This gentleman, who succeeded the late lamented Mr. Wilkins in the
professor’s chair of the Royal Academy, is labouring with all the
generous energy for which he is distinguished, to lay the products
of a well-stored mind before the students, so as to excite them to
an emulation of the works and achievements of the great masters in
Architecture who have gone before. We have had the pleasure of attending
the course of lectures of this session, and were greatly rejoiced to
find, from the numbers and character of the auditory, that the study of
the art is being regarded with interest by many out of the pale of the
profession. It would have been a grateful duty to us to have given a full
report of these lectures for the benefit of our readers, but we felt
to be precluded from doing so, by a previous announcement on the part
of the _Athenæum_ of the intention to do so, and which has since been
very effectively carried out. In justice to that excellent periodical,
we can, therefore, only refer to its pages those of our readers who may
be anxious to give that attentive perusal of the lectures which they
require and deserve, contenting ourselves with the liberty of making such
extracts as we think will suit the purpose of our less ambitious readers,
or to whet the appetite of the others.
There is one thing, however, in which even the comprehensive report of
the _Athenæum_ is necessarily defective. Such a display of illustrative
drawings, so laboriously compiled, as were exhibited by the learned
lecturer, it has never before been our good fortune to see brought
together; and without these, or some more adequate representation of
them than mere description, the spirit or essence of the lecture is
greatly weakened, and in some instances lost. Two large sheets, or rather
assemblage of sheets, were hung up, shewing in comparative juxta-position
most of the famous structures of antiquity, the one in elevation, the
other in section, and over these the eye could wander and the mind
could dwell with marvellings and delight that no words can express.
How small appear those finished and exquisite gems of Grecian art, its
temples, when compared with the developed boldness of the works of the
successors to the Greek school, who have been charged with innovations
and corruptions. These great sheets present to us a map or chart reduced,
as it were, to a small scale, of the hitherto ascertained geography of
building art, and suggest an endless train of reflection and inquiry.
But there were others whose assemblage and lengthened treatment would
make up volumes, some embodying the ingenious speculations of the
professor, but, in the main, rigid and critical delineations of the
buildings of the ancients from measurement and other laborious means of
research.
These, however, it would be quite in vain for us to attempt to enumerate,
or to refer to in any more lengthened way of notice; we therefore proceed
to our extracts.
After quoting the regulations of the Royal Academy in reference to the
delivery of these lectures, and pointing out how much it is desirable
to add to their provisions in this respect, on the model of the French
Academy, the effects of which are visible in the advantages which the
architects of that country enjoy; and contrasting the pains taken by the
governments of the Continent in the encouragement and cultivation of art,
with the niggard policy pursued in this country, he says—
“It is now more than a hundred years that Thomson, the
best informed upon the Arts of all our poets, indignantly
remonstrated on our national inferiority and neglect of this
branch of intellectual culture, and complained with grief, in
his Ode to Liberty,—
‘That finer arts (save what the Muse has sung,
In daring flight above all modern wing),
Neglected droop their head.’
“Foreigners have attributed this disregard of the rulers of
an ingenious and a great people to various causes—to physical
insensibility, to the sordid nature of our commercial habits,
or the adverse propensity of the Protestant religion,—to which
objections the history of the ancient dynasties of this country
(never inferior in the fine arts), the abundant enthusiasm of
individual artists of our own times, and the public sympathy,
are direct contradictions. Finally, they have fixed the
reproach on the government, by pointing at the Schools of
Design established by parliament; for they say, truly, that so
soon as the inferiority of our design in manufactures drove us
from the foreign markets, we took the alarm, and immediately
formed schools of design, _à l’instar_ of those on the
continent; not from a generous love of art, but, confessedly,
from the well-grounded fear of loss in trade. The members of
this academy hailed the measure with joy, as the harbinger of
a better sense of what is due to our intellectual position
in Europe, and they have willingly given their gratuitous
attention to its conduct. But the instruction of youth must be
accompanied with the higher prospect of employment and honour
in national works; and we are happy in the reflection that the
decoration of the parliamentary palace at Westminster, and
the interest taken by an illustrious personage in that great
object, hold out to us the hopes of equality at least in these
noble studies with the improving countries of the continent,
and the opening of a new career for genius and industry.”...
“Academies were established as depositories of learning and
practice in the fine arts, and the means of their preservation
and transmission through the vicissitudes of the times. The
enlightened and commercial Colbert had seen how in Greece and
ancient Rome, and in modern Rome, under his own countryman,
the Constable Bourbon, a public calamity might disperse and
ruin them for half a century, without some fixed and corporate
body and abode. He never dreamt that, in the absence of the
fostering patronage and employment of government, the Academy
could do more than fulfil these negative objects. The Royal
Academy had done much more than this—it had sustained the
credit of the country in fine art, and had reared talents which
were now part and parcel of English history. Through good and
evil report it had nourished the flame; and it was consolatory
to find that they had transmitted it to better times, through
long and adverse circumstances; for now they had the happiness
to see two Professors in the Universities of London, the
British Institute of Architects, large public patronage in
Art-Unions, &c., and a growing interest in the Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge towards fine art generally.”
The professor next contended for the necessity of an intimate and active
union of architecture with the sister arts of painting and sculpture,
shewing how in Egypt, where these were less regarded than subsequently
in Greece, a deficiency existed in the justness of proportions, and a
seeming neglect of order and regularity.
Of his first course of two years back, he remarked, that as the history
of art was the only safe foundation of study, so he had chosen that as
the commencement of the discharge of his duties as a lecturer. “The
second course (that of last year) had treated chiefly the literature of
art.” Books and the authorities that lived in them, such as Vitruvius,
the old Italian and French authors, and, above all, the admirable
Alberto, were not to be discredited, as is too much the fashion
now-a-days.
“As well,” said he, “might the lawyer or the divine dispense with books,
as the architect. In the very dawn of literature the architect required
to be learned. In the Memorabilia of Xenophon, Socrates inquires, ‘But
what employment do you intend to excel in, O Euthedemus, that you collect
so many books? is it architecture? for this art, too, you will find no
little knowledge necessary.’
“A familiar example of the great utility of these researches had been
given in the quotation from Philibert de l’Orme (lib. ii. c. xi.), of the
specification for concrete, written in the latter part of the sixteenth
century, and corresponding precisely with the recent so-called discovery
of this method of securing foundations. During the last century our
architects had discontinued the ancient practice, having adopted the most
fallacious fashion of wood-sleepers, to the ruin of many fine buildings.
It was, then, the ignorance of this invaluable and most instructive
and amusing author, Philibert de l’Orme, which had led to so fatal an
error....
“In the present course the Professor purposed the consideration of
the more difficult, but no less important, injunction of the Academic
regulations, ‘that these lectures should be calculated to form the
taste of the students, to instruct them in the laws and principles of
composition, and fit them for a critical examination of structures.’”
(TO BE CONTINUED.)