Originally published in A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, edited by Paul Atterbury. Published for The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. 103–135.
The Pointed Arch will circle the globe.
–
A. N. Didron, 1853
Nurtured in
the fertile soils of nationalism and the religious revival of the early nineteenth
century, the Gothic Revival seemed poised, by the time of Pugin’s death in
1852, to become an international affair. Revived Pointed or Christian architecture
scarcely needed a renewed apology, Pugin’s greatest French champion, Adolphe-Napoléon
Didron, reassured the readers of his polemical Annales Archéologiques: “M. Pugin is dead, but he lives on in his
older son and in … eight or ten other young architects in Great Britain who have
devoted themselves to medieval architecture.” No other country could rival
the cohort of George Gilbert Scott, William Butterfield, G. E. Street, R. C.
Carpenter, William White, to name but a few “Goths” who had established respected
and highly active architectural offices in London by the 1850s. But nearly
everywhere the movement was gaining ground. Didron offered a field report.
France was in the forefront, and the campaign there was advancing with huge
strides: two hundred neo-Gothic churches were under construction and the
aesthetic ministry had found adherents in nearly every region. A Gothic-style chapel
was even said to be under construction in Corsica. In the politically fragmented
map of German-speaking Central Europe Catholics and Protestants alike were
exploring the “national” past as essential to the forging of the “national” future.
In addition to these strongholds, where Gothic antiquarianism could be traced
back to the turn-of-the century, new conquests were being made each year.
Medievalizing churches were planned or under way in Belgium, Switzerland, Austria,
Spain, and Russia. Even Greece had given way: “The Greek style has been
conquered even its last citadel, its very cradle.” Didron concluded in
noting a neo-Gothic church under construction in Athens. Colonial Gothic was
established from New Zealand to the West Indies. The next issue of the Annales included a report on the “mouvement
archéologique” in the United States, the only independent western-style nation
state with no gothic past. Even here the future was bright and Gothic: “So the
pointed arch has arrived even in California and we can adopt for it the slogan
we used once for Liberty: The Pointed Arch will circle the globe.”
By 1852, Didron had become one of the
most tireless and internationally connected promoters of the Gothic cause. And
he was a master at public relations. For in reality the Gothic was no more
clearly triumphant at mid-century than political liberty, which had failed
nearly everywhere with the collapse of the revolutionary uprisings of 1848–49.
Whether the cause be the forging of a modern democratic nation state or the
revival of the “national” architecture—and many were advocating that the two
went hand-in-hand—it was clear in 1852 that both the stylistic and political
struggles remained on the horizon. This was so even though the English, and A.
W. N. Pugin in particular, had set an example. Just as Pugin’s own career had
taken him from ad-hoc antiquarianism to a theory of Gothic as a comprehensive system
for a once and future Christian Society, so the European Gothic Revivals were evolving
and facing new challenges in the 1850s.
The
Gothic Cause at Mid-Century
In many ways 1852 was a signal year on the Continent. Not
only was nearly every country adjusting politically to the aftermath of the
revolutions that had shaken the political status quo from Paris to Budapest in
1848–49, but the world of architecture was rife with conflict. Nearly
everywhere key figures in the Gothic Revival took stock of their positions, and
engaged, often even politically, for the fight ahead. In many cities skylines were
being corrected in the spirit of Pugin’s famous contrast between the industrial
city of 1840 and the medieval city of 1440: Sainte Clotilde in Paris (Franz Christian
Gau and Théodore Ballu, 1846–57) and the Nikolaikirche in Hamburg (G. G. Scott,
1845–63). There was also the ongoing project of completing Cologne Cathedral,
where the keystone of the main arch of the west front was laid in 1852. New
opportunities arose as never before; but the Gothic was anything but a fait accompli.
The question of style was everywhere the
subject of politicized debate. In September 1852 the cornerstone was laid for a
romano-byzantine style cathedral in Marseilles, the first new cathedral built
in France in the nineteenth century. It was part of Louis Napoleon’s campain to
win over the south of France to the upcoming declaration of the French Second
Empire. In the same year style was debated in the two leading German states,
Prussia and Bavaria. A major polemic over the funding of architectural
education arose in the Prussian parliament. In Bavaria King Maximilian II was
awaiting the decision of the jury on an unusual competition to create a new
style for use in a grand public building and its boulevard in Munich. In the
following years major church competitions were announced for Gothic designs, in
Vienna in 1853 and in Lille in 1854. The issues that loomed large in the 1850s
were at once architectural and political: stylistic eclecticism versus national
purity, invention versus tradition, nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, and the
challenge of new building programs and new materials to the historicist logic
of the Gothic Revival position.
While the battle lines of the 1830s and
40s had generally been clearly drawn between classical and Gothic camps, by the
1850s positions had evolved. Gothic Revival theorists had begun to question
earlier doctrines of strict archaeological imitation, a trend announced by
Pugin in his own late writings and especially apparent in the positions
espoused by The Ecclesiologist from
the early 1850s. The architectural establishment itself was changing, even if
the “Goths” would not always acknowledge it in polemical exchanges. In France, Prussia,
and Bavaria the academies and state schools of architecture had all been rocked
by internal critiques. A younger generation challenged the absolutist
aesthetics and timeless universals of doctrinaire Neoclassicism with calls for
a style that obeyed the laws of historical development and responded to the
relative demands of national and local conditions. The world was much changed
from the polarized situation portrayed in
Pugin’s Contrasts of 1836 (2nd
ed., 1841), even if this book was to have a revival in Belgium after Pugin’s
death.
France
Throughout the early nineteenth century French Gothic Revivalists
envied the advance enjoyed by the English in the historical study of medieval architecture
and art, and even more the professional stature and sophistication of
neo-Gothic design in Britain. Yet nowhere else did Gothic enjoy the official
endorsement accorded it by the French state. Ever since the 1789 Revolution,
successive regimes had drawn on the medieval past to assert the historical
legitimacy of their regime, even as they came to power with a sharp rupture with
the immediate past. Just such a rupture had given birth to the campaign to
convert medieval monuments from symbols of a “superstitious” and “tyrannical”
past, instruments of the hierarchies of church and aristocracy, into precious vessels
of national identity and memory. While the Revolution coined the term vandalism—inventing the word to kill the
thing, in the Abbé Grégoire’s oft-quoted words—and formulated the first
legislation to place ancient buildings under government protection, it was only
after the July Revolution of 1830 that a powerful set of institutions was put in place, quickly becoming the
model for state restoration efforts
throughout Europe. This was the
result of a happy conjuncture: the
anxieties of the citizen king Louis Philippe (reigned 1830–48)
over the shaky foundations of
his regime born on the barricades combined with the entry into the government of a number of the historians. François Guizot, who was most
notable among them, had already crafted
an engaged practice of historical narrative and research as a powerful
political tool during his days in the liberal opposition to the revived Bourbon
Monarchy in the 1820s. Arguably no European government in the nineteenth
century cultivated historical study more assiduously than Louis Philippe’s July
Monarchy. Not only was Versailles converted into a national history museum, but
in the 1830s Guizot and his successor in the Ministry of Public Education,
Salvandy, established commissions and committees of historians, men of letters,
artists, architects, and amateur archéologues.
Two influential committees were concerned
with studying, classifying, and even conserving the nation’s architectural
heritage: the Comité historique des arts et monuments and the Commission des
Monuments Historiques. The first, of which Didron served as secretary from 1835
to 1852, was concerned with inventorying artistic and architectural monuments
throughout the country and creating a set of manuals outlining the principal
styles and types of monuments likely to be encountered for the use of local
historians as well as to guide any restoration efforts. They were part of
Guizot’s larger enterprise of writing a national history. The second had a much
greater budget to undertake selective restorations on buildings of national
significance. Throughout the late 1830s and 1840s these committees were sympathetic
breeding grounds for those architects who felt that research into the monuments
of the national past and their careful restoration as “historical monuments”
were preludes to the creation of an appropriate modern architecture for France.
Here they mounted a challenge to the long-standing adherence of the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts to an exclusive devotion to the models of classical antiquity.
This is not to say that the committees,
on which architects were in the minority, had achieved a unanimous voice. There
was consensus on the value of an inclusive approach to recording and even
restoring the monuments of the most diverse periods of French history. But
views on the implications of that historical work for contemporary design and
society diverged sharply. In the showcase restoration projects launched by the
commission in the 1840s two distinct camps began to emerge among the
architects: one group, ever since known as the “Romantics,” had already defied
the academy’s exclusive classicist doctrines and enjoyed the official support
of the historian/ministers Guizot and Adolphe Thiers; the other, slightly
younger group enjoyed especially the support of Prosper Mérimée, named
Inspecteur Général des Monuments Historiques, in succession to Ludovic Vitet in
1834. Together with his protégé Viollet-le-Duc and the young renegade architect
Jean-Baptiste Lassus who had strong alliances with liberal neo-Catholicism,
this “Gothicist” group was to craft its own power base within the Commission
des Monuments Historiques. The group saw the commission as a counterweight to
the academy and as the locus for a revival of a hands-on approach to
architecture that recalled the practices of the medieval cathedral mason’s
guilds.
The Romantic architects were represented
on the commission by Félix Duban, who was appointed to restore the Sainte
Chapelle in 1836 and the château at Blois in 1843, and by Léon Vaudoyer. In the
new world of official research and the emerging art of monumental restoration both
found an enlarged scope for the historical studies they had already begun as
students at the French academy in Rome. From the late 1820s they sought to
challenge academic orthodoxy and the influential Neoclassical doctrine of the
academy’s secrétaire-perpetuelle A.
C. Quatremère de Quincy. Their method was to expand the canon of architectural
models and attempt to understand each monument historically as the relative
product of its particular cultural situation rather than as an immutable
embodiment of timeless ideals. Exploring the heritage of French medieval and Renaissance
architecture, they saw the history of France and its institutions worked out in
the stylistic evolution of its great monuments, an insight into the very nature
of history which they sought to make palpable for the general public through
restoration of national monuments.
For instance, the château of Blois
comprised four buildings ranging in date from the early thirteenth to the
seventeenth century and Duban set out to underscore the distinctive style of
each building. At the same time he created transitions and continuities that
revealed that the succession of styles were related to one another as links in
a chain of progress, a favorite metaphor of historians taken with the notion
that history could be explained as a dialectical process. For Duban the building,
destined to serve as a museum in which the architecture was as much on display
as the city’s art works housed within, was to be celebrated as “a summary of
our national architecture.” Along with his fellow romantics, Duban considered
the stylistic diversity of monuments as more than a record of the continual
dialectic between tradition and innovation that propelled stylistic change. It
was testimony to the great patterns of emigration, conquest, and intermingling
that had forged modern national identities and institutions out of the
convulsed map of late antiquity.
In seeking lessons valuable for the
architectural present, the Romantics focused increasingly on transitional
styles as revealing of the very process of historical change. They examined in
particular the ways in which the antique heritage of Roman Gaul had gradually
been transformed, by the catalyst of Byzantine influence, into the native French
styles at the outset of the Middle Ages, and the critical renewal of medieval
technique by the rediscovery of antique harmony at the dawn of the Renaissance.
