The dissolution of the dominant stylistic discipline, hardly completed even in the fifties, had nevertheless begun very early indeed. In terms of historical significance, if not of absolute achievement, the Picturesque rises rapidly in comparative importance from the time of Wyatt’s Fonthill Abbey in the 1790s. Beside Soane’s crisp Bank interiors it is necessary to carry in the mind’s eye the prophetic image which his renderer J. M. Gandy (1771-1843) provided of them as a Romantic ruin; nor should the vast dream-like Gothic cathedrals that Schinkel made the centre of some of his early paintings be forgotten in the cool presence of his Grecian Schauspielhaus and Museum. Fortunately no one is likely in looking at Barry’s _palazzi_ to forget that they are contemporary with his Gothic Houses of Parliament; one does, however, tend to forget that the career of his associate Pugin as protagonist of the mature Gothic Revival ended well before Barry’s did as the chief English protagonist of the Renaissance Revival. Earlier the Gothic Revival was hardly more than a special aspect of the Picturesque; with Pugin, however, it became a major movement in its own right and actually anti-Picturesque in theory, if rarely so in practice. To a considerable extent, moreover, the Gothic Revival usurped during the forties the centre of the stage in England, if hardly to the same degree in other countries even in the following decades. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER 6 THE PICTURESQUE AND THE GOTHIC REVIVAL THE principal modern treatise on the Picturesque with a capital P, Christopher Hussey’s of 1927, is subtitled ‘Studies in a Point of View’. By the opening years of the nineteenth century the term had come to have a far more precise, if also a more complex, meaning than the adjective ‘picturesque’ as it is generally used today. But Hussey is perfectly correct: the Picturesque is no more a style than is the Sublime, it _is_ a point of view. That point of view nevertheless influenced architecture[105] increasingly as the first half of the nineteenth century wore on. It had a solvent, and eventually a destructive, effect on the dominant Romantic Classical style as has already been suggested in discussing the later work of various leading architects in several countries.