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“The Scattered Limbs of the Giant”: Recollecting Medieval Architectural Revivals
In 1813, the English antiquary William Gunn referred to the Roman spolia, reused to formulate round-styled buildings throughout Europe, as “the scattered limbs of the giant,” poorly reassembled. Launching the theme that Mary Shelley’s novella, Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus would treat five years later, Gunn inaugurated the most significant corporal metaphor for nineteenth-century historicism: an organism assembled from the dead remains of the past – recharged, resuscitated, and rendered monstrous. Gunn’s large corpus of Romanesque buildings appeared to him very like the hybrid behemoth brought to life by science’s antihero, Victor Frankenstein. They were massive, deformed, inhumanly proportioned, gloomy, and recollected from Roman leftovers, with human industry, nearsightedness, and naiveté.1
Both the beast and the beastly Romanesque were baptized and reified as products of nineteenth-century historicist understanding, an ontology in which all creation arose a priori from the past and was ineluctably bound – morally, genetically, and stylistically – to its origins. This historical perspective provided the psycho-philosophical scaffolding and link not only for the understanding of the round-arched style, but also for the nineteenth-century revival of medieval architecture and its concomitant historiography. Medieval architectural styles, Gunn reckoned, were the first revivals – albeit monstrous – of Classical Roman forms.
It was not the antiquaries’ tomes, however, but the roman, a product of early modern Europe, which proved the most fertile aesthetic and critical battleground upon which medieval architecture and civilization died, was resurrected, and transmogrified, like Frankenstein’s hybrid. Thirteen years after Gunn, Victor Hugo published his robust Notre-Dame de Paris, a novel which quickly became a monument in its own right, establishing itself as a pre-eminent medievalizing text. Hugo was among the first and arguably the most significant French writer to revive and sculpt the medieval, textually positioning his audience both literally and figuratively above his lost medieval stone hulk. The period of media aetas had come to a close in 1830, 348 years, 6 months, and 15 days after the inaugural events of the novel in 1482. The fabric of time had been rent. In reviving the moribund medieval, Hugo had perforce to refashion it, and his romantic vision of medieval architecture and society still commands us.2
Victor Hugo was more romanced by the dark, inscrutable forces of medieval buildings than edified by their rational structure. Into the dense and exotic web of Notre-Dame’s medieval fabric, Hugo wove his own monster – hunchbacked, mute, splay-footed Quasimodo, the embodiment of the primitive Romanesque crypt. Esmeralda, the gypsy enchantress, personified its more popular Gothic features. Hugo’s beloved pile became a synecdoche for all medieval churches, at once horrific and sublime, lugubrious and joyfully transcendent, symbolic of eternal paradise and the gulf of hell. It was the avatar of Christian sacred space until suppressed by Gutenberg’s book.3
For this novelist and incisive architectural critic, Notre-Dame was stylistically transitional, with its Romanesque base and Gothic middle, each characterized by its generative design element. The crushing incubus of the round style’s broad and massive barrel vault, glacially nude and majestic in its simplicity, formed a cave-like, nearly Egyptian architectural space. This face of Janus looked back and spoke to the political authoritarianism and resolute theocracy of Roman Catholicism. Notre-Dame’s Gothic “upper torso,” tall, airy, and penetrated by color, was the intrepid, unbridled, bourgeois, and democratic product of modern France.4 Hugo’s antitheses internationally reoriented medieval architectural criticism and defined the critical rubrics not only for Romanesque and Gothic architecture, but also for their nineteenth century revival styles.5 Hugo’s novel became the most widely read book in France; his interpretation of medieval architecture seeped into the collective unconscious and, in little time, became common international currency.
This clinical retrovision of the early years of the European nineteenth century, this art of looking backward for inspiration, occurred because the fabric of tradition and memory had been ruptured, and the speed of time had increased. Man’s relationship to the past was no longer as casual and familiar as it had previously been, and man’s connection to the past weakened as he excavated it. This nascent medievalism, which became a pervasive cultural phenomenon, was a self-conscious experiment, away from the centrifugal Classical center of ritualized architectural patterns, forms, and meanings. A certain degree of aesthetic schizophrenia set in, in which the traditional Classical object of pleasure was shunted aside, and the medieval, unnatural and supernatural, incorporated opposition into its aesthetic. Neo-medieval construction became asexual or inert, and the spectator was guilt-ridden with fear of the new replica. One new factor responsible for the change in critical attitudes was Christianity. Restored after the schisms of the Reformation and the French Revolution, it forced redemption into the future and determined a critical nexus of anxiety throughout medieval revival historiography.
The novel and historiography marched hand-in-hand in the Romantic era, both with a prophetic dimension, celebrating the essential relativity of life and history. Both stood weeping, to paraphrase Panofsky, at the graveside of the Middle Ages, hoping to resurrect its soul. Historicism, the belief that history marches on in a clear pattern guided by visionary leaders and divine providence, directing us closer to an ultimate goal, was the defining ideal of both. It was within this philosophical context of the unity of historical phenomena in an evolutionary pattern of deliverance, promising the unique identification of the nation, that medieval revival became possible and forced changes in historiographical patterns.
The architectural metalanguage of criticism continued to prioritize the Classical architectural legacy, albeit periodically sotto voce, and concomitantly directed critical opinion against medieval revivalism. It is out of the tension between the popular, romantic craving for the historicizing medieval and the established textual and academic culture of Classical architecture that clear principles regarding exclusion and inclusion of medieval revival developed c.1820. This tension is at the center of any investigation of medieval revival criticism.6 The fluidity of historical memory – relative, redefined by time and type, and representative of various types of memory – shapes perception. The ethos of a building or type of buildings is, in some form of intellectual and psychological addition or multiplication, the sum of the critical accounts or memories of it. These contentions direct an investigation of the shifting critical issues which came to bear on medieval revival styles.
Back to the Medieval Future or A “Theatre of Outworn Masks”?
