Originally published in James “Athenian” Stuart, 1713–1788: The Rediscovery of Antiquity, edited by Susan Weber Soros. Published for The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, New York. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006. 515–548.

From the exhibition: James “Athenian” Stuart, 1713-1788: The Rediscovery of Antiquity.

---

Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens might be seen as a small stone thrown into a very large English pond which nonetheless produced ripples that moved in ever-widening circles throughout Europe and North America for up to two centuries. They can have had no conception of the impact their work would have on Western architecture, culture, and politics, from Glasgow to Munich, from Paris to Philadelphia. For architects and interior designers, for sculptors and artists, as well as for those politically inspired by the notion of ancient Greece as the birthplace of liberty, the plates and text of Antiquities of Athens were an unrivaled source of information. This chapter is the unexpected story of a visionary ideal that spread across the world from its beginnings in the Society of Dilettanti in Georgian England.

England and Nineteenth-Century Greek Revival

By 1816, when the fourth volume of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens was published, Sir William Chambers, whose anti-Grecian stance had been attacked so violently in the third volume, had been dead for twenty years. The Greek Revival was about to dominate British architecture, particularly its public buildings, for a quarter of a century. Joseph Woods, editor of the fourth volume, thus adopted a triumphalist note in his preface, claiming that “on the publication of the first volume, the knowledge of Grecian art burst upon the public in all its splendour”; that “the Grecian architecture was quite unknown: the genius of Stuart first pointed towards it”; and that Stuart’s Lichfield House, 15 St. James’s Square (1764–66), was “the first building erected in England of real Grecian Architecture.”1 His last claim, though enthusiastic, was untrue, but with it began the formulation of the myth about Stuart. The composition of the façade of Lichfield House was wholly Palladian: nothing about it was Greek except its Erechtheion Ionic capitals, and even the associated architrave and frieze were severely truncated.

British architects and artists were the first to appreciate the decorative potential of the Parthenon frieze. They had been familiar with such sculpture from the publication of the second volume of Antiquities of Athens, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that knowledge of the Parthenon reached a wider audience. From the moment the Elgin marbles were put on view in London, they had a profound impact. They were shown first to a limited audience in 1807 and then to the general public at the British Museum in 1816.2 Their fame spread further after casts of them were manufactured beginning in 1818. Ambitious examples of Parthenon-influenced design in London include the Ionic screen at Hyde Park Corner (1824–25) and the Athenaeum Club (1827–30). Both were by the architect Decimus Burton (1800–81) and were decorated by fine sculpture inspired by the Parthenon, designed and executed by the Scottish sculptor, John Henning, working with his sons, John and Samuel. Henning had first seen the Elgin marbles in 1811.

Thomas Hope (1769–1831), an early and important patron of the sculptor John Flaxman, studied Greek architecture in detail in Athens in 1799. In the same year, he acquired a large mansion by Robert Adam in Duchess Street, London, and made designs for adding a sizable picture gallery to it, with details drawn from the Hephaesteion (Theseum) and the Tower of the Winds. Executed for him by Charles Heathcote Tatham, this pioneering Grecian gallery was ready to be shown to the public in 1804, while Hope published it with the other principal interiors at Duchess Street in Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807).3 The bibliography that Hope provided in his book began emphatically with a reference to “Stuart’s Athens.” A new Picturesque aesthetic, however, also led Hope to complain of engravings of ancient buildings that “from these the least unfaithful, the least inaccurate even, such as Stuart’s Athens, Revett’s Ionia, no adequate idea can be obtained of that variety of effect produced by particular site, by perspective, a change of aspect, and a change of light.”4

Sir John Soane (1753–1837) wrote in the margin of his copy of the pamphlet in which Hope had made this observation, “true, and worthy of the most serious consideration of him who wishes to distinguish himself in the higher beauties of architecture.”5 Soane was, nonetheless, a lifelong admirer of Stuart. Indeed, Soane’s earliest commonplace book, dating from about 1776,6 included quotations from the first volume of Antiquities of Athens, as well as from Robert Morris’s Lectures on Architecture (1734), Sir William Chambers’s Treatise on Civil Architecture (1759), and Stephen Riou’s Grecian Orders of Architecture (1768), which was dedicated to Stuart.7 As early as 1788, Soane had designed a sumptuous state bed for William Beckford’s palatial house, Fonthill Splendens.8 The bed was surmounted by a large domical structure inspired by Stuart’s re-creation of the crowning feature of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.

Soane’s preparations from 1806 for lectures that he delivered between 1810 and 1820 as professor of architecture at the Royal Academy led him to study, and subsequently to hail, Stuart’s achievement. It is interesting that, in the course of condemning the fashion for rococo decoration in English interiors, Soane reminded his students that “at the very time when these miserable apologies for decoration seemed to have become general, fortunately for art, Stuart and Revett, those great luminaries, returned from Athens, and began to overturn the dreadful taste in decoration, which was spreading a baneful influence in every direction.9 In his lectures he referred to Stuart and Revett by name on eight occasions for their work as archaeologists, praising, for example, Stuart’s solution to the placement of mutules and triglyphs “in delineations … [where] mutules of equal breadths are placed over, and between, each triglyph.”10

A new Romantic sensibility, however, led Soane to remark that, because Stuart’s Lichfield House in St. James’s Square faced northeast, it “appears flat and uninteresting. But let it be placed in a different situation, the effect would be then as pleasing as it is now uninteresting: all the parts are beautiful.”11 Soane’s deep consciousness of the importance of light in architecture had been bolstered by his reading of the important treatise by Nicholas Le Camus de Mézirès, Le génie de l’architecture (1780), in which, for example, Le Camus complained that the Paris Mint (1768–75) by Jacques-Denis Antoine “seems monotonous … of which its northerly exposure is the sole cause.”12

In unpublished notes, moreover, Soane cited Stuart’s temple at Shugborough as supporting the opinion of the Picturesque theorist, Richard Payne Knight, that Greek temples were unsuitable as models for garden buildings.13 Soane, who had seen Greek temples in grandiose natural landscapes such as that at Segesta in Sicily, felt that versions of such temples in the modest parks and gardens of England were unacceptable. For similar reasons, he disapproved of William Wilkins’s Grange Park, Hampshire (1809), the most complete templar house ever erected in Britain, combining on an heroic scale elements of the Hephaesteion (Theseum) and the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus in Athens.

