may be grouped in other ways with a nearer and a more distant placing, especially when they are “engaged” or partly built into the solid wall behind them. But however placed and however grouped, they, the columns, are the one decorative feature, the entablature acting in reality as their restraining limit, the needed link between them and the necessary structure. This building is of 1777. Ten years later the clock of the centuries marked that moment of time when architectural out-of-door growth was to stop and architectural transplanting and forcing were to begin. By that time in Paris, the centre of the architectural world for the eighteenth century, they had accumulated a number of very worthy buildings. The famous École Militaire, south of the Champs de Mars, was built about 1760, and the most accessible front of its principal mass has no artistic charm except that obtainable from the even succession of large windows, the well drilled, the exact, the highly organized lay out of a large front. The two admirable buildings on the north side of the Place de la Concorde were built in 1765-70 and these contain the whole style, for they have the great free colonnades of the centre, the engaged columns of the wings, the high basement without any adornment beyond that feeble breaking-up of the surface which we call Rustication, and they have for all external sculpture the feeblest and most insufficient little carved frames of what look like round mirrors hung here and there. These are the two typical buildings of the time and they are typical too of the whole tendency of neo-classic architecture throughout the decadence, a tendency away from variety, away from movement and charm, towards gravity and dignity, but also towards cold uniformity, with nothing to break it except the semi-Roman Order, more or less well understood, more or less graceful in itself but having no real mission to fulfill and therefore not forming part of the organized and perfect whole which we call style in architecture. It has one fitness, however, for a hurried headlong modern civilization, a civilization too busy with its physical development to spend much thought or much energy on the working of pure intelligence. This advantage is that it is so easy to manage. It is very easy to handle for those who can handle it at all. There is needed to make it sightly that good taste which controls the fancy and the memory, and prevents the designer from even recalling those well-known details and architectural effects which will not suit his purpose. Given such good taste, and a certain moderate acquaintance with the books, and designs as good as the best can be made with great speed and with perfect satisfaction to all concerned: nor does the designer need to go beyond the walls of his draughting-room to decide upon all things which are of first-rate importance to his conception.
CHAPTER IX
NINETEENTH CENTURY: IMITATIVE DESIGN
SO far as architectural history is known to us there has never been since the beginning of civilization a condition of art at all resembling that which surrounded the people of the nineteenth century. There have been epochs of deliberate revival, not only the famous one of the fifteenth century in Italy, and the sixteenth century in the North, which we call especially the New Birth (see definitions, Risorgimento, etc.), but also some as important as that one, to the people concerned. There will be always such attempts in every epoch of self-conscious civilization. Under Hadrian, in the second century, A. D., there was a deliberate attempt at reviving the Grecian purity of style. Egyptologists know that traces are plainly to be seen of similar movements 2000 and 3000 B. C. In Byzantine art there has been much conscious restoring of archaic forms and methods. In France, in the reign of Louis XVI, there was a deliberate recall of the world of art back from the too loose and irregular, too fantastical and violent style of the mid-eighteenth century, to a graver and, as it were, purified taste. One peculiarity, however, marks all of these reasoned-out and deliberate, rather than spontaneous, movements: they succeeded, and the ideas embodied in them soon dominated the situation. There have been some abortive attempts at reform: but those which we cite as rebirths succeeded altogether. All the tendencies of the day, good, and not so good, went out towards the revival, and the change was accepted by the whole world of designers. Nor is it hard to see sufficient reasons for this uniform tendency, for this simple development of a new style, however introduced: the designers of the time and their more instructed critics, the connoisseurs or dilettanti of the day, knew nothing very positive nor had even any special idea of any style of the past. There were no photographs and scarcely any books of historical record—no such books at all, indeed, if by historical record is meant an accurate account of the architecture of earlier times. Wealthy and influential men of the later years of Louis XV might have been divided into those who rather liked the fantastical style of the rococo and those who contemned it and would fain have had something more refined. The purists saw in the seventeenth century reproductions of Roman orders a finer taste than their own. That much help from the past they may have got, but the work they did in the course of their reformatory movements shows that they were pursuing a perfectly natural evolution of art with no more conscious guidance from their theories than that which led them towards more and more severe lines—more and more slender parts—more and more constructional methods of design. And as this movement was so natural and easy we never think of it as a rebirth: by that term we mean something much more radical.
When, after the close of the Napoleonic wars, men began to breathe free again in Europe, it became evident to those who observed the tendencies of their own time that there was no restraint of tradition left—at least no restraint which was recognized by more than a small group of men, while another group of men equally intelligent, perhaps, rejected those traditions and set up their own standard. King Ludwig of Bavaria (reigned 1825-48) had studied and travelled before his accession to the crown; he had purchased and brought to Munich the Greek sculptures from the temple at Ægina; he had seen the buildings of the Italian Renaissance and admired them; he was a comparatively unprejudiced dilettante with a liking for many styles, a sympathy for many forms of artistic thought. He and his architects started in his capital, Munich, the Ludwigskirche (Church of St. Louis) only a dozen years after Napoleon’s final dethronement, and the royal Library a few years later—each of these being in a kind of Southern Romanesque style without columned porticoes or other attempts at classicism. The Allerheiligenhofkirche (Court Church of All Saints) is of the same character of design with a somewhat more frank observance of Italian models. The Old Pinakothek was begun in 1826, contemporaneously with the Ludwigskirche, or nearly so, but this building is a careful study of the Italian Renaissance. The southern front of the Royal Palace, the Königsbau, is again of the same year as to its commencement, and this also is studied from Florentine fifteenth century palazzi. The north front of the Post Office, directly opposite the Königsbau, has a Florentine loggia of thirteen arches—fifteenth century style, not badly carried out. The Glyptothek is the earliest of all: it was begun before Ludwig’s accession, and almost immediately after the restoration of peace to Europe, and the outside of this was meant to be as Greek as it was possible for a modern designer to make a building. Within, it had indeed to resort to the non-Greek device of vaulting, to cover its large halls: but it was still of Grecian taste in its details. The Valhalla, by which term the King designated a Temple of Honor built on a noble hill by the Danube, above Ratisbon, is of the same epoch and of the same deliberately Hellenic character of design; a really fine exterior, studied closely from a Doric Temple of the best period. Another such temple of honor stands at the southeastern edge of the new town of Munich, the Ruhmeshalle (Hall of Fame), begun in 1843, and as completely Greek as the two others. The basilica of St. Boniface was begun in 1835 and is a most faithful study of the later basilicas of the pure Latin style, that is to say, a basilica of the sixth or the seventh century. To complete the circle of the styles from the fifth century B. C. to the sixteenth century A. D., and to cover all the important styles which mark the circuit of those two thousand years, there was built in the Au suburb a Gothic church as completely in the fourteenth century spirit as the intelligence of the builder would enable him to make it. Roman imperial art was not represented, for the scholars had hardly begun to differentiate it from the pure Greek: and for some such reason, probably because the Germans have always been inclined to use the term “Byzantine” for all round-arched mediæval work, the King’s advisers made no attempt at a piece of rugged northern Romanesque: but all the other epoch-making styles of Europe were included in the enlarged capital city.