adam’s screen, like boulders piled up 
by a giant. Adam’s gracefully ornamented pilasters and the Hon in 
profile silhouetted against the sky make Vanbrugh appear a tartar, 
Burlington a pedant. What Adam admired in a building is, in his own 
words: “the rise and fall, die advance and recess, and other diversity 
of forms”, and “a variety of fight mouldings”. 

Now this is eminently revealing. It is neither Baroque nor 
Palladian—although in the exteriors of his country houses Adam 
did not often depart from Palladian standards—nor is it classical. It 
is Rococo if anything—yet another passing and concealed appear¬ 
ance in England of the general European style of the mid-i8th 
century. All the same, it is not wrong either to see in Robert Adam 

190 



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 Passtum 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 ever since the Books of Orders of the 16th 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 of the 
severest phase or variety of the Classical Revival, that known in 
England as the Greek Revival. Stuart and Revett’s work was 
paralleled in French by Le Roi’s skimpier Ruines de Grice 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 placed the Apollo Belvedere and die 
Laocoon,that is examples of Late GreekBaroque 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 i 
It is not at all unlikely. His Grecian tastes probably did not go forther 
than say Josiah Wedgwood’s. Wedgwood copied vases from those 
Greek examples of the 5th 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 gende and elegant— 
an Adam not a Greek style. Still, there is the undeniable desire to be 

191 


E.A.—14 



ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

Greek, the marked tendency in archeological publications to prefer 
the Greek to the Roman, and there is, if not in Adam, in his contem¬ 
porary James Stuart, “Athenian” Stuart (1713-88), the actual copy¬ 
ing in earnest of complete Greek structures on Northern soil and the 
putting up of Doric temples for Northern patrons. If this is not a 
genuine Greek Revival, what is e But once again, if we forget about 
associations and intentions and simply use our eyes, we see miniature 
pavilions in Doric forms placed into landscape gardens—picturesque 
pieces of garden furnishing. Such a Doric temple of Stuart’s, e.g., 
graces the grounds at Hagley, near Birmingham, and close to it the 
same owner put up at the same time a Gothic ruin as a keeper’s 
lodge and a rustic seat to the memory of Thomson of the Seasons. 

The only difference between the Doric and the Gothic of Hagley 
is that the one is tolerably correct and the other is not. The owner, 
owing to his classical education, watched the one, but cOuld not 
watch the other. Architects too and even country builders knew by 
1760 enough of the orders and the details of antiquity to be able to 
reproduce a Pantheon en miniature or a half-broken Roman aque¬ 
duct without too many blunders. But in the case of the earliest 
Gothic Revival antiquarian knowledge was still scanty. Thus while 
the result in the Greek and Roman copies tends to be somewhat dry, 
the innumerable Gothic seats, hermits’ cells, “umbrellos” and sham 
ruins (fig. 95) are charmingly naive and lighthearted—a Gothic 
Rococo, as Adam’s was a classical Rococo. 

To Horace Walpole belongs the credit of having inspired and 
commissioned the first complete country house in the Gothic style: 
Strawberry Hill, near London, begun in 1747. Walpole was ahead 
of his day in insisting on correct details, especially in his interiors, 
where fireplaces or wall panelling were copied from engravings 
after mediaeval tombs and screens. He evidently admired other 
qualities in the Gothic style than we do. In letters of 1748 and 1750 
he talks of “the charming venerable Gothic” and the “whimsical air 
of novelty which Gothic motifs give to contemporary buildings. 
And charming and whimsical Strawberry Hill is indeed with its 
min, papery exterior work and the pretty gallery inside whose gilt 
fan-vaults and tracery have mirrors set in as panels. This playful use 
of Gothic forms is closer in spirit to Chippendale’s Chinese furniture 
than to Wordsworth’s feelings at Tintern Abbey or to Victorian 
Neo-Gothic churches. Walpole himself was against the fashion of 
the Chinoiserie; but for a generalising view of the style of 1750 a 

192 



STRAWBERRY HILL AND THE GOTHIC ROCOCO 

Chinese bridge, a miniature Pantheon and a Gothic ruin all belong 
together. In fact we find that even Robert Adam enjoyed drawing 
mins with all the Rococo sparkle of Piranesi, and occasionally de¬ 
signed domestic work in a mildly mediaeval taste. And we also 
find Sir William Chambers in spite of his staunch adherence to 
Palladianism designing the Pagoda at Eew Gardens. 

Kew had or iginally the most varied set of such Rococo garden 
extravaganzas: besides the Pagoda (which alone survives) a temple 
of Pan, a temple of Aiolus, a temple of Solitude, a temple of the 
Sun, a temple of Bellona, a temple of Victory, a house of Confucius, 
a Corinthian colonnade, an Alhambra, a mosque, a Gothic cathedral, 
a ruin, various stone seats, etc. The fun of Turkish, Moorish, Gothic 
and Chinese in this omnium gatherum of exotic styles is that of 
Voltaire’s Zadig and Babouc and of Iviontescjuieu s Lettres Persaties, 
that is one of a sophisticated Rococo double-meaning. Not much of 
the solemn meditation of the Romantics could in fact be evoked by 
a Pagoda. When the Romantic Movement somewhat later instilled 
these sentiments into gardening, a good many of the current garden 
adornments were eliminated as unsuitable. Yet to Walpole too 
Strawberry Hill had associational qualities. It was, in some ways, 
his Castle of Otranto. It seems difficult to believe that; but that Beck- 
ford’s mansion, Fonthill Abbey, with its vast galleries and enormous 



95 . GARDEN SEAT FROM P. DECKER^ “ GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE 
DECORATED,” 1759* 


193 












ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM I76O TO THE PRESENT DAY 

tower had to him some of die awe-inspiring qualities of the dark 
Middle Ages can be appreciated from surviving illustrations. Here 
the eccentricity of a millionaire seems to have created something 
truly romantic. Fonthill was built by James Wyatt (1746-1813) from 
1796 onwards. But already as early as 1772 Goethe in front of Stras¬ 
bourg Cathedral had found words of passionate admiration for the 
Gothic spirit in architecture. “It rises like a most sublime, wide- 
arching Tree of God, who with a thousand boughs, a million of twigs, 
and leafage like the sands of the sea, tells forth to the neighbourhood 
the glory of the Lord, his master. ... All is shape, down to the 
minutest fibril, all purposes to the whole. How the firm-grounded 
gigantic building lightly rears itself into the air! How filagree’d all 
of it, yet for eternity. . . . Stop brother, and discern the deepest 
sense of truth . . . quickening out of strong, rough, German soul 
... Be not girled, dear youth, for rough greatness by the soft 
doctrine of modem beauty-lisping.” 1 

Now here the Gothic style is no longer something in the same 
category as Rococo, Chinese and Hindu, it stands for all that is 
genuine, sincere, elemental—in fact very much for what Winckel- 
tnann, and only a litde later Goethe himself, saw in the art of Greece. 
The Greek and the Gothic were both, in the minds of serious 
sestheticians and artists, the salvation from 18th-century flippancy. 
But they could not be an effective remedy. For no healthy style can 
stop at the mere imitation of another. The Renaissance had not done 
it. The Grecians of the early 19th century did it too often. Goethe in 
the most classical mood of Ids Iphigenia remained essentially original. 
But in fact what he had praised more than anything at Strasbourg 
was originality in the sense of Young. And so the few architects of 
Goethe’s era who possessed true genius used the forms of Greece 
and Rome with the greatest freedom. Of Greece and Rome; for an 
equally free and masterly style based on Gothic principles time was 
not yet ripe. The sense of mediaeval building had not yet been 
sufficiendy digested to allow for a revival in another than an imita- 
tivesense. 

Two architects above all others must be mentioned as the creators 
of an original idiom of 1800: Sir John Soane in England and Friedrich 
Gilly in Prussia. Soane (1753-1837) had gone through apprenticeship 
and Royal Academy tuition, when he went to Rome in 1778. 

1 Geoffrey Grigson’s translation, published in The Architectural Review, vol. 98, 
1945 - 


194 



GOETHE, FONTHUi AND SOANE 

Already amongst his earlier designs there is an amazingly personal 
blend of Baroque grandeur of composition with Grecian severity 
of detail. Soane was the first (except for Piranesi, the engraver) to 
understand the terribilith of the Greek Doric order. Then during the 
nineties Soane discovered that the severity which was his aim could 
be achieved by sheer unadorned surface—a discovery which makes 
his work appear so topical to-day. He had been appointed architect 
to the Bank of England in 1788. 

The exterior, before it was converted by recent governors and 
directors into a podium for a piece of 20th-century commercial 
showiness, indicates this new and to the majority shocking austerity. 
The interiors, preserved though atrociously ill-treated, give an even 
clearer idea of his sense of surface integrity. Walls flow smoothly 
into vaults. Mouldings are reduced to a minimum. Arches sit on 
piers which they seem to touch only in points. No precedent is 
allowed to cramp the master’s style. The Dulwich Gallery of 1811- 
14 (damaged by bombs but not irreparably) and Soane’s own 
house inLincoln’s Inn Fields (pi. xcvm), built in 1812-13 and intended 
to be carried on to more than double its width, are his most inde¬ 
pendent designs. The ground floor of the house has severely plain 
arcading in front of the actual wall; the first floor repeats this un¬ 
usual motif with the variation of a centre with Ionic columns sup¬ 
porting the thinnest of architraves, and wings where the weight 
of the piers is lightened by typically Soanian incised ornament. The 
top pavilions on the left and the right are equally original. Except 
for the Ionic columns there is not one motif in the whole facade that 
has a Greek or Roman ancestry. Here more than anywhere in archi¬ 
tecture England approached a new style unhampered by the past, 
and a style moreover that possesses the crispness and precision of the 
dawning machine age. Soane for all we know was not in special 
sympathy with that age, which in most of its social and visual 
aspects was still sordid enough. Soane was a wilful, obstinate and 
irritable character, and wilful is his almost Art Nouveau looking 
ornament. But its meaning is clear. These delicate lines emphasise 
the planes into which they are cut, just as the lack of pediments on 
the flat roofs emphasise the cubic relations of such planes. From the 
beginning of his career Soane had been fascinated by this problem 
of cubic relations. He first expressed it with massive Doric columns 
and rustication, but later with flat surfaces of seeming skin or film 
or slab thinness. 


195 



ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 



“ 96. CLAUDE NICOLAS LEDOUX: ONE OF THE CITY GATES OF PARIS, DESIGNED BETWEEN 

1784 AND 1789. 

The same faith in the bare surface but not the same elegance ap¬ 
pears with a much more aggressive force in the work of a few French 
architects of the time of the Revolution. Claude Nicolas Ledoux 
(1736-1806) has only within the last fifteen years been rediscovered. 
He was an eccentric, cantankerous and quarrelsome. But his designs 
since 1776 are amongst the most original ever conceived by any 
architect, original sometimes to the verge of mania: a completely 
spherical house, a pyramidal house, fantastic projects for vast com¬ 
munity buildings. His planning is as boldly Baroque as Soane’s. His 
predilection for the squat Doric column also connects him with 
Soane (fig. 96). He was no doubt influenced by England, and the 
publication of his work in 1804 may have influenced England in 
turn. 

Friedrich Gilly (1772-1800), the Soane of Germany, was certainly 
inspired by Ledoux. He had his training in Berlin, one of a small 
group of young architects who about 1790 discovered the force of 
the true Doric order in Italy. Gilly himself however never saw 
Italy, and went to Paris and London only after he had designed one 
of the two masterpieces which are left us to bear witness of his genius 
—left, however, only in drawings. Neither was ever carried out. The 
first is the National Monument to Frederick the Great (1797), the 
second a National Theatre for Berlin—clearly a conception of the 
Goethe age (pi. xcix). The Doric portico without a pediment is 
a strong and grave opening. The semicircular windows, a favourite 
motif of the revolutionary architects ofParis, though imported from 
England, add strength to strength, and the contrast between the 
semicylinder of the auditorium walls and the cube of the stage is 
functionally eloquent and aesthetically superb. Here again we are 
close to a new style of the new century. 

Why is it then that a hundred years had to pass before an original 
“modem” style was really accepted? How can it be that the 19th 

196 
































LEDOUX, GHX.Y AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 

century forgot about Soane and Gilly and remained smugly satisfied 
with the imitation of the past ? Such a lack of self-confidence is the 
last thing one would expect from an epoch so independent in com¬ 
merce, industry and engineering. It is the things of the spirit in 
which the Victorian age lacked vigour and courage. Standards in 
architecture were the first to go; for while a poet and a painter can 
forget about their age and be great in the solitude of their study and 
studio, an architect cannot exist in opposition to society. Now those 
to whom visual sensibility was given saw so much beauty destroyed 
all around by the sudden immense and uncontrolled growth of cities 
and factories that they despaired of their century and turned to a 
more inspiring past. Moreover the iron-master and mill-owner, as 
a rule self-made men of no education, felt no longer bound by one 
particular accepted taste as the gentleman had been who was brought 
up to believe in the rule of taste. It would have been bad manners 
to build against it. Hence the only slightly varied uniformity of the 
English 18th-century house. The new manufacturer had no manners, 
and he was a convinced individualist. If, for whatever reasons, he 
a style in architecture, then there was nothing to prevent him 
from having his way and getting a house ora factory or an office build¬ 
ing or a club built in that style. And unfortunately for the immediate 
future of architecture he knew of a good many possible styles, 
because—as we have seen—some sophisticated and leisurely 
cognoscenti of the 18th century had explored for fun certain out- 
of-the-way architectural idioms, and a set of Romantic poets was 
revelling in nostalgic fantasies of the distant in time and space. The 
Rococo had reintroduced alien styles, the Romantic Movement 
had endowed them with sentimental associations. The 19th century 
lost the Rococo’s lightness of touch and the Romantics emotional 
fervour. But it stuck to variety of style, because associational values 
were the only values in architecture accessible to the new ruling class. 

We have seen Vanbrugh’s defence of ruins for associational 
reasons. Sir Joshua Reynolds in his thirteenth Discourse o'f 1786 
made the same point more neatly. He explicitly counts amongst the 
principles of architecture “that of affecting the imagination by means 
of association of ideas. Thus,” he continues, “we have naturally a 
veneration for antiquity; whatever building brings to our remem¬ 
brance ancient customs and maimers, such as the^castles of the Barons 
of ancient Chivalry, is sure to give this delight.” 

Hence on the authority of the late President of the Royal Academy 

197 



ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

the manufacturer and merchant could feel justified in placing 
associational criteria foremost. Visual criteria his eyes were not 
trained to appreciate. But the eyes of architects were; and it was a 
grave symptom of a diseased century that architects were satisfied 
to be story-tellers instead of artists. But then painters were no better. 
They too, to be successful, had to tell stories or render objects from 
nature with scientific accuracy. 

