INTRODUCTION
The round numbers of chronology have no necessary significance historically. Centuries as cultural entities often begin and end decades before or after the hundred-year mark. The years around 1800, however, do provide a significant break in the history of architecture, not so much because of any major shift in style at that precise point as because the Napoleonic Wars caused a general hiatus in building production. The last major European style, the Baroque, had been all but dissolved away in most of Europe. The beginnings of several differing kinds of reaction against it—Academic in Italy, Rococo in France, Palladian in England—go back as far as the first quarter of the century; shortly after the mid century there came a more concerted stylistic revolution.
1750 and 1790 the new style that is called ‘Romantic Classicism’[[1]] took form, producing by the eighties its most remarkable projects, and even before that some executed work of consequence in France and in England. Thus the nineteenth century could inherit the tradition of a completed architectural revolution, and at its very outset was in possession of a style that had been fully mature for more than a decade. The most effective reaction against the Baroque in the second, and even to some extent the third, quarter of the eighteenth century had taken place in England; the later architectural revolution that actually initiated Romantic Classicism centred in France.
Yet Paris was not the original locus of the new style’s gestation but rather Rome.[[2]] From the early sixteenth century Rome had provided the international headquarters from which new ideas in the arts, by no means necessarily originated there, were distributed to the Western world. To Rome came generation after generation of young artists, connoisseurs, and collectors to form their taste and to formulate their aesthetic ideals. Some even settled there for life. From the time of Colbert the French State maintained an academic establishment in Rome for the post-graduate training of artists. Thus French hegemony in the arts of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was based on a tradition maintained and renewed at Rome. The nationals of other countries came to Rome more informally, and were for the most part supported by their own funds or by private patrons; only in the seventies were young English architects of promise first awarded travelling studentships by George III. In the fifties the number of northern architects studying in Rome notably increased; some of them, beginning with the Scot Robert Mylne (1734-1811) in 1758, won prizes in the competitions held by the Roman Academy of St Luke.[[3]]
The initiation of Romantic Classicism was by no means solely in the hands of architects. In the mid-century period of Roman gestation, Winckelmann, Gavin Hamilton, and Piranesi—a German archaeologist, a Scottish painter, and a Venetian etcher—played significant roles, as well as various architects, some pensionnaires of the French Academy, others Britons studying on their own. Certain aspects of Romantic Classicism (1720-78), not the projects in his Prima parte di architettura of 1743 or the plates of ruins in his Antichità romane of 1748 but his fanciful Carceri dating from the mid 1740s. On the theoretical side the Essai sur l’architecture of M.-A. Laugier (1713-70), which first appeared anonymously in 1751 with further editions in 1752, 1753, and 1755, had something of real consequence to contribute as a basic critique of the dying Baroque style. In simple terms Laugier may be called both a Neo-Classicist and a Functionalist. The bolder functionalist ideas of an Italian Franciscan Carlo Lodoli (1690-1761) as presented by Francesco Algarotti in his Lettere sopra l’architettura, beginning in 1742, and in his Saggio sopra l’architettura of 1756 were also influential. However, despite all the new archaeological treatises inspired by the Roman milieu, of which the first was the Ruins of Palmyra published in 1753 by Robert Wood (1717-71), and all the excavations undertaken at Herculaneum over the years 1738-65 and those at Pompeii beginning a decade later, the first architectural manifestations of Romantic Classicism did not occur on Italian soil.
Two buildings begun in the late 1750s, one a very large church in France completed only in 1790, the other a mere garden pavilion in England, may be considered to announce the architectural revolution: Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, desecrated and made a secular Panthéon in 1791 immediately after its completion, was designed by J.-G. Soufflot (1713-80);[[4]] the Doric Temple at Hagley Park in Worcestershire is by his exact contemporary James Stuart (1713-88). The Panthéon remains one of the most conspicuous eighteenth-century monuments of Paris; the Hagley temple is familiar today only to specialists. Yet, historically, Stuart’s importance is rather greater than Soufflot’s, even though his production was almost negligible in quantity. Born and partly trained in Lyons, Soufflot studied early in Rome and returned to Italy again in the middle of the century. Like several of the French theorists of the day, he had had a lively interest in Gothic construction from his Lyons days. He owed his selection to design Sainte-Geneviève in 1755 to his friendship with Louis XV’s Directeur Général des Bâtiments, the Marquis de Marigny, brother of Mme de Pompadour, whom he had accompanied to Italy in 1749 along with the influential critics C.-N. Cochin and the Abbé Leblanc.
The Scottish architect James Stuart had also gone to Rome, and formed there as early as 1748 the project of visiting Athens; by 1751 he was on his way, accompanied by Nicholas Revett (c. 1721-1804), with whom he proposed to produce an archaeological work on the Antiquities of Athens. The publication of the first volume of this epoch-making book was delayed until 1762. In the meantime, in 1758, the year Stuart designed his Hagley temple, J.-D. Leroy (1724-1803) got ahead of him by publishing Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce; but the very pictorial and inaccurate plates in this had little practical effect on architecture.
The significance of Stuart’s temple may be readily guessed; small though it is, this fabrick was the first example of the re-use of the Greek Doric order[[5]]—so barbarous, or at least so primitive, in appearance to mid-eighteenth-century eyes—and the first edifice to attempt an archaeological reconstruction of a Greek temple. By the fifties many architects and critics were ready to accept the primacy of Greek over Roman art, if not little or no knowledge of Greek architecture several French writers before Laugier had praised it. J. J. Winckelmann also recommended Greek rather than Roman models in his Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke (Dresden, 1755) published just before he settled in Rome.[[6]]
Out of Italian chauvinism Piranesi attacked the theory of Grecian primacy in the arts; yet before his death he had prepared an impressive and influential set of etchings of the Greek temples at Paestum which his son Francesco published. In 1760, moreover, Piranesi decorated the Caffè Inglese in Rome in an Egyptian mode. Eventually Greek precedent in detail all but superseded Roman for over a generation; yet a real Greek Revival, at best but one aspect of Romantic Classicism, did not mature until after 1800. There was never a widespread Egyptian Revival,[[7]] but Egyptian inspiration did play a real part in crystallizing the formal ideals of Romantic Classicism; it also provided certain characteristic architectural forms, such as the pyramid and the obelisk, and occasional decorative details.
Soufflot’s vast cruciform Panthéon provides no such simple paradigm as Stuart’s temple. No longer really Baroque, it is by no means thoroughly Romantic Classical. Like most of the work of the leading British architect of Soufflot’s generation, Robert Adam (1728-92),[[8]] the Panthéon must rather be considered stylistically transitional. For example, the purity of the temple portico at the front, in any case Roman not Grecian, is diminished by the breaks at its corners. The tall, hemispherical dome[[9]] over the crossing is even less antique in character, owing its form to Wren’s St Paul’s rather than to the Roman Pantheon, which was the favourite domical model for later Romantic Classicists. In the interior, up to the entablatures, the columniation is Classical enough and the structure entirely trabeated[[10]]—at least in appearance (Plate [1]). Above, the domes in the four arms are perhaps Roman, but hardly the pendentives that carry them; these are, of course, a Byzantine structural device revived in the fifteenth century by Brunelleschi. Over the aisles the cutting away of the masonry and the general statical approach, while not producing anything that looks very Gothic, illustrate the results of Soufflot’s long-pursued study of Gothic vaulting. Many aspects of nineteenth-century architectural development were thus presaged by Soufflot here, as will become very evident later (see Chapters [1]-[3], [6], and [7]).[[11]]