The Napoleonic emendation of the Piazza San Marco in Venice calls for little comment. There Sansovino’s church of San Zimignan at the end was removed in 1807 and replaced with a structure by G. M. Solis (1745-1823) more consonant with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Procurazie by Buon and by Scamozzi along the sides. Solis’s emendation finally completed, and not unworthily, this most magnificent piece of urbanism in the form we now know it. La Fenice, the Venice opera-house, had been rebuilt by Giannantonio Selva (1751-1819) in 1786-92; of his work, however, only the rather dull façade remains. The exquisite Neo-Rococo interior is, rather surprisingly, of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, being by the brothers Tommaso and G. B. Meduna (1810-?), who restored the theatre after a fire in 1836.
Ever since the fifteenth century Italian architects had worked much abroad, generally bringing with them the latest stylistic developments. Now that day was largely over; France, England, and very soon Germany were exporting taste as Italy had done for so many previous centuries. After the Second World War her position as architectural mentor began, at least, to revive again (see Chapter [25]).
The employment of foreign architects by Russian Tsars was a well-established tradition by the late eighteenth century;[[33]] most of them had been Italians, but one, Charles Cameron (c. 1714-1812), who represents like Adam the transition from Academic to Romantic Classicism, was Scottish.[[34]] There had also been a French designer of the most original order working in Russia early in the eighteenth century, Nicholas Pineau (1684-1754); he even formed his mature style there, initiating the ‘Pittoresque’ phase of the Rococo well before he returned to France. Half a century later Catherine the Great acquired the greater part of the drawings of Clérisseau, friend and mentor of Adam and also of Jefferson. Catherine’s grandson, Alexander I, was so esteemed as a liberal ruler in what had once been the most advanced of French architectural circles that Ledoux, long left behind as a builder by Revolution and Empire, dedicated to him his book on architecture in 1804, as has already been noted.
Soon after Alexander’s accession in 1801 he called on a less distinguished French architect, Thomas de Thomon (1754-1813), to design the Petersburg Bourse[[35]] for him; this structure, built in 1804-16, not Brongniart’s slightly later Bourse in Paris, is the great, indeed almost the prime, monument of Romantic Classicism around 1800 (Plate #8A:pl008A). The blank pediment, rising from behind a colonnade, the great segmental lunette lighting the interior, the flanking rostral columns, the smooth stucco so crisply painted, all establish this as a perfect exemplar of this period, even though every idea in it can be found in projects, if not in executed work, by Ledoux and Boullée dating from before the Revolution. An even more precise prototype is provided by a project for a ‘Bourse Maritime’ by Pompon that won a second Grand Prix de Rome in 1798; this was not published until 1806, after Thomon had begun his Bourse, but he was probably familiar with it all the same. Not only is the Bourse exemplary in itself; Petersburg—already a century old and with many vast Baroque palaces to its credit—rather than the newly founded city of Washington on the other side of the western world, offers the finest urban entity of this brief period and of the following decades during which Alexander and his brother Nicholas I continued for some thirty years major campaigns of construction along Romantic Classical lines.
Thomon’s chief Russian rival, Nikiforovich Voronikhin (1760-1814), was French-trained, a pupil of de Wailly. His Kazan Cathedral at Petersburg of 1801-11 is still rather Baroque in its obvious reminiscences of St Peter’s in Rome. But the Academy of Mines, which he began ten years later, although somewhat heavy-handed in the way Romantic Classicism tended to be, away from the great cultural centres, is almost as exemplary as Thomon’s Bourse. More characteristically Russian in its incredible extension and the great variety of its silhouette is the Admiralty[[36]] of 1806-15 by Adrian Dimitrievich Zakharov (1761-1811). But the end façades successfully enlarged to monumental scale the theme of the arched entrance to the pre-revolutionary Hôtel de Salm in Paris by Pierre Rousseau (1751-1810). Altogether the Admiralty exceeded in quality as well as in scale almost everything that Napoleon commanded to be built in France, except perhaps the Arc de l’Étoile.
