60 Geoffrey Scott, 1914

Geoffrey Scott, 1914.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 Geoffrey Scott and the Dream-Life of Architecture

MARK CAMPBELL

When the English aesthete Geoffrey Scott sat down in the spring of 1918 to continue the “history of taste” he had begun four years earlier with the Architecture of Humanism, he was struck by a frustratingly sudden attack of writer’s block. The severity of this attack was even more pronounced given his long-standing plans to add to this history; yet in spite of his initial enthu- siasm, Scott’s daughter-in-law, the writer Iris Origo, vividly remembered the scene in his study, where a large piece of foolscap . . . lay for many weeks upon the centre of his desk, bearing, in his fine scholar’s hand, the following words, and these only: A HISTORY OF TASTE Volume I Chapter I “It is very difficult . . .”1 Origo was alluding not only to Scott’s difficulty with writing, however, but to the gravity of his “black moods,” which left him “incapable of doing any work” and would ultimately result in his complete nervous breakdown later that year.2 Following his doctor’s concerned advice, Scott traveled to Switzerland, where he was treated in the Lausanne clinic of Dr. Roger Vittoz (1863–1925), one of the preeminent psychologists of the period and the author of the mag- isterial Treatment of Neurasthenia by Teaching of Brain Control.3 With a perfunctory sweep of his hand, Vittoz proclaimed Scott a neurasthenic, his much-preferred diagnosis, and prescribed a lengthy course of treatment. This regime, another famous patient noted, was “a system of mental control and concentration,” in which Vittoz advocated “the habit of eliminating unnec- essary thoughts and worries from one’s mind [by] practic[ing] eliminating letters from words, or one number from a set of numbers.”4 Although it is impossible to know how closely Scott followed this regime—given that the second volume of his history ended where it had begun, with the taunting ellipsis that followed the phrase “It is very difficult . . .”—it can be suggested that he was more than adept in the elimination of letters from words and had progressed to the subtraction of words from sentences and, perhaps, even

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 the erasure of ideas from arguments. Like his “incapacity to do anything,” however, Scott’s writer’s block was more selective than it was all-consuming. And it was during these days recu- perating in the Swiss air that he worked on the poems he would publish as A Box of Paints in 1924 and Poems in 1932.5 In a strange coincidence, Vittoz’s treatment seems to have been especially conducive to writing poetry, as the experience of yet another patient, T.S. Eliot confirms. Following his own nervous collapse in 1921, Eliot sought refuge in Lausanne. His treatment successfully cured his writer’s block, and when he returned to London the following year, he carried with him the by-product of his stay: the first complete draft of The Waste Land.6 Together with their love of verse, it seems that Scott and Eliot shared an appreciation of Vittoz’s treatment with a tempered understanding of the consequences implicit in Eliot’s immortal line, “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad.”7 But the question here is what form did Scott’s nerves take? Or—to be more precise—what influence did his famously fragile nerves have over his argument in the Architecture of Humanism and its description, following a con- temporaneous notion of aesthetic empathy, of how architectural inhabitants projected their emotions on the walls that enclosed them? Again, this is a question that can be addressed through another line of Eliot’s poetry, one that foreshadowed the complications that lay behind Scott’s account of the inhabitation of space. Although Scott described this process in the Architecture of Humanism in consciously positivistic terms, noting that it was an exchange that was “true and reliable,” his own immediate experience suggested that these correspondences were decidedly more nuanced and uncertain than he had allowed. “As Eliot had written of such an ambivalence in 1911, these were physical states that were projected . . . as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.”8 For Scott, this screen was not only the interior surfaces of architecture but the blank expanses of the page that followed after his frustrating ellipsis. And the diaphanous patterns that his nerves cast were composed not only of his sensory perceptions of architecture but of his image of architectural history. While Eliot’s self- awareness of his nerves resulted in some of the masterpieces of modernism, Scott’s nervousness consoled itself with his turn to an anachronism of the nineteenth-century: aesthetic connoisseurship. Within this turn, however, Scott’s promotion of an architecture that would “construct, within the world as it is, a pattern of the world,”9 and his theorization of the inhabitation of space, would be complicated by that least diagnostically convincing of dis- eases, neurasthenia. As he outlined his project in 1914, Scott explained that his original intention

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 to “formulate the principles of classical [architectural] design” had been thwarted by the “present state of thought.” “While there may be a lack of architectural taste,” he bemoaned, “there is, unfortunately, no lack of architectural opinion.”10 Scott felt that the Victorian era’s eclectic “revivals” had perverted “architectural taste,” and he further argued that a series of critical misconceptions—which he famously labeled as the “romantic, ethical, tech- nical, and biological fallacies”—had unduly confused “architectural thought.”11 In the first—“destructive”—part of the Architecture of Humanism, he sought to disprove these fallacies and argue for a return to classical architectural principles, as they were expressed in such works as his own luxurious house, the Villa Medici by Giuliano da Sangallo (constructed 1458–1461). However, Scott did not simply base his argument for this return on a promotion of the Renaissance as a “style,” although he certainly advocated that, but on a new form of criticism that considered the inhabitant’s spatial “reaction” to architecture, a form that allowed him to argue that Renaissance works provided the highest “satisfaction of aesthetic delight.”12 In the book’s second—“constructive”—part, Scott explained how this “satisfaction” took place through a “psychological” investment in architecture: a “humanization” that he believed could restore “taste.” Scott imagined that the inhabitants wrote themselves into architectural space, and in this way he argued that architecture became a sort of biographic composite of their emo- tional states. While his conception of this process suggested that architecture reaffirmed biographic existence, his explanation of it assumed that architecture remained subservient to its subjective aestheticism (in the sense that it was a product of this process), and his historical idealization of the Renaissance collapsed its three-dimensional object into his pictorial memory. As Scott’s friend the English writer Vernon Lee had written of such an aesthetic sensibility, what mattered was not a concern with the “actual thing,” in all its three-dimensional complexity, but rather a “contemplation of the Aspect,” an idolization of the two-dimensional image.13 In this way Scott’s ideals were commensurate with the aestheticism of his mentor and erstwhile employer, the American art connoisseur Bernard Berenson, as well as with the ideals of an expatiate Anglo-American society whose members lived in turn-of-the-century Florence and celebrated the Renaissance as the epitome of artistic creation. Scott worked as Berenson’s private secretary from 1908 to 1912 while he labored on the Architecture of Humanism, and, as several critics have noted, he was heavily influenced by Berenson’s examination of the art-work from “the point of view of the aesthetic spectator.”14