Constructs of historicism undergirded stylistic manifestations. Until recently and despite its century-long volume of pan-European, American, and other national production, nineteenth-century architecture, patronizingly classified as historicist, has been dismissed by listings and datings, which categorized its multivalent revivals under ambivalent rubrics. Somehow, neo-medieval creations were mistakes architects would not have made had they seen into the crystal ball of modernism. Today Viollet-le-Duc, Ruskin, Pugin, and Revival architects of c.1780–1920 are not so easily dismissed.7
Gothic architecture, which is currently determined as the European and continental pointed style of the mid-twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, has had a more resolved and independent, if not positive, critical history than its Romanesque predecessor of c.1000–1150. Their critical histories, and to a large degree their stylistic characteristics, remained conjoined and conflated under the common portmanteau, “Gothic,” through 1820.8 No sooner had the fork in the historiographical road divided them by name than their critical fates diverged, and they were chosen as model architectural languages in which to tell a nineteenth-century story. Gothic Revival dominated that of its ugly, dumpy, round-styled sister, now rendered nearly invisible through anonymity, despite astute critical and visual sources from the fifteenth century onward, that had singled her out as the older, more residually classical, medieval style.
Charles Eastlake’s groundbreaking analysis of the Gothic Revival in England defined the terms of a critical dialogue which dominated architectural literature until about a generation ago, vis-à-vis characterization, periodization, and aesthetic verdict.9 For the discerning Eastlake writing in the thick of Victorian eclecticism, the revival of pointed architecture in England c.1780 was not simply an episode in the history of taste but rather the British national style destined to supersede all others. Architectural expression of “an age when art was pure and genuine,” the Gothic became, for the next century, the architectural quintessence of England, whose history and institutions had descended in a continuous pattern from their murky medieval source.10
Eastlake determined a first “survival” phase from c.1600 to 1750, when English architects such as James Essex set to restoring their moldering Gothic legacy, and when others continued to build after pointed-style models. Secondly, he traced an underdeveloped, unselfconscious, pre-Puginian revival from c.1750 to 1840, a revival without archaeological pretension, induced by Horace Walpole and punctuated by James Wyatt. During this period, architects like John Nash, Robert Smirke, and Thomas Rickman, who were not concerned enough with “correct, honest Gothic building,” often produced “melancholy” results.11
Eastlake’s third watershed period occurred when the talented Charles Barry, assisted by A. W. N. Pugin, rebuilt London’s neo-Gothic Houses of Parliament (1840–88) and when illustrated professional weeklies such as The Builder (1843) began not only to advance the taste of architectural students and the general public for this new style but also to lay a foundation for its more scholarly treatment. G. G. Scott, Matthew Hadfield, and Richard Carpenter, et al., emerged as competent in the neo-Gothic mode. Finally, Eastlake traced a period from about 1860 to 1870 during which the number of Gothic Revival buildings nearly doubled over those built in the preceding decade. By then, claimed Eastlake, “the grammar of an ancient art… (had been) mastered.”12
Every cause has its martyrs, but before 1928, the Gothic Revival had fewer than most. In the 56 years between Eastlake’s seminal assessment and Clark’s Revival monograph, there was no significant text in English interpreting England’s neo-Gothic legacy. In order to fill this critical lacuna and to raise the Revival to a level of critical significance, Clark, while not relieved of the aesthetic force of Eastlake’s formulations, introduced several new concepts which pivoted scholarship in new directions for the next 75 years. The most consequential were his pronouncements that not only was the Gothic Revival “the most widespread and influential artistic movement which England… [had] ever produced,” but also “perhaps the one purely English movement in the plastic arts.”13 These many neo-Gothic monuments, “monsters… unsightly wrecks stranded upon the mud flat of Victorian taste,” deserved to be excavated from their critical neglect and studied as historical documents, “irrespective of their beauty.”14 The more art-historically objective Clark alleviated the neo-Gothic of two centuries of critical opprobrium, precisely because it had once captivated England’s aesthetic imagination.
The Houses of Parliament, “the first neo-Gothic buildings which… [England] can call great,” transformed the style from a popular, non-professional experiment in cottage-building, or “pure Batty Langley” to a national, English style.15 Clark thus positioned the Revival critically front and center. The aesthetic ambivalence toward Gothic since fifteenth-century Italian criticism had relegated it to history’s critical basement was reconciled within Clark’s nationalizing assessment.16 While Clark reiterated pejorative appraisals, dubbing London’s previously acclaimed Houses of Parliament, “a great necropolis of style,” he redirected art historical commentary. By accounting for neo-Gothic “mistakes” as perhaps lifeless and derivative, but ultimately respectable due to their significance for a nineteenth-century audience, he argued their importance as reflections of England’s national and religious, post-Puginian sentiment. Clark thus placed himself firmly within the nineteenth-century linguistic dialogue regarding the origins and nature of style, critically oriented away from Vitruvian notions of architecture as natural, monogenetic, and cyclical. Instead, operating within a still-current paradigm of architecture as language, Clark viewed style as socially or behaviorally determined and as representative of the behavior and society of man and not his genetic roots.17
Herein lay Clark’s trailblazing critical impact. Clark assessed Gothic Revivalism as a movement, intrinsic to English society, an idea foreign to the historicizing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century consciousness and rooted within his early twentieth-century critical context. Furthermore, Clark rewrote Eastlake’s account of Pugin as a Catholic villain who recognized the principles of good architecture but who perverted them to the service of religious bigotry. Establishing Pugin’s historical importance as a revival apologist, Clark argued that Pugin had fortified the Gothic with principles of a Christian socialist nature because he had understood how Gothic Revival architecture functioned as a symbolic vehicle for promoting religious and social views; not all Revivalists had followed the rules of honesty and truth to structure which Pugin had set forth in his Contrasts (1836) and in his True Principles (1841). In pleading for an architectural rationale based on truth, honesty, and economy in materials, structure, and decoration, Pugin had connected art with morality.
Pugin’s Revival apologia became a foundation for later nineteenth-century rationalist theories in England and France as well as a preamble to the modern movement. Following Eastlake, Clark certified that for better or critical worse, neo-Gothic was a way-station on the road to modernism and that Pugin’s philosophical dicta had forged this connection. Pugin, the modern Vitruvius, granted architecture a new moral standard. From the late nineteenth through the middle of the twentieth century, pioneers of architectural modernism from Great Britain’s Morris, Shaw, Webb, and Mackintosh, to Belgium’s van de Velde, Austria’s Wagner and Loos, and America’s Wright, worked their way through Gothic Revival architecture to arrive at sound, modern concepts of design informed by Puginian and Ruskinian philosophy. Architectural historians from Clark to Hitchcock and Pevsner established this. These two dicta changed not only the course of Revival criticism but also that of modern architectural criticism.