They were convinced that the imposition of rigid rules, what they labeled
academicism, had gradually led to the paralysis of French art, a process that
reached its high point under Louis XIV. And they saw the mission of contemporary
architecture to renew the “chain of human progress,” obeying the laws of
historical evolution to forge a new stylistic link appropriate to the modern
secular age of science still in search of an appropriate expression. They were
looking for a renewal of the French classical tradition that could accommodate
the accomplishments in both architecture and the enhancement of political
liberties and social equalities whose gradual evolution had been traced by
Augustin Thierry, Guizot, and most recently Jules Michelet.
The younger group had much the same
reading list, but drew radically different conclusions. Spearheaded by the
young Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc and the slightly older Jean-Baptiste Lassus,
they sought to focus attention particularly on the last golden moment of French
civilization: the early thirteenth century. Gothic architecture had then
reached its perfection in the great series of urban cathedrals of the Île-de-France,
and modern political freedoms and economic independence were first forged in
cities freed of feudal shackles and monastic rule. For them the flourishing of Gothic
was anything but a gradual transition. It represented a veritable revolution in
building, establishing a national tradition which all architects since the time
of Louis XIV had dishonored and which held out the promise to serve as the catalyst
for a renewal of French architecture to unrivaled rationality as well as pure
national expression. Not surprisingly both Viollet-le-Duc and Lassus were virulent
critics of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which, in their view, held a veritable monopoly
on prestigious commissions and careers in architecture. And although they were
sympathetic to the historical interests of the Romantics, they were wary of
their conclusions and suspicious of their academic aspirations.
Like so many others, including Didron,
Lassus had been deeply moved by Victor Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831), with its plea for government to halt
the decay and insensitive restoration under way on Paris’s cathedral, which was
richly portrayed in Hugo’s novel as the embodiment of French genius and
national identity. In restoration projects displayed at the annual Salon—the Sainte Chapelle in 1835 and
the refectory of Saint Martin des Champs in 1836—and in his early writings for
Didron’s Annales Archéologiques,
Lassus launched a full-scale attack on the summary dismissal of Gothic
architecture in Quatremère de Quincy’s widely respected Dictionnaire Méthodique d’Architecture (1832). Gothic for Quatremère
was a ruleless and empirical architecture, one in which no underlying geometry
or system of proportions could be found. The instinctive product of a society
in decadence, it could be compared only “with the architecture produced by
certain animals, notably beavers.” This brief comment, the final judgment
of the few lines devoted to the Middle Ages in the three volumes of Quatremère’s
canonic work, proved a vital spur to Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc’s crusade.
Beginning in the 1840s and gaining in
virulence with each new conflict, they tried to demonstrate that Gothic was a
highly sophisticated system, based on the most rigorously logical and rational solutions
to structural problems, and that it had achieved an unimpeachable clarity and
perfection in the sophisticated and daring structures of the thirteenth century
in the Île-de-France. For Viollet-le-Duc the conflict was to lead to the great project
of replacing Quatremère’s reference
work with a new Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’Architecture (1854–68). For
Lassus preservation of these monuments against the ravages of time was the sacred
duty of modern Frenchmen. The cathedrals such as Notre Dame in Paris and
Chartres, where he was active until his early death in 1857, were the source of
all architectural knowledge and the key to responding to the great challenge of
the nineteenth century to devise a modern architectural language uniquely
appropriate to the physical and social conditions of a post-Revolutionary France.
Although he had been schooled under Henri Labrouste in the theories of Romantic
historians, Lassus was equally influenced by the writings of the Romantic
neo-Catholics, particularly those who embraced a progressive social mission for
the modern clergy, including P. J. B. Buchez, H. F. R. Lamennais, and the comte
de Montalembert, who was Pugin’s greatest supporter in France.
Viollet-le-Duc was an avowed enemy of all
academies—in 1852 he proposed that the French Academy and its Ecole des
Beaux-Arts be replaced by a revival of the ancient guilds in the form of an open
union of architects. He considered the revival of classicism sponsored by
Renaissance academies as one of the principal seeds of the decline of French
architecture from its High Gothic apogee. The rationally inquiring French spirit
had then been unshackled, and the work of architecture had been the free expression
of masons and a whole coterie of artists working in harmony. To face the
challenges of a society in which scientific inquiry and free enterprise held the
potential for dynamic progress Viollet-le-Duc shared Lassus’s view that no
better school was available than that of the national Gothic. The state-funded
restoration projects were to give them high visibility in the 1840s and 1850s.
Notre Dame remained one of the best funded of all the undertakings endorsed
anew by Napoleon III as part of an array of projects meant to thank the church
for its support in the plebiscite endorsing the declaration of the Second
Empire.
In contrast to England, the French Gothic
Revival was thus developing its architectural theory largely in a secular
setting, with government support. Although many members of the clergy were to
be won over to the Gothic cause—as recent studies of provincial architecture in
nineteenth-century France are just starting to make clear.—the theoretical
apparatus of the Gothic Revival was defined in a largely secular, and in
Viollet-le-Duc’s case, even anticlerical, context. In large measure this was
due to the fact that since the Revolution church buildings were the property of
the state and thus—with the exception of pilgrimage or votive churches that
were built by private subscription—all work, whether restoration or new
construction, was reviewed by government agencies. The primary stylistic battles
were to take place as much over visions of the meaning of French history as
over issues of theological correctness. Although a number of skirmishes occurred
over parish churches in the 1840s—Sainte Clotilde in Paris, Saint Nicholas at Nantes,
to name the best known—it was cathedral design that provided a series of
battles with long-ranging consequences for the fate of the Gothic Revival in
France. Firmly tied to French identity by Hugo’s prose, the cathedral was also
postulated as the great communal building characteristic of the last golden or
organic period in the comte de Saint-Simon’s cyclical vision of historical development.
It remained the vortex of the debates over style that challenged the
antiquarian position in the French Gothic Revival in the 1850s.
The scene was set in the mid-1840s with
the wresting of Notre Dame Cathedral from the hands of the academically trained
Etienne Godde. His austere Neoclassical church designs in Paris and insensitive
restoration work at the cathedrals of Amiens and Paris had made him the bête noire of the Gothic cause. Despite
Hugo’s stirring pleas in 1831, Godde continued his ad-hoc restoration work
intermittently into the early 1840s, by which time a chorus of voices had
gathered to apply pressure on the administration. In 1842 the Minister of the
Interior agreed to open consultations with architects willing to present overall
restoration projects, a first for what had heretofore been an entirely
haphazard procedure. Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc’s heavily documented report, a
monument to the new standards of Guizot’s historical committees, was also a manifesto
for the Gothic as a system of architecture that must be restored with
scrupulous attention to its own internal logic. It was accompanied by a dazzling
set of watercolors envisioning Notre Dame cleansed of all post-medieval
additions, its facade statuary and crossing flèche reinstated, and the building
enhanced with a new sacristy on the south in a seamless extrapolation of the
purest elements of the cathedral’s early thirteenth-century Gothic syntax.
Their appointment on March 11, 1844 was an official endorsement of this vision
of the organic wholeness of Gothic construction. Even the president of the
Conseil des Bâtiments Civils, reputed for its refusal to accept any neo-Gothic
proposals, admitted that henceforth all restoration work required “the feeling and
the science of Gothic art.” Ultimately the work at Notre Dame would last
two decades, completed by Viollet-le-Duc alone in 1864, seven years after
Lassus’s death. From the Notre-Dame workshop would emerge a whole generation of
committed Gothic Revivalists—in essence the school of Viollet-le-Duc—including
Emile Boeswillald, Anatole de Baudot, Eugène Millet, and Edmond Duthoit, in
addition to Suréda, who would emigrate to Spain where he helped establish the
national historical monuments service.
As Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc began work,
Didron launched the Annales Archéologiques;
his earlier journal, La Liberté
(1832) had folded after six issues. Annales
was a private venture, financed by contributions from Montalembert and by
subscribers who included an impressive roster of foreign “Goths,” from Pugin in
England to August Reichensperger in Germany. It was not only an outspoken enemy
of official Neoclassical taste in both the academy and the Conseil des Bâtiments
Civiles, but an unforgiving critic of the more severe restorations undertaken
by the Commission des Monuments Historiques, and an ardent promoter of the
cause of the Gothic Revival. “Let us repeat once again that we are not involved
in archaeology for our leisure, but rather as people who demand of the past all
that it can offer the present and especially the future,” Didron reminded
his readers whenever the occasion presented itself. Although he applauded every
effort to revive Gothic—and duly recorded every conversion of the clergy to the
cause—Didron’s own vision of the Middle Ages was strictly aligned with that of
the so-called progressive “neo-Catholic” revival inspired by the writings of
Joseph-Marie de Maistre, Lamennais, Buchez, and most particularly Montalembert.
He was persuaded that only a revival of the Middle Ages would bring with it a
revival of the profound harmony between the civic and ecclesiastical orders
that had last flourished in the thirteenth century. His vision came closer to
Viollet-le-Duc’s view of a secularized Middle Ages than to the Catholic
nostalgia of Pugin. In addition, Didron shared Viollet-le-Duc’s republican
sympathies.
Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc first developed
their visions of Gothic architecture’s unique relevance to present-day France
in the pages of Didron’s magazine. In 1844 Viollet-le-Duc began to publish a
series of historical articles “De la construction des édifices religieux en
France depuis le commencement du christianisme jusqu’au XVIe siècle” (On the
construction of religious buildings in France from the beginning of
Christianity until the 16th century). These contain in seed his famous theory
that “Gothic architecture is above all construction … its appearance is but
the result of its structure.” They outline the mandate of his theory for years
to come, namely to describe the rapid perfecting of Gothic structure in the
early thirteenth century as a triumph of the rational French spirit, and the
emergence of the bourgeois urban classes from the feudal yoke, rather than a drive
for spiritual expression or Christian faith. France’s destiny to master the
world through science and technology—the great challenge of the rivalry of
nations in the mid-nineteenth century—was firmly anticipated then by this
earlier flourishing of the national spirit. Interspersed with the first
installments of Viollet-le-Duc’s historical demonstration were the two parts of
Lassus’s first major polemic in favor of the neo-Gothic, “De l’art et de l’archéologie”
(On art and archaeology). Lassus echoed Viollet-le-Duc’s descriptions of Gothic
as a logical system of design born of and uniquely appropriate to French
circumstances, materials, and conditions. And although he was quick to deflect
charges of flaccid copyism, he noted that the first efforts would undoubtedly
be largely derivative until French architects, long burdened with the official
Latin of the academy, learned once again to speak their native tongue. Copy for
now he concluded, “later we’ll do better, if we can.”
There are hints in this article, in which
the evils of eclecticism were first sermonized, that Lassus was aware that the
battleground was shifting. Confrontations would continue with the Conseil Général
des Bâtiments Civils, dominated by older statesmen from the academy. Stalwart
supporters all of Neoclassical models, they had rejected nearly every neo! Gothic
design that had come before them during the 1840s. The culmination would be the
battle over the design for a new parish church on a prominent site on Paris’s
Left Bank, near the Assemblée Nationale, to be dedicated to Sainte Clotilde.
