Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
Soufflot’s vast cruciform Panthéon provides no such simple paradigm as
Stuart’s temple. No longer really Baroque, it is by no means thoroughly
Romantic Classical. Like most of the work of the leading British
architect of Soufflot’s generation, Robert Adam (1728-92),[8] the
Panthéon must rather be considered stylistically transitional. For
example, the purity of the temple portico at the front, in any case
Roman not Grecian, is diminished by the breaks at its corners. The tall,
hemispherical dome[9] over the crossing is even less antique in
character, owing its form to Wren’s St Paul’s rather than to the Roman
Pantheon, which was the favourite domical model for later Romantic
Classicists. In the interior, up to the entablatures, the columniation
is Classical enough and the structure entirely trabeated[10]—at least in
appearance (Plate 1). Above, the domes in the four arms are perhaps
Roman, but hardly the pendentives that carry them; these are, of course,
a Byzantine structural device revived in the fifteenth century by
Brunelleschi. Over the aisles the cutting away of the masonry and the
general statical approach, while not producing anything that _looks_
very Gothic, illustrate the results of Soufflot’s long-pursued study of
Gothic vaulting. Many aspects of nineteenth-century architectural
development were thus presaged by Soufflot here, as will become very
evident later (see Chapters 1-3, 6, and 7).[11]
The Panthéon was finally finished in the decade after Soufflot’s death
by his own pupil Maximilien Brébion (1716-_c._ 1792), J.-B. Rondelet
(1743-1829), a pupil of J.-F. Blondel, and Soufflot’s nephew (François,
?-_c._ 1802). Well before that, a whole generation of French architects
had developed a mode, similar to Adam’s in England, which is usually
called, despite its initiation long before Louis XV’s death in 1774, the
_style Louis XVI_. Whether or not this mode in its inception owed much
to English inspiration is still controversial. In any case it was widely
influential outside France from the seventies to the nineties, and in
those decades both French-born and French-trained designers were in
great demand all over Europe, except in England; and even in England
French craftsmen were employed. With that completely eighteenth-century
phase of architectural history this book cannot deal, even though most
of the architects who after 1800 had first made their reputation under
Louis XVI, or even earlier under Louis XV. The _style Louis XVI_ and the
English ‘Adam Style’ were over, except in remote provinces and colonial
dependencies, by 1800.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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