Giuliano da Sangallo. Villa Medici, 1458–1461.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 Of course, this viewpoint was synonymous with that of the connoisseur, and such an appreciation of architecture, like Berenson’s delectation of art, was as invested with connoisseurial ambition as it was infused with “humanist” sentiment. Interestingly, Berenson’s own conﬂation of the humanist with the aesthetic is particularly evident in his only meditation on architecture, “A Word for Renaissance Churches,” written in 1893 and published in 1902. As he described the church of Santa Maria della Consolazione at Todi, Berenson noted that he found it almost inconceivable that “the purpose of the building was other than the realization of a beautiful dream of space. It suggests no ulterior motive . . . Such a buildings sings not to the glory of God, but the Godhead of man.”15 (Or, it can be suggested, praised the Godhead of Berenson.) Although Berenson preferred to take his humanism in Renaissance paintings, his inﬂuence over Scott suggests that the Architecture of Humanism can be productively considered as Scott’s own manifestation of this “beautiful dream of space.” And here it is important to consider an ulterior motive that lay behind this “beautiful dream”: an ambition that Berenson had neatly condensed into his “aim” to “live life dreamt-out as if it were a work of art.”16 For both Scott and Berenson this was the dream of a “humanized” world, in which the imperfections of the actual world were sublimated by the aesthetic pleasures and refined sociability of a “beautiful leisure.”17 Berenson’s ambitions weren’t exactly a dream, however, and the transparency of his desires, together with the self-consciousness of their expression, was diametrically opposed to Freud’s contention that the dream represents a “secret meaning.” While it appears that Berenson sought to take the work out of the dream-work, he was astute enough to recognize his own duplicity and, in spite of his pseudo- mystical descriptions of art, his “professional” attention to the art-work never wavered. Like his own mentor, Giovanni Morelli, Berenson focused his eye on the work’s smallest, least conscious details in the belief that they would divulge whether it was an original or a fake—an attention to the unconscious detail that the connoisseur shared in common with the psychoanalyst.18 In contrast, Scott’s “unprofessional” view of architecture had none of his mentor’s focused attention to detail, and—in the sense that he sought to explain the spectator’s inhabitation of space—he was not concerned with the authenticity of the architecture-work but with the veracity of its perception and the drafting of an image of the Renaissance. Scott’s understanding of this reception was limited by his aestheticism,

Bernard Berenson, 1909.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 however, and his explanation of it was constrained by his self-conscious attention to the work’s formal qualities, at the expense of its unconscious con- tent. In this way, while Scott’s “dream of space” was no less invested than Berenson’s, it was profoundly more ambivalent. And, although it advocates an emotive investment in space, the Architecture of Humanism remained strangely disengaged from its object; confusing the real with the idealized, and the physical sensation with its imagined memory. (Here I would offer that Scott’s own dream of architecture was more of a daydream: a series of images that were too consciously constructed to be ignored, yet indefinite enough to suggest that they could be mistaken for something more.19) If the Architecture of Humanism illustrates a moment when a notion of an “emotive space” entered Anglocentric architectural discourse, as several critics have suggested20, then I would also argue that this is a moment when the pos- itivism that Scott saw in the spectator’s investment of space blithely gave way to a more nuanced vision, one that was evident in the psychopathologies that Freud had begun to read in everyday life. As Freud had suggested in his 1895 paper “On the Grounds of Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description Anxiety- Neurosis,” these were neuroses that could be distinguished from the “indefinite symptomatology” of neurasthenia. As it had been originally formulated by the American neurologist George Miller Beard in the 1860s, neurasthenia, or “nervous exhaustion,” was often thought to be an expression of the psychical “shock” of modernity. However, by the time Scott’s nerves were examined in 1918, neurasthenia had become less of a clinically useful diagnosis than an indicator of social status and a cover for a variety of vague and often hypo- chondriacal ailments.21 Unlike other doctors, who considered their patients’ hypochondria a distraction, Beard argued— as Freud would after him—that their “false symptoms” constituted a basis to “read” the disease. In this way the symptoms were metaphoric, and it is scarcely surprising that many neurasthenics shared Scott’s delight in describing their symptoms by letter, realizing even the most absurd of their ailments through this act of writing. Scott was scarcely alone in suffering from neurasthenia, and it appears that an epidemic of nervous exhaustion had swept through the Florentine “villadom” in which he lived. In spite of their aesthetic