Thus by 1830 we find a most alarming social and aesthetic situa¬ 
tion in architecture. Architects believed that anything created by 
the pre-industrial centuries must of necessity be better than anything 
made to express the character of their own era. Architects’ clients 
had lost all aesthetic susceptibilities, and wanted other than aesthetic 
qualities to approve of a building. Associations they could under¬ 
stand. And one other quality they could also understand and even 
check: correctness of imitation. The free and fanciful treatment of 
styles developed into one of archeological exactitude. That this 
could happen was duetto that general sharpening of the tools of 
historical knowledge which characterises the 19th century. It is in 
truth the century of Historicism. After the system-building 18th 
century, the 19th appears to an amazing extent satisfied with, say, a 
historical and comparative study of existing philosophies to the study 
of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, etc., themselves. And so it was in 
theology and philology too. Similarly architectural scholarship 
abandoned aesthetic theory and concentrated on historical research. 
Thanks to a subdivision of labour which architecture, like all 
other fields of art, letters and science, took over from industry, 
architects were always able to draw from a well-assorted stock of 
historical detail. No wonder that little time and desire were left 
for the development of an original style of the 19th century. Even 
with regard to Soane and Gilly we have to be careful not to over¬ 
estimate their originality and “modernity”. Soane did a great deal 
that is more conventional than his own house. There are even 
some Gothic designs by him. And Gilly drew and published in detail 
the grandest of the mediaeval castles of the German knights in East 
Prussia. Exquisite as these drawings are, the attitude that made Gilly 
spend so much time on them is only partially romantic and patriotic. 
Antiquarian ambition is at least as conspicuous in these careful 
renderings. The case of Girtin’s and Turner’s early water colours is 
very similar. They are the transition (though still a romantic tran¬ 
sition full of creative power) between the polite 18th-century 

198 



THE COMING OF B 3 ST 0 RICISM 

engravings of Athens and Paestum and the voluminous 19th-century 
books on cathedral antiquities and mediaeval details. 

Amongst such books die transition can also be noted: the earliest 
are still rather sketchy, while later they became more and more 
thorough and as a rule rather dull. In actual buildings we find exacdy 
the same development from the elegant and whimsical but some¬ 
times inspired to the learned but sometimes deplorably pedestrian. 
Strawberry Hill stands for Rococo-Gothic, Robert Adam for a 
Rococo-Classical Revival. The next generation is characterised by 
John Nash (1752-1835). Nash had nothing of the intransigent 
creative fury of Soane. He was light-handed, careless, socially 
successful and artistically conservative. His frontages of old Regent 
Street and most of his palace-like facades round Regent’s Park, 
planned and carried out between 1811 and about 1825, are still of 
an 18th-century suppleness. What makes them memorable is the 
way in which they form part of a brilliant town-planning scheme, 
a scheme linking up the Picturesque of the 18th century with the 
Garden City ideas of the 20th. For these vast terraces face a landscape 
park, and a number of elegant villas are placed right in the park— 
the fulfilment of what had been foreshadowed in the juxtaposition 
of houses and lawn in the Royal Crescent at Bath. While the Regent 
Street-Regent’s Park frontages are almost entirely classical, Nash 
built with the same gusto Gothic if required. He had a nice sense of 
associational propriety; as shown in his choice of the Neo-Classical 
for his town house and of the Gothic for his country mansion 
(complete with Gothic conservatory). Moreover he built Cronkhill, 
in Shropshire (1802), as an Italianate villa with a round-arched loggia 
on slender columns and with the widely projecting eaves of the 
Southern farmhouse (Roscoe’s Lorenzo Medici had come out in 
1796), he built Blaise Castle, near Bristol (1809), in a rustic Old- 
English cottage style with barge-boarded gables and thatched 
roofs (one is reminded of the Vicar of Wakefield, Marie Antoinette’s 
dairy in the Park of Versailles, and Gainsborough’s and Greuze’s 
sweet peasant children), and he continued the Brighton Pavilion 
in a Hindu fashion, first introduced just after 1800 at Sezincote, in 
the Cotswolds, where the owner, because of personal reminiscences, 
insisted on the style. “Indian Gothic” was the eminently character¬ 
istic contemporary name of the style. 

So here, in the early years of the 19th century, the fancy-dress 
ball of architecture is in full swing: Classical, Gothic, Italianate, 

199 



ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

Old-English. By 1840 pattern-books for builders and clients include 
many more styles: Tudor, French Renaissance, Venetian Renais¬ 
sance and others. That does not however mean that at all moments 
during the 19th century all these styles were really used. Favourites 
changed with fashion. Certain styles became associationally branded. 
A familiar example is the Moorish synagogue. Another is the per¬ 
severance of the battlemented castle for prisons. An account of 
architecture from 1820 to 1890 is bound to be one of the coming and 
going of period styles. 

On the Classical side 1820-40 is characterised by the most 
correct Neo-Greek. Fancy had left the treatment of antiquity even 
earlier than that of the Middle Ages. The results are competent, 
and in the hands of the best architects of a noble dignity. The British 
Museum, begun in 1824 by Sir Robert Smirke (1780-1867), is 
amongst the best examples in Britain (pi. c), or would be if 
its front with its grand Ionic order of the Erechtheum in Athens 
could been seen from a distance; Carl Friedrich Schinkel (1781- 
1841), Gilly’s pupil, is the greatest, most sensitive and most original 
representative on the Continent (fig. 97), William Strickland 
(1787-1854) probably the most vigorous in the United States. 

For now, with the Greek Revival, America can no longer be left 
out of the picture of Western architecture. American building had 
be en colonial to die end of the 18th century; colonial as the latest 
Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque buildings of the Spanish and the 
Portuguese in North, Central and South America. The Greek Re¬ 
vival in the United States is also still closely dependent on European, 
especially English examples, but national qualities, such as a remark¬ 
able stress on engineering technique, sanitary installation and equip¬ 
ment in general, now come to the fore. The ideological back¬ 
ground of the strict Neo-Greek is the liberal humanism of the 
educated classes in the early 19th century, the spirit of Goethe, i.e. 
the spirit which created our first public museums and art galleries, 
and our first national theatres, and which is responsible for the re¬ 
organisation and the broadening of education. 

On the Gothic side the corresponding development leads back 
to the Romantic Movement. Young Goethe’s enthusiasm for 
Strasbourg had been a revolutionary genius’s worship of genius. To 
degeneration after his, the Middle Ages became the ideal of Christian 
civilisation. Friedrich Schlegel, one of the most brilliant of Romantic 
writers and one of the most inspired Gothicists, became a convert 


200 




CARL FRIEDRICH SCHINKEL *. THE OLD MUSEUM (ALTES MUSEUM), BERLIN, 1 8 22-JO. 




































ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

to the Roman Catholic church. That was in 1808. Chateaubriand 
had written his Gink du Christianisme in 1802. Then, about 1835 in 
Pn g 1 W, Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-52) transferred the equation 
of Christianity and Gothic into architectural theory and practice. 
With him, to build in the forms of the Middle Ages is a moral duty. 
And he went further. He contended that, as the mediaeval architect 
was an honest workman and a faithful Christian, and as mediaeval 
architecture is good architecture, you must be an honest workman 
and a good Christian to be a good architect. In this the associational 
attitude appears fatefully extended. Similarly contemporary Class¬ 
icists began to brand the architect who favoured Gothic as an 
obscurantist and, worse still, his work as popery. On the whole 
the arguments of the Gothicists proved stronger and had, in an un¬ 
expected way, a more beneficial effect on art and architecture, but 
the aesthetic value of the buildings designed by the Classicists was 
higher. The Houses of Parliament, begun in 1836, are aesthetically 
more successful than any later large-scale public building in the 
Gothic style (pi. a). The competition—a significant symptom- 
had demanded designs in the Gothic or Tudor style. A monument 
of national tradition had to be in a national style. The architect Sir 
Charles Barry (1795-1860) preferred the Classical and the Italian. 
But Pugin worked with him and was responsible for nearly all the 
detail inside and outside. Hence the building possesses an intensity 
of life not to be found in other architect’s endeavours in the Perpen¬ 
dicular style. 

Yet even Pugin’s Gothic turns out to be only a veneer, as soon as 
the Houses of Parliament are examined as a whole. They have, it is 
true, a picturesque asymmetry in their towers and spires, but the 
river front is, in spite of that, with its emphasised centre and comer 
pavilions a composition of Palladian formality. You can without 
much effort visualise it with porticoes of a William Kent or John 
Wood type. And strangely enough, the British Museum, perfecdy 
Greek as it appears, reveals to the deeper-searching an equally 
Palladian structure. Centre portico and projecting wings are familiar 
features. The Athens of Pericles never conceived anything so loosely 
spread-out. 

So while the battles raged between Goth and Pagan, neither 
realised how all this application of period detail remained on the 
surface. Moral arguments and associational tags were freely used, 
but architecture as a job of designing to fulfil functions remained 

202 



THE NEW BUILDING TYPES OF THE 19TH CENTURY 

unheeded—or at least undiscussed. Even to-day in suet cases as the 
British Museum and the Houses of Parliament people think much 
too much of aesthetics and too little of function. Yet it should not 
be forgotten that to build a palace for democratic government 
and a palace for the instruction of the people was equally new. In 
fact to erect public buildings, specially designed as such, had been 
extremely rare before 1800. There were town halls of course, and 
London had the Royal Exchange. Somerset House also had been 
intended for Government offices and learned societies from the 
be ginning . But these were exceptions. If one takes the 19th century 
on the other hand, and tries to pick out the best examples of town 
architecture of all dates and all countries, a number of churches will 
have to be included, palaces rarely, private houses of course; but the 
vast majority of what one would collect are Governmental, muni¬ 
cipal and later private office buildings, museums, galleries, libraries, 
universities and schools, theatres and concert halls, banks and ex¬ 
changes, railway stations, department stores, hotels and hospitals, 
i.e. all buildings erected not for worship nor for luxury, but for the 
benefit and the daily use of the people, as represented by various 
groups of citizens. In this a new social function of architecture appears, 
representative of a new stratification of society. But the work in 
evolving plan forms for these new uses was more often than not 
anonymous, or at least appears so to us. The Renaissance library 
had been a hall of two or three aisles. The Renaissance hospital had 
been almost exactly identical in plan. Both came without essential 
modifications, from the monastic buildings of the Middle Ages. 
Now schemes were worked out for special library stores with 
stacking apparatus. For hospitals systems were tried of groups of 
separate wards and separate buildings for each kind of disease. For 
prisons the star-plan was invented (Pentonville) and accepted. For 
banks and exchanges the glass-covered centre hah or court proved 
the most serviceable solution. For museums and galleries a specially 
good system of lighting was essential, for office buildings the most 
flexible ground plan. And so every new type of building required its 

own treatment. . 

But the academician architects were too busy with new trim¬ 
mings for facades to notice much of all that. When the struggle 
between Classicists and Gothicists began to subside, other styles 
took their place. In the mediaeval field the generations before Pugin 
had been all for Perpendicular. To Pugin and those who followed 

203 



ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

him, notably Sir George Gilbert Scott, Perpendicular was anathema. 
Gothic had now to be of the 13 th and early 14th century to be right, 
and Scott and his colleagues never minded replacing a genuine 
Perpendicular window by an imitation earlier one when they had 
to restore a church. Their archaeological knowledge sharpened and 
on the whole their imitations grew in sensitivity as the century pro¬ 
gressed. The change from Perpendicular to Early English belongs 
to the thirties. In the last quarter of the century Bodley’s and espe¬ 
cially Pearson’s work (St. Augustine’s, Kilburn, London ; St.John’s, 
Red Lion Square, London; Cathedral, Truro) are the most refined. 
Whenit comes to originality, however, these accomplished revivalists 
were far surpassed by such characters as William Butterfield and James 
Brooks. Butterfield’s detail is original to die extreme of harshness 
and demonstrative ugliness (All Saints’, Margaret Street, London; 
St. Alban’s, Holborn, London), and Brooks’s plans occasionally 
abandon all dependence on English Gothic precedent. 

No other country took so whole-heartedly to the Gothic Revival 
in all its tendencies and shades as England. France kept away from 
it for a long time and has only a few Neo-Gothic churches of the 
first order (and Gau, the architect of Ste. Clotilde, was born at 
Cologne). In Germany the change from Schinkel’s sometimes 
romantic and sometimes free functional treatment of Gothic form 
to the archaeological phase is connected with the effort to complete 
Cologne Cathedral, after the original plan had been found in 1841. 
Since then good Gothic churches and later on public buildings 
appeared from Hamburg to Vienna. 

In the opposite camp of the Southerners the grand style of the 
Italian High Renaissance palazzi replaced the chastity of the Neo- 
Greek. The first European Neo-Renaissance palace is Klenze’s 
Beauhamais Palace, in Munich, of 18x6. Munich after that produced 
a number of excellent examples in the thirties (National Library 
by Gartner, 1831). So did Dresden, thanks to Gottfried Semper 
(Opera, 183.7). In London the style makes its appearance with Sir 
Charles Barry’s Travellers’ and Reform Clubs (1829 and 1837). 
What helped to popularise the Renaissance style must have been its 
plasticity as against the flatness of Neo-Classical and the thinn ess of 
Neo-Perpendicular form. Also.it represented a more substantial 
prosperity, and this, as is well known, was the ideal of the leading 
classes during the Victorian age (pi. crt). 

Then, already shortly after 1831, France rediscovered her native 

204 



NEO-RENAISSANCE AND NEO-BAROQUE 


Early Renaissance, and Paris rebuilt its 16th-century towrL f^T 
with picturesque gables and playful pilasters. To this correspo^ftd 
in England a revival of Elizabethan and Jacobean forms, especiiBm 

for country houses. Their associational value was of course national; 
their aesthetic appeal lay in a still livelier play of ornaments on surfaces. 
Apparently the underground tendency, covered up by c angrng 
period costumes, was towards the monvemente and spectac ar, 
the flamboyant style of Disraeli and the pompousness of Gladstone. 
Thus about 1850-60 Italianate forms became also more an more 
exuberant, until a Neo-Baroque was reached. Charles Garmers 
Opera in Paris of 1861-74 is one of the earliest and best examp es 
(pi. cm). Another is Poelaert’s enormous Law Courts at xusse s 
(1866-83). In England there is little of this Second Empire style. A. 
revival of PaUadianism. in its most Baroque form took its pice. an a 
strong inspiration from the Wren of Greenwich Hospital. Then wi 
a slight sobering of form and a marked influence from a assic 
Re-revival in America (McRim, Mead, and White) a c aracter 
istically prosperous Edwardian Imperial style was arrive a 
(Selfridge’s). In Germany the late 19th- and early 20th-century 
Neo-Baroque goes under the name of Wilhelmian, in tay it as 
disgraced Rome with the national monument to g lctor 

Emmanuel II. . - 

However, by the time these buildings were designe , a reac ion 
had come and spread against so superficial—truly super a a 
conception of architecture. It did not originate wL t e arc tec . 
It could not; because it concerned problems of socia re orm an o 
engineering, and architects were not interested in these. ost ® 
them loathed the industrial development of the age just as rear y 
as the painters. They did not see that the Industrial Reeolnoon 
while destroying an accepted order and an accepte stan ar ° 
beauty, created opportunities for a new kind of beauty an or er. 
It offered to the imaginative new materials and new manu acturing 
processes, and opened up a vista towards architectur p annmg on 


an undreamt-of scale. , . . 

