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The last post left off with the Federal Style of architecture that expressed the optimistic, if incoherent, American Enlightenment thought that informed the founding of the United States. This blend of Palladian, Georgian, Roman, and Greek elements in a generic Neoclassical soup is a good metaphor for the naive hope that different ethnicities would unify under the universal principles of Enlightenment reason. The problem is that humans aren't options in an architecture book, and the "principles" just Anglo-American cultural preferences passed off as fake laws in a depressingly familiar rationalist bait and switch. It made no more sense to expect non-Anglo-Americans to abandon their cultural ethoi to expect the framers to do the same. But somehow the shining city on the hill was supposed to transcend human nature...
Charles Bulfinch, Massachusetts State House, 1795-98, Boston
An early Federal Style landmark that captures the ill-founded optimism of this historical moment. The values encoded here are specifically Anglo-American - they don't speak to anyone else in the same way. And all the wishful thinking on the part of Anglo-Americans won't change this in sufficient numbers to matter.
The Federal Style included the final stages of European Neoclassicism, which brings us to the end of Enlightenment architecture, but unfortunately not the Enlightenment legacy. Faith in human reason comes into question, but the theoretical and institutional structures that were founded on that reason don't miss a beat. To call the shot:
Late Enlightenment architecture was shaped by the increasing knowledge of the ancient world that came from applying new “scientific” methods to history. The eighteenth-century was when modern disciplines like history and archaeology began to take form, and researchers began looking at claims about the past in a more methodical way.
Robert Adam, Syon House interiors, designed 1762, London
The Adam style adapted new archaeological discoveries into an opulent settings that were very popular with aristocrats.
Robert Adam, Kenwood House interiors, 1764-79
One of Adam's early classically inspired projects. These were still posh and aristocratic, just inspired by the new archaeological discoveries.
Robert Adam, Headfort interiors, 1771-75, Co. Meath, Ireland
The Adam style of Neoclassicism spreads beyond England
Parlor from James Duncan Jr. house, Haverhill, Massachusetts, ca. 1805, White pine and plaster, Metropolitan Museum of Art
It jumped the Atlantic to add refined classical details to the American Federal Style. Designs were published in book form, making them very portable.
The Federal Style brings us back to the end of the last post, where we wondered why the Pantheon is a symbol of America.
The interior of the Baltimore Basilica is recently restored and a lovely example of a Federal interior at its most Adam-esque.
The Baltimore Basilica also brings to the final phase of Neoclassical architecture - the Greek Revival. Its somber Ionic porch recalls the monumental austerity of Classical Greece.
James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Doric portico, from The Antiquities of Athens, Vol. I, London: John Haberkorn, 1762.
The Greek Revival started when improved relations with the Ottoman Empire brought access to Greek monuments.
Architect and archaeololgist James "Athenian" Stuart's Antiquities of Athens (1762) was the first modern treatise on Greek architecture.
Archibald Archer, Temporary Elgin Room at the British Museum, 1819, oil on canvas, 94 x 132.7 cm, British Museum
The Elgin Marbles were a climax of this "exploration". These works by the ancient Greek sculptor Phidias were acquired from the Parthenon with the permission of Turkish officials. One problem with Empire is the disregard for the heritage of the subject people.
James Stuart, The Doric Temple, Shugborough, 1760, Staffordshire, England
The new style was popular with aristocrats at first. The use of the Doric order on a very simple temple design is a break from the more ornate Neoclassicisms that came before.
Nicholas Revett, New St. Lawrence Church, 1778, Ayot St. Lawrence
Stuart's partner Revett with an early adaptation of the Propalyeon, or ancient gate of Athens. The simple Doric temple front is the sign.
William Wilkins, Charles Robert Cockerell, Robert Smirke, Northington Grange, 1804, Itchen Stoke and Ovington, England
In the early nineteenth-century it became the in style.
Robert Smirke, British Museum, 1753-59, London
Just in time for the rising British Empire to need imposing imperial buildings.
Empires always want to project power with architecture.
Greek Revival came to America quite quickly. Jefferson owned a copy of The Antiquities of Athens and the influence can be seen at Monticello.
Burlington's Chiswick was an influence on Monticello, but Jefferson made some changes. The more massively proportioned Doric porch instead of the Corinthian one is a sign of Greek influence.
William Strickland, Second Bank of the United States, 1818-24, Philadelphia
The full-blown Greek Revival designs that follow are as strict as anything found in England.