Soane himself, however, more than any British architect of his generation, used the baseless, fluted or unfluted, Greek Doric order to powerful effect in his buildings and designs. It was appropriate that the editors of the supplementary fifth volume of Antiquities of Athens (1830), C. R. Cockerell, Thomas Leverton Donaldson, William Jenkins, William Kinnard, and William Railton, should dedicate it to Soane, “in admiration of his munificence in promoting the Fine Arts and the science of Antiquity.”14

In common with Wilkins, many early nineteenthcentury architects, such as Robert Smirke, John Foster, Henry Goodridge, and William and Henry William Inwood, incorporated into their buildings replicas of works such as the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, based on plates in Antiquities of Athens. The Inwoods even included doorways taken from molds of those on the Erechtheion at their St. Pancras New Church (1819). The caryatid portico at the same church was a sensational re-creation of the entire Porch of the Caryatids at the Erechtheion, as illustrated in Antiquities of Athens, though the caryatids were far from exact copies. The octagonal tower combined elements from the Tower of the Winds and the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, as did the striking Lansdown Tower at Bath (1824–27), designed by Goodridge for William Beckford. Such a combination strangely ignores the great disparity in size between the two Athenian buildings, the Tower of the Winds which is monumental in scale, and the Choragic Monument which is diminutive.

Like St. Pancras New Church, Belsay Hall in Northumberland was an inventive and highly sophisticated application of Greek forms to a non-Greek function. It was built in 1807–17 from designs by its owner, Sir Charles Monck (1779–1867). Having visited Athens on his honeymoon in 1805, where he studied the monuments with Sir William Gell (1777–1836), Monck created this stark Greco-Roman villa built round a peristyle and approached through a giant portico in antis. It was based on the Hephaesteion (Theseum) in Athens, with details of the Doric order as well as the Erechtheion Ionic order in the peristyle and in the bookcases in the library, derived from the engravings in Antiquities of Athens.15 In the peristyle, Monck characteristically omitted the most succulent feature of this order, the anthemion necking band, while the bookcases are even more austere.

Another powerful Greek Revivalist was the architect, Edward Haycock (1790–1870), a pupil of Sir Jeffrey Wyatville. His Clytha Park, Monmouthshire (1824–28), has an exquisite giant portico in the Erechtheion Ionic order, while his Millichope Park, Shropshire (1835–40), features a six-column Ionic portico above a novel and dramatic basement entrance flanked by two primitivist columns in an unfluted stripped Doric.16 With something of the flavor of funereal architecture, this may be indebted to the arrangement of ancient tombs, such as that at Mylasa, Turkey, with its basement entrance. This was illustrated in Antiquities of Ionia from material supplied by Nicholas Revett and Richard Chandler.17

Meanwhile, Wilkins had employed the Erechtheion Ionic order at Downing College, Cambridge (1806–21), where he also designed an ambitious porter’s lodge, inspired by the Propylaea. His first book, Antiquities of Magna Graecia (1807), a pioneering study of the Greek antiquities in Sicily and Italy, was modeled on the first three volumes of Antiquities of Athens.18 This was followed by his Atheniensia (1816),19 while in his United University Club, Pall Mall East, London (1816–17), Wilkins incorporated porticos with Greek Doric and Erechtheion Ionic orders, and a staircase hall adorned with casts of the Parthenon frieze. This model was to be followed in three other London clubs that sported casts of Greek friezes whether inside or out: Decimus Burton’s Athenaeum (1827–30), Charles Barry’s Travellers’ Club and his Reform Club, both of the 1830s. Wilkins’s University College, London (1826), boasted a gigantic ten columned Corinthian portico, based on the Temple of Jupiter Olympius in Athens. Stuart had devoted much attention to this unfinished temple, partly as a way of attacking Le Roy who had identified its remains incorrectly in I758.20

When Wilkins published The Civil Architecture of Vitruvius (1813, 1817), he included a substantial introduction of seventy-six pages, called “An Historical View of the Rise and Progress of Architecture among the Greeks,” which had been written anonymously by the Earl of Aberdeen, to whom the book was dedicated.21 In 1809 Wilkins had provided a saloon for Aberdeen’s London house, with columns in the Erechtheion Ionic order and a frieze inspired by the Elgin marbles. Aberdeen later expanded his introduction into a sympathetic book about the aesthetics of Greek architecture, citing Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens frequently and arguing that the celebrated definition of beauty by the writer and statesman Edmund Burke had been displaced by the discovery of the arts of Greece. He noted that the sixth of Burke’s seven defining qualities of beauty—that colors should not be “very strong and glaring”22—was contradicted by the Parthenon where “the colour, although now somewhat softened by the effects of time and weather, was formerly the most bright and glaring which it is possible to imagine, viz. the dazzling whiteness of the marble of Pentelicus.”23 Despite his admiration for the Parthenon, Aberdeen believed that Greek models should not be copied, but rather translated to suit English needs. In his opinion, “any architect who should slavishly regulate his practice by a strict adherence to the models of antiquity, without fully consulting our peculiar habits and customs, and considering the nature of our climate would probably meet with the neglect he deserved.”24

Sir William Gell, a friend of Sir Charles Monck, published books on Troy, Greece, and Italy, including The Itinerary of Greece (1810) and Itinerary of the Morea (1817).25 He followed Stuart’s rather improbable association of the modern inhabitants of Greece with the ancient Athenians, arguing that “notwithstanding the lapse of twenty centuries … in Greece the same physical causes which produced the original distinction between the inhabitants of neighbouring districts, still operate with such force, that no other country affords so many traces of ancient manners, or recalls so frequently the recollection of its former inhabitants.”26 In the second edition of Itinerary of Greece (1827), when the Greek Revival was in full swing, Gell introduced a more polemical note by hailing Stuart’s achievement in linking archaeology and modern design. He now claimed that this was “of most essential service of the arts by first showing to the world, how very unlike the architecture of the Greeks is that which has disfigured the cities of northern Europe under the name of Grecian.”27 In a mood of optimism, he added that “it is probable that in time the science will be gradually diffused, and that in another century the grandeur and unity of Grecian architecture may reappear.”28

Further support came from Joseph Gwilt (1784–1863)in his Encyclopaedia of Architecture (1842), which contains his awkwardly expressed praise of “the chasteness and purity which … [Stuart and Revett] had, with some success, endeavoured to introduce into the buildings of England, and in which their zeal had enlisted many artists, had to contend against the opposite and vicious taste of Robert Adam … [and] his depraved compositions.”29 Gwilt’s monumental work ran into many subsequent editions so that his opinions of the relative merits of Stuart and Adam were still being published in 1891.