After thrice rejecting the neo-Gothic designs by Franz Christian Gau, the Conseil
des Bâtiments Civils finally consented to give their approval to his severe
thirteenth-century design. This only after being threatened with an investigation
into the restoration under way at the Royal Basilica of Saint Denis, where
François Debret’s radical restoration had so weakened the structure of the
north tower that it needed to be demolished. The incident unleashed a heated
debate over the question articulated by the academy: “Est-il convenable à notre
epoque de construire une église dans le style dit gothique?” (Is it appropriate
in our time to build a church in the so-called Gothic style?). A voluminous war
of words consolidated positions. Lassus published a violent attack on the
academy, and in the end the Gothic party carried the day. Or so it seemed. Gau’s
design was a mockery of the lessons Lassus and Viollet-le-Duc had been seeking
to instill. Combining elements from French and German buildings—including the
rather ill-timed adoption of substantial elements from Cologne Cathedral given
the recent Rhine crisis which reactivated rivalries between French and German nationalism—Gau’s
design was anything but a fluent exercise in the language of Gothic. It was all
too clearly a competent and well-intentioned exercise in translation by an architect
better versed in classical design. Although Didron insisted that even an
imperfect Gothic design was better than a classical one, Lassus redoubled the fight
against eclecticism. The Gothic party was on the verge of splitting.
While a heated exchange had been engaged with
the stalwart academicians, the rising power of the younger Romantics, sympathetic
to the cause of the Commission des Monuments Historiques but virulently opposed
to the notion of a Gothic Revival, posed a more difficult challenge. As
Viollet-le-Duc and Lassus were articulating their revivalist positions in the
pages of the Annales, a subtly
different historicist prognosis for the relationship of the canon of national
monuments to the problems of a modern language of architecture was being forged
by the Romantics in the Saint-Simonian populist journal Le Magasin Pittoresque. In a serialized history of French
architecture, published between 1839 and 1852, Albert Lenoir and Léon Vaudoyer set out to demonstrate that
for over a thousand years French architecture had evolved as a continual dialectic
between tradition and innovation. The transitions were gradual and continual,
and in fact it was in the unfinished potential of the transitions from
Romanesque to Gothic, and more particularly from Gothic to Renaissance, that modern
architects could renew with the grand mission of French culture as the great
crucible of European culture. “France,” Vaudoyer explained at the peak of the
Sainte-Clotilde crisis, “can be considered as the heart of this great body we
call Europe, that is to say destined to receive all foreign influences and to excercise
its own universally.” In 1844 Vaudoyer and Lenoir interrupted their
historical narrative for a direct attack on the Gothic Revival position of the
new Annales Archéologiques:
What! Gothic can be claimed as our
national art? Should we thus renounce all the advances that have been made
since! What! The limits on French genius were such that since the fifteenth century
our art has lost all its originality, all its character! This we cannot accept
on faith; art in general, and architecture in particular, is subject to the
movement of the ideas that dominate in the era of its making. Architecture … is
the most direct interpretation of the principles, of the morals and of the
spirit of a civilized nation.
Vaudoyer and Lenoir’s attack clarified matters for Lassus,
who now identified eclecticism as the leading danger facing the Gothic Revival
cause: “Stylistic unity no matter what one does is one of those fundamental
rules from which it is impossible to deviate, since without this rigorous condition
there can be neither art nor artists. In architecture eclecticism is completely
impossible and makes no sense whatsoever.” He continued, interweaving metaphors
of fashion and linguistics: “To take what is best in each time period is to transport
into architecture what one does to put together one of those costumes that are
indispensable for certain balls, and which are formed from the debris of twenty
other costumes.” The linguistic analogy would remain at the center of the
debate between these two conflicting views of the relationship between past and
present in architecture for the next decade. In the same issue Viollet-le-Duc
framed the debate even more explicitly in an article entitled “De l’Art
Etranger et de l’Art National” (On Foreign and National Art): “In a country two
things must be quintessentially national, the language and the architecture, for
they are what best express a people’s character. We haven’t given up our
language, we have modified it, perhaps wrongly. Why then should we give up our
architecture?”
Vaudoyer was quick to put forth a
different image of the historical roots and future growth of French linguistic
and architectural identity:
Children of Roman civilization, we have
borrowed everything from antiquity; but does that mean that we don’t have our
own originality? Architecture follows the same rule as language, and if this
analogy has been made frequently it is because no other could be as precise or
as striking. Although the French language is formed of Greek, Latin, and
Italian elements is it not in spite of that the most exact expression of our French
spirit?
At the dawn of the Second Empire, in the
heated moment of church projects and restorations launched by Napoleon III
aiming to consolidate the support he had found among the Catholic Clergy, and
specifically from Montalembert in the pages of the liberal catholic L’Univers, the confrontation between
linguistic and national purity and an eclectic vision of France as an
historical melting pot took on a new intensity. Battle lines formed over the
first newly commissioned cathedral to be built in France in nearly a century.
In September 1852, in a bid to win over the devout, but anti-Bonapartist
populations of Marseilles, Napoleon III had laid the cornerstone of a new
cathedral for the country’s teeming port city, with its diverse immigrant populations,
during a campaign tour through the south of France. The architect chosen was
none other than Vaudoyer, protégé of the newly appointed Ministre de l’Instruction
Publique et des Cultes, Hippolyte Fortoul. Vaudoyer had designed a
romano-byzantine style building. This recently coined historical/stylistic
category was based on the notion that French medieval architecture had married
the traditions of the western Roman empire with the structural innovations of
Byzantium—most particularly the pendentive dome—to achieve a new system of
structure and decorative expression that would continue to evolve through
experiment and intermingling.
In an 1853 reorganization of the
administration of ecclesiastical architecture, the lines for the next skirmish
between Vaudoyer’s progressive eclecticism and Viollet-le-Duc’s quest for
stylistic unity were redrawn. Both architects were named, along with Léonce Reynaud,
to serve as Inspecteurs Généraux des Edifices Diocésains, in charge of reviewing
restoration and construction in all French cathedrals. Viollet-le-Duc’s ongoing
restoration of Notre Dame was included among Vaudoyer’s assignments, while
Viollet-le-Duc would keep a watchful eye on the diocese of Marseilles. Vaudoyer
missed no opportunity to remind the committee that the Gothic cathedral was an
historical artifact whose only lesson for modernity was a negative one, namely
the expensive maintenance of its flawed system of flying buttresses and exposed
structural members. Historical piety and the future of French architecture should
not be confused, Vaudoyer noted. Viollet-le-Duc in turn continued to rail
against the pernicious example Vaudoyer was setting as he continued to enrich
his design with references to an ever broader range of sources, including Byzantine,
Lombardic, French Romanesque, and even Arabic elements. For Vaudoyer these were
all interrelated as members of “the great Mediterranean family of architectures”
which it had been the role of Marseilles throughout history to absorb into a
new synthesis. Viollet-le-Duc rarely expressed his desire for linguistic purity
in architecture more adamantly than his critique of Vaudoyer’s revised design
of 1855:
He seems to want to prove that in the
same building forms belonging to different ages and different cultures can be
combined. Certainly if anyone is capable of overcoming this difficulty it is Monsieur
Vaudoyer … who knows better than we do that architecture is not the project
of chance: when one decides thus (and how can one do otherwise today) to adopt
a style, why seek to compose a macaronique
tongue when one has at hand a beautiful and simple language?
What could be
ruder than this accusation of the macaronique,
a bastardized mixture of Latin and native words, a pig-Latin whose natural
habitat was in the burlesque of the French theater rather than in the rational
vision of structural logic Viollet-le-Duc was pursuing. Viollet-le-Duc responded
in the “Cathedral” entry of his dictionary, illustrated by a bird’s-eye view of
an ideal French cathedral, a purified vision of the finest features of the
cathedrals of Reims, Paris, Chartres, and other monuments from the best period.
In the preface to the Dictionnaire he
had penned his program for a modern architecture:
If
all the monuments left us by the Middle Ages were above reproach then we could
think of slavishly copying them in our own time, but if one erects a new
building, it is but a language that one needs to learn how to use to express one’s
own thoughts, not to repeat what others have already said ….
Even as he
worked to bring the Middle Ages back to life in his restoration of Notre Dame,
for which he now proposed to correct history by realizing the twin facade
towers never completed, Viollet-le-Duc launched his own great monument: a
dictionary of medieval architecture. This was to be a manual to guide the work
of returning French architecture to the linguistic purity of the original
gothic syntax, so rational that it could easily confront the demands of modern
scientific society.
Just
as Viollet-le-Duc’s effort to check any possible influence of Vaudoyer’s
Marseilles design and the philosophy it expounded was reaching its peak, a
second chance for a Gothic Revival cathedral presented itself. In Lille, the
local clergy had been agitating for some time to have this booming city
declared a diocese, independent of the declining capital of French Flanders,
Arras. The idea had found a cool reception with Napoleon III’s administration,
but in late 1854 Didron seems to have been instrumental in selling the local
advocates of the project on the idea of an international competition. It would
be his most spectacular publicity gesture for the Gothic cause to date. The
program called for an ambitious building and specified that only Gothic designs
would be accepted. Félix Duban and Henri Labrouste refused an invitation to
serve on the jury to protest publicly this exclusive stylistic demand, as they
explained in the Moniteur des Architectes
(July 15, 1856, p. 399). Thrown open to architects of all nations, the event
was meant to establish what Didron had already noted in 1852 upon Pugin’s
death, that everywhere “people are studying, people are copying their old
national monuments, still but little known not so long ago.” In this period
where national rivalry and cooperation had been cultivated in the first
Universal Expositions, Didron looked forward to a tournament of like-minded
nationalists: “We await architects from every country on the battlefield at
Lille that we might judge loyally if the victory will go to foreigners or to
the French.” The national breakdown of the entries put on display in March 1856
was a fairly accurate barometer of the relative strength of the Gothic Revival
in major European states. The French and British were tied with fifteen entrants
each, although the English took the lion’s share of the prizes. The seven “German”
entries represented the strongholds of the Gothic Revival on the other banks of
the Rhine: three came from the Prussian Rhineland, and one each from Hannover,
Silesia, Karlsruhe, and Austria. In addition there were entries from Belgium,
the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.
William
Burges and Henry Clutton took first prize, and George Edmund Street second.
“ C’est l’Angleterre qui a triomphé” (England has triumphed), Didron admitted.
Third prize went to Lassus. But even more striking is the contrast between the
designs and the positions. Burges and Street had both begun to explore
Continental Gothic in the early 1850s as a way of expanding the aesthetic
vocabulary and historical base of their Gothic language of design. Both were
leading advocates of the notion that to become a universal and modern
architectural style Gothic needed to transcend national references. A
cosmopolitan historical attitude was the basis for the catchword of the more
progressive ecclesiology of the 1850s: development.
By development the High Victorian Goths meant the capacity of using Gothic as a
matrix, indeed a starting point, for developing a flexible style, born of
historical logic but free from continual reference to precedent. This style
could fill new programmatic demands, create moving effects in the modern city, and
provide great scope for the individual signature of the nineteenth-century
architect.
With
the motto “Éclectisme est la plaie de l’art” (Eclecticism is the open sore of
art)” Lassus’s competition entry was scarcely anonymous. Not only was it by far
the most masterly display of fluency in pure Île-de-France thirteenth-century Gothic
submitted, but the phrase itself had already peppered Lassus’s polemical
writings in the Annales Archéologiques.