Wait a minute. England and America were supposed to be mortal enemies, or at the very least political opposites. The British had just burned the White House in 1812. What "national values" did they share that called for the same architectural expression? What how vague and meaningless does a symbolic language have to be to apply to a centuries-old monarchy and a new colonial republic?
Ammi B. Young, Doric portico, Vermont State House, 1833, Montpelier
Presumably this was supposed to represent the pure light of classical reason. But what reason? Dionysian mystery? Neoplatonic mysticism?
When your "reference" is historical fiction, don't be surprised when your plan doesn't quite work out.
The temple form is telling, because the new republic was already in the process of building a fake civic mythology in the vain attempt to compensate for an actual national identity.
John J. Barralett, artist, Benjamin Tanner, engraver, America Guided by Wisdom, 1815, engraving and etching, 496 x 646 mm, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Notice the wholesale adoption of Greco-Roman mythology. Minerva, Ceres, and Mercury symbolize wisdom, commerce, and agriculture for the new "goddess" America. Civilization is the movement from colonial cabins to imposing Neoclassicism and Washington mounted like an emperor.
This symbolism is Roman rather than Greek, but the Federal Style chose freely from "Classical" antiquity. What is really significant is the use of mythological language of any kind. The ancients invented it because they believed in the beings at some point in their histories, and it was revived in the Renaissance by people who at least held out hope that it was a key to supernatural revelations. But there was no place for supernatural keys in the light of Enlightenment rationalism. This picture is pretty, but means nothing more than the wishful thinking and personal tastes of political elites.
Antonio Canova, George Washington, 1970 copy of 1821 original, North Carolina State Capitol, Raleigh
It is worth taking a moment to reflect on the strangeness of citizen-soldier Washington in ancient period costume.
The first crack at a fake national mythology just asked for faith in historically meaningless pagan symbols with no metaphysical argument whatsoever.
The way the light falls does make him look inspired though.
What we are seeing is the last gasp of a dying faith in the ancient world as a cultural ideal. No one in early America believed in pagan gods or imaginary Roman heroes - the only actual belief was in "Progress". The fake mythology was a rhetorical fig leaf draped over a demographic pastiche. This worked so long as two things happened. Economically, continual growth is necessary to keep up the illusion of progress and inflate the social mood. Socially, the pastiche of nationalities needs freedom of association within their own communities and enough in common to function as citizens. When growth stagnates, identity politics are inevitable. And Classical architecture means nothing more than aristocratic taste.
John Russell Pope, The Jefferson Memorial, 1939-43, Washington, DC
A temple to a false god is just a cool place to sit.
The whole point of classical style of the west was based on Renaissance metaphysics - geometric harmony as an expression of Neoplatonic unity and the belief that older cultures had purer knowledge. The self-absorbed "rationalism" and materialism of the Enlightenment put an end to both of these.
Anonymous portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, after 1760, oil on canvas, 71 x 85 cm, Royal Castle, Warsaw
Papal secretary Winckelmann was the great theorist of Greek Neoclassicism, despite never having gone to Greece. His argument was innovative, if incoherent - Classical Greek art was both a historical period style and the timeless essence of artistic perfection.
Apollo Belvedere or Pythian Apollo, Roman copy after Leochares, circa AD 120–140; original ca. 350–325 BC, marble, 224 cm, Vatican Museums
Winckelmann's Greek ideal was based on Roman copies. Statues like this that he considered standards of perfection tell us more about the aesthetics of Imperial Rome than Classical Athens. The old notion of ancient perfection vanished under historical analysis.
Antonio Canova, Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1804-6, marble, 242.6 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
It did inspire great art, but the ability to claim deeper metaphysical truth was washed away by Enlightenment reason. The lesson for Postmodernist art is that standards are important, even if they aren't metaphysical absolutes.
Wedgewood Muses Vase by Josiah Wedgwood's Etruria Factory, Staffordshire; 1790 - 1800, jasperware (unglazed stoneware), 36.2 cm
In the end, we have elite taste. Wedgewood got started producing high quality pottery of Grecian inspiration to capitalize on the popularity of this style. As a symbol, this means nothing more than a Greek flavored Adam room would - the owner is rich and "cultured".
The reason = Classical simplicity equation had already questioned in rationalist French intellectual circles. We saw the work of LeDoux in that environment in an earlier post.