Five years after Gwilt had penned these words, the architect James Elmes (1782–1862) went so far as to claim that in 1847 “no event that ever occurred in the history of architecture in England, and thence throughout all Europe, produced so sudden, decided, and beneficial effect as did the works of James Stuart.”30 Certainly, one of the most striking aspects of Stuart’s influence was on a whole generation of practicing architects who felt the need to publish archaeological works on Greek architecture and for whom he was a role model. After William Wilkins, these included: Francis Bedford who published The Unedited Antiquities of Attica (1817) with Sir William Gell; John Peter Gandy (later, Deering); and C. R. Cockerell, who contributed to the additional volume of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens (1830) and published a ground-breaking study, The Temples of Jupiter Panhellenius at Aegina and of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae (1860).31 Henry William Inwood produced a monograph, The Erechtheion at Athens (1827), that became the standard work on this temple.32 Thomas Leverton Donaldson contributed to Antiquities of Athens (1830). Francis Cranmer Penrose specialized in the so-called optical refinements in Greek architecture and published the monumental Investigation of the Principles of Athenian Architecture (1851), a book recently described as “the best work ever printed on the Parthenon: it is a monument of scientific method, consistency and unparalleled human skill.”33

Preliminary remarks in the fourth volume of Revett’s Antiquities of Ionia, published by the Society of Dilettanti in 1881 noted that before Stuart, “it was Roman taste and magnificence that was admired, and Roman forms and details that were copied.”34 The author, probably James Fergusson, went on to claim:

It was not until the publication of the first volumes of Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, in 1761 and 1787, that the learned practically became aware that Greece possessed a separate style of her own, more elegant and refined than anything that Rome had ever produced, and, though probably less flexible for modern purposes, far more worthy of study than the style that had so long exclusively occupied the attention of Europe.35

Contemplation of the inadequacies of Greek Revival buildings had already led the architect C. R. Cockerell (1788–1863) to believe that too rigid an application of Greek forms was unsuitable for modern buildings, even though he was a passionate admirer of Greece. After Soane, Cockerell is generally agreed to have been the most distinguished classical architect at work in England in the first half of the nineteenth century.36 He had early been familiar with Stuart for, as a boy at Westminster School, he undoubtedly had seen the remarkable backdrop depicting Athens, which Stuart had painted in 1758 for the annual Latin play and which was used for long afterward.37 Cockerell rushed to see the Elgin Marbles in their shed in Park Lane as early as February 1807, making a sketch of a section of the north frieze.38 On his long Grand Tour (1810–I7), he made significant archaeological discoveries, notably at Bassae and Agrigentum, which overthrew many previous assumptions about Greek architecture. He broke with tradition in several areas. His awareness that Greek architects used molded wall-mass and engaged columns questioned the traditional notion of the “honesty” of Greek structure. He understood the role of Greek sculpture as “the voice of architecture.” He discovered polychromy at the temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina and identified the entasis of the columns of the Parthenon. Writing excitedly about entasis to his former master, the architect Smirke, in 1811, he described it as “almost curious fact, which has hitherto escaped Stuart & our most accurate observers—indeed, it is so delicate that unless one measures it, the eye alone cannot perceive it.”39

Like Leo von Klenze in Bavaria, but unlike Schinkel in Prussia, Cockerell was so distinguished as an archaeologist that he had no need to draw on Stuart for sources and in fact contributed to the additional volume of Antiquities (1830). In an early commission at Oakley Park, Shropshire, begun in 1819, he incorporated two porticos of the Doric order of the Temple of Apollo on Delos, as illustrated in Antiquities of Athens, but in mature works such as the Ashmolean Museum and Taylorian Institution, Oxford (1841–44), he went quite beyond the world of Stuart to create a rich synthesis of Greek, Roman, and Mannerist architecture.

Scotland as the “Athens of the North”: Edinburgh and Glasgow

The plates of Antiquities of Athens were used extensively for numerous Greek Revival buildings that established Edinburgh as the “Athens of the North,” notably the Royal High School (1825–29) by Thomas Hamilton and the National Monument, an uncompleted replica of the Parthenon of I 824–29, by C. R. Cockerell and W. H. Playfair. It is not always noted, however, that Glasgow became an equally Grecian city. The great Glaswegian architect, Alexander “Greek” Thomson (1817–75), a Grecian enthusiast himself, felt that the Greek Revival had been limited by being based on a small number of structures on or near the Acropolis in Athens. These, of course, were known principally through Stuart and Revett’s engravings of them. He complained that “this was surely scant material from which to furnish the world with architecture. Yet that was what the promoters of the Greek Revival proposed to do, and they failed not because of the scantiness of the material, but because they could not see through the material into the laws upon which that architecture rested. They failed to master their style, and so became its slaves.”40

Thomson observed, somewhat ironically, of these monuments that “like the Muses they are nine,” seven of which he said appeared in Glasgow. He noted these Glaswegian examples as the Court House (1807) by William Stark, inspired by the Parthenon; the Wellington Street Church (1825) by John Baird, with the Ionic order of the temple on the Ilissus River; the Royal Bank of Scotland (1827) by Archibald Elliot, featuring the Erechtheion Ionic order; Clarendon Place (1839–41) by Alexander Taylor, with the Tower of the Winds order; the Custom House (1839–40) by John Taylor, with the Theseion Doric order below an attic from the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus; and the County Buildings (1842) by Clarke and Bell, with the order and frieze of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.

Incomparably greater than the architects of any of these buildings, Thomson was one of the most distinguished heirs to “Athenian” Stuart, acquiring, like him, a Hellenistic name tag. He produced a timeless trabeated architecture with Egyptian and Greek elements in Glasgow, such as Moray Place (1857–59) and St. Vincent Street Church (1859).41 He was powerfully influenced by the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus (319 B.C.), which he praised perceptively as “an example of the freedom with which a master may accommodate familiar forms to an entirely novel combination.”42 The fact that he always described it as though it were still in existence, presumably unaware that it had been destroyed in 1826, shows the. extent to which he must have relied on the engravings in Antiquities of Athens (vol. 2, ca. 1790).43 Because use of this monument became a hallmark of the Greek Revival, Stuart and Revett’s plates of it were among their most valuable. The only other records of it, by Wheler, Pococke, and Le Roy, were far inferior, Le Roy providing only a perspective view that lacked precise architectural details.44

The Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus broke the conventional rules of classical architecture by introducing various peculiarities. It had a solid placed in the middle of the façade, and this pier was narrower than those at either end of the façade. The expected triglyphs and metopes in the frieze were replaced by a continuous row of eleven laurel wreaths. Moreover, its open, trabeated, or mullioned frame had a functional flavor that exercised an appeal to modern architects as being more adaptable to a variety of contemporary uses than the full panoply of the orders. It also featured in the only nineteenth-century building in England of comparable quality to Thomson’s work in Scotland: St. George’s Hall, Liverpool (1839–54) by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, Robert Rawlinson, and C. R. Cockerell, which had monumental side elevations of an ultimately Thrasyllan articulation.

