CHAPTER 3 - Notes
[61]. The idea for the two-towered façade is probably derived from a project of 1809 by Lebas, but could also come from Gisors’s Saint-Vincent in Mâcon of 1810.
[62]. Three pieces only of the enamelled lava decoration were put in place; owing to the ensuing outcry they were soon removed.
[63]. Hittorff and other architects of his generation such as Henri Labrouste and Duban, who supported his proposal to revive the external polychromy they had noted on the Classical temples of Sicily, were closer in fact to Ingres than to Delacroix. Ingres in 1828 backed Labrouste’s controversial rendering of the Paestum temples showing external colour. Duban, one of the first to introduce polychrome decoration—the plaques of enamelled lava used in the entrance courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts are his—was a close friend and on occasion a collaborator of Ingres. Hittorff collected paintings by Ingres and assisted him with the architectural backgrounds of his pictures, though that in the ‘Stratonice’, which gives perhaps the best idea of the sort of polychromy intended by these architects, was supplied by Victor Baltard.
[64]. Actually the original paintwork on the beams and panels of the vestibules of the Gare du Nord is still there, but so dulled and begrimed that one hardly notices it. To the twentieth century the remarkable roof of Hittorff’s Rotonde des Panoramas in the Champs Élysées of 1836 would be, if extant, of more interest, since it was suspended from iron cables.
[65]. As has been noted in Chapter 2, both de Chateauneuf and Meuron studied with Leclerc.
[66]. The history of this project is very complicated. As might be surmised from its character, a design was at one point prepared by Gilbert, the principal Louis Philippe architect for this sort of work. The actual construction of the Hôtel Dieu by Diet followed only after a decade of changes of plan, yet the executed work probably incorporates something of Gilbert’s design; in any case, what was built is still wholly in the spirit of Gilbert’s Louis Philippe work and not at all in that of the Second Empire (see Chapter [8]). Diet was Gilbert’s son-in-law.
[67]. Begun by John Harvey, continued by Thomas Hardwick, and completed by Sir Robert Smirke.
[68]. See Venditti, A., Architettura neoclassica a Napoli, Naples, 1961.
[69]. See Missirini, M., Del Tempio eretto in Possagno da Antonio Canova, Venice, 1833. Some give credit to Selva, but not Bassi his biographer. See also Meeks, C. L. V., ‘Pantheon Paradigm’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XIX (1960), 135-44.
[70]. See Falconetti, A., Il Caffè Pedrocchi, dagherrotipo artistico descrittivo, Padua, 1847; and Cimegotto, C., and others, [Centenary volume on the Caffè Pedrocchi], Padua, 1931.
[71]. See Montferrand, A.-R. de, L’Église cathédrale de Saint-Isaac, description architecturale, pittoresque, et historique, Saint-Pétersbourg, 1845.