The Renaissance was an orientation of the European mind towards the
forms of Roman and Greek civilization, and towards the meaning of
classical culture. On the latter side its impulse was plainly a
liberating one: it delivered the human soul from a cell of torments
in which there were no modulating interests or activities between the
base satisfactions of the temporal life and the beatitudes of heaven.
With the Renaissance the god-beast became, once again, a man. Moreover,
just when the Catholic culture of Christendom was breaking down under
the influence of heresy and skepticism, the classics brought to the
educated men of Europe a common theme which saved them from complete
intellectual vagrancy. The effect of classical civilization, on the
other hand, was not an unmixed good: for it served all too quickly
to stereotype in old forms a spirit which had been freshly reborn,
and it set up a servile principle in the arts which has in part been
responsible for the wreck of both taste and craftsmanship.
The first builders of the Renaissance, in Italy, were not primarily
architects; they were rather supreme artists in the minor crafts; and
their chief failing was, perhaps, that they wished to stamp with their
personal imprint all the thousand details of sculpture, painting,
and carving which had hitherto been left to the humble craftsman.
Presently, the technical knowledge of the outward treatment of a
building became a touchstone to success; and a literal understanding
of the products of antiquity took the place in lesser men of personal
inspiration. The result was that architecture became more and more
a thing of paper designs and exact archæological measurements; the
workman was condemned to carry out in a faithful, slavish way the
details which the architect himself had acquired in similar fashion.
So the architect ceased to be a master-builder working among comrades
of wide experience and travel: he became a Renaissance gentleman who
merely gave orders to his servants.
Victor Hugo said in Notre Dame that the printing-press destroyed
architecture, which had hitherto been the stone record of mankind. The
real misdemeanor of the printing-press, however, was not that it took
literary values away from architecture, but that it caused architecture
to derive its value from literature. With the Renaissance the great
modern distinction between the literate and the illiterate extends
even to building; the master mason who knew his stone and his workmen
and his tools and the tradition of his art gave way to the architect
who knew his Palladio and his Vignola and his Vitruvius. Architecture,
instead of striving to leave the imprint of a happy spirit on the
superficies of a building, became a mere matter of grammatical
accuracy and pronunciation; and the seventeenth-century architects who
revolted from this regime and created the baroque were at home only in
the pleasure gardens and theaters of princes. For the common run of
architects, particularly in the northern countries, the Five Orders
became as unchallengeable as the eighty-one rules of Latin syntax. To
build with a pointed arch was barbarous, to build with disregard for
formal symmetry was barbarous, to permit the common workman to carry
out his individual taste in carving was to risk vulgarity and pander to
an obsolete sense of democracy. The classics had, it is true, united
Europe anew in a catholic culture; but alas! it was only the leisured
upper classes who could fully take possession of the new kingdom of
the mind. The Five Orders remained firmly entrenched on one side, the
“lower orders” on the other.
Hereafter, architecture lives by the book. First it is Palladio and
Vignola; then it is Burlington and Chambers; then, after the middle
of the eighteenth century, the brothers Adam and Stuart’s Antiquities
of Athens. Simpler works with detailed prescriptions for building in
the fashionable mode made their way in the late seventeenth century
among the smaller fry of carpenters and builders; and they were widely
used in America, as a guide to taste and technique, right down to the
middle of the nineteenth century. It was by means of the book that
the architecture of the eighteenth century from St. Petersburg to
Philadelphia seemed cast by a single mind. We call the mode Georgian
because vast quantities of such building was done in England, as a
result of the general commercial prosperity of that country; but it
was common wherever European civilization had any fresh architectural
effort to make, and if we call this style “colonial” in America it is
not to mark any particular lapse or lack of distinction.
The Renaissance in architecture had reached England at about the time
of the Great Fire (1666), fully two generations after the Italian
influence had made its way into English literature; and it came to
America, as one might guess, about a generation later. It was left
for Alexander Pope, who himself was a dutiful Augustan, to sum up the
situation with classic precision to Lord Burlington, who had published
Palladio’s Antiquities of Rome:
“You show us Rome was glorious, not profuse,
And pompous buildings once were things of use.
Yet shall, my lord, your just and noble rules
Fill half the land with imitation fools;
Who random drawings from your sheets shall take
And of one beauty many blunders make.”
These lines were a warning and a prophecy. The warning was timely;
and the prophecy came true, except in those districts in which the
carpenter continued to ply his craft without the overlordship of the
architect.