12_D Michael J. Lewis, "The Gothic Revival", London, 2002, pp.13-57,81-93,105-23 it)' with existing buildings. vVren felt that 'to deviate from the old Form, would be to rurn [ a building] into a disagreeable Mixture, which no Person ofa good Taste could relish.' At Christ Church. Chapter 1: Literature Oxford, he built Tom Tower, a rather florid Gothic gatehouse. For the restoration of\Vesmlinster Abbey he made designs for a Gothic facade and transept, intending 'to make the whole of a Piece'. \ Vren also appreciated the structural refinements of the Gothic. At St Paul's, London, the crowning achie\'ement of his .My stud.y holds three thousand volumes classicism, he supported the great barrel va ult of the navc with a AndJet Jsighfor Gothic columns. mighty array of fly ing bu ttresses, although these were carefully Sanderson Miller, 1750 masked from sight behind a blank second-storey wall. Here was the characteristic seventeenth-century attitude toward the It is a leap to go frolll writing poems about ruins to making ruins Gothic: respect and admi ration for its structural achievements, to represent poems, but in the early eighteenth century England horror and disgust for its vi su al fo rms. did just this. The Gothic Revival began as a literary movement. Throughout Europe, simila r attitudes prevailed. Damaged or drawing its im pulses from poetry and drama, an d trans lating dila pidated cathed rals were patched with simplified Gothic ele­ them in to architecture. It was swept into exis tence in Georgian ments, as at ~ oyon, France in the mid-eighteenth century. In England by a new li terary appetite fo r melancholy, horror, gloom some cases entirely new Gothic elements were designed: Gothic and decay. It revelled in the exalted psychological states of transepts were designed fo r the cathedra1 of Saint-Croix in Shakespeare's characters, the love of the fantastic an d the super­ Orleans in the 1620s; a Gothic facade fo llowed in abou t 1708. natural in Edmund Spenser and, later, the morbid graveyard This was no provincial outpost, but a major cathedral funded by poetry ofThomas Gray. All these themes, which stood in opposi­ royal contribution, and the decision to proceed in the Gothic \\'as tion to the cl assical val ues of clarity and orderliness, came to be made personally by Louis X lV. And the quality of the work wa s associated wi th the crumbling Gothic lan dscape ofEngland. uncommonly high, carried out in finely dressed stone, much fi ne r, The medieval landscape of Englan d had long been the foc us of in fa ct, than much oft.he Georgian era that followed it. powerful cultural associations. It was exceptionally rich in its At the other side of Europc, the Gothic was Ilkewise enjoying heritage ofmedieval monasteries and abbeys. Al th ough di ssolved a spirited afterlife. The Bohemian architect Giovann i Santini­ and looted by Henry VIII during the protestant Reformation, Ai chel (1677-1723) concocted a ri chly idiosyncratic blend of these decaying monasteries were an es scnti al component of the Baroque and Gothic forms, reviving the sinuous tracery and landscape. The Engl ish attitude toward this landscape was web-like vau lting of the late Gothic Parl er style. T ypically unusu.ll ly reverent. Because of the social history of England - a inventive was his pilgrimage church of 5t John of Nepomuk, Norman aris toc racy arri\-ing in l066 to supplant an Anglo­ Zclena Hora, now in the Czech Republic (c. 1720-). T hi s was Saxon kingdom - pedigree and dynastic continuity were matters Baroque in its pentagonal central plan and undulating wa lls even of great symbolic weight. At the same time, Englan d's aristoc­ as its la minated surfaces and its energetic ribbing were resolutely racy was rural. not urban, and enjoyed an intimate relationship to Gothic. These works and those of \Vren represent the culmina­ the land, as it does to this day. \Vhen the Puritans ruled England tion of Gothic Survival, requiring j ust a speck of nostalgia and from 1646 to 1660, Tory aristocrats were exiled to their rural antiquarian pleasure to tip them over into Revival. estates; barred from public life. many took refuge in antiquarian ­ Ironically, even as the Renai ssance dislodged the Gothic, it ism, a favourite aristocratic diversion in troubled times. Most suggested by its own example that a discarded style might. at estates were built on or near the ruins Of monasteries, whose some distant day, be made to li ve again. T hus in 1700,just as the antiquity seemed to oOer historical legitimacy to their upstart Gothic finally vanished as a structural system and a style, it was possessors, albeit of a rather spu ri ous sort. Such is the back­ about to be revived as an idea. ground 10 vV illiam Dugdale's lvlonosticon Angliconum ( 1655), an extravagant compendillln of these monasteries produced during l:.! IS 12_D Michael J. Lewis, "The Gothic Revival", London, 2002, pp.13-57,81-93,105-23 the Puritan interregn um . \Venzel Hollar's su perb plates formed a 7 Gothic TemP'e at Shotover PMk, rich sou rcebook for the Gothic Hcvi\,al.e\·cn into Pug in's day. Oxfordshire. 