Spain, 16th Century: Monastery San Marcos at Leon; palace of the Infanta, Saragossa; Carcel del Corte at Baez; Cath. of Malaga, W. front, 1538, by de Siloë; Tavera Hospital, Toledo, 1541, by de Bustamente; Alcazar at Toledo, 1548; Lonja (Town Hall) at Saragossa, 1551; Casa de la Sal, Casa Monterey, and Collegio de los Irlandeses, all at Salamanca; Town Hall, Casa de los Taveras and upper part of Giralda, all at Seville.—17th Century: Cathedral del Pilar, Saragossa, 1677; Tower del Seo, 1685.—18th Century: palace at Madrid, 1735; at Aranjuez, 1739; cathedral of Santiago, 1738; Lonja at Barcelona, 1772.
[CHAPTER XXV.]
THE CLASSIC REVIVALS IN EUROPE.
Books Recommended: As before, Fergusson. Also Chateau, Histoire et caractères de l’architecture en France; and Lübke, Geschichte der Architektur. (For the most part, however, recourse must be had to the general histories of architecture, and to monographs on special cities or buildings.)
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. By the end of the seventeenth century the Renaissance, properly speaking, had run its course in Europe. The increasing servility of its imitation of antique models had exhausted its elasticity and originality. Taste rapidly declined before the growth of the industrial and commercial spirit in the eighteenth century. The ferment of democracy and the disquiet of far-reaching political changes had begun to preoccupy the minds of men to the detriment of the arts. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, the extravagances of the Rococo, Jesuit, and Louis XV. styles had begun to pall upon the popular taste. The creative spirit was dead, and nothing seemed more promising as a corrective for these extravagances than a return to classic models. But the demand was for a literal copying of the arcades and porticos of Rome, to serve as frontispieces for buildings in which modern requirements should be accommodated to these antique exteriors, instead of controlling the design. The result was a manifest gain in the splendor of the streets and squares adorned by these highly decorative frontispieces, but at the expense of convenience and propriety in the buildings themselves. While this academic spirit too often sacrificed logic and originality to an arbitrary symmetry and to the supposed canons of Roman design, it also, on the other hand, led to a stateliness and dignity in the planning, especially in the designing of vestibules, stairs, and halls, which render many of the public buildings it produced well worthy of study. The architecture of the Roman Revival was pompous and artificial, but seldom trivial, and its somewhat affected grandeur was a welcome relief from the dull extravagance of the styles it replaced.
THE GREEK REVIVAL. The Roman revival was, however, displaced in England and Germany by the Greek Revival, which set in near the close of the eighteenth century. This was the result of a newly awakened interest in the long-neglected monuments of Attic art which the discoveries of Stuart and Revett—sent out in 1732 by the London Society of Dilettanti—had once more made known to the world. It led to a veritable furore in England for Greek Doric and Ionic columns, which were applied indiscriminately to every class of buildings, with utter disregard of propriety. The British taste was at this time at its lowest ebb, and failed to perceive the poverty of Greek architecture when deprived of its proper adornments of carving and sculpture, which were singularly lacking in the British examples. Nevertheless the Greek style in England had a long run of popular favor, yielding only during the reign of the present sovereign to the so-called Victorian Gothic, a revival of mediæval forms. In Germany the Greek Revival was characterized by a more cultivated taste and a more rational application of its forms, which were often freely modified to suit modern needs. In France, where the Roman Revival under Louis XV. had produced fairly satisfactory results, and where the influence of the Royal School of Fine Arts (École des Beaux-Arts) tended to perpetuate the principles of Roman design, the Greek Revival found no footing. The Greek forms were seen to be too severe and intractable for present requirements. About 1830, however, a modified style of design, known since as the Néo-Grec, was introduced by the exertions of a small coterie of talented architects; and though its own life was short, it profoundly influenced French art in the direction of freedom and refinement for a long time afterward. In Italy there was hardly anything in the nature of a true revival of either Roman or Greek forms. The few important works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were conceived in the spirit of the late Renaissance, and took from the prevalent revival of classicism elsewhere merely a greater correctness of detail, not any radical change of form or spirit.
FIG. 198.—BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON.
ENGLAND. There was, strictly speaking, no Roman revival in Great Britain. The modified Palladian style of Wren and Gibbs and their successors continued until superseded by the Greek revival. The first fruit of the new movement seems to have been the Bank of England at London, by Sir John Soane (1788). In this edifice the Greco-Roman order of the round temple at Tivoli was closely copied, and applied to a long façade, too low for its length and with no sufficient stylobate, but fairly effective with its recessed colonnade and unpierced walls. The British Museum, by Robert Smirke (Fig. 198), was a more ambitious essay in a more purely Greek style. Its colossal Ionic colonnade was, however, a mere frontispiece, applied to a badly planned and commonplace building, from which it cut off needed light. The more modest but appropriate columnar façade to the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, by Bassevi, was a more successful attempt in the same direction, better proportioned and avoiding the incongruity of modern windows in several stories. These have always been the stumbling-block of the revived Greek style. The difficulties they raise are avoided, however, in buildings presenting but two stories, the order being applied to the upper story, upon a high stylobate serving as a basement. The High School and the Royal Institution at Edinburgh, and the University at London, by Wilkins, are for this reason, if for no other, superior to the British Museum and other many-storied Anglo-Greek edifices. In spite of all difficulties, however, the English extended the applications of the style with doubtful success not only to all manner of public buildings, but also to country residences. Carlton House, Bowden Park, and Grange House are instances of this misapplication of Greek forms. Neither did it prove more tractable for ecclesiastical purposes. St. Pancras’s Church at London, and several churches by Thomson (1817–75), in Glasgow, though interesting as experiments in such adaptation, are not to be commended for imitation. The most successful of all British Greek designs is perhaps St. George’s Hall at Liverpool (Fig. 199), whose imposing peristyle and porches are sufficiently Greek in spirit and detail to class it among the works of the Greek Revival. But its great hall and its interior composition are really Roman and not Greek, emphasizing the teaching of experience that Greek architecture does not lend itself to the exigencies of modern civilization to nearly the same extent as the Roman.