As for new materials, iron, and after i860 stee, ma e it possi 
to achieve spans wider than ever before, to build g er mi ever 
before, and develop ground plans more flexible than ever e ore. 
Glass, in conjunction with iron and steel, enabled e engineer o 
make whole roofs and whole walls transparent. Reinforced concrete 
introduced at the end of the century, combines the tensile strength 


205 



ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

of steel with the crushing strength of stone. Architects knew little 
of these things. They left them to the engineers. For about 1800, 
in connection with the growing subdivision of competencies, the 
architect’s and the engineer’s had become different jobs for which a 
different tr aining was provided. Architects learnt in the offices of 
older architects and in schools of architecture, until they set up in 
practice themselves doing what the civil-servant-architect had done 
in the 17th century, but now chiefly for private clients instead of the 
State. Engineers were trained in special university faculties or (in 
France and Central Europe) special technical universities. The most 
perfect examples of early iron architecture, the suspension bridges, 
such as Brunei’s Clifton Bridge, designed in 1829-31 and begun in 
1836, are the work of engineers, not of architects. Paxton who con¬ 
ceived the Crystal Palace of 1851 was a landscape gardener used to 
the iron and glasswork of conservatories. The men who introduced 
iron stanchions into the construction of American warehouses and 
occasionally, in the forties and fifties, opened whole fronts by 
glazing the whole interstices between the stanchions, are mostly 
unknown or undistinguished as architects. And in France, where a 
few trained and recognised architects (Labrouste: Genevieve 
Library, 1845-50) used iron conspicuously—even occasionally for a 
whole church interior (St. Eugene, Paris, begun 1854), they were 
attacked and ridiculed by the majority. 

In all this a fundamentally unsound conception of architecture as 
a social service is apparent. This was first recognised by Pugin, who 
saw only one remedy : the return to the old faith of Rome. Then ___ 
shortly after him, John Ruskin preached in The Seven-Lamps oj 
Architecture (1849) that a building must be truthful-first of all. And 
a little later he began to realise that to achieve this, thought had to 
be given to social as well as aesthetic problems. The step from theory 
to practice was taken by William Morris (1834-96). He had under¬ 
gone the influence of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, had actually 
been for a time a pupil of Rossetti, and also of one of the most con¬ 
scientious Neo-Gothic architects. But he was not satisfied with 
either painting or architecture as he saw them practised, i.e. 
painting as the' art of making easel pictures for exhibitions, and 
architecture as writing-desk and drawing-board work. 

And whereas Ruskin kept his social activities apart from his 
aesthetic theory, Morris was the first to link up the two in the only 
way they could be successfully linked up. Instead of becoming a 

206 



RUSKIN AND MORBIS 

painter or an architect, he founded a firm for designing and making 
furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, carpets, stained glass, etc., and got his 
Pre-Raphaelite friends to join him. Not until the artist becomes a 
craftsman again, this was his belief, and the craftsman an artist, can 
art be saved from annihilation by the machine. Morris was a 
violent machine-hater. He attributed to mechanisation and sub¬ 
division of labour all the evils of the age. And from his point of 
view he was right. The solution he found was aesthetically sound, 
though socially not in the long run adequate. To build up a new 
style on design was sound, to try to build it up in opposition to the 
technical potentialities of the century was just as much escapism as 
the Classicist’s disguising of a town hall as a Greek temple. The forms 
which Morris & Co. chose for their products were inspired by the 
late Middle Ages, as was Morris’s poetry. But Morris ad not imi¬ 
tate. He recognised Historidsm as the danger it was. What he ad 
was to steep himself in the atmosphere and the aesthetic principles 
of-the Middle Ages, and then create something new wkh a similar 
flavour and on similar principles. This is why Morris fabrics and 
wallpapers will live long after all applied art of the generation 
before his will have lost its significance. 

Morris’s social-aesthetic aeory as it was emboaed in the many 
lectures and adaesses he delivered from 1877 onwards will keep its 
life in history too. By trying to revive ae old^faith in service, by 
inrlirring the contemporary architect’s and artist’s arrogant indiffer¬ 
ence to design for everyday needs, by discreating any art created by 
individual genius for a small group of connoisseurs, and by forcing 
home with untiring zest the principle that art matters only if all cm 
share it”, he laid the foundation of ae Modem Movement. 

What Morris did for ae philosophy of art and for design, 
Richardson in ae United States and Webb and Norman Shaw in 
Britain ad concurrently for the esthetics of architecture. Henry 
Hobson Richardson (1838-86) unquestionably still belongs to ae 
era of period revivals. He sttidied m Paris and returned to New 
England deeply impressed by ae power of the French Romanesque 
style. He continued to make use of it for churches, public and office 
buildings (Auditorium, Chicago)—but no longer just for imitative 
or association^ reasons. He saw that these plain massive stone sur¬ 
faces and mig hty round arches could convey emotional contents 
more suited to our own age ffian any other familiar to him. And he 
and his followers designed country houses in the eighties freer and 

207 


E.A.—15 



ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM I76O TO THE PRESENT DAY 



98. ROBERT NORMAN SHAW I STORES AND INN AT THE BEDFORD PARK GARDEN SUBURB, 

CHISWICK, 1878. 

bolder than any Europe did at the same time—or should one say 
Europe with the exception of Philip Webb in England 1 Webb 
(1830-19x5) liked plain brick walls, and introduced into them the 
p lain slender windows of the William and Mary and Queen Anne 
period, remaining nevertheless in sympathy with the sturdy honest 
building traditions of the Gothic and Tudor styles. The Red 
House at Bexley Heath, near London, his first work, designed for 
(and with) Morris in 1859 shows already a combination of pointed 
arches and long segment-headed sash windows. 

The picturesque possibilities of a mixture of motifs derived from 
widelydifferentstylesweremorereadilytakenupbyRichardNorman 
Shaw (1831-1912). He had a much fighter touch, a quicker imagina¬ 
tion, but a less discriminating taste. In a professional career extending 
over more than forty years he never ceased to try the contemporary 
appeal of new period styles. Thus he went in for half-timbered 
Tudor country houses, then for the many-gabled brick architecture 
of the Dutch Renaissance, then for a very restrained Neo-Queen 
Anne, or rather Neo-William and Mary, and finally joined in the 
pompous Edwardian Imperial. He enjoyed, however, nothing more 
than playing with motifs of different centuries (fig. 98). By com¬ 
bining a few Tudor and a few 17th-century motifs with others of his 
own invention, he achieved a lightness and animation that makes 
Morris designs appear gloomy. 

Norman Shaw’s influence on the architectural profession was 
i m mediate and very widespread. A generation of architects came 
from his studio to whom he left the freedom of following Morris’s 
ideas, while following his own forms. They and some closer disciples 
of Morris founded the Arts and Crafts Movement. Once one knows 


208 














NORMAN SHAW, VOYSEY, RICHARDSON 

what Morris taught, the name becomes self-explanatory. More and 
more original interpretations of architectural traditions were worked 
out by the members of this group, almost exclusively in designs 
for town and country houses. Lethaby, Prior, Stokes, Ricardo 
are amongst the most noteworthy names. They are little known 
nowadays, but the -freshness of their approach was unique in the 
Europe of about 1885 to 1890. In America, however, the country 
houses of Richardson and his followers in the seventies and 
eighties had already achieved a synthesis of novelty with comfort 
and ease which England only reached in the early works of the 
most brilliant architect arid designer of his generation: Charles 
F. Annesley Voysey (1857-1941). Voysey was neither connected 
personally with Shaw nor with Morris. His fabrics, wallpapers, 
furniture and metal-work especially, so novel and so graceful, had 
an effect no less revolutionising than Morris’s. In his buildings he 
appears just as dainty and lovable (fig. 99). Of period detail little 
is kept, but no effort is made to eliminate a general period flavour. 
In fact it is just the effortless, unaffected nature of Voysey’s archi¬ 
tecture that gives it its charm. Moreover, going more closely into it, 
one will be struck by the boldness of bare walls and long horizontal 
bands of windows. In such buildings of the nineties England came 
nearest to the idiom of the Modem Movement. 

For the next forty years, the first forty of our century, no British 
name need here be mentioned. Britain had led Europe and America 
in architecture and design for a long time; now her ascendancy had 
come to amend. From Britain the art of landscape gardening had 
spread, and Adam’s and Wedgwood’s style, in Britain the Gothic 



99. CHARLES F. ANNESLEY VOYSEY: HOUSE AT COLWALL, MALVERN, 1893, 

209 





ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

Revival had been conceived, to Britain the degradation of machine- 
produced applied art was due, to Britain the constructive reaction 
against it. The domestic revival of Morris, Norman Shaw and 
Voysey was British; British was the new social conception of a uni¬ 
fied art under architectural guidance, and British the first achieve¬ 
ments of design completely independent of the past. They are to be 
found in the work of Arthur H. Mackmurdo’s Century Guild about 
1885 and then in that of Voysey and some architects influenced by 
him, Baillie Scott, C. R. Ashbee and above all Charles Rennie 
Mackintosh (1869-1928). 

Art Nouveau, die first novel style on the Continent, and in fact 
a style, it seems now, desperately set on being novel, drew its in¬ 
spiration from English design. It started in Brussels in 1893 and had 
by 1895 become the dernier cri amongst the young artists and archi¬ 
tects of Germany, Austria and France. Of Continental buildings 
designed between 1760 and the years of Art Nouveau not many 
have so far been mentioned in this chapter. All that was of import¬ 
ance either happened in Britain or could at least be followed just as 
easily in Britain as abroad. 

The position changed a few years before 1900. The stage reached 
by Britain at that moment was one of truly contemporary design, but 
of a free traditionalism (as against the earlier more pedantic His- 
toricism) in architecture. The step that had to be taken to recover 
a genuine style was that from Voysey’s designs to buildings equally 
bold. And the British character was (and is) all against such drastic 
steps, so uncompromising an attitude, so logical a procedure. Thus 
progress ill Britain stopped for thirty years. Voysey’s Tudor tra¬ 
ditionalism was followed by a Wren and Georgian traditionalism, 
equally pleasant in domestic architecture, but feeble if not painfully 
inflated-looking in representational buildings. 

The first private houses in which the new, original style of the 
20th century can be recognised are Frank Lloyd Wright’s (bom 
1869), built in the nineties in the neighbourhood of Chicago. They 
have the freely spreading ground plans, the interweaving of ex¬ 
teriors and interiors by means of terraces and cantilevered roofs, 
the opening up of one room into another, the predominant hori¬ 
zontals, the long window bands that are familiar in to-day’s houses. 
Also at Chicago, and as early as the eighties and nineties, the first 
b uild ings were erected with steel skeletons (William Le BaronJenney: 
Home Insurance Company, 1884-85) and facades not disguising 


210 



THE FAILURE OF VICTORIAN ARCHITECTS 

them (Hoiabird and Roche: Marquette Building, 1894)- If a period 
style was still used for external detail it usually was Richardson’s 
severely plain American Romanesque. As against this American 
priorityin the appreciative use of steel, France was the first country 
to design in a genuine concrete character. (A. de Baudot: St. Jean 
de Montmartre, begun 1894, and buildings of c. 1900-5 by Tony 
Gamier, bom 1869, and Auguste Perret, bom 1873). 

Then, between 1905 and 1914, Germany became the most im¬ 
portant country. Here the liaison of design and architecture was 
most successful. Peter Behrens (1868-1938) designed factories and 
their products. The Werkbund was founded to be a meeting-place 
of progressive manufacturers, architects and designers. And while 
in the United States and France the pioneers remained solitary, in 
Germany, twenty years ago, .a style independent of the past had 
been accepted by quite a large public. In 1914, Walter Gropius (bom 
1883) showed the world, at an exhibition in Cologne, a factory so 
completely of to-day in every detail that it might be mis-dated by 
anybody (pi. civ). It had a flat roof, again the general stress on 
horizontals, and two staircases entirely encased in curved glass so 
that the skeleton and the interior workings were proudly exposed. 
It will at once be recognised that in this motif as in the floating 
ground plan of Wright (and later on of Le Corbusier), and as 
incidentally also in the fantastic American highways intersections 
with wide areas given up to nothing but traffic bands on different 
levels, the eternal passion of the West for spatial movement once 
more expresses itself. 

So by 1914 the leading architects of the younger generation had 
courageously broken with the past and accepted the machine-age in 
all its implications: new materials, new processes, new forms, new 
problems. Of these the most important is symbolised to an extent 
that probably future civilisations will find as obscure as we find 
Avebury Circle and the Rennet Avenue, by the American traffic 
crossings just mentioned: namely the problem of modem town- 
planning. It has been said before that one of the greatest changes 
brought about by the Industrial Revolution was the sudden growth 
of cities. To cope with this, architects should have concentrated on 
the adequate housing of the vast new working-class populations 
of these cities and on the planning of adequate routes of traffic for 
the worker to get to his job and back every day. But they were 
interested in facades and nothing else; and so in a way were muni- 


311 



ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

cipalities of the 19th century. New public buildings cropped up 
everywhere. They were as splendid as money could buy them. 
Take Manchester Town Hall, Glasgow University, the Law Courts 
in Birmingham, London County Hall, or take the series of magni¬ 
ficent but characteristically unrelated monuments along the Ring- 
strasse in Vienna: the Gothic Town Hall, the Classical Houses of 
Parliament, the Renaissance museums, etc., one cannot say that 
Governments and city councils failed in their undeniable duty to 
give representational architecture a chance. 

Where they failed was in their infinitely greater duty to provide 
decent living conditions for their citizens. One may say that this was 
an outcome of the philosophy of liberalism, which had taught them 
that everybody is happiest if left to look after himself, and that 
interference with private life is unnatural and always damaging; 
but while this explanation will satisfy the historian, it could not 
satisfy the social reformer. He saw that 95 per cent of the new houses 
in industrial towns were put up by speculative builders as cheaply 
as the scanty regulations would allow, and acted as best he could. 
If he was a man like William Morris, he preached a mediaevalising 
socialism and escaped into the happier world of handicraft. If he 
was like Prince Albert and Lord Shaftesbury, he founded associations 
for improving by private generosity the dwellings of the artisan and 
labourer. If however he was an enlightened employer himself, he 
went one step further and commissioned an estate to be designed 
and built to a more satisfactory standard for his own workers. Thus 
Sir Titus Salt founded Saltaire,near Leeds,in 1853. It looks very drab 
now, but it was pioneer work. Lever Brothers began Port Sunlight 
in 1888 and Cadbury’s Bourneville in 1895. These two were the 
first factory estates planned as garden suburbs. From them—and 
Bedford Park, near London, which had been designed as early as 
1875 by Norman Shaw on the same principle, though for private 
tenants of a wealthier class—the garden suburb and the garden city 
movement spread, another British contribution to the pre-history 
of modem European architecture. 

Now in connection with this movement, architects re-entered 
the domain of town-planning. The greatest town-planning scheme 
between 1830 and 1880 had been the work of an administrative 
genius, Baron Haussmann, Napoleon Ill’s prefect of the Seine De¬ 
partment. His long, wide and straight roads all through the centre 
of Paris were drawn for the sake of civic magnificence and military 


212 



FRANK PICK 


security, but also for easier traffic to such focal points as railway 
stations. Haussmann was, however, not interested in housing, in 
the slums that developed behind his new facades, nor did he extend 
his appreciation of traffic to the railways themselves. 