1716-17. If the point 0( a building was 10 evoke I t was one thing to draw and research medie\'al monasteries; it Gothfc associations, II could never was quite another to build copies of them. For this to happen be Clammed too full of Gothic required mental adjustments of a traumatic nature. Up to the motifs. Tyrrell's GOthfc TemP'e at Shotover Par1l. presented a full start ofthe eighteenth century it was slill taken for granted that a panopty 0( cathedral elements in building mllst be beautiful to look at. This meant classical archi­ shorthand form: an arcaded porch slung between two octagonal tecture, as revived by the Renaissancc and proportioned turrets. a rose window and a according to the punctili ous method ofVitrU\,jus. In this system lonely fin~1 atop its crenellated Gothic architecture had no place. To admit the merit of Gothic gable. architecture, either oneoftwo things mu st occur. Either the defi­ nition of beauty could be stretched so that the Gothic could be defined as beautiful, orthe merit of a building could be S(.'C 11 to reside in va lues other than beauty. The eighteenth century. though it struggled to do the fi rst, chose the second course. T he consequences of this \\ ere not restricted to the Gothic Re\'i\'al and came to affect mu ch of\ Vestern cu lt ure. T he doctrine which came to compete with beauty as the fun­ damental end of art was that ofassociationi sm. Accordi ng to this doctrine, a wo rk of art should be judged not by sll ch intri nsic qualities as proportion or form, bu t by the mental sensations they conjure in the mi nd:) of\·iewers. Such an idea has a long pedigree and it ultimately stretches back to John Locke's Essa) Concerning /luman Ullderslalldillg(1689), which treated sensory experience as the source of human kn owledge. T he relationship of this con­ cept to art was stated most sllccinctly by Hichard Payne Knight (1750-182 1- ), whose IlJItlI)'lical Inquiry into the Picturesque pro­ pa inted landscapes of Claude Lorrain and Salvato I' Rosa. Tn their claimed that 'all th e pleasure of intellect ari se frolll the paintings melancholy ruins were indispensable, serving to estab­ association of ideas' . Fo r I\ night, the real richncss of a work of an lis h scale and perspectival depth, and in la ndscaped gardens they was not in th eo plll cnceof it ~ materi als oreleganceof its forl11 bu t did the same. Ofco u r ~ c . while Cl audc's ruins were classical, those in its limitless capacity to induce thoughts and impressions: of the English countryside were medieval. Thus from an early 'almost every objcct of nature or art. that presents itself to the date the English landscaped garden introduced medieval senses, ei ther excites fresh train s and combinations of ideas, or \' ignettes among its cl assical pavilions. Some ofthese consisted of vivifi es and strengthens those \\ hid l existed before.' A wooded remodelled or altered monastic ruins while others consisted of landscape might summon agreeable thoughts and memories of entirely ne\\ buildings in the 'Gothick' sty le. Such lighthearted childhood picnics; a ruined abbey might call to mind melancholy structures posed no menace to the classica l tradition, which reRectionsofthc \'iolence of the Middle Ages, or reRections on it::, ah\ ays tolerated grotesqueness in the Saturnalia of the garden. piety. Payne Knigh t's book did not appear until lS05 but it only (The speJ1ing 'Gothick' was gradually replaced by 'Gothic' in the put into words what had long since become common practice. 1750s. In the nineteenth cen lury. 'Gothick' came to stand for any The pl ayground fo r in dulging associations was the pic­ Gothic Rc\'ival building that was particularly nai've. Rim sy or his­ turesquciy landscaped garden. that essential creation of toricalJ y incorrec t.) eighteenth-centll ry English culture. T hese gardens rec reated One of the firs t of these new buildings was the soli tary GothiC' the rambl ing irregularity an d cOll trasting scenery found in the Temple bui lt fo r Colonel James Tyrrell at Shotover Park , 14 r 12_D Michael J. Lewis, "The Gothic Revival", London, 2002, pp.13-57,81-93,105-23 Oxfordshire.