German Idealism and the Classical Ideal

In no country did Philhellenism come to dominate so completely as Germany, where it lasted throughout the nineteenth century.45 Winckelmann’s call for the imitation of Greek art, especially sculpture, became part of a program of new state-funded cultural institutions in which, for example, scholars and politicians united in grand archaeological projects such as the acquisition of the Pergamum A1tar.46 The key monument of early neoclassical architecture in Germany had been the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin (1788–89) by Carl Gotthard Langhans (1732–1808). Inspired by the Propylaea in Athens, which Stuart and Revett had not yet published, it must have been based on Le Roy’s engravings, for Langhans had not been to Athens. Demonstrating his belief that the moderns had no need to copy Greek buildings, Le Roy showed the Propylaea as a symmetrical building in the only full-scale restoration study in his book.47 Stuart is known to have given copies of Antiquities of Athens to the library of University of Göttingen.48 Together with information from Stuart and Revett, the Brandenburg Gate became the model for subsequent monumental Grecian gateways, such as that by Thomas Harrison at Chester Castle, in Chester, England (1810–22), and another by Leo von Klenze in the Propylaea at Munich (1846–60). All these buildings were on flat terrain, however, and thus fail to capture the power of the Athenian Propylaea which towers dramatically above the visitor on a rocky, precipitous site. Stuart’s account of the Propylaea in volume two of Antiquities was inadequate because circumstances had forced him to leave Athens without investigating it.49

The model provided by the Brandenburg Gate was taken up in a starker and more dramatic form by the brilliant young architect, Friedrich Gilly (1772–1800). Dying young, he built little, but his powerful Doric designs, notably his monument to Frederick the Great (1796), were widely known to contemporaries in Berlin.50 These included Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841), the greatest architect of the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany. He was probably also the architect who put the work of Stuart and Revett to the greatest and most sophisticated use. Schinkel studied with Friedrich Gilly and Gilly’s father David and had access to books in the elder Gilly’s library, including Antiquities of Athens, Le Roy’s Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce, and Alois Hirt’s lectures on antique sculptures.51

A translation into German of Antiquities of Athens was published in 1829–33, but before then Schinkel drew on Stuart for details of his visionary painting of 1825, Blick in Griechensland Blüte (A Glance at the Golden Age of Greece).52 Though a nostalgic fantasy, the painting also had the real purpose of urging the Berlin of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia to regenerate itself, taking as a model the struggle of the Greeks for liberation in the Persian Wars. The painting contains a quotation from Aristotle’s hymn referring to Arete, wife of the king of the Phaeacians in the Odyssey, praising the self-sacrifice of warriors. Showing the construction of a temple with a vast landscape in the background containing a fabulous classical city, Schinkel’s enormous painting made a powerful popular impact. It depicted handsome sun-browned craftsmen, protected by an awning, at work on a curiously formed temple or public building with a great figured frieze, which Schinkel based not on the actual remains of the Parthenon frieze but on Stuart and Revett’s plates of it.53

Like Alexander Thomson, Schinkel frequently relied on a trabeated architectural language, a key feature of which was taken from the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus in Athens, as illustrated in Antiquities of Athens. In Schinkel’s Sammlung, he explained of his Schauspielhaus (Play House) in Berlin (1818–21) that he had “tried to emulate Greek forms and methods of construction in so far as this is possible in such a complex work.”54 He went on to praise the Thrasyllan model on functional grounds since it allowed window openings of the maximum size. He was also one of the many architects who used the bas-reliefs of the wind gods on the Tower of the Winds, as illustrated in the first volume of Antiquities of Athens. He placed these strikingly on the four corner towers of his Schloss Tegel, Berlin, in 1821–24.

More inventively, when he learned from Stuart and Revert that a Roman temple of Augustus had once stood on the Acropolis in axis with the Parthenon, he chose this location for the main court of the palace for the King of Greece, which he planned for the Acropolis in 1834.55 In the grounds of Schloss Glienicke, he built the startling Grosse Neugierde (Great Curiosity) in 1835–37, a belvedere containing a large circular colonnade of columns of the Corinthian order of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. This is surmounted by a cupola inspired by the same monument, crowned with a cast bronze reconstruction of the tripod, like Stuart’s creation more than sixty years earlier at Shugborough.

Christian Grosch (1801–65) was a Danish architect of German descent whose numerous works in Oslo included the Greek Doric Exchange (1826–52) and the university (1838), the plans for which were submitted to Schinkel for his comment. With their trabeated façades they are strikingly Schinkelesque and form a major urban composition which is also indebted to Schinkel’s ideal of civic planning.

While Schinkel dominated architecture in Prussia, Leo von Klenze (1784–1864), with his grandiose and, indeed, largely realized vision, was the leading figure in Bavaria.56 As he was a Greek archaeologist of some distinction, he did not need to rely on the publications of others, as did architects such as Schinkel. However, he studied the works of Stuart and Revett57 as well as of Le Roy in conceiving his Grecian masterpieces, notably the Walhalla outside Regensburg and the Propylaea in Munich. The Walhalla, initiated in 1814 and built in1830–42, was modeled on the Parthenon and was dedicated to the memory of the greatest Germans of all periods. On its stunning site above the Danube, it was the climax of the Greek Revival, though its rich polychromy went beyond the vision of Stuart like so many nineteenth-century revival buildings.

Klenze’s Propylaea in Munich, which had been projected in 1817, was built in 1846–60 in the Königsplatz as the western entrance to the city, which Klenze had rebuilt as a royal, governmental, and cultural center. Commemorating the Greek War of lndependence, the pediments and friezes of the Propylaea were carved by Ludwig von Schwanthaler with scenes from the war. Architecturally, the central gateway made reference to the Athenian Propylaea but was flanked by much higher pavilions or pylons that had an almost Egyptian flavor, their trabeated upper stories featuring Thrasyllan piers.

The Impact of Polychromy

The alarm which has sometimes been aroused by polychromy in Greek architecture and sculpture seems related to a fear of color in Western art. No small matter, this long predates Winckelmann, lying deep and unacknowledged in many attitudes. Thus it has recently been boldly claimed that “chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity… colour is made to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body, usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer, or the pathological … [or] colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic … Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both.”58

The notion of Greek polychromatic sculpture was introduced to an astonished French audience by Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755– 1849) in Le Jupiter olympien (1814).59 The influential permanent secretary to the Académie des Beaux-Arts from 1816 to 1839, Quatremère de Quincy was the leading architectural theorist and heir to Winckelmann in the promotion of Greek idealism in France. The first French translation of Antiquities of Athens had appeared in four volumes in 1808–24.60

Sir William Gell defended Greek polychromy in his book, Pompeiana, written with J. P. Gandy, in which he noted that “the taste of the Romans in preferring the coloured marbles has been censured, and the works of the Greeks referred to as purer models for imitation. The fact however, is, that no nation ever exhibited a greater passion for gaudy colours, with which, in the absence of the rarer marbles, they covered the surfaces of the beautiful pentelic.”61 Pointing as evidence to the Erechtheion and to Greek sculpture, Gell wrote that “Blue marble is mixed with white in one of their best examples, the temple of Minerva Polias, at Athens; while even their statues were seldom left colourless.”62 Gell acknowledged the help he had received from C. R. Cockerell who provided drawings of Pompeiian wall paintings and the plan of the House of Pansa.63

