FIG. 199.—ST.
GEORGE’S HALL, LIVERPOOL.
GERMANY. During the eighteenth century the classic revival in Germany, which at first followed Roman precedents (as in the columns carved with spirally ascending reliefs in front of the church of St. Charles Borromeo, at Vienna), was directed into the channel of Greek imitation by the literary works of Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe, and others, as well as by the interest aroused by the discoveries of Stuart and Revett. The Brandenburg Gate at Berlin (1784, by Langhans) was an early example of this Hellenism in architecture, and one of its most successful applications to civic purposes. Without precisely copying any Greek structure, it was evidently inspired from the Athenian Propylæa, and nothing in its purpose is foreign to the style employed. The greatest activity in the style came later, however, and was greatly stimulated by the achievements of Fr. Schinkel (1771–1841), one of the greatest of modern German architects. While in the domical church of St. Nicholas at Potsdam, he employed Roman forms in a modernized Roman conception, and followed in one or two other buildings the principles of the Renaissance, his predilections were for Greek architecture. His masterpiece was the Museum at Berlin, with an imposing portico of 18 Ionic columns (Fig. 200). This building with its fine rotunda was excellently planned, and forms, in conjunction with the New Museum by Stuhler (1843–55), a noble palace of art, to whose monumental requirements and artistic purpose the Greek colonnades and pediments were not inappropriate. Schinkel’s greatest successor was Leo von Klenze (1784–1864), whose more textual reproductions of Greek models won him great favor and wide employment. The Walhalla near Ratisbon is a modernized Parthenon, internally vaulted with glass; elegant externally, but too obvious a plagiarism to be greatly admired. The Ruhmeshalle at Munich, a double L partly enclosing a colossal statue of Bavaria, and devoted to the commemoration of Bavaria’s great men, is copied from no Greek building, though purely Greek in design and correct to the smallest detail. In the Glyptothek (Sculpture Gallery), in the same city, the one distinctively Greek feature introduced by Klenze, an Ionic portico, is also the one inappropriate note in the design. The Propylæa at Munich, by the same (Fig. 201), and the Court Theatre at Berlin, by Schinkel, are other important examples of the style. The latter is externally one of the most beautiful theatres in Europe, though less ornate than many. Schinkel’s genius was here remarkably successful in adapting Greek details to the exigent difficulties of theatre design, and there is no suggestion of copying any known Greek building.
FIG. 200.
—THE OLD MUSEUM, BERLIN.
In Vienna the one notable monument of the Classic Revival is the Reichsrathsgebäude or Parliament House, by Th. Hansen (1843), an imposing two-storied composition with a lofty central colonnade and lower side-wings, harmonious in general proportions and pleasingly varied in outline and mass.