Although the “picturesque Gothic Revival” before Pugin abounded in examples of castles with dysfunctional portcullises and drawbridges, Clark noted that after 1840, the severity of Pugin’s, the Ecclesiologists’, and the Cambridge Camden Society’s “ethical Gothic Revival” righted the wrongs of the adolescent neo-Gothic. “For such ideas,” argued Clark, “Pugin deserves our gratitude.”18 Clark underlined, de nouveau, the importance of the theologically rigorous Oxford Movement and Cambridge Camden Society, that small, pietistic architectural society which generated two important Revival precepts: the importance of sacramentality (a prescriptive, functionalist, clerical view which militated for architectural features best facilitating the liturgy and worship), and the conviction that honest architecture could only result from the handicraft of honest men.19 Emblazoned in their motto, “Good men build good buildings,” this ideal determined critical thinking. Henceforth, the builder’s moral sentiment, like that of the virtuous medieval mason, came directly to bear on architecture’s style, morality, and ultimate value. The international history of the Arts and Crafts Movement through the buildings of Le Corbusier and F. L. Wright cannot be understood without reference to this critical Revival watershed; henceforth, the reform of art led the reform of society.20
Finally, Clark carefully defined the critical contribution of that apostle of taste, John Ruskin, to medieval Revival. Ruskin’s accessibility, eloquence, and international popularity ranked him as a chief Victorian architectural critic and apologist. 21 The Protestant Ruskin succeeded in “disinfecting Gothic architecture” by disassociating it from Rome. Even though Ruskin was antagonistic to the Gothic Revival at mid-century, he was remembered by Clark and until today as one of the originators of Revival doctrines. Like Pugin, Ruskin inspired contemporary architects to build strong, honest, articulated structures. He differed, however, in one particular point which would define an important dialectic of modern architecture: ornament. Less was not yet more for the Victorian Ruskin. To add some medievalizing chimneys or to vary the size of a building’s many ogival windows was, for the sensitive and neurasthenic Ruskin (who sneered at Paxton’s Crystal Palace), to give a building style.22 Clark’s readers are left with a bittersweet taste for the failed Gothic Revival. Though it “changed the face of England… [with its] Gothic lodging-houses, and insurance companies, [its] Gothic everything… [it left behind] a wilderness of deplorable architecture.”23 Taste would not swing back from the horizontal to the vertical until the early twentieth century.
A mid-century landmark architectural history, H. R. Hitchcock’s volume on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represents critical thought on neomedieval architecture through the 1970s. Developing out of what Hitchcock termed “Romantic Classicism,” formed between 1750 and 1790 in France and exported throughout the US, Europe, and Russia, all nineteenth-century architecture fell roughly under this catchall rubric – including the countercurrent “picturesque” and medieval revivals. Revival styles were considered “aberrations” which launched the “chaos of nineteenth-century eclecticism.”24 Despite Clark’s apologetic legacy, these neo-styles horrified Hitchcock and his generation, enamored, by mid-century, of architecture’s modern movement.
Only the study and exploitation of new materials culminating c.1850 lay outside the realm and aesthetic of revivalist modes for Hitchcock, as it had for Pevsner, and represented modern architecture’s salvation. Hitchcock blamed some of the neo-Gothic frivolity on its patrons, who requested it as a cheaper alternative to the “more noble Grecian.” Whether Gothic church, baronial manor house, or castellated prison or bridge, neo-Gothic was aesthetically cast as indecorous, indistinct, and inappropriate. It had, Hitchcock agreed, improved during the 1830s, according to the legitimizing principles of the “Romanist” Pugin’s Contrasts (1836) and had become brittle and absolute after 1840 with the Anglican Church’s doctrinaire application of Pugin’s principles. Only with Barry’s Houses of Parliament did the Gothicists accomplish, proclaimed Hitchcock echoing Eastlake, “one of the grandest academic products of the nineteenth century.”25
Characteristic of his taxonomically driven, formalist generation and of the continued aesthetic ambivalence toward the neo-medieval, Hitchcock generated a plethora of new stylistic terminologies for the neo-Gothic offshoots of his “Romantic Classicism”: Georgian Gothick, Late Georgian Picturesque, Norman, Rustic Cottage, Italian Villa, pre-Victorian, Early Victorian, Puginian Gothic, High Victorian Gothic, and Queen Anne. All of these rubrics variously applied to a neo-Gothic mode which had “accepted”: irregularity, variety of silhouette, coloristic decoration, plastically complex organization, textural exploitation of traditional rustic materials, and a picturesque point of view.26 Hitchcock appreciated the functional doctrines of the Gothic Revival and its devotion to honest expression. We must build in a certain way, he argued, because it is right, not because it is pleasing.
Michael Charlesworth’s 2002 study addressed English Gothic novels, architecture, and medieval architectural criticism in a three-volume interdisciplinary compilation, rare in Revivalist literature. One new idea emerging from this magisterial anthology is that violence committed against the monastic orders, medieval architecture, and the Catholic population of Reformation England engendered a collective guilt which appeared in latent and symbolic form in the Gothic novel and in literature on the Revival. Gothic architecture, Charlesworth argued, was a setting conducive to the dramatic play of guilt and produced, in these dark novels of c.1760 through 1820, spectacular cruelty and heinous crimes. The mythic Gothic castle, a bridge to the past riddled with horror, was the literary scaenae frons, for this play of bad conscience. Gothic Revival architects, in a desire for distance from associations of crime, transgression, and cruelty, created an antiseptic neo-Gothic which mimicked and recalled the old but was physically and chronologically free of the former’s guilt.
Many international scholars who investigated the origins of the Gothic allied themselves to this architectural revival cause, affecting the debate in a way that favored the architect’s whitewashed neo-Gothic. Based on his vast compendium of sources, Charlesworth argued that the English, more than any other nation, raised the stakes of the Revival and, in order to sustain its literary thrust, transformed it into a living experience – from dressing up like monks à la Sir Francis Dashwood for evenings of drinking at Medmenham Abbey, to surveying surviving monasteries, to building neo-Gothic buildings with emotion, religious feeling, and in the chaste and honest spirit of the medieval craftsman.27 Eventually, the neo-Gothic became a way of life through Pugin, Ruskin, and onto William Morris, father of the modern movement.