Another central figure in relating archaeology to current architecture was the architect and scholar Jacques-Ignace Hittorff (1792–1867) who was a friend of C. R. Cockerell and, a rarity among French architects, an Anglophile. With a high regard for British classical archaeology, in 1827 he published a translation of Gell and Gandy’s Pompeiana, and in 1832, a translation of Gandy, Bedford, and Gell’s Unedited Antiquities of Attica. He issued this to be in conformity with Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, of which his translation appeared posthumously in 1881.64

In 1822 Hittorff traveled to Italy where he met Thomas Leverton Donaldson, who fired him with the notion that Greek architecture had been colored. Hittorff now established color as the basis of life in Greek architecture in his books, Architecture antique de La Sicile (1827) and Restitution du temple d’Empédocle à Selinunte, ou l’architecture polychrome chez les Grecs (1845–51). His colored plates have a vibrancy that can still shock today.65 His architectural masterpiece as an architect was the Church of St. Vincent-de-Paul in Paris (1830–46), its mullioned towers owing something to the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus. Its façade was enlivened with colored enameled panels, while there was rich coloring within, including frescoes by followers of Ingres echoing a procession like that on the Parthenon frieze.66 The new emphasis on color was seen as dethroning Greek architecture from the divine plateau where, burning in a white light, it had been elevated by Fréart de Chambray, Winckelmann, and Stuart. Students at the École des Beaux-Arts who had won scholarships to the Académie de France à Rome studied Stuart avidly for information about colored ornament for their envoi, sets of architectural drawings of an ancient Roman monument in Italy that they were obliged to submit to Paris in their fourth year.67 The application of painted ornament, because it was essentially temporary, seemed to speak the popular language of the marketplace, almost of the funfair. The academy was shocked by an envoi on the temples at Paestum, sent in 1828 by Pierre-François Labrouste (1801–75). Not only he had chosen a Greek, rather than Roman subject, but he also suggested that one of the monuments was not a temple but a civil assembly hall for the people, which he showed in use with trophies, inscriptions, and graffiti.68 The myth of Greece seemed at an end.

Polychromy became the central issue of architectural enquiry and debate in Europe from the 1830s, and French and German scholars carefully searched Antiquities of Athens for evidence about the use of color. In Germany, Gottfried Semper (1803–79), perhaps the greatest architectural theorist of the nineteenth century,69 published Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity (1834), citing Stuart as part of the archaeological documentation for color.70 This forty-nine-page pamphlet was the first expression of Semper’s lifelong belief that color was paramount to Greek artistic thinking. Complaining that Winckelmann had seen sculpture as white, he pointed out that “Stuart’s work, admirable for its time, appeared soon after him, and permitted a more correct view of Greek antiquity.”71 Significantly, he noted of Antiquities of Athens that “the indications of antique wall painting that it contained went almost unnoticed, since they were presented without enthusiasm—as though with disbelief and resistance. They were too foreign to the time.”72

The views of the Scottish architect Thomson, born in 1817, benefited from two discoveries about Greek architecture made after Stuart’s time: the existence of extensive polychromatic decoration and knowledge of entasis, or optical refinements, both discovered by Cockerell and later investigated in detail by Hittorff and Penrose respectively. By 1874 Thomson could thus point to “the exquisite refinement of detail” of the Parthenon, which included some details “so extremely delicate that they escaped the very keen observation of Stuart and Revert, who were the first to delineate the buildings with any degree of accuracy.”73 Of the shimmering color on the Acropolis, Thomson exclaimed: “Fancy all these beautiful forms composed of marble of pearly whiteness, and the azure crimson, and gold with which they were partially tinted, seen from a distance. The colors, blending with white, would yield a chaste iridescence resembling that of an opal.”74 This is a vision which would have appealed to Schinkel but not to Stuart.

Greek Democracy for the United States

English emigrant architects, notably Latrobe, Hadfield, and Haviland, brought the achievement of Stuart and Revett to America. Thomas Jefferson, an amateur architect who served two terms as president from 1801 to 1809, promoted Greek architecture as the expression of the democratic ideals of the new republic. He was able to fulfill a long-held ambition of acquiring Antiquities of Athens, buying the first volume when he was in Paris as American ambassador from 1784 to 1789.75 He was aware that, since the forms of Greek architecture had not been in use between the ancient world and the late-eighteenth century, they had not become overly associated with monarchs, princes, and popes, as had Roman architecture. Grecian forms, therefore, seemed ideal for building a new democracy.

This appropriateness had been hinted at in Antiquities of Athens, which suggested that Greek art and architecture flourished at a time of political freedom.76 Eighteenth century England, however, still saw itself as the heir to Augustan and imperial Rome, so that it was open to America to adopt the role of heir to republican Greece. This process was initiated for Jefferson by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who had been a pupil in England of C. R. Cockerell’s father, Samuel Pepys Cockerell. In 1796 Latrobe immigrated to America where he became the father of American Grecian architecture and, indeed, of the architectural profession itself.

Though several copies of Antiquities of Athens were circulating in America before the Revolution,77 it was not until Latrobe that the quality of Greek details and forms began to echo in new buildings, such as his Bank of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (designed 1798, built 1799–1801, demolished 1867). Built of local marble, this building featured two six-columned porticos of the Ilissus Ionic order and contained an elegant domed rotunda. Latrobe’s Harvie-Gamble House, Richmond, Virginia (1798), incorporated a porch with columns of the Delian Doric order, illustrated by Stuart and Revett, with fluting at only the top and bottom of the shafts.

Arguing that “Greece was free” and that this was “the source of her eminence,” Latrobe claimed that “in Greece every citizen felt himself important … [so] the path of glory was equally open to all.”78 He pointed out that “Greece was free when the arts flourished, and that freedom derived from them much of her support and permanence,” and drew attention to his Bank of the United States as the first building in America “in which marble was employed as the principal material of its front,” implying a fruitful association of freedom with prosperity and with banking in particular.79

Latrobe also wrote uncompromisingly to Jefferson that “principles of good taste are rigid in Grecian architecture. I am a bigoted Greek in the domination of the Roman architecture of Baalbec, Palmyra, and Spalatro. “80 In practice he was far more accommodating, happy to incorporate features such as the Roman dome in his beautiful Roman Catholic Cathedral, Baltimore, Maryland (1805–20). Its grace and lightness owed something to, the work in London of John Soane. Despite Latrobe’s start in the 1790s, it was not for some years that his Grecian mode was followed, notably by his pupils, Robert Mills and William Strickland.