Top: Santa Maria della Consolazione. Bottom: A picnic visit to the Aqueduct of Claudius, c. 1897.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 distractions, the bored denizens of this world were acutely aware of the “imperfections” of their lives “measured out . . . with coffee spoons” and “the music from a farther room.”22 And it can be suggested that such an “anxious concern” was endemic to what one doctor derisively referred to as “society.” In the Treatment of Neurasthenia (1901), this doctor—the eminent Parisian physician Adrien Proust—suggested that class distinctions were a predomi- nant cause of nervousness. While he accepted that neurasthenia was “almost exclusive[ly] limit[ed] to the cultivated classes,” in an interesting reversal of Beard’s original formulation Proust noted that he found the strain of “habitual brain-work” to be one of the “least formidable” causes of neurasthenia.23 Instead he argued that the demands of “a wholly artificial and fictitious existence” in society left the socialite with little time for a truly “restful leisure.”24 “Nothing is so enervating,” he concluded, “nothing so fitted to unbalance and weaken the nervous system, as to be wholly taken up with the pursuit of pleasure and the satisfaction of the least elevated and least noble causes . . . neurasthenia is often the natural but regrettable penalty paid [for] uselessness, idleness, and vanity.”25 Although there is little doubt that Proust had his son Marcel, a noted hypochondriac, in mind as he wrote this passage, his description is also an astute characterization of the Berensonian connoisseur: an “aesthetic spectator” who sought to repress the ugly pragmatics of work beneath the beautiful veneer of the useless, idle, and vain. As several of his acquaintances’ memoirs testify, Scott thought of himself as an “arbiter of taste,” and it is only natural that he preferred to defer the functional to the aesthetic in his understanding of architecture. As he attempted to explain the “Naturalism” of the classical style, Scott offered that such an architecture satisfied the “general uses of mankind.” Following his reading of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance und barock in the early 1910s, he argued that these functions were so apparent and unconsidered that “the history of civilization leaves in architecture its truest, because its most unconscious record.”26 As Proust’s caution suggests, however, Scott’s reading of this unconscious record was subject to his own self-conscious formalism. And, in spite of the significance he attributed to a “formal saturation” in the humanist works of the Renaissance, neither the first (1914) nor the second (1924) editions of the Architecture of Humanism con- tained illustrations. Instead Scott’s references to different architects and works are made in passing, like the allusions—to the weather or his myriad symptoms—that accompanied his letters.

Top: Dr. Adrien-Achille Proust, 1884. Bottom: Marcel Proust, 1900. Opposite: Edith Wharton, 1925.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 In this way Scott wove his impressions of these real entities into the narrative thread of his architectural history, combining them with an informality that reflected his work’s origins in aesthetic appreciation, not objective history. The extent to which the formal qualities of this writing infused the Architecture of Humanism cannot be understated, and it is by considering Scott as a writer “with an interest” in architecture rather than as an architect writing on architecture that his aestheticism can be related to his description of an emotive projection in architecture and its realization through the process of writing. Even those critics who immediately rejected Scott’s aestheticism acknowledged the eloquence of his argument, and his “writerliness” was recognized by such celebrated literary figures as Vita Sackville-West, who was “charmed” by his book; Virginia Woolf, who applauded his “ease of style”; and Edith Wharton, who complemented his “gift for vivid phrasing” and praised his “brilliant and discriminating . . . analysis.”27 However, Scott’s satisfaction with his own writing led one astute critic to note that the intellectual dimension of his argument was lost in the eloquence of its expression. This was a “poetic license,” I would further argue, that Scott extended to his theorization of the spectator’s inscription in space. While he accepted that such a theory depended on an analogy, when “a metaphor is so obvious and immediately understood,” he contended, “it presupposes a true and reliable experience, [and] such metaphors are wholly different than literary conceits.”28 Or are they? As an aesthete, Scott clearly understood the value of “con- ceit,” and he celebrated writing as a “magical gesture” that blurred the fictive with the real to open the self out to those personalities “completely disengaged by the pen.”29 However, this was a “disengagement” that Wharton also read between his “creative and critical faculties” in the Architecture of Humanism. Although she had originally considered this work formally “scrupulous” when she reviewed it in 1914, when she returned to it in 1933, she found “something dispersed and tentative” in its argument: a “discord” she concluded was the result of Scott’s interest in a subject evaporating, “as soon as he had exteriorized the emotions producing it.”30 As Wharton undoubtedly knew, this was a projection of emotion that char- acterized the “humanist value” of architecture for Scott. “[He] had a great feeling for space,” the architect Clough Williams-Ellis recalled, a sympathy that was evident in his “gesturing and posturing to express [a] feeling within buildings.”31 As Scott understood it, however, the physical body was itself an image that was a composite of these past “gestures,” an image that was not so much determined by physical space

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 as it was subject to an unconscious manipulation. It was for this reason that Scott placed such a stress on an immediate—and seemingly irrefutable— correspondence with space. Architecture should be “simply and immediately perceived,” he argued, recognized as an aesthetically satisfying combination of “spaces, masses, and lines,” revealed in light and shade: elements so simple they not only resisted any “intellectual distortion” but remained oblivious to the caprices of the historical imagination.32 The simplest of these perceptions, he insisted, produced an image that correlated the architectural form to “the human func- tion”: an “identification” in which “[w]e have looked at the building and identified ourselves with its apparent state. We have inscribed ourselves into [sic] terms of architecture.” 33 Moreover, this is an inscription that Scott specifically figured as a gesture of the eye. As the spectators trace architectural form, the kinesthetic movements of their eyes are in turn translated into “muscular sensations” throughout their bodies—a translation that not only related their bodies to an architectural form in the definition of the “physical memory” but that rein- scribed the eye as the primal organ of connoisseurship. It is with these “gestures,” he bluntly states, that “[w]e transcribe architecture into terms of ourselves.”34 And it is this process, in which the spectators’ kinesthetic movements cast out their nerves on an architectural screen and read back the pattern in “terms of themselves,” that Scott concluded is the “humanism of architecture.”35 Such a theory was “not new,” he admitted, but was drawn from an interpretation of Theodor Lipps’s “constantly discussed and frequently misun- derstood” notion of “empathy.”36 Although Scott’s knowledge of German empathy theory—as it had been developed by such figures as Lipps and Wölfflin—was not insubstantial, it will suffice here to note that these read- ings were moderated by his discussions with Berenson. And like Berenson before him, Scott would always place the intellectual enquiries of the “German-minded” at the service of his aesthetic, a dissuasion that is evident in his deferral of “interested readers” to Vernon Lee’s comprehensive explanation and bibliography in her Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (1912).37 In spite of their aesthetic sympathies, however, Scott and Berenson disagreed on one essential point: the value of architecture. Understandably the art connoisseur privileged a painterly “dream of space” over an architectural realization of it. As Berenson had noted in the late 1890s, he found such an “enclosure of space . . . too literal” when compared against the “Painted space-composition,”38 which opened-out space by “unconsciously

