The Country House (with Designs)Châteauneuf, Alexis de
History
The Country House (with Designs)
Châteauneuf, Alexis de
Architecture -- England -- History -- 19th century; Architecture, Domestic -- England; Country homes -- England
Limiting our views for the present to those architectural productions
in which a union with the other arts is more directly attainable, we
find Grecian or early Italian architecture the predominating style. The
last grafted on the former, may be said to be more or less complete in
the greater or less proportion in which it derives its nourishment from
the parent stem. If we look, for example, to the progress or course of
painting in Italy, that art flourished there in proportion to the
nourishment it derived from the antique. The works of Mantegna, M.
Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael bear testimony to this; and
those great men would probably have attained to a higher degree of
excellence, had they been as well acquainted with the sculptures of the
Parthenon, and the Greek bronzes, as they were with the works of the
Romans. Most assuredly a knowledge of the architecture of the time of
Pericles, or of that of Pompey, would not have been without its
influence upon such men as Bramante, San Gallo, and Baldassore Peruzzi,
nor have failed of being turned to account by them: observe, however,
that this remark is not intended to depreciate what they actually
accomplished, nor to disparage the style which they formed. These
explorers had unquestionably discovered new veins in the rich mine
which had been opened by the Greeks; as the Romans, who were the
immediate imitators of the Greeks, had already extended the one first
of all worked. In all subsequent operations, as in what the French term
the _Renaissance_ style, nothing more was done than to go on
excavating, seldom, however, with sufficient pains or caution, so as to
separate completely the gold from the dross. When, therefore, I propose
to make a design in the "Greek style," I wish you to observe that I
understand by this term a striving after the purity of this canon, but
at the same time with a reserved right to the free use of those modes
and motives with which later European architecture supplies us. If a
determinate name must be given to the style, I propose I should call
it, "the Renaissance style of the nineteenth century."
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