The text accompanying his design contained a lengthy analysis of the current
situation in architecture, in addition to the required detailed description of
the liturgical and iconographic specifics of his project. Lassus outlined
four possible positions in the quest for an appropriate style for the
mid-nineteenth century: create an entirely new art; admit a melange of the forms
of all past styles; copy slavishly a single past style; or take inspiration in
a single past style and carry it to perfection. Needless to say the fourth was
the one he argued as the only viable option. The first was immediately
eliminated as in violation of the fundamental laws of history: “L’art ne s’invente
pas, il s’impose” (Art can’t be invented, it imposes itself), he noted briskly.
The third, although it had adherents in both the Gothic and classic camps, was
likewise easily discredited. The real battle was between the second
proposition, eclecticism, and the fourth, the creation of a modern Gothic. For
Lille, where the Gothic had made only a belated appearance historically, Lassus
proposed not a revival of the Flamboyant style but rather the perfect
thirteenth-century “Cathedral for the North of France” that history had failed to
build.
The
ensuing battle was to be fought not so much with the Establishment, which seemed
to recognize that the chances of building the cathedral were remote, but with
Gothic Revivalists abroad. The spirit of cooperation between the British and
French soon turned to bitterness and dispute, as much doctrinal as parochial.
Reviewing the projects The Ecclesiologist
complained that Lassus’s design had “the look of being too servile a copy,” and
that his theoretic position was inconsistent:
The
motto that the architect has chosen … has misled him. Unless we
misinterpret altogether the conditions of the present competition, the object sought
for is not a mere dead reproduction of the French style of 1200–1250, but a
church in which the needs and experiences of the middle of the nineteenth
century are embodied according to the architectural principles of that style.
The successful competitor ought to be the man who has, with a true eclecticism,
laid hold of every real advantage made in construction or in taste during the
last six centuries, and has assimilated it, so to say, into his design,
congrously with the principles of the prescribed period.
What was
missing from Lassus’s design were “signs of progress.”
Lassus
was eager to make amends. He explained at great length the danger of “a whole school”
in France “who admit the possibility of creating a new art, or an entirely new
philosophical doctrine, by borrowing the elements of their creation from all
styles or from all philosophical systems,” and suggested that his British
friends had perhaps confused “eclecticism with invention, two things
essentially different, we might almost say completely opposed.” Linguistic
impurity remained the danger, lest architecture be reduced to a Tower of Babel,
that oft-evoked metaphor of the period.
I
am perfectly convinced, in the state of anarchy into which art is now reduced,
that there remains to us only one anchor of safety, unity of style; and as we
have no art belonging to our own time … there is only one thing for us to do:
that is to choose one from among the anterior epochs, not m order to copy it,
but in order to compose, while conforming to the spirit of that art … but let
us always preserve the unity of style, not trying to give existence to any of
those hybrid and unnatural creatures analogous to the monsters who are
concealed in the most obscure recesses of our cabinet of curiosities.
Marseilles was not to be repeated at Lille. The event
had been staged to display an international accord on nationalist art, but the
level of misunderstanding between the English and French escalated when the
local clergy decided to overturn the decision of the international jury in
favor of a national architect, style, and religion. The idea of rallying the
political and financial support for a new Gothic cathedral designed by an
English Protestant seemed to raise the stakes too high, even if Burges was a
profound student of French medieval architecture. In the end Lassus’s design was
adopted for it seemed to promise, as one promoter noted, the dream of a
cathedral more perfect even than any left by the thirteenth century: “… this
monument without equal will be national like the cathedral at Reims, beautiful
like Amiens, strong like that at Chartres, as Didron put it.” But Lassus’s
was a Pyrrhic victory. He died just a few months after his last diatribe against
eclecticism was published in the Ecclesiologist.
Over the next few years his design was modified by the local Lille architect
Charles Leroy, whose idea of synthesis was to copy specific parts of the major cathedrals
of the Île-de-France and reassemble them in the design of Lille. The Basilica
of Notre Dame de Ia Treille, never elevated to cathedral status, still awaits a
west front. While the English Gothic Revival would create a modern Gothic
cathedral at Liverpool to counter the eclectic admixture of the Catholic
Westminster Cathedral, the French Gothic Revival would never produce a modern
cathedral.
One
year later, in 1858, Viollet-le-Duc revealed how far he had traveled from the
late Lassus’s position in the closing volumes of his dictionary of medieval
architecture. With the dual entries “Style” and “Unity” his quest for a
rational basis became even more radical, leaving behind the tutorial in Gothic
design which he thought of as the prelude to a modern French architecture. In
the entry “Unity” he evokes a universal rational principle for architecture
which transcends historical style and rivals contemporary science in its quest
for irrefutable positive grounds for experimentation:
We
are not among those who deny the usefulness of studying earlier arts, inasmuch
as no one should forget, or allow to forget, the long chain of past traditions;
but what every thinking mind must do when confronted with this mass of
materials is to put them in order before even dreaming of using them…. The
discoveries in the physical sciences show us every day, with increasing
evidence, that if the order of created things manifests an infinite variety in
her expressions, it is subject to a number of laws more and more limited …. It cannot be repeated too often that only by following the order that nature
herself observes in her creations can one, in the arts, conceive and produce
according to the law of unity, which is the essential condition of all creation
….
At the same time he began drawing up a series of
ideal projects to illustrate his Lectures
on Architecture in which frank use of iron and geometries based on the
equilateral triangle—also found in Gothic—would generate buildings with no
precedent in any of the great national cathedrals. Not the least indicative of
this switch was Viollet-le-Duc’s decision in 1852 to abandon the pages of
Didron’s Annales Archéologiques for those
of César Daly’s progressive Révue Générale
de l’Architecture. Increasingly Viollet-le-Duc’s architects, known as the école diocésain, would distance
themselves from antiquarian and pious research into the Catholic Middle Ages.
The Gothic Revival would continue to produce countless church designs, drawing
on the explosion of plate books published by mid-century, but the school of
architects trained in Gothic restoration were pursuing a progressive and
inventive doctrine that increasingly blurred the distance between them and the
progeny of the Romantics.
Germany
Although it
was a late addition to the nation states of Europe, Germany was a pioneer in
the ideology of nationalism in architecture. In this Gothic commanded pride of
place from the start. The French were the catalysts, not only in the consciousness-raising
that accompanied first the Revolutionary armies and then Napoleon’s
expansionist Empire, but throughout the nineteenth century as the “other” of
German national identity. As early as 1797 Friedrich Gilly, although originally
enthralled like so many of his generation with the democratic and liberal
ideals of the French Revolution, had made an impassioned plea for the
restoration of the medieval castle of the Teutonic knights at Marienburg in
East Prussia (today Poland) as the embodiment of national (German) identity.
During
the wars against Napoleon, Gilly’s pupil Karl Friedrich Schinkel exploited a
series of Gothic dreams toward the project of rallying national sentiment
against the invader. He proposed immediately after Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig
that a great “Cathedral of Liberation” be constructed on Berlin’s Leipziger
Platz as both symbol and instrument of national regeneration. Schinkel hoped
not only to revive the style that Goethe had already revalorized as “German”
but with it the principle of the communal effort of building that made the
Gothic the veritable symbol of a nation arising naturally from popular
sentiment. It was a part of
a rising tide of sentiment that the Germans, divided among countless political
entities, needed a national monument. Rival efforts were inaugurated by the
leading states, most notably Ludwig I of Bavaria’s monumental classical temple,
the Walhalla near Regensberg, first proposed in 1814 and dedicated in 1842 on the
anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig.
But
the only project with true potential to transcend the complex political
boundaries of German-speaking Europe was the completion of Cologne cathedral.
This mid-thirteenth-century design cut a curious profile in the skyline of Cologne,
with the twin peaks of its choir, completed in 1322, and the stump of the
projected twin-towered West Front, crowned by a late medieval construction
crane that had been stilled in 1560 when the project was abandoned. In the
intervening years a series of modest houses had filled in the space layed out
for a grand nave. By the 1820s the magnificent engravings of Sulpiz Boisserée’s
portfolio of the original architectural drawings, discovered by Georg Moller,
and theatrically lit visions of the completed interior provided an image of the
national cathedral that history had left to modernity to complete. Many would
dispute the paternity of this idea, just as the paternity—German or French—of
the Gothic style would soon complicate the nationalist impulse of revived medievalism.
Although both the Bavarian and Prussian kings studied the problem—in 1816 Friedrich
Wilhelm III of Prussia sent Schinkel to draw up a report—and funded the project
over the next sixty years, it was private interests in the Rhineland that were
to remain the most tireless promoters of the project, most famously the
journalist and scholar Joseph Görres and his disciple the lawyer August Reichensperger.
With the Catholic Rhineland’s inclusion in the redrawn map of (largely Protestant)
Prussia after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the politics of the situation grew
ever more complex. The building came to serve simultaneously the symbolic needs
of local pride and the campaign to foster German patriotism in anticipation of
unity. Cologne cathedral, where rebuilding began in 1823, was in the words
of Görres the “symbol of the new empire that we are trying to build.”
For
Reichensperger, whose career became increasingly politicized during the 1830s,
the building should become the catalyst for the reform of architectural education
and practice and the forging of regional identity for the Catholic Rhineland
within the expansive and centralizing Prussian state. As Michael Lewis has
explained,
The
same principles that motivated his political program shaped … his architectural
program. He conceived of the Gothic Revival as an inherently regional
phenomenon, based on the expression of local tradition, custom and materials.
It must be free of the control of the academies, which were modeled on the
French system—just as German society must rediscover its democratic roots,
shunning the centralism and bureaucracy of France. It must spring instead from
communal and fraternal organizations, such as the late medieval building lodge,
just as the revival of these fraternal and private organizations would overturn
the power monopoly of the autocratic state.
When Ernst
Friedrich Zwirner was appointed head architect in 1833 Reichensperger’s hopes
for a revival of the medieval mason’s lodge, or Bauhütte, became a reality.
Here a new generation of architects would be trained in the principles of
Gothic construction. From here they would be dispersed to bring revived Gothic
to parish churches throughout the German lands, or at the very least throughout
the Catholic states. As he explained in his 1845 manifesto, Die christliche-germanische Baukunst und ihr
Verhältnis zur Gegenwart (Christian-Germanic architecture and its relation
to the present) Gothic would be recognized at once, in the spirit of Pugin, who
remained a point of reference for Reichensperger, as the only legitimate style
to express both Germany’s national character and its Christian devotion.
But
by 1852 Reichensperger’s position had been challenged and was becoming more
nuanced and accommodating. He had weathered the storm over the origins of
Gothic, even conceding that Cologne’s design was clearly indebted to the
earlier work at Amiens cathedral. For this he expanded his notion to a “Christian-German”
architecture that could include the Germanic influence all over Europe. Even as
he acknowledged that Gothic had its origins in the north of France—where the
influence of Germanic civilization was vital in his view—he maintained that it
had been brought to mature perfection in Germany. As so often in nationalist
arguments ever since, the lack of coincidence between the boundaries of the
original tribes and the modern nation state based on ethnicity was quickly glossed
over. In the early 1850s Reichensperger was expounding the notion that, as a
universal style, the Gothic Revival must be capable of solving all building
problems, even that of a modern theater, although he remained adamantly opposed
to the integration of modern materials in Gothic settings. Like Didron,
with whom he established close contact, Reichensperger applauded all efforts
even as he sought in a variety of publications and in the pages of the Kölner Domblatt, the official organ of
the Cathedral project, to refine a purist vision of a revived Germanic Gothic
from the best period.