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 construct[ing] the third dimension.”39 In response Scott could counter only that architecture’s spatial literality made it a “truer” humanist expression, providing what he considered to be the “unique pleasure” of being “sur- round[ed by] a void of three dimensions.”40 However, Scott’s argument not only left Berenson unconvinced, it contradicted his own claim that architecture manifested the “ﬁnest” metaphoric relation to space. Ironically, Berenson’s argument that such an aesthetically determined conception of architecture would only enclose space was unusually prescient. And his disagreement with Scott provides an important illustration of how Scott’s argument wavered between the “real” architectural object, which he suggested allowed a “unique pleasure,” and his idealization of it, which not only “presupposed a true and reliable experience” but sought to satisfy an “unconscious sense of taste.”41 Moreover, Scott did not question his adoption of Berenson’s therapeutic conception of art, and he failed to allow that the sensory perception of architecture could not only revitalize—but exhaust— the nerves. As a textbook of the period had inevitably warned, such a sensory fatigue was usually accompanied by a “quite special weakening of vision,” which assumed more serious complications than a typical case of museum fatigue. “As soon as the patient takes to [any] occupation requiring a sustained effort of vision,” this work cautioned, “he experiences a painful sensation in the eyeballs, soon followed by a confusion of the visual images.”42 In this way the neurasthenic’s memory was “defective,” not only because the past experience had been conditioned by the weakness of its perception but because their “exhaustion” entailed that the recollection of these forgotten images was overly demanding: “the neurasthenic lives, so to speak[,] in a state of perpet- ual absentmindedness.”43 This was a “forgetfulness” that Scott directly incorporated into the Architecture of Humanism. While Berenson was able to measure his “professional memory” against the 60,000 images he had collected in his photo- graphic archive, Scott insisted that spectators transcribed themselves into space and, in this way, he relied on his memory of architecture to archive these images. However, Scott’s willingness to refer to architecture through the rhetorical evocations of his memory ignored the possibility that these impressions could be confused with one another, rearranged with the same accidental ease that taunted Berenson as he searched through his archive for a wrongly ﬁled photograph. In 1924 Scott returned to

Berenson working in the Uﬁtzi Gallery, 1955.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 his conception of the relationship between the architectural “memory” and the “unconscious sense of taste” in an epilogue that was added to the second edition of the Architecture of Humanism. Although he allowed that architecture stimulated physical sensations, he reiterated that “physical memories” could not provide “the whole explanation of architecture,” because they were subject to past experiences and a revision by the “visual memory.” Instead, he offered that this explanation lay beyond the immediacy of the physical sensation in an understanding of the “psychologically founded” and “purely intuitive judgment of beauty.”44 While the aesthetic “pleasure” of architecture is “experienced consciously,” he further noted, this “judgment” occurs “below the field of consciousness, and rises to consciousness simply as ‘pleasure.’” Interestingly, in the first edition of the Architecture of Humanism, Scott had offered that the “proper science” to understand this arousal was psychology. Although he was undoubtedly referring to a Jamesean study of the mind that would correlate the architectural detail to the sensory effect, Scott was at least familiar with the complicated “new ideas” that were coming from Vienna. (Scott had been forced to defend his views against the criticism of Karin Stephen, Mary Berenson’s daughter and a trained psychoanalyst. The author of a didactically Freudian work on neurosis and hypochondria, Medicine and Psycho-Analysis: A Study of the Wish to Fall Ill (1933), Stephen had studied with Ernst Jones, Freud’s Welsh interlocutor, and had only missed being analyzed by the master when he had committed to working with her cousin-in-law James Strachey.45) In response Scott concluded that these “unconscious preferences” would need to be explained in a “future project”: a volume that would languish in the difficulty of its being written. In his 1924 epilogue Scott simply returned this “understanding” to a conscious training of the eye, arguing that “the training of the [architectural] fac- ulty will not lie in the analysis of [this translation], but rather in rendering it more sensitive”46—a sensitivity that was synonymous with his conception of an architectural connoisseurship and his incorporation of its perceptual experience into his history. However, by the 1920s the “loss of [architectural] vision” that Scott continued to find in contemporary buildings could not be so easily ascribed to the “distortions” of the critical fallacies that he had done so much to dispel ten years earlier. While he followed Berenson in restating that an understanding of art lay in a “saturation in its image,”47 I would argue that Scott’s own fatigue can, in turn, be traced to his oversaturation with this image and to his exhaustion with writing himself out in architectural terms. He simply seemed bored with this image, and although he remained sensitive to the absence of illustrations in the Architecture of Humanism, their continued occlusion can be more productively related to this ambivalence

