Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 2

by Sir George Gilbert Scott

I have further to confess that these lectures have been for the most part limited to the particular phase of our art in which I am myself most deeply interested; for I do not see much utility in artificially forcing myself to appear as a teacher in a phase which is not that which I view as my special mission.

I trust, however, that on my own special subject I may have been useful; anyhow, I believe I have done more than has been done before, and I am sure that I have at least taken an infinity of pains.

My lectures have been non-continuous, not only as to their periods of delivery, but as to their subjects. I think, however, they will be found to contain a fairly clear account of the rise and development of our Mediæval architecture, with some useful digressions extending somewhat beyond this range.

I have not continued this history of Mediæval architecture beyond the period of its perfect development; because, beautiful though are its late phases, their history does not maintain the same interest with that of the noble enthusiasm which urged on its earlier growth.

On now closing my lectures I think I may become, for once, rather more discursive, and may venture a little to the right and left, and in other directions, in search of matters bearing generally upon architectural art as viewed in reference to the past, the present, and the future, and (which concerns yourselves more nearly) in reference to your own individual studies.

Our art, as has so often been remarked, differs from the sister arts of painting and sculpture in this, that whereas they arise directly from the artistic aspirations of our nature, apart from practical necessities and utility, ours arises first from these necessities, and then from the desire to clothe the results with beauty. It may be said that the yearning after abstract beauty unlinked with utility is the higher and more spiritual sentiment; but, on the other hand, if we look around us throughout the creations of nature, we are prompted to reply that, in linking beauty with utility, we are more directly imitating Him who made man in His own image, and in whose works this union of the useful and the beautiful is one of the most universal characteristics.

Architecture, then, as distinguished from mere building, is the decoration of construction. If I were lecturing on architecture, in the broadest form of the expression, I must treat throughout of construction, and of its decoration, pari passu, as the latter has but little meaning if severed from the former, which is its groundwork. And, even in lectures from this chair, where architecture is viewed specially in its character as a Fine Art, it is still impossible—as indeed it would be undesirable—wholly to sever that higher characteristic from the more practical phase to which it owes its origin.

Now, the history of this concurrence of art with construction is the History of Architecture; and, to an architectural historian who is capable of taking at once an artistic, a philosophical, a political, and a religious view of the facts which he chronicles, nothing can be more interesting than to follow out from the earliest ages to which we can carry back our researches, firstly, the practical changes in building, arising from the exigencies of climate, the stage of civilisation, the traditions of race, and the varied influences of political and religious circumstances; and to connect with these the changes, the progress, and perhaps the decline and degradation of the art made use of in the decoration of their buildings; and to trace out the causes which led to these changes.

Let us not, however, suppose that a knowledge, however intimate or accurate, of architectural history, is of necessity a part of the study of architecture itself. On the contrary, at no period when a genuine, unborrowed style of architecture has prevailed, has any knowledge whatever existed of the history of art; nor at any period previous to our own has the history of architecture—beyond a very limited knowledge of that of Greece and Rome—been viewed as an object of study.

From the dawn of civilisation to what is known as “the revival of letters,” the leading nations of the world possessed each a genuine architecture of their own; all growing, by a natural growth, from an original stem—unborrowed and unimitated—and practised by artists highly skilled in their art, but ignorant of its history.