Frank Salmon

British Architects, Italian Fine Arts Academies and the Foundation of the RIBA, 1816–43

With the foundation of the Royal Academy in London in 1768 British artists went some way towards providing themselves with the sort of institutional basis for education and management in their professions which many of their European peers had long since enjoyed. From the outset, however, architects were poorly represented among the Royal Academicians, and it soon became apparent that the specific requirements which architects had of a professional institution were fundamentally different from those of painters and sculptors. This realization lay behind the sequential appearance between 1791 and 1834 of at least eleven separate architectural organizations in London, beginning with the Architects’ Club and culminating in the foundation of the Institute of British Architects (officially the Royal Institute of British Architects since 1866). A striking feature of several of these organizations was the reference they made to the foreign fine arts academies with which some of the architects involved had been connected during their educational travels abroad. Thus, for example, nobody was eligible for election to the Architects’ Club in the 1790s ‘unless he be an Academician or Associate of the Royal Academy in London, or has received the Academy’s gold medal for Composition in Architecture, or be a member of the Academies of Rome, Parma, Bologna, Florence, or Paris’. The fact that four of the five foreign academies listed here were Italian reflects the pre-eminence of Italy as the principal location for British architectural study abroad in the later eighteenth century. During the period of the Napoleonic Wars, when this pattern of travel was seriously interrupted, moves towards a British architectural institution nevertheless continued to be influenced by those with experience of Italian academies. Among the individuals endeavouring to found a Royal Academy of Architecture in 1810, for example, were Joseph Michael Gandy and Charles Heathcote Tatham, who had been variously involved with the academies of Rome and Bologna during the mid-1790s. After 1815 British architects reached Italy in greater numbers than at any stage in the later eighteenth century, and among the eighteen members of the Architects’ and Antiquaries’ Club in 1820 were eleven architects, no fewer than eight of whom had visited Italy within the previous four years (Edward Cresy, John Goldicutt, Joseph Gwilt, Thomas Jeans, William Purser, John Sanders, George Ledwell Taylor and John Foster). The founders of the Club stated that in their travels abroad they ‘had observed that Academies for Architecture and its connected Sciences were established in several cities, and were calculated to produce very beneficial effects. They could not resist the mortifying contrast which was presented in comparing the state of Architecture in those cities, and their native kingdom’. Among the members Goldicutt, who had won the Royal Academy’s silver medal in 1814, had been elected an honorary member of the Accademia di San Luca whilst at Rome in 1818.

'Storming the Campo Vaccino': British Architects and the Antique Buildings of Rome after Waterloo

The later eighteenth century was a period when, as a result of increasingly eclectic and picturesque taste in the use of the classical language of architecture, young British architects were effectively compelled to spend some years studying in Italy if they wished to reach the forefront of their profession. The importance of this first-hand experience of Italy is attested by the physical and financial hardships many architectural students were prepared to endure in order to gain it, as well as by the fact that the pattern of travel continued unabated in the face of political hostilities in which Britain was periodically engaged within Europe. During the Seven Years War of 1756–63, for example, when the British found themselves at enmity with the French, the Austrians and, after 1762, with the Spanish, no fewer than eight British architects nevertheless travelled on the continent and did so relatively unimpeded. In fact there was at least one British architectural student present in Italy in every year between 1740 and 1797. This consistent pattern of travel was brought to an enforced end, however, when the Italian peninsula itself became the setting for overt military action after Napoleon had invaded Piedmont in April 1796. While five British architectural students managed to reach Italy during the brief peace which followed the conclusion of the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802, one finding it possible to travel ‘through the heart of France without the least molestation’, the deterioration of Anglo-French relations after Trafalgar in 1805 left the peninsula largely inaccessible to the British until the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

The Site of Michelangelo's Laurentian Library

In his monographic article on Michelangelo9s Laurentian Library in Florence, first published in 1934, Rudolf Wittkower relegated the history of its siting within the canonica (claustral buildings) of San Lorenzo to a third appendix. Since then a number of scholars have given detailed consideration to the site history, realizing it to be a significant aspect of Michelangelo9s early career as an architect. The present paper maintains that some study of the canonica as Michelangelo probably encountered it should be prerequisite to any account of the site and presents new observations, measurements, and previously unnoticed 18th-century plans preserved in Prague to make such a study. The comprehensive publication of Michelangelo9s correspondence, records, and drawings during the past 20 years facilitates reconstruction of the sequence of events in his development of the site, and this further illuminates the artist9s working methods and relations with both his patron and his assistant. Consideration is also given to an abandoned idea for a library beyond the confines of the canonica, bordering on piazza San Lorenzo and perpendicular to the church facade. Documents from the Florence State Archive confirm the identity and location of properties as shown on Michelangelo9s own plan of the vicinity, which is newly oriented, and the rejected scheme is briefly examined in relation to contemporary urban redevelopment in Florence.

The South Front of St George's Hall, Liverpool

The Conservation Plan currently being put into effect for St George’s Hall, Liverpool, has occasioned new research into the history of a building which, since its completion in 1855, has been universally hailed by architects and historians alike as an outstanding example of European neo-classical architecture. However, the unusual functional arrangements of the building (particularly the disposition of Crown and Civil Courtrooms either side of a Concert Hall and consequent difficulties with public access) have been subject to criticism over the past century and a half, mainly by those who have had cause to use it. This article is concerned with one part of St George’s Hall, the south front and its approaches, the form and function of which have been perhaps the most problematic aspect of the building from its conception through to the present day.

James “Athenian” Stuart and the Geometry of Setting Out

A characteristic feature of the neoclassical attitude to Greco-Roman architecture that ran from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth has long been held to be the minute surveys of ancient buildings that were undertaken and published during that period. Ultimately inspired by Antoine Desgodetz’s Les edifices antiques de Rome (1682), measured surveys of antique buildings across the Mediterranean world became a staple part of architectural and antiquarian study from the 1750s, especially in relation to the growing interest in Greek architecture. The British were especially assiduous in framing these surveying activities as part of a discourse about “truth” (as Robert Wood put it in 1753) and “accuracy”, a term used by James Stuart in the preface to the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens in 1762. However, the process of surveying an existing structure is by no means commensurate with that of setting it out in the first place, since some dimensions are effectively concealed by the fabric of the building itself. Further still, methods appropriate for drawing on the smooth surface of a drawing board may be quite different from those appropriate for the staking out of the plan in the field or the marking of stone by the mason. This situation raises a number of related conundra: How did Stuart take measurements in the field? How did they get translated to published form? What assumptions did he make about Greek setting out, and how did these assumptions color his measurements and his reconstructions?

Perspectival Restoration Drawings in Roman Archaeology and Architectural History

This paper is concerned with the graphic means deployed since the Renaissance to restore the appearance of ancient Roman architecture, and specifically with the use of various forms of perspective. Disdained by architectural theorists from Leon Battista Alberti onwards because of its supposed subjectivity, the perspective nonetheless became a valuable tool in the second half of the eighteenth century for studying Roman architecture and urban form in pristine condition. It remained so until, with the consolidation of a more scientific approach to the discipline of archaeology in the last third of the twentieth century, it was reduced to schematic form and supplemented by isometric and axonometric projectional restorations, notably in English-language histories. The discipline of architectural history has not, however, been well served by this development, and an argument is made here for the retention of perspectival restoration and for the furtherance of the recent development of restorations modelled with the aid of computers.