The two principal English immigrants after Latrobe were George Hadfield (1763–1826) and John Haviland (1792–1852). Hadfield, a pupil of James Wyatt and an enthusiastic student of Greek architecture, immigrated to America in 1795. His knowledge of Antiquities of Athens was evident in his designs for the executive office for the first U.S. Treasury Building (1796–97), as well as his City Hall (1820–26) and Second Bank of the United States (1824), all in Washington.

Haviland, who studied from 1811 to 1814 with James Elmes, a passionate admirer of Stuart, supervised the construction of Elmes’s design for St. John’s Chapel, Chichester, England (1812–13). This has a polygonal form echoing the Tower of the Winds and also a cupola that is a miniature version of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. Haviland immigrated to America in 1816 and published The Builder’s Assistant, the first textbook for an American audience to illustrate the Greek orders.81 His Franklin Institute Building, Philadelphia (1825–26), featured a starkly impressive Thrasyllan façade, with four piers rather than the three of the original.

Robert Mills, promoted by Jefferson as a young man, was a pupil of Latrobe until 1808. His Monumental Church, Richmond, Virginia (1812–17), one of the most powerful and inventive buildings of the Greek Revival in America, has many imaginative features and a portico with columns of the Delian Doric order.

William Strickland (1788–1854), another pupil of Latrobe beginning in 1804, studied the volumes on Greek monuments in Latrobe’s library, including Antiquities of Athens. Strickland made his career with the design of the Second Bank of the United States, Philadelphia (1818–24), its two octastyle Greek Doric porticos based on the measured drawings of the Parthenon by Stuart and Revett. In his Merchants’ Exchange, Philadelphia (1832–34), Strickland deployed the Greek Corinthian order of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, the first use of this form in American architecture. He based it on the measured drawings in Antiquities of Athens, while took inspiration for the unusual curved portico below it from C. R. Cockerell’s Literary and Philosophical Institution, Bristol (1821–23), which he had studied on a visit to England in 1825. Strickland’s United States Naval Asylum, Philadelphia (1826–33), included a portico in the Ilissus lonic order, while his magnificent State Capitol, Nashville, Tennessee (1845–59), combined an Erechtheion Ionic portico with a Lysicratean tower. Strickland supposedly told his assistants that a successful architect need look no further for models than the plates of Antiquities of Athens. One fine product of this practice was the Custom House, Wall Street, New York (1833–42), by Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, its side elevations powerfully articulated with rows of giant Thrasyllus piers dividing the windows.

Minard Lafever (1798–1854) was a successful New York architect and author whose books, containing plates inspired by Antiquities of Athens, influenced the design and decoration of current domestic architecture, though his own work was more often in the Gothic, Italianate, and Egyptian styles. His Young Builder’s General Instructor (1829) had plates copied from Metropolitan Improvements (1827–29) by James Elmes. Other titles by Lafever included The Modern Builder’s Guide (1833) and The Beauties of Modern Architecture (1835).82

Another key figure in the spread of information derived from Stuart and Revett was Asher Benjamin (1771–1845), prolific both as an architect and as an author of pattern books, such as Practice of Architecture and The Architect, or Complete Builder’s Guide.83 Practical and beautiful, they were among the most influential of all Greek Revival handbooks, especially in the American South, Midwest, and New England.

It is an extraordinary tribute to a movement that maybe said to have been begun by Stuart and Revett that “by the mid-nineteenth century there was hardly a sizeable town in Europe or North America that did not somewhere possess the cast of at least one of Elgin’s marbles.”84 A climax was reached in America when a full-size replica of the Parthenon was built for the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition, Nashville, in 1897.85

Reactions Against Stuart in the Nineteenth Century

The numerous Greek Revival buildings in Britain, Germany, and North America were nourished by the black-and-white engravings of Stuart and Revett and whitened casts of sculptural friezes. Their character reflected the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, “modern, international, sceptical, forward-looking, scientific, and exact.”86 This is what was still wanted in the early nineteenth century, but by the 1830s forces were at work that would undermine this world by a growing emphasis on nationalist ideals. Lord Elgin himself had the misfortune of being confronted with this when, despite his forceful campaign in favor of adopting the Grecian style for the new Houses of Parliament,87 it was decided that they should be “Gothic or Elizabethan.” Criticizing what he called “Gothomania,” Elgin’s private secretary, William Hamilton, urged that the new buildings should “remind us not of those dark ages … but of those brighter days, when under the banner of freedom the human intellect attained its highest eminence.”88 The choice of “Gothic or Elizabethan” which was a romantic gesture intended to express the historic continuity of the British parliamentary system, had also been encouraged by the theory of the Picturesque with its stress on the importance of attending to the genius loci: for example, the Houses of Parliament occupied an historic medieval site and the new building was to incorporate the fourteenth-century Westminster Hall.

Writers such as James Elmes and Joseph Gwilt, who praised Stuart in the 1840s, were born in the 1780s and were a living part of the early Greek Revival from which they could hardly escape. Color, in particular colored ornament, seemed the way out of the contemporary architectural malaise, whether in the rich polychromy of Pugin’s Gothic or of Hittorff’s Greek. A central figure in this world was Owen Jones (1809–74), who was responsible in 1851 for the red, blue, and yellow color scheme of the Crystal Palace in which he designed the controversial Greek Court. He published a defiant defense of his design in An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court (1854).89 Acknowledging the pioneering work of Stuart and Revett in making known the presence of “painted ornaments,” Jones regretted that some of them had been “engraved in their work as if in relief,” adding, “but artists were for long after unwilling to accept these fragments as evidence that an entire system of ornamentation prevailed in the Greek buildings.”90 He answered his own question about whether temples were “painted and ornamented” by stating, “entirely so, so that neither the colour of the marble nor even its surface was preserved.” This extreme view has never been widely held, but Jones referred to his discussions about polychromy with Hittorff and concluded his essay with a translation of Semper’s section on polychromy in his Vier Elemente der Baukunst (1851).91

Jones complained in 1853 that “when Stuart and Revett published their work on Greece it generated a mania for Greek architecture, from which we have barely recovered,”92 yet in his influential Grammar of Ornament (1864) he showed dazzling examples of decoration, including Greek, Roman, Gothic, and Islamic. In his text he expressed characteristically Victorian moralizing modes of thought when he complained that “Greek ornament was wanting, however, in one of the great charms which should always accompany ornament,—viz. Symbolism. It was meaningless, purely decorative, never representative, and can hardly be said to be constructive”; Pompeiian decoration “often times approaches vulgarity”; while the aim of Roman temples was “self-glorification,” so that “every part is overloaded with ornament.”93