But this problem, too, could not in the long run be neglected 
by the architect, once he accepted it as his job to design whole 
estates and suburbs. These new estates of small houses in their own 
gardens took a great deal of space. They were only possible right 
outside the built-over areas of towns. So the question of well- 



IOO. CHARLES HOLDEN: ARNOS GROVE STATION,OP THE LONDON UNDERGROUND, I932. 


organised road and rail traffic became imperative. This question 
until then had been in the hands of the business man and again the 
engineer. Both had shown themselves staggeringly obtuse to archi¬ 
tectural values. Some of the best vistas of London were cut into by 
railway bridges: the approach to St. Paul’s, e.g., and the views down 
the-Thames. Station buildings themselves, except for a few early 
ones such as old Euston and King s Cross, and except for the be¬ 
wildering splendour of Gilbert Scott s Early English St. Pancras 
Station, were mean and untidy—at least in Britain. TBs unwilling¬ 
ness to accept the care for decent design as a public duty still applied 
quite universally to British big business and public services thirty 
years ago. The first to set an example of what immense improve¬ 
ments personal initiative can acBeve was Frank Pick, to whom 
London owes a transport system beautifully designed from the station 
building down to the lighting standards and the fitter baskets. 

Frank Pick must be mentioned in a history of architecture as the 
prototype of the 20th-century patron. A Medici, a. Louis XIV, are 
impossible in an age such as ours. The new Maecenas is an admin¬ 
istrator, a worker Bmself, with a house not much bigger than yours 

213 




ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY 

and mine, a cottage in the country, and a car far from spectacular. 
But as Managing Director of the London General Omnibus and the 
London Underground Companies, Pick saw that to assemble artists 
and architects round such a vast business enterprise would be to 
bring Morris’s ideals up to date. So before the first World War 
he began to reform the lettering used, had one of the best 
modem type-faces designed especially for his purpose and im¬ 
pressed it so deeply on the minds of millions that a revolution 
in British lettering ensued. Concurrently he started a campaign 
for better posters, and again succeeded in establishing Britain in 
the front rank of modern poster art. And when in the twenties 
and thirties many new stations had to be built, he realised that 
the Continent had evolved a style more suited than contemporary 
English Neo-Georgian to express the synthesis of function and 
civic dignity that was his ideal. So he found the right architect 
in Mr. Charles Holden, and the London Underground stations 
(fig, 100) became the most perfect examples in London of the 
style of to-day, serviceable, uncompromisingly modem, and yet in 
keeping with the quiet distinction of the Georgian brick house. 

Those who are doubtful about the blessings of the Modem 
Movement in architecture often say that the strongest argument 
against it is the very fact that its most representative examples are 
stations, factories, office buildings and the like. Now this is certainly 
not an accident. It would not be possible to find anything like the 
same number of good contemporary buildings for private luxury as 
for workaday use. But then, does not the architect to-day build for 
a population with nothing like the leisure for luxuries which patrons 
of the Baroque enjoyed? Must that not change the style, if it is a 
genuine style ? Moreover, as has already been said, nearly every 
building that is designed nowadays serves masses and not individuals. 
Must not therefore our style be one adapted to mass production, 
not only in the sense of production in masses but also for masses ? 

Thus, if the new style is bare, if it goes straight to the point, there 
are good reasons for it. The ground had first of all to be cleared of 
the weeds of 19th-century sham ornamentation. Once that had been 
done, all available energy had to be devoted to research into function. 
What during the 19th century had been done slowly and anony¬ 
mously, now became the central task of the architect. If you have to 
build a soap factory, you must know how soap is being made. If 
your job is to design a nursery-school, you must find out all about 

214 



THE MODERN MOVEMENT 

nursery-school work. You cannot accept any plan on authority; it 
must be evolved anew every time from fundamentals. This Back- 
to-Fundamentals attitude with regard to function encouraged the 
same attitude to form. Again no authority was accepted, and again 
—after the first Art Nouveau flourish of unshackled imagination— 
the basic principles were rediscovered. This happened—a very hope¬ 
ful sign—not only in architecture, but also in painting and sculpture. 
Cubism and then abstract art were the outcome, the most architec¬ 
tural art that had existed since the Middle Ages. In architecture, 
sheer proportion at last took its legitimate place again. No mould¬ 
ings, no frills were permitted to detract one’s attention from true 
architectural values: the relation of wall to window, solid to void, 
volume to space, block to block. I need not here go into more 
detail about things which belong to our own day and not to 
history yet. 

The one fact that matters to the historian already now, and the one 
that he can state without falling into the role of counsel for the defence 
or for prosecution, is that the Modern Movement is a genuine and 
independent style. This fact is full of promise. For over a hundred 
years no style in that sense had existed. As Western civilisation had 
become more and more subdivided, it had lost its faculty to create 
a language of its own. An atomised society cannot have an archi¬ 
tectural style. Can we not take it then that the recovery of a true 
style in the visual arts, one in which once again building rules, and 
painting and sculpture serve, and one in which form is obviously 
representative of character, indicates the return of unity in society 
too } Granted that this new style often looks rather forbidding and 
seems to lack human warmth. But is not the same true of contem¬ 
porary life? Here, too, amenities to which we have been used are 
being replaced by something more exacting and more elementary. 

Beyond stating this the historian should not go. Whether the 
new social and architectural attitude heralds a last phase of Western 
civilisation or the dawn of a new, whether the style of the future will 
be at all s imilar to our own, and whether we shall like it—all this it 
is not for the historian to foretell. His job is done when he has applied 
the principles of historical analysis as far into the problems of the 
present day as they can safely be applied. 


215 




APPENDIX i 


Bibliography 


GENERAL 

A. Michel: Histoire de Y Art, 18 vol., Paris, 1905-29. 

Sir Banister Fletcher : A History of Architecture, 13 th ed., London, 1946. 
R. Sturgis: Dictionary of Architecture and Building, 3 voL, New York, 
1901-2. 

Talbot F. Hamlin: Architecture through the Ages, New York, 1941. 

Fiske Kimball and G. H. Edged: A History of Architecture, New York, 
1918. 

Wasmuths Lexikon der Baukunst, 5 vol., Berlin, 1929-37. 

U. Thieme and F. Becker: Allgemeines Lexikon der bddenden Kiinstler, 
32 vol., Leipzig, 1907 seqq. 

M. S. Briggs: The Architect in History, Oxford, 1927. 

G. Dehio and F. von Bezold: Die kirchliche Baukunst des Abendlandes, 

10 vol., Stuttgart, 1884-1901. 

BRITAIN 

W. Godfrey: The Story of Architecture in England, 2 vol, London, 1928. 

F. Gibberd: The Architecture of England from Norman Times to the 
present Day, 5th ed., London, 1944. 

N. Lloyd: A History of the English House, London, 1931. 

H. Avray Tipping: English Homes, 9 vol., London, 1920-37. 

FRANCE 

C.Enlart: Manuel darcheologiefran^aise, 2nd ed., 4vol.,Paris, 1919-32* 
P. Lavedan: L’architecture fran^aise, Paris, 1944. 


GERMANY 

G. Dehio: Geschichte der deutschen Kunst, 2nd ed., 6 vol, Berlin, 

1921-31. 

HOLLAND 

F. Vermeulen: Handboek tot de Geschiedenis der NederlandscheBouw- 
kunst, 3 vol., The Hague, 1928-41. 

A. W. Weiszman: Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Bouwkunst, Amster¬ 
dam, 1912. 

H. E. van Gelder (and others): Kunstgeschiedenis der Nederlanden, 
2nd ed., Utrecht, 1946. 

ITALY 

A. Venturi: Storia dell*Arte Italiana, 21 vol, Milan, 1901 seqq, 

M. Salmi: L’Arte Italiana, 3 vol., Florence, 1943 - 44 * 

C. A. Cummings: A History of Italian Architecture, 2 vol.,-New York, 
1901. 


217 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 


SPAIN 

B. Bevan: A History of Spanish Architecture, London, 1938. 
Marques de Lozoya: Historia del Arte hispanico, 4 vol., 1931-45. 


MIDDLE AGES 


EARLY CHRISTIAN AND BYZANTINE 

O. M. Dalton: East Christian Art, Oxford, 1925. 

O. Wulif: Altchristliche und Byzantinische Kunst (Handbuch derKunst- 

wissenschaft), 2 vol., Neubabelsberg, 1914--18. 

D. Talbot Rice: Byzantine Art, Oxford, 1935. 

C. Diehl: Manuel d’Art Byzantin, 2nd ed., Paris, 1925-26. 

L. Brehier: L’Art Byzantin, Paris, 1924. 

MEDIAEVAL : GENERAL 

W. R. Lethaby: Mediaeval Art from the Peace of the Church to the Eve 
of the Renaissance, London, 1904. 

A. Kingsley Porter: Mediaeval Architecture, its origins and development, 
2 vol.. New York, 1909. 

P. Frankl: Die Fruhmittelalterliche und Romanische Baukunst (Handbuch 

der Kunstwissenschaft), Neubabelsberg, 1926. 

A. W. Clapham: Romanesque Architecture in Western Europe, Oxford, 
I 93 < 5 . 

H. R. Hahnloser: Villard de Honnecourt, Vienna, 1935. 

BRITAIN 

F. Bond: An Introduction to English Church Architecture, 2 voL, 
London, 1913. 

C. E. Power: English Mediaeval Architecture, 2nd ed., 3 vol., London, 

1923. 

E. S. Prior: A History of Gothic Art in England, London, 1900. 

E. S. Prior: The Cathedral Builders in England, London, 1905. 

T. F. Bumpus: The Cathedrals ofEngland and Wales, London, 1905. 

K. Escher: Englische Kathedralen, Zurich, 1929. 

A. Hamilton Thompson: The Ground-Plan of the English Parish Church, 
Cambridge, 1911. 

A. Hamilton Thompson: The Historical Growth of the English Parish 
Church, Cambridge, 1913 . 

J. C. Cox: The English Parish Church, London, 1914. 

F. E. Howard: The Mediaeval Styles of the English Parish Church, 
, London, 1936. 

A. Hamilton Thompson: Military Architecture in England during the 
Middle Ages, London, 1912. 

G. Baldwin Brown: The Arts in Early England. Vol. 2: Anglo-Saxon 

Architecture, 2nd ed., London, 1925. 

218 ■■ ■■ 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 


A. W. Clapham: English Romanesque Architecture, 2 vol, Oxford, 
1930-34. 

S. Gardner: A Guide to English Gothic Architecture, Cambridge, 1922. 
J. Bilson: Les origines de [’architecture gothique, and Les premieres 
croisees d’ogives en Angleterre, Revue de f Art Chretien, 1901 

and 1902. > 

C. Enlart: Du Role de 1 ’Angleterre dans l’Evolution de 1 Art Gothique, 

Paris, 1908. 


FRANCE 

R. deLasteyrie: L’Architecture Religieuse en France a l’Epoque Romane, 
2nd ed., Paris, 1929. 

J. Baum: Romanesque Architecture in France, 2nd ed., London, 1928. 

C. Martin: L’Art Roman en France, 3 vol., Paris, c. 1910-14. 

J. Evans: The Romanesque Architecture of the Order of Cluny, Cam¬ 
bridge, 1938. 

E. Gall: Die Gotische Baukunst in Frankreich und Deutschland, vol. 1, 
Leipzig, 1925. 

R. de Lasteyrie: L’Architecture Religieuse en France a 1 Epoque Gothique, 
2 vol., Paris, 1926-27. . 

C. Martin and C. Enlart: L’Art Gothique en France, 2 vol.. Pans, 
c. 1913-25. 

L. Schurenberg: Die Kirchliche Baukunst in Frankreich zwischen 1270 
und 1380, Berlin, 1934. 

E. Male: L’Art Religieux du XH e Siecle en France, Pans, 1922. 

E. Male: L’Art Religieux du XHI® Siecle en France, Paris, 1902 (English 
translation, 1913). 


ITALY 

P. Toesca: Storia dell’Arte Italiana, vol. I, Turin, 1927. 

A. Kingsley Porter: Lombard Architecture, 4 vol., Newhaven, 1915-17. 
G. T. Rivoira: Lombardic Architecture, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1934. 

C. Ricci: Romanesque Architecture in Italy, London, 1925. 

C. Martin and C. Enlart: L’Art Roman en Italie, 2 vol, Paris, c. 1911-24. 
M. Salmi: L’Architettura Romanica in Toscana, Milan, 1927. 

W. Paatz: Werden und Wesen der Trecento-Architektur in Toskana, 
Burg, 1937 - 


SPAIN 

V. Lamperez y Romea: Historia de la Arquitectura Cristiana Espanola en 

la Edad Media, 2nd ed., Madrid, 1930. 

G. G. King: Pre-Romanesque Churches of Spain, Bryn Mawr, 1924. 

M. Gomez-Moreno: El arte romanico espanol, Madrid, 1934. 

G. E. Street (revised by G. G. Kmg): Some Account of Gothic Archi¬ 
tecture in Spain, London, 1914. 

E. Lambert: L’Art Gothique en Espagne, Paris, 1931. 

219 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 


RENAISSANCE, MANNERISM AND BAROQUE IN ITALY 

J. Burckhardt: Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, 5th ed., Esslingen, 

1912. 

W. J. Anderson and A. Stratton: The Architecture of the Renaissance in 
Italy, London, 1927. 

C. von Stegmann and H. von Geymiiller: Die Architektur der Renais¬ 

sance in Toskana, 12 vol., Munich, 1909. 

A. Haupt: Renaissance Palaces of Northern Italy and Tuscany, London, 
3 vol, c. 1931. 

D. Frey: Architettura della Rinascenza, Rome, 1924. 

J. Baum: Baukunst und dekorative Plastik der Friihrenaissance in Italien, 
Stuttgart, 1920. 

C. Ricci: Baukunst der Hoch- und Spatrenaissance in Italien, Stuttgart, 
I923 ‘ 

G. Giovannoni: Saggi suH’Architettura del Rinascimento, Milan, 1931. 
N. Pevsner: The Architecture of Mannerism, The Mint, 194 6. 

N. Pevsner: Gegenreformation und Manierisums, Repertorium fur 
Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 46,1925. 

C. Gurlitt: Geschichte des Barockstils in Italien, Esslingen, 1887. 

A. E. Brinckmann: Die Baukunst des 17 and 18 Jahrhunderts in den 
Romanischen Landern (Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft), Neuba- 
belsberg, 1919 seqq. 

C. Ricci: Baroque Architecture and Sculpture in Italy, London, 1912. 

T. H. Fokker: Roman Baroque Art, 2 vol., Oxford, 1938. 

Brunelleschi: H. Folnesics, Vienna, 1915. 

L. H. Heydenreich Jahrhuch der preussischen Kunstsammlungen, vol. 52, 

. I93I# 

Michelozzo: L. H. Heydenreich, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutsin 
Florenz, vol. 5,1932, and Festschrift fur Wilhelm Pinder, Leipzig, 1938. 
Alberti :M. L. Gengaro, Milan, 1939. 

R. "Wittkower, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , 
vol. 4,1941. 

Bramante: C. Baroni, Bergamo, 1941. 

Raphael: T. Hofmann, 4 vol., Zittau, 1900-14. 

Michelangelo: J. A. Symonds, 2 vol., London, 1893. 

H. Thode: Kritische Untersuchungen, 6 vol., Berlin, 1902-13. 
Michelangelo’s Laurenziana Library: R. Wittkower, The Art Bulletin, 
vol. 16,1934. 

Giulio Romano: E. Gombrich, Jahrhuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen 
in Wien, N.F., vols. 8 and 9,1935-36. 

Serlio : W. B. Dinsmoor, The Art Bulletin, vol. 24,1942. 

Palladio: A. M. della Pozza, Vicenza, 1943. 

F. Burger, Die Villen des Andrea Palladio, Leipzig, c. 1909. 

R. Wittkower, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 7, 
1944 - 


220 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 


Bernini; S. Fraschetti, Milan, 1900. 

