Robert Adam and the Imperial Palatine Tradition*

Chapter 3 The Imprimatur of Decadence: Robert Adam and the Imperial Palatine Tradition*

Erika Naginski

I was convinced, notwithstanding the visible decline of Architecture, as well as of the other arts, before the reign of DIOCLESIAN, that his munifi- cence had revived a taste in Architecture superior to that of his own times, and had formed artists capable of imitating, with no inconsider- able success, the stile and manner of a purer age. (adam, ��)1 … It can be scarcely believed, the ornaments of Diocletian’s palace at Spalatro should have loaded our dwellings contemporaneously with the use among the more refined few of the exquisite exemplars of Greece, and even of Rome, in its better days. Yet such is the fact; the depraved compositions of Adam were not only tolerated, but had their admirers. (gwilt, ��)2

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Among the notable leitmotifs of architectural culture in the late Georgian period was the increasingly fractured state of the classical canon, which resulted from an ever-widening array of antique sources of inspiration.

* Unless otherwise stated, the translations are mine. 1 Robert Adam, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia. London: Printed for the author, 1764, p. 2. 2 Joseph Gwilt, An Encyclopaedia of Architecture, Historical, Theoretical, and Practical. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842, p. 224, quoted in Eileen Harris, The Furniture of Robert Adam. London: A. Tiranti, 1963, p. 32.

Multifaceted and polemically charged developments in architectural theory and practice set the stage for this fracturing. These included challenges to the system of harmonic proportions established by Vitruvian theory: the Graeco- Roman debate, which placed into confrontation advocates of ancient Roman architecture against the philhellenes of their generation; and the convergence of antiquarian methodologies (aimed at recovering the facts of history from ancient sites) with an approach to architectural aesthetics that, whether it touted the superiority of the moderns or not, was anything but presentist in orientation (given its emphasis on the archaeological accuracy of graphic reconstitutions). For the Scottish architect Robert Adam, the ruins of Diocletian’s Palace at Spalatro (the medieval name for current-day Split, Croatia) on the Dalmatian coast, however liminal the geographical boundary between Orient and Occident they occupied, attested to the revival of European architecture (past and present). For the architect and writer Joseph Gwilt, by contrast, the importation to England of so many decorative baubles of dubious cultural origin was an affront to the purveyors of a more refined under- standing of the origins of good architecture. Hence, to juxtapose these two pas- sages by Adam and Gwilt is to reveal more than simply a conflict of taste about what was deemed appropriate or excessive in architecture. More than this, the juxtaposition offers a glimpse into anxieties about the influence of antiquity along with the moral dimensions of a veritable culture war pitting purity against decadence, the Golden Age of Athens against the Roman Empire, the preservation of universal rules against flexibility in changing circumstances, and the proper disposition of the orders against ornamental eclecticism. Ultimately, Adam’s (1764) lavishly illustrated Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia was a means of claiming as his own the discovery, restitution, and interpretation of the domestic architecture of the ancient Romans.3 The folio publication underscored in its introduction that nothing could “more sensibly gratify [the architect’s] curiosity, or improve his taste, than to have an opportunity of viewing the private edifices of the Ancients, and of collecting, from his own observation, such ideas concerning the disposition, the form, the ornaments, and uses of the several apartments.”4

3 See Robin Middleton, Gerald Beasley, and Nicholas Savage, The Mark J. Millard Architectural Collection, Vol. 2: British Books, Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries. Washington, DC/ New York: National Gallery of Art/George Braziller, 1998, pp. 3–11; Iain Gordon Brown, Monumental Reputation: Robert Adam & the Emperor’s Palace. Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1992; Eileen Harris and Nicholas Savage, British Architectural Books and Writers 1556–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 71–81; John Fleming, “The Journey to Spalatro,” Architectural Review 123 (February 1958): 103–107. 4 Adam, Ruins of the Palace, p. 1.