Karl Baedeker. Guide to Central Italy, 1903.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 than to his concerns with the ﬁnancial impact of adding full-color plates to the publication.48 As his passing references suggest, Scott seems to have imagined his readers were already familiar with the works he was alluding to and, while he “publicly” aimed to satisfy a “general readership,” it appears that Scott sought to address an audience composed of “travelers after his own heart.”49 If an architectural image was already ingrained in his readers’ minds, then Scott’s history of taste in The Architecture of Humanism operated on one level as a mnemonic framework. However, Scott’s understanding of history was “vague and uncertain [at best],” as a contemporary historian noted, and on several occasions he confuses one architect with another or exchanges one building for another.50 He appeared resigned to these “historical lapses,” however; which is to say, he was ambivalent toward them. As Scott realized, a luxury of his aesthetically determined position was that it was concerned with an illumination of the image not an elucidation of its detail. This intellectual disengagement allowed Scott to define an image of the Renaissance that was not only his aesthetic idealization of it, but was a composite of its works within his historical narrative. Although this Scott’s history insists these works should be considered as aesthetically distinct objects, they do form a sequence of views strung together by Scott’s narrative in the Architecture of Humanism. In this way his history was not only highly individual, in the sense of its idiosyncrasies, but also a biographic exterior- ization of his interest in architecture, a pattern that was cast out to describe the spectator’s “nervous” investment in space. In this way Scott’s writerly block parodied his kinesthetic exhaustion with architecture and his dilet- tantish abandon of it. The problem that this dissuasion suggested, however, as Scott would himself acknowledge—but could never address—was that these examples were not autonomous aesthetic objects, nor fictional constructions, but villas and palazzos with names and addresses that had been dutifully indexed in Karl Baedeker’s famous guides. Scott’s confusion of these images and his lapses in historical memory were only to be expected, however, as these ambivalent gestures—along with verbal slips, jokes, and coincidences—formed part of what Freud had begun to explain as the fabric of the unconscious. Although his account of “forgetfulness” is well-known, it is interesting to note that when Freud sought to illustrate this

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 “psychical mechanism,”51 he used an example that directly mimicked the connoisseur’s mnemonic frustrations. During a vacation in Dubrovnik, Freud was alarmed to discover that he couldn’t remember the artist of a series of frescoes he had seen several years earlier in Italy. After exerting his “powers of recollection,” Freud was sur- prised to find that while he still couldn’t name the artist, he could recall the smallest details of that day, “conjure[d] up [in] pictures with [a] great . . . sensory vividness.”52 To his relief, when a “cultivated Italian” supplied the missing name, Signorelli, for the imagined artist, Botticelli, the “ultra-clear memory” of these images “faded away.”53 As Freud had begun to realize, however, these memories never completely “faded away”; instead, they formed the rich visual reservoir of past experiences from which the unconscious drew. When these images returned to “the surface of consciousness,” moreover, they were patterned with other images as a screen memory, an image whose “ultra-clear vividness” was by no means an indication of its veracity. Needless to say, these were processes that were more pernicious than Vittoz’s practice of consciously subtracting letters from words could account for. As Freud duly noted, when such an erasure took place, the unconscious simply filled in this absence. “We find in our memory a single letter or sylla- ble,” he wrote of this mechanism, “which we recognize as parts of the name we are in search of. We say, for instance, ‘It begins with a “B.”’ If we finally succeed . . . in discovering what the name is, we find in the great majority of cases that it does not begin with a ‘B’ and does not in fact contain the letter ‘B’ at all.”54 As this passage suggests, the “archives” of memory were suscep- tible to a series of manipulations that produced what Freud pointedly called a “work of fiction”: a work that easily mistook Signorelli for Botticelli, as he himself had done, or replaced a building by da Sangallo with one by Michelozzo, as Scott had. Although their reasoning would scarcely agree, like Freud, Scott realized that the historical truth was subject to the personal narrative and,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 perhaps, even that a certain poverty arose when the dream dreamt in images was translated into words. In conclusion I would suggest that Scott’s selective writer’s block illus- trated a moment when he ﬁnally became conscious of the self-consciousness of his “dream of space”—a moment when the undeniable reality of the modern world encroached on his ambition of restoring an idealized humanist conception of architecture to it. While the Architecture of Humanism was undoubtedly concerned with describing architecture, this attention, as Scott stated on numerous occasions, remained subject to an aesthetic. And in his argument’s most ambivalent moments, when its “idealized image” came into contact with the “real object,” architecture became merely symptomatic of a more pervasive aesthetic poverty that haunted both Scott and Berenson. Under Vittoz’s direction, Scott had trained his mind to eliminate letters from words, and maybe even images from dreams, however his “nervous exhaustion” meant that he no longer had the unconscious energy to substitute other images in their place. Scott’s neurasthenia can also be interpreted as a metaphor, however—another, politer, way of referring to the boredom he felt with a subject once he had exteriorized his emotions toward it. Although he toyed with a couple of other architectural topics, including his “revisions” to the Architecture of Humanism and an article on the dome of St. Peters,55 it can be argued that by 1918 Scott had essentially exhausted his aesthetic imagination of architecture. The Architecture of Humanism is unique, however: if not for its introduction of an empathetic notion of “space” into Anglo-American discourse—an introduction that had occurred elsewhere and would eventually arrive in a more intellectually convincing form with Siegfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture in 1941—then for its particularly connoisseurial view of architecture.56 In this way it not only represents a rhetorically self-conscious image of architecture but—with its exposition of the spectator’s “writing-out” into space—a moment in which the mind’s eye had begun to split open (a fracture that Freud would read as the modern mind). Like the hypochondri- acal symptoms that the neurasthenics used to describe their disease, Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste offers an unwitting—which is to say, an unconscious—reminder of the ambivalence inherent to inhabiting space. And the aesthetic spectator it envisaged, like its author, remained resigned to his or her paralysis at the center of space, like a large piece of foolscap immobilized on a desk or “a patient etherized upon a table.”

