The initiation of Romantic Classicism was by no means solely in the hands of architects. In the mid-century period of Roman gestation, Winckelmann, Gavin Hamilton, and Piranesi—a German archaeologist, a Scottish painter, and a Venetian etcher—played significant roles, as well as various architects, some _pensionnaires_ of the French Academy, others Britons studying on their own. Certain aspects of Romantic Classicism (1720-78), not the projects in his _Prima parte di architettura_ of 1743 or the plates of ruins in his _Antichità romane_ of 1748 but his fanciful Carceri dating from the mid 1740s. On the theoretical side the _Essai sur l’architecture_ of M.-A. Laugier (1713-70), which first appeared anonymously in 1751 with further editions in 1752, 1753, and 1755, had something of real consequence to contribute as a basic critique of the dying Baroque style. In simple terms Laugier may be called both a Neo-Classicist and a Functionalist. The bolder functionalist ideas of an Italian Franciscan Carlo Lodoli (1690-1761) as presented by Francesco Algarotti in his _Lettere sopra l’architettura_, beginning in 1742, and in his _Saggio sopra l’architettura_ of 1756 were also influential. However, despite all the new archaeological treatises inspired by the Roman milieu, of which the first was the _Ruins of Palmyra_ published in 1753 by Robert Wood (1717-71), and all the excavations undertaken at Herculaneum over the years 1738-65 and those at Pompeii beginning a decade later, the first architectural manifestations of Romantic Classicism did not occur on Italian soil. Two buildings begun in the late 1750s, one a very large church in France completed only in 1790, the other a mere garden pavilion in England, may be considered to announce the architectural revolution: Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, desecrated and made a secular Panthéon in 1791 immediately after its completion, was designed by J.-G. Soufflot (1713-80);[4] the Doric Temple at Hagley Park in Worcestershire is by his exact contemporary James Stuart (1713-88). The Panthéon remains one of the most conspicuous eighteenth-century monuments of Paris; the Hagley temple is familiar today only to specialists. Yet, historically, Stuart’s importance is rather greater than Soufflot’s, even though his production was almost negligible in quantity. Born and partly trained in Lyons, Soufflot studied early in Rome and returned to Italy again in the middle of the century. Like several of the French theorists of the day, he had had a lively interest in Gothic construction from his Lyons days. He owed his selection to design Sainte-Geneviève in 1755 to his friendship with Louis XV’s Directeur Général des Bâtiments, the Marquis de Marigny, brother of Mme de Pompadour, whom he had accompanied to Italy in 1749 along with the influential critics C.-N. Cochin and the Abbé Leblanc.