Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/502

Rh 444 A R C II I T E C T U R E [MODERN higlier beauties of arcliitccturc. Hawksmoor added to the style of his master that noble ornament in which Italian works are so very deficient a prostyle portico. His com positions are marked by severe simplicity, and only want to be absolved from a few faults and enriched with a few elegances to be among the best of modern times. Not the least distinguished architect of the same age (the first half of the 18th century) was the earl of Burlington, who was a passionate admirer of the style of Palladio and Inigo Jones. Many of the edifices erected by Kent are asserted to be from the designs of that nobleman, who, with consider able talent, was, however, a somewhat bigoted devotee to Vitruvius and the Ciuquecento generally, as well as to Palladio in particular ; for he frequently used columns representing half -barked trees in conformity with the silly tales of Vitruvius, and the sillier whims of his disciples. The portal of his own house in Piccadilly, and that of the King s Mews, were special examples of this bad taste, and of other faults of the school besides. Lord Burlington built for himself at Chiswick a villa on the model of the Villa Capra, or llotonda, near Vicenza a structure which has been called the master-piece of Palladio. In form and proportion it is certainly elegant, but its details strongly exhibit the poverty of Italian columnar architecture, when unaided by the frittering which is its bane, and almost its only element of effect. Gibbs, a contemporary, had, like Hawksmoor, imbibed a taste for the classic prostyle portico, which he evinced in St Martin s Church in London ; but that he also was in the trammels of the Italian school is no less evident, in the same structure, to a considerable extent, and still more so in the church of St Mary in the Strand, which is a mediocre specimen of architecture, though a favourable one of its style. During the following half- century (the latter half of the 1 8th) Sir William Chambers and Sir Robert Taylor were the most distinguished architects of this country. They were both men of genius and skill, who had availed themselves of the remains of Roman antiquity to good purpose (for as yet those of Greece were cither unknown or unappreciated), and the former has left us, in the Strand front of Somerset House in London, perhaps the best specimen of its style in existence. Other parts of the same edifice, however, are far from deserving the same degree of praise ; indeed, as an architectural composition, the river front is altogether inferior in merit to the other, though of much greater pretence. The inner fronts to the great quadrangle, though exhibiting good parts, are, as a whole, not above mediocrity. An air of littleness pervades them ; and the general effect of the fronts themselves is made still worse by the little clock towers and cupolas by which they are surmounted ; and to this may be added the infinity of ill-arranged chimneys, which impart an -air of meanness and confusion that nothing can excuse. While Sir William Chambers and a few others were applying the best qualities of Italian architecture, indeed, improving its general character, and, it may be said, making an English style of it, there were many structures raised in various parts of the country in a manner hardly superior to that of the time of James I., structures in which all the meanness and poverty of the Cinquecento are put forth, without any of its elegance of proportion, or that degree of effectiveness which men of talent contrived to give it. During the same period, too, the seeds of a revolu tion were sown, which almost succeeded in ejecting the Italian style and its derivative from this country, without perhaps having furnished a complete equivalent. In the year 1748 James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, two painters pursuing their studies in Rome, having moreover paid some attention to architecture, issued &quot; Pro posals for publishing an accurate description of the Antiqui ties of Athens, &c.&quot; These proposals met with general approbation, and in consequence they determined on prose cuting their plan ; but various hindrances prevented their arrival in Athens till March 1751, when they commenced measuring and delineating the architecural monuments of that city and its environs. In this work they were unre mittingly employed (as far as their own exertions went, for they were frequently interrupted by the Turks) for several years, so that they did not reach England with the result of their labours until 1755; and, by a series of almost unaccountable delays, the first volume of their work did not appear until the year 1 7G2. Sixteen years more expired before the second issued from the press ; and the third was not published until 1794, being nearly fifty years from the time the work was first announced ! In the meantime a Frenchman of the name of Le Roy, who was at Rome when our countrymen issued their proposals, had gone to Athens, and collecting in a very short time some loose materials, had published at Paris, in 1758, a work which he called Les Ituines des })lus beaux Monumens de la Grece, &c., in which he makes not the slightest mention of Stuart and Revett, or of their labours or intentions, with all of which he was well acquainted. This work is, moreover, notoriously and grossly incorrect, so incorrect, indeed, as to make it difficult of belief that its author ever saw the objects of which he professes to give the representations. It was, however, from M. le Roy s work that the public had to judge of the merits and beauties of Greek architecture ; for the first volume of Stuart and Revett s Antiquities did not appear for several years after it, and that does not contain any pure specimen of the national or Doric style : the second, which does, was not published for twenty years after Le Roy s. Considering, therefore, the source of information on the subject, it can hardly be wondered at that Greek architecture was vituperated on all sides ; and by none with greater acrimony than by Sir William Chambers, whose apology must be ignorance and the prejudices of education. He really did not know the style he carped at ; and his education in the Italo-Vitruvian school had unfitted him for appreciating its grand, chaste, and simple beauties, even if he had known it. Notwithstanding the mis representations of Le Roy, the vituperations of Chambers, the established reputation of Italian architecture, and the trammels which Vitruvius and his disciples had fixed on the public mind, when Stuart and Revett s work actually appeared, the Greek style gradually advanced in esteem, by its intrinsic merits alone for it has had no factitious aids ; and since that period, Greece and all her colonies which possess remains of her unrivalled architecture have been explored, and we now possess correct delineations of almost every Greek structure which has survived, though in ruins, the wreck of time and the desolation of barbarism. To our country and nation, then, is due the honour of opening the temple of Greek architectural art, of drawing away the veil of ignorance which obscured the beauties it contains, and of snatching from destruction, and consequent oblivion, the noble relics of ancient architecture which bear the impress of the Grecian mind. Not only, indeed, were we the first to open the mine, but by us it has been prin cipally worked ; for among the numerous treatises on the Hellenic remains which now exist, by far the greatest number, and indisputably the most correct, are by English men, and have been published in England. It required, however, a generation for the effects of ignorance and pre judice in some, and imperfect knowledge in others, to wear away before any effects of the study of the Greek style could be obvious in our structures. The works of the Adams, who were the contemporaries and immediate successors of Sir William Chambers, evince a taste for the beauties of Greek architecture, but a very imperfect know ledge, indeed, of the means of reproducing them. The