The changing taste of these decades usually demanded ever more and busier detail. Rivalry with the archaeological pretensions of the Greek Revival, moreover, called for a certain parade of stylistic erudition. But the archaeological sources drawn upon were very various and to varying degrees effectively documented. From the Early Christian to the quattrocento, most of them were more or less Italianate. However, there were some architects who succeeded—like Gärtner at the Wittelsbach Palace—in using pointed-arched precedent in a characteristically Rundbogenstil way; others elaborated their detail with real originality rather than adhering closely to any past precedent at all.
On its quattrocento side the Rundbogenstil was perhaps most notably represented in Germany by the Johanneum in Hamburg of 1836-9 (completely destroyed in the Second World War), a large building surrounding three sides of a court and incorporating two schools and a library (Plate [11B]). This was by C. L. Wimmel (1786-1845), like Hübsch a pupil of Weinbrenner, and F. G. J. Forsmann (1795-1878). This particular Rundbogenstil work can also be classified as belonging, like Klenze’s Königsbau, to the international Renaissance Revival of which Hamburg was rather a centre. For example, the extant Exchange there of 1836-41 by these same architects is of richer and more High Renaissance character and not at all Rundbogenstil.
Many houses in Hamburg built by Gottfried Semper (1803-79), Alexis de Chateauneuf (1799-1853), who had studied in Paris, and others in the forties were of elegant Early Renaissance design—one by the former even having sgraffiti on the walls—more like Klenze’s row of shops in the Odeonsplatz. The Rücker-Jenisch house of 1845 by the Swiss-born Auguste de Meuron (1813-98), a pupil of the same French architect, A.-F.-R. Leclerc, as de Chateauneuf, was certainly not Rundbogenstil but rather a version of the Travellers’ Club in London. Thus it followed, in this anglicizing city, an epoch-making model by Charles Barry that dates from fifteen years earlier (see Chapter [4]). However, de Chateauneuf’s Alster Arcade beside the waters of the Kleine Alster and his red brick Alte Post (now the Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv) of 1845-7 in the Poststrasse are both prominent and excellent examples of the Rundbogenstil of this period in Hamburg, the latter being slightly Gothic in its detailing.
The work of Hübsch, Weinbrenner’s successor as State architect in Baden, despite his very serious archaeological study of Early Christian and Romanesque architecture,[[47]] falls somewhere between Gärtner’s Ludwigskirche and Ziebland’s Bonifazius Basilika without achieving either the crisply Durandesque quality of the one or the relative archaeological plausibility of the other. In his civil buildings, such as the very simple Ministry of Finance designed in 1827 and built in 1829-33, the more ornate Technische Hochschule of 1832-6, the Art Gallery of 1840-9, and the Theatre of 1851-3, all in Karlsruhe, very considerable originality of composition was more and more confused as he grew older by the fussy elaboration of the terracotta ornamentation.
In his later work Hübsch frequently used not the round but the segmental arch—a highly rational form with brick masonry—and was usually somewhat happier than the Bavarians in handling the tawny tonalities of brick and terracotta which so generally replaced the pale monochromy of the Greek Revival in the thirties and forties. A minor but especially fine example of his most personal manner is the Trinkhalle of 1840 at Baden-Baden (Plate [11A]), rather better suited in its festive spirit to a watering-place than the Classical severity of Weinbrenner’s Kurhaus there of 1821-3. Hübsch’s churches are naturally more archaeological in character and definitely more Romanesquoid than Rundbogenstil. Those at Freiburg (1829-38), Bulach (1834-7), and Rottenburg (1834) are typical. The Rundbogenstil railway stations of another Baden architect, Friedrich Eisenlohr (1804-55), at Karlsruhe (1842) and Freiburg precede Bürklein’s in Munich in date and are rather superior to it.
The Rundbogenstil was particularly dominant in the southern German states, overflowing also into Switzerland, where the Federal Palace in Berne, built in 1851-7 by Friedrich Studer (1817-70), is a particularly extensive and nobly sited example. It was, however, in Prussia in the north of Germany that the greatest architect who worked in this mode was active, and he owes his reputation largely to his Grecian work.
Karl Friedrich von Schinkel, the only architect of the first half of the nineteenth century who can be compared in stature with the English Soane, was the great international master of two successive phases of Romantic Classicism, first of the programmatic Greek Revival, with which the post-Napoleonic period began almost everywhere in the second decade of the century, and then of the more eclectic phase that followed. Born in 1781, a generation later than Soane, Schinkel’s serious architectural production began only in 1816. His relatively early death in 1841 truncated his career; but his pupils and his spirit dominated Prussian, and indeed most of German, architecture for another score of years and more.
Somewhat as the long-lived Titian stood to the short-lived Giorgione stood Schinkel in relation to his near-contemporary and associate Friedrich Gilly, whose projects have already been mentioned (Plate [9A]). Indeed, Schinkel showed almost as great a capacity to absorb and continue the revolutionary architectural ideals of the 1780s in France as Gilly—more, certainly, than most of the foreigners who visited Paris during the unproductive years following the Revolution, or even those who stayed on to study there.
Schinkel, however, soon to be one of the most architectonic of architects, made his earliest mark not with architectural projects but, like Inigo Jones in England before him, as a designer of theatre sets. Down to 1815 he executed no buildings of any consequence; but in his paintings of these years, even more perhaps than in his stage sets, he established himself as a High Romantic artist of real distinction. At their best these follow in quality very closely after the master works of German Romantic landscape by Caspar David Friedrich. Characteristically, buildings play an important part in Schinkel’s pictures, and vast Gothic constructions in the ‘Sublime’ spirit of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey are actually more frequent than Grecian or Italianate fabricks.
