Another typical monument in the Napoleonic tradition rose also from Monferran’s designs, the Alexander Column of 1829 in the Winter Palace Square (Plate [27B]). This may well be the largest granite monolith in the world—a typically Russian claim—but it quite lacks the elegance of Alavoine’s still later Colonne de Juillet in Paris or the scale of Mills’s Washington Monument. The Triumphal Gate of 1833 by Vasili Petrovich Stasov (1769-1848) is a trabeated Greek Doric propylaeon, somewhat comparable to Nobile’s Burgtor in Vienna; more significant is the fact that, like the July Column in Paris and Monferran’s great dome, not to speak of a curious Egyptian suspension bridge of this period in Petersburg, this structure is all of metal.
In 1840 the authority of the Committee of 1816 was terminated and in Petersburg, as so generally elsewhere in Europe, coherent urbanistic control came to an end. The great architectural period there was over as Moscow, with its nationalistic traditions, came more to the fore. Characteristically, the most important new church of the second quarter of the century, the Cathedral of the Redeemer of 1839-83, was built in the older capital and is the first major Russian example of Neo-Byzantine. One is not surprised to find that Konstantin Andreevich Ton (1794-1881), its architect, was German not French; for in a sense this represents a rather clumsy local variant of the German Rundbogenstil, continuing the particular eclectic line initiated by Klenze in his Munich Court Church more than a decade earlier.
CHAPTER 4
GREAT BRITAIN
In English terminology, the most productive period of Nash and Soane, the two greatest Romantic Classical architects of England, extending from 1810 down to the thirties, is loosely referred to as ‘Regency’, and the rest of the first half of the century as ‘Early Victorian’. Neither term has much more specific meaning in an international frame of reference than does ‘Restoration’ or ‘Louis Philippe’ in France, not to speak of ‘Biedermeier’, which is sometimes used for this period in Germany and Austria. ‘Regency’ production includes the characteristic monuments of mature Romantic Classicism in England and also much work that makes manifest the Picturesque point of view. Early Victorian production illustrates the modulation of Romantic Classicism into the Renaissance Revival, and includes as well the most doctrinaire phase of the Gothic Revival (see Chapter [6]).
Although current researches are somewhat amending the picture, it is accepted that private architecture has generally been more significant in England than public architecture. This was least true in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Soane had been Architect to the Bank of England, in effect if not in fact an important branch of the State, from 1788. Nash succeeded Wyatt in the office of Surveyor-General—although he was only given the title of Deputy—in 1813. And in 1815 Soane, Nash, and Smirke, undoubtedly the three leading architects of their day if one excepts Wilkins, became the members of a new board set up by the national Office of Works, which was at a peak of its authority and activity immediately after Napoleon’s downfall. Soane and Smirke, though not personal favourites of George IV, were knighted, like several of their German contemporaries. The principal building project of the day, the laying out and the construction of Regent Street and Regent’s Park, the latter on Crown land, had the fullest personal support of George IV, first as Regent and after 1820 as King.
Yet Soane’s most important work between 1810 and 1818 was private, except for what he built as Architect to the Chelsea Hospital, and, in the case of his house and his family tomb, wholly personal. All that remains of consequence of his work at the Chelsea Hospital, the stables of 1814-17, might as well be private, for this is no great monument with columned portico and Pantheon-dome such as preoccupied most architects of Soane’s generation and status abroad (Plate [28A]). Rigidly astylar, boldly arcuated, and executed in common yellowish London stock bricks, with no more deference to the purplish walling bricks and bright orange-red rubbed dressings of Wren’s earlier buildings at the Hospital than to his English Baroque style, this is as utilitarian as any project of Durand’s. Moreover, in its very simple detailing this reflects, and quite consciously, something of that primitivistic aspect of international Romantic Classical theory deriving from the theories of Soane’s favourite critical author, Laugier. Above all, in the proportioning and in the organization of the arcuated elements, the design of the stables is personal almost to the point of perversity. It is far more comprehensible to the abstract tastes of the twentieth century than in accordance with the ideals most widely accepted in the England of Soane’s own day.
Soane’s Dulwich Gallery of 1811-14, outside London, is likewise built of common brick and has similarly primitivistic detailing. This structure is most characteristic of its period in being a museum, indeed it is the earliest nineteenth-century example; but it could hardly be more different from the line of sculpture galleries that runs from Klenze’s Glyptothek in Munich through Bindesbøll’s Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen. Nor does it much resemble the picture galleries of the period running from those in Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin through Klenze’s Ältere Pinakothek in Munich to Voit’s Neuere Pinakothek, also in Munich. It is least unlike the last of these, although that was designed forty years later; this similarity may help to suggest how confusingly advanced in style Soane, eldest of the leading architects of the post-Napoleonic decades, remained even in middle and old age.
But Soane’s Rundbogenstil—so to apply this term out of its German context, as one might do even more properly to the Chelsea Hospital stables—is a round-arched style with a difference. There are neither medieval nor quattrocento Italian overtones here. While Soane’s approach was creatively personal in the detailing as well as in the over-all organization, that approach seems most closely parallel to Durand’s rationalism, particularly in the technical skill with which the monitor-lighting was handled. The centrepiece of the Gallery is a mausoleum in which Soane’s virtuosity in three-dimensional composition—an interest that sets him well apart from most of his generation on the Continent—and also at abstract linear ornamentation, produced here by plain incisions in the stone slabs of the lantern, reaches something of a climax.
Even more of such ornamentation is to be seen on the family tomb in St Pancras churchyard of 1816 as also, though much more chastely handled, on the façade of his own house[[72]] of 1812-13 at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The interiors of this house are full of spatial exercises, many of them miniscule in scale, which Soane developed later in various public structures. It may suffice here to mention the small breakfast-room with its very shallow dome, its varied and ingenious effects of indirect lighting, and its characteristic decoration by means of incised linear patterns and convex mirrors.