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, Rotonde de la Villette, 1785-89, Paris
The Doric entablature around the top of the building is a classically incorrect reflection of the popularity of Greek design in the later eighteenth century. But it is "rational" simplicity that guides the design, not faith in ancient styles. Ledoux foreshadows Modernist abstraction more than anyone seen here so far.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne, 1806, oil on canvas, 259 x 162 cm, Musée de l'Armée
Napoleon put an end to the Revolution madness before installing himself as an emperor and launching a wave of invasion and conquest. In this official portrait, Ingres, the leading artist in the French Academy captures Napoleon's version of imperial Neoclassicism based on Roman symbols.
Roman models make sense for him for the same reasons that this historical empire has always appealed to imperialists.
Statue of Jupiter, late 1st century AD, marble, drapings, scepter, Eagle, Victory, painted plaster 19th century
Ingre's based the pose on the Capitoline Jupiter, the enthroned king of the gods in the main temple in ancient Rome. The original statue was long gone, but the pose was known from many copies like this one.
Pierre-Alexandre Vignon, La Madeleine, 1807-28, Paris
Napoleon's huge temple was planned as an imperial monument before becoming a church under the restored monarchy. It is a classical temple, but a Roman one with a deep porch, steps on the front only, and Corinthian columns.
To be fair, it can be hard to tell Roman apart from Greek on a glance. This is partly because Roman architecture was derived from the Greek - sort of the first Neoclassicism - and comes with built in similarities. But "Greek" and "Roman" weren't living cultures in early modern Europe. They didn't mean anything beyond elite stylistic preference. No one other than theoretical absolutists cared whether the details were right. The Adam and Federal styles both freely blended Greek, Roman, and Palladian elements.
The symbolic lines get blurry because the differences are functionally meaningless.
Quick refresher.
Shortly before Napoleon, Ingres' great predecessor in the Academy, Jacques-Louis David used the Capitoline Jupiter pose for a very different purpose.
Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787, oil on canvas, 130 x 196 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Here, Olympian authority is given to the Enlightenment ideal of pure intellectual freedom. Socrates is a martyr for "free speech" and traditionalist oppression. David made an important change in the meaning of the raised arm. Jupiter and Napoleon's hold a staff or scepter of rulership, while Socrates points heavenward, suggesting his authority comes from a higher truth.
Horatio Greenough, George Washington, 1832, Carrara marble, Smithsonian Institution
When applied to the new fake American mythology, Washington becomes the Olympian with one hand holding the imperialist sword and the other pointing, like Socrates, to some higher power. The face is more authoritarian than even Napoleon. And the foot was extended like Jupiter's as a place for the adoring touches of the faithful.
But what is the logical or metaphysical justification behind faith in this idol? Why should it be touched reverently? What is the source of this higher power that justifies imperialism? The imaginary "Creator" from the Constitution? Enlightenment "reason"? Classical iconography? A hard stare?
It's intellectually fake, literally idolatrous, and potentially blasphemous.
Mark Porter, Satanic Temple Monument
This statue of the occult "god" Baphomet introduces pedophilic and occult themes, but the pose is... familiar. Here the hand gestures mean heaven and earth - all things, basically. This would be the moral endpoint of faith in metaphysical absurdity, the last stop on the fake faith express.
One place where Napoleon's imperialism lined up with Enlightenment ideas was in historical scholarship. The invasion of Egypt included teams of researchers to study, catalog, and bring artifacts back to France. Conquerors always brought spoils home to show the extent of their power, but nineteenth-century looting was unique for its intellectual pretense. It's ok if the stolen treasures are put in an imperial museum for the enrichment of the people. This is the same logic, and at the same time, as the removal of the Elgin marbles from Athens.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bonaparte Before the Sphinx, 1886, oil on canvas, 61.6 × 101.9 cm, Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California
The absurdity of imperialism is obvious in this painting.
Friedrich Weinbrenner, Old synagogue of Karlsruhe, 1798-1871, photo circa 1810, Repro Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe.
Opening Egypt brought a new architectural style - the Egyptian revival. This synagogue may be the earliest example, and the symbolism makes sense for a group looking to identify as apart from its host nation.
Egyptian Revival building on Rousseau Street, 1836, New Orleans
But there is no real communal meaning behind this sort of design. It is just personal preference or taste.
Antonio Canova, Tomb of Maria Cristina of Austria, Augustinerkirche, Vienna
Even Neoclassicists mix Egyptian and Classical motifs freely.
The End of the Enlightenment brought an end to faith that the classical tradition of architecture was a portal to some kind of timeless truth. Better understanding of history and political authoritianism made it obvious that "antiquity" can be used to symbolize pretty much anything, or nothing at all.