Sigmund Freud. The physical mechanism of forgetfulness, 1898.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 Notes This paper was originally presented at the “Architecture and Psychoanalysis” conference held at Yale University, 24–26 October 2003. I would like to thank Margaret Deamer for her kind invitation and Joanna Merwood for her insightful comments. It is also a part of a much larger project on Scott’s Architecture of Humanism; I would like to thank Eduardo Cadava, Edward Eigen, Spyros Papapetros, and especially Beatriz Colomina for their support of this work.

1. Iris Origo, Images and Shadows: Part of a Life (London: John Murray, 1970), 104. 2. As Origo remembered it, Scott’s instability resulted in “the uncertainty as to whether he would not awake, after an evening enlivened by his stories and his wit, to a morning blackness which, for three days, would envelop the whole house in a dank mist of silence and gloom.” Origo, Images and Shadows, 104. 3. Roger Vittoz, Traitement des psychonévroses par la rééducation du contrôle cérébrale (Paris: Baillière, 1911). Scott found Vittoz “one of the most interesting men I have ever met.” As he noted to a friend, “He can tell whether you are lying or telling the truth [and,] in a few months, he expects to have perfected an instrument which will report [psychical] phenomena mechanically.” (Geoffrey Scott to Nicky Mariano, 6 June 1919, Berenson Archive, I Tatti, Florence.) Unfortunately there is no evidence that Vittoz completed his invention. 4. Ottoline Morrell, Ottoline, The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 237. Morrell recommended Vittoz’s clinic to both Scott and T.S. Eliot. 5. Geoffrey Scott, A Box of Paints (London: Privately printed, 1924); Geoffrey Scott, Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932). 6. Eliot showed this draft to Ezra Pound as he passed through Paris on his return to London in 1922. It was published by the Criterion journal later that year, and republished the same year in book form by Boni and Liveright, Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s publishing house. 7. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1940), 31. The line is from Canto II. A Game of Chess, line 111. 8. “And this, and so much more?— / It is impossible to say just what I mean! / But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: / Would it have been worth while / If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, / And turning toward the window, should say: / ‘That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant at all.’” T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Originally published in Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist Press, 1917). Collected in Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems, 13. 9. Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (New York: Houghton and Mifﬂin, 1914), 240; emphasis in original. 10. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, vii. 11. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, vii. 12. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, viii. 13. See Vernon Lee, “Aspects versus Things,” in The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 14–21, esp. 18. “When we say that a thing is beautiful, we mean that it affords one or more aspects which we contemplate with satisfaction. . . . what we contemplate as beautiful is an Aspect of the Thing, but never a thing itself” (18; emphasis in original).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 14. Bernard Berenson, “A Word for Renaissance Churches,” in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Second Series (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1902), 62. 15. Bernard Berenson, “Renaissance Churches,” in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 70. 16. Berenson repeated this phrase with the hypnotic repetition of a mantra, albeit without any of the underlying conviction. It occurs frequently throughout his autobiographic writings: Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts (New York: Pantheon, 1948); Sketch for a Self- Portrait (New York: Pantheon, 1949); Rumour and Reflection, 1941–1944 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952); One Year’s Reading for Fun: 1942 (New York: Knopf, 1960); The Passionate Sightseer: From the Diaries, 1947 to 1956 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1960); Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947–1958, ed. Nicky Mariano (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963); and The Bernard Berenson Treasury, A Selection from the Works, Unpublished Writings, Letters, Diaries, and Journals: 1887–1958, ed. Hannah Kiel (London: Methuen, 1964). Several of his biographers also use the phrase to frame his aestheticism. See, for example, Nicky Mariano, Forty Years with Berenson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966); Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979); Ernest Samuels with Jayne Newcomer Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1987; Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979); and Sylvia Sprigge, Berenson: A Biography (Cambridge: Riverside, 1960). 17. The phrase “beautiful leisure” is taken from Meyer Schapiro’s damming biographic sketch, “Mr. Berenson’s Values” (1961), reprinted in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, vol. 4 of the Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 209–26. As Schapiro insightfully notes, Berenson’s “career depended on the coincidence of his personal aims with the style of life of the more cultivated rich at the end of the century and especially their new interest in collecting Renaissance art. The perfection of the individual was sought then in aesthetic sensibility; through it one could surmount and redeem the egotism of practical affairs on which the well-being of this class rested. Happiness and freedom were found chiefly in the enjoyment of the arts, in travel and refined sociability in a beautiful leisure, means only available to a fortunate few. . . . Beauty was separated from the ethical, the civic, and the religious, and lifted above these as a self-sufficient, private goal. The aesthetic in itself could sublimate the imperfections of the world” (222). 18. This shared attention to the detail is noted by Carlo Ginzburg in his “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125. See also Richard Wollhiem, “Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship,” in On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 177–201. 19. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud acknowledged the importance of the daydream. Although the waking dream, like the nocturnal form, is a wish fulfillment and is based on the impressions of infantile experience, it differs from the nocturnal form in that it is shaped to a greater extent by the secondary revision; that is to say, it is subject to the effects of censorship and respectability. These revisions shape the daydream into a “ready-made narrative,” constructing what Freud described as “the façade of the dream.” See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), vols. 4–5 of The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 5:492–93.