Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/881

ARCHITECTURE. Saint George's Hall in Liverpool, the Bourse in Paris, and the great theatre of Bordeaux. It is curious to find this Kouian style of colonnades and pediments decorating an otherwise severely plain huilding revived without essential changes at the olose of the Nineteenth Century. The rea- son for it is not far to seek — it is in the ini- practical)ility of producing an interesting new style founded upon classical traditions, unless with the willing and continuous labor of several decades at least. To copy Roman forms has jiroved easy to able and well-tauglit men, as all that is needed is free expenditure upon the building and the possession by the designer of a number of measured drawings. To found a new style upon it, whether deliberately, as by the careful thought of men who can design and who are also students, or more uneonseiously and natiirally by the work of uninformed build- ers who take the details their masters used before them and modify them to suit the new requirements — to do either has proved imprac- ticable. The immediate result, chronologically speaking, of the first Xeo-Roman revival was the introduction into domestic and civil building of the insignificant architecture kno«ni to us all from the abiindant remains left from the years l)etween 1830 and 1870. The Hotel de Ville, in Paris, as it was under Louis Philippe and until its destruction in 1871, contained only the cen- tral mass of the building of Henry IV., the wings being wholly of the "bourgeois" and un- impressive style of which we are speaking. The 'ast structure in Washington occupied by the departments of State, War, and the Navy is an almost perfect e.xample of the class of buildings in question. There was more sincerity in the work of sojne English architects, apart from the tiothic revival named below. Thus the club- houses designed by the elder Charles Barry (Sir Charles), such as the Travellers" and the Reform in Pall Hall, and Bridgcwater House, by the same artist, were all built between 1830 and 18.50, and all have some architectural character. This epoch saw also the work of King Ludwig I. in ilunich. often of a character wholly different from the p.seudo-Greek buildings named above. Thus, the Royal Library was finished before 1843, in a style borrowed from Italian palazzi of the Fifteejith Century, as was also the southern front of the royal palace (Kijnigs- bau); and of this time also was the Hauptwache, a reduced coj)y of the Loggia de' Lanzi at Florence. The buildings of the new Louvre, built during the reign of Napoleon III., just miss this expressionless vulgarity of style: they miss it in that they arc large in their parts, built at great cost, and adorned by a sclmol of highly trained architectural sculptors to whom it was impossible to turn out other than interesting details. Even the dismal Hotel de Ville above mentioned would have had some interest had it been covered with elaborate architectural sculp- ture of admiralde workmanship. The reign of dullness continued until 18(i0 or later; but there was much that was interesting in the way of individual buildings. The Liln-ary of Sainte Gene- vieve, in Paris, is an example of the very small group of buildings called Neo-Cireek — which term is a misnomer, pointing rather to the studies of the founders of the school than to their finished work. The buildings especially classed under this term, as the librarj' above named and the rebuilding of the Palais de Jus- tice, have no tJreek character: and even Vis- conti's tomb of Napoleon 1. is rather Neo-Roman — as if a prolongation of the ,S7(/7c I'mpire rather than a novel departure. Of this epoch, too. are the basilica churclies— Saint Vincent de Paul and Notre Dame de Lorette, in Paris, and .Saint Boniface, in Munich— buildings of a style most promising to one who hopes for original" work in the future, but not as yet carried farther. This epoch, 1830 to" 1870, includes also the time of the Gothic revival, properly so called; that IS, of the earlier years of that "movement— of the time wlien the reformers were full of liope and courage, and believed that the sin- cerity and the logi<'al construction and decora- tion of Gothic churches were capable of being reproduced. The intellectual movement assumed that modern churches were cold, devoid alike of ornament and of interest; while the churches of the Eourteentli Century— for it -as the later Gothic which first attracted the student— were full of interest. Therefore, tlio.se en"a<'ed in the movement undertook to studv the forms and the details, and to rejiroduce them exactly for a while, believing that there would com"e in- evitably a (iothic style which would be either the old one reived or some modification of it still more nearly suited to modern needs Again, as to civic and domestic buildings, the enthusiasts believed also that these would be far more admirable if they were built as the' Fourteenth Century Italians and the Fifteenth Century Frenchmen built. Moreover, this style admits of all kinds of adornment by means of the colors of natural material. lii England, in France, and in Germany, preceding venera- tions had done little of that; but in Italy they did much, and it was deemed clear that modern architects might study Italian as well as other forms of Gothic. All this can be found at len<Ttli in the writings of the authors of that tini?— authors of whom some are still in repute— and in the work of a host of later writers, men who also were inspired with the same hope of speedy improvement of the artistic situation. One set of studies of the past having failed, another was thought sure to succeed; and only after twenty years of efl'ort did it begin to "be clear tha't nothing complete was to come from the Gothic revival. The most costly building of the style was almost the earliest,' the great Westniins"ter Palace (q.y.), designed by the elder Charles Barry, who was knighted as having been the architect of the home of the British Parlia- ment. This building is studied from the most formal type of the Tudor style, and the at- tcni]]t to cover it with rich' decoration only enhances the evident formalism of the constantly repeated details of ornament. In spite of this, in Germany and in England, the style became al- most e.xclusively ecclesiastical, wiiile the clas- sical methods prevailed for eiyic buildings. In France it had so little efi'eet upon the strongly organized and deeply convinced workmen and thinkers of that most artistic of modern nations that only a few l)uildiiigs of completely mediipval character were built, either in France itself or in the countries under immediate French inllu- enee. These, when they were built, had, how- ever, this great superiority, that they were com- pletely constructional, vaulted in masonry if not according to the strict Gothic principle of