PROFESSOR COCKERELL’S LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
This gentleman, who succeeded the late lamented Mr. Wilkins in the professor’s chair of the Royal Academy, is labouring with all the generous energy for which he is distinguished, to lay the products of a well-stored mind before the students, so as to excite them to an emulation of the works and achievements of the great masters in Architecture who have gone before. We have had the pleasure of attending the course of lectures of this session, and were greatly rejoiced to find, from the numbers and character of the auditory, that the study of the art is being regarded with interest by many out of the pale of the profession. It would have been a grateful duty to us to have given a full report of these lectures for the benefit of our readers, but we felt to be precluded from doing so, by a previous announcement on the part of the Athenæum of the intention to do so, and which has since been very effectively carried out. In justice to that excellent periodical, we can, therefore, only refer to its pages those of our readers who may be anxious to give that attentive perusal of the lectures which they require and deserve, contenting ourselves with the liberty of making such extracts as we think will suit the purpose of our less ambitious readers, or to whet the appetite of the others.
There is one thing, however, in which even the comprehensive report of the Athenæum is necessarily defective. Such a display of illustrative drawings, so laboriously compiled, as were exhibited by the learned lecturer, it has never before been our good fortune to see brought together; and without these, or some more adequate representation of them than mere description, the spirit or essence of the lecture is greatly weakened, and in some instances lost. Two large sheets, or rather assemblage of sheets, were hung up, shewing in comparative juxta-position most of the famous structures of antiquity, the one in elevation, the other in section, and over these the eye could wander and the mind could dwell with marvellings and delight that no words can express. How small appear those finished and exquisite gems of Grecian art, its temples, when compared with the developed boldness of the works of the successors to the Greek school, who have been charged with innovations and corruptions. These great sheets present to us a map or chart reduced, as it were, to a small scale, of the hitherto ascertained geography of building art, and suggest an endless train of reflection and inquiry.
But there were others whose assemblage and lengthened treatment would make up volumes, some embodying the ingenious speculations of the professor, but, in the main, rigid and critical delineations of the buildings of the ancients from measurement and other laborious means of research.
These, however, it would be quite in vain for us to attempt to enumerate, or to refer to in any more lengthened way of notice; we therefore proceed to our extracts.
After quoting the regulations of the Royal Academy in reference to the delivery of these lectures, and pointing out how much it is desirable to add to their provisions in this respect, on the model of the French Academy, the effects of which are visible in the advantages which the architects of that country enjoy; and contrasting the pains taken by the governments of the Continent in the encouragement and cultivation of art, with the niggard policy pursued in this country, he says—
“It is now more than a hundred years that Thomson, the best informed upon the Arts of all our poets, indignantly remonstrated on our national inferiority and neglect of this branch of intellectual culture, and complained with grief, in his Ode to Liberty,—
‘That finer arts (save what the Muse has sung,
In daring flight above all modern wing),
Neglected droop their head.’
“Foreigners have attributed this disregard of the rulers of an ingenious and a great people to various causes—to physical insensibility, to the sordid nature of our commercial habits, or the adverse propensity of the Protestant religion,—to which objections the history of the ancient dynasties of this country (never inferior in the fine arts), the abundant enthusiasm of individual artists of our own times, and the public sympathy, are direct contradictions. Finally, they have fixed the reproach on the government, by pointing at the Schools of Design established by parliament; for they say, truly, that so soon as the inferiority of our design in manufactures drove us from the foreign markets, we took the alarm, and immediately formed schools of design, à l’instar of those on the continent; not from a generous love of art, but, confessedly, from the well-grounded fear of loss in trade. The members of this academy hailed the measure with joy, as the harbinger of a better sense of what is due to our intellectual position in Europe, and they have willingly given their gratuitous attention to its conduct. But the instruction of youth must be accompanied with the higher prospect of employment and honour in national works; and we are happy in the reflection that the decoration of the parliamentary palace at Westminster, and the interest taken by an illustrious personage in that great object, hold out to us the hopes of equality at least in these noble studies with the improving countries of the continent, and the opening of a new career for genius and industry.”...
“Academies were established as depositories of learning and practice in the fine arts, and the means of their preservation and transmission through the vicissitudes of the times. The enlightened and commercial Colbert had seen how in Greece and ancient Rome, and in modern Rome, under his own countryman, the Constable Bourbon, a public calamity might disperse and ruin them for half a century, without some fixed and corporate body and abode. He never dreamt that, in the absence of the fostering patronage and employment of government, the Academy could do more than fulfil these negative objects. The Royal Academy had done much more than this—it had sustained the credit of the country in fine art, and had reared talents which were now part and parcel of English history. Through good and evil report it had nourished the flame; and it was consolatory to find that they had transmitted it to better times, through long and adverse circumstances; for now they had the happiness to see two Professors in the Universities of London, the British Institute of Architects, large public patronage in Art-Unions, &c., and a growing interest in the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge towards fine art generally.”
The professor next contended for the necessity of an intimate and active union of architecture with the sister arts of painting and sculpture, shewing how in Egypt, where these were less regarded than subsequently in Greece, a deficiency existed in the justness of proportions, and a seeming neglect of order and regularity.
Of his first course of two years back, he remarked, that as the history of art was the only safe foundation of study, so he had chosen that as the commencement of the discharge of his duties as a lecturer. “The second course (that of last year) had treated chiefly the literature of art.” Books and the authorities that lived in them, such as Vitruvius, the old Italian and French authors, and, above all, the admirable Alberto, were not to be discredited, as is too much the fashion now-a-days.
“As well,” said he, “might the lawyer or the divine dispense with books, as the architect. In the very dawn of literature the architect required to be learned. In the Memorabilia of Xenophon, Socrates inquires, ‘But what employment do you intend to excel in, O Euthedemus, that you collect so many books? is it architecture? for this art, too, you will find no little knowledge necessary.’
“A familiar example of the great utility of these researches had been given in the quotation from Philibert de l’Orme (lib. ii. c. xi.), of the specification for concrete, written in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and corresponding precisely with the recent so-called discovery of this method of securing foundations. During the last century our architects had discontinued the ancient practice, having adopted the most fallacious fashion of wood-sleepers, to the ruin of many fine buildings. It was, then, the ignorance of this invaluable and most instructive and amusing author, Philibert de l’Orme, which had led to so fatal an error....
“In the present course the Professor purposed the consideration of the more difficult, but no less important, injunction of the Academic regulations, ‘that these lectures should be calculated to form the taste of the students, to instruct them in the laws and principles of composition, and fit them for a critical examination of structures.’”
(TO BE CONTINUED.)