If Schinkel seems to have adopted here a version of the Renaissance Revival—as, for that matter, he had already done much earlier in his somewhat similar remodelling of the Berlin City Hall in 1817—at the Neue Tor, also of 1832, he provided two gatehouses which were in a sort of Rundbogenstil Tudor comparable to Gärtner’s Wittelsbach Palace of fifteen years later. His trip to England[[53]] had fascinated him with English architecture, old and new; there he had noted everything with intelligent interest—from medieval castles to the towering new cotton mills near Manchester with their internal skeletons of iron. He had no occasion, however, to make large-scale use of iron construction, though there is little doubt that had he lived on through the forties he would have done so with both technical and aesthetic mastery.
At Schloss Babelsberg,[[54]] built for the rather tasteless brother of his own particular patron, later the Emperor William I, he essayed an English sort of castle, admittedly more in the contemporary Picturesque mode of the new Castellated Mansions of Nash and Wyatt than like any real medieval one. This was designed in 1834 and begun in 1835. Persius took it over on Schinkel’s death, redesigning one of the principal towers, and it was finally finished after Persius’s death by Heinrich Strack (1805-80) in 1849. Though certainly not inferior to Smirke’s Eastnor or Cundy’s Hawarden, if without the lovely site and the richly organic composition of Busby’s Gwrych, Babelsberg is better appreciated in Schinkel’s or Persius’s drawings than in actuality. Schloss Kamenz, a rather Tudoresque remodelling of an earlier structure which Schinkel undertook in 1838, is more typical but no more successful.
Although playing but a very minor part in Schinkel’s own production, his exercises in the Chalet mode should at least be mentioned. Not only do these illustrate the very wide range of his own eclectic inspiration, considerably wider than that of Durand and the French of the previous generation, they also represent one of the peripheral aspects of his achievement which his pupils, and German architects of the mid century generally, delighted to exploit. The happiest work of his followers, however, continued rather the Italian Villa line of Glienecke and the Court Gardener’s House, a line in which Persius at least all but equalled his master.
The Grecian work of Schinkel’s imitators and emulators tended to be overdecorated and lacking in geometrical order while their Rundbogenstil is in general awkwardly proportioned and incoherently ornamented (see Chapter [9]). Outside Prussia, such Hamburg architects as Wimmel & Forsmann and de Chateauneuf illustrate better than other North Germans the real possibilities of the Rundbogenstil. De Chateauneuf had something of an international reputation, moreover, after winning the second prize in the competition held in 1839-40 for the Royal Exchange in London. His design for that was based on the Loggia dei Lanzi, and may well have provided the suggestion for Gärtner’s Feldherrenhalle in Munich begun the next year.
It is impossible and unnecessary to follow Romantic Classicism to all the other German centres. At Darmstadt the Classical Ludwigskirche of 1822-7 by Georg Moller (1784-1852),[[55]] a pupil of Weinbrenner, is a handsome circular edifice with an internal colonnade below the dome. Thus it is rather like the ‘central space’ in Schinkel’s Museum, but more broadly proportioned. A boldly arched entrance of almost Ledolcian character is set against the external circumference of blank wall rather than the more usual temple portico. The Artillery Barracks at Darmstadt of 1825-7 by Moller’s pupil Franz Heger (1792-1836) provided a notably early example of the Rundbogenstil. Comparable was August Busse’s Castellated Zellengefängnis in Berlin of 1842-9, the first German example of a penitentiary radially planned and with individual cells (see Chapter 5). Stüler’s destroyed Trinitatiskirche in Cologne, a Persius-like Early Christian basilica completed in 1860, was much finer than his Berlin churches (see Chapter [9]).
Also Rundbogenstil, but of a more medievalizing order, was Semper’s Synagogue of 1838-41 in Dresden. Its centralized massing is uncharacteristically plastic. His Palais Oppenheim there of 1845-8 at 9-11 An der Bürgerwiese, based on Raphael’s Pandolfini Palace, was a handsome and very ‘correct’ example of the international Renaissance Revival to be compared, like de Meuron’s house in Hamburg, with Barry’s London clubhouses. The Cholera Fountain of 1843 in Dresden was Gothic, however, providing further evidence of Semper’s rather directionless eclecticism at this time.
Figure 8. Gottfried Semper: Dresden, Opera House (first), 1837-41, plan
His principal works of this period were the first Opera House[[56]] in Dresden of 1837-41, where Wagner’s early triumphs took place, burnt and rebuilt by Semper later, and the nearby Art Gallery of 1847-54 which completed so unhappily the circuit of the marvellous Rococo Zwinger by Daniel Pöppelmann. The one was a rather festive, the other a rather solemn example of the Renaissance Revival; both are more notable for their planning and their general organization than for any visual distinction (Figure [8]). The Opera House in Hanover, built by G. L. F. Laves (1789-1864) in 1845-52, is less original in plan but more sober, even a bit Schinkelesque, in design (Plate [14B]). Its interior has been completely done over since it was bombed in the Second World War.
The historian tends always to press forward, forcing rather than retarding the pace of development in his written account. Klenze’s Propylaeon, however, has already provided evidence of the late continuance of Grecian ideals in the German States; in Stuttgart the Königsbau of 1857-60 by C. F. Leins (1814-92), a pupil in Paris of Henri Labrouste, provides a worthier example, although this was actually begun twenty years earlier by J. M. Knapp (1793-1861). In Vienna, as late as 1873, the Parliament House of Theophil von Hansen (1813-91) provides a gargantuan example of what the French had first aspired to build almost a century earlier. Ambiguous in its massing, if still very elegant in its Grecian detail, this contrasts markedly with Hansen’s other Viennese work of the third quarter of the century which is generally of High Renaissance design (see Chapter 8).