Thus four more weary centuries were added to the fruitless slumbers of Ideal Beauty among the temples of Greece. Meanwhile, in turn, the Byzantine, the Northman, the Frank, the Turk, and finally the bombarding Venetian, left their rude invading footprints among her most cherished haunts, and defiled her very sanctuary with the brutal touch of barbarous conquest. But the kiss which was to dissolve this enchantment was one of Love; and not Love, but cold indifference, or even scorn, was in the hearts of the rude warriors. So she slept on undisturbed in spirit, though broken and shattered in the external type, and it was reserved for a distant future to be made beautiful by her disenchantment and awakening.
In 1672, a pupil of the artist Lebrun, Jacques Carrey, accompanied the Marquis Ollier de Nointee, ambassador of Louis XIV., to Constantinople. On his way he spent two months at Athens, making drawings of the Parthenon, then in an excellent state of preservation. These drawings, more useful in an archaeological than an artistic point of view, are now preserved in the Bibliothèque Impériale of Paris. In 1676, two distinguished travellers, one a Frenchman, Dr. Spon, the other an Englishman, Sir George Wheler, tarried at Athens, and gave valuable testimony, in terms of boundless admiration, to the beauty and splendor of the temples of the Acropolis and its neighborhood, then quite unknown to the world. Other travellers followed these pioneers in the traces of that old civilization. But in 1687 Königsmark and his Venetian forces threw their hideous bombshells among the exquisite temples of the Acropolis, and, igniting thereby the powder-magazine with which the Turks had desecrated the Parthenon, tore into ruins that loveliest of the lovely creations of Hellas. It was not until the publishing of the famous work of Stuart and Revett on "The Antiquities of Athens," in 1762, that the world was made familiar with the external expressions of Greek Architecture. This publication at once created a curious revolution in the practice of architecture,—a revolution extending in its effects throughout Europe. A fever arose to reproduce Greek temples; and to such an extent was this vacant and thoughtless reproduction carried out, that at one time it bid fair to supplant the older Renaissance. The spirit of the new Renaissance, however, was one of mere imitation, and had not the elements of life and power to insure its ultimate success. No attempt was made to acclimate the exotic to suit the new conditions it was thus suddenly called upon to fulfil; for the sentiment which actuated it, and the Love with which it was created, were not understood. It was the mere setting up of old forms in new places; and the Grecian porticos and pediments and columns, which were multiplied everywhere from the models supplied by Stuart and Revett, and found their way profusely into this New World, still stare upon us gravely with strange alien looks. The impetuous current of modern life beats impatiently against that cumbrous solidity of peristyle which sheltered well in its day the serene philosophers of the Agora, but which is now the merest impediment in the way of modern traffic and modern necessities. But presently the spirit of formalism, engendered by the old Renaissance, took hold of the revived Greek lines, and stiffened them into acquiescence with a base mathematical system, which effectually deprived them of that life and reproductive power which belong only to a state of artistic freedom. They were reduced to rule and deadened in the very process of their revival.
So the Greek Ideal, though strangely transplanted thus into the noise of modern streets, was not awakened from its long repose by the clatter and roaring of our new civilization. As regarded the uses of life, it still slept in petrifactions of Pentelic marble. And when those petrifactions were repeated in modern quarries, it was merely the shell they gave; the spirit within had not yet broken through.
Greek lines, therefore, owed their earliest revival to the vagaries of a capricious taste, and the desire to give zest to the architecture of the day by their novelty. It was not for the sake of the new life there was in them, and of that pliable spirit of refinement so suited to the wise re-birth of ancient Love in Art. It is not surprising that some of the more modern masters of the old Renaissance, with whom that system had become venerable, from its universal use as the vehicle by which the greatest artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had expressed their thoughts and inspirations, regarded with peculiar distrust these outlandish innovations on the exclusive walks of their own architecture. For they saw only a few external forms which the beautiful principles of Hellenic Art had developed to fit an old civilization; the applicability of these primary principles to the refinement of the architectural expressions of a modern state of society they could not of course comprehend. About the year 1786, we find Sir William Chambers, the leading architect of his day in England, in his famous treatise on "The Decorative Part of Civil Architecture," giving elaborate and emphatic expression to his contempt of that Greek Art, which had presented itself to him in a guise well suited to cause misapprehension and error. "It must candidly be confessed," he says, "that the Grecians have been far excelled by other nations, not only in the magnitude and grandeur of their structures, but likewise in point of fancy, ingenuity, variety, and elegant selection." A heresy, indeed!