Borromini: E. Hempel, Vienna, 1924. 

H. Sedlmayr, Munich, 1939- 

16th TO 18th CENTURY IN' BRITAIN, FRANCE, GERMANY 
" AND SPAIN 

BRITAIN 

T. Gamer and A. Stratton: Domestic Architecture of England during the 
Tudor Period, 2nd ed., 2 vol, London, 1929. 

J. A. Gotch: Early Renaissance Architecture in England, London, 1914. 

J. A. Gotch: The English House from Charles I to George IV, London, 1918. 

S. E. Rasmussen: London, the Unique City, London, 1937. 

J. Summerson: Georgian London, London, 1946. 

Inigo Jones: J. A. Gotch, London, 1928. 

Wren: G. Wehb, London, 1937. 

L. Weaver, London, 1923. 

Wren Society, 20 vol, London, 1924-44. 

Bicentenary Memorial Volume, published by the Royal Institute of 
British Architects, London, 1923. 

Lord Burlington: R. Wittkower, Archeological Journal, vol. 102, 1945. 
Wood: M. A. Green, Bath, 1914. 

Adam: J. Swarbrick, London, 1915. 

A. T. Bolton, 2 vol., London, 1922. 

FRANCE 

Sir Reginald Blomfield: A History of French Architecture 1494-1774, 

4 vol., London, 1911-21. 

F. Kimball : The Creation of the Ro coco, Philadelphia, 1943. 

L. Hautecoeur: Histoire de f Architecture classique en France, vol, 1, parts 
1 and 2, Paris, 1943. 

A. E. Brinckmann: Die Baukunst des 17 mid 18 Jahrhunderts in den 
Romanischen Landem (Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft), Neuba- * 
belsberg, 1919 seqq. 

H. Rose: Spatbarock, Munich, 1922. 

L. Hautecoeur: Les Grands Palais de France, Le Louvre et les Tuileries, 
Paris, c. 1924. 

L. Hautecoeur: L’Histoire des Chateaux du Louvre et des Tuileries . . 
Paris and Brussels, 1927. 

G. Briere: Le Chateau de Versailles, 2 vol., Paris, 2c. 1910. 

P. de Nolhac: Versailles et la Com: de France, 10 portfolios, Paris, 1925-30. 
G. Gebelin: Les Chateaux de la Loire, Paris, 1947. 

J. Vacquier and Jarry: Les Vieux Hotels de Paris, 22 portfolios, Paris, 

1910-34- 

Pillement: Les Hotels de Paris, 2 voL, Paris, 1941—45. 

A. Blunt: Francois Mansart, London, 1941. 


221 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 


GERMANY 

W. Pinder: Deutscher Barock, 2nd ed., Konigstein, 1924. 

S. Sitwell: German Baroque Art, London, 1927. 

M. Hauttmann: Geschichte der kirchlichen Baukunst in Bayern, Schwaben 

und Franken, 15 50-1780, Munich, 1924. 

SPAm 

A. Byne and M. Stapley: Spanish Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, 
New York, 1917. 

O. Schubert: Geschichte des Barocks in Spanien, Esslingen, 1908. 

19 th AND 20 th CENTURIES 

S. Giedion: Spitbarocker und Romantischer Klassizismus, Munich, 1922. 
C. Hussey: The Picturesque, London, 1927. 

N. Pevsner: The Genesis of the Picturesque, The Architectural Review, 

vol. 96,1944. 

Sir Kenneth Clark: The Gothic Revival, London, 1928. 

N. Pevsner: Pioneers of the Modem Movement, from William Morris to 
Walter Gropius, London, 1936. 

S. Giedion: Space, Time and Architecture, Harvard, 1941. 

T. E. Tallmadge: The Story of Architecture in America, London, 1928. 

J. M. Richards: An Introduction to Modem Architecture, Pelican Books, 

3rd ed., 1945. 

Soane: A. T. Bolton, London, 1927. 

Nash:J. Summerson, London, 1935. 

Ledoux: G. Levallet-Haug, Paris, 1934. 

M. Raval and Moreux, Paris, 1946- 
Gilly: A. Oncken, Berlin, 1935. 

Schinkel: A. Grisebach, Leipzig, 1924 - 

William Morris: J. W. Mackail, 2nd ed., London, 1922. 

A. Vallance, London, 1897. 

H. H. Richardson: H. R. Hitchcock, New York, 1936. 

Norman Shaw: Sir Reginald Blomfield, London, 1940. 

N. Pevsner, The Architectural Review, vol. 89,1941. 

P. Webb: W. R. Lethaby, London, 1935. 

F. L. Wright : H. R. Hitchcock, In the Nature of Materials, New York, 
1942. 


222 



APPENDIX 2 


Some Technical Terms Explained' 

Only less familiar architectural terms are included, and only those which 
have not already been explained in the places where they first occurred 
in the text. Note.—Bracketed references refer to drawings illustrating 
technical terms in this appendix. 


Ambulatory: Aisle round an apse or a circular building. 

Arcade: Group of arches on columns or pillars. 

Architrave: Bottom member of an entablature (C.3). 

Attic: Low story above main cornice. 

Basilica: Church with aisles and a nave higher than the aisles. 

Bay: Vertical unit of a wall or facade; also compartments into which a 
nave is divided. 

Caryatid: Sculptured figure used as a support. 

Clerestory: Upper part of church nave with windows above the roofs of 
the aisles. 

Cornice: Projecting top portion of an entablature or any projecting top 
course of a budding (A.3 and C.4). 

Cross: Cf. Greek cross. 

Cross Rib: (E.i). 

Drum: Circular or polygonal structure on which a dome is raised (B.i). 

Entablature: The horizontal top part of an order of classical architecture. 
It is supported by columns and consists of architrave, frieze and 
cornice (C.5). 

Greek Cross: Cross with all four arms of equal length. 

J amb : Vertical part of the masonry of a door or window (D.i). 

Lantern: Small open or glazed structure crowning a dome or a roof (B.2). 

Lieme: A decorative rib in a Gothic vault which does not spring from the 
wall and does not touch the central boss (E.5). 

Metope: Panel filling the space between triglyphs (C. 1). See Triglyph. 

Mullion: Vertical division of a window. 

Narthex: Porch in front of the nave and aisles of a mediaeval church. 


Ogee Arch: (D). 

Pediment: Triangular or segmental upright front end of a roof of moder¬ 
ate pitch (A.i). 

Plinth: Projecting base of a budding or a column. 

Quoins: Corner stones at the angle of a budding (A.2). 

Ridge Rib: (E.3). 

Rustication: Wad treatment with large freestone blocks, either smooth 
with recessed joints, or with a rough, rock-like surface and recessed 


joints. 

Solar: Chamber on an upper floor. 


I.A.— 16 


223 



SOME TECHNICAL TERMS EXPLAINED 

Spandrel: Space between the curve of an arch; the vertical drawn from 
its springing and the horizontal drawn from its apex (C.6). 

String-course: Projecting horizontal band along the wall of a building 

(A 4 ). 

Tierceron: Rib inserted in a Gothic vault between the transverse and 
diagonal ribs (E.4). 

Transom: Horizontal division of a window. 

Transverse Rib: (E.2). 

Triforium: Wall passage between the arcade of a church nave and the 
clerestory, or between the gallery and the clerestory. It opens in 
arcades towards the nave. The arcading can also be blind, with no 
wall-passage behind. Some writers call the gallery a triforium. 

Triglyph: Vertical grooved member of the Doric frieze (C.2). 

Voussoir: A wedge-shaped block forming part of the arch of a door or 
window (D.2). 



A.—QUEEN ANNE HOUSE. 

3. Comice. 

4. String-course. 


1. Pediment. 

2. Quoins. 






C,—CLASSICAL DETAILS. 

4. Cornice. 

5. Entablature 

6 . SpandteL 


Metope. • 
Triglypb. 
AtcMtmve 














5 


E.-GOTHIC VAULT. 

1. Diagonal Rib. 

2. Ridge Rib. 

3. Transverse Arch. 


4. Tiercerons. 

5. Licmes. 


226 



APPENDIX 3 


A Comparison 

BETWEEN THIS EDITION AND THE TWO 
PENGUIN EDITIONS OF 1943 AND 1945 


T HE first edition of this book, published by Penguin Books in 1942, 
was by at least one-third shorter than this third edition. For readers 
fomiW with the first or the enlarged second Penguin edition it may 

be useful to have a list of the chief additions. _ , , ... 

The most serious omission in the original text was Spain. I had decided, 
after much hesitation, to leave it out, partly for lack of space, and partly 
because I have never travelled in Spain. Then, however, Geoffrey Webb 
in his very generous review in The Architectural Review brought forward 
such incontrovertible reasons for giving Spain her due, even m die smallest 
of histories of architecture, that I changed my mind and said what little I 
could on the Visigothic-‘Carolingian” style, the Late Gothic of the 15th 
century, the Plateresque and the 18th-century Baroque. All these expres¬ 
sions'of the Spanish character in architecture may, from the European 
point of view, not be as central as events in France and Italy, but they are 
not more marginal than, say, the Elizabethan style in England or the 


Rococo in Germany. .. . , ,_ 

As for other additions, pages 24 to 26 have a htde more on the schools 
of French Romanesque than there had been. From pages 56 to 66 nearly 
all is new, a somewhat more comprehensive analysis of Decorated and 
Perpendicular in England, the Late Gothic of the Friars and of Spam and 
the “Sondergotik” of Germany. Pages 103 to about 105 contain a far too 
brief account of Mannerism in Italian architecture; pages 142 to 145, anote 
on the development of staircases in the 16th and 17th centuries. On pages 
iss to 157 some new matter, though not enough, will be found on the 
Elizabethan and Jacobean styles. Pages 188 to 190 are given to some 
hints on the landscape garden, one of the greatest English contributions 
to Western architecture, and one treated quite inadequately in the first 
edition. Finally, on pages 188 to 198 comment on the Classical and the 
early Gothic Revival is amplified, and some lines of appreciation inserted 
on-the genius of John Soane and Friedrich Gilly. 

So much for the differences between the editions of 1943 and 1945- 
Now for this present edition still more minor gaps were filled in. There 
are a few fines new on pages 1 and 2 on Roman architecture, and a few on 
pages 4 and 5 on the origin of the Christian basilica and on Constantmian 
basilicas. On pages 7 and 8 a Htde more is said on Anglo-Saxon and 
Merovingian churches, and on pages 10 and n alitde more on Carolingian 
architecture, especially Centula. The treatment of die Romanesque style 
has scarcely been altered. Minor additions will be found regarding ear y 
tunnel-vaults (page 20), two-tower facades (page 24), the characteristics 


227 



A COMPARISON 


of French pilgrimage churches (page 24), the school of Cologne (page 
27) and relations forward and backward between Rhineland and 
Lombardy (page 27). 

In the chapter on Early and High Gothic the wonderfully logical de¬ 
velopment from St. Denis to Chartres, Rheims and Amiens via Sens, 
Noyon, Laon and Paris is described in words and drawings on pages 39 
to 46. 

Regarding the Italian Renaissance, pages 82 and 83 have a paragraph 
or two on late Brunelleschi and Michelozzo, followed by several pages on 
the evolution of central planning through the 15th century, with due stress 
on Filarete and Milan. Then apropos Alberti a little is put in on page 88 
about the Palazzo Venezia and the Palace of Urbino and about such 
combinations of longitudinal with central conceptions as Faenza. Bra- 
mante’s early work in Milan has also received a little more attention 
(page 95). For Italian Mannerism I have largely taken over, by kind 
permission of Messrs. Routledge, what I had written in the first volume 
of The Mint. The Italian Baroque could stay as it was, except for some 
paragraphs withrdrawings on oval and kindred plans (pages 124 and 125). 

Coming now to France and England since the Renaissance, pages 152 
and 153 contain something on theoretical books of the 16th century, and 
pages 162 to 165 a good deal on Paris buildings between 1600 and 1660, 
Levau and Antoine Lepautre for instance. On page 176 some comment 
can be read on the coming and characteristics of the Rococo in France. 
After that there are only two more additions worth mentioning: a page 
or so on the historical revivals after 1830 in England and on the Con¬ 
tinent (pages 202 to 205), and half a page on the two great contemporaries 
of Morris and Norman Shaw, on H. H. Richardson and Philip Webb 
(pages 207 to 209). 

N. P. 


228 



Plates 
















MSI 























IV (top). R A VENN A } S. VITALE, COMPLETED IN 547. 




















VIII. 


earl’s BARTON, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE, IOTH OR EARLY IITH CENTURY. 







IX (top). CASTLE HEDINGHAM, ESSEX, I 2TH CENTURY. 
WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL, NORTH TRANSEPT, C. I080-9O. 


X. 


















XI. 

































xna (top), jumieges, abbey church, begun c. 1040. 

xilb. TOULOUSE, ST. SERNIN, THE NAVE, EARLY I2TH CENTURY. 














CHURCH, FROM THE EAST, ACCORDING TO PROFESSOR CONANt’S RECONSTRUCTION 
LATE IITH TO EARLY I2TH CENTURY. 

















mwmMMwmmmmmmmmrn 


















































































XXI. WORMS CATHEDRAL, C. II75-I25O. 





























XXII. MILAN, S. AMBROGIO, PROBABLY SECOND QUARTER OF THE I2TH CENTURY. 

XXIII. FLORENCE, S. MINIATO AL MONTE; GROUND FLOOR SECOND HALF OF THE IITH CENTURY, UPPER 

PARTS LATER. 































XXIV. ST. DENIS, CHOIR AMBULATORY, 11 40-44 (THE PIER ON THE RIGHT IS OF C, 1235). 
XXV. LAON CATHEDRAL, NAVE, LAST QUARTER OF THE I 2 TH CENTURY. 



















































XXVI. PARIS, NOTRE DAME, NAVE, DESIGNED C. 1185. THE EAST BAY SHOWS A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE 

ORIGINAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE WINDOWS. 





























































XXVII. 


AMIENS CATHEDRAL, NAVE, BEGUN IN 1220 . 


























XXVIII. RHEIMS CATHEDRAL, THE WEST FRONT, BEGUN C. 1225 . 
































RHEIMS CATHEDRAL, FROM THE NORTH, BEGUN IN 1211 ; CHOIR, TRANSEPTS AND NAVE I3TH CENTURY. 

TOWERS I5TH CENTURY. 

XXX. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, FROM THE NORTH, CHIEFLY 1192-1280. 











XXXia (top). LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, THE CHOIR, BEGUN IN 11 92, 
XXXlb. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, THE NAVE, ROOFED IN 123 3. 






























XXXII. LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, THE ANGEL CHOIR, BEGUN 























































































XXXV. BRISTOL CATHEDRAL, CHOIR AISLE, 129 8 - 1 3 3 2 . 



















































XXXVI. ELY CATHEDRAL, FROM THE LADY CHAPEL, I32I-49. 



















































XLII (TOP). CAMBRIDGE, KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL, BEGUN 1446, MAINLY EARLY l6 T H CENT! 
XLHI. VALLADOLID, ST. PAUL’S, <■. I490-I5IJ. DESIGNED BY SIMON DE COLONIA. 























XLIV. NUREMBURG, ST. LAWRENCE, CHOIR, I445-72 (SEVERELY DAMAGED IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR). 