The Gothic Revival was a more important and complex issue in Protestant countries, including the United States and Australia, where Catholic religion and thought had been either extirpated and replaced or never cultivated across a wide portion of the population.28 Medieval revival came to bear differently on each nation in a complex mix of politics, religion, and national identity, and the history of the Gothic Revival in Catholic France was very different from its English, German, or American counterpart. The suppression of things medieval, aristocratic, or ecclesiastical during the French Revolution came much later to France than had the Reformation to England. This delayed the spirit of revival until the years around 1830, when the taste for renewal was ripe and in large part borrowed or imported from England.29 Additionally, the French medieval revival manifested itself rather in an intense program of restoration, often resulting in almost complete rebuilding.30
Neo-Romanesque: The Ugly, Dumpy, Elder Sister or Avatar of Modernism?
During the high noon of the English neo-Gothic, the Ecclesiologist militated for a more functional Gothic church. The prescriptive nature of the Gothic Revival affected the revival of Romanesque architecture which had neither a champion like Pugin or Ruskin nor was promulgated anywhere by a society with a written platform. Associated with a lack of Gothic sophistication, the neo-Romanesque, pan-European like its mother style, developed between c.1830 and 1910 throughout England, Europe, the US, and elsewhere. In an ironic twist of critical fate, adaptive neo-Romanesque forms – though given much shorter historiographical shrift – outlived their Gothic forebears and became the structural bearers of meaning for the modern movement.
Early nineteenth century definitions of the Romanesque stressed its two unifying cultural characteristics. First was its romanitas, as emerging nations of Europe were united in the development of a civilization which was substantially defined by imperial Roman ideals, laws, and architectural forms. Second, a Romanesque melting together of antique Roman and Christian forms effectuated a quintessential historicizing moment when antique forms became infused with new meaning – as Gunn had explained for England and de Gerville had claimed for France.
Terminological ambivalence accounts for the early critical vacuum. Romanesque encompassed and was called by its alternative labels: Byzantine, Lombard, Norman, Saxon, Rhenish, and Rundbogenstil. In today’s scholarship, discussions of the neo-Romanesque still suffer by association from what the French antiquary Gidon termed, “la maladie de la nomenclature.”31 Far less culturally determined, far more elusive of definition and origin, and far more geographically widespread, the “primitive” Romanesque was beset by the same critical issues as its distant “Roman” relative. Doomed to chronic inferiority by historicizing, neo-Classical theorists who judged any post-antique or post-Renaissance style as devolved from the Classical ideal, medieval and neo-medieval architecture remained prisoners of this perspective through a scholarly generation ago.
Another complicating factor was the Romanesque sculptural program which has traditionally been conceived of as integral to, defined by, and defining of its architectural context.32 Another ascribed Romanesque stylistic characteristic was its integration of a large-scale sculptural program within its monumental space for the first time since Roman antiquity. Despite this international understanding, Romanesque architecture has traditionally been separated from its accompanying sculptural program in critical discussion. Its hydrocephalic heads and stocky bodies, its uncanonic “orders,” and its wild effusion of unruly, flattened, plant ornament created a house of natural horror. Strangling and overwhelming its station, Romanesque sculpture and ornament had no comfortable place within Classical terminology or taxonomy. The easiest way to deal with these strange bedfellows was to separate sculpture from discussions of its historicizing albeit devolved architectural setting.
Christianity had disturbed the harmony between man and nature; it had upped the Classical ante by claiming a higher spiritual value and realm than man’s natural state. This dichotomous, idealistic belief system undermined the very basis of Classical architecture – a system designed to reflect a balanced, body-centered belief in its anthropocentric, modular, symmetrical proportions. The passionate struggle for grace and against sin informs medieval sculpture, which displays incoherent, fragmented, subversive, inauthentic, and polychromatic fantasy.33
The Romanesque Revival is best traced in predominantly Protestant Germany and the US, where its political uses presented newly empowered groups with forms expressing change within a traditional architectural language and value system. The Romanesque Revival developed, stimulated by and within the shadow of Gothic Revival. It reflected a renewed international appreciation of medieval forms manifest in: the restoration and preservation of medieval buildings, the organization and institutionalization of the architectural establishment and journals from 1830 on, increased travel, and developments in photography.34 However, no major definition of neo-Romanesque appeared in the journals spawned by this movement.
Between 1846 and 1876, most American architecture was round-styled. Qualitatively the most significant nineteenth-century style, it has been ignored in much critical literature, perhaps because many examples of neo-Romanesque have been demolished. Terminological ambivalence has not facilitated consistent classification and study. The historiography of the neo-Romanesque was launched with Robert Dale Owen’s praise of James Renwick’s design for Washington’s Smithsonian Institution (1846), which style, Owen heralded, deserved being “named as a National Style of Architecture for America.”35 For Owen and other early commentators, neo-Romanesque fulfilled the American aesthetic desiring picturesque irregularity, flexibility, economy, simplicity, and Republicanism. It was not too fancy or exotic a stylistic or decorative choice. Owen credited the Englishman Thomas Hope and subsequent antiquaries as having predisposed German, English, and hence American taste for the round style.36
By 1842, the neo-Romanesque was suggested as a model for “occasional adoption” in the US and England, as illustrated in the work of R. Upjohn, who “converted” to Romanesque with his Church of the Pilgrim in Brooklyn. Emerging proponents of this style advocated its classic beauty, durability, relative economy of materials, and rapid execution. The 1853 publication of the Congregationalist Church’s Plans for Churches signaled “America’s testimony to neo-Romanesque popularity.”37 While developing architectural journals discussed Romanesque Revival, there was no commanding historical or aesthetic stylistic assessment until the mid-twentieth century. Mary Woods accounted for Americans’ sidelining of the discussion of past historical styles and their relative value until c.1920–50 claiming its divisiveness and that Americans were more concerned with the “dangers than the privileges of history.”38 Works such as Samuel Sloan’s City and Suburban Architecture indicated the incipient popularity of the round style in American secular building.39
C. L. V. Meeks’s article was the first monograph on the American neo-Romanesque, establishing the architects involved and a chronology and typology of American neo-Romanesque buildings, classifying them as roundarched with Lombard bands and arcades resulting in either “Byzantine” or “Norman” styles, or as “Italian Villa,” a round-arched style combined with pilasters and entablatures. On the basis of little previous incisive scholarship, Meeks determined the primary building types in the round-arched style: churches, governmental buildings, markets, retails stores, homes, hospitals, schools, railroad stations, and churches of non-liturgical Protestant congregations such as Congregationalists, Methodists, Unitarians, and Presbyterians.40 Probing the nature and rationale of America’s choice of the round-style, Meeks determined its inherently easier design process, its relative lack of detail, and the consequent ease of establishing archaeological “correctness” in this more “stripped down” neo-style. Meeks suggested Germany’s Rundbogenstil revival as a source of American stylistic appreciation.