In Scotland, Alexander Thomson was, in many ways, an anachronism in maintaining Greek Revival language into the 1870s, for in England it had been overtaken, first by the Italianate Revival and then by the Gothic Revival. The critic W. H. Leeds preceded his monograph on Charles Barry’s Travellers’ Club, Pall Mall (1830–32), a landmark in the Italianate Revival, with an essay that was a distinguished but devastating attack on the Greek Revival. Associating this with Stuart, he claimed that “the Grecian style is deficient in variety; yet, as if it was not sufficiently monotonous of itself, our practice has been to render it more so by stereotyping columns and capitals—contrary to the practice of the Greeks themselves, who allowed a considerable latitude in regard to matters of detail.”94 He believed that “piece-meal copying of the separate parts is, most assuredly, a very different thing from entering into the spirit of Grecian architecture,” though he admitted of Doric and Ionic columns that they cannot “be attacked or censured, seeing they are fac-similes of warranted examples, as may at once be attested by our turning to Stuart’s ‘Athens’.”95

James Fergusson (1806–86), in his popular study, History of the Modern Styles in Architecture (1862), condemned the Greek Revival totally, complaining that ” the Grecian Doric is singularly untractable and ill-suited to modern purposes.”96 He was unimpressed by Stuart, writing that “though Stuart practised as an architect after his return from Greece, he does not seem to have met with much patronage, nor did he then succeed in introducing his favourite style practically to his countrymen.” Rightly observing that the revival occurred later, he noted that “once the fashion was introduced it became a mania … an easily detected sham.”97

Fergusson set his comments in the context of the fascinating links which he drew between poetry and architecture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He suggested that Joseph Addison was a parallel to William Chambers, and James Thomson to Robert Adam, but regretted that this harmony had since been broken. He welcomed the simplification in the language of poetry at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when “the poets had exhausted every form of imitation” and therefore “wholly freed themselves from the chains their predecessors had prided themselves in wearing.”98 He lamented, however, that “just when the architects might have done the same, Stuart practically discovered and revealed to his countrymen the beauties of Greek Art,” pointing out tartly that “the poets had had the distemper; the architects had still to pass through it.”99 He rejoiced that “at last a reaction set in against this absurdity,” but deplored that this led architecture to a further bondage: this time to Gothic architecture, but still not to sense.

George Wightwick (1802–72), an unhappy amanuensis of John Soane in 1826–27, published The Palace of Architecture (1840), a tribute to Romantic eclecticism in which, though criticizing Greek Revival architecture, he urged the reader to do “homage” to ancient Greek architecture itself as “palpable Truth.”100 The notion of architecture as truth lay behind the doctrines of the Gothic Revivalist, A. W. N. Pugin, and, to some extent, those of John Ruskin (1819–1900). It is intriguing to find that Ruskin had a high regard for certain aspects of Stuart’s work. He included engravings of the Parthenon and Erechtheion from Antiquities of Athens in the great collection of images of works of art which he began assembling on his appointment as Slade Professor at the University of Oxford in 1870. He subsequently gave these to the university.

In explaining Stuart’s engravings to his pupils, Ruskin admitted that “they by no means well express” the quality of their subject but nonetheless commended them for “their modesty, earnestness and honesty.”101 Seeing them as anticipating the kind of honest workmanship associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, he pointed out that “they are not works of genius (either in draughtsman or engraver) … but they are absolutely sincere and simple in aim; industrious and faithful work.” As a result, he told them that “I wish you, every one, to draw the curve of the Parthenon capital as a first lesson in purity and precision.”102

In Germany the Grecian legacy of Schinkel and Klenze became a state-organized Philhellenism that prevailed throughout the nineteenth century. It was not so easily challenged on grounds of nationalism as in England, because it had been more firmly rooted from the start as an expression of German values. After unification in 1870, it was also used to bolster the self-conception of the Reich as a European Kulturnation.103 Archaeological excavation which, by moving farther east to Assyria, Egypt, and Axum, left the Greek colonies far behind, releasing Germans from what Edith Butler famously identified as “the Tyranny of Greece over Germany.”104

In Italy, where there had been much late neoclassical architecture in the early nineteenth century, often with a stern Greek flavor, the growing move to unite the separate states of which the country was composed led to unification in 1861. The need to provide a sense of nationhood and of pride in the past not surprisingly now encouraged a Renaissance Revival.105

Influence and Appraisals in the Twentieth-Century

Just when it might have been supposed that interest in Stuart had run its course, a remarkable tribute to him came from the architect Sir Albert Richardson (1880–1964) in his Monumental Classic Architecture in Great Britain and Ireland (I914).106 This book was part of a program of overthrowing the Gothic Revival and the Arts and Crafts movement, which Richardson saw as having a narrow nationalist base. It had thus stifled the international classical tradition as represented in the work of Stuart, Soane, Cockerell, Elmes, Pennethorne, and Thomson. These architects had upheld the torch of classicism, which had been kept alight on the Continent by architects such as Hittorff and Labrouste in France, Schinkel m Germany, and, in Richardson’s day, by the firm of McKim, Mead and White in North America.

Richardson proclaimed unexpectedly that Stuarts Lichfield House in St. James’s Square “demonstrated how the spirit of the Hellenic art could be interpreted without having recourse to mere reproduction, an important achievement which many of Stuart’s successors failed to accomplish.”107 Richardson went so far as to claim that, even including Chambers and Gandon,”there is not one whose influence was destined to be felt so strongly, at a later period, than that of this shrewd Scotsman.” He complained that “Chambers fought shy of the newer teaching, and Gandon, while professing great curiosity as to why Greek architecture should be so much extolled, continued with his opinions concerning that of Rome. Stuart, however, was an energetic persistent man who … practised the doctrines he advocated.”108

Richardson even suggested that Stuart’s “pioneer labours instantly acted as a check to the prevalent style … [and] by reason of their sequence and iron restraint … they imposed the cult of the academic on all having recourse to the principles expounded.”109 For Richardson, Stuart’s work had a “formality which is the very life of refinement; and while standing out in clear definition amidst other works of his period, although intimately related to the latter, they, not withstanding, bear an air of unrivalled distinction.”110

In this remarkable essay in wishful thinking, in which Stuart was cast in an improbable role as an “energetic persistent man” characterized by “iron restraint,” Richardson reconstructed Stuart as a man in his own image who could be recruited in the effort to reform early-twentieth-century British architecture along grand classical lines. Richardson’s own contribution to this movement can be seen in his New Theatre, Manchester (1912), which intelligently combined Grecian elements from Cockerell and Hittorff. His ambitions were paralleled by those of Geoffrey Scott in The Architecture of Humanism (1914).111 The First World War brought an end to these hopes, but a few years before, the works of architects such as Arthur Beresford Pite (1861–1934) had encouraged Richardson to believe that the revival he sought might be at hand.