Although
the early polemicists for the Gothic Revival had framed their arguments within
the spirit of the polarities between Gothic and Greek architecture first
formulated by the Romantics, notably Friedrich Schlegel in his Grundzüge der gotischen Baukunst of
1804–1805, Germany’s leading academies of architecture had evolved beyond the
neoclassical doctrines of the early nineteenth century toward a synthetic
historicist position. Grouped under the deliberately inclusive term Rundbogenstil, variants of this eclectic
philosophy were professed in the academies of Berlin, Munich, Karlsruhe, and
Hannover. It was articulated by figures as diverse as Friedrich von Gärtner,
Schinkel, and Heinrich Hübsch, who had coined the term in his 1828 manifesto, In welchem Style sollen wir Bauen? (In
what style should we build?). The Rundbogenstil
was based on a dynamic vision of historical evolution in which the
interaction of the material and structural demands of construction with the
spiritual requirements of different cultures followed laws that could be
studied and extrapolated to create modern buildings in the trajectory of
historical progress. It was a position with distinct parallels to that of
the Romantics in France. Faced with this somewhat elusive opponent, the Gothic
Revivalists articulated increasingly a position that sought to counter both the
historical ideology and the formal preferences of the position they saw as eclectic,
and which Reichensperger viewed with as much suspicion as his friend Lassus had
in France.
In
the wake of the 1848 revolutions in Prussia, Reichensperger had served in the
preliminary assembly convened in Frankfurt with the aim of drafting a
constitution for a united Germany. He quickly emerged as an outspoken proponent
of the Grossdeutschland position
which sought a union that would include Austria. It would associate Austria’s
political power with the German project and draw on its largely Catholic
population to create a more evenly divided mix of Catholic and Protestant in the
united state. Although the Frankfurt assembly was dissolved after one year and
had few concrete results, Reichensperger continued his active political career
in the Prussian Parliament, to which he was elected in 1850 (no doubt on the basis
of the great local support he had for his years of labor for the cathedral
cause) as a delegate from the Rhineland. Gothic architecture remained central
to his vision of Prussia, and a future Germany, as a state which could
accommodate regional differences and religious diversity, promote private
initiatives, and allow the blossoming of individual rights. Architectural reform
was to serve as an opening wedge.
The
building boom that accompanied Berlin’s population explosion and planned expansion
in the early 1850s was firmly under the control of Schinkel’s pupils, who were
seeking diversely to interpret the mandate of the great master’s career.
Many of them specialized in a single aspect of the diverse solutions Schinkel
had devised for domestic or public, rural or urban building programs. A core
group, however, sought to adopt the progressive vision of stylistic development
their master had left in his unfinished architectural textbook and made
manifest in his last great public building, the Bauakademie (1831–35). The
Bauakademie housed both the central building administration of Prussia, which
sought to enforce standards of construction and design throughout the far-flung
Prussian provinces, and the school of architecture. Its challenging
architecture sought to derive a modern synthesis from the legacy of Greek and
Gothic architecture, which Schinkel viewed as elements in a continual development
rather than as irresolvable counter propositions. The whole was realized with
the most efficient spanning forms of construction—the segmental arch and vault—and
in brick and terra-cotta, materials at once with a pedigree in North German
Gothic and a future in burgeoning Prussian industrialization.
The
implicit conflict between these two visions of the future direction of German
architecture erupted in February 1852 when Reichensperger decided to oppose the
normally routine annual appropriation for the Bauakademie. The Bauakademie “and
all its related institutions must vanish from our budget,” Reichensperger
insisted on the floor of the Prussian Parliament. Only the eradication of this
institution of centralization would permit the development of an independent national
architectural expression. Like the Gothic, it would have its origins in the
building yards and be decentralized and individualistic, even as it found unity
as the natural expression of national character. “I hope that we will
thereafter acquire straightforward apprentices and deft masters once more.”
In the heat of rhetorical exchange he let fly not only at the institutions
housed in the Bauakademie but at Schinkel’s building itself. This he variously
represented as a modern Tower of Babel in its stylistic eclecticism and as an
incongruous Grecian, even foreign, intrusion on the banks of the Spree River,
reflecting the conflicting legacy of Schinkel as the father both of a revived Hellenism
and a progressive synthetic historicism. For a moment the Bauakademie and Cologne
Cathedral seemed poised to become the irreconcilable poles of the debate over an
appropriate national style, with each party claiming that history, nationality,
and an experimental inventive artistic spirit supported their position and
their position alone.
The
Berlin establishment, spearheaded by the architectural press, was galvanized
into action. In the Zeitschrift für Bauwesen,
Reichensperger’s speech was paraphrased and refuted line for line. Reichensperger
was accused of ignorance in architecture (the Bauakademie was scarcely a
Grecian building), of being willfully dismissive of Prussian history (the
current state of Prussian architecture and public art was a fitting memorial to
Prussia’s glorious rise), and of being a partisan Catholic. Even more telling
was the virulent refutation of his historical point of view. While the value of
completing Cologne Cathedral was never called into question, the extrapolation
of this act of restoration to a position of revival was seen as a mockery of
the laws of history that a generation of philosophers, architects, and art
historians had been seeking to elucidate in Berlin in the wake of Hegel’s 1828
lectures on aesthetics. The laws of history alone argued against any return to
a moment in the past. Moreover Reichensperger’s critique of what he perceived
as Prussia’s unhealthy dependence on foreign inspiration—whether the imagery of
ancient Greece of the academic institutions of modern France—was dismissed as
an historically impossible position. For if Germans were to resist foreign
influence, the editor of the Zeitschrift
argued, the very mechanism of historical progress would be disabled. Gothic,
just as Romanesque before it, and the German Renaissance style after it, had
been born of foreign influences interacting with native talents: “Succinctly
put: if the peoples that have had the greatest influence on the development of
architecture, held the same narrow-minded viewpoint that Herr Reichensperger
gave witness to in his speech before the Chamber, we would probably even still
find ourselves among the Troglodytes and Tent-dwellers. In any case the Christlich-Romanische architectural
style would never have developed, since
this emerged from the roman-pagan styles.”
An
even more thoroughgoing historicist argument was developed by Franz Kugler,
Schinkel’s friend and first biographer and the first director of the Altes
Museum, in a revised edition of his tract on church design, Vorlesung über die Systeme des Kirchenbaues
(Discourse on the systems of church architecture; revised edition 1852). Kugler
sidestepped the pressing liturgical and denominational issues of the day to
postulate church building as the leading barometer of the architectural health of
a civilization. Echoing a frequent complaint of opponents of the Gothic
Revival, Kugler noted that in the nineteenth century for the first time a natural
relationship with the laws of history had been severed. In opposition both to
the antiquarian position of the Gothic or classical revivals, and to the
unrealistic notion that an entirely unprecedented new style could be created ex
novo from solving modern demands by the laws of materials alone, Kugler
postulated “a third way.” His position was based on the new science of art history
with its cardinal notion that every civilization and every phase of historical
time produced, spontaneously, its own distinctive stylistic expression. He even
compared this position to the middle of the road in politics, implying that it
was a position that evolved from historical law rather than either hopeless
nostalgia or revolutionary change. Echoing Schinkel’s earlier lament that the nineteenth
century was no longer graced with a naive stylistic production, Kugler argued
that the modern comprehension of the laws of history offered a way out. Kugler
analyzed the history of church architecture to extract a developing principle that
had been carried forward by successive civilizations even as they had stamped
their monuments indelibly with the particular character of their time. With
intriguing parallels to Vaudoyer, who had traveled to Germany with Fortoul a
few years earlier, Kugler found the solution to the dilemma of choice was not
to adapt a moment in the past but rather to continue forging the chain of
historical development. Follow the dictates of history he concluded: “They tell
us, we should simply wait for the final goal of the movement, which imbues the
spirit of modern times: the form of our architecture will generate itself.”
As
Schinkel had sought to make evident to students and public alike in the formal
language of the Bauakademie, Kugler demonstrated how a comprehensive study of
history—here reduced to the development of the Christian Church type—would emerge
from understanding the continual dialectic between local circumstances and a
larger essence of architecture inscribed in historical progress. He sought to
demonstrate how the replacement of the flat entablatures over the colonnades of
Early Christian churches was but the first of a long series of integrations of
daring new structural solutions into an existing tradition, which both
respected and transcended the model. He concluded with Schinkel’s attempts to
reintegrate the dome into the organic vaulted tradition of Gothic—first
proposed in his 1814 Cathedral for the Wars of Liberation—as another catalyst
for a new structural and aesthetic development which would have dramatic
consequences for the communal and liturgical needs of large modern Protestant
churches:
We
possess a rich legacy in the long chain of ecclesiastical monuments erected
over the course of fifteen centuries. To use it is not simply for us an
advantage, it is an obligation. The whole secret of rendering this legacy
useful, from our point of view, resides in the skill of knowing how to
differentiate between general aesthetic principles and local and historical particularities,
that is to say the modes of period taste in which these principles have
expressed themselves in any given manifestation…. So if we would like to
establish a firm foundation of principle for contemporary church building—to
the extent that such an ideal training is in fact our goal—it would behoove us not
so much to adopt one of the available systems for imitation or transformation,
but rather to take possession of the sum total of our architectural heritage
from which we might derive a general principle of form-making, one which would endow
our modern ecclesiastical spaces with a lively dignity and an awe-inspiring
rhythmic elevation. Thereby we will establish the positive bases upon which our
artists can express the character of our time, of our sentiments, feelings, and
thoughts.
Gothic was
reduced to a single manifestation of a longer essential history of the formal
development of architecture, one of the many spiritual motors that had directed
mankind’s creative energies. It was not the manuals of Reichensperger’s followers,
with their grammars of Gothic, but a philosophical understanding of the history
of architecture that would point the way to future invention.
The
immediate occasion for Kugler’s position paper was renewed discussion over the construction
of a new Lutheran cathedral in Berlin. The eighteenth-century building, although
splendidly remodeled by Schinkel to form the fourth side of the Lustgarten
between the Royal Palace and the new museum, was severely overcrowded and totally
out of scale with the ambitions of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV who ascended the
throne in 1840 with determination to be a modern Christian monarch. His project
to rebuild the cathedral was renewed in 1849 by Friedrich August Stüler with a
monumental round-arched design crowned by a huge medieval dome. It was at once a
fulfillment of Kugler’s program and, in the mind of the king, a worthy
Protestant response to the rising symbol of Catholicism in Cologne. Work began
on this new focal point for the capital in 1855 but languished as Friedrich
Wilhelm IV was declared insane in 1857 and conceded power to his brother
William I as regent in 1858. Although the project was revived in 1868, and
Reichensperger’s disciples responded with visions of the German Gothic
Cathedral, a new cathedral was not in fact commissioned until 1892, long after unification.
Julius Raschdorff’s building, completed in 1905, is even today an out-scaled
monument in the heart of Berlin. Its monumental size and bombastic classical rhetoric
corresponded to an entirely different set of ambitions, namely to create a
Protestant counterpart to Saint Peter’s in Rome. In 1880, Cologne Cathedral was
inaugurated with much fanfare and neo-medieval pageantry, but the dream of a
modern Gothic cathedral was to evade Reichensperger in Germany even as it had
Didron in France.