Most recently, P. Kent’s comparative overview of revival literature from 1830 to 1910 classified Romanesque Revival as a complex international movement, which varied from country to country and region to region, with its years of greatest popularity between 1875 and 1900. Relying on the few studies since mid-century, Kent defined neo-Romanesque as a style which provided newly empowered groups with architectural options and legitimacy, and characterized its stylistic polarities: primitive and progressive; crude and artistic; nationalist and internationalist; legitimate and subversive.41 Neo-Romanesque forms served in developing an industrial architectural idiom for American urban centers. This resulted in buildings clad in medievalizing forms. Increasing numbers of building types converted to or were conceived of, de novo, in the neo-Romanesque. Kent enlarged Meeks’s building type list with warehouses, hotels, office blocks, art galleries, and natural science or ethnographic museums. What these types shared was their need to accommodate new forms within progressive, innovative designs. The “commercial deployment” of the neo-Romanesque ran on the wheels of urban, industrial, commercial, and financial progress.42
The signature neo-Romanesque of the Beaux-Arts-trained Henry Hobson Richardson, a highly rusticated, irregularly and compactly massed, Francophilic style, took the US by storm and lent legitimacy to the round style there and abroad. Richardsonian Romanesque (c.1870–90) was, however, “but a flower on a well-rooted stalk,” as Richardson had derived much from American architectural developments.43 The revived round style had become critically associated with American qualities of rugged individualism, innovation, entrepreneurialism, and industry. Richardson and Chicago School architects such as Sullivan, Burnham, and Root accommodated new building types to this secure, classically resonant, divested medieval style. A happy marriage of simple form and practical content took place. Thrifty, seasoned, and pragmatic, the neo-Romanesque was the environment and signature of the solid American marketplace. 44 From today’s perspective, the vitality of the Romanesque continues, as it plays a distinct and significant role, having seeded ideas of postmodernism.
Rundbogenstil, a German stylistic epithet designating the early nineteenth century revived round style of Germany and central Europe, makes no real sense in discussions of Romanesque Revival in the US or English-speaking countries. It has recently become more widely used in English-language publications perhaps because of its simple and broad meaning, its more simple stylistic characteristics, and because it was coined specifically for the revived epiphany of the German medieval romanisch.
While critical commentary regarding the American preponderance for and leadership in the neo-round style resulted of a national inclination for this simpler medievalizing style, the inverse was true for Germany. While the round styles of both nations were similar in many respects in form and composition and while German and American examples resulted in a larger corpus of Revival buildings than anywhere else, the theoretical and political processes that led to these similar results were altogether different.
Early German adoption of and apologies for the Rundbogenstil responded to a pervasive national insecurity, rooted in Napoleon’s destruction of medieval monuments. In What Style Should We Build? was the imperative and interrogatory title of Heinrich Hübsch’s book announcing Germany’s anxiety over “the crisis of present-day architecture.”45 The resolution to this two-decade long controversy was not to create, ex novo, but to imitate in the Rundbogenstil. Revival of the round style in Germany was more careful and programmatic than anywhere else, and by 1859 it was touted as the German national product.
The architectural histories of Franz Kugler and disciple Wilhelm Lübke definitively established the Rundbogenstil for Germany.46 For Lübke and for generations to follow, the pure and exact round style, having been engendered by Saxon imperial rule, embodied, “the strong, independent feeling of the German people… because… [it took] an especially deep root in Germany… and sank… profoundly… into the national life.”47 Politics, theory, and roundstyle architecture were inextricably bound in Germany’s historiographies. In the years following the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, the Rundbogenstil became a national choice under Hohenzollern patronage.48
Barbara Miller Lane’s study on “romantic nationalism” is one of very few significant twentieth-century theoretical studies on German medieval revival. Lane refuted the widely held tenet that modern European architecture resulted in a continuous and linear progression away from historical models and toward modernist styles such as the German Bauhaus. She also took to task the traditional and exclusive association of nationalism with neo-Classicism, providing a compelling account of Rundbogenstil revivalism, linked perhaps even more closely to German nationalism, populism, and innovation until well into the 1930s. Focusing on the continuities in German architectural history over the past 130 years, she argued that Germany both valued forms which suggested a distant medieval past as well as tended toward innovation in technology and building design in order to define its modernity.49 The very burden of its historical discontinuity, Lane argued, led Germany to prioritize medieval Rundbogenstil forms.
Kathleen Curran’s groundbreaking book on Romanesque Revival in Germany, England, and the US from c.1825 to 1875, took the German Rundbogenstil as its point of departure. In a complex disentangling of its international historical, religious, and political roots, Curran traced the origins of the first round-styled revival to the Munich and Karlsruhe of Ludwig I and the architectural theories of Hübsch, and mapped its rapid spread to England and the US.50 Influential Americans such as R. Dale Owen, Horace Mann, and Henry Barnard sought German architectural models. Curran uncovered an international circle of friends at the epicenter of the early Rundbogenstil in Germany and the US, including Hübsch, C. von Bunsen, and Friedrich Wilhelm IV, inter alia.51 This comprehensive archiving led Curran to determine that the primary patrons of the Rundbogenstil were German monarchs and members of the English and American Protestant Church hierarchy. The concerns of these powerful men were both “secular and sacred”: to spiritually reinvigorate a Protestant Church threatened by increasing industrialization and to reinvent state institutions.52
All stylistic roads led to Rome for budding German medievalists and neo-Classicists – all part of the late Romantic movement. All good nineteenth-century Germans since Winckelmann and Mengs went to drink at Rome’s fountain, returning with a thirst to create their own national style. The revival of the round style rode this wave of appreciation for Classical shapes and styles. The thorny debates regarding the developing concept of style were integral to the establishment of the Rundbogenstil in Germany. International aesthetic repercussions of this broad subject aside, this matrix generated theories of a national German style based on a mixture of materialist ideas regarding structure, purpose, materials, and technology. Seen within this complex and voluminous literature, the Rundbogenstil takes its place as an historicizing episode in German history – no less Frankensteinian than Gunn’s or de Gerville’s “new” styles. Germany’s Rundbogenstil, a less slavishly sculptural and more angular style than the French or English, was nonetheless a “monster” whose limbs were more “successfully” surgically fused.
