Abstract
While Aesthetic and Historical Interests as Well as a Nationalist ideology spurred the French nineteenth-century interest in the Middle Ages, in England, as explored in Chapter 5, already in the eighteenth century, scholars and writers were examining English medieval architecture as an aspect of the local and national history of England. Indeed, during this period, whether German, French, or English, one of the remarkable aspects of the discussion of Gothic architecture is how often writers identify the style as unique to a particular national culture.
La construction est une science; c’est aussi un art. (Construction is a science; it is also an art.)
—Viollet le Duc, “Construction”2
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
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Notes
Berce, Des Monuments Historiques, 7–50. For a thorough introduction to the people involved in the French recovery movement and their diverse attitudes in this period, see Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, La Cathedrale (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 13–39; also see Kevin D. Murphy, Memory and Modernity: Viollet le Due at Vézelay (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 2000).
Sir John Summerson, “Viollet le Duc and the Rational Point ofView,” Architectural Design 3, no. 4 (1980): 7–8.
See Sylvia Lyon, The Life and Times of Prosper Merimee (New York: Dial, 1948), vii; Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, “Ruskin and Viollet le Duc: Englishness and Frenchness in the Appreciation of Gothic Architecture,” Architectural Design 3, no. 4 (1980): 48.
Fran4oise Berce, “Archéologie et Politique,” in Prosper Mérimee: Ecrivain, Archéologue, Historien, ed. Antonia Fonyi (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 3–14.
See Speer, “Is There a Theology of the Gothic Cathedral?” in Mind’s Eye, in which he argues that “liturgy” was the prompt to redesigning Saint-Denis (68–69). Also see Michael Camille, Gothic Art: Glorious Visions (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996).
E. Viollet le Duc, Lettres d’Italie 1836r1837, ed. Genevieve Viollet le Duc (Paris: Leonce Laget, 1971), 327–28.
Viollet le Duc, L’architecture raisonee; Extraits du Dictionanire de l’architecture francaise, ed. Hubert Damisch (Paris: Hermann, 1978), 52–53.
Hunt, “Pugin versus the Panopticon,” in Building jerusalem, 57–95, for the revival of festivals, pageantry, and “national faith.” For the emergence of the taste for ruins in England, specifically, see Paul Zucker, Fascination of Decay: Ruins: Relic-Symbol-Ornament (Ridgewood, NJ, Gregg, 1968), 161–91.
Clark’s argument in Gothic Revival. For the Houses of Parliament, see Clark, Gothic Revival, 108–21; see also Andrew Saint, “Pugin’s Architecture in Context,” in A. WN. Pugin, Master of Gothic Revival, ed. Paul Atterbury (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 84.
Thomas Rickman, An Attempt to discriminate the styles of Architecture in England from the Conquest to the Reformation (1817; repr., London: John Henry Parker, 1848).
Augustus Charles Pugin, Specimens of Gothic Architecture; Selected from Various Ancient Edifices in England, 2 vols. (London, 1821; repr., Edinburgh: John Grant, 1895).
“Gothic architecture is generally considered as more picturesque, though less beautiful, than Grecian, and, upon the same principle that a ruin is more so than a new edifice” (Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful and on the Use ofStudying Pictures, for the Purpose oflmproving Real Landscape [London: J. Robson, 1794], 63). For an overview of the development of the idea of the “picturesque,” see Frankl, Gothic, 428–42; also, Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (London: Leigh & Sotheby, 1808).
John Ruskin, “Preface to the Third Edition” (1874), in The Stones of Venice, 3 vols. (Orpington, Kent: George Allen, 1886), 2:v.
See P. A. T. I. Burman, “What is Cultural Heritage?” in Rational Decision-making in the Preservation of Cultural Property, ed. N. S. Baer and F. Snickars (Berlin: Dahlem University Press, 2001), 12, for the applicability of Morris’s criteria to contemporary definitions of “cultural property.”
Paul Philippot, “Historic Preservation: Philosophy, Criteria, Guidelines,” in Preservation and Conservation: Principles and Practices, ed. Sharon Tirnmons (Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, 1976), 372.
See Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fir-de-Siecle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 26, for Riegl’s theories about time.
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© 2008 Brenda Deen Schildgen
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Schildgen, B.D. (2008). The Turn to National Heritage: Nineteenth-Century Europe and Restoration. In: Heritage or Heresy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230613157_9
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