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 20. See, for example, Colin Rowe’s history of “space-talk” in “The Present Urban Predicament,” in As I Was Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 3, ed. Alexander Caragonne (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1996), 165–220. See also, Reyner Banham, “Lethaby and Scott,” in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Butterworth, 1960), 44–67, esp. 67. 21. Beard first formulated this disease in George Miller Beard, “Neurasthenia or Nervous Exhaustion,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 3 (1869): 245–259; and then developed it in George Miller Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia): It’s Symptoms, Nature, Sequences, Treatment (New York: E.B. Treat, 1888); and George Miller Beard, American Nervousness: It’s Causes and Consequences: A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: Putnam, 1881). Freud discussed Beard’s diffuse formulation in “On the Grounds of Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description Anxiety-Neurosis” (1894), in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 87–120. As James Strachey notes in an editorial comment to Freud’s work, this article and its genesis in the Drafts and Letters to William Fliess form the beginnings of Freud’s categorization of the neuroses. 22. As T.S. Eliot wrote in “Prufrock,” 11. 23. Achille Adrien Proust and Gilbert Ballet, The Treatment of Neurasthenia, trans. Peter Campbell Smith (London: Kimpton, 1902). In a play on Beard’s original formulation of the democratic nature of neurasthenia, which he considered an “American disease,” Proust and Ballet cite Karl Von Hösling’s statistical survey, Handbuch der Neurasthenie (Leipzig: Franz Müller, 1893), to show that among 598 patients diagnosed with neurasthenia, there were 198 merchants and manufacturers, 130 clerks, 68 professors and teachers, 56 students, 38 officers, 33 artists, 19 without profession, 17 medical men, 17 agriculturalists, 10 clergy, 6 men of science and learning, 6 schoolboys, and 6 working men (Proust and Ballet, 9)—thereby proving the susceptibility of the “brain-classes” to nervous exhaustion. 24. Proust and Ballet, 21, 22. 25. Proust and Ballet, 22–23. Adrien Proust’s son Marcel was an infamous hypochondriac who would consult up to six doctors at once and complain constantly about his pains, headaches, and sensitive digestive system. In one emblematic story, Marcel Proust was so trou- bled by a persistent headache that he asked one specialist to perform a trepanotomy, an oper- ation in which the brain is exposed by removing a disc of bone from the skull. The neurologist understandably refused. Proust was duly proud of his father’s accomplishments and Adrien Proust’s Treatment of Neurasthenia can be read, in turn, as a prescription written out to his son. On Proust’s hypochondriasis and symptomatology, see Bernard Strauss, The Maladies of Marcel Proust: Doctors and Disease in his Life (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), esp. 1–39. 26. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 3. In these sentiments Scott is following Wölfflin’s argument in his Renaissance and Baroque (1888), trans. Kathrin Simon (1964; repr., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). 27. See Vita Sackville-West to Geoffrey Scott, mid-October 1923, cited in Richard Maxwell Dunn, Geoffrey Scott and the Berenson Circle: Literary and Aesthetic Life in the Early 20th Century (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 228; Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, ed. Anne Oliver Bell (New York: Harcourt, 1979), 36; and Edith Wharton, review of The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste, by Geoffrey Scott, Times Literary Supplement (25 June 1914); repr. in Edith Wharton, The Uncollected Critical Writings,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 ed. Frederick Wegener (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 131–34. During the early 1920s Scott was involved in a “literary affair” with Sackville-West, who advised him on the revisions to the second edition of the Architecture of Humanism and would leave him to pur- sue Woolf. On Scott and Sackville-West’s relationship, see Dunn, 228–29; and Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (New York: Knopf, 1983), 225–32. 28. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 215. 29. Geoffrey Scott, Portrait of Zélide (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 152. As he sur- mised, “in the correspondences of lovers there will be four elements at play—four egoisms to be placated instead of two.” A division, which he allowed meant “the habit of writing letters has estranged more lovers than it has united.” 30. See, for example, Edith Wharton’s description of Scott in A Backward Glance (1933; repr., New York: Touchstone, 1998), 375–76. Similarly Berenson considered his former secretary an intellectual dilettante who readily abandoned one intellectual concern for another at the first sign of boredom. According to Berenson, a “dilettante is someone who cannot put up with boredom. And work whatever involves moments of the most funereal boredom which one must have the strength to overcome in order to reach the happiness of a result. . . . Dilettantes do not follow any regular path, but leap from one thing to another like flamingos in a swamp.” Berenson, as quoted in Umberto Morra, Conversations with Berenson, trans. Florence Hammond (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 171–72. It should be noted that Scott would not have objected to Berenson’s ornithological slight. 31. Clough Williams-Ellis, as quoted in David Watkin, “The History of the ‘English Tradition’: 1900–1945,” in The Rise of Architectural History (London: Architectural Press, 1980), 116. 32. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 210. 33. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 213; emphasis in original. 34. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 213; emphasis in original. 35. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 213. Scott considered the ability to recognize “the image of those [human] functions” in architectural terms as the “true basis, in its turn, of critical appreciation.” 36. See Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 213–14, n. 1. Lipps first articulated his notion of empathy in his Raumaesthetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschung (Leipzig: J.A. Barth, 1897) and then expanded on it in Theodor Lipps, Von der Form der äesthetischen Aperception (Halle an der Saare: Max Niemeyer, 1902); and Theodor Lipps, Ästhetik: Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst (Leipzig: Theodor Voss, 1923). On the historic contextualization of Lipps’s theorization and its subsequent development, see Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 28–29, 37, 46–47. 