STRASSBURG CATHEDRAL, PORTAL OF ST. LAWRENCE. BY JAKOB OF LANDSHUT, 1495 * 


XLV. 





















XT VTT 













XLVIII. FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI : FOUNDLING HOSPITAL, FLORENCE, BEGUN 1419. 
rx LUCIANO LAURANA (?) : COURTYARD OF THE DUCAL PALACE, URBINO, C. I47°~75 















LEONE BATTISTA ALBERTI : S. FRANCESCO, RIMINI, BEGUN 1446. 

























LI I (ABOVE). RAPHAEL : PALAZZO VIDONI CAPTARELLI, ROMI-, C. 1515-20. 






















































LIII. DONATO BRAMANTE : THE TEMPIETTO OF S. PIETRO IN MONTORIO, ROME, I5O2, 












LIV. ANTONIO DA SAN GALLO : PALAZZO FARNESE, ROME, I53C-46. THE TOP FLOOR BY MICHELANGELO. 
LV. BALDASSARE PERUZZI : PALAZZO MASSIMI ALLE COLONNE, ROME, BEGUN 153 5. 













































































LVIII. ANDREA PALLADIO : VILLA ROTONDA, OUTSIDE VICENZA, BEGUN C. 15 67. 







































LX. GIORGIO VASARI : THE UFFIZI PALACE, FLORENCE, BEGUN IN 1570. 
LXI. GIACOMO VIGNOLA : CHURCH OF THE GESU, ROME, BEGUN IN I 5 68. 












































LXII. MICHELANGELO : THE DOME OF ST. PETER’S IN ROME, DESIGNED I 5 5 8-60, COMPLETED BY GIACOMO DELLA 

PORTA 1588-90. 














LXI 1 I. 


ST. PETERS IN ROME, WITH THE FRONT AND NAVE BY CARLO MADERNA, 1607 -C. 1615, AND THE 
COLONNADES BY BERNINI, BEGUN IN 1 656. THE VATICAN PALACE APPEARS ON THE RIGHT. 







LXIV (TOP). FRANCESCO BORROMINI : S. CARLO ALLE QUATTRO FONTANE, ROME, BEGUN IN 1633. 
LXV. FRANCESCO BORROMINI : S. CaRLO ALLE QUATTRO FONTANE, ROME, THE FRONT, BEGUN IN 1667. 
























LXVr. PIETRO DA CORTONA : S. MARIA DELLA PACE, ROME, BEGUN IN 165 6. 






















LXVII (top). GIANLORENZO BERNINI : THE SCALA REGIA IN THE VATICAN PALACE, ROME, C. 1660-70. 
LXVIII. GIANLORENZO BERNINI : ALTAR OF ST. TERESA AT S. MARIA DELLA VITTORIA, ROME, 1646. 





































LXIX (top). NARCISO TOM£ : THE TRASPARENTE IN TOLEDO CATHEDRAL, COMPLETED IN 1732. 

LUIS DE AREVALO AND P. MANUEL VASQUE2 : SACRISTY OF THE CHARTERHOUSE (CARTUTA), GRANADA 

I727-64- 
















LXXI. COSMAS DAMIAN AND EGID QUIRIN ASAM : ST. JOHN NEPOMUK, MUNICH, I73O -C. 1750. 






















LXXII# JOHANN BALTHASAR NEUMANN : VIERZEHNHEILIGEN, 1743-72. 



















LXXIII (TOP). JAKOB PRANDTAUER : THE MONASTERY OF MELK ON THE DANUBE, 1702-36. 

LXXIV. MATTHAUS DANIEL POPPLEMANN : THE ZWINGKR AT DRESDEN, I709-I9 (BADLY DAMAGED IN THE 

SECOND WORLD WAR). 
























LXXV. JOHANN BALTHASAR NEUMANN : STAIRCASE IN THE ELECTORAL PALACE AT BRUCHSAL, DESIGNED 1730. 

GROUND FLOOR. 














LXXVia (TOP). JOHANN BALTHASAR NEUMANN : STAIRCASE IN THE ELECTORAL PALACE AT BRUCHSAL, 
DESIGNED I730. HALF-WAY BETWEEN GROUND FLOOR AND UPPER FLOOR. 

LXXVlb. JOHANN BALTHASAR NEUMANN : STAIRCASE IN THE ELECTORAL PALACE AT BRUCHSAL, DESIGNED 

I73O. A LITTLE HIGHER UP THAN LXXVia. 











LXXVII. JOHANN MICHAEL FEICHTMAYR : STUCCO CARTOUCHE, BRUCHSAL, 1752 




















LXXIX. BLOIS : THE CASTLE, WING OF FRANCIS I, 1515—^. I525. 

















LXXX. PIERRE LESCOT: SOUTH-WEST PAVILION IN THE LOUVRE COURTYARD, PARIS, 1546. 




























































LXXXI. BURGHLEY HOUSE, NORTHANTS, CENTRE PAVILION IN THE COURTYARD, I 5 85. 

































LXXXXI. 


Lxxxrix. 


LONGLEAT, WILTSHIRE, BEGUN IN 1 567. 

INIGO JONES : QUEEN’S HOUSE, GREENWICH, BEGUN IN l6l6. 



























































LXXXVI. CLAUDE PERRAULT THE LOUVRE, PARIS, EAST FRONT, BEGUN IN 1665. 














LXXXVII. JULES HARDOUIN-MANSART : ST. LOUIS DES INVALIDES, PARIS, I 675 —1706. 





III. SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN : ST. PAUL’S CATHEDR 






LXXXIX. SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN : ST. STEPHENS, WALBROOK, LONDON, 1 672-78. 

























XCII. SIR JOHN VANBRUGH : BLENHEIM PALACE, GATE PAVILION OF THE KITCHEN WING, 1708— 09. 


















XCIII. BLENHEIM PALACE FROM THE AIR. THE GROUNDS LAID OUT BY LANCELOT BROWN. 




XCIV. JOHN WOOD THE ELDER : PRIOR PARK, NEAR BATH, BEGUN IN 1735 
XCV. JOHN WOOD THE YOUNGER : ROYAL CRESCENT, BATH, BEGUN IN 1 76' 













XCVI. ROBERT ADAM : KENWOOD, NEAR LONDON, THE LIBRARY, 1 767-69. 


























XCVII. ROBERT ADAM : SYON HOUSE, NEAR LONDON, THE ENTRANCE SCREEN, 1 773. 







XCVIII. SIR JOHN SOANE : DESIGN FOR THE ARCHITECT’S OWN HOUSE, LINCOLN^ INN FIELDS, LONDON, l8l 
XCIX. FRIEDRICH GILLY : PLAN FOR A NATIONAL THEATRE, BERLIN, 1 798. 



















































CIV. WALTER GROPIUS : MODEL FACTORY 


Ar THE ‘WERKBUND ” EXHIBITION, COLOGNE, 1914. 








INDEX 


Aachen, Charlemagne’s Palace Chapel at, 
9-xo, pi. v r 

Abbate, Niccolo dell’, 105 
Abelard* 20 

Adam Robert, 187, 190-1, 193, I99 
pis. xcvr, xcvn 
Addison, Joseph, 185 
Aegina, 191 
Aethelwold, 18 
Aix-la-Chapelle, see Aachen 
Albert the Great, 47 
Albert, Prince, 212 

Alberti, Leone Battista, 86—94) 116, 117 i<o 

figS. 50, 51, pis. L, LI * 

Albi Cathedral, 60, 63 
Alcuin, 8 
Alexander VI, 94 
Alhambra, 105, 133 
Allen, Ralph, 184 
Alsace, 27 

America, 200, 205, 207, 2x0-11 
Amiens Cathedral, 33, 39, 42, 43-6, 52, 59 
3 i» pi. xxvn 

Ammanati, Bartolommeo, 111, fio-. <0 
Anet, 151 5 ’ 

Angouleme Cathedral, 26, pi. xv 
Annaberg, 62 

Antwerp Town Hall, 152, 155, fig. 80 
Apollo Belvedere, 191 
Aquitaine, School of, 24, 26 ' 

Aretino, Pietro, 101 
Arevalo, Luis de, 133 
Arles, 24 

Arnolfo di Cambio, pi. xivi 
Art Nouveau, 210 
Arts and Crafts Movement, 208-9 
Asam Brothers, Cosmas Damian aud Egid 
Quinn, 133-6, pi. ixxi 
Ashbee, C. R., 210 
Asia Minor, 3 
Asturias, 13 
Athanasius, St., 3 
Athens, general, 191, 202 
Erechtheum, 200 
Parthenon, 1,55,191, pi. 1 
Audley End, 157,177 
Augsburg Town Hall, 160 
Augustine, St., 3 
Augustus the Strong, 140 
Autun, St. Lazare, 28, pi. xvm 
Auvergne, School of, 24-5, 32 
Avignon, 77 

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 136 
Bamberg Cathedral, 50 
Banos, S. Juan de, 13, fig. 9 
Barry, Sir Charles, 202, 204, pis. cr, cn 
Bartholomseus Anglicus, 47 
Basil, St., 3 
Batalha, 74 
Bath, Circus, 186 
Prior Park, 147, 184, 186, pi. xov 


> Bath, (cottL) 

Queen Square, 186 

Royal Crescent, 159, 186, 199, pi. xcv 
Baudot, Anatole de, 2x1 
Bavaria, 27, 61 
Beaumaris Castle, 54, 68 
Beauvais Cathedral, 39, 42, 46, 55 
Becket, St. Thomas, 20 
Beckford, William, 193-4 
Bede, the Venerable, 7, 14 
Behrens, Peter, 211 
Benedict XIV, 121 
Benno of Osnabriick, x8 
Berlin, Old Museum, 200, fig. 97 
National Monument to Frederick the 
Great, 196 

National Theatre, 196, pi. xcix 
Bernard of Clairvaux, 19, 22, 51 
Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 100, 121, 123-4, 126 
128-31, 135, 167, 181, figs. 63, 66, 69’ 
pis. ixm, ixvn, Lxvm 
Bemward of Hildesheim, 17 
Bertoldo, 108 

Bexley Heath, Red House, 208 
Birmingham Law Courts, 212 
Black Death, 66 
Blaise Castle, 199 

Blenheim, 180-3,190, fig. 94, pis. xci, xcn, 
xcm 

Blois, Francis I wing, 143, 150, pi ixxxx 
Orleans wing, 161-2, 179, pi, ixxxxv 
Blum, Hans, 152 
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 78 
Bodley, G. F., 204 
Boffiy, Guillermo, 64, fig. 37 
Bof&and, Germain, 176, pi. xc 
Boileau, Nicolas, 167, 185 
Bologna, 94, 104 
Bonaventura, St., 47 
Borgia, Cesare, 94 
Borromeo, St. Charles, 113 
Borromini, Francesco, 121, 123-6,129, 141, 
fig. 67, pis. LXIV, LXV 
Bournville, 212 * 

Bradford-on-Avon, 14, 52, fig. 10 
Bramante, Donato, 95-100, 103, 108, 112, 
114, 129,143,151, fig. 56, pi. nn 
Bridges, suspension, 206 
Brighton Pavilion, 199 
Bristol Cathedral, 58, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66, 
pL xxxv 

Clifton Bridge, 206 
St. Mary Redcliffe, 71 
Brixworth, 8 
Bronzino, Angelo, 101 
Brooks, James, 204 
Brosse, Salomon de, 160 
Brown, “Capability”, 190, pL xcm 
Bruchsal, Bishop’s Palace, 141, 142, 145-6, 
147 ) i?d, fig. 76,. pis. ixxv, Lxxvxa 
and b 
Bruges, 77 


E.A.—22 



INDEX 


Brunei, I. K., 206 

Brunelleschi, Filippo, 79, 80-2, 86, 96, 99, 
108, 112, 115, figs. 42, 43, 44, pis. 
XLVU, XLVm 
Bruni, Leonardo, 78 
Brussels, Law Courts, 205 
Bullant, Jean, 151, 152, 157, 165 
Buonarroti, see Michelangelo 
Burghley, Lord, 156 
Burgos Cathedral, 63, 75 
Burgundy, School of, 24-5, 31 
Burlington, Lord, 18, 183-4, 190 
Buttresses, flying, 32 
Byzantium, 6 


Chicago, general, 210 
Home Insurance Company, 210 
Marquette Building, 210 
Chinoiserie, 192 
Chippendale, Thomas, 192 
Chipping Campden, 62 
Chiswick, see London 
Churriguera, Jos6 de, 133 
Cistercians, 51,60-1,75, figs. 22,23 
Classicism, 103-5 

Clermont Ferrand, Notre Dame, 15 (foot¬ 
note) 

Clifton Bridge, see Bristol 
Clovis, 7 


Cadbury, 212 

Caen, Holy Trinity and St. Stephen's, 19, 
24, 40 

Cambrai Cathedral, fig. 22 
Cambridge, King’s College Chapel, 69-70, 
73, 148, 150, pis. xxh, ixxvm 
Pembroke College Chapel, 166 
Campbell, Colin, 183 
Campen, Jacob van, 165, pi, ixxxv 
Canigou, St. Martin de, 20 
Canterbury Cathedral, 22, 34-5, 51, 52, 67, 
75. fig* 15 

Capitals, block, figs. 14, 15 
carved, Anglo-Norman, 19, 22 
France, 28, figs. 18, 19 
crocket, English, 55 
French, 55, fig, 20 
fluted, fig. 17 

Capra, Villa, see Vicenza, Villa Rotonda 

Capua Gate, 75 

Capuchins, the, 113 

Carlone, Michele, 143 

Casanova, Giacomo, 136 

Caserta, 140 

Castel del Monte, 54, 75 
Castiglione, Count Baldassare, 83, 87, 112 
Castle Hedingham, Essex, pi. ix 
Castle Howard, 181 
Castles, 53-4 
Catalonia, 63, 69 
Cecil, William, 156 
Cellini, Benvenuto, 104 
Centrally planned churches: Byzantium, 6; 
France, 26-7; Italy, 6, 26-7, 81-3 85’ 
86, 92-3, 96 
Century Guild, 210 
Chambers, Sir William, 191, 193 
Chambord, 143, 160 
Chapter-houses, 54 
Charlemagne, 8 
Charles I (of England), 161 
Charles II, 161, 166 
Charles V (Emperor), 105, 113 
Charles VIII (of France), 147-8 
Charleval, 161, 165 

Chartres Cathedral. 24, 39, 40, 42, 4 6, jo, 
fig. 29 

Chateaubriand, F. R„ 202 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 70 
Chesterfield, Lord, 184 


v WJU1L..UI,, X3, .44, OO 

Cluny Abbey, 15-16,21,24-5, 41,51, fig. 12 
pi. xm 0 

Cola da Caprarola, in 
Colbert, J. B., 165, 167, 168, 175 
Coleshill, Berks, 177 
Cologne Cathedral, 75, 204 
Holy Apostles, pi. xx 
St. Mary in Capitol, 27 
School of, 27 

Colwall, near Malvern, 209, fig. 99 
Como, S. Fedele, 27 
Conques, St. Faith, 24, 25 
Constantine, 2, 3, 6, 129 
Constantinople, 2, 6 
Cordova, 13 
Cornaro family, 130 
Corneille, Pierre, 161, 167 
Correggio, A. A. da, no 
Cothay Manor, Somerset, 68, fig. 3 8 
Courtonne, Jean, 176, fig. 92 
Coventry, St. Michael’s, 72, pi. xl 
Crak des Chevaliers, 53 
Cromwell, 50 
Cronkhill, Shropshire, 199 
Crusades, 25, 50, 53 

