MA History of Art: Special Options
Modernity and Antiquity in British Architecture, 1615-1815
course description
In this course, we examine the architectural production – that is, texts and drawings, as well as buildings – of England and Scotland between 1615 and 1815. The period begins with Inigo Jones’s assumption of his roles as both Surveyor of the King’s Works and missionary on behalf of what an admirer called the ‘elegant art of the ancients’, meaning classical antiquity. It ends with the completion of the first stage of John Soane’s house-museum, designed to make the study of architectural history itself a spatial (or, as Soane wrote, ‘poetical’) experience. The intervening two centuries saw the construction of buildings of great interest and variety, of which a number are available for first-hand study in the London area. The Banqueting House and the Goose-Pie House; Greenwich Hospital, Chelsea Hospital and the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; Castle Howard, Downton Castle and Culzean Castle; Bedlam and the Bank of England; St Paul’s Cathedral; Newgate Gaol: many are, or were, large and expensive works that required considerable collaboration among architects, craftsmen and paymasters and took a long time to complete. For precisely these reasons, they resist ready categorisation, even as simple examples of an architectural ‘style’. How do we get beyond description and begin to think about this architecture?
Within a broadly chronological course structure, our particular interest will be the ways in which built form and its creators were not only affected by, but actively directed, Britain’s shifting and increasingly complex understandings of its own past, both pagan and Christian, distant and more recent, architectural and political. Jones’s relatively unproblematic conception of a modernity that had fallen off from classical ‘elegance’ into raw individualism was echoed by his Palladian admirers in the early eighteenth century, but now with an edge added by the memory of the intervening Civil War: individualistic licence might be deadly, as well as distasteful. Later in the seventeenth century, Christopher Wren had explored the possibility of building Christian churches in the classical, pagan style, in part through an investigation into Roman Imperial Christianity that was subsequently taken by his follower Nicholas Hawksmoor. Hawksmoor’s friend John Vanbrugh wondered if it was possible to avoid historical quotation entirely and arrive at something he called ‘form’; he, Hawksmoor, George Dance and Dance’s pupil Soane in turn questioned the extent to which an architect could be a free modern and still adhere to a patriarchal and millennia-old classical canon. We will pursue these questions, and the buildings that both reflected and directed them. The answers had implications, not just for architecture but for the more general political relationships, as perceived, between the individual, Church and State during a particularly dynamic period in British history.
language and other requirements
Standard entry requirements.