[138]. Of the Seven Lamps, of the first volume of the Stones of Venice, and of the Lectures on Architecture and Painting, American editions appeared respectively in 1849, 1851, and 1854, the same years as the original London editions, and were succeeded by new issues and new editions at a pace far exceeding that maintained by the original publishers in England. In part this may merely mean that the American editions, all pirated, were smaller; but it is certainly evidence of an avid and extensive body of American readers from the mid century down to 1900.
[139]. See Chenesseau, G., Sainte-Croix d’Orléans; histoire d’une cathédrale gothique réedifiée par les Bourbons, 1599-1829, 3 vols, Paris, 1921.
The design of 1707 for the façade was by Robert de Cotte, J.-H. Mansart’s principal lieutenant. The work was carried on more actively by A.-J. Gabriel under Louis XV. With the Restoration in 1816 Louis XVIII took up the completion of the project—which Napoleon had actually ordered before Waterloo—as part of the general preoccupation of the Restoration with a strengthening of the Church, and Charles X opened the finished church in 1829. Thus the renewal of activity here in the second decade of the nineteenth century precedes the other Neo-Gothic work described below by some twenty years. But credit—or discredit—for its Rococo-Gothic character belongs to the eighteenth not to the nineteenth century.
[140]. See Rotrou, E. de, Dreux, ses antiquités, Chapelle St Louis, Dreux, 1864.
[141]. The aesthetic climate of the period is presented in several books: Rosenthal, L., L’Art et les artistes romantiques, Paris, 1928; Robiquet, J., L’Art et le goût sous la Restauration, Paris, 1928; Schommer, P., L’Art décoratif au temps du Romantisme, Paris, 1928. These were published in advance of the ‘Centenaire du Romantisme’ in 1930.
[142]. See Thiénon, C., Voyage pittoresque dans le Bocage de la Vendée, ou vues de Clisson et ses environs, Paris, 1817.
[143]. In 1836 Viollet-le-Duc wrote to his father that every greengrocer had a small Italian Villa with a tower, but this is patently a rhetorical exaggeration.
[144]. See Kaufmann, E., Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu, Philadelphia, 1952.
[145]. See Heideloff, K., Nürnberg’s Baudenkmale der Vorzeit, Nuremberg, 1839; and Die Kunst des Mittelalters in Schwaben, Stuttgart, 1855. His Ornaments of the Middle Ages (to give it its English title), which began to appear in Nuremberg in 1838, had several editions with French and English text.
[146]. This is least true in France, where the Neo-Catholic intellectuals were Gothic enthusiasts and succeeded in imposing Gothic on the architects, few of whom ever took to it with whole-hearted enthusiasm. Even Viollet-le-Duc, after the forties, was confusedly eclectic in most of his newly designed buildings as distinguished from his ‘restorations’ and his completions of unfinished medieval monuments (see Chapter [11]).