But antiquity also had centuries of history claiming it was the ideal standard of human culture and the wellspring of Enlightened human progress. Those associations linger long after active faith in their meaning has evaporated. This is why the elites kept turning to Classical ideas when building fake national mythologies - those old forms had a deep well of largely unconscious associations. But those associations were based on people understanding them. With the collapse of education in the Postmodern era, these old symbols are largely unrecognizable.
Duncan Stroik, Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel, 2003-09, Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, California
In our Postmodern wasteland, "Classical" just means some positive impression of "tradition". No one cares about the purity of the ancient forms.
This is a fine bit of Postmodern historicism - a pastiche of historical pieces done with a spirit of sincerity rather than irony or mockery. Renaissance flavored Neoclassicism coexists with Spanish Renaissance and Colonial Mission in an attractive package.
The end of Classicism as an authority was a result of some huge social changes connected to the Enlightenment.
Industrial/Agricultural Revolutions
Historians distinguish these but the Band will consider them together for simplicity's sake. We are discussing Classicism, after all.
The Agricultural Revolution actually came first, vastly increasing food production while displacing rural populations and destroying traditional communities. This "free enterprise" form of collective farming, with its militarized political enforcement and elite land ownership carries well into the Industrial Revolution. Good thing, since the displaced people needed squalid slums and Mordor-esque factories to land in after having their generations-old existences shattered.
William Wyld, Manchester from Kersal Moor, with rustic figures and goats, 1852, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic and some scraping out, over graphite, 319 x 491 mm, Royal Collection
The important thing is that some wealthy and connected elites became extraordinarily wealthy and connected and stuff got flashier and cheaper at the same time. This was known as "Progress".
Prosperity at home, prestige abroad, between 1895 and 1900, Campaign poster showing William McKinley, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC
It is actually kind of amazing how seamlessly the wealth and material privilege of the economic elites was conflated with myths of human advancement on some sort of moral evolutionary scale. And how long this fallacy hung around.
The Iron Bridge over the River Severn, opened 1781, Shropshire, England
The reality is that the Industrial Revolution brought huge positive changes in the convenience and comforts of life. Structural iron must have seemed mike magic when you had to build in stone and brick.
The Industrial Revolution brought new stuff for enough people to life the myth of "progress", at least until the upheavals at the end of the century leading to World War I.
Joseph Nash, The Great Exhibition Jersey, Guernsey, Malta and Ceylon, 1851, watercolor, 33.3 x 48.4 cm, Royal Collection
The Great Exposition of 1851 brought the goods of the world to London. This is the shiny apple side of globalism - look at all the restaurant options we have now...
Sir John Gilbert, Miss Flyte introduces the Wards in Jarndyce to Krook, the Lord Chancellor (from Bleak House) 1860, watercolor, Private collection
But it brought previously unimaginable social problems. The destruction of traditional communities led to rapid urbanization as the desperate country folk sought factory work.
Social stratification became extreme and living conditions for the poor atrocious.
Luke Fildes, Houseless and Hungry, 1869, engraving, Cardiff University Library Special Collections and Archive
Nothing in the history of Europe was preparation forcrowded squalid urban conditions. Traditional communities were much smaller and dealt with hardships on an individual basis. Masses of urban poor drove the need for "social assistance" and all the statist power grabs that followed.
Winslow Homer, The Christmas Tree, from Harper's Weekly, Vol. II, December 25, 1858, 14.9 x 23.2 cm
Meanwhile the affluent lived like a different species, cloud people enjoying the fruits of "progress". Hard to believe that they might see the poor as fungible.
But Scrooge bought Tiny Tim a turkey...
Virtue-signaling predatory fake "conservatives" are worse than collectivists in some ways because the collectivists are open in their dyscivic evil. Parasitic "free marketeers" that exploit favorable "laws" to enrich themselves on the back of their nations while virtue signaling about freedom and principles are repulsive.
Predatory elite "capitalism" at the expense of the national interest is not conservative.
The conservative "principle" being distorted here is the idea that people be free to transact without government interference. But it takes fake rationalism to twist this into an absolute law that literally destroyed the organic integrity of the nation that the laws were intended to conserve. Unfettered commerce is healthy until it isn't, and collusion between political and economic elites is the literal opposite of free enterprise. Warping something circumstantial into a fake absolute to destroy cultures is pure leftism.
The Irish Famine: Scene at the gate of a workhouse, 1847, Collection of Maggie Land Blanck
Managing the poor created another opportunity for central control - welfare and social assistance. Here we see the Agricultural Revolution team up with bureaucratic indifference to unleash horrors.