The issue of terminology guided this tower-of-Babel debate as Rundbogenstil replaced the current neugriechische, byzantinisch, and romanisch because of its widespread use in English and French. The recent terminological resurrection of Rundbogenstil by scholars of German neo-round-styled architecture continues the terminological historiography as Germany and America’s national redefinitions continue.53 All told, the Romanesque Revival of Germany and the US led the insecure German nation and the young American republic toward confident twentieth-century identities.
The history of taste is a history of ways of seeing. This critical review reveals how successive generations valued their medieval legacies and their revivals. The template of our current understanding of medieval and revival architecture was formed when the medieval was first being resurrected, and this double birth continues to inform contemporary architectural style and theory. Modern and postmodernist architecture depends on Romanesque and neo-Romanesque spatial achievements, bold masonry work, and architectonic mural surfaces. Our understanding responds to other ideals such as our sensitivity to this moody, medieval place in time and how we envision ourselves vis-à-vis this past – politically, socially, and spiritually.
As quintessential architectural icons of Christianity, neo-medieval styles embodied the religious cradle and matrix of safety, nourishment, and peace in modern revivalist and contemporary memory. This architectural locus of the divine incorporated the first and final anchor, the portal to life and death. The medieval church has become part of the collective typology of the holy, an avatar of spiritual haven. It has become the greatest integrating architectural repository for the thoughts and aspirations of mankind. Our need to chronically revive this archetype of spirituality is fundamental to an understanding of medieval revivals in the West. This is why fairy tales often had medieval architectural environments – to house their battles where good triumphs over evil, in a land far away, once upon a medieval time. Life-sized Romanesque and Gothic sculpture turns us back on ourselves, and in the words of Henri Focillon, humanizes the celestial.
On the other hand, all of life’s insecurities come to bear on these stylistic archetypes. The medieval church is the locus in quo where death, accident, disease, and loss are mediated. Transformation and transcendence await the faithful in medieval and medievalizing building. For today’s student of architecture, medieval and neo-medieval buildings are no longer mistakes that post-Renaissance criticism would have us forget or bury. These buildings, formerly five centuries or so of architectural faux pas, were not bad architecture, revived by foolish nineteenth-century architects. They have determined the shape of modern architecture and architectural history due to the historical patterns they established and spurned. We continue our interest in the moldering Middle Ages as the study of who we were informs who we are.
1 [On spolia, Romanesque architecture, and Gothic architecture, see chapters 11, 14, and 18, by Kinney, Fernie, and Murray respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
2 Despite the fact that Prosper Merimée despaired of the novel, and Goethe thought it too schematic, Notre-Dame de Paris’s (1831) popular influence was swift and international, undergoing four English translations (1833–9). Gothic novels in England by Walpole and Radcliffe predated Hugo’s, but none concerned itself as intrinsically with medieval architectural criticism. In his Revival monograph, K. Clark recognized the considerable literary component of England’s Gothic Revival and accounted for its “failure” in its literary over-determination. French critics tended to more intrinsically mix the literary and architectural manifestations of revivalism.
3 Hugo was an initiator of medieval restoration. He took to task the vandals of medieval buildings in Guerre aux démolisseurs (1829) and La Bande noire (1824), railing against the revolutionary and Bourbon destruction. From 1835 through 1848, Hugo served on the Commission des arts et monuments, re-established after the Revolution to oversee medieval restoration, and he oversaw the restoration of Chartres. See Léon, La Vie des monuments français and Emery, Romancing the Cathedral, pp. 1–10, in which Emery traced the late nineteenth-century rise in popularity of the cathedral.
4 Hugo, like Gunn and C. de Gerville who invented the neologism, l’architecture romane (1818), defined the Romanesque as having been born in the late Roman Empire and having died with the Conqueror. The Gothic ended during the reign of King Louis XI (1461–83). Contemporary French architectural historians, writers, and politicians were quick to follow Hugo’s lead and claim the Gothic for France. Ludovic Vitet echoed Hugo’s words almost verbatim when he claimed that Gothic architecture was bourgeois, free, French, and Christian (La République sera chrétienne, ou elle ne sera pas (Paris, 1874)). F.-R. de Chateaubriand had anticipated and stimulated the mania of the medieval with his Génie du Christianisme (1802), extolling Gothic architecture, based more on the vague and mystical frisson it produced in the viewer than on its formal qualities. L’architecture romane became the logical relative of the eleventh-century French vernacular. The French were, however, more interested in the conservation of medieval monuments than in their revival.
5 With respect to the complex theoretical question of revival vs. survival in architecture, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were marked by the psychic pain of death and detachment from the Middle Ages. Panofsky’s seminal chapter in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, as well as the collective bulk of neo-Classical literature which prioritizes any Classical manifestation, continued to direct opinion and scholarship on revivalism toward a negative evaluation of the impact and artistic quality of any non-Classical revival. Just as the Carolingian renovatio and the twelfth-century “proto-renaissance” were not, according to Panofsky, quantitatively or qualitatively as significant as the fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance, neither were its artistic manifestations as valid. Since long before Panofsky and probably since just before Vasari, the Italian Renaissance and Classical antiquity have been incontrovertibly linked. Panofsky confirmed that no good, liberal renascence ignored the universal, Classical past which was unhampered by religious or dogmatic prejudice. I would argue that the crucial difference between the early nineteenth century revivals and that of the Italian Renaissance was not their chronological or philosophical perspective, which was at least as great as that of the fifteenth century, but their level of Romantic self-consciousness, which bred guilt and shame rather than optimism. Unlike the link the Italian Renaissance forged with antiquity, medieval revivals of the modern period did not fashion a golden middle age to which they wished to return. Their interpretation of history was dominated rather by a quasi-religious belief in progress, a quasi-apocalyptic belief in the future which the Middle Ages could inform. Panofsky’s ancient and Classical “Arcadia” was now displaced into the medieval future.