Two distinguished German artists—the one, Schinkel of Berlin, born in 1781,—the other, Klenze of Munich, born in 1784—were children when Chambers uttered these treasonable sentiments concerning Greek Art. Later, at separate times, these artists visited Greece, and so filled themselves with the feeling and sentiment of the Art there, so consecrated their souls with the appreciative study of its divine Love, that the patient Ideal at last awoke from its long slumbers, entered into the breathing human temples thus prepared for it by the pure rites of Aphrodite, and once more lived. Thus in the opening years of the nineteenth century was a new and reasonable Renaissance, not of an antique type, but of a spirit which had the gift of immortal youth, and uttered oracles of prophecy to these chosen Pythians of Art.
Through Schinkel, the pure Hellenic style, only hinted at previously in the attempts of less inspired Germans, such as Langhaus, who embodied his crude conceptions in the once celebrated Brandenburg Gate, was fairly and grandly revived in the Hauptwache Theatre and the beautiful Museum and the Bauschule and Observatory of Berlin. He competed with Klenze in a series of designs for the new palace at Athens, rich with a truly royal array of courts, corridors, saloons, and colonnades. But the evil fate which ever hangs over the competitions of genius was baleful even here, and the barrack-like edifice of Gütner was preferred. His latest conception was a design of a summer palace at Orianda, in the Crimea, for the Empress of Russia, where the purity of the old Greek lines was developed into the poetry of terraces and hanging-gardens and towers, far-looking over the Black Sea. Schinkel was called the Luther of Architecture; and the spiritual serenity which he breathed into the pomp and ceremonious luxury of the Art of his day seems to give him some title to this distinction. Yet, with all the freedom and originality with which he wrought out the new advent, he was perhaps rather too timid than too bold in his reforms,—adhering too strictly to the original letter of Greek examples, especially with regard to the orders. He could not entirely shake off the old incubus of Rome.
And so, though in a less degree, with Klenze. When, in 1825, Louis of Bavaria came to the throne, he was appointed Government Architect, and in this capacity gave shape to the noble dreams of that monarch, in the famous Glyptothèque, the Pinacothèque, the palace, and those civil and ecclesiastical buildings which render Munich one of the most monumental cities of Europe. It was his confessed aim to take up the work of the Renaissance artists, having regard to our increased knowledge of that antique civilization of which the masters of the sixteenth century could study only the most complex developments, and those models of Rome which were farthest removed from the pure fountain-head of Greece. "To-day," he said, "put in possession of the very principles of Hellenic Art, we can apply them to all our actual needs,—learning from the Greeks themselves to preserve our independence, and at the same time to be duly novel and unrestrained according to circumstances." These are certainly noble sentiments; and one cannot but wish, that, when, in 1830, Klenze was called upon to prepare plans for the grand Walhalla of Bavaria, he had remembered his sublime theory and worked up to its spirit, instead of recalling the Parthenon in his exterior and the Olympian temple of Agrigentum in his interior. The last effort of this distinguished artist was the building of three superb palaces for the museum of the Emperor at St. Petersburg, finished in 1851.
The seed thus planted fell upon good ground and brought forth a hundred-fold. Then, throughout Germany, the scholastic formalism of the old Renaissance began to fall into disrepute, and a finer feeling for the eloquence of pure lines began to show itself. The strict limitations of the classic orders were no longer recognized as impassable; a sentiment of artistic freedom, a consciousness of enlarged resources, a far wider range of form and expression, were evident in town and country, in civil and ecclesiastical structures; and with all this delightful and refreshing liberty was mingled that peculiar refinement of line which was revived from Greece and was the secret of this change. It was not over monumental edifices alone that this calm and thoughtful spirit was breathed, but the most playful fancies of domestic architecture derived from it an increased grace and purity, and the study of Love moved over them, elegant and light-footed as Camilla.
"The flower she touched on dipped and rose,
And turned to look at her."
This revival of Hellenic principles is now infusing life into modern German designs; and so well are these principles beginning to be understood, that architects do not content themselves with the mere reproduction of that narrow range of motives which was uttered in the temples of heroic Greece, but, under these new impulses, they gather in for their use all that has been done in ancient or modern Italy, in the Romanesque of Europe, in the Gothic period, in Saracenic or Arabic Art, in all the expressions of the old Renaissance. By the very necessity of the Greek line, they are rendered catholic and unexcluding in their choice of forms, but fastidious and hesitating in their interpretation of them into this new language of Art. Thus the good work is going on in Germany, and architecture lives there, thanks to those two illustrious pilgrims who brought back from the land of epics, not only the scallop-shells upon their shoulders, but in their hearts the consecration of Ideal Beauty.