Gothic and the Rise of Nationalism in Central Europe
Frustrated in
his confrontation with the Berlin establishment, Reichensperger could
nonetheless find much to bolster his faith in the Gothic Revival cause as he
looked across the map of Central Europe in the mid-1850s. Although in the north
of Germany individual architects were to explore regional variants of the
Gothic—particularly the school of Conrad Wilhelm Hase in Hannover with its
revival of the northern brick or Backsteingothik—it
was in the Catholic south that the Gothic future seemed the rosiest in 1852.
In
1850 an unusual competition had been announced by King Maximilian II of
Bavaria, who had assumed the-throne in the wake of the 1848 uprisings in
Munich. The project centered on a grand public building to house an educational
institution for future statesmen. Its site was on a prominent hill culminating
a new boulevard, the Maximilianstrasse, that would span the Isar River. A long
document sent to each competitor, however, also spelled out a larger mandate,
namely the definition of a single appropriate nineteenth-century style. The
stage was set for another battle between stylistic purists and advocates of a progressive
historicism, a promise made more concrete with the casting of the jury on April
15, 1852. It included two of the leading Gothicists of the German lands:
Zwirner from Cologne and Karl Heideloff from Nuremberg, in addition to F. C.
Gau, author of Sainte Clotilde in Paris. But the Goths were outnumbered by the
Neoclassicists, led by Leo von Klenze, and a diverse group who might be called “historicists”
which included Friedrich-August Stüler from Berlin, Heinrich Hübsch from
Karlsruhe, and Friedrich Bürklein from Munich. Only seventeen entries were
submitted, including one by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia who proposed
that Bavaria develop its own national architecture by translating the wooden
houses of the Alps into a monumental urban stone style. He believed (along with
Klenze) that the alpine houses were ultimately descended from the same models
as the Greek temples. Already nationalist particularisms were gaining the upper
hand over stylistic unity. First prize went to Wilhelm Stier of Berlin, one of
the most original theorists of a hybrid style derived from an analysis of the
principles of historical development, although his precise response to the central
question of the period encapsulated in the Bavarian king’s brief has yet to
resurface. But despite this defeat for the Gothic position, when work
actually began on the Maximilianstrasse in the mid-1850s, now entrusted to Bürklein,
who had served on the jury, a highly original vocabulary of “developed Gothic”
was favored to cater to the longstanding Gothic tastes of the monarch. Dubbed
overnight the “Maximilianstil,”it entered the scenographic and eclectic landscape
of Munich not as a resolution to the problem of historical style but as an
expansion of the representational dialectics available. The Tower of Babel had
not yet been taken.
Austria,
Prussia’s great rival throughout the mid-nineteenth century, emerged in the
1850s as most receptive to the architectural ideology emanating from Cologne.
There had been little Austrian interest in the Gothic during the first half of the
nineteenth century—despite such impressive historical monuments as Saint
Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna—but in 1853 the Gothic was prescribed as the
requisite style for the great Votive Church (the Votivkirche) that Emperor
Franz Josef determined to build. Its construction was to celebrate his 1853
escape from the bullet of a Hungarian nationalist assassin. It would be “a
monument of patriotism and of devotion of the people of Austria to the Imperial
House.” The Votivkirche competition (open from April 2, 1854 to January 31,
1855) as well as the 1857 competition for a new Rathaus (City Hall) in Vienna—two
of the most prominent monuments on Vienna’s emerging Ringstrasse—were to prove
major magnets for the younger generation of Gothicists rising through the ranks
of the Cologne Cathedral stoneyard. Almost without rival in their expertise in
Gothic design and technique, they were soon challenged to adapt their stylistic
fluency to the complex issue of nationality in the Hapsburg Empire where Czechs,
Hungarians, Slovenes, Italians, and others were seeking either independence or
a degree of national autonomy within the empire.
Although
the Votivkirche commission was awarded to a young Viennese architect, Heinrich
Ferstel, otherwise untrained in the Gothic, the competition proved one of the
major showcases for the formidable Gothic talent that Zwirner’s training and Reichensperger’s
vigilance had fostered in Cologne. In addition to Georg Gottlob Ungewitter,
known even in his own day as the German Pugin, Vincenz Statz and Friedrich Schmidt,
both master masons at Cologne, submitted projects. They took second and third
prizes respectively with designs derived from close study of Cologne as a model
for future designs. As fate would have it they both won important commissions in
Austria within the next two years. In 1857 Statz was appointed architect for a
new cathedral at Linz, where the dream of a new Gothic cathedral was realized
in Catholic Austria between 1857 and 1922. In the same year Schmidt emerged as
victor in the competition for Vienna City Hall; his Gothic design established
an image for the German town hall that was to have much greater progeny than
Scott’s widely publicized winning competition design for the new Rathaus in
Hamburg. In 1857 Schmidt was also asked by the Austrians to take up a position
in the academy in Milan, where he would spread the word of the revival of
medieval art and of restoration in the twilight years of Austrian Lombardy. Two
years later he was given a post in the academy in Vienna, the first major
Gothicist to penetrate the establishment, followed by his appointment as chief
architect to the restoration of Saint Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna, which began
in 1863 and continued for decades. In addition Schmidt would advise on
restoration projects throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From these posts,
Schmidt formed more Gothic Revivalists than any other architect in Europe, men
who would carry his style and ideals to the most diverse contexts. Between his
office and his studio at the academy he built up an efficient Gothic machine,
while remaining faithful to the humble creed of workmanship and individuality forged
at Cologne. His tombstone was inscribed “Hier ruht in Gott ein deutscher
Steinmetz” (Here lies in peace a German stonemason).
Even
more remarkable than the selective use of the Gothic by the Imperial Austrian
household and the liberal bourgeoisie of Vienna, each to their own ends, is
the role Schmidt’s pupils played in promoting Gothic restoration and revival in
the diverse non-German parts of the Hapsburg Empire. Rather than fostering the
universal Gothic Revival, which Reichsensperger would continue to campaign for
even after German unification in 1870, Gothic restoration and neo-Gothic went
hand-in-hand as instruments of national consciousness in the Hapsburg Empire. Despite
its successful squelching of the 1848–49 uprisings throughout the empire, the
regime of Franz Josef II was nearly everywhere forced slowly to negotiate
various degrees of local autonomy, giving in over the course of the 1850s and 1860s
to the demands of the alliances of intellectuals who had formulated a vision of
national identity based on ethnicity and language. The 1850s were to be repressive
years in the Hapsburg lands, and architecture continued to apply the neo-Renaissance
vocabulary of central authority when building was undertaken. But with the
gradual granting of powers to the provinces, first to the Czech lands in the
1850s, and then to the Kingdom of Hungary in the famous “Hungarian Compromise”
of 1867, Gothic architecture was poised to join the ongoing efforts at
purifying the national tongue which had already fueled the great initiatives of
collecting folk literatures and writing national dictionaries in the preceding decades.
Under
Hapsburg Rule since the early sixteenth century, the Czechs found in the Gothic
an image of the great period of the kings of Bohemia who had built the
remarkable Vladislav Hall in Prague Castle and sponsored one of the grandest of
Gothic workshops in Saint Vitus Cathedral. Over the course of the late 1850s
and early 1860s a number of concessions were made to the increasingly vociferous
demands of Czech nationalists in favor of the territorial integrity of Bohemia
and Moravia, of the right to elementary school education in Czech rather than
German (a full language decree would not be passed until 1880 however), and the
abolition of tariffs, allowing Czech small industry to prosper. In 1859 the
Cathedral Commission was established to complete Saint Vitus Cathedral within
the confines of Prague Castle, a project that was to serve for decades as the centerpiece
of the search for Czech identity within the ethnically diverse Hapsburg
conglomerate. Paralleling the efforts to purify the Czech language and fortify
it in the battle against the German-speaking aristocracy, the cathedral was restored
and completed in the principle of stylistic unity, taking inspiration at once
from the writings of Viollet-le-Duc and the doctrine of Cologne. The cathedral
workshop, which was later to foster a belated Gothic Revival in Czech
architecture, was placed under the direction of Josef Kranner and Josef Möcker,
who had trained under Schmidt in Vienna.
Even
more striking is the case of Hungary, where the Magyar Nationalists had set the
tone for the demands that the Czechs and Southern Slavs were making in these
decades. The 1850s saw little building activity in the wake of the suppression by
the Hapsburg troops of the 1848/49 Revolution in Budapest. But after the Austro-Hungarian
Compromise of 1867, which granted Hungary self-determination in its internal
affairs, the need for a Hungarian past became a pressing necessity. Three of
Schmidt’s most gifted pupils, the Hungarians Imre Steindl, Frigyes Schulek, and
Ferenc Schulcz, crafted a series of medieval landmarks in the center of Budapest
which were in sharp counterpoint to the prevalent Renaissance Revival of the prominent
administrative buildings in the Hungarian capital, similar to those favored throughout
the Empire. A national church for the Hungarians was created with the
restoration of the Church of Saint Mathias on the crest of Buda overlooking the
Danube. Work here began under Schulek’s direction shortly after the coronation
there of Franz Josef and Elisabeth as king and queen of Hungary in 1867.
The
nationalist ideology of the Hungarian Gothic Revival was especially stamped in
the 1860s by the theories of Imre Henszlmann, who had first become interested
in the “Old German” churches of Hungary in the 1840s, but soon developed
notions that would lead him to envision Gothic as a way of differentiating
Magyar Hungary from Germanic Austria. He spent the decade of the 1850s abroad
in England and France—the leading centers of debate over the Gothic Revival—where
he developed his highly influential theory of Gothic proportions. His claim to
have discovered the secret of the Gothic masons generated considerable excitement
and was taken up especially by Lassus and Violletle-le-Duc, who thanked Henszlmann
by name in the Dictionnaire.
Henszlmann returned to Hungary after participating in the Lille Cathedral
competition, where he was associated with two neo-Gothic architects from
Rheims, and entering alone the Crimean War Chapel competition. In 1861 he collaborated
on an entry in the competition for a new headquarter for the Hungarian Academy—a
building with a high ideological charge as Hungary strove to craft a national
identity within the empire. Associations with the great monuments crowning Buda
were of importance to be sure, but Henszlmann explained neo-Gothic design with arguments
reminiscent of Viollet-le-Duc’s vision. He “argued that gothic had been
invented in France, which was important because all things German were extremely
unpopular in Hungary in those years, owing to the defeat of the Hungarians at
the hands of the Austrians in the war of independence. He called gothic the
style of freedom in contrast to Romanesque monastic architecture, and the style
of enlightened institutions like the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge.” In
the heat of the moment, Gothic, which no one considered indigenous to Hungary,
had the great advantage of not following Austrian norms. Although the competition
was won by Stüler from Berlin with a neo-Renaissance style design, the Gothic
would ultimately triumph as the symbol of Hungarian national freedom with
Steindl’s 1883 design for the great Gothic Revival Hungarian Parliament. It
was completed on the banks of the Danube River, a dramatic site, in 1904. It
might even be said that Viollet-le-Duc’s arguments in favor of the association
of the Gothic with the rise of the free bourgeoisie was to have even greater
resonance in Central Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century than
in France.