6 Even before the medieval revivals of 1780, the neo-Classical movement in which Flaxman, Gunn, David, Quatremère de Quincy, et al. participated, had challenged Classicism as a too-narrowly defined language of structure and decorative elements, initiating an historicizing investigation of the dominant aesthetic of Classicism. Additionally, the expanding parameters of the known world worked to weaken the hegemony of the Classical ideal over others. Lavin, in Quatremère de Quincy, investigated the priority of Egyptian architecture in late eighteenth-century architectural criticism. This debate was the battleground for the meta-question of the origins of all Western architecture. Lavin claimed that a new view of architecture’s origins resulted with Egypt’s archaeological study. This view begged the question of truth in origins as a determinant of the true nature of reality or architectural style and substituted the social, linguistic model which still scaffolds architectural criticism.
7 I must cast my net widely around the critical reception of neo-Romanesque and neo-Gothic, which spanned two centuries and many countries. I have chosen to prioritize English criticism of the neo-Gothic and German and American criticism of the neo-Romanesque for reasons of their predominant and cardinal status, sheer volume of monuments and commentary, and leading architectural trends. While the Gothic was arguably a northern phenomenon, the Romanesque was pan-European and widely exported. The intersection of these two critical corpora, therefore, seemed logical and practical in this context. I have restricted myself to landmark and seminal studies which have fashioned the direction and tenor of architectural criticism.
8 Most educated or sensitive viewers conceived of the round style as a primitive version of the pointed until the mid-nineteenth century when the Gothic Revival was in full swing. See my study, Romanesque Architectural Criticism, chs. 1 and 2, for a discussion of the absence of medieval stylistic subdivisions before the seventeenth century. See also Frankl, The Gothic.
9 Eastlake’s History of the Gothic Revival adduced primary sources from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
10 Ibid., p. 71. Eastlake criticized Ruskin for his proposal (Modern Painters, 1854), to choose a British national architectural style from among: Pisan Romanesque, Trecento Florentine, Venetian Gothic, or English Decorated, objecting to their unworkability and foreign origins.
11 Ibid., p. 95. Rickman’s terminology (Saxon, Norman, Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles) in An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England (London, 1817), took quick hold in England.
12 Ibid., p. 372.
13 Clark, The Gothic Revival, p. 7.
14 Ibid., p. 7.
15 Ibid., pp. 98, 133.
16 More recently, Germann, The Gothic Revival continued Clark’s terminological evaluation.
17 See Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy, on the link between language and architecture, whose bibliography is lengthy. I cite only a few significant examples in this regard: Dynes, “Art, Language, and Romanesque”; Eco, Search for the Perfect Language. McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor; Guillerme, “The Idea of Architectural Language.”
18 Clark, The Gothic Revival, pp. 142–3.
19 The Cambridge Camden Society, founded by Cambridge’s Trinity College graduates J. M. Neale and Benjamin Webb, was dedicated to the reform of Church architecture and antiquities, the revival of ritual arrangements, and the restoration of medieval architecture. After its dissolution by the Anglican clergy (1845), the group changed its name to the Ecclesiological Society, continuing to publish its monthly vademecum, The Ecclesiologist.
20 One of the first publications of Morris’s Kelmscott Press was Ruskin’s Stones of Venice (1851). Clark, The Gothic Revival, p. 202, called Morris’s chapter, “The Nature of Gothic,” “one of the noblest things written in the nineteenth century.”
21 Clark observed that Ruskin, in his prodigious writings (39 vols.), crystallized many critical ideals already formulated by Pugin. Ruskin published his Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849, his Stones of Venice (2 vols.) from 1851 to 1853, and his Lectures on Architecture and Painting in 1854.
22 Clark, The Gothic Revival, pp. 196–8.
23 Ibid., p. 214.
24 Hitchcock, Architecture, p. 21.
25 Ibid., p. 150.
26 Hitchcock did investigate American neo-Gothic, considering it “feeble parable(s) of English originals” (ibid., p. 155). A more positive evaluation of Gothic Revival in the US would have to wait for American scholars such as M. Trachtenberg and I. Hyman, Architecture from Prehistory to Post-Modernism.
27 English Catholics were placed under various legal sanctions from the Reformation through 1829, when Catholics were emancipated. See Charlesworth, ed., The Gothic Revival. Hugo and many French critics to follow blamed the overwhelming influence of Italian Renaissance forms for the suppression of the French Gothic.
28 I agree with Trachtenberg’s assessment of the Italian Gothic, in “Gothic/Italian ‘Gothic’,” as never having been really “Gothic” according to its reified definition from mid-century onward. He argued that fourteenth-century Italians eclectically and self-consciously gothicized various types of buildings, to various expressive ends, never having swallowed the gray Gothic pill. His vision of the pan-European Romanesque as a “sustained conflict between historicist and modernist tendencies,” is a brilliant one and strikes at the very essence of the issue of revivalism from the fourth century onward, as suggested by Gunn. One could argue that after Greece, all Western styles are revivals! Italy’s revival of antiquity (Roman, Byzantine, or Moorish) is more characteristic of that nation’s historical aesthetic choices. I have chosen to deal in greater depth with the literature of countries whose revival of either the Romanesque or Gothic styles and accompanying critical literature are consistent, long-lived, exemplary, and characteristic.
29 See Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism, chs. 3 and 8. From Napoleon’s Empire through the Restoration, neo-Classical forms remained in favor. There were some French Gothic Revival buildings, such as St Jean-Baptiste, St Clothilde, and St Bernard in Paris, Notre-Dame de Bon Secours in Rouen, and St Nicholas in Nantes, but far fewer than in England. Viollet-le-Duc’s “restoration” of the ramparts of Carcassonne and his work on the château de Pierrefonds was exceptional. During la belle époque, a new discourse on Gothic developed casting it as a tower of reason and Celtic design.