37. Scott is referring to the explanation and bibliography of Vernon Lee [Violet Paget] and Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psychological Aesthetics (London: John Lane, 1912); and Vernon Lee, The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913). Beauty and Ugliness is a collection of Lee’s writings on aesthetics from 1897 to 1912. Although it was not widely read, her 1897 essay “Beauty and Ugliness” effectively introduced a Lippsean notion of empathy to the English art world. As Mark Jarzombek, among others, has noted, Lipps’s work was subsequently popularized in English with the publication of The Foundations of Aesthetics,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 ed. C.K. Ogden, I.A. Richards, and James Wood (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922). See Jarzombek, “De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experimentalism,” Assemblage 23 (1994): 28–69. 38. Bernard Berenson, The Central Italian Painters (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897); repr. as book three of The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1952), 121. Berenson equates this “untrammeled space” with the life-enhancing value of art. “In such pictures how freely one breathes,” he notes, “as if a load has just been lifted from one’s breast; how refreshed, now noble, how potent one feels; again, how soothed; and still again, how wafted forth to abodes of far-away bliss!” Berenson’s conception of the therapeutic value of art remained ill-defined and problematic. On the contradictory nature of this formulation, see Mary Ann Calo, Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 44–66. 39. Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896); repr. as book two of The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon Press, 1952), 40. The full passage reads: “painting is an art which aims at giving an abiding impres- sion of artistic reality with two dimensions. The painter must, therefore, do consciously what we all do unconsciously—construct the third dimension. And he can accomplish his task only as we accomplish ours, by giving tactile values to retinal impressions. His first business, therefore, is to rouse the tactile sense, for I must have the illusion of being able to touch a figure, I must have the illusion of varying muscular sensations inside my palm and fingers corre- sponding to the various projections of this figure, before I take it for granted as real, and let it affect me lastingly.” 40. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 226. 41. Scott, Architecture of Humanism, 254. 42. Proust and Ballet, 66. In case there was any doubt about the seriousness of this obfus- cation, Proust added that this condition could not be corrected with the “appropriate glasses.” 43. Proust and Ballet, 54. 44. Geoffrey Scott, “Epilogue,” in The Architecture of Humanism, 2nd ed. (1924; repr., New York: Norton, 1960), 188–189. 45. Karin Stephen, Psycho-analysis and Medicine: A Study of the Wish to Fall Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). 46. Scott, “Epilogue,” 185–86. 47. See Scott, “Epilogue,” 186. 48. On this sensitivity, see Geoffrey Scott to Mary Berenson, 24 August 1922, Berenson Archive. 49. Scott clearly understood the relationship between travel and architectural connoisseurship as one between the mastery of physical distance and a proximity to the historical object. This understanding is evident in his flirtation during the 1910s with the idea of writing a guidebook to Italian architecture. On more than one occasion Berenson referred his minor clients to Scott’s services as a guide to the aesthetic pleasures of Italy. During 1909 Scott had traveled as an assistant to Ogden Codman—the Boston architect who would cowrite The Decoration of Houses (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1917) with Edith Wharton—during Codman’s research on eighteenth-century French chateaux. Scott considered him largely igno- rant of architecture, someone who was, “properly speaking, a decorator.” Geoffrey Scott to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/1526381041165494 by guest on 27 September 2021 Mary Berenson, mid-August 1909, Berenson Archive. 50. Reginald Blomfield, Modernismus (London: MacMillan, 1934), 17. The principal exception to the brevity of Scott’s history is his sustained, three-line, discussion of Vitruvius’s architectural treatise, a work he considered “less a theory of architecture than an encyclope- dia of knowledge.” 51. Sigmund Freud, “The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness” (1898), in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 287–97. While remaining a frustration, this mechanism was not without its uses, as Freud noted in the papers conclusion. After misplacing the address of the acquaintances’ fam- ily he was supposed to visit, but hadn’t wanted to, Freud noted that: “In my unconscious hid- ing of the [address card] the same intention had been operative as my curiously modified act of forgetting.” (297.) 52. Freud, “Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” 290–91. As Strachey notes, Freud is drawing attention here to his observation that when a memory is repressed, an unusually vivid image often appears in the conscious that is not the repressed memory itself but an image that is closely related to the repressed memory. The following year Freud called these phenomena “Screen Memories” in his 1899 paper of the same name, and in one of his last papers, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), he related the vividness of these images to hallucinations. In all of these examples Freud specifically uses the German überdeutlich, which Strachey translates as “ultra-clear.” 53. Freud, “Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” 291. Later Freud noted that a third party’s resolution of his forgetfulness was “a good example of the efficacy of psychoanalyti- cal therapy, which aims at correcting the repressions and displacements and which removes the symptoms by re-instating the genuine psychical object” (295). 54. Freud, “Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness,” 289. 55. Geoffrey Scott, “The Vatican Basilica of St. Peters, Part I,” Country Life 60 (1925): 1000–1006; and “The Vatican Basilica of St. Peters, Part II,” Country Life 61 (1926): 16–23, 1925–1926. Scott’s sensibilities were perfectly matched with the “dreamy nostalgia” that Country Life institutionalized. As editors of this journal promised in the first edition, within its pages “You can easily forget for the first time you are living in the nineteenth century.” Country Life 1 (1897): 20, as cited in Watkin, “The History of the ‘English Tradition,’” 94. 56. In this sense, Reyner Banham is typical in his suggestion that Scott’s introduction of a Lippsean notion of empathy into Anglocentric discourse was interesting but “not seminal” and was a reflection of a general movement in architectural thought. As Banham concluded, a more convincing intellectual translation occurred with Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941); and Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (London: J. Murray, 1943). See Banham, “Lethaby and Scott,” 67.

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