An Arts and Crafts architect, Pite had been impressed by the Grecian richness of Cockerell, lamenting the 1896 demolition of his Hanover Chapel, Regent Street (1823–25), and the imminent destruction of Nash’s Regent Street. He was impressed by the restoration of the ancient Greek city of Selinunte in Sicily by the Beaux-Arts student, Jean Hulot, which had been exhibited in London in 1908. This, Pite felt, was in harmony with the urban and stylistic qualities of his own London, Edinburgh and Glasgow Assurance Company premises in Euston Square (1906–8), with a sculptural richness in which he had adopted many of Cockerell’s discoveries about Greek architecture including the unique Bassae Ionic order.102

Between the wars, a new, if very localized, interest in Stuart was kindled by the seventh Earl Spencer, who took the unusual step in 1924 of moving back into his London mansion, Spencer House, which the family had been obliged to let for much of the time since 1889. A civilized and learned figure, Lord Spencer restored the house to its eighteenth-century appearance insofar as was possible and published three articles on it and its furniture in 1926.113

A new level of scholarship in the study of Stuart arrived with Lesley Lewis, one of the first non-architects to be concerned with him. In 1938 she published a groundbreaking article on Stuart and Revett in the Journal of the Warburg Institute.114 The Warburg Institute, founded in Hamburg, Germany, by Aby Warburg in 1925, was (and happily still is), a center for the academic investigation of the survival, or afterlife, of the classical tradition (das Nachleben der Antike).115 In 1933 with the threat of Nazi persecution, it relocated with its library in London, where it continues to exercise profound influence on the development of the study of the history of art. One unusual early product of the Warburg Institute was the traveling exhibition of photographs of British art, organized in I941 by the art historians Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower. They explained that “at a time when the Mediterranean had become a battleground” and “inter-European relations were disrupted by the war, it was stimulating to observe in the arts of this country the agelong impact of the Mediterranean tradition on the British mind.”116

The exhibition included Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens. Although Saxl and Wittkower found that “the statement in the preface to the fourth volume (1816) that ‘on the publication of the first volume, the knowledge of Grecian art burst upon the public in all its splendour,’ may be an exaggeration,” they nonetheless proclaimed that the work “certainly appears in historic retrospect as the corner-stone of the whole movement.”117 Interestingly, this war-time exhibition chose to emphasize the links of England with the Continent at a time when new books were generally stressing quite the opposite. This was because it had been decided to promote the British war effort by frequent visual and written emphasis on the appeal of the English countryside, the farms and hamlets, and the country ways and crafts of an indigenous, pre-industrial and localized economy.

Sir John Summerson, in his highly regarded Architecture in Britain, first published in 1953, was impatient with the Greek Revival, perhaps partly because his earlier promotion of the Modern Movement in architecture gave him an initial lack of sympathy with any revivals.118 Referring to William Wilkins, he wrote of the “priggish loyalty to Neo-classical ideals … servile reproduction of Erechtheum detail … [in buildings] as doctrinaire as they could be … [marked by] restraint and pedantry.”119 He asked in despair, “What did the reproduction of Greek Doric ever do for English architecture?”120

A 1994 attempt at a comprehensive history of architectural theory by a German scholar also adopted a surprisingly sour tone, the author complaining that “Antiquities of Athens is unsystematic and at the same time pedantic in its attention to detail. Its manner is doctrinaire and it paints a lifeless, anaemic picture of Greece which largely prevailed in the nineteenth century and was not replaced by anything better. Like Desgodetz, Stuart aimed at providing a definitive theory of architecture but he was quite inadequate to the task.”121

In 1991 the architect Jan van Pelt observed somewhat obscurely that “when in 1762 the initial volume of the first reliable description of the architectural remains of the Acropolis appeared (Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of Athens), ancient Greece had already been assigned its proper historicist designation within a general context of realist resignation.”122 He went on to join in the process of dethroning the myth of Greece, a process begun in the nineteenth century. He did this by criticizing, understandably, the romantic but pretentious reaction to the Acropolis by the American architectural historian Vincent Scully, who wrote, “There is only being and light. Time lies dead in the white and silver light of the outdoor room between the Parthenon and the Erechtheion.”123 Van Pelt’s response to this was, “I have never been able to avoid the crowds up there. And so I learned to understand the Acropolis as a place designed for crowds, today and twenty-five centuries ago. It was, after all, nothing but a tasteful version of Disneyland’s Main Street USA.”124

By contrast, J. Mordaunt Crook’s Greek Revival (1972) which had been partly written at the Warburg Institute with the support of its director, Ernst Gombrich, continued the sympathetic approach of Saxl and Wittkower. Adopting their claim that Stuart and Revett were “the corner-stone of the whole movement,” Crook argued that “from the I760s onwards, Greek Revivalism is a continuous and expanding theme in British architecture and decoration.”125 Change came in 1995 with the publication of Giles Worsley’s Classical Architecture in Britain, a major work which has largely superseded Summerson’s Architecture in Britain and Ireland as the standard history of British eighteenth-century architecture.126 Worsley criticized the picture of Stuart presented in Crook’s book, questioning in particular the reference to “Greek Revivalism” which we have just quoted. Worsley showed, rightly, that Stuart had himself no wish to replace entirely Roman orders with Greek, but to increase the range available.

In my own monograph on Stuart in 1982, I concluded that “despite Stuart’s undoubted role as a pioneer if patchy Greek Revivalist,” we should remember that interiors like his Painted Room at Spencer House, “enlivened with painted decoration and plaster work based on classical models,” belonged to “a tradition which went back to Italy in the golden years of the Renaissance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”127 thus pointed out that “Kent, Stuart, Chambers, Adam, Mylne, Dance, Wyatt and Soane, all spent formative years in Rome,” and their work might be considered “for a moment as simply a late stage in the acclimatisation of England to the ideals of the Italian Renaissance.”128

Support for such an interpretation can be found in an earlier time, in the decision of Walter Pater (1839–94) to include his celebrated essay on Winckelmann of 1867 in his later volume of essays on Renaissance art, because, he explained, Winckelmann “really belongs in spirit to an earlier age. By his enthusiasm for the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, by his Hellenism, his life-long struggle to attain the Greek spirit, he is in sympathy with the humanists of a previous century. He is the last fruit of the Renaissance, and explains in a striking way its motive and tendencies.”129

Pater also quoted the erudite French writer Madame de Staël, who had perceived the significance of the pull to the south in Winckelmann’s life and affections. She wrote that “he felt in himself an ardent attraction towards the south. In German imaginations even now traces are often to be found of that love of the sun, that weariness of the north (cette fatigue du nord) which carried the northern peoples away into the countries of the south.”130 The pull of the warm and colorful south was also strong among writers from the north, writers as varied as Ruskin, Burckhardt, and, of course, James “Athenian” Stuart.

© Bard Graduate Center, David Watkins.