The
history of the Gothic Revival in Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary extends into the
last third of the nineteenth century and far beyond the direct legacy of Pugin.
While Pugin’s utopian vision of Gothic as a beacon for the future continued to
find renewed life in new arenas—notably in Flanders—direct support of the
nationalist uses of Gothic restoration and revival was sought in the two
continental models of nationhood: in that grandfather of national ideology,
France, and in the most spectacular success of nation-making in the century,
Germany. The majority of the great movements for national identity in the last
third of the nineteenth century were to give renewed potency to Gothic Revival
ideology and to draw heavily upon the joint legacies of Viollet-le-Duc’s theories
and the practices defined in the two great cathedral workshops of Paris and
Cologne. By the end of the century Schmidt’s pupils, for instance, could be
found practicing throughout Germany, Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, Hungary,
Croatia, Galicia in Poland, and Austrian Trieste, as well as in the Netherlands
and Switzerland. One pupil, Josef Vancas, was serving as Cathedral Architect in
Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Viollet-leDuc, increasingly under the spell
of Count Gobineau’s theories of racial purity, was consulted throughout Europe,
but most particularly in the younger countries of Central and Eastern Europe, for
both practical advice on medieval restoration and on the thorny issues of
defining a national architectural style. Croats, Poles, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians,
Swedes, Spanish, Italians, Portuguese, and Romanians all consulted the great
master either through official channels or individually in the name of the
international Gothic cause. But just as he admonished his own pupils in
1863 for attempting to please him by imagining a pure neo-Gothic design for the
French colonies in North Africa, so Viollet-le-Duc sought to direct each of his
diverse interlocutors to discovering in their own past a principle at once rational
and national.
The culmination came with the invitation in 1877
by a group of Russian Slavophiles to write a book on Russian art and
architecture that it might guide them in valorizing a nationalist past and defining
a national future. Although he never visited Russia, relying instead on materials
sent him by Viktor Butovsky and those collected by his own son-in-law, Maurice
Ouradou, Viollet-le-Duc advised the Russians on the method for finding a starting
point in the architecture that preceded Peter the Great’s enslavement of the Russian
genius to the blind imitation of western forms. But he warned them of falling
into the trap of slavishly imitating any single monument, rather encouraged
them to find the rational strand in the development of Slavic forms and to “choose
from among these elements those most capable of improvement, those which derive
from the most pure and original sources, the sources that conform most closely
to the national genius.” Although he left the project of formal experimentation
to Russian architects, he offered a vision of a progressive direction in which
the tradition of Muscovite brick construction and centralized onion-domed
spaces was extended to admit the modern possibilities of cast-iron construction
in the form of diagonal piers and to solve the modern problem of a huge place
of modern assembly. For Viollet-le-Duc this design embodied the great challenge
of the age, whether it be in the older states of France and Britain or in
nations just now forging their particular identity: to retain the universal rational
essence of Gothic architecture while following the specific historical and
regional expressions that expressed the particular genius of the diverse nation
states of modern Europe. The different languages of modern Europe were to his mind
perfectly compatible in the search for the higher laws of all architecture. His
arguments having matured in the debates of the 1850s, Viollet-le-Duc hoped that
the cause of rational architecture could take root in new soil, free of the
battles of the styles that had raged in the early years of the movement in
France, Germany, and Britain.
© Bard Graduate Center, Barry Bergdoll.
“M. Pugin est
mort; mais il revit dans son fils aîné et dans … huit ou dix autres jeunes
architectes que se vouent dans la Grande Bretagne, à l’architecture du moyen-âge”
(A. N. Didron, “Renaissance de l’Architecture Chrétienne,” Annales Archéologiques 13 [1853]: 314–27, here cited, p. 321).
“Le grec est
vaincu jusque dans sa dernière citadelle, jusque dans son propre berceau”
(ibid.).
“Voilà done
le style ogival en Californie et nous pouvons done lui appliquer ce qu’on disait
autrefois de la liberté: “L’ogive fera le tour du monde” (Annales Archéologiques 13 [1853], p. 270).
Belgian
Gothic Revival was probably closer to Pugin’s ideas than other national movements,
thanks to A. G. B. Schayes (a frequent contributor to Didron’s Annales Archéologiques), and to T. H.
King, an Englishman living in Bruges. King published what was ostensibly a
French translation of Pugin’s True
Principles under the title Les Vrais Principes
de l’Architecture Ogivale ou Chrétienne, avec des remarques sur leur renaissance
au temps actuel (Bruges, 1850). This was a compilation of elements of True Principles and Contrasts with plates relating to Belgian examples of Neoclassical
work and the Belgian architectural and social situation. For further
information on King and the Flemish Gothic Revival, see Jan de Maeyer, De Sint-Lucasscholen en de neogotiek. 1862–1914 (Leuven, 1988), and Jean van Cleven,
ed., Neogotiek in Belge (Ghent,
1994).
There has
been considerable work recently on the new attitudes to history catalyzed by the
French Revolution. See especially Anthony Vidler, “Grégoire, Lenoir et les ‘monuments
parlants,’ in Jean-Claude Bonnet, ed., La
Carmagnole des Muses, L’homme de lettres et l’artiste dans la Révolution (Paris,
1988), pp. 131–54; and Françoise Choay, L’Allégoire
du Patrimoine (Paris, 1992), esp. pp. 76–95. Also see the earlier, classic
sources by Paul Léon, La Vie des Monuments
Français (Paris, 1951); and Louis Réau, Histoire
du Vandalisme (Paris, 1958; reprint 1994).
For an
excellent summary of this, see Laurent Thies, “Guizot et les institutions de mémoire,”
in Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de Mémoire:
La Nation (Paris 1986), vol. 2, pp. 569–92. For the Museum at Versailles,
see Michael Marrinan, Painting Politics
for Louis Philippe (New Haven, 1988). For the Commission des Monuments
Historiques, see the works listed in note 5 and Françoise Bercé, Les Premiers Travaux de Ia Commission des Monuments
Historiques, 1837–1848 (Paris, 1979).
On
Viollet-le-Duc and Lassus’s activities at the Commission des Monuments
Historiques, see Viollet-le-Duc,
exhib. cat. (Paris, 1980), esp. pp. 50–59; and Jean-Michel Leniaud, Jean-Baptiste Lassus (1807–1857), ou le
temps retrouvé des cathédrales (Paris, 1980), esp. pp. 64ff.
There is a
growing literature on the Romantic group, but their interactions with the Gothic
party has been little discussed. For an orientation, see Barry Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the Age of
Industry (New York, 1994), esp. chaps. 3 and 4. Duban’s key position
between the two groups will be elucidated in a 1996 exhibition catalogue edited
by Françoise Hamon, Bruno Foucart, and Sylvain Bellenger (Paris, forthcoming).
For a summary
of Duban’s reports and comments, see Jacques Pons, “Félix-Jacques Duban:
Architecte du gouvernement 1797–1870,” thesis, Ecole Nationale des Chartes, 1985;
Annie Cospéric, Blois, la forme d’une
ville, étude topographique et monumentale (Paris, 1994); and forthcoming catalogue
cited in n. 8.
A. C.
Quatremère de Quincy, “Gothique,” Encyclopédie
methodique. Paris, 1832.
For a
summary of Viollet-le-Duc’s historical views, see Martin Bressani, “Notes on Viollet-le-Duc’s
Philosophy of History: Dialectics and Technology,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 48 (1989), pp.
327–50; and Robin Middleton, “The Rationalist Interpretations of Léonce Reynaud
and Viollet-le-Duc,” AA Files 11
(1986), pp. 29–48. On Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire
in relationship to academic theory, and to Quatremère de Quincy in particular,
see Barry Bergdoll, The Foundations of Architecture:
Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné of Viollet-le-Duc (New York, 1990),
introduction.
Viollet-le-Duc, “Un mot sur l’architecture en 1852,” Revue Générale de l’Architecture 10 (1852), pp. 371–79.
For a
summary of this research, see notes and bibliographical references, and the dictionary
of artists, in Jean-Michel Leniaud, Les
Cathédrales au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1993). Also see François Loyer and
Hélène Guéné, L’Eglise, l’Etat et les
Architects, Rennes, 1870–1940 (Paris, 1995). For a fine study on the
Charente area and Bordeaux, see Claude Laroche, Paul Abadie, architecte, 1812–1884 (Paris, 1988).
On the role
of the state’s administrations of ecclesiastical architecture, most importantly
the Service des Edifices Diocésains, see Jean-Michel Leniaud, Les Cathédrales au XIXe siècle (Paris,
1993); idem, L’Administration des cultes
pendant Ia période concordataire (Paris, 1988); and Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer, pp. 200–206.
For a
summary of the Saint-Simonian vision of history, see Middleton, “The Rationalist
Interpretations,” pp. 29–48.
“Le
sentiment et la science de l’art gothique” (quoted in Leniaud, Les Cathédrales, p. 284).
“Répétons
encore que nous ne faisons pas d’archéologie en purs oisfs, mais en gens qui
demandent au passé tout ce qu’il pourrait donner au présent et surtout à l’avenir”
(Annales Archéologiques 4 [1846], 3e
livraison). For a summary of the major issues raised in the magazine and its international
relations, see Georg Germann, Gothic
Revival in Europe and Britain: Sources, Influences and Ideas (Cambridge,
Mass., 1972), pp. 135–50. For an excellent discussion of Didron, see Catherine
Brisac and Jean-Michel Leniaud, “Adolphe-Napoléon Didron ou les media au
service de l’art chrétien,” Revue de l’Art
77 (1987), pp. 33–42.
“Plus tard,
à faire mieux si nous pouvons” (Jean-Baptiste Lassus, “De l’art et archéologie,”
Annales Archéologiques 2 [1845], p.
329).
Jean-Baptiste Lassus, Réaction de l’Académie
des Beaux-Arts contre l’art gothique (Paris, 1846).
On the
central role of Sainte Clotilde in the evolution of the Gothic Revival in
France, see Robin Middleton and David Watkin, Neoclassical and Nineteenth Century Architecture (New York, 1987),
vol. 2, pp. 366–68.
“La France
peut-être considerée comme le coeur de ce grand corps qu’on appelle l’Europe,
soit à la fois destinée à recevoir toutes les influences étrangères et à
exercer la sienne universellement” (Léon Vaudoyer, “Histoire de l’architecture en
France,” in Edouard Charron, Patria
[Paris, 1846], vol. 2).
“Quai, le
gothique serait notre art national! et nous devrions répudier routes les conquêtes
qui ont été faites depuis! Quoi! telles seraient les barnes imposées au génie français,
et depuis le quinzième siècle notre art aurait perdu route originalité, tout caractère!
Nous ne pouvons le croire, l’art en général, et l’architecture particulièrement,
sont soumis à l’impulsion des idées qui dominent à l’époque de leur production.
L’architecture … est le plus fidèle interprète des principes, des moeurs et
de l’esprit d’une nation civilisée” (Albert Lenoir and Léon Vaudoyer, “Etudes
de l’Architecture en France,” Magasin
Pittoresque 12 [1844], pp. 262).