30 Viollet-le-Duc repudiated the idea of revival in the preface to his Dictionnaire raisonnée de l’architecture française (1854). Passionate about the Gothic, he delved the structural secrets of its neo-Gothic application. Architect to the Service des monuments historiques, he restored the medieval churches at Vézelay, Amiens, St Denis, Chartres, and Reims, “correcting” each. See K. Murphy, Viollet-le-Duc at Vézelay (University Park, 2000). A number of French architects worked in both the neo-Gothic: Anatole de Baudot, St Jean de Montmartre, Paris; and neo-Romanesque styles: Claude Naissant, Notre-Dame de la Gare, Ivry, 1855; Victor Baltard, St Augustin, Paris, 1860–7; Gustav Guérin, Chapelle des Lazaristes, Tours, 1861; Théodore Ballu, St Ambroise, Paris, 1863–9; Paul Abadie, Sacré-Coeur, Paris, 1872–1919; Emile Vaudremer, St Pierre de Montrouge (1864–70), and Léon Vaudoyer, Cathédrale la Major de Marseille (1852). Paul Abadie, “l’homme néo-romane,” restored St Front de Périgueux. Foucart et al., in Paul Abadie, p. 11, have claimed that Abadie was to a great degree responsible for the institutionalization of architectural restoration on a grand scale which inaugurated the important French rubric and discussion of patrimoine, addressed in the four-volume Les lieux de mémoire (Paris, 1997).
31 M. F. Gidon, “L’Invention du terme ‘l’architecture romane’ par Gerville (1818),” Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de la Normandie 36 (1935), p. 285.
32 The pioneering work of J. Bony on the Norman “mur épais” (Bull. Monu., 1939) and of E. Armi on the southern First Romanesque continuous order (JSAH, 34, 1975) have patterned Romanesque scholarship. [On sculptural programs in general, and Romanesque and Gothic sculpture in particular, see the essays by Boerner, Hourihane, Maxwell, and Büchsel in this volume (ed.).]
33 M. Camille discussed the pioneering role of M. Schapiro’s scholarship in renewing appreciation of the Romanesque (“How New York Stole the Idea”). Camille assessed American scholarship before Schapiro, when formalist poetics echoed nineteenth-century romantic visions of the medieval. Schapiro reckoned that medieval and modern art shared aesthetic goals, repositioning both into the center of “high art” discussions. Camille argued that medieval sculpture was popular like its modern American counterpart because of their rugged individualism and depersonalization.
34 Kent, “The Meaning of the Romanesque Revival” (Ph.D. thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 1993), pp. 50–5, reported that there was more written on architecture between 1850 and 1900 than previously.
35 Owen, Hints on Public Architecture, p. 109.
36 Watkin, Rise of Architectural History, pp. 68–9, took up Owen’s argument.
37 According to Steege, “The Book of Plans,” pp. 227–31, this book was the Congregationalists’ analogue to The Ecclesiologist and a catalyst in disseminating neo-Romanesque.
38 Woods, “History,” p. 77.
39 S. Sloan, City and Suburban Architecture (Philadelphia, 1859). Meeks, “Architectural Education,” p. 31 pointed out that nine-tenths of Sloan’s examples are of the round style.
40 Meeks, “Architectural Education,” p. 18. She named the major architects: Renwich, Upjohn, Tefft, Sloan, Windrim, and H. H. Richardson.
41 Kent, Meaning of the Romanesque, p. 156, analyzed neo-Romanesque criticism in England, the US, and Australia. He argued that Romanesque Revival was closely allied to other modernizing movements and that modernists drew on neo-Romanesque forms in developing their new aesthetic. See also O’Gorman, H. H. Richardson, and Miller Lane, “National Romanticism.”
42 Kent, Meaning of the Romanesque, p. 77.
43 Meeks, “Architectural Education,” p. 33.
44 Kent, Meaning of the Romanesque, pp. 79–80.
45 Hübsch, Bau-Werke, p. 1, as quoted in In What Style Should We Build? (Santa Monica, 1992).
46 Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, and Lübke, Geschichte der Architektur.
47 Lübke, Geschichte der Architektur, p. 470.
48 Miller Lane, “National Romanticism,” pp. 111–47.
49 Ibid., pp. 111–47.
50 Curran, The Romanesque Revival, p. xxiv.
51 Ibid., p. xxvii.
52 Ibid., p. xxv.
53 Ibid., pp. 17–21.
T. W. Bizzarro, Romanesque Architectural Criticism: A Prehistory (Cambridge, 1992).
M. Camille, “How New York Stole the Idea of Romanesque Art,” Oxford Art Journal 17 (1994), pp. 65–75.
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K. Clark, The Gothic Revival (New York, 1962 [1928]).
K. Curran, The Romanesque Revival: Religion, Politics, and Transnational Exchange (University Park, 2003)
W. Dynes, “Art, Language, and Romanesque,” Gesta 28 (1989), pp. 5–10.
C. Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival (Watkins Glen, 1979 [1872]).
U. Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (Oxford, 1994).
E. Emery, Romancing the Cathedral: Gothic Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle French Culture (New York, 2001).
B. Foucart et al., Paul Abadie, Architecte, 1812–1884, Exposition, Musée d’Angoulême. 21 octobre–13 janvier, 1985 (Angoulême, 1984).
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M. F. Gidon, “L’Invention du terme ‘l’architecture romane’ par Gerville (1818),” Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de la Normandie 36 (1953), pp. 268–88.
J. Guillerme, “The Idea of Architectural Language: A Critical Inquiry,” Oppositions, Fall (1977), pp. 21–6.
H. R. Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York, 1977 [1958]).
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P. Kent, “The Meaning of the Romanesque Revival” (Ph.D. thesis, Bryn Mawr College, 1993).
F. Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1842).
B. Miller Lane, “National Romanticism in Modern Germany,” in R. A. Etlin, ed., Nationalism in the Visual Arts (Hanover, 1991).
S. Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, 1992).
P. Léon, La Vie des monuments français: Destruction, restauration (Paris, 1951).
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S. Sloan, City and Suburban Architecture (Philadelphia, 1859).
G. Steege, “The Book of Plans and the Early Romanesque Revival in the United States: A Study in Architectural Patronage,” JSAH 46 (1987), pp. 215–27.
M. Trachtenberg, “Gothic/Italian ‘Gothic’: Toward a Redefinition,” JSAH 50 (1991), pp. 22–37.
M. Trachtenberg and I. Hyman, Architecture from Prehistory to Post-Modernism (Englewood Cliffs, 1986).
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D. Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History (London, 1980).
Mary N. Woods, “History in Early American Architectural Journals,” in The Architectural Historian in America 35 (Hanover, 1990).