Thus Romantic Classicism before Waterloo had major representatives all the way from Latrobe and Mills in America, the one a foreigner, the other a native, to Thomon and his two native rivals in Russia; while the work of Leconte in Naples could once be matched by that done by Ramée in Hamburg and Denmark before he went to America and by the projects, at least, of Desprez in Sweden (see below). Other Frenchmen were working throughout Napoleon’s realm and outside it as well; but the most distinguished architect of this period hitherto unmentioned was a Dane, C. F. Hansen (1756-1845). The design of his Palace of Justice of 1805-15 in the Nytorv in Copenhagen, with its associated gaol, derives from the most advanced projects made by Frenchmen in the earlier years of Romantic Classicism before 1800. The gaol and the arches of its courtyard are more definitely Romantic than anything executed in France under Louis XVI, for they specifically recall the ‘Prisons’ of Piranesi, those strange architectural dreams in which the Baroque seems to become the Romantic before one’s very eyes. The gaol also resembles a prison designed for Aix by Ledoux and owes a certain medieval flavour, one must presume, to Hansen’s first- or second-hand knowledge of the projects of Boullée.
Still finer, because more homogeneous in conception if less pictorially Romantic, is the principal church in Copenhagen, the Vor Frue Kirke in the Nørregade, designed in 1808-10 by Hansen and built over the years 1811-29. The severely plain tower above the Greek Doric portico at the front illustrates the more primitivistic and Italianate aspects of Romantic Classical theory—more precisely it might seem to derive from the tower of a project for a slaughterhouse by F.-J. Belanger (1744-1818),[[37]] a pupil of Leroy. The interior, eventually furnished with statues of Christ and the Twelve Apostles by one of the greatest Romantic Classical sculptors, the Danish Thorwaldsen, raises its ranges of Greek Doric columns to gallery level above a smooth arcuated base (Plate [4B]). These carry a coffered Roman barrel vault in a way that follows quite closely, although with some change in the proportions, Boullée’s project for the Bibliothèque Royale. Not the least successful and original feature of the exterior is the plain half-cylinder of the half-domed apse broken only by a portal of almost Egyptian simplicity. But in Copenhagen, with its old tradition of building in brick, the characteristic Romantic Classical surfaces of smooth stucco seem alien and the curious pinky-brown that Hansen’s buildings are painted is certainly a little gloomy today.
In Sweden the Rome-trained French architect Desprez, whose projects of the 1780s have been mentioned, was largely occupied not with building but with theatre settings; however, there is at least the excellent Botanical Institute that he built in Uppsala, designed in 1791 and completed in 1807, with its characteristic Greek Doric portico and plain wall surfaces. More notable was his grandiose project, also of 1791, for the Haga Slott in the form of a very long peripteral temple with an octastyle pedimented portico projecting in the middle of the side. But Sweden saw no such monumental example of Romantic Classicism carried to execution. Typical of actual production is the country house at Stjamsund built in 1801 by C. F. Sundahl (1754-1831); this is more English than French in character, indeed with its plain rectangular mass and central portico almost literally Anglo-Palladian.
Harassed and recurrently conquered or gleichgeschaltet though most of the German states were in the Napoleonic Wars (while Sweden eventually received a Napoleonic marshal as sovereign through the testament of her legitimate ruler) there was much more building altogether in these years of the turn of the century in Germany than in Sweden, or indeed in France, much of it of high quality. The frontispiece to Romantic Classicism in Germany is the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, built in 1789-93 by K. G. Langhans (1733-1808). Still somewhat attenuated and un-Grecian in its proportions, this is the first of the Doric ceremonial gateways that were to be so characteristic of Romantic Classicism everywhere and also one of the most complex and original in composition. More ponderous and provincial is Langhans’s Potsdam theatre of 1795; but the Stadttheater at Danzig of 1798-1801 by Held, the City Architect, a cube with a Doric temple portico and a low saucer dome, follows a more Ledolcian paradigm.
David Gilly (1748-1808) was a more advanced Berlin architect than the elderly Langhans; but his best work of these years is the Viewegsches Haus in Brunswick of 1801-5 with its smooth stucco wall-planes, boldly incised ornament, and Greek Doric porch. More elegantly French is another Brunswick house of this period, the free-standing Villa Holland of 1805 by P. J. Krahe (1758-1840).