“L’unité de
style, par exemple et quai qu’on fasse, est une de ces règles fondamentales
dont il est impossible de se départir; car, sans cette condition rigoureuse, il
n’y a ni art ni artistes. En architecture, l’éclectisme est complétment
impossible et ne présente aucun sens…. Prendre ce qu’il y a de mieux dans
chaque époque, ce serait faire, en architecture, ce que l’on pratique pour
composer l’un de ces costumes indispensables pour certain bals et qui sont
formés des débris de vingt costumes” (Lassus, “De l’Art et Archéologie,” p.
76).
“Dans un
pays deux choses doivent être éminemment nationales, la langue et l’architecure;
c’est ce qui exprime le plus nettement le caractère d’un peuple. Nous n’avons
pas abandonné notre langue; nous l’avons modifiée, peut-être à tort. Pourquoi
done abanonnerions-nous notre architecture?” (E. E. Viollet-le-Duc, “De l’Art
Etranger et de l’Art National,” Annales
Archéologiques 2 [1845], p. 508).
“Enfants de
Ia civilisation romaine, nous avons tout emprunté de l’antiquité; est-ce donc à
dire que nous ne conservions pas une originalité propre! Il en est de l’architecture
comme du langage, et si cette comparison a déjà été faite bien souvent, c’est
qu’il ne saurait y en avoir de plus exacte et de plus fraprante; de ce que la langue
française s’est formée d’éléments grecs, latins et italiens, n’est-elle pas, malgré
cela, la juste expression de notre esprit français!” (Vaudoyer, “Histoire de l’architecture,”
col. 2160).
For greater
detail see Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer,
esp. pp. 224–74.
“Il semble
vouloir prouver qu’on peut allier dans un même édifice des formes appartenant à
des âges et à des peuples différents. Certes, si quelqu’un est en étage de
surmonter cette difficulté c’est M. Vaudoyer…. [il] sait mieux que nous qu’une architecture
n’est pas le produit du hasard: quand donc, on se décide (et comment faire
autrement aujourd’hui) à adopter un style, pourquoi chercher à composer une
langue macaronique quand on a sur la main un beau et simple langage”
(Viollet-le-Duc, ms. report of 1855, Service des Edifices Diocésains, Archives
Nationales, Paris, F-19-7741; fuller citation in Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer, p. 254).
“Tous les
monuments enfantés par le moyen âge seraientils irréprochables, qu’ils ne devaient
donc pas être aujourd’hui servilement copiés, si l’on élève un édifice neuf, ce
n’est qu’un langage dont il faut apprendre à se servir pour exprimer sa pensée,
mais non pour répéter ce que d’autres ont dit…” (E. E. Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’Architecture
[Paris, 1854], vol. 1, pp xv–xvi).
“On étudie,
on copier les vieux monuments nationaux, naguère encore si méconnus”; and “Nous
attendons sur le champ de bataille de Lille les architectes de tous les pays, pour
juger loyalement la victoire soit aux étrangers, soit aux français” (A. N.
Didron, “Une cathédrale au concours,” Annales
Archéologiques 16 [1856], p. 115).
Although the
competition and its role in the French Gothic Revival await proper study, the
importance of this competition for the development of English High Victorian Gothic
has been underscored; see especially Stefan Muthesius, The High Victorian Movement in Architecture, 1850–1870 (London,
1972), esp. pp. 117ff. See also J. M. Crook, William Burges and the High Victorian Dream (Chicago, 1981).
The report
is reproduced in full in Leniaud, Jean-Baptiste
Lassus, pp. 243–55.
“The
Competition for the Proposed Cathedral at Lille,” The Ecclesiologist 17 (1856), p. 91.
“M. Lassus
on Eclecticism in Art,” The
Ecclesiologist 17 (1857), p. 285.
Ibid., p.
286.
“… ce
monument sans pareil que sera national comme Ia cathédrale de Reims, beau comme
celle d’Amiens, solide comme celle de Chartres selon l’expression de Didron” (Louis
Cloquet, quoted in Chanoine H. Vandame, Iconographie
de Ia Basilique Notre Dame de la Treille à Lille [Lille, 1906], p. 1).
E. E.
Viollet-le-Duc, “Unité,” Dictionnaire Raisonné
de l’Architecture, vol. 9, p. 345, quoted in Bergdoll, The Foundations, p. 28.
On Schinkel’s
interest in Gothic see Georg Friedrich Koch, “Karl Friedrich Schinkel und die
Architektur des Mittelalters,” Zeitschrift
für Kunstgeschichte 29 (1966), pp. 177–222; idem, “Schinkels
architektonische Entwürfe im gotischen Stil 1810–1815,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 32 (1969), pp. 262–316; and Barry
Bergdoll, Karl Friedrich Schinkel: An
Architecture for Prussia (New York, 1994).
This story
has been well studied: see Germann, Gothic
Revival; Hugo Borger, ed., Der Kölner
Dom im Jahrhundert seiner Vollendung, exhib. cat. 2 vols. (Cologne, 1980); Michael
Lewis, The Politics of the German Gothic
Revival: August Reichensperger (New York, 1993).
Quoted in
Germann, Gothic Revival, p. 94.
Lewis, The Politics, p. 24.
Germann, Gothic Revival, p. 160.
See W. D.
Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the
Gothic Revival in Germany (Oxford, 1965), esp. pp. 129–45.
On the
debates over the Rundbogenstil in the
1830s and 40s, see In what style should we
build?: the German debate on architectural style. Intro. / trans. by
Wolfgang Hermann (Santa Monica, 1992).
Eva Börsch-Supan,
Berliner Baukunst nach Schinkel, 1840–1870.
Munich, 1977.
On the
Bauakademie see Bergdoll, Karl Friedrich Schinkel,
pp. 195–208, with older bibliography.
Translated
and quoted in Lewis, The Politics, p.
155.
“Mit einem
Wörte: Wenn die Völker, die auf die Entwicklung der Architektur vornämlich von
Einfluss gewesen sind, in ähnlichen engherzigen Anschauungen befangen gewesen
wäre, wie Herr Reichensperger sie in seiner Kammerrede kund gibt, so würden wir
vermuthlich noch jetzt zu den Troglodyten und Zeltenbewohnern gehören; jedenfalls
aber würde sich niemals der christlich-romanische Baustyl entwickelt haben, da
derselbe ja durchaus vom römische-heidnischen Stile ausging” (“Der Abgeordnete Reichensperger
und die Baukunst,” Zeitschrift für Bauwesen
2 [1852], p. 234).
“Sie sagt
uns, wir sollten nur das endliche Ziel der Bewegungen, welche die Geister der
neueren Zeit erfüllen, abwarten: die Form würde sich dann schon von selber finden”
(Franz Kugler, Vorlesung über die Systeme
des Kirchenbaues, gehalten am 4. März 1843 im wissenschaftlichen Verein zu
Berlin von F. Kugler, 2nd ed. [Berlin, 1852], p. 3). Written in 1843, it
was republished in 1852 during the debates over the Bauakademie.
“Es liegt
uns in der langen Folgenreihe der kirchlichen Monumente, die im Laufe von 15
Jahrhunderten entstanden sind, ein reiches Erbtheil vor, dessen Benutzung nicht
bloß unser Vortheil, sonder auch unsre Pflicht ist. Das ganze Geheimniß, wie
wir dasselbe der Benutzung von unsrer Seite zugänglich zu machen haben, berught
eben nur darin, daß wir die allgeinenen ästhetischen Principien von den lokalen
und historischen Besonderheiten der Erscheinung, von der Weise des Zeitgeschmackes,
in der sie sich ausgeprägt haben, zu unterscheiden wissen…. Wollen wir demnach
für die Zwecke des heutigen Kirchenbaues—sofern dabei überhaupt eine ideale
Durchbildung erstrebt wird—zu einer festen Grundlage, zu einem klaren Urtheil
gelangen, so scheint es nöthig, nich sowhol ein einzelnes der vorhandenen
Systeme zur Nachbildung oder Umbildung vorzunehmen, als vielmehr aus der ganzen
Summe unsrer Erfahurungen jene allgemeinen Gesetze der Formenbildung, durch
welche der kirchliche Raum lebenvolle Würde und fierliche rhythmische Erhebung gewinnt,
uns zu eigen zu machen…. Dadurch gewinnen wir den positiven Inhalt, dem der
schaffender Künstler das Gepräge unsrer Zeit, unsrers Sinnens, Fühlens und
Denkens, aufzudrücken vermag” (ibid., pp. 22–23).
For studies of
this event, see Eberhard Drüeke, Der Maximilianstil,
Zum Stilbergriff der Architektur im 19. Jahrhundert (Mittenwald, 1981) and
August Hahn, Der Maximilianstil in
Munchen, Programm und Verwirklichung (Munich, 1982) .
On Stier,
see Börsch-Supan, Berliner Baukunst.
On the
participation of Cologne architects in Austrian competitions, particularly the Linz
Cathedral commission, see Lewis, The
Politics, pp. 175–82, 195–99. On Friedrich Schmidt, see Historisches
Museum, Friedrich von Schmidt (1825–1891),
Ein gothischer Rationalist (Vienna, 1991).
For an
excellent discussion of the relationship of style to the politics of the
Imperial Household and the enfranchised bourgeoisie of Vienna in this period,
see Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna, Politics and Culture (New York, 1981), pp. 24ff.
For this
summary of Hungarian Gothic Revival I am most indebted to the advice and
publications of József Sisa, whose forthcoming contributions to the history of
Hungarian architecture, which Dora Wiebenson is editing for the MIT Press, will
greatly expand our understanding of this complex issue. In the interim, see Jòzsef
Sisa, “Steindl, Schulek und Schulcz—Drei ungarische Schüler des Wiener
Dombaumeisters Friedrich von Schmidt,” Mitteilungen
der Gesellschaft für Vergleichende Kunstforschung in Wien 37 (Sept. 1985),
pp. 1–8.
Jòzsef Sisa,
“Imre Steindl and Neo-Gothic in Hungary in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in
Rossana Bossaglia, ed., Il Neogotico nel
XIX e XX secolo (Milan, 1989), vol. 1., p. 142.
László
Csorba, Jòzsef Sisa, and Zoltán Szalay, The
Hungarian Parliament (Budapest, 1993).
See “Verzeichnis
jener Schmidtschüler, welche an der k.k. Akademie der bildenden Künste in Wien
inskribiert waren,” (1905) reprinted in Historische Museum Friedrich von Schmidt, pp. 231–38.
A synthetic
study of Viollet-le-Duc’s influence, in particular in relationship to nationalist
ideologies, has yet to be undertaken; in the interim, see Pierre-Marie Auzas, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879 (Paris,
1979; first published 1965), pp. 219–51; Actes
du Colloque International Viollet-le-Duc, Paris 1980 (Paris, 1982), pp. 223–24.
E. E.
Viollet-le-Duc, L’Art russe: ses
origines, ses éléments constitutifs, son apogée, son avenir (Paris, 1877).
For an analysis of this text see Robin Middleton, “Viollet-le-Ducksy?”, Architectural Design 49 (1970), pp. 67–68;
and, with impressive detail on the Slavophile context in Russia in the 1870s,
Lauren M. O’Connell, “A Rational, National Architecture: Viollet-le-Duc’s
Modest Proposal for Russia,” Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians 52 (1993), pp. 436–52.