Sampson Kempthorne, Workhouse design for 300 paupers, from the Great Britain Poor Law Commissioners' Annual report, 1835, vol. 1, page 411
Workhouses were supposed to provide relief for the poor under pro-social oversight. The social reformers had all the best Enlightenment intentions seen in "rational" designs like these...
Lewis W. Hine, Glassworks. Midnight. Location: Indiana, 1908, for the National Child Labor Committee, New York, Library of Congress, Washington, DC
...and all the horrific realities of the children of the Father of Lies.
Men at dinner in St Marylebone Workhouse, 1900, photograph, Geffrye Museum
The road to one-world globalism began with the Enlightenment
Romantic Nationalism
The Industrial Revolution joins with Great Power imperialism to add fuel to the endless series of European wars. The Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath sharpened patriotic sentiment along nation state lines, which the elites were happy to twist into justification for social inequity, empire, and constant conflict.
Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, The Battle of Trafalgar, 1836, oil on canvas, 270 x 480 cm, Private collection
Alliances shift and change for short term political and economic advantages. None of the Great Power wars bring any benefit to the nations forced to fight them.
Ninteenth-century nationalism brings Germany onto the stage. Let's look at some maps.
Map of the Napoleonic Empire. The Germanic territories of the old Holy Roman Empire had been conquered by France and the old Empire dissolved in 1806.
The Congress of Vienna rewrote the borders of Europe in 1815 after Napoleon met his Waterloo This included the creation of German Confederation to coordinate the defense and economic activity of thirty-nine restored German states.
Austria and the rising kingdom of Prussia jockeyed for control.
The Prussians won out and became the kernel of first the North German Confederation, and then the German Empire in 1871, after the southern states joined. The Prussian king became the German emperor or Kaiser.
This nationalist movement is the opposite of America - culturally similar people dissolving state borders to create a single nation. Or so it seems...
When we talk about the rise of the German Empire to Great Power status, we're including Prussia as well, since it was the kingdom that drove German industry, scholarship, and militarism. But the reality was that during the period of Prussian ascendance, the German people were fragmented among numerous relatively impotent states. Pan-German sentiment was natural, and German letters were colored with the sense of a great people tragically divided.A quick glance at their musical and philosophical histories shows that they weren't off base. As Prussia/ Germany grew in power and significance, it asserted itself in the standard Great Power ways, with industrialization, empire, and the advancement of learning. Germans were central to the development of the modern university. Make of that what you will.
Carl Gotthard Langhans, Brandenburg Gate, 1788-91, Berlin
Defining yourself as a power always used grand architecture, and in Enlightenment Europe, that meant Neoclassicism. This Prussian monument is up to date in its choice of Doric Greek Revival. And what better way to show the seriousness of this new nation by linking it to what was thought of as the wellspring of the West.
Mnesicles, Propylaea, 437-432 BC, Acropolis, Athens
Langhans' gate was based on the Propylaea, the ceremonial entry to the Acropolis of ancient Athens.Seen here in an artist's recreation and some of the Mnesicles' original Doric.
Today it serves as a site for empty virtue signaling. Suis-ing Charlie only matters if you are willing to address the causes of Charlie and similar acts of vibrancy.
It took a while for Germany to unify because of differences between the individual states, but the idea of a single German state was in the air from the founding of the German Confederation. Both Berlin in Protestant Prussia and Munich in Catholic Bavaria were started preparing themselves to be suitable capitals of the future great nation. This still meant demonstrating cultural authority with grand Greek Revival structures.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Neue Wache, 1816, Berlin
Schinkel's Doric monument to the Prussian military.
The current interior display is an apt metaphor for Germany in the twenty-first century.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Altes Museum, 1823-30, Berlin
Great nations need great halls of culture. This is Schinkel's Ionic Greek Revival colonnade on the facade of his museum of classical art.
Leo von Klenze, Glyptothek, 1816-30, Munich
Von Klenze was the Bavarian answer to Schinkel. His grand art museum has an Ionic temple front and minimal decoration.
Leo von Klenze, Walhalla, 1830- 42, near Regensburg, Germany
This monument to great figures from German history, beginning with the tribal past. But the design is a Doric Greek temple like the Pantheon.
You would be justified in asking what this building has to do with the German heritage of the proposed new nation.
Wait...
The Romantic movement was a widespread reaction to Enlightenment rationalism. In the arts, this meant Classical logic and clarity gave way to the feeling and emotion. Instead of geometric harmony we see the awesome sublime and shadowy mystery. And egalitarian universalism is replaced with nationalism.
Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape with a Church, 1811, oil on canvas, 33 x 45 cm, Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte
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