Damiani, St. Peter, 49 
Decker, Paul, 193, fig. 95 
Defoe, Daniel, 183 

Delorme, Philibert, 151, 152, 157, 161 
Descartes, Ren6, 161 
Diocletian, 2, 3,191 
Disraeli, Benjamin, 205 
Dominicans, 50, 60-1, 75 
Dresden, general, 204 
Opera, 204 

Zwinger, 140-1, pi. ixxiv 
Dryden, John, 183 

Ducerceau, Jacques Androuet, 152, 161. 16s 

Dughet, Gaspard, 189 

Dulwich, see London 

Duns Scotus, 56 

Durer, 147-8 

Durham Cathedral, 19, 20-2, 32, 42, 46 

^ ? L 2X1 # 

Dutch East Indies, 74 

Earl’s Barton, 14, 66, 73, pi. vm 
Ecouen, 151, 165 
Eddius, 8 


232 



INDEX 


Edinburgh, 186 
Edward I, 53 
Edward in, 69 

Egas, Enrique de, 143, fig. 75 
Egypt, 3 

Eltham, see London 

Erfurt 3 ^^ 1,19 ’ 58_9 ’ 6l - 65 ’ ™ 

Etruria (Stoke-on-Trent), 191 
Exeter Cathedral, 70 

Faenza Cathedral, 93 : 

Feichtmayr, Johann Michael, 145-6 D 1 

1XXVH ^ 

Ferrara, 93 

Filarete, Antonio, 85, 86, 96, figs. 47 and 48 
Florence, Cathedral, 75, 77, 79> g 0> g 3> p j_ 

city of, 77, 78, 113 

Foundling Hospital, 79, 88, pi. xlvei 
^ urenzmna Library, 109-10, 148, pi. ux 
Medici Chapel, 108,148 * 

Medici Palace, 88, 90, fie. 4.0 
Pitti Palace, 88, 160 

Rucellai Palace, 88, 90, 92, 93, 94, p L m 
SS. Annunaata—Michelozzo’s Rotunda 

83, 85, fig. 45 

5. Croce, 75, 77 
S. Lorenzo, 108 

S. Maria degH Angeli, 82, 96,99, figs. 43, 

44 

S, Maria Novella, 75, 77, 84, 88 
S. Miniato al Monte, 28, 77, 80, pi xxm 

St XLVu mt0 * 8 °~ 3 ’ 88 ’ 92s 9<5> 4 2 ’ P 1 * 

Strozzi Palace, 88 
Uffizi Palace, no-ir, pi. i.v 
Floris, Cornells, 152, 155, fig. 80 
Fontainebleau, School of, 105, 

Fonthill Abbey, 193-4 
Fouquet, Jean, 162 
Francis I (of France), 150 

Francis de Sales, 121 
Francis of Assisi, 50 
Franciscans, the, 50, 60-1, 75 
Frederick II (Emperor), 54, 75 
Friars* churches, 60-1 
Fulda Abbey, 10-11, fig. 7 

Gainsborough, Thomas, 199 
Garden suburbs, 212 
Gamier, Charles, 205, pi. cm ‘ 

Gamier, Tony, 211 
Gartner, Friedrich, 204 
Gau, F. C., 204 
Gaunt, see John of Gaunt 
Genoa, 121,143,177 
Gerona Cathedral, 63-5, fig. 37 
Gervase, 35 
Ghent, 77 

Gilly, Friedrich, 194,196,198, 200, pi. xcix 
Giotto, 78, 8(5 
Girtin, Thomas, 198 


! Si 11 ? 0 Roi »ano, 101, 104, ice no »1 tvt 
G ladstone, William, 205 ’ P 

Glasgow University, 212 ' 

Gloucester Cathedral, 67, 73, pi. xxxvh 
Cloisters, 70, 81, pi. xxxvm 
Cnostacs, 3 
Goethe, 194 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 190 
Gonzaga, 85 
Gothic Revival, 189 
Gothic Rococo, 193 
Granada, Alhambra, 105, 133 * 

Charterhouse vestry. 74,133, p l. lxx 
Greco, El, ioi 
G reek Revival, 191-2 
Greenwich Hospital, 180, 205 
Queen’s House, i 57> 158-9, p I. lxxxnr 
Gregory of Tours, 7, 8 
Gresham, Sir Thomas, 155 
Greuze, J.-B„ 199 
Gropius, Walter, 21 r, pl. civ 
Guarini, Guarino, 120 
Gulielmus Durandus, 48 

Hagley, 192 

Hague, Mauritshuis, 165, 179, pl. lxxxv 
H am, 179 
Hamburg, 204 

Hampton Court, 150-1, fig. 78 
Hanseatic League, 6i, 68, 71 
Hardouin-Mansart, Jules, lyo-i, 175-6, fins. 

86, 89, pl. lxxxvh 
H ardwick Hall, 157 
Harlech Castle, 54, 68, fig. 34 * 

Hatfield House, 156, 157, 177 
Haussmann, Baron, 212-13 
Henry II (of England), 20 
Henry II (of France), 152 
Henry III (of England), 53, 69 

Henry IV (of France), 16S 

Henry IV (Emperor), 24 
Henry VI (of England), 69 
Henry VII (of England), 69,148 
Henry Vm (of England), 50, 69,148,150 
Herland, Hugh, 72 
Herrera, Francisco de, 143 
Hexham, 8, 11 
Hildesheim Cathedral, 24, 27 
St. Michael’s, 17-18, 23, 27, figs, 13, 14, 

16 

Historicism, 198-9 

Holabird and Roche, 210 

Holden, Charles, 214, fig. 100 

Holkham Hall, 147 

Holl, Elias, 105,160 

Honnecourt, see Villard de Honnecourt 

Hontanon, Juan Gil de, 63, fig. 36 

Horseshoe arches, 12 

Hull, Holy Trinity, 72 

Hundred Years’ War, 69 

Hurle, William de, 59 

Huygens, Constantin,! 5 > 


233 


He de France, School of, 39, 95 
Ingelheim, Charlemagne’s Palace, 8-9* fig. 6 



INDEX 


Inquisition, 113 

Jakob of Landshut, 73, pi. xlv 
Jarrow, 8 

Jenney, William Le Baron, 210 
Jerome, St., 3 

Jesuits, the, 113, n<5, 117-18, 121 
John of Gaunt, 67 

Jones, Inigo, 157-60, 161, 165, 175, 183, pi, 
Lxxxm 

Joseph, Father, 16S 
Judseism, 3 
Julius II, 93-4, 108 
Julius III, in 
Jumi&ges, 19, 24, pi. xna 
Justinian, 6 
Juvara, Filippo, 120 

Karlsruhe, 173 
Keeps, Norman, 19 
Kenilworth, 67 
Kent, William, 183, 184, 189 
Kenwood, see London 
Kew, see London 

King’s Lynn, St. Nicholas, 72, fig. 39 
Klenze, Leo von, 204 
Klosterneuburg, 139 

Laach, 27 

Labrouste, Henri, 206 
Lacalahorra, Castle of, 143 
Landscape gardening, 184-6, 189, 192-3 
Landshut Jakob of, see Jakob of Landshut 
Laocoon, 191 

Laon Cathedral, 3 8-9, 40, 46, figs. 20,25, pi. 

xxv r 

Laurana, Luciano, 85, 95, pi. xxix 
Lausanne, 38 
Lavenham, 71 
Leasowes, 189 

Le Baron Jenney, William, 210 
Lebrun, Charles, 162 
Le Corbusier, 211 

Ledoux, Claude Nicolas, 196, fig. 96 
Leghorn, 160 
Leibniz, G. W. von, 135 
Leiden, Rhineland County Hall, 155, fig. 
81 

Lemercier, Jacques, 161,162, fig. 82 

L’Enfant, Pierre, 173 

Le Notre, Andre, 162, 173, 184, fig. 89 

Leo X, 99 

Le6n, 75 5 , 

Leonardo da Vinci, 78-9, 84, 87, 95-6 07 
XI2,. 150, figs. 54, 55 
Leom, Giacomo, 183 
Lepautre, Antoine, 162,175, 176 
Le Puy, 24 
Le Roi, 191 

r e ^ 0 u’ Pi Sfu 150 ’ W w. 167, pi. IXXX 

Lethaby, W. R., 209 

Levau, Louis, 124, 161, 162, 167, 175, 177, 
figs. 83, 84, 85, 90 77 

Lever Bros., 212 
Limoges, St. Martial, 25 


’ Lincoln Cathedral, 50, 51, 52-3, pis. xxx 
xxxia and b 

A* 1 #^ Choir, 56, 66, 69, pi. xxxn 
Loire School, 150, 155 
Lombard masons, 27 
Lombardy, 28, 95 
London, 175 
Adelphi, 187 

All Saints, Margaret St., 204 
Amos Grove, 214, fig. 100 
Ashburnham House, 177 
Bank of England, 195 
Banqueting House, Whitehall, 157 
Bedford Park, 212, fig. 98 
British Museum, 200, 202-3, pi. c 
Chiswick Villa, 18,184, 189 
County Hall, 212 
Covent Garden, 159 
St. Paul’s, 160 
Crystal Palace, 206 
Dulwich Gallery, 195 
Eltham Lodge, 179 
Euston Station, 213 

Fenton House, Hampstead, 179, fig. 93 
Finsbury Square, 187 
Fitzroy Square, 187 
Hampstead, 179 

Houses of Parliament, 202-3, pi. ci 
Kenwood, 147, 190, pi. xcvi 
Kew Gardens, 161, 193 
King’s Cross Station, 213 
13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 195, pi. xcvm 
Lindsay House, 159 
Pentonville Prison, 203 
Red House, Bexley Heath, 208 
Reform Club, 204 
Regent’s Park, 159, 199 
Regent St., 199 
Roehampton, 179 
Royal Exchange, 203 
Royal Society, 166 
St. Alban’s, Holborn, 204 
St. Augustine’s, Kilburn, 204 
St. John’s, Red Lion Square, 204 
St. Pancras Station, 213 
St. Paul’s Cathedral, 166, 170-3, fig. 87 
pi. Lxxxvni ’ * 

Covent Garden, 160 
St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, 69 
Walbrook, 171, fig. 88, pi. ixxxix 
Selfridge s, 205 
Syon House, 190, pi. xcvn 
Soane Museum, see 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields 
Somerset House, 203 
Tower of London, 53 
Travellers* Club, 204 
Twickenham, Pope’s Villa, 185-6,192,, 199 
Underground stations, 213-14 
Vanbrugh’s house, Blackheath, 189 
Westminster Abbey, 50, 69 
Henry VII Chapel, 69, 148 
Henry VII Tomb, 148, fig. 77 
Westminster Hall, 70, 72 
Whitehall Palace, 85, 161 
Wren’s plan, 173 


^34 



INDEX 


Longhena, Baldassarc, 177 
Longleat, 157, pl. Lxxxn 
Lorraine, Claude, 189 
Louis DC (St. Louis), 50 
Louis XII, 148 
Louis XIV, 123, 167 
Loyola, St. Ignatius, 113 
•Lunghi, Martino, 126, fig. 68 
Lutlier, Martin, 62 
Lyons, 77 

Machiavelli, Niccolo, 83 
Machuca, Pedro, 105 
McKim, Mead and White, 205 
Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 210 
Mackmurdo, Arthur H., 2x0 

fc a «, Ca f 0 ' 114 12I ~ 2 > I2 3. 145, 

. hg. 63, pl. Lxm 

Maisons-Lafitte, 161, 162 
Majeul, Abbot, 15, 16 
Major, Thomas, 191 
Malatesta, Sigismondo, 87 
Manchester Town Hall, 212 
Manichafism, 3 
Manor-houses, 67-8 

W rT r h Fr f fois ’ l6 °- 1<Sl - 2 -179, pl. ixxxiv 
Jules Hardoiun-, see Hardouin-Mansart 
Mantua, Cathedral, no 
Duke of, 104 

Giulio Romano’s House, 104, pl. lyx 
Palazzo del Te, 104 ^ 

S. Andrea, 92, 93,116-17, fig. 50 
o. Sebastiano, 92, 95, fig. 51 
Manuel of Portugal, 74 
Marcus Aurelius, 2 
Marie Antoinette, 199 
Marlborough, Duke of, 180 
Master-masons, 33, 70 
Matsys, Quentin, 148 
May, Hugh, 179 
Mazarin, 161, 167-8 
Mazzini, Giulio, 148 
Medici, the, 68, 77, 78, 86 
Cosimo, 77, 78 
Giuliano de, 113 

Lorenzo the Magnificent, 77, 83-4, 108 
Maria de, 160 

Meissonier, Juste-Aurele, 146, 176 
Meledo, Villa Trissino, 106, fig. 58 
Melk, 139-40, pl. Lxxm 
Merchant Taylors’ Guild, 69 
Mexico, 133 

/Michelangelo, 78, 86, 93, 95, 101, 106-10, 
X12, 113-16, 120, I2j, 129, 148, 170, 

1 81, fig. 60, pis. LXX, LXH 
Michelozzo, 83, 86, 88, figs. 45, 49 
Milan, general, 3, 77, 96 
Medici Bank, 86 

Ospedale Maggiore, 85, 86, fig. 47 
S. Ambrogio, 21, 28, pl. xxn 
S. Eustorgio, 86 

S. Satiro, Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, 
86,95 

Sforza Chapel, 85, fig. 46 
Mithraism, 3 


! Modena Cathedral, 28 
Moissac, 24 
Moliere, 168 
Monkwearmouth, 8 
Montesquieu, 121, 193 
Moptfort, Simon de, 53, 69 
Morris, William, 206-7, 208-9, 212 
Mozarabic churches, 13 
Munich, Beauhamais Palace, 204 
National Library, 204 
St.John Nepomuk, 135, 136, p I. LXXI 

Naples, 130 
Napoleon 1,146 
Napoleon HI, 212 

Naranco S. Maria de, 13-14, p l s . v , yi 
rsasn, John, 159,199 
Naumburg Cathedral, 50 
Needham James, 151, fig. 78 
Needham Market, 72 
Neri, St. Philip, 1x3 

Neumann, Johann Balthasar, 133-4,136,141 
145, figs. 71,72, 73,76, pis. ixxu, xW 
ixxvia and b 

Nevers, St. Stephen, 25, fig. jg 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 133, 166, 185 
Nicolo Pisano, 75 
Nogaret, William de, 68 
Normandy, School of, 24-5 
Normans, the, 18 

Noyon Cathedral, 39, 40-1, 46, fig. 25 
Nuremberg, St. Lawrence, 62, 63, 63, 72 

pl. xxrv ’ * 

Occam, William, 56 
Ogee arch, 56, 59-60 
Olympia, 191 

Oppenord, Gilles-Marie, 146,176 
Oratorians, 113 
Origen, 3 
Orleans, 24 
Otto the Great, 15 
Oxford, Christchurch Hall, 188 
Provisions of, 53 
Sheldonian Theatre, 166 


Paestum, 1, 191 
Paganino, see Mazzini, Giulio 
Palladio, Andrea, 105-6,111,122,140,141-2, 
152, 158, 160, 170, 183, 184, 185, 186, 
190,191, fig. 58, pis. lvh, lvih 
P almanova, 173 
Palmyra, 3 
Paris, 121 

Bretonvilliers, Hotel de, 175 
College des Quatre Nations, 162, 270, 
fig* 83 

Feuillants, Church of the, 160 
Gates, 196, fig. 96 
Genevieve Library, 206 
Haussmann’s plans, 212—13 
Institut de France, see College des Quatre 
Nations 

Jesuit Novitiate Church, 160 


235 



INDEX 


Paris, (cant.) 

Lambert, H6tel, 175, fig. 90 

Louvre, 123, 150-2, 167, 171, pis. lxxx, 

LXXXVI 

Luxembourg Palace, 160, 161' 

Matignon, Hotel de, 176, fig. 92 
Notre Dame, 39,40-1, 42, 46, figs. 27, 28, 

pi. XXVI 

Opera, 205, pi. cm 

Place de la Concorde, 147 

Place de Pjfetoile, 173 

Place des Vosges, 161 

Sainte Cbapelle, 55, 59 

St. Etienne du Mont, 160 

St.- Eugene, 206 

St. Eustache, 160 

St. Gervais, 160 

St. Jean de Montmartre, 211 

St. Louis des Invalides, 170-1, fig. 86, pi. 

ixxxvn 

Sorbonne Church, 162,170, fig. 82 
Soubise, Hotel de, 176, pi. xc 
Tuileries, 161, 177 
Vrillibre, H6tel de la, 175 
Parish churches, 61, 67, 68, 71 
Parma, 93 
Pascal, 166 
Pattern Books, 152-5 
Paul III, 113, 114 
Paul V, 113 

Paxton, Sir Joseph, 206 
Pearson, J. L., 204 

Penshurst Place, 67, 68, 69, pi. xxxix 
Pepin the Short, 8 
Pepys, Samuel, 160 
Pericles, 1 

Perigueux, St. Front, 24, 26, 85, pi. xvi 

Perrault, Claude, 167, 171, pi. lxxxvi 

Perret, Auguste, 211 

Peruzzi, Baldassare, 103, 104, pi. lv 

Petersham, 179 

Petrarch, 78 

Philip n, 113 

Pick, Frank, 213-14 

Pico della Mirandola, 83 

Pienza Cathedral, 90 

Piero della Francesca, 95 

Piers Plowman, 68 

Pietro da Cortona, 121, 126, pi. lxvi 

Pilgrimage routes, 24 

Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 193, 195 

Pisa Cathedral, 28 

Pisano, see Nicolb Pisano 

Pistoia, S. Maria delle Grazie, 86 

Pitti family, 77 

Pius II, 90 

Plateresque, 152 

Plato, 84 

Plotinus, 3 

Poekert, Joseph, 205 

Pointed arch, 31, 51 

Poitiers, St. Jean, 8, 24 

Poitou, School of, 24-5, 31 

Pompei, Basilica, 5, fig. 2 

Pope, Alexander, 183,184,185-6, 189 


Poppelmann, Mathaus Daniel, 140, pi. lxxiv 

Porta, Giacomo della, 115, 117, pi. lxjx 

Port Sunlight, 212 

Portugal, 74 

Portuguese Indies, 74 

Poulteney, John, 69 

Poussin, Nicolas, 161, 167, 189 

Prandtauer, Jakob, 139, pi. Lxxm 

Pratt, Roger, 177, 179 

Primaticcio, Francesco, 105, 150 

Prior, E. S.» 209 

Provence, School of, 24-5 

Puget, Pierre, 162 

Pugin, Augustus Welby, 135, 202, 203, 206, 
pi. ci 

Purcell, 173 

Quedlinburg, St. Wiper t, 21 
Racine, 168 

Rainaldi, Carlo, 124, fig. 25 
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 157 
Ramiro I of Asturias, 14 
Raphael, 94, 95,100,101,103,112,114,115, 
pi. in 

Ratisbon, 134 

Ravenna, S. Apollinare Nuovo, 4, 23, fig. 1, 
pi. m 

S. Vitale, 6, 9-10, fig. 5, pi. rv 
Reformation, 63 
Rembrandt, 100, 135 
Revett, Nicholas, 191 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 196 
Rheims Cathedral, 33, 38, 39, 42, 46, 48, 50, 
51, figs. 24, 30, pis. xxvnr, xxix 
Riario, Cardinal, 93 
Ricardo, Halsey, 209 
Richard Coeur-de-Lion, 68 
Richardson, Henry Hobson, 207-8, 209, 210 
Richelieu, 161 

Richelieu, Cardinal, 161, 168 
Rimini, S. Francesco, 87, 88, pi. 1 
Ripon, 8 
Rocaille, 146, 176 
Rococo, 176, 186, 190 
Roehampton, 179 
Rohr, 134-5 

Romano, see Giulio Romano 
Rome, 2, 94-5, 99, 120 
Barberini Palace, 121-2, 129, 145, 162, 
171, fig. 63 

Basilica of Maxentius, 2, pi. 2 

“Basilica” of Porta Maggiore, 6, fig. 4 

Cancelleria, Palazzo della, 93, 94, fig. 53 

Capitol, 114, 129 

Caprini Palace, 99 

Caracalk, Baths of, 2 

Colosseum, 2, 80, 88 

Farnese Palace, 101-3,104,106-8,114,143, 
fig. 57, pi. nv 

Flavian Emperors’ Pakce, 6, fig. 3 
Gesu, 116-19, 123, 126, 160, figs. 61, 62, 

pi. LXI 

Marcellus Theatre, 103 

Massimi Palace, 101, 103, 109, 155, pi. rv 


236 



INDEX 


Rome, (cont.) 

Minerva Medica, Temple of, 83, fig, 45 
Pantheon, 2 ,192 
Piazza del Popolo, 173 
S. Agnese in Piazza Navona, 124, 126 
fig. 65 

S. Andrea al Quirinale, 124, fig. 66 
S. Anna dei Palafrenieri, 123-4, fig. 64 
S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 123,124-5, 
126, 128, 129, 171, 181, fig. 67, pis’. 

LXIV, LXV r 

S. Giacomo al Corso, 124 

S. Giovanni in Laterano, 4 

S. Ignazio, 123 

S. Maria Maggiore, 4 

S. Maria di Monte Santo, 124 

S. Maria della Pace, 126, pi. ixvi 

S. Maria della Vittoria (Chapel of St. 

Teresa), 130, pi. Lxvm 
S. Paolo fuori le Mura, 4 
J** Peter’s, 4,10,41,93.97-8,108,114-16, 
120, 121, 123, 128-9, 170, figs. 56, 60, 
pis. lxh, Lxm 

S. Pietro in Montorio (Tempietto), 96^7, 
pi. Lm 

SS. Vicenzo ed Anastasio, 126, fig. 68 
Vatican, 99, 114,143, pi. Lxm 
Scala Regia, 128, fig. 69, pi. ixvn 
„ Sistine Chapel, 94 
Venezia Palace, 88 
Victor Emmanuel Monument, 205 
Vidoni CafFarelli Palace, 99,103, pi. tit 
Villa Giulia, in, fig. 59 
Roofs, timber, 72-3 
Rosa, Salvator, 189 
Roscoe, William, 199 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 206 
Rouen Cathedral, Tour de Beurre, 73 
St. Maclou, 73, fig. 40 
Royal Academy, 191 
Rubens, P. P., 180 
Rucellai, family, 77 
Giovanni, 87-8 
Ruskin, 128,135, 206 
Ruthwell Cross, 14 

Saintes, 24 
St. Clotilde, 204 

St. Denis Abbey, io-n, 31-3,39, 40,46, fig. 

21, pi. xxiv 
St. Florian, 139 
St. Gall, 11, 18 
St Gilles, 24, 28, pi. xix 
St. Martin de Canigou, 20 
St. Riquier, see Centula 
Salamanca Cathedral, 62, 152, figs. 36, 79 
Salisbury Cathedral, 51,69,179, figs. 32, 33 
Chapter-house, 54-5, 60, pi. xxxni 
Salt, Sir Titus, 212 
Saltaire, 212 

Sammicheli, Michele, 104, 105, 134 
San Gallo, Antonio da, 101, 108, 113, 114, 
fig. 57, pLnv 

Santiago de Compostela, 24-5 
Sardinia, King o£ 140 


Savoy, Duke of, 140 
Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 173 
Schinkel, Carl Friedrich, 200, 204, fig. 97 
Schlegel, Friedrich, 200-2 
Scholasticism, 47 
Scott, Baillie, 210 
Scott, Sir George Gilbert, 204, 213 
Screens, wooden, 72 
Sculpture, figure (general), 30 
England, 50 
France, 48-50 
Selby Abbey, 86, fig. 35 
Semper, Gottfried, 204 
Senlis Cathedral, 39 
Sens Cathedral, 35, 39, 40-1 
Serlio, Sebastiano, 104-5,106,122,143,150, 
151-2 

Sezincote, 199 
Sforza, Francesco, 85, 86 
Sforzinda, 86 

Shaftesbury, lord, 184, 185, 212 
Shakespeare, 157 

Shaw, R. Norman, 207, 209, fig. 98 * 

Shenstone, William, 189 

Shute, John, 152 

Sicily, 18, 28 

Silchester, 6 

Simon of Cologne, 73-4, pi xim 
Sixtus IV, 93-4 
Smirke, Sir Robert, 200, pi. c 
Soane, Sir John, 194-5, 198, pi. xcvin 
Society of Dilettanti, 191 
Southwell, 23, 59, pi. xxxiv 
Spalato, Diocletian’s Palace, 191 
Spavento, Giorgio, 93, fig. 52 
Speier Cathedral, 27 
Spenser, Edmund, 157 
Sperandio, Niecolb, 85, fig. 46 
Spinoza, 135 
Squares, 175-86 

Staircases, 142-3,145, 177-9, fig* 91 
Stamford, Burghley House, 156, 157 
Stoke-on-Trent, 191 
Stoss, Veit, 62 
Stowe, 147 

Strapwork ornament, 155, fig. 81 
Strassburg Cathedral, 24, 194, pi xiv 
St. Lawrence Portal, 73 
Strawberry Hill, see London 
Strickland, William, 200 
Strozzi family, 77 
Stuart, James, and Revett, 191 
Stucco, 145,190, pi. lxxvh 
Stupinigi, 140 

Suger of St. Denis, 31, 33, 39, 77 
Suspension bridges, 206 
Swaffham, 72, pi xn 
Sweden, 27 
Swift, 183 
Syria, 3 

Talenti, Francesco, pi xlvi 
Tangier, 166 
Teresa, St., 113 
Tertullian, 3 


237 



INDEX 


Theodore, St., 50 
Theodoric, 4, 9 

Thomas Aquinas, St., 47 * 4-8, 49 
Thomson, 192 
Thorpe, John, 152-3 
Tiepolo, G. B., 145 
Tintoretto, Jacopo, 101, no 
Titian, iox, 105 
Tivoli, Villa d’Este, in 
Toledo Cathedral, 131, 133 . I 47 > fig- 7 °» 
pi. lxxdc 

Hospital of the Holy Cross, 143, 148, 

fig. 75 

Toledo, Juan Bautista de, 143 
Tomar, 74, fig. 41 

Tom 6 , Narciso, 13 it fig. 7 °> pb i*xix 
Toro, Bernard, 176 
Torrigiani, Pietro, 148, fig. 77 
Toulouse, St. Semin, 24-5, pis. xnb, xiv 
Tours, St. Martin, 15, 24, 25, fig. n 
Town houses, England, 175, 179 
France, 175, 176, 177, 179 
Town-planning, 173,199, 211-12 
Tracery, 46, 56 
Traffic problems, 213 
Trier, 3 

; Truro-.Cath'edtal,:204 ‘ * 0 ' ’ ’ ^ 

^Turner, J. M. W., 198 
Thscar^y, 777*78, 95 * 

Ulm Minster,'71 ; * 

Umbria, 95 

Urbinc^Ducal Palace, 88, pi. xnx 
Valla, Lorenzo, 84 

Valladolid, St> Paul’s, 73, 74, 133, pi* xim 
Vanbrugh, Sir John, 188-9,190,196, fig. 94, 
pis. xci, # xeni 

Vasari, Giorgio, 101, no-n,'fig, 59, pi. 
Vasquez, F. Manuel, 133, pi. lxx 
Vaulting, 20-1 
Fan, 70 
Rib, 21-2, 32 
England, 67 
Star, 63 

Vaux-le-Vicomte, 162, ids, figs. 84, 85 
Velasquez, 100 
Venasque, Baptistery, 8 
Venice, general, 28, 77, 93 
IlRedentore, 105, in 
S. Giorgio Maggiore, 105, in, 177 
St. Mark’s, 26, 85 
S. Salvatore, 93, fig. 52 
Verona, 104 

Verrocchio, Andrea del, 127 
Versailles, 89, in, 147, 162, 173, 181, 182, 
i8d, 199 

Vdzelay, 24, 25-6, 28, fig. 19, pi. xvh 
Vicenza, 105 

Palazzo Chierigati, 106, 112, 158 
Villa Rotonda, iod, 184, pi. Lvm 


Vienna, 204, 212 

Vierzehnheiligen, 136-9, 141, 171. 176, 
figs. 71, 72, 73, pi. ixxn 
Vignola, Giacomo, in, 116-19,123-4,126, 
152, 160, 170, figs. 59, 61, 62, 64, pi. 

LXI 

Villard de Honnecourt, 36-8, 49, 70, figs. 22, 
23, 24 

Vincent of Beauvais, 47-9 
Vinci, see Leonardo da ■ 

Vingboons, Ph., 165 
Vitruvius, 87, 99, 105 
Voltaire, 136, 193 

Voysey, Charles F. Annesley, 209, 210, fig. 
99 

Vredeman de Vries, Hans, 153 

Wagner, Richard, 127 
Wallis, John, 166 
Walpole, Horace, 186, 192, 193 
Washington, D.C., 173 

Webb, John, 161, 179 
Philip, 207-8 
Wedgwood, Josiah, 191 
Weingarten Monastery, 139, fig. 74 
Wells Cathedral, 50, 51, 52, 58, 69 
'WelfefiBffi-g; 134-5 ' 

Werkbund , Deutsche r, 211 
Wessobrunn, I45 i 

Westwork, n f 

’Westphalia,'61 £ 

Whittington, Dick, 69V 70 

Wilfrid,« ■ 

Wilhelmian style, 205 
William the Conqueror, 20 
William of Sens, 34-5 
Wilton House, 159 
Winchelsea, 54 

k Winchester, Cathedral, 19, 22, 42, 50, 67, 

* fig.' 17.’ pi- X 

Winckelmann, J. J., 146, 191, 194 
Windsor, St. George’s Chapel, 69 
Wolfram of Eschenbach, 47, 50 
Wollaton Hall, 156 
Wolsey, Cardinal, 150 
Wood, John (the Elder), 184, 186, pi. xov 
(the Younger), 186, pi. xcv 
Wordsworth, William, 192 
Worms Cathedral, 27, pi. xxi 
Wren, Sir Christopher, 165-7, 170-3, 179, 
180, 181, 182, 188, 205, figs. 87, 88, 
pis. Lxxxvm, LXXXIX 
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 210, 211 
Wiirzburg, 134, 145 
Wyatt, James, 194 

Yevele, Henry, 70-2 
York, 8, 71 

Cathedral